Again this strengthens Pollan's rhetoric and continues the line of reasoning he began in Omnivore's Dilemma.
So it's good to be encouraged by Pollan, who eulogises the pleasures of cooking, and to be reminded of some basic truths."When you cook at home, you seldom find yourself reaching for the ethoxylated dyglycerides or high-fructose corn syrup," he says. "The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals has a great many worries, but 'health' is simply not one of them because it is a given."The final advice given by Pollan encapsulates it all: "Don't eat anything your greatgrandmother wouldn't recognise as food." ("Food Really Does Grow" 12)
The rhetoric of his work is demonstratively evident as his lines of reasoning attempt to make consumers more responsible for their own consumption, and overall more healthy in an intellectual and physical sense. One of my favorite passages from the work, that details all the issues of rhetoric, pathos, logos and ethos is the paragraph Pollan dedicates to describing the ethics of buying organic foods from a mass market center, in this case unseasonable asparagus from Argentina:
The ethical implications of buying such a product are almost to numerous and knotty to sort out: There's the expense, there's the prodigious amounts of energy involved, the defiance of seasonality, and the whole question of whether the best soils in South America should be devoted to growing food for affluent and overfed North Americans. And yet you can also make a good argument that my purchase of organic asparagus from Argentina generates foreign exchange for a country desperately in need of it, and supports a level of care for that country's land-farming without pesticides or chemical-fertilizer-it might not otherwise receive. Clearly my bunch of asparagus had delivered me deep into the thicket of trade-offs that global organic marketplace entails. (Pollan 175)
The passage in many ways describes the whole nature of the work. Pollan proposes a question, then a reasonable marketplace answer and then brings the consumer to the process of thought regarding the pathos, logos and ethos of the choices he or she made to reach the point in the consumer chain where he or she stands. It is fantastic.
Mr. Pollan's premise is that the lack of a traditional food culture, combined with a bewildering number of food choices (including 17,000 new products on supermarket shelves each year), contradictory scientific studies and diets galore have caused Americans to be abnormally concerned about what they eat. Obsessed with getting thin while becoming ever fatter, they bounce from one food fad (margarine is good for you) to another (carbs are bad for you).Faced with the same confusion at the supermarket as everyone else (Organic or conventional apples? Local or imported? Wild or farmed fish? Transfats or butter or the "not butter?"), Mr. Pollan concluded that before settling the dinner question he needed answers to two other questions: "What am I eating? And where in the world did it come from?" ("Food for Thought; What" B08)
Pollan's use of language and point-of-view are particularly telling of his rhetorical stance as well as good conductors of his message, which is meant to appeal not only to a food audience but to the whole of society in America, where were have unknowingly and knowingly removed ourselves from our food sources, with the goal of seeking greater convenience.
The industrial food industry takes advantage of this quandary. "It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage them with new products," writes Pollan. "Our bewilderment in the supermarket is no accident. "I considered myself a somewhat savvy shopper until I read this book. I buy food at a local co-op, not at Wal-Mart, though it, too, now stocks organic products....
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