TOW #9: What's Eating in America by Michael Pollan (written, non-fiction text)

Nowadays, corn makes up not only almost everything people eat, but also almost everything that is around people ranging from fertilizers to wallboards around supermarkets. In Michael Pollan's "What's Eating in America," Pollan informs readers with damage of unnatural nitrogen, which is the building block of corn, and warns them that the manmade nitrogen that is used to make corn has many disadvantages that people were previously unaware of. Pollan has been writing on food production all his life, so he establishes some immediate credibility. Pollan is aware of the current society’s ignorance and unawareness of things they eat, the things that go directly into their body and become a part of them. Out of concern, Pollan tries to implement the same concerns in his readers with his uses of exemplification on the other uses of corn. He purposefully mentions Fritz Haber, the inventor of combining nitrogen with different elements to produce new, life-sustaining compounds, to claim that he was also responsible for the extermination of millions of Jews during World War II with his invention of poisonous gases. His inventions were so notorious that “his wife, a chemist sickened by her husband’s contributions to the war effort, used his army pistol to kill herself” (Pollan 303). With his use of horrifying examples, Pollan appeals to the readers’ pathos by helping them think about the negative contributions of corn. Pollan really makes readers question about the food that they have so trusted to come from natural plants; maybe these foods were manufactured in some egregious and unorthodox ways similar to how poisonous chlorine gas that killed millions of people was produced. Followed by his exposure on the true identity of corn that resulted from manufactured nitrogen, he reminds the readers that everyone has to rely less on synthetic corn and “build a more diversified agriculture… and give up our vast nitrogen guzzling monocultures of corn” (Pollan 305).