Michael Pollan's argument about corn and American obesity

Michael Pollan is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His book The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006) is important in that "what we eat is what we are' and so we all care about what we eat, particularly since there may be concealed toxics in our food placed there due to political and economic stratagems. Pollan (2006) states that we wish to eat food, but what we are eating instead is "edible food like substances' -- and this naturally is a worry to us. Despite nutritional science and the medical field offering programs and realms of advice on the subject, professionalization of eating has failed to make us healthier. It is for these reasons that Pollan's book is worthy of interest.

Summary

Pollan (2006) states that the industrial food chain that American man is sustained on is largely based on corn, whether in its direct form, fed to livestock, or processed into chemicals such as glucose, and the cheapest forms of these are high-fructose corn syrup and ethanol. The former, particularly, through a combination of biological, cultural, and political factors, appears in the cheapest and most common of foods that constitute the American diet. Corn sweetens soda pops, it fattens meat, it appears virtually everywhere in the cheapest of products. And is also fed to cows instead of the grass that should be rightfully fed them. The dollar buys more corn than fruit juice and, therefore, for a disadvantaged person, corn -- the fattening ingredient - becomes the majority of one's meal. Corn is the ingredient that results in obesity and, since it is cheapest, it is the ingredient that the poorer, rather than the wealthier individuals, consume resulting in an epidemic of obesity for the more disadvantaged swathes of American society.

Pollan states that animals may not be able to choose the fact that they have to eat corn instead of grass, but that humans to a certain extent can select their nutrition (although Pollan is vague indicating that disadvantaged people are, firstly, restrained to certain food and secondly, not aware of the damaging property of the food that they are constrained to eat). This is the crux of where Pollen's argument can be refuted since given that all (poor and wealthy alike) are given equal access to information, the less disadvantaged people can choose to follow as healthy a nutrient as the weather people. This need not mean that they incorporate organic food in their diet, but, rather, that they can adhere, if they wish to, to a more nutritious, vegetable-based meal. Anyone can do this. The basics of such a meal -- vegetables, fruit, water, and whole-food are relatively cheaply priced. And they don't have to be organic. That poor people are not necessarily more obese than wealthier individuals due to their constraint to certain diet can be evidenced from the fact that many wealthy people are obese, whilst many from the poorest of backgrounds are skinny.

Which leads us onto another issue of defining 'poor'. The Poverty Guidelines that are employed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human services (HHS) for classifying poor individuals (U.S. Department of Health and Human services, 2011) seem to be different than those that Pollan employs, but when you assess benchmark realties of these really poor or destitute individuals, they are generally far form obese. Activity and labor keep them painfully thin, and lack of food keeps them on a starvation diet. Rarely, if ever, have sharecroppers been pictured as obese, or people who suffered during the Great Depression pictured as fat. The poor is stereotypically painted as haggard and lean and the wealthy CEO (and so forth) as fat and obese, for his very indolence and lack of sluggishness makes him so.

Conclusion

Pollan (2006) opines that the cheapness of American produce is making the poor, rather than the wealthy, obese, for it is the wealthy who can afford the organic products and healthier, but higher priced food that is on the market, whilst the poor turn to that which is closest and most affordable to them, namely the cheap corn, sugar, and other superficial unreal products. "Very simple, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots" (p.100).

But any number of reasons may exist for making people obese, or for people choosing to become obese and, at the end of the day, this is where the crux of the issue lies, people choose to become obese. In short, rather than saying that the poor are obese, and the fat, conversely, are lean, I would be careful to be more precise with my terms and say that the very poor (or the true usage of the term) generally tend to be skinny at best and malnourished at worst (for little to eat), whilst those who are less wealthy than others may tend to indulge themselves in fast food therefore being obsess. This does not exclude wealthy people, though, from not being obese too.

Before we start gnashing our food or matters of corruption that have extended to American nutrition, and blaming obesity on factors out of our control, exhaustive cross-sectional and longitudinal research must be conducted before we come to any definite conclusion. Blaming the obesity of the poor on external factors may not only be a fallacy but may also be a case of shifting the problem to external factors thus freeing humans from responsibility. Identification of causes of obesity should be pursued and steps taken to mitigate the problem. Most importantly, all should be done using authoritative scientific research.

Reference

Bray, G. (2004). The epidemic of obesity. Physiology & Behavior, 82, 115-121.

Pollan. M. (2006) The Omnivore's Dilemma. Penguin: UK

World Health Organization. (2000). Obesity: preventing and managing the global epidemic. Report of a WHO consultation. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization. WHO Technical Report Series, 894.

Wing, R.R., & Polley, B.A. (2001). Obesity. In A. Baum (Ed). Handbook of health psychology (pp. 263-279). NJ: Erlbaum.