Critical Thinker

The Game Changers Lesson #1 (Save Raw Deal for Lesson #2)

Building Block #1 Due March 25

The Assignment: Your first paragraph

In a paragraph of about 200 words, explain why someone watching The Game Changers with an uncritical eye might be seduced by its message. In what ways does the documentary appeal to us? How is the documentary effective in pressing our emotional buttons and making us "want to drink the Kool-Aid"? 

Building Block #2: Due March 29

The Assignment: Develop a Thesis for Paragraph 2 of Your Essay

In a paragraph of about 200 words, develop a claim that explains how persuasive the Netflix documentary The Game Changers is in terms of ethos, logos, and pathos. Be sure your thesis statement is followed by mapping components that will direct your body paragraphs. 

Study of Men’s Health Article That Critiques The Game Changers

“This New Documentary Says Meat Will Kill You. Here’s Why It’s Wrong”

By Paul Kita, Published September 16, 2019

Commentary Based on Summary, Paragraph, and Direct Quotations

Plant-Based has replaced the ugly word vegan. The latter represents joyless, pinch-faced eating. On the other hand, plant-based evokes natural, organic, healthy, and joyful. 

The Netflix documentary The Game Changers “pushes” the plant-based lifestyle. Produced by James Cameron, the film argues that “eating any animal products--including meat, fish, eggs, and dairy--can hinder athletic performance, wreak havoc on your heart, impair sexual function, and lead to an early death.”

The film’s through-line or narrative arc is watching MMA fighter James Wilks convert from an omnivore to a plant-based diet. 

Paul Kita’s verdict on the film can be contained in the following:

“Except that The Game Changers presents only one side of the facts, often via controversial sourcesLinks to an external site., grand extrapolations from small studies, and statements that are flat-out misleading.”

• One-sided facts
• Dubious or less-than-credible sources
• Exaggerated claims from small studies
• Misleading and deceptive statements

Kita explains how there is insufficient research on claims about the benefits of a plant-based diet. 

The first “study” is no study at all but a short narrative. As Kita writes:

Wilks begins the movie, and builds its entire concept around, a study he came across that reported Roman gladiators didn’t eat meat.

Except that the study isn’t actually a study.

It’s a short narrativeLinks to an external site. by Andrew Curry, a contributing writer to Archaeology, a publication of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Curry recounts a visit to the Medical University of Vienna where he held a gladiator skull and remarks upon how gladiators ate “a vegetarian diet rich in carbohydrates, with the occasional calcium supplement.”

There does exist researchLinks to an external site. on gladiators following non-meat diets, some of which is later cited in the film, but Wilks still calls a narrative a “study” when it is not a study.*

Yes, this is a minor point, but it's indicative of the often misleading portrayal of "research" to come.

***

In other words, Kita observes that the film begins with a loss of credibility. In a critical thinking class, we call credibility an important part of establishing a persuasive argument--ethos. 

From the very beginning, The Game Changers has problems with ethos. 

Perhaps to compensate for its lack of ethos and credible studies, the film tries to razzle-dazzle us with flashy research. As Kita writes:

And The Game Changers is filled with research. Studies flash upon the screen at a wild rate—sometimes three or four in a row. Medical experts offer long explanations of scientific conclusions in lab-coat speak. The amount of data is daunting, with the implication being: Look at all the science! How can veganism be wrong?!

The problem is that the study findings are often twisted and presented to the viewer without giving them a full understanding of the research.

In one instance where Wilks does cite actual peer-reviewed researchLinks to an external site., he narrates: “And when it comes to gaining strength and muscle mass, research comparing plant and animal protein has shown that as long as the proper amount of amino acids are consumed the source is irrelevant.”

What Wilks doesn’t call out is that the same study states this: “as a group, vegetarians have lower mean muscle creatine concentrations than do omnivores, and this may affect supramaximal exercise performance.”

Elsewhere in The Game Changers, Wilks name-checks studies that feature small sample sizes and then extrapolates broad generalizations.

***

Cherry-Picking Facts

In other words, even when credible studies are given, the principals cherry-pick the facts to paint a distorted picture. Again, such cherry-picking diminishes the film’s ethos. 

In addition to ethos, we must use another important factor to be persuasive in our argumentation--logos. The word logos in this context refers to the logic and reasoning that is used. We see a lapse of both ethos and logos in the misinterpretation of a 2010 study. 

As the writer observes:

The most glaring instance of this is when Wilks claims that cow’s milk can increase estrogen and lower testosterone in men.

The 2010 study he referencesLinks to an external site., published in the journal Pediatrics International, was conducted using the milk of pregnant cows. The scientists pulled from a pool of 18 people (seven men, six children, and five women), and found that milk reduced testosterone secretions—not overall testosterone—temporarily.

Seven men. Temporarily.

***

It is not logical to take a study of seven men who have temporary testosterone reduction and make the claim that cow’s milk “can increase estrogen and lower testosterone in men.”

***

The author makes a concession that Wilks is correct to criticize the biased beef industry for its fake and biased research, but then in the same breath, Wilks cites an avocado study that makes grand claims about avocados:

One of the studies The Game Changers cites repeatedly throughout the film is “Hass Avocado Modulates Postprandial Vascular Reactivity and Postprandial Inflammatory Responses To a Hamburger Meal In Healthy Volunteers.Links to an external site.”

Wilks uses this study to support his argument that meat impairs blood flow and increases inflammation. Except, that as you can probably guess, the study is “supported by the Hass Avocado Board.”

***

Another factor in argumentation is pathos--developing an emotional connection to your argument. The film tries to impress us with lots of scientific language, but it doesn’t add to much and too often the case, the scientific mumbo-jumbo is misleading. As the writer points out:

Numerous times throughout the documentary, The Game Changers bombards you with the scientific terms TMAO, hetereocyclic amines, heme iron, neu5gc (a doozy!), endotoxins, and AGEs.

Here, again, Wilks presents claims that these compounds, unique to animal products, increase the risk of inflammation, which can lead to a host of nasty diseases, particularly cancer.

Except that the scientific understanding of these compounds is far less studied than The Game Changers leads the viewer to believe. And the results of emerging studies are not nearly as concrete as those done on cigarettes, as the film later implies.

***

Exaggerated Claims

Another failure in ethos and logos is the exaggerated claims based on misinterpreted studies. Take the connection between processed meats and colorectal cancer. Kita writes:

“A person's lifetime absolute risk of developing colorectal cancer is about 5 percent. We also know that eating processed meats increases the risk of developing colorectal cancer,” says Brian St. Pierre., M.S., R.D., C.S.C.S., Director of Performance Nutrition at Precision NutritionLinks to an external site., a nutrition coaching company that has worked with the San Antonio Spurs, the Carolina Panthers, and thousands of non-athlete clients.

“In fact, eating 50 grams of processed meat daily (about one hot dog) increases the risk of developing colorectal cancer by 17 percent. Sounds scary. However, this increased risk is relative,” St. Pierre says.

In reality, actual risk goes up by about 1 percent total, to a new absolute risk of about 6 percent.

Sure, any increase in a risk of cancer isn’t good. But it’s not as bad as disinformation efforts can make it seem.

"These kind of misunderstandings (or intentional misleadings) make it easy for folks to be confused, or to misinterpret or misunderstand actual changes to risk," St. Pierre says. "It's not wrong, it's just often out of context."

"So, while it's true that the 'strength of the evidence' for the carcinogenicity of smoking is the same as processed meat. The 'degree of risk' is not even in the same sport, let alone the same ballpark," he says.

"What The Game Changers fails to mention is that though hetereocyclic amines seem to cause cancer, and the overall risk may be small, you can mitigate potential damage by marinating your meat with spices and acidic marinades (such as yogurt or vinegar-based marinades)," St. Pierre says.

"And by eating your meat with fruits and vegetables, all of which can significantly reduce your risk of HCAs.”

You could even go so far as to say "virtually eliminate your risk", as they can decrease HCA formation by up to 99 percent, says St. Pierre.

***

High-Performing Athletes Could Have Been Carnivores (Cherry-picking)

Kita points out that the film does an excellent job of creating pathos or emotional connection. They use “high-performing athletes” who are now eating a plant-based diet. But these anecdotal stories are not substitutes for real studies. 

Plant-based eating is not the cause of their athleticism and fitness. It is correlated. These are genetic specimens who are mindful of what they eat and who train regularly. They could be just as impressive on a keto or some other diet.

We must distinguish causation from correlation. 

Either/Or Fallacy: "You must make a choice"

Another problem is what’s called the Either/Or fallacy. Kita observes that you don’t have to be plant-based or meat-eater. You could be both, but the movie wants you to “make a choice.” In the words of Kita:

“Either you eat animal products and suffer the consequences or avoid animal products and thrive, the movie argues.

Except that there’s another choice: Eat more vegetables.

This is the choice that has vast and well-established scientific benefits.

This is the choice that qualified and experienced registered dietitians (of which none are featured in The Game Changers, by the way) urge their clients, professional athletes and regular people alike, to adopt.

This is a choice of inclusion, rather than exclusionLinks to an external site..

Around the half-hour mark, The Game Changers makes this claim: “Even iceberg lettuce has more antioxidants than salmon or eggs.”

It’s a statement that is so face-smackingly stupid, and it typifies the dangers of either/or eating.

By over-valuing one nutrient (antioxidants in iceberg lettuce), you devalue the host of beneficial nutrients in the other (heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids in salmon, brain-aiding choline in eggs—just to name two).

“Ultimately, it's not that getting people to eat plants is a bad thing. It's generally a great thing. But you don't have to do so by erroneously telling people that meat is killing them, and they need to go to an all-plant diet. That is a false dichotomy,” says St. Pierre.

“Instead, teach them the benefits of adding more wholesome plant foods to their meat intake. And then teach them to eat higher-quality meat options. Maybe even to consider swapping some meat for a plant-based protein (such as tempeh, tofu, or seitan). There's a progression, and a happy middle ground for most.”

***

Study of Women’s Health Article about The Game Changers

“Netflix’s Doc The Game Changers is Big News: A Nutrition Expert On the Science” by Claudia Canavan, November 8, 2019

I notice The Game Changers has a lot of “bro science” in an attempt to appeal to young men. To get a different perspective, I looked at this article from Women’s Health.

Canavan begins by saying her rugby fan friend at a pub said The Game Changers had converted him. He was going to be a vegan. 

She continues to explain that the film has broad appeal; it hit number one on iTunes and enjoyed top ratings on Netflix. 

Canavan explains the film’s popularity this way:

As to the secret sauce seasoning its success? The Game Changers has taken the plant-based message and calcified it with a shell of testosterone. If the previous comms hadn't hit (animal agriculture is now been toutedLinks to an external site. as playing a bigger role in the climate crisis than power generation; factory farming is needlessly cruel; people who go hard on greens often glow like fireflies) then this is the slice that was missing.

Namely, that you can sashay away from steak, eggs and salmon, and still be a tanked-up bro with sinew-studded muscles who is strong enough to throw over cars.

***

In other words, you don’t have to be a pencil-neck geek soy boy. You can be a Muscle Bro. 

Canavan further explains that the film challenges the notion that optimal muscle and athletic nutrition comes from meat, dairy, and eggs. Moreover, the film says the opposite is true: A vegan diet makes you more manly. 

Here the film is pulling on the emotional strings (pathos) of the male audience. 

The film’s narrator, a vegan convert, is an Alpha Male--muscular MMA fighter James Wilks.

At this point in the essay, the author discloses that she does not eat meat. She goes short of calling herself a vegan, however. 

While sympathetic to many of the movie’s claims, she wants to consult an expert, so she interviews Dr. Mayur Ranchordas of Sheffield Hallam University and a sport nutrition consultant. 

He says the following:

Look, everybody can benefit from having more plant-based foods in their diet, and I do not want to discourage people from taking up plant-based diets, if they want to.

But I do think that some of the comparisons presented in the film don't hold up. For example, a segment in which three athletes are given either a bean burrito, a chicken burrito or a red meat burrito and then have their blood analysed for endothelial function. [Science: the endothelium lines the inside of your blood vessels and helps to regulate your immune function and blood clotting. Impairment might lead to heart disease, per Diabetes UK.Links to an external site.]

The blood of the athlete who ate the bean burrito is seen to have better endothelial function – it appears to be more clear.

