Both Michael Pollan’s “Unhappy Meals” and Melanie Dupuis’s “Angels and Vegetables: A Brief History of Food Advice in America” address the shift that has been made from simply eating food to survive to the current omnivore’s “moral” choice of what they should eat. Pollan explains that people no longer eat “food”; we eat “nutrients”. In the grocery store, people used to see words such as “cookies”, “cereal”, and “eggs”. Now we mostly see things like “cholesterol” and “low-fat”. People today are consuming a lot of “food-like” items instead of natural food. Pollan gives some good advice by telling his readers that in order to be as healthy as possible, they should “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” Food has become a source of pleasure and entertainment in today’s culture, which has led to consuming large amounts of tasty, unhealthy foods.

Where people find information about what they should and should not eat has also changed over the past several decades.  People used to look to religion for answers when deciding what to eat. Then people began listening to scientists when it came to dietary advice. Dupuis claims that people no longer ask religion or science what they should eat, but “rely on popular writers to steer [them] through a welter of confusing and contradictory information.”

Both of these articles have made me think about my own food choices—what I eat and why I decide to eat them. I’ve never really thought much about what I eat and have, along with most Americans, probably tend to eat what Pollan calls “food-like” products. Some of my diet includes fruits and vegetables, but a lot of it is snack foods that probably aren’t very natural. I think these type of eating habits have become an issue in today’s food culture. Eating these processed “nutrients” is neither natural nor healthy. In order for the food culture to make the shift back to eating “food”, we must reevaluate what we eat, why we eat, and how we make dietary decisions.