Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto acts as a guide in the world of food. He reveals the distortion surrounding food in the United States by detailing nutritionism and exploiting the significant problems of the Western diet. In defending food, Pollan provides rules of the road for how to escape the Western diet and live healthier. Nutritionism, as Pollan describes it, is an ideology given its name by Gyorgy Scrinis, an Australian sociologist. The idea was that scientists should break down food and try to understand the components of different nutrients which make up that food. That way, they could add “good” nutrients into other food. However, as Pollan repeatedly announces, the most important flaw with this system is the fact that food is more than the sum of its nutrient parts. He explains how chemical components in food combine in ways scientists cannot uncover. “Good” nutrients will not be the same extracted from the natural food it was found. …show more content…
He uses the example of margarine to portray the hazards of synthetic food. In the 1950s, margarine thrived due to the recent discovery that processed food could be healthier than natural foods. Whatever margarine was lacking, manufacturers could add as an ingredient; anything bad for your health, they could just take out. But, as Pollan is quick to prove, margarine (like many processed foods) is more dangerous than revolutionary. In the case of margarine, it was the heart attack-causing main ingredient. With this, he further insists that a man-made food could never be better than one found in