But endothelial function is affected by exercise, regular intake of polyphenol and antioxidant-rich foods such as fresh fruits, vegetables of all colours, olive oil, tea and small amounts of red wine. Feeding of one meal is a poor illustration of how endothelial function can change.

In randomised controlled trials, you don’t just measure one outcome, but a series. So you'd look at what's happening in the blood, what’s then happening with your hormonesLinks to an external site., your lifestyle, your mood, your sleep quality.Links to an external site.

Cherry-picking things that are going to be quite dramatic means that you’re only telling a very short chapter of a big story.

***

Misinterpreting and cherry-picking data and not even conducting credible experiments diminish the movie’s ethos or credibility.

The author finishes by defending the film in a way I haven’t seen before:

It's worth noting that Joseph Pace and James Wilks, the creators and producers of The Game Changers, have always remained in full control of the film, have never accepted any corporate sponsorship or funding, and have no investments or equity stake in any plant-based products or services.

I should also point out that none of the subjects in the film were paid for their appearances, and that none of our high profile executive producers, including James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jackie Chan, Lewis Hamilton, Chris Paul, and Novak Djokovic, received any payment or equity stake in the film for supporting it.'***

The author address rebuttals to the vegan diet: That it makes you deficient in iron and zinc. She offers this rebuttal:

'Many people assume that, without meat or other animal products, we will become deficient in nutrients like iron and zinc, but according to the two most recent position statements from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics on vegetarian diets, people who avoid meat are no more likely to develop iron-deficiency anaemia than people who eat meat.

Similarly, they conclude that blood levels of zinc are well within the normal range for people who don't eat meat, noting that zinc deficiency is simply not evident in Western plant-based populations.

I find it interesting that critics of plant-based eating are often quick to 'warn' us of potential deficiencies, while failing to address that people on an animal-based diet often fall short on recommendations for several key nutrients, including fibre, vitamin C, folate, and potassium, all of which are typically more abundant in plant-based diets.

The key takeaway here is that, instead of relying on outdated fears about plant-based diets, we should look at the strong body of evidence that supports this way of eating and make sure that everyone, no matter where they fall on the spectrum, is aware of what nutrients their bodies require and the healthiest sources to get them from.'

 

 

 

Study of Layne Norton’s “The Game Changers Review--A Scientific Analysis (Updated)”

Layne Norton begins by explaining that he was skeptical about seeing The Game Changers because he’s seen several food documentaries that have been a pile of propaganda and BS. 

He goes on to write that real documentaries--that is, credible ones--are science-based, examine opinions on both sides, and don’t twist and cherry-pick information to promote preconceived ideas.

Norton makes it clear early on that he’s no fan of The Game Changers. He says he won’t refer to it as a documentary but as a film because clearly, it doesn’t adhere to credible critical thinking principles to deserve being called a documentary.  

The film would rather be “sexy” and scintillating than credible. 

Another issue Norton has is that one of the producers, the great Arnold Schwarzenegger, ate a lot of meat during his bodybuilding years and then turns around “to espouse the virtues of a vegan diet.” 

After being scolded by the vegan community for his skepticism, Norton decided to see the film. Here is the critique that follows:

Unlike the filmmakers, Norton discloses his biases: He’s not a vegan. His research in graduate school was sponsored by the Egg and Dairy Councils. He also points out that he is equally critical of meat-eating “low-carb zealots.” 

The filmmakers do not disclose their conflicts of interest. They are either vegan or have money invested in vegan companies. Or both. 

Furthermore, all the “experts” whose “studies” are used in the film sell vegan products. 

Norton is skeptical that the film’s narrator MMA fighter James Wilks read 1,000 hours of studies about nutrition. 

The first “study” about gladiators is no study at all but a short article. Worse, the article is cherry-picked so that one scholar is ignored. This is the scholar who said that gladiators who ate a vegetarian high-carb diet were either fat or coated with a lot of adipose tissue. Being fat on a vegetarian diet is an inconvenient truth that doesn’t promote the film’s propaganda. 

Then the film refutes the idea that protein is fuel for exercise, yet Norton points out that everyone stopped making this erroneous claim many years ago, so to bring it up is a Straw Man argument. 

The filmmakers seek out high-performance vegan athletes to confirm their bias when in fact there are far more omnivore athletes. The filmmakers are merely cherry-picking athletes to promote their propaganda.

Norton continues to criticize the film’s false claim that plant protein and animal protein are the same. “That is a flat out misrepresentation of scientific data,” Norton writes. 

Plant proteins are less bioavailable, which means we don’t digest as high a percentage of plant protein as we do meat protein. They are only 10-40% as digestible as animal protein and they lack essential amino acids for optimal health and performance. You can combine plant proteins to improve the amino acid profile but you’re still getting less bioavailable protein. 

There are lame claims like a peanut butter sandwich at 8 grams of protein having as much protein as 3 eggs, 18 grams, or a 3-oz steak, which has 21 grams. Why even make the false claim?

The film follows this lame claim by showing off powerlifter and strongman Patrick Baboumian. They don’t question if whether or not he’s on steroids or PEDs. Nor do they tell you he drinks 4 vegan protein shakes a day for 410 grams of protein. The film should disclose that if you’re going to get protein from a vegan diet, you will need to use vegan protein supplements to eat over 400 grams of protein when most people eat about 100 grams of protein a day. 

Being a vegan would be less desirable if you were told you would have to eat 200-400 grams of protein a day to make sure you were digesting enough protein. The filmmakers hide this information.

Norton goes on to show the misleading representations of the Burrito and Beet Juice studies. I won’t go into the weeds here. Both studies were full of false and exaggerated claims and the claim that avocados improve endothelial function was funded by Hass Avocado Brand. Of course, the filmmakers didn’t disclose that.

The filmmakers blame meat for increased inflammation when in fact the true cause is obesity. They don’t show the link between obesity and inflammation because that would detract from their attempt to demonize meat.

Yet another aspect of propaganda is when the wife of a vegan NFL player makes “healthy” vegan dishes: chicken wings, mac and cheese, burgers, and cheesecake. These foods are calorie-dense, processed, full of canola oils, and agreed upon by the scientific community to be bad for you. In fact, vegan mac and cheese causes more inflammation than real cheese, but such truth would not promote the film’s propaganda.

Let’s Stop for a Moment

Let’s stop for a moment and say this: There is nothing wrong with promoting a plant-based diet based on the truth that you will need to take a lot of protein and other supplements to get adequate nutrition and you won’t be able to eat the “fun,” oil-larded processed vegan foods but rather eat whole foods. The point here isn’t to bash a plant-based diet. The point is to bash the dishonesty of propaganda that informs this film. 

Let’s get back to the critique.

***

Norton then takes on the film’s claim that meat causes more CVD (cardiovascular disease) and cancer. Lean meat doesn’t and fatty fish lowers your CVD. The film doesn’t disclose this.

Norton then points out that the film makes a faulty comparison between humans and “vegan” gorillas. Our digestive tracts are different. Gorillas can absorb more vegan protein so the comparison is false, misleading, and dangerous.

Does a vegan diet help save the planet? Norton writes the following:

This might be the one compelling argument to limit meat consumption insofar as raising meat takes a disproportionate amount of land and water, but here again, the filmmakers misrepresent the truth about the impact of meat production on the environment. They claim that the emissions from meat are more than all of the total forms of transportation in the world combined. This is quite simply not true. Meat production accounts for about 3% of the USA’s greenhouse emissions (13-18% in less developed countries), while the energy industry at large is 80% of the greenhouse gases from the USA (64% worldwide). [63] Moreover,

Animal agriculture is responsible for 13–18% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions globally, and less in developed countries (e.g. 3% in the USA). Fossil fuel combustion for energy and transportation is responsible for approximately 64% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions globally, and more in developed countries (e.g. 80% in the USA)…The burning of fossil fuels for energy and animal agriculture are two of the biggest contributors to global warming, along with deforestation. Globally, fossil fuel-based energy is responsible for about 64% of human greenhouse gas emissions, with deforestation at about 18%, and animal agriculture between 13% and 18%. [64]

So before you admonish someone for eating meat and how bad it is for the environment, if you drive a muscle car but admonish others for eating meat because of how bad it is for the environment, you might want to look in the mirror.

Norton concludes:

In this case, the film used strawman, false dichotomies, cherry picking, and a whole host of other logical fallacies in an attempt to demonize animals products and make vegan diet the solution to the world’s problems. To be clear, I think a diet that is heavy in plants and fiber is great. I also have no problem with those who choose to not eat meat for their own ethical reasons, it’s not my job to judge your ethics. All I ask is that we are honest about what the science says. If you don’t want to eat meat because you don’t want to intentionally harm animals, that’s great. But do not twist scientific research and retroactively attempt to contort data so that it fits your bias.

I continue to be utterly disgusted by food ‘documentaries.’ As of yet, I have not seen one food film that is anything other than a steaming pile of ****. These are not documentaries. A documentary gives you experts from BOTH sides and then lets you draw your own conclusions. This film would be closest to a comedy, because it’s a joke. I didn’t even address all the ludicrous claims in the video, I simply picked out the most egregious claims. I would have needed to hire extra staff to fully debunk this steaming pile of dung. It helps no one and does not move veganism forward and will do nothing but further confuse the average person through misrepresentation of science and fear mongering.

F-, we are all dumber for having watched this, and may God have mercy on your souls.

Food Lesson #3: 3-15-23: Review of Harriet Brown's Flaws and Fallacies

Review Essay Outline for Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand Essay 

Paragraph 1: Either outline Brown’s essay or write a personal anecdote about you or someone you know who went on a weight-loss quest. 

Paragraph 2: Write a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the claim (made by both Harriet Brown and Sandra Aamodt) that dieting is a fool’s errand. Make sure your thesis can be supported by 3 or 4 reasons because these reasons will be in your body paragraphs.  

Paragraphs 3-6 will be your supporting paragraphs.

Paragraphs 7 and 8 will be your counterargument and rebuttal paragraphs. It’s important to let your reader know you battle-tested your claim by considering your opponents’ strongest counterarguments.

Paragraph 9 is your conclusion, a powerful restatement of your thesis.

Your final page is an MLA-formated Works Cited with a minimum of 4 sources, which would include the essays of Harriet Brown, Sandra Aamodt, and at least 2 others. 

Review Flaws and Strengths of Harriet Brown’s Essay

Let us review the flaws. 

Flaw #1 Oversimplifying Our Concern with Weight

Brown’s first flaw is that she oversimplifies our weight-consciousness as cosmetic-driven beginning in the 1910s when in fact, post World War II, an abundance of calorie-dense foods did indeed cause a spike in weight:

As Brown writes:

Weight inched its way into the American consciousness around the turn of the 20th century. “I would sooner die than be fat,” declared Amelia Summerville, author of the 1916 volume Why Be Fat? Rules for Weight-Reduction and the Preservation of Youth and Health. (She also wrote, with a giddy glee that likely derived from malnutrition, “I possibly eat more lettuce and pineapple than any other woman on earth!”) As scales became more accurate and affordable, doctors began routinely recording patients’ height and weight at every visit.  Weight-loss drugs hit the mainstream in the 1920s, when doctors started prescribing thyroid medications to healthy people to make them slimmer. In the 1930s, 2,4-dinitrophenol came along, sold as DNP, followed by amphetamines, diuretics, laxatives, and diet pills like fen-phen, all of which caused side effects ranging from the annoying to the fatal.

The national obsession with weight got a boost in 1942, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company crunched age, weight, and mortality numbers from policy holders to create “desirable” height and weight charts. For the first time, people (and their doctors) could compare themselves to a standardized notion of what they “should” weigh. And compare they did, in language that shifted from words like chubby and plump to the more clinical-sounding adipose, overweight, and obese. The word overweight, for example, suggests you’re over the “right” weight. The word obese, from the Latin obesus, or “having eaten until fat,” conveys both a clinical and a moral judgment.

***

Flaw #2: Oversimplifying and Downplaying the Health Effects of Being Overweight

Brown’s second flaw is oversimplifying the effects of being overweight. To a degree, being “overweight” is not a risk factor, but Brown doesn’t address morbid levels of obesity that make people at risk. She cherry-picks some evidence but ignores a whole body of other evidence.

Brown writes:

Higher BMIs have been linked to a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers, especially esophageal, pancreatic, and breast cancers. But weight loss is not necessarily linked to lower levels of disease. The only study to follow subjects for more than five years, the 2013 Look AHEAD study, found that people with type 2 diabetes who lost weight had just as many heart attacks, strokes, and deaths as those who didn’t.

