National eatind disorder essay PDF

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1 Professor Rowe First Year Seminar 8 February 2016 Pollan, Michael. “Introduction: Our National Eating Disorder” The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Penguin, 2006, pp. 1-11 In the “Introduction: Our National Eating Disorder” The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, the author Micheal Pollan proposes the commonly asked question of what we should eat for dinner. The opening chapter goes into a description of how people decide what to eat and the outside sources which effect this decision. He comes to the consensus that there are many other concepts and ideas which sway our point of view on what we should be eating. Pollan’s main argument is that the media is effecting the decisions people make on what they want to eat and he develops this by talking about Our National Eating Disorder and the basic ideas of the phrase “The Omnivores Dilemma.” According to Pollan our country is facing this “National Eating Disorder” because we don't have any sort of origin to out food and the way our meals are prepared. Countries in Europe date much further back then the United States and they have food that is traditional to their country while America is a melting pot and we have people from every country coming together. Pollan even states “Americans have never had a single, strong, stable culinary tradition to guide us.” Due to this, people blindly follow the medias ideas of what is “heathy” and “safe” to eat. Pollan describes The Carb Craze of 2000 as his example of the country blindly following the media. The country faces a “food scare” this is due to the creation of government policies and the concept of the food pyramid. It resulted in the elimination of eating bread and the country being afraid of carbs as a whole. Pollan states that “virtually overnight, Americans changed the way

2 they eat.” He stated that if our country were healthy and didn't have this “National Eating Disorder” we wouldn't be prone to these drastic and violent swings of our eating practices. An Omnivore is someone who eats meats and vegetables, they have many readily available options and this is what leads to much of the dilemma. To some, this idea of many choices may come off as a good thing but in accordance with this idea of humans following what the media says, its actually very bad. When people have lots of choices and knowledge of the way different foods will effect us this produces anxiety. If someone finds a new food they may be unsure of how it effects their body and this will cause us to have more anxiety. Today the Omnivores Dilemma can be a way of understand our National Eating Disorder. Pollan gives the example of being in a supermarket and being unsure what to get. People get a lot of anxiety and this causes them to be influenced by the media, food fads, and food science. The Omnivores Dilemma of having many choices can be seen as both a blessing and a cure because if human beings did not have so many choices there would be no anxiety over what to eat. Each and every one of us would just know what we can cannot eat without ever having to worry. Throughout “Our National Eating Disorder” Pollan focuses on this idea that the media is causing a lot of the chaos over what we should and should not be eating due to the fact that humans have a lot of anxiety over their meal decisions. The media has caused a lot of traumatic food events in history and Pollan is intending to identify the main reason why humans views and decisions are so swayed by what the media says they should be doing....