Food Fads Summary

In the section, “Food Fads” the author discusses the absence of a national food culture in the United States. With the lack of customs and traditions, we “have few rules about what to eat, when to eat, and how to eat. We don’t have any strong food traditions to guide us, so we seek food advice from ‘experts’. This may be one of the reason we have so many diet fads in this country” (Pollan 92). The earliest example of these ‘experts’, was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg ran a “sanitarium”, or a health clinic, in Battle Creek, Michigan. There, a lot of wealthy people traveled there to follow his misguided ideas about diet and health. He gave advises of all-grape diets and of hourly enemas. Enemas were where doses of yogurt were applied to the digestive …show more content…
A process that involved chewing food as much as possible. It would have been seen as if people have learned from their mistakes. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Even today, “Food fads still come and go with alarming speed: A scientific study, a new government guideline, a lone crackpot with a medical degree can change our nation’s diet overnight” (Pollan 93). It really isn’t that difficult to influence the ways that people eat. Especially when they don’t have a solid food culture to fall back on. For example, “In 2002, one article in the New York Times Magazine said that carbs make you fat. Suddenly millions of Americans gave up bread and other carbohydrates and started eating mainly meat. Fifty years from now that diet might seem as crazy as Kellogg’s enemas” (Pollan 93). Basically, people who lack a solid food culture are often prone to following what science, at that time, deems to be healthy. All because they are simply clueless of what else to eat and how to eat it. With this section, the author builds suspicion amongst all the readers. Based upon the previous section, it invokes even more questions, yet again it also solves many as