Not only that, since 2002, study after study has turned up what researchers call the “obesity paradox”: Obese patients with heart disease, heart failure, diabetes, kidney disease, pneumonia, and many other chronic diseases fare better and live longer than those of normal weight.

***

Brown conveniently ignores the billions of health care costs that obesity places on Americans. Granted, she wrote her essay pre-Pandemic, but overweight people are at the highest risk for fatality from Covid-19.

Flaw #3: Unlike Aamodt, Brown fails to look at the real factors of high-risk lifestyles. 

Unlike Harriet Brown, Sandra Aamodt gives us a clear picture of someone who is at high risk. This person has the following characteristics:

• Lives in a food desert
• Has low income
• Lives in a high-stress environment
• Suffers from loneliness
• Doesn’t eat whole foods and several servings of fruits and vegetables a day
• Doesn’t exercise every day

Because Brown fails to see the whole picture, she offers no Exit Strategy. 

Flaw #4: Brown’s essay as a whole is bitter, hopeless, and needlessly fails to provide an Exit Strategy or a viable solution. 

Whereas Sandra Aamodt encourages us to eat wholesome foods, listen to our hunger cues, exercise regularly, and take on a reasonable attitude in life, Brown’s essay suffers from despair and nutritional nihilism, the idea that we should just give up. 

Can we provide an honest and persuasive defense of Harriet Brown?

Let us now look at some defenses of Harriet Brown in the form of a counterargument and rebuttal. 

My opponents and supporters of Harriet Brown’s essay will make the claim that Brown does a powerful, cogent, and persuasive job of showing that dieting is a fool’s errand because dieting is both harmful and futile. Brown provides specific evidence to show that beauty standards are contrived by the media, advertising, and health insurance companies; she shows that the diet industry stands to make billions by believing the chicanery or BS that diets work effectively, and she does an outstanding job showing that drugs and surgeries to address obesity have large failure rates and present high risk to the patients. I will concede with defenders of Harriet Brown that Brown’s points are irrefutable, demonstrable, and persuasive. However, her essay is a failure when we consider she conveniently doesn’t address the need to make healthy lifestyle changes, she doesn’t address, as Sandra Aamodt does, the real high-risk conditions that people confuse with the generic term “obesity,” and her failure to give us an Exit Strategy from the Diet Hell that society imposes on us.  

Sample Thesis:

While Harriet Brown’s essay is larded with too many flaws to be considered a successful essay, I agree with those who make the claim that both Harriet Brown and Sandra Aamodt in her essay “Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet” champion the idea that trying to lose weight is a fool’s errand. Dieting is doomed to fail, it is doomed to inflict chaos on our metabolism, it is bound to inflict us with stress, anxiety, and shame, and it is bound to force us to spend an enormous amount of time, money, and energy on a futile quest for weight loss. The Wise Errand is seeking to eat whole, healthy foods, exercise, make a decent living, and establish healthy social connections. 

 

Review of Harriet Brown Fallacies:

Dietary Nihilism

Brown suggests giving up in paragraph 1 yet offers no alternatives. Giving up with no solutions to weight-related problems is what I call Dietary Nihilism, an unacceptable position for someone who wants to live a long, healthy life. 

Telling people to give up dieting while offering no alternatives strikes me as bitter and irresponsible. Such a position compromises the writer’s ethos (credibility) and pathos (my emotional connection to the writing). 

Cherry-Picking Based on Cognitive Bias

There is an abundance of credible studies showing how being overweight has deleterious effects on our health, but Brown conveniently ignores those studies and focuses on studies that show that the contrary is true: There is no connection between high BMI and having bad health in terms of heart disease, high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome, diabetes 2, inflammation, higher risk for cancer, stroke, and cardiac arrest; shortened lifespan. 

If I want to eat to my heart’s content, then my cognitive bias is going to point me in the direction to “research” that gives me the Green Light to eat pizza, donuts, and ice cream. 

Cherry-picking evidence based on cognitive biases does not help Brown in terms of credibility, reasoning, or emotional power: ethos, logos, and pathos.

 

“It’s All So Confusing!” Fallacy

Brown complains that there are so many kinds of diets making health claims: keto, vegan, raw, organic, high-protein, low-fat, etc. She just doesn’t know what to believe anymore. 

When an important topic is confusing or difficult, should we shrug our shoulders and scream, “I just don’t know what to do!”

Of course, weight management is difficult and so is healthy eating, but Brown says nothing about nutritional literacy and how such literacy will make great strides in improving our health.

What is nutritional literacy?

• It’s knowing the difference between whole and processed foods and where to find whole foods in the grocery store and how to avoid processed foods in the grocery store.
• It’s learning how to cook at least half a dozen healthy meals that you enjoy eating so that you are both healthy and self-reliant. 
• It’s learning how to avoid sugar and find foods that satisfy you without eating sugar.
• It’s learning how to achieve satiety (fullness) by eating sufficient protein.
• It’s learning how to steam vegetables and season them and make high-protein salads that you enjoy eating.
• It’s learning to replace alcohol, sugar, and processed foods with healthy foods that you actually like. 

Brown’s failure to address food literacy and her cry of learned helplessness because “eating is just so confusing” compromises her credibility (ethos). 

Failure to Acknowledge That Two Things Can Both be True: Either/Or Fallacy

Brown does a good job of showing that a skinny body aesthetic was artificially imposed upon us starting around the 1920s. For the last 100 years, there has been a money-making conspiracy to make us ashamed of our bodies:

• Advertising
• Consumerism
• Media giving us unrealistic body aesthetic
• Diet pills
• Insurance companies
• Unrealistic BMI levels
• Bariatric surgeries
• Variety of pharmaceuticals 
• Ever-changing dietary advice from the medical community and the government

While all of this is true, it can at the same time be true that being overweight is unhealthy. 

Either the quest for a healthy body is legit or there is a conspiracy to give us an unrealistic expectation of the ideal body. 

Brown commits an either/or fallacy: It’s possible that there is a profit-driven diet industry AND that being overweight is a health risk at the same time.

Her either/or fallacy compromises her credibility and reasoning (ethos and logos). 

Failure to Acknowledge Self-Empowerment Through Knowledge and Reasonable Expectations

Life is a cruel place. Once we’re 18, we’re out on our own. We have to fend for ourselves. There are many confusing things we have to deal with: health, diet, relationships, education, career, politics, civil responsibilities, and developing an appropriate philosophy of life.

Telling you that dieting is too confusing, that being skinny is nothing more than a profit-driven conspiracy, and that it’s too much work to eat right is the Gospel of Despair, Helplessness, and Victimization. 

Brown’s Gospel of Despair has no business in my class and it has no business infecting my students. 

I would rather tell my students that you should fight to find a job that gives you a good living, find people to love in your life so that you have enough self-worth to work on having a long healthy life for your sake and your loved one’s sake, make a good living so you can afford to eat healthy because healthy whole foods are expensive, but that’s the situation. Empower yourself. Develop food literacy. Develop knowledge about health because knowledge is power and you’re responsible for gaining that power.

Harriet Brown’s sob story won’t give it to you. 

Learning to eat healthy foods may not give you a hot Instagram bod, but you’ll be vastly healthier than if you give up and go on an Eat- Everything Diet.  

See Netflix Explained: Why Diets Fail and linked to Vox. 

Review of "Why Diets Fail":

One. Our body has a skinny rebel, the hormone leptin. 

Two. Snack industry brainwashed us into snacking so that we constantly have elevated insulin, resulting in obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, etc.

Three. Food industry has us addicted to processed foods, which are higher profit than whole foods.

Four. After World War II, calories became "low-hanging fruit," easy pickings.

Five. "Normal" is eating in excess of 3,000 calories a day when, from an evolutionary level, we're more suited to under 2,000. 

Six. Diets may or may not work. It doesn't matter because most of us don't stick to them in the long term.

Seven. Related to Six, most people don't stick to diets because weight-loss management is a full-time job not suited to people who have to work, go to school, parent, etc. If you're rich and have the whole day to focus on your navel and hire a personal trainer and have an Instagram account showing off your Hot Bod, then perhaps you will be a string bean. But that's not most of us.

Eight. The only people who tend to manage their weight find a way to enjoy eating whole foods for their lifetime.

Sample Thesis Statements

Defining a thesis:

A thesis is a meaningful claim or argument that is the central focus of your essay, that you can defend with credible information, that will outline an essay of 1,200 words or more, that is challenging enough to be appropriate for college-level writing, that has high stakes, and that defies simple analysis. 

• The thesis or claim is the central focus of your essay. It is the reason you are writing your essay. To stray from your thesis is to betray your original intention. 
• The thesis is based on an informed opinion based on credible research. Your research has been peer reviewed and is rooted in reality. To look to “research” based on a fever swamp of unproven conspiracies and misinformation is to present an essay that is disconnected from reality. We live in an age where even facts and reality itself are disputed. This is a very specific crisis called the epistemic crisis. You can read about this crisis in Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge. 
• A strong thesis may have reasons contained in the sentence. These reasons are also called mapping components. They outline your essay’s body paragraphs. Observe the following example: Working from the home is more viable for most companies because working from the home saves your workers from commute time, doesn’t expose workers to illnesses resulting in lost work time, reduces work theft opportunities, reduces company expenses such as heat, AC, lighting, etc., and takes advantage of the technology that’s cheaply available to make your employees’ home office an efficient business office. 
• The thesis can generate an essay that is 1,200 words or more means the thesis is demonstrable: You can defend the thesis with reasoning, logic, examples, and research. 
• Your thesis has high stakes. You present an argument and the listener or reader doesn’t feel compelled to say “So what?” Rather, you have chosen a topic that is relevant, vital, and urgent to the human condition. 
• Your thesis defies simple analysis. You are avoiding the obvious and factual such as “What the world needs now is love.” Rather, you are focusing on debatable topics. 

Sample Thesis Statements

Sample #1 offers no mapping components and may or may not be demonstrable:

Suppose your Western Diet, an endless buffet of sugar, processed food, and sodium, is presenting you with various health afflictions that are so extreme that you have a variety of morbidity factors. In that case, you have to push Harriet Brown’s pessimism aside and manipulate your eating environment and recalibrate your eating habits in such a way that your diet is not a fool’s errand but a necessary step in saving your life. 

Sample #2 with mapping components

If you’re discouraged by your lackluster build and pudgy contours and aspire to look like a chiseled Instagram model, you will most likely find that your austere dietary program will give you short-term results, but in the long run, your diet will be a fool’s errand because willpower can only last so long, environmental and social pressures to indulge will break you, high-density-calorie foods are in abundance, and sugary, fatty foods are an irresistible drug that provides an escape from the stresses of modern life.  

Sample #3 with mapping components

While it’s true that long-term adherence to a proper diet is difficult and that sugary, fatty foods can indeed become an irresistible drug from the stresses of modern life, I propose that a healthy whole food diet over the long haul is more viable than the self-destructive Western Diet because a healthy whole food diet can be adopted through habit, economic wellbeing and prove to be necessary for the fight against depression, diabetes, and other comorbidity factors. 

Sample #4 with mapping components

While Harriet Brown in “The Weight of the Evidence” makes many compelling and persuasive points, her essay suffers from a lack of persuasion because of problems in ethos, logos, and pathos.

Sample #5 without mapping components is probably demonstrable. 

While Harriet Brown’s “The Weight of the Evidence” suffers problems in ethos, logos, and pathos, her main argument about the futility of dieting remains insightful, compelling, and persuasive.

Sample #6 with mapping components 

While Harriet Brown’s tone is a bit glum and some of her studies seem cherry-picked, she nonetheless demonstrates persuasively that dieting is a fool’s errand because of unrealistic societal expectations, money-driven skinny aesthetics of a fraudulent dieting industry, the inevitable failure of willpower, and biological impediments. 

Sample #7 with mapping components

While Harriet Brown makes many insightful and irrefutable points, I find her essay offensive and harmful because she cherry-picks studies to support her claim that being fat is not a health risk, she doesn’t leave nuance in the realm of healthy eating as an alternative to throwing care to the wind and eating “whatever,” she doesn’t offer any success stories to provide a counterbalance to her doom and gloom, and she offers no encouragement for at least eating healthy whole foods so that as a whole her essay leaves a sour and putrid taste in my mouth. 

