Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

Exigence: The text is responding to the current food crisis situation in the United States. American are eating more processed food than real food and are consequently getting sick. As Pollan States it " We have created the one diet on the planet that reliably gets people sick"

 

Audience: I beleive the intended audience in the average U.S citizen who might be uneducated and unwilling to look up nutitional information or is so confused about the amount of true and not true nutritional science out there. I think his secondary audience would by the food industries as those able to make and advocate for change in our society. 

 

Purpose: The audience is supposed to feel a sense of relief and understanding after reading the text and be compelled to follow a few of the rules presented by Pollan and be a bit more educated of all the tricks the food industry makes, hopefully leaving the population a little more healthy and wise than before. The ultimate goal would be to get the population off the western diet and get them to start demanding change in the food industry, 

 

Contraints: The fact that it is such a paired down, simplified book creates a constraint. All the vast amounts of scientific and other knowledge that is usually is Pollan's books, he can not put in. This creates a complelling read for the audience but limits Pollan to really think about what is important to include. He has to make a compelling enough case with limited info, which he uses precisly that constraint to make his case. Another constraint that the illustrator was approached by Pollan, so she was limited to make paintings that went with his rules. She has some creative range but ultimately she was confined to making paintings that helped Pollan's case he was making with his rules. If her opinion differed she didn't really have any room to show it. 

 

Genre:  The genre of the book is labeled as a manual. This along with the fact that it is differentiating from the western normally thinking about food creates a non-normative text. Food books are not normally written as manuals and not normally written in a fashion tells the audience to get rid of the western diet in their lives. The genre adds to Pollan's thesis of " culture and old wisdome might have more to say about eating healthy than science and corporations" is supported with this genre. The fact that he took old wisdom and saying and put them into a "manual" shows that he beleives these are things that should be followed to a T. The term manual gives it a playful yet serious mood. Manuals are things we typically think of it terms of car or computer manuals, things that tell us EXACTLY what we should do and things we follow without much question. He is hoping for the same things from his audience, but with a nicer tone than the factual tone presented in normal manuals.