TOW #8 - The Omnivore’s Dilemma (IRB)

     Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading my independent reading book: Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In his book, the Pollan uses insightful and humorous metaphors and addresses a counterargument in order to revolutionize the reader’s understanding of the food industry and the way we eat.
     As mentioned in my previous post on this book, Pollan has a gift for using metaphors in order to explain complicated phenomena and processes to the general public. In his second section, the one on organic food, Pollan says that Whole Foods has one of the largest collection of “grocery lit” (137) as he gives examples of the colorful--and most likely not completely truthful--stories of free-range chickens and organic milk on the labels of many products. This metaphor compares the information on the labels, which is supposed to be just that, to stories and literature. The audience, while chuckling at the comparison, also gets a better understanding of Pollan’s experience in reading all of the labels at Whole Foods.
      In the third and final section of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan takes a chapter to write about the ethics of eating meat. In doing so, he addresses a counterargument that many vegetarians are likely to bring up against his decision to go hunting for his final meal (for the book, not for the rest of his life). In order to do so, Pollan actually becomes a vegetarian himself for awhile, trying to better understand those on the other side of the argument. This gives him incredible ethos by the time he gets to proposing his solution: a middle ground in which animals destined to be eaten are treated well and slaughtered humanely. This chapter as a whole makes a very strong and convincing argument, appealing to logos in the solution and ethos in becoming a vegetarian. Therefore, addressing this counterargument makes it easier for the reader to buy into Pollan’s revolutionary revelations about the food industry.
     All in all, Pollan does a great job in answering his question from the introduction: “What should we eat?” (1) In order to help the reader better attack this complex question, Pollan uses funny and eye-opening metaphors and addresses a counterargument throughout all three of the main sections of his book. And, now that I know so much more about where my food comes from, it’ll be so much easier to figure out what to eat for dinner tonight.