Sample Counterarguments and Rebuttals for Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand Essay

Typically, when we write argumentation essays, we devote a section of our essay, usually before our conclusion, that addresses our opponents’ disagreement with our central argument or the way we anticipate how our opponents will object to our essay’s claim. 

We want to make a clear presentation of how and why our imagined opponents might disagree with us. This is called the counterargument. 

We then examine the counterargument and offer a rebuttal or refutation of that counterargument. 

Here are some examples for the essay that addresses the claim that losing weight is such a futile endeavor that dieting surely is a fool’s errand. 

Example of a Counterargument and Rebuttal for Essay That Supports Idea That Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand

I can anticipate my opponents taking my claim that dieting is a fool’s errand as bait for accusing me of “dietary nihilism,” the notion that we should throw care to the wind and engage in reckless disregard when it comes to our bodies, indulging in gluttony, and being both beholden and addicted to the food industry’s myriad of fat-, salt-, and sugar-laden foods. On the contrary, I am no dietary nihilist. I am a dietary realist or pragmatist. My approach is not to focus on weight loss but on health by cultivating a love for cooking whole foods, avoiding processed foods, and having the food literacy to know the difference. 

Example of a Counterargument and Rebuttal for Essay That Refutes Idea That Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand

I am a staunch defender of the idea that we should not let the majority of dieters, doomed to fail for a myriad of reasons too many to list here, be an excuse for our own individual aspirations to manage our weight and live a healthy lifestyle. My opponents will point out, correctly, that many lack the time and resources to buy and prepare healthy foods. I concede their point. For many hard-working Americans, time and budget constraints impede them from devoting the kind of time and resources necessary for a permanent weight-loss plan. But my fellow Americans’ dietary failures, however legitimate, do not excuse me for taking personal responsibility for my own dietary success. The truth of the matter is I have the familial, financial, and environmental support to succeed at my dietary goals, and my particular situation is such that dieting is not a fool’s errand. Rather, dieting and keeping excess weight off is a moral imperative. 

Example of Counterargument and Rebuttal for Essay That Supports Idea That Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand

Since the overwhelming majority of Americans lack the time and resources to devote to full-time dieting, I stand by my argument that dieting for the most part is a fool’s errand. My opponents will point out that there are some Americans who enjoy enough financial comfort and discretionary time to devote to their weight-loss plan. But this amount of Americans is too minuscule to make a drop in the bucket, so to speak, when it comes to successful dieting because we cannot really talk about dieting as a fool’s errand, or not unless we talk about viability and sustainability for most people. If we can’t scale successful dieting for the masses, then dieting indeed is a fool’s errand with the exception of a very elite and specialized class of people who can meet all the caveats and conditions for succeeding at permanent weight loss. And I would remind the elite class that even they have a strong probability of failing, so my contention that dieting is a fool’s errand stands. 

Authorial Presence

After 35 years of teaching college writing, I am convinced that the highest compliment I can put on students’ essays is that they wrote with authorial presence, which I would define as a confident writing voice that curates the argument, narrative, or any other kind of exposition with a distinctive point of view. This point of view rests on five major pillars: The student writes from a philosophical position that developing an essay as an academic exercise is morally repugnant; rather, writing an essay attempts to create a greater understanding of a murky issue that is relevant to the human condition. 

Secondly, the authorial presence is generated from an informed opinion in which the writer did her due diligence, studying credible sources, and exploring opposite sides of a position before reaching her conclusion. Third, her authorial presence, or writing voice, makes it clear that living in the world of ideas is not an austere, boring place but rather one of the highest realms of human existence, the privilege of being engaged in the Cafe Society of the Mind. This Cafe Society of the Mind is not a place for smug complacency and mutual praise. Rather, we challenge each other. As such, we arrive at the fourth pillar of authorial presence: The writer disrupts our assumptions about life and ourselves by challenging us with contrarian ideas, or to use  Kafka’s words, her writing “is the ax that breaks the frozen ocean.” 

Finally, over time her authorial presence melds with her personality so that her speaking persona and her writing persona both come from the core of her being. In other words, her intellectual life has replaced the embryonic person she was before starting her intellectual journey. Her authorial presence reflects the different person she has become and this different person, unlike her previous iteration, is strongly defined, distinctive, and stamps her signature in everything she does. 

The strength of her persona reminds us of Oscar Wilde’s famous, often misinterpreted adage. “The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second one is, no one has yet discovered.” I would argue this “pose” is an authorial presence. But it is not the hollow pose of a dandy. Rather, it is a distinctive persona built with blood, sweat, and tears. 

In Your Thesis, Be Sure to Address One of the Assigned Readings with a Signal Phrase

A lot of you are writing that dieting can be done with hard work and professional guidance (a sound, demonstrable thesis) and a lot of you are writing that dieting can often be a fool’s errand because of the physical and mental problems that result (also a sound, demonstrable thesis), but your thesis doesn’t have sufficient context nor does it address the assignment unless you use a signal phrase in which you respond to one of the authors in our assignment. Let me give you two examples:

Example of a Student Using a Signal Phrase to Disagree with One of the Authors

While Harriet Brown makes many compelling points in her essay “The Weight of the Evidence,” I would counter her point that dieting is a futile quest because a healthy approach to dieting can work if we take the focus off the Hot Instagram Bod and instead strive for health, if we increase our protein to stave off our appetites, if we develop a baseline of nutritional literacy, and if we can enjoy the health benefits from our weight loss. 

Example of a Student Using a Signal Phrase to Agree with One of the Authors

While I’ll concede that a healthy approach to dieting can work for some people, I find that Harriet Brown makes a convincing case in “The Weight of the Evidence” that dieting is rooted in an unrealistic body image, fueled by the greedy weight-loss industry, doomed to wreak disappointment, failure, and low self-esteem on us, and to be responsible for an array of metabolic and hormonal disruptions so that we’re worse off than before our dieting quests. 

Do You Want to be a Brawler or a Peacemaker in Your Argumentative Tone?

In argumentation, we decide upon a rhetorical voice. We can be aggressive brawlers who take no prisoners in our argumentation or we can be peacemakers who try to arrive at a point of common understanding. One style is not better than the other.

They are different, and both have good and bad points. The aggressive style can come off as brash and arrogant, but it is very powerful writing when done well. The more polite style can show more decorum and show humility, but it may come across as being too tepid and boring. 

Example of a Counterargument-Rebuttal That Is Aggressive and Forceful

Striving to eat a clean diet of whole foods, mostly plant-based, while eating 150 grams of protein a day and abstaining from sugar and alcohol is by no means a fool’s errand. Such a nutritional regimen could very well save one’s life. Opponents of my call for healthy eating are too focused on the folly and self-destruction of what I call Social Media Fad Dieters, those misguided souls who starve themselves, look for gimmicks and silver bullets and get hustled into buying supplements they don’t need, and gaining all their weight back after finding they cannot adhere to their crash course in weight loss. But these nay-sayers such as Harriet Brown make the fatal mistake of making the claim that just because 95% of aspiring dieters don’t do their due diligence and find a way to enjoy healthy eating that we should surrender a life of good health and happiness and resign ourselves to a life of slovenliness and gluttony. Harriet Brown and her ilk seem to be making the logical fallacy of Two Rights Make a Wrong: Since crash dieters are wrong in their approach and fail miserably, then it’s somehow okay to give up on a healthy approach to eating. Harriet Brown can give us several reasons for why diets fail, but she doesn’t give a hint at eating healthy. To be sure, I agree with her that unrealistic expectations and crash diets are bad, but there are joys, pleasures, and good health that we can enjoy when we can learn to eat clean whole foods rather than sob and feast on the pity party of learned helplessness. 

Counterargument-Rebuttal with a Peace-Maker Tone

I would like to first make it clear that I agree with my opponents such as Harriet Brown that fad dieting doesn’t work and that the diet industry makes profits by pounding us over the head with messages that we are never skinny enough. I would also like to make it clear that I agree with my opponents that losing weight and keeping it off permanently on any kind of diet is most likely futile and what could be called a “fool’s errand.” Where I’d like to differ with my opponents, though, is that I don’t think we should throw away the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. What is the baby? Healthy eating. And what is healthy eating? Consuming whole foods, 150 grams of protein a day, and abstaining from sugar and alcohol. Will such a regimen guarantee the kind of weight loss that will make us worthy of being Instagram models? Likely not. But will such a dietary regimen make us look and feel better? Indeed, it will, which is why I am not so mired in despair as my adversaries who seem so discouraged by the fad diets that they may have been over-eager to dismiss the healthy-eating diets as well. 

For the last few semesters, my critical thinking students have been grappling with the argument: Is losing weight a fool’s errand? 

What Students Have Taught Me:

• Most students themselves have dieted or they know friends and family who have dieted for the purposes of gaining self-esteem, conforming to an unrealistic body aesthetic, improving their health, or taking orders from a doctor who has warned them that they are dangerously obese.
• Many students have horrid tales of aspiring dieters getting exploited and manipulated by the profiteering diet industry, which promises fast, unrealistic results and tries to make their clients dependent on their products.
• Most students know someone who tried the Single Food diet: eating nothing but bananas, potatoes, cabbage soup, etc., which surely is not sustainable.
• Most students find the losing-weight quest to be a Shame and Anxiety Dungeon where failure to adhere to some Strict Eating Orthodoxy banishes them to a life of shame and misery so acute that the diet cannot be sustained for long before people suffer a nervous breakdown.
• Some students have identified a Pathological Diet Culture based on neurosis, paranoia, narcissism, and addiction. 
• Some students have smartly distinguished this Pathological Diet Culture from a Healthy Whole Foods Culture in which people emphasize eating whole foods over processed foods, but they don’t freak out when they have an occasional cheat meal.  
• Some students have smartly rejected both extremes of dieting: Strict Orthodox Dieting on one hand and Nihilistic Throw-Care-to-the-Wind Gluttony Diet on the other and in rejecting both extremes, these students have embraced a common sense emphasis on whole and healthy foods with more emphasis on health than body weight. 

Recognizing Logical Fallacies

Begging the Question

Begging the question assumes that a statement is self-evident when it actually requires proof.

Major Premise Based on a False Assumption: Fulfilling all my major desires is the only way I can be happy (false assumption).

Minor Premise: I can’t afford when of my greatest desires in life, a Rolex Deepsea Dweller wristwatch.

Conclusion: Therefore, I can never be happy.

Major Premise Based on a False Assumption: I need to go on a diet because staying on a diet will exercise my willpower, increase my self-esteem, and make me healthier. 

Minor Premise: Every time I go on a diet, I fail after a few months.

Conclusion: I must have lousy willpower, lousy self-esteem, and lousy health. 

Circular Reasoning

Circular reasoning occurs when we support a statement by restating it in different terms.

Going on a diet is good for you because diets make you lose weight, and losing weight is a good thing.

Stealing is wrong because it is illegal.

Admitting women into the men’s club is wrong because it’s an invalid policy.

Your essay is woeful because of its egregious construction.

Your boyfriend is hideous because of his heinous characteristics.

I have to sell my car because I’m ready to sell it.

I can’t spend time with my kids because it’s too time-consuming.

I need to spend more money on my presents than my family’s presents because I need bigger and better presents.

I’m a great father because I’m the best father my children have ever had.

Weak Analogy or Faulty Comparison

Analogies are never perfect but they can be powerful. The question is do they have a degree of validity to make them worth the effort.

Finding the right diet is like finding your perfect soul mate.

A toxic relationship is like cancer that gets worse and worse (fine).

Sugar is high-octane fuel to use before your workout (weak because there is nothing high-octane about a substance that causes you to crash and converts into fat and creates other problems)

Free education is a great flame and the masses are moths flying into the flames of destruction. (horribly false analogy)

Ad Hominem Fallacy (Personal Attack)

You attack the person but not the argument.

Harriet Brown looks like a bitter person so we shouldn’t believe what she writes about dieting.

“Who are you to be a marriage counselor? You’ve been divorced six times?”

A lot of people give great advice and present sound arguments even if they don’t apply their principles to their lives, so we should focus on the argument, not a personal attack.

“So you believe in universal health care, do you? I suppose you’re a communist and you hate America as well.”

Making someone you disagree with an American-hating communist is invalid and doesn’t address the actual argument.

“What do you mean you don’t believe in marriage? What are you, a crazed nihilist, an unrepentant anarchist, an immoral misanthrope, a craven miscreant?”

