Intro to Pollan

Read the Introduction to In Defense of Food (pp 1-15) and select ONE of the follow topics and write a minimum 200-word response.  In all three, I am asking you to engage closely with the text, so provide quoted or paraphrased evidence from the text to illustrate and support your ideas (and to also give the rest of us a specific place in the text to focus on when reading your post).

POST: due by Monday, 6/27, 10 pm.

DISCUSS: Return by Tuesday, 6/28, 10 pm to comment on someone else's post, and return one final time to respond again by Wednesday, 6/29, 10 pm.

PROMPT OPTIONS:

1. The introduction chapter of any book is meant to introduce the author's key ideas.  It's important to make note of these because when they come up later in the book, you'll be more easily able to process those keys ideas.  In this way, an introduction is a preview of the content of the book.  Thus, what key ideas is Pollan going to cover based on your understanding of the introduction?  I'm not expecting you to explain them perfectly--but I'd like to see you beginning to try to understand them.
2. The introduction is also where an author explains the problem he or she is trying to address in their book--the reason they wrote it, the reason they think there is a need for the argument they are about to make.  What is Pollan's purpose as he explains it in the introduction?  Why is he writing this book?  What problem is he trying to solve or think through?  
3. Look at the front cover of the book: the sub-title says "An Eater's Manifesto," and Pollan addresses this in the final pages of the introduction.  Read wikipedia's explanation of a manifesto Links to an external site., and explain how that changes your view of his purpose in the text.  Why would we need an "eater's manifesto" these days?  Why does Pollan think we need one?  How does that make Pollan's book different from the horde if diet and nutrition books that are constantly at the top of the best-sellers lists in the US?

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