Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

As andy’s increasingly angry responses reveal, what seemed to really motivate was the assumption that if you criticize pollan, you must be someone with rilly rilly declasse tastes. Which, I don’t know, might have been more a reaction to me and Andy’s assumptions about who I am. Which I hand’t considered until just now. Anyway, twice, Andy accuses me have having no appreciation for Pollan’s book because I’m clearly the person Pollan describes in his intro: someone with no class, no taste, no capacity for thinking about the food I eat and taking, you know, pleasure in one of the finer things in life. Crass, coarse, low class - of course she doesn’t like Pollan, Andy concludes.

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At 09:08 AM 10/13/2008, Andy wrote:
You might not think that way about your salad, shag, with your
bacon bits and Pepperidge Farm croutons and hot sauce*, but then
you’re not the target market.

I’m trying to catch up and read all the posts exchanged in this series. I’m a little confused on this issue — and others.

First, I just picked up Pollan in the library last week, on a foray to find something, anything to read that was more entertaining than the ones on the semantic web and ajax programming I’d been reading. I’d never heard of Pollan, except in terms of the suggestions to read _The Omnivore’s Dilemma_ on this list. Moreover, I had no idea that he was connected with the Local Food movement which I’ve previously whined about here. I had no idea that Pollan is incredibly popular or that he had a following here. To make matters worse, I was too busy to read what everyone but Dwayne wrote — except what I caught inter alia.

I realize you are kidding, above, but what are you kidding about? What I put on a salad? Or that I’m not the book’s target audience? Both? I was confused.

If your answer includes the assumption I’m not the book’s target audience, I’m curious as to why you think that. Trying to figure it out, I flipped back to the intro, where authors usually describe who they think the target audience is. He says this:

“To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them. There are things in it that will ruin their appetites. But in the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasures that are only deepened by knowing.” (p 11)