Straw Man Fallacy

You twist, distort, and misconstrue your opponent’s argument to make it look weaker than it is when you refute it. Instead of attacking the real issue, you aim for a weaker issue based on your deliberate misinterpretation of your opponent’s argument.

“Those who are against universal health care are heartless. They obviously don’t care if innocent children die.”

“I told you to go off Twitter because it’s toxic and feeds your addiction, not because I’m jealous of your popularity on Twitter. Don’t twist my words.”

“Don’t accuse me of hating my country when I criticize it. I criticize my country because I have high expectations for it. The day I stop criticizing my country is the day I’ve given up on it.”

Hasty Generalization (Jumping to a Conclusion)

You base a generality on an insufficient sample.

“I’ve had three English instructors who are middle-aged bald men. Therefore, all English instructors are middle-aged bald men.”

“I’ve met three American celebrities with fake British accents and they were all annoying. Therefore, all American celebrities, such as Madonna, have fake British accents.”

“Every vegan I’ve ever met is preachy, judgmental, and looks anemic and undernourished.”

“Every guy I’ve met who is obsessed with the band Rush is middle-aged, chain smokes, underemployed, and still lives with his parents.”

Either/Or Fallacy

There are only two choices to an issue makes an oversimplification and an either/or fallacy.

“Either you be my girlfriend or you don’t like real men.”

“Either you be my boyfriend or you’re not a real American.”

“Either you play football for me or you’re not a real man.”

“Either you’re for us or against us.” (The enemy of our enemy is our friend is everyday foreign policy.)

“Either you agree with me about increasing the minimum wage, or you’re okay with letting children starve to death.”

“Either you get a 4.0 and get admitted into USC, or you’re only half a man.”

Equivocation

Equivocation occurs when you deliberately twist the meaning of something in order to justify your position.

“You told me the used car you just sold me was in ‘good working condition.’”

“I said ‘good,’ not perfect.”

The seller is equivocating.

“I told you to be in bed by ten.”

“I thought you meant to be home by ten.”

“You told me you were going to pay me the money you owe me on Friday.”

“I didn’t know you meant the whole sum.”

“You told me you were going to take me out on my birthday.”

“Technically speaking, the picnic I made for us in the backyard was a form of ‘going out.’”

Red Herring Fallacy

This fallacy is to throw a distraction in your opponent’s face because you know a distraction may help you win the argument.

“Barack Obama wants us to support him but his father was a Muslim. How can we trust the President on the war against terrorism when he has terrorist ties?”

“You said you were going to pay me my thousand dollars today. Where is it?”

“Dear friend, I’ve been diagnosed with a very serious medical condition. Can we talk about our money issue some other time?”

Slippery Slope Fallacy

We go down a rabbit hole of exaggerated consequences to make our point sound convincing.

“If we allow gay marriage, then what’s next? We’ll have to allow people to marry turtles.”

“If we allow gay marriage, my marriage to my wife will be disrespected and dishonored. I will not allow you to disrespect my marriage.”

Appeal to Authority

Using a celebrity to promote an energy drink doesn’t make this drink effective in increasing performance.

Listening to an actor play a doctor on TV doesn’t make the pharmaceutical he’s promoting safe or effective.

Tradition Fallacy

“We’ve never allowed women into our country club. Why should we start now?”

“Women have always served men. That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it always should be. That is the basis of a successful marriage. Look at divorce today. It’s because we’ve forgotten our traditional roles.”

Misuse of Statistics

Using stats to show causality when it’s a condition of correlation or omitting other facts.

“Ninety-nine percent of people who take this remedy see their cold go away in ten days.” (Colds go away on their own).

“Violent crime from home intruders goes down twenty percent in a home equipped with guns.” (more people in those homes die of accidental shootings or suicides)

Post Hoc, Confusing Causality with Correlation

Taking cold medicine makes your cold go away. Really?

The rooster crows and makes the sun go up. Really?

You drink on a Thursday night and on Friday morning you get an A on your calculus exam. Really?

You stop drinking milk and you feel stronger. Really? (or is it a placebo effect?)

Non Sequitur (It Does Not Follow)

The conclusion in an argument is not relevant to the premises.

Megan drives a BMW, so she must be rich.

McMahon understands the difference between a phrase and a dependent clause; therefore, he must be a genius.

Whenever I eat chocolate cake, I feel good. Therefore, chocolate cake must be good for me.

Bandwagon Fallacy

Because everyone believes something, it must be right.

“You can steal a little at work. Everyone else does.”

“In Paris, ninety-nine percent of all husbands have a secret mistress. Therefore adultery is not immoral.”

 

 

 

Diet Essay, Lesson #2, Thesis, Counterarguments, Brawler and the Peace-Maker

Is Thinking About Food a Waste of Time?

Some people might object to writing an essay about food and what we eat. Why should I care about what I eat? What I eat is a product of habit, circumstance, and environment. Thinking about eating is a waste of time because no thoughts will change the habits that have been instilled inside of me all of my life. Thinking about eating is also a waste of time because what I eat bears no relevance to the quality of my life. 

While I concede it’s possible to spend too much time thinking about what we eat to the point that overthinking eating, like overthinking anything, can be a self-destructive neurosis, I disagree with the claim that thinking about eating is a waste of time.

Critical thinking means questioning habits rather than mindlessly accepting the habits and routines we engage in that define our existence. If we are eating inferior food, we are likely suffering in terms of mental and physical performance, success goals, and personal identity. A life of fast food, Funyuns, and Fanta is a life of depression, destitution, and crapulence. 

To blindly succumb to mindless eating and to “get punk fed” is a form of debasement and humiliation. 

In contrast, to question one’s eating habits and replace any bad habits by embracing food literacy is to fight back against the current of mindless eating. 

Fighting back with the knowledge of food literacy is a form of self-preservation and self-agency that is a predictor of success and high self-confidence. 

Resisting food nihilism, the belief that it doesn’t matter what we eat because we’re all doomed to being imprisoned by our Set-Point, is to express the kind of critical thinking that we don’t just merely apply to eating but to all endeavors. Therefore, to reject mindless eating and to critically think about what kind of food we put into our bodies is a crucial part of a healthy self-identity, success, and confidence.

 

 

Is the following sample essay, which takes some rather strident aim at Harriet Brown, fair?

Selective Despair

Harriet Brown laments that dieting is so confusing with so many conflicting theories from supposed experts and that the human body is inclined to not lose weight but rebel against all weight-loss programs. Further, she complains that the diet and medical industry are rife with grifters and charlatans who are profit-centered and could care less about our health. To add to our despair, Brown includes a diatribe on unrealistic media images of the human body, which inevitably lead to low self-esteem and body dysmorphia. Brown’s lamentation is, I’m sad to say, a smokescreen for learned helplessness and dietary nihilism. In fact, living a strong, healthy life requires hard work, getting the right facts, and having realistic expectations. Rather than point us in the direction of common sense and struggling for our health, Brown pushes us toward dietary despair. 

Just as Chris Rock points out the inconsistency of cowardly anger in his Netflix comedy special “Selective Outrage,” I would like to point out Harriet Brown’s inconsistency in an essay titled “Selective Despair.” Why would anyone choose to despair when it comes to dieting? Is not such despair a rationale for throwing care to the wind and eating everything? It seems Brown is doing just that. However, Brown doesn’t choose despair in other areas of her life. She has a college degree. Yet going to college is fraught with challenges--the cost, the lack of certainty of majoring in the “right” major; the lack of any certainty that the college graduate will land a job that will pay for the student debt. Nevertheless, in spite of these obstacles, Brown did not despair. She struggled through college and found success as a journalism professor and as a magazine writer.

Take marriage. Brown is married, yet the statistics for divorce are terrifying. Almost half of all marriages in the United States end in divorce, which eviscerates people emotionally and financially. The risk is so high. The cost is even higher. Yet Brown forged ahead and got married and seems to be doing fine. 

The point is that Brown worked hard in college to make her education give her rewards. The same is true of her marriage. She works at making her marriage work and by all accounts, she and her husband are in a loving functional marriage. 

Why does she reserve “being confused,” lost, and overwhelmed when it comes to dieting but not when it comes to education and marriage? Could it be that she chooses to be confused and overwhelmed by dieting because she doesn’t want eating boundaries, yet she is content exercising discipline and free agency in her career and marriage? 

It seems we play the Despair Card when we want to play it. If our agenda is to eat as we please, then perhaps we’ll argue that dieting in pursuit of health is a fool’s errand. But the real fool’s errand is selective despair. 

 

 

Ethos, Logos, Pathos: The 3 Pillars of Argument

Adapted from Diana Hacker's Rules for Writers, Eighth Edition (99)

Ethos

Ethos is an ethical appeal based on the writer's character, knowledge, authority, savvy, book smarts, and street smarts. The latter is evidenced by the author's savvy in using appropriate, not pretentious language to appeal to her readers.

Ethos is further achieved through confidence, humility, and command of language and subject. 

Confidence without humility is not confidence; it is bluster, bombast, and braggadocio, elements that diminish logos.

Real confidence is mastery, detailed, granular, in-depth knowledge of the topic at hand and acknowledgment of possible limitations and errors in one's conclusions. 

Ethos is further established by using credible sources that are peer-reviewed. 

Logos

Logos is establishing a reasonable, logical argument, appealing to the reader's sense of logic, relying on credible evidence, using inductive and deductive reasoning, and exposing logical fallacies. 

Logos is further achieved by using sources that are timely, up-to-date, current, and relevant. 

To strengthen logos, the writer considers opposing views, concedes where those opposing views might diminish the claim, and make appropriate rebuttals to counterarguments. 

Pathos

Pathos is achieved by appealing to the reader's emotions, moral sense, and moral beliefs. 

Pathos gets away from the brain and toward the gut. It makes a visceral appeal. 

Appropriate pathos uses emotion in a way that supports and reinforces the evidence. It does not manipulate and use smokescreens that depart from the evidence. 

Common signal phrases

We read in Author X’s essay that:

We read in Corbin Smith’s essay “Alan Ritchson’s ‘Reacher” Is a Gigantic, Unstoppable Force” that Jack Reacher embodies “The four virtues of Stoicism.”

According to Author X, and As Author X writes: 

According to Corbin Smith, the Stoical Hero balances his passion with his powers of reason. As Smith writes: “You are passionate, but not completely driven by your baser instincts.” 

Author X argues that and As Author X observes:

Corbin Smith argues that Reacher’s appeal rests largely in the sheer physicality of its star Alan Ritchson. As Smith observes: Ritchson “is a slab of rock-hard marbled beef with an unnerving square jaw and blue eyes that cut holes through steel.”

When you write an argumentative essay, most likely you will be required to write a counterargument-rebuttal section in which you address your opponents’ objections to your argument. The following are templates for counterarguments followed by rebuttals:

• Some people may object to my point X, but they fail to see Y.
• Some people will take issue with my argument X, and I will concede their point to some degree. However, on balance, my argument X still stands because______________________________.  
• It is true as my opponents say that my argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that Y, but I would counter-argue by observing that ___________________. 
• I would be the first to agree with my opponents that my argument can lead to some dangerous conclusions such as X. But we can neutralize these misgivings when we consider __________________________. 

My personal analysis:

Dietary Nihilism

Brown suggests giving up in paragraph 1. Giving up with no solutions to weight-related problems is what I call Dietary Nihilism, an unacceptable position for someone who wants to live a long, healthy life. 

Telling people to give up dieting while offering no alternatives strikes me as bitter and irresponsible. Such a position compromises the writer’s ethos (credibility) and pathos (my emotional connection to the writing). 

Cherry-Picking Based on Cognitive Bias

There is an abundance of credible studies showing how being overweight has deleterious effects on our health, but Brown conveniently ignores those studies and focuses on studies that show that the contrary is true: There is no connection between high BMI and having bad health in terms of heart disease, high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome, diabetes 2, inflammation, higher risk for cancer, stroke, and cardiac arrest; shortened lifespan. 

If I want to eat to my heart’s content, then my cognitive bias is going to point me in the direction to “research” that gives me the Green Light to eat pizza, donuts, and ice cream. 

Cherry-picking evidence based on cognitive biases does not help Brown in terms of credibility, reasoning, or emotional power: ethos, logos, and pathos.

 

“It’s All So Confusing!” Fallacy

Brown complains that there are so many kinds of diets making health claims: keto, vegan, raw, organic, high-protein, low-fat, etc. She just doesn’t know what to believe anymore. 

