Sunday, May 20, 2012

What to eat?


According to Dupuis, we’d better stop asking the question “What to eat?” Stop listening to and following intermediaries, who keep advocating various eating guidelines without authenticities. Nowadays, a large number of people obey the food advice of popular food writers without consideration, no matter how confusing and implausible these food advices are. They just lost their faith in religion and science, letting popular food writers control their eating habits. We pretend that our food choices could resolve the politic problems. But the history has already showed the fact that we were pursuing eating perfectly while we always failed. Following various food advices will just result in inequality instead of making many improvements in our diets. Therefore, he is opposed to listen to popular food writers’ eating advices.

Different from Dupuis, Pollan still comes up with several eating advices although he mentions that many food advices today are confusing and unreasonable at the beginning of the article. For example, “Just last fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time presented us with strikingly different conclusions.”(Pollan, page1) And he also points out that nutritionism is ideology instead of science. As he said, “Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions.”(Pollan, page2) However, at the end of his article, he suggests that do not eat industrial foods and processed foods; eat real foods instead of foodlike things, which our ancestors wouldn’t recognize as foods. Also, he says that we’d better eat food with high quality instead of large quantity.

The most helpful suggestion by Pollan is that eating like French people, that is, eating various kinds of food but eat just small portions of them. This method not only fulfills our desire of eating a wide range of cuisines, but also prevents us from getting too fat and unhealthy. I am also confused to varied food advices advocated by numerous food writers and professionals, but i believe eating less and eating mostly vegetables will have positive effects on our health.

1 comment:

  1. Good summary of Dupuis. Her main point seems to be that food advice is always changing and that it is more about the time and the people giving the advice than it is about what really is best to eat.

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