I'm very much in agreement with you, both on liking about 95% of what Pollan says and in being very uncomfortable with how he uncritically accepts the cultural attitudes about fatness. (I've read The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, and I'd recommend both books, incidentally.)
I think Pollan's fans tend to overlap with a certain class of middle-class slightly elitist liberals who listen to NPR and look down on people who shop at Wal-Mart. For these people, fatness is sort of emblematic of what they see as the problems of American society--overconsumption, unsustainability, an emphasis on "more."
This is what drove me crazy about Wall-E, by the way. Well, that and the coded-pregnancy stuff. It's that uncritical acceptance of, "Red-state people drink soda by the gallon, they tool around in their SUVs that get three miles a gallon, they have houses full of cheap tchotchkes, and they're fat"--as if all of these things were inextricably linked together.
And it makes so much intuitive sense, if you have always grown up with that attitude that dieting is the natural response to being over the "right" weight, that it's very hard to replace that with a paradigm of, "It's not right to police other people's bodies," or "Health doesn't look the same for everybody."
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branchandroot
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Date: 2009-09-27 04:07 am (UTC)I think Pollan's fans tend to overlap with a certain class of middle-class slightly elitist liberals who listen to NPR and look down on people who shop at Wal-Mart. For these people, fatness is sort of emblematic of what they see as the problems of American society--overconsumption, unsustainability, an emphasis on "more."
This is what drove me crazy about Wall-E, by the way. Well, that and the coded-pregnancy stuff. It's that uncritical acceptance of, "Red-state people drink soda by the gallon, they tool around in their SUVs that get three miles a gallon, they have houses full of cheap tchotchkes, and they're fat"--as if all of these things were inextricably linked together.
And it makes so much intuitive sense, if you have always grown up with that attitude that dieting is the natural response to being over the "right" weight, that it's very hard to replace that with a paradigm of, "It's not right to police other people's bodies," or "Health doesn't look the same for everybody."