When an important topic is confusing or difficult, should we shrug our shoulders and scream, “I just don’t know what to do!”

Of course, weight management is difficult and so is healthy eating, but Brown says nothing about nutritional literacy and how such literacy will make great strides in improving our health.

What is nutritional literacy?

• It’s knowing the difference between whole and processed foods and where to find whole foods in the grocery store and how to avoid processed foods in the grocery store.
• It’s learning how to cook at least half a dozen healthy meals that you enjoy eating so that you are both healthy and self-reliant. 
• It’s learning how to avoid sugar and find foods that satisfy you without eating sugar.
• It’s learning how to achieve satiety (fullness) by eating sufficient protein.
• It’s learning how to steam vegetables and season them and make high-protein salads that you enjoy eating.
• It’s learning to replace alcohol, sugar, and processed foods with healthy foods that you actually like. 

Brown’s failure to address food literacy and her cry of learned helplessness because “eating is just so confusing” compromises her credibility (ethos). 

Failure to Acknowledge That Two Things Can Both be True: Either/Or Fallacy

Brown does a good job of showing that a skinny body aesthetic was artificially imposed upon us starting around the 1920s. For the last 100 years, there has been a money-making conspiracy to make us ashamed of our bodies:

• Advertising
• Consumerism
• Media giving us unrealistic body aesthetic
• Diet pills
• Insurance companies
• Unrealistic BMI levels
• Bariatric surgeries
• Variety of pharmaceuticals 
• Ever-changing dietary advice from the medical community and the government

While all of this is true, it can at the same time be true that being overweight is unhealthy. 

Either the quest for a healthy body is legit or there is a conspiracy to give us an unrealistic expectation of the ideal body. 

Brown commits an either/or fallacy: It’s possible that there is a profit-driven diet industry AND that being overweight is a health risk at the same time.

Her either/or fallacy compromises her credibility and reasoning (ethos and logos). 

Failure to Acknowledge Self-Empowerment Through Knowledge and Reasonable Expectations

Life is a cruel place. Once we’re 18, we’re out on our own. We have to fend for ourselves. There are many confusing things we have to deal with: health, diet, relationships, education, career, politics, civil responsibilities, and developing an appropriate philosophy of life.

Telling you that dieting is too confusing, that being skinny is nothing more than a profit-driven conspiracy, and that it’s too much work to eat right is the Gospel of Despair, Helplessness, and Victimization. 

Brown’s Gospel of Despair has no business in my class and it has no business infecting my students. 

I would rather tell my students that you should fight to find a job that gives you a good living, find people to love in your life so that you have enough self-worth to work on having a long healthy life for your sake and your loved one’s sake, make a good living so you can afford to eat healthy because healthy whole foods are expensive, but that’s the situation. Empower yourself. Develop food literacy. Develop knowledge about health because knowledge is power and you’re responsible for gaining that power.

Harriet Brown’s sob story won’t give it to you. 

Learning to eat healthy foods may not give you a hot Instagram bod, but you’ll be vastly healthier than if you give up and go on an Eat- Everything Diet.  

See Netflix Explained: Why Diets Fail and linked to Vox. 

Review of "Why Diets Fail":

One. Our body has a skinny rebel, the hormone leptin. 

Two. Snack industry brainwashed us into snacking so that we constantly have elevated insulin, resulting in obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, etc.

Three. Food industry has us addicted to processed foods, which are higher profit than whole foods.

Four. After World War II, calories became "low-hanging fruit," easy pickings.

Five. "Normal" is eating in excess of 3,000 calories a day when, from an evolutionary level, we're more suited to under 2,000. 

Six. Diets may or may not work. It doesn't matter because most of us don't stick to them in the long term.

Seven. Related to Six, most people don't stick to diets because weight-loss management is a full-time job not suited to people who have to work, go to school, parent, etc. If you're rich and have the whole day to focus on your navel and hire a personal trainer and have an Instagram account showing off your Hot Bod, then perhaps you will be a string bean. But that's not most of us.

Eight. The only people who tend to manage their weight find a way to enjoy eating whole foods for their lifetime.

 

Sample Thesis Statements

Defining a thesis:

A thesis is a meaningful claim or argument that is the central focus of your essay, that you can defend with credible information, that will outline an essay of 1,200 words or more, that is challenging enough to be appropriate for college-level writing, that has high stakes, and that defies simple analysis. 

• The thesis or claim is the central focus of your essay. It is the reason you are writing your essay. To stray from your thesis is to betray your original intention. 
• The thesis is based on an informed opinion based on credible research. Your research has been peer reviewed and is rooted in reality. To look to “research” based on a fever swamp of unproven conspiracies and misinformation is to present an essay that is disconnected from reality. We live in an age where even facts and reality itself are disputed. This is a very specific crisis called the epistemic crisis. You can read about this crisis in Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge. 
• A strong thesis may have reasons contained in the sentence. These reasons are also called mapping components. They outline your essay’s body paragraphs. Observe the following example: Working from the home is more viable for most companies because working from the home saves your workers from commute time, doesn’t expose workers to illnesses resulting in lost work time, reduces work theft opportunities, reduces company expenses such as heat, AC, lighting, etc., and takes advantage of the technology that’s cheaply available to make your employees’ home office an efficient business office. 
• The thesis can generate an essay that is 1,200 words or more means the thesis is demonstrable: You can defend the thesis with reasoning, logic, examples, and research. 
• Your thesis has high stakes. You present an argument and the listener or reader doesn’t feel compelled to say “So what?” Rather, you have chosen a topic that is relevant, vital, and urgent to the human condition. 
• Your thesis defies simple analysis. You are avoiding the obvious and factual such as “What the world needs now is love.” Rather, you are focusing on debatable topics. 

Sample Thesis Statements

Sample #1 offers no mapping components and may or may not be demonstrable:

Suppose your Western Diet, an endless buffet of sugar, processed food, and sodium, is presenting you with various health afflictions that are so extreme that you have a variety of morbidity factors. In that case, you have to push Harriet Brown’s pessimism aside and manipulate your eating environment and recalibrate your eating habits in such a way that your diet is not a fool’s errand but a necessary step in saving your life. 

Sample #2 with mapping components

If you’re discouraged by your lackluster build and pudgy contours and aspire to look like a chiseled Instagram model, you will most likely find that your austere dietary program will give you short-term results, but in the long run, your diet will be a fool’s errand because willpower can only last so long, environmental and social pressures to indulge will break you, high-density-calorie foods are in abundance, and sugary, fatty foods are an irresistible drug that provides an escape from the stresses of modern life.  

Sample #3 with mapping components

While it’s true that long-term adherence to a proper diet is difficult and that sugary, fatty foods can indeed become an irresistible drug from the stresses of modern life, I propose that a healthy whole food diet over the long haul is more viable than the self-destructive Western Diet because a healthy whole food diet can be adopted through habit, economic wellbeing and prove to be necessary for the fight against depression, diabetes, and other comorbidity factors. 

Sample #4 with mapping components

While Harriet Brown in “The Weight of the Evidence” makes many compelling and persuasive points, her essay suffers from a lack of persuasion because of problems in ethos, logos, and pathos.

Sample #5 without mapping components is probably demonstrable. 

While Harriet Brown’s “The Weight of the Evidence” suffers problems in ethos, logos, and pathos, her main argument about the futility of dieting remains insightful, compelling, and persuasive.

Sample #6 with mapping components 

While Harriet Brown’s tone is a bit glum and some of her studies seem cherry-picked, she nonetheless demonstrates persuasively that dieting is a fool’s errand because of unrealistic societal expectations, money-driven skinny aesthetics of a fraudulent dieting industry, the inevitable failure of willpower, and biological impediments. 

Sample #7 with mapping components

While Harriet Brown makes many insightful and irrefutable points, I find her essay offensive and harmful because she cherry-picks studies to support her claim that being fat is not a health risk, she doesn’t leave nuance in the realm of healthy eating as an alternative to throwing care to the wind and eating “whatever,” she doesn’t offer any success stories to provide a counterbalance to her doom and gloom, and she offers no encouragement for at least eating healthy whole foods so that as a whole her essay leaves a sour and putrid taste in my mouth. 

Sample Counterarguments and Rebuttals for Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand Essay

Typically, when we write argumentation essays, we devote a section of our essay, usually before our conclusion, that addresses our opponents’ disagreement with our central argument or the way we anticipate how our opponents will object to our essay’s claim. 

We want to make a clear presentation of how and why our imagined opponents might disagree with us. This is called the counterargument. 

We then examine the counterargument and offer a rebuttal or refutation of that counterargument. 

Here are some examples for the essay that addresses the claim that losing weight is such a futile endeavor that dieting surely is a fool’s errand. 

Example of a Counterargument and Rebuttal for Essay That Supports Idea That Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand

I can anticipate my opponents taking my claim that dieting is a fool’s errand as bait for accusing me of “dietary nihilism,” the notion that we should throw care to the wind and engage in reckless disregard when it comes to our bodies, indulging in gluttony, and being both beholden and addicted to the food industry’s myriad of fat-, salt-, and sugar-laden foods. On the contrary, I am no dietary nihilist. I am a dietary realist or pragmatist. My approach is not to focus on weight loss but on health by cultivating a love for cooking whole foods, avoiding processed foods, and having the food literacy to know the difference. 

Example of a Counterargument and Rebuttal for Essay That Refutes Idea That Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand

I am a staunch defender of the idea that we should not let the majority of dieters, doomed to fail for a myriad of reasons too many to list here, be an excuse for our own individual aspirations to manage our weight and live a healthy lifestyle. My opponents will point out, correctly, that many lack the time and resources to buy and prepare healthy foods. I concede their point. For many hard-working Americans, time and budget constraints impede them from devoting the kind of time and resources necessary for a permanent weight-loss plan. But my fellow Americans’ dietary failures, however legitimate, do not excuse me for taking personal responsibility for my own dietary success. The truth of the matter is I have the familial, financial, and environmental support to succeed at my dietary goals, and my particular situation is such that dieting is not a fool’s errand. Rather, dieting and keeping excess weight off is a moral imperative. 

Example of Counterargument and Rebuttal for Essay That Supports Idea That Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand

Since the overwhelming majority of Americans lack the time and resources to devote to full-time dieting, I stand by my argument that dieting for the most part is a fool’s errand. My opponents will point out that there are some Americans who enjoy enough financial comfort and discretionary time to devote to their weight-loss plan. But this amount of Americans is too minuscule to make a drop in the bucket, so to speak, when it comes to successful dieting because we cannot really talk about dieting as a fool’s errand, or not unless we talk about viability and sustainability for most people. If we can’t scale successful dieting for the masses, then dieting indeed is a fool’s errand with the exception of a very elite and specialized class of people who can meet all the caveats and conditions for succeeding at permanent weight loss. And I would remind the elite class that even they have a strong probability of failing, so my contention that dieting is a fool’s errand stands. 

Authorial Presence

After 35 years of teaching college writing, I am convinced that the highest compliment I can put on students’ essays is that they wrote with authorial presence, which I would define as a confident writing voice that curates the argument, narrative, or any other kind of exposition with a distinctive point of view. This point of view rests on five major pillars: The student writes from a philosophical position that developing an essay as an academic exercise is morally repugnant; rather, writing an essay attempts to create a greater understanding of a murky issue that is relevant to the human condition. 

Secondly, the authorial presence is generated from an informed opinion in which the writer did her due diligence, studying credible sources, and exploring opposite sides of a position before reaching her conclusion. Third, her authorial presence, or writing voice, makes it clear that living in the world of ideas is not an austere, boring place but rather one of the highest realms of human existence, the privilege of being engaged in the Cafe Society of the Mind. This Cafe Society of the Mind is not a place for smug complacency and mutual praise. Rather, we challenge each other. As such, we arrive at the fourth pillar of authorial presence: The writer disrupts our assumptions about life and ourselves by challenging us with contrarian ideas, or to use  Kafka’s words, her writing “is the ax that breaks the frozen ocean.” 

Finally, over time her authorial presence melds with her personality so that her speaking persona and her writing persona both come from the core of her being. In other words, her intellectual life has replaced the embryonic person she was before starting her intellectual journey. Her authorial presence reflects the different person she has become and this different person, unlike her previous iteration, is strongly defined, distinctive, and stamps her signature in everything she does. 

The strength of her persona reminds us of Oscar Wilde’s famous, often misinterpreted adage. “The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second one is, no one has yet discovered.” I would argue this “pose” is an authorial presence. But it is not the hollow pose of a dandy. Rather, it is a distinctive persona built with blood, sweat, and tears. 

