THIS is EVERYTHING.
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I don’t actually believe this is the hill you want to die on.
That’s a very western/US/Euro-centric view. Much of the world’s population is not in these regions, and yet the advice for eating well stays the same.
In the east, westernization of food habits is directly correlated with increased obesity and ill-health.
There is a fight to maintain “traditional” food habits for health reasons while populations get wealthier with more disposable income to spend on western fast food chains and processed food.
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No one’s dying on any hills* but I thought it was important to point out that Pollan was going back further than grandparents.
I very much don’t want to eat the way my grandmother did. And all I know about my great-grandmother’s diet was that it involved carp swimming in the bathtub and freshly slaughtered chickens (and likely a lot of scarcity in her early, pre-American years).
I also have big problems with people who insist they only eat food with ingredients they can pronounce, which sounds as though they’re very proud of remaining ignorant about the pronunciation of long words.
I thought the point of the article was simply to acknowledge that not everyone has the same great-grandmother, which is true, if not the most earth-shattering revelation I’ve read today. And to get mad at Michael Pollan because a lot of people like slogans.
*And isn’t that expression used for strong disagreement? I wasn’t disagreeing with you. I was correcting you. Might be just as annoying, but it’s different.
Cluttered writing, personal examples and examples taken out of context. But props for catching the attention of this forum to debate the blog.
The writer, keeping the effort in context.
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Double ugh.
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No argument at all with the correction from grandmother to great-grandmother.
But every generation has something that was wildly unhealthy…and we seem to increase them several fold with each generation, so to hover around those seems to skip over the point of not eating so much processed food.
My statement was more that I know you to be mostly rational (I mean, you’re a regular on this site, so there’s THAT, lol)…and that I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that the intent of your comment wasn’t as prickly as it read (to me)
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It wasn’t. And thank you for the benefit of the doubt.
I think this is also true. The unhealthy food of our ancestors skewed more toward spoilage, contamination, too little food, not nutritious enough food, etc. And our unhealthy food is more too much sugar, too much fat, too much salt, too much not-exactly-food, too much, generally. I wouldn’t look backward for the ideal. Rather, I’d say we should just continue to evolve.
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correction: hipster TO eat natural
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Blegh.
That confirms my thoughts.
Delicious.
Wow, I’m sorry for triggering you. I thought this would spark conversation, but man, you don’t like people criticising Michael Pollan or, what, being critical of a particular dimension of food culture?
As for the Western/ Eurocentric conversation-- that would be an interesting one to take further because the Michael Pollan himself is speaking to a particular sector (so speaking back to Pollan from the perspective of some in that sector makes sense.) That said, some of what she writes resonates in terms of conversations I’ve had with Asian friends (regarding the romance of certain footways and what that meant for the women expected to do the work) but yes, this would be interesting to consider globally and comparatively.
It has sparked conversation. If more resourceful effort had been put into the newsletter article you posted, I would have been more inclined. What I gathered was a lot more about the writer’s family and what she perceived about her own elders.
Trigger? Hilarious.
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Who are you addressing? All of us?
My great grandmother was enslaved. Very unhealthy ( in general, to be enslaved, but according to Ancestry.com, she lived longer than my mom!) We still eat some of the same foods though.
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I can’t tell if you’re intentionally misinterpreting the criticism as people being triggered by Pollan, which was not my issue nor that of others who commented.
As an academic, I’m surprised the article did not bother you more.
Yes, there are interesting discussions to be had on many related topics, but this article was not a credible source or starting point for anything like that to my read.
But I’d love to hear what concrete arguments or analysis from the author resonated with you.
The subject of women’s load, invisible and visible, is a pretty constant topic of discussion in my circles - not just in the past tense of our great-grandmothers but in the present tense of ourselves.
That’s why something like this reads as exploitative and self-promotional - that’s the trigger, not Pollan (or white men or diet culture or the other quick-draw incendiary terms dropped in solely for a reaction).
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I think we all like discussing food related issues and nobody (including Pollan) is above criticism. At the same time just because somebody wrote an article automatically means its worth discussing if it is quite evident (and others in this thread have shown it in more detail) that it is a low quality, badly written one. Publishing something somewhere doesn’t mean automatically that it is good. This article is just a blog post with some buzz words to self promote her books and not to contribute to any meaningful discussion
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