Michael Pollan's Eat Food: Food Defined?

The relationship between health and food is a huge topic of discussion, especially in a time when obesity is a major factor in many health problems. Michael Pollan’s “Eat Food: Food Defined” sheds light on what really goes in food and what readers should be looking for at supermarkets to avoid processed foods. Pollen tries to clear up “our current state of confusion” by giving his readers three “rules of thumb” to follow when shopping (06). The first rule Pollan states is that the readers should not eat anything that their great grandmothers would not be able to recognize, to a time “before the advent of most modern foods”(06). Using this rule will keep processed foods out of the cart. Pollen uses a quote from Joan Gussow to point out that eating these processed foods trick the …show more content…
Scientists have found ways to process these foods to make shoppers have “preferences for sweetness and fat and salt” (07). Scientists are really excelling at this because those exact standards are hard locate in nature, but easy to manufacture and exploit. The great grandma rule will work for most products in the supermarket, its also important to read the ingredients label. Pollans second rule of thumb is to look at the ingredients label. If the ingredients on the label are “unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number or that include high fructose corn syrup,” they should be avoided (08). All of these products have “crossed over from foods to food products” (08). Pollen gives an example of how to properly use this rule by listing out all of in the ingredients in a loaf of Sara Lee bread. A loaf of bread is considered to be a traditional food made up of traditional ingredients, but bread has become a product of modern food science. The list of ingredients that Pollan gives fails every test that the second rule describes. It has unfamiliar ingredients, more than five ingredients, unpronounceable ingredients, and most importantly it has high fructose corn syrup.