In Your Thesis, Be Sure to Address One of the Assigned Readings with a Signal Phrase

A lot of you are writing that dieting can be done with hard work and professional guidance (a sound, demonstrable thesis) and a lot of you are writing that dieting can often be a fool’s errand because of the physical and mental problems that result (also a sound, demonstrable thesis), but your thesis doesn’t have sufficient context nor does it address the assignment unless you use a signal phrase in which you respond to one of the authors in our assignment. Let me give you two examples:

Example of a Student Using a Signal Phrase to Disagree with One of the Authors

While Harriet Brown makes many compelling points in her essay “The Weight of the Evidence,” I would counter her point that dieting is a futile quest because a healthy approach to dieting can work if we take the focus off the Hot Instagram Bod and instead strive for health, if we increase our protein to stave off our appetites, if we develop a baseline of nutritional literacy, and if we can enjoy the health benefits from our weight loss. 

Example of a Student Using a Signal Phrase to Agree with One of the Authors

While I’ll concede that a healthy approach to dieting can work for some people, I find that Harriet Brown makes a convincing case in “The Weight of the Evidence” that dieting is rooted in an unrealistic body image, fueled by the greedy weight-loss industry, doomed to wreak disappointment, failure, and low self-esteem on us, and to be responsible for an array of metabolic and hormonal disruptions so that we’re worse off than before our dieting quests. 

What Students Have Taught Me

Do You Want to be a Brawler or a Peace-Maker in Your Argumentative Tone?

In argumentation, we decide upon a rhetorical voice. We can be aggressive brawlers who take no prisoners in our argumentation or we can be peace-makers who try to arrive at a point of common understanding. One style is not better than the other. They are different, and both have good and bad points. The aggressive style can come off as being brash and arrogant, but it is very powerful writing when done well. The more polite style can show more decorum and show humility, but it may come across as being too tepid and boring. 

Example of a Counterargument-Rebuttal That Is Aggressive and Forceful

Striving to eat a clean diet of whole foods, mostly plant-based, while eating 150 grams of protein a day and abstaining from sugar and alcohol is by no means a fool’s errand. Such a nutritional regimen could very well save one’s life. Opponents of my call for healthy eating are too focused on the folly and self-destruction of what I call Social Media Fad Dieters, those misguided souls who starve themselves, look for gimmicks and silver bullets and get hustled into buying supplements they don’t need, and gaining all their weight back after finding they cannot adhere to their crash course in weight loss. But these nay-sayers such as Harriet Brown make the fatal mistake of making the claim that just because 95% of aspiring dieters don’t do their due diligence and find a way to enjoy healthy eating that we should surrender a life of good health and happiness and resign ourselves to a life of slovenliness and gluttony. Harriet Brown and her ilk seem to be making the logical fallacy of Two Rights Make a Wrong: Since crash dieters are wrong in their approach and fail miserably, then it’s somehow okay to give up on a healthy approach to eating. Harriet Brown can give us several reasons for why diets fail, but she doesn’t give a hint at eating healthy. To be sure, I agree with her that unrealistic expectations and crash diets are bad, but there are joys, pleasures, and good health that we can enjoy when we can learn to eat clean whole foods rather than sob and feast on the pity party of learned helplessness. 

Counterargument-Rebuttal with a Peace-Maker Tone

I would like to first make it clear that I agree with my opponents such as Harriet Brown that fad dieting doesn’t work and that the diet industry makes profits by pounding us over the head with messages that we are never skinny enough. I would also like to make it clear that I agree with my opponents that losing weight and keeping it off permanently on any kind of diet is most likely futile and what could be called a “fool’s errand.” Where I’d like to differ with my opponents, though, is that I don’t think we should throw away the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. What is the baby? Healthy eating. And what is healthy eating? Consuming whole foods, 150 grams of protein a day, and abstaining from sugar and alcohol. Will such a regimen guarantee the kind of weight loss that will make us worthy of being Instagram models? Likely not. But will such a dietary regimen make us look and feel better? Indeed, it will, which is why I am not so mired in despair as my adversaries who seem so discouraged by the fad diets that they may have been over-eager to dismiss the healthy-eating diets as well. 

For the last few semesters, my critical thinking students have been grappling with the argument: Is losing weight a fool’s errand? 

Here’s what I’ve learned:

• Most students themselves have dieted or they know friends and family who have dieted for the purposes of gaining self-esteem, conforming to an unrealistic body aesthetic, improving their health, or taking orders from a doctor who has warned them that they are dangerously obese.
• Many students have horrid tales of aspiring dieters getting exploited and manipulated by the profiteering diet industry, which promises fast, unrealistic results and tries to make their clients dependent on their products.
• Most students know someone who tried the Single Food diet: eating nothing but bananas, potatoes, cabbage soup, etc., which surely is not sustainable.
• Most students find the losing-weight quest to be a Shame and Anxiety Dungeon where failure to adhere to some Strict Eating Orthodoxy banishes them to a life of shame and misery so acute that the diet cannot be sustained for long before people suffer a nervous breakdown.
• Some students have identified a Pathological Diet Culture based on neurosis, paranoia, narcissism, and addiction. 
• Some students have smartly distinguished this Pathological Diet Culture from a Healthy Whole Foods Culture in which people emphasize eating whole foods over processed foods, but they don’t freak out when they have an occasional cheat meal.  
• Some students have smartly rejected both extremes of dieting: Strict Orthodox Dieting on one hand and Nihilistic Throw-Care-to-the-Wind Gluttony Diet on the other and in rejecting both extremes, these students have embraced a common sense emphasis on whole and healthy foods with more emphasis on health than body weight. 

 

1C Agenda 2-22-23: Dieting Lesson #1: Harriet Brown's Gospel of Despair

Building Block #1: Due February 25

Paragraph 1: Using appropriate signal phrases, compare the major points in Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence" and Sandra Aamodt's essay "Why You Can't Lose Weight on a Diet."

Paragraph 2: Develop a thesis that explains how the essays compare as works of persuasion in terms of ethos, logos, and pathos.

Common signal phrases

We read in Author X’s essay that:

We read in Corbin Smith’s essay “Alan Ritchson’s ‘Reacher” Is a Gigantic, Unstoppable Force” that Jack Reacher embodies “The four virtues of Stoicism.”

According to Author X, and As Author X writes: 

According to Corbin Smith, the Stoical Hero balances his passion with his powers of reason. As Smith writes: “You are passionate, but not completely driven by your baser instincts.” 

Author X argues that and As Author X observes:

Corbin Smith argues that Reacher’s appeal rests largely in the sheer physicality of its star Alan Ritchson. As Smith observes: Ritchson “is a slab of rock-hard marbled beef with an unnerving square jaw and blue eyes that cut holes through steel.”

There are many more signal phrases. When you use them in a research paper, you need to include parenthetical citations. For a brief primer, consult this video:

“The Weight of the Evidence” by Harriet Brown

If you’re one of the 45 million Americans who plan to go on a diet this year, I’ve got one word of advice for you: Don’t.

You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chance of keeping if off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.

This isn’t breaking news; doctors know the holy trinity of obesity treatments—diet, exercise, and medication—don’t work. They know yo-yo dieting is linked to heart disease, insulin resistance, higher blood pressure, inflammation, and, ironically, long-term weight gain. Still, they push the same ineffective treatments, insisting they’ll make you not just thinner but healthier.

In reality, 97 percent of dieters regain everything they lost and then some within three years. Obesity research fails to reflect this truth because it rarely follows people for more than 18 months. This makes most weight-loss studies disingenuous at best and downright deceptive at worst.

One of the principles driving the $61 billion weight-loss industries is the notion that fat is inherently unhealthy and that it’s better, health-wise, to be thin, no matter what you have to do to get there. But a growing body of research is beginning to question this paradigm. Does obesity cause ill health, result from it, both, or neither? Does weight loss lead to a longer, healthier life for most people?

Studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly find the lowest mortality rates among people whose body mass index puts them in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories. And recent research suggests that losing weight doesn’t actually improve health biomarkers such as blood pressure, fasting glucose, or triglyceride levels for most people.

So why, then, are we so deeply invested in treatments that not only fail to do what they’re supposed to—make people thinner and healthier—but often actively makes people fatter, sicker, and more miserable?

Weight inched its way into the American consciousness around the turn of the 20th century. “I would sooner die than be fat,” declared Amelia Summerville, author of the 1916 volume Why Be Fat? Rules for Weight-Reduction and the Preservation of Youth and Health. (She also wrote, with a giddy glee that likely derived from malnutrition, “I possibly eat more lettuce and pineapple than any other woman on earth!”) As scales became more accurate and affordable, doctors began routinely recording patients’ height and weight at every visit.  Weight-loss drugs hit the mainstream in the 1920s, when doctors started prescribing thyroid medications to healthy people to make them slimmer. In the 1930s, 2,4-dinitrophenol came along, sold as DNP, followed by amphetamines, diuretics, laxatives, and diet pills like fen-phen, all of which caused side effects ranging from the annoying to the fatal.

The national obsession with weight got a boost in 1942, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company crunched age, weight, and mortality numbers from policy holders to create “desirable” height and weight charts. For the first time, people (and their doctors) could compare themselves to a standardized notion of what they “should” weigh. And compare they did, in language that shifted from words like chubby and plump to the more clinical-sounding adipose, overweight, and obese. The word overweight, for example, suggests you’re over the “right” weight. The word obese, from the Latin obesus, or “having eaten until fat,” conveys both a clinical and a moral judgment.

In 1949, a small group of doctors created the National Obesity Society, the first of many professional associations meant to take obesity treatment from the margins to the mainstream. They believed that “any level of thinness was healthier than being fat, and the thinner a person was, the healthier she or he was,” writes Nita Mary McKinley, a psychologist at the University of Washington-Tacoma. This attitude inspired a number of new and terrible treatments for obesity, including jaw wiring and stereotactic brain surgery that burned lesions into the hypothalamus.

Bariatric surgery is the latest of these. In 2000, about 37,000 bariatric surgeries were performed in the United States; by 2013, the number had risen to 220,000. The best estimates suggest that about half of those who have surgery regain some or all of the weight they lose. While such surgeries are safer now than they were 10 years ago, they still lead to complications for many, including long-term malnutrition, intestinal blockages, disordered eating, and death. “Bariatric surgery is barbaric, but it’s the best we have,” says David B. Allison, a biostatistician at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

Reading the research on obesity treatments sometimes feels like getting stuck in an M.C. Escher illustration, where walls turn into ceilings and water flows upward. You can find studies that “prove” the merit of high-fat/low-carb diets and low-fat/high-carb diets, and either 30 minutes of daily aerobic exercise or 90 minutes. You’ll read that fen-phen is safe (even though the drug damaged heart valves in a third of those who took it). Studies say that orlistat (which causes liver damage and “uncontrollable” bowel movements) and sibutramine (which ups the risk of heart attacks and strokes) are effective. After reading literally more than a thousand studies, each of them claiming some nucleus of truth, the only thing I know for sure is that we really don’t know weight and health at all.

“We make all these recommendations, with all this apparent scientific precision, but when it comes down to it we don’t know, say, how much fat someone should have in their diet,” says Asheley Skinner, a pediatrician at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill School of Medicine. “We argue like we know what we’re talking about, but we don’t.”

For instance, much of the research assumes that when fat people lose weight, they become “healthy” in the same ways as a thinner person is healthy. The evidence says otherwise. “Even if someone loses weight, they will always need fewer calories and need to exercise more,” says Skinner. “So we’re putting people through something we know will probably not be successful anyway. Who knows what we’re doing to their metabolisms.”

Debra Sapp-Yarwood, a fiftysomething from Kansas City, Missouri, who’s studying to be a hospital chaplain, is one of the three percenters, the select few who have lost a chunk of weight and kept it off. She dropped 55 pounds 11 years ago, and maintains her new weight with a diet and exercise routine most people would find unsustainable: She eats 1,800 calories a day—no more than 200 in carbs—and has learned to put up with what she describes as “intrusive thoughts and food preoccupations.” She used to run for an hour a day, but after foot surgery she switched to her current routine: a 50-minute exercise video performed at twice the speed of the instructor, while wearing ankle weights and a weighted vest that add between 25 or 30 pounds to her small frame.

“Maintaining weight loss is not a lifestyle,” she says. “It’s a job.” It’s a job that requires not just time, self-discipline, and energy—it also takes up a lot of mental real estate. People who maintain weight loss over the long term typically make it their top priority in life. Which is not always possible. Or desirable.

While concerns over appearance motivate a lot of would-be dieters, concerns about health fuel the national conversation about the “obesity epidemic.” So how bad is it, health-wise, to be overweight or obese? The answer depends in part on what you mean by “health.” Right now, we know obesity is linked with certain diseases, most strongly type 2 diabetes, but as scientists are fond of saying, correlation does not equal causation. Maybe weight gain is an early symptom of type 2 diabetes. Maybe some underlying mechanism causes both weight gain and diabetes. Maybe weight gain causes diabetes in some people but not others. People who lose weight often see their blood sugar improve, but that’s likely an effect of calorie reduction rather than weight loss. Type 2 diabetics who have bariatric surgery go into complete remission after only seven days, long before they lose much weight, because they’re eating only a few hundred calories a day.

Disease is also attributed to what we eat (or don’t), and here, too, the connections are often assumed to relate to weight. For instance, eating fast food once a week has been linked to high blood pressure, especially for teens. And eating fruits and vegetables every day is associated with lower risk of heart disease. But it’s a mistake to simply assume weight is the mechanism linking food and disease. We have yet to fully untangle the relationship.

Higher BMIs have been linked to a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers, especially esophageal, pancreatic, and breast cancers. But weight loss is not necessarily linked to lower levels of disease. The only study to follow subjects for more than five years, the 2013 Look AHEAD study, found that people with type 2 diabetes who lost weight had just as many heart attacks, strokes, and deaths as those who didn’t.

Not only that, since 2002, study after study has turned up what researchers call the “obesity paradox”: Obese patients with heart disease, heart failure, diabetes, kidney disease, pneumonia, and many other chronic diseases fare better and live longer than those of normal weight.

Likewise, we don’t fully understand the relationship between weight and overall mortality. Many of us assume it’s a linear relationship, meaning the higher your BMI, the higher your risk of early death. But Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist with the CDC, has consistently found a J-shaped curve, with the highest death rates among those at either end of the BMI spectrum and the lowest rates in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories.

None of this stops doctors and researchers from recommending weight loss for health reasons. Donna Ryan, professor emeritus at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, co-chaired the National Institutes of Health panel that recently developed new guidelines for treating obesity, including calorie-restricted diets and commercial diet programs. “Those who have a BMI of 30 and up need treatment, no questions asked,” they wrote. I asked Ryan why, given that so few people keep weight off and given the risks of yo-yo dieting, the committee backed the same old ineffective treatments. “I’m not familiar with any of the research that says yo-yoing is bad for you,” Ryan told me. “I’m not convinced there’s any harm whatsoever in losing and regaining weight.”

Why do doctors keep prescribing treatments that don’t work for a condition that’s often benign? I suspect one reason lies in the fanaticism that often seems to drive the public debate around weight. Last January, for instance, when Flegal’s meta-analysis showing a low risk of death for overweight people hit the news, one of its most vocal critics was Walter Willett, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health. He told a reporter from NPR, “This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it.” A month later, Willett organized a symposium at Harvard just to attack Flegal’s findings.

Willett’s career, like countless others’, has been built on the obesity-will-kill-you paradigm. Tam Fry, a spokesperson for the National Obesity Forum in the U.K., also dissed Flegal’s work. “This is a horrific message to put out,” he told the BBC. “We shouldn’t take it for granted that we can cancel the gym, that we can eat ourselves to death with black forest gateaux.”

Actually, Flegal’s findings suggest nothing of the kind. But Willett, Fry, and others seem to see them as a dangerous challenge to a fundamental truth. UCLA sociologist Abigail Saguy, author of What’s Wrong With Fat?, says people are often invested in their own thin privilege. “They want to think they’ve earned it by working hard and counting calories, and they cling to it,” she says.

There’s a lot of money at stake in treating obesity. The American Medical Association—against the recommendations of its own Committee on Science and Public Health—recently classified obesity as a disease, and doctors hope insurers will start covering more treatments for obesity. If Medicare goes along with the AMA and designates obesity as a disease, doctors who discuss weight with their patients will be able to add that diagnosis code to their bill, and charge more for the visit.

Obesity researchers and doctors also defend what appear to be financial conflicts of interest. In 2013, the New England Journal of Medicine published “Myths, Presumptions, and Facts About Obesity.” The authors dismissed the often-observed link between weight cycling and mortality, saying it was “probably due to confounding by health status” (code for “We just can’t believe this could be true”) and went on to plug meal replacements like Jenny Craig, medications, and bariatric surgery.

Five of the 20 authors disclosed financial support from sponsors in related industries, including UAB’s David Allison. I asked him how he would respond to allegations of financial self-interest. “It would be no different than anybody saying about any other person who puts forth an idea, ‘I want to comment that you have this background or personality, this sexual orientation, weight, gender, or race,’ ” he argued. “These conflicts were disclosed, we didn’t hide them, we weren’t ashamed of them. And what’s your point?”

Another layer to the onion may lie in our deeply held cultural assumptions around weight. “People, journalists, and researchers live in a world where it’s taken for granted that fat is bad and thin is good,” says Saguy.

Doctors buy into those assumptions and biases even more heavily than the rest of us, which may explain in part why they continue to blame patients who can’t keep weight off. Joseph Majdan, a cardiologist who teaches at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, has lost and regained the same 100 or so pounds more times than he can count. Some of the meanest comments Majdan has heard about his weight have come from other doctors, like the med-school classmate who asked if she could project slides onto a pair of his white intern’s pants for a skit. Or the colleague who asked him, “Aren’t you disgusted with yourself?”

“When a person has recurrent cancer, the physician is so empathetic,” says Majdan. “But when a person regains weight, there’s disgust. And that is morally and professionally abhorrent.”

The idea that obesity is a choice, that people who are obese lack self-discipline or are gluttonous or lazy, is deeply ingrained in our public psyche. And there are other costs to this kind of judgmentalism. Research done by Lenny Vartanian, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales, suggests that people who believe they’re worthless because they’re not thin, who have tried and failed to maintain weight loss, are less likely to exercise than fat people who haven’t strongly internalized weight stigma.

It’s hard to think of any other disease—if you want to call it that—where treatment rarely works and most people are blamed for not “recovering.”

Over the years, Robin Flamm, a full-time parent from Portland, Oregon, has bounced in and out of Weight Watchers and Overeaters Anonymous, gone paleo, done Medifast. Everything worked—for a while. She’d lose 30 pounds and gain back 35, lose 35 and regain 40. She thought she needed to exercise more, eat less, work harder. Like most of us, she blamed herself.

At age 48, she decided she’d spent enough time hating her body, wishing herself different, feeling like a failure. She started seeing a therapist who offers an approach called Health at Every Size, though she was skeptical at first. In the current “obesity epidemic” climate, the idea of pursuing health separate from weight, of accepting that people come in many shapes and sizes, feels radical.

She felt both terrified and relieved to put away her scale, delete her calorie-counting app, and start to rethink her beliefs around food and health. While most obesity docs insist that restrained eating—counting calories or points or exchanges—is necessary for good health, not everyone agrees. About 10 years ago, Ellyn Satter, a dietitian and therapist in Madison, Wisconsin, developed a concept she calls eating competence, which encourages internal self-regulation about what and how much to eat rather than relying on calorie counts or lists of “good” and “bad” foods. Competent eaters, says Satter, enjoy food; they’re not afraid of it. And there’s solid evidence that competent eaters score better on cardiovascular risk markers like total cholesterol, blood pressure, and triglycerides than non-competent eaters.

Not that abiding by competent eating, which fits the Health at Every Size paradigm, is easy; Robin Flamm would tell you that. When her clothes started to feel a little tighter, she panicked. Her first impulse was to head back to Weight Watchers. Instead, she says, she asked herself if she was eating mindfully, if she was exercising in a way that gave her pleasure, if she, maybe, needed to buy new clothes. “It’s really hard to let go of results,” she says. “It’s like free falling. And even though there’s no safety net ever, really, this time it’s knowing there’s no safety net.”

One day she was craving a hamburger, a food she wouldn’t typically have eaten. But that day, she ate a hamburger and fries for lunch. “And I was done. End of story,” she says, with a hint of wonder in her voice. No cravings, no obsessing over calories, no weeklong binge-and-restrict, no “feeling fat” and staying away from exercise. She ate a hamburger and fries, and nothing terrible happened. “I just wish more people would get it,” she says.

 

***

My personal analysis:

Dietary Nihilism

Brown suggests giving up in paragraph 1. Giving up with no solutions to weight-related problems is what I call Dietary Nihilism, an unacceptable position for someone who wants to live a long, healthy life. 

Telling people to give up dieting while offering no alternatives strikes me as bitter and irresponsible. Such a position compromises the writer’s ethos (credibility) and pathos (my emotional connection to the writing). 

Cherry-Picking Based on Cognitive Bias

There is an abundance of credible studies showing how being overweight has deleterious effects on our health, but Brown conveniently ignores those studies and focuses on studies that show that the contrary is true: There is no connection between high BMI and having bad health in terms of heart disease, high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome, diabetes 2, inflammation, higher risk for cancer, stroke, and cardiac arrest; shortened lifespan. 

If I want to eat to my heart’s content, then my cognitive bias is going to point me in the direction to “research” that gives me the Green Light to eat pizza, donuts, and ice cream. 

Cherry-picking evidence based on cognitive biases does not help Brown in terms of credibility, reasoning, or emotional power: ethos, logos, and pathos.

 

“It’s All So Confusing!” Fallacy

Brown complains that there are so many kinds of diets making health claims: keto, vegan, raw, organic, high-protein, low-fat, etc. She just doesn’t know what to believe anymore. 

When an important topic is confusing or difficult, should we shrug our shoulders and scream, “I just don’t know what to do!”

Of course, weight management is difficult and so is healthy eating, but Brown says nothing about nutritional literacy and how such literacy will make great strides in improving our health.

What is nutritional literacy?

• It’s knowing the difference between whole and processed foods and where to find whole foods in the grocery store and how to avoid processed foods in the grocery store.
• It’s learning how to cook at least half a dozen healthy meals that you enjoy eating so that you are both healthy and self-reliant. 
• It’s learning how to avoid sugar and find foods that satisfy you without eating sugar.
• It’s learning how to achieve satiety (fullness) by eating sufficient protein.
• It’s learning how to steam vegetables and season them and make high-protein salads that you enjoy eating.
• It’s learning to replace alcohol, sugar, and processed foods with healthy foods that you actually like. 

Brown’s failure to address food literacy and her cry of learned helplessness because “eating is just so confusing” compromises her credibility (ethos). 

Failure to Acknowledge That Two Things Can Both be True: Either/Or Fallacy

Brown does a good job of showing that a skinny body aesthetic was artificially imposed upon us starting around the 1920s. For the last 100 years, there has been a money-making conspiracy to make us ashamed of our bodies:

• Advertising
• Consumerism
• Media giving us unrealistic body aesthetic
• Diet pills
• Insurance companies
• Unrealistic BMI levels
• Bariatric surgeries
• Variety of pharmaceuticals 
• Ever-changing dietary advice from the medical community and the government

While all of this is true, it can at the same time be true that being overweight is unhealthy. 

Either the quest for a healthy body is legit or there is a conspiracy to give us an unrealistic expectation of the ideal body. 

Brown commits an either/or fallacy: It’s possible that there is a profit-driven diet industry AND that being overweight is a health risk at the same time.

Her either/or fallacy compromises her credibility and reasoning (ethos and logos). 

Failure to Acknowledge Self-Empowerment Through Knowledge and Reasonable Expectations

Life is a cruel place. Once we’re 18, we’re out on our own. We have to fend for ourselves. There are many confusing things we have to deal with: health, diet, relationships, education, career, politics, civil responsibilities, and developing an appropriate philosophy of life.

Telling you that dieting is too confusing, that being skinny is nothing more than a profit-driven conspiracy, and that it’s too much work to eat right is the Gospel of Despair, Helplessness, and Victimization. 

Brown’s Gospel of Despair has no business in my class and it has no business infecting my students. 

I would rather tell my students that you should fight to find a job that gives you a good living, find people to love in your life so that you have enough self-worth to work on having a long healthy life for your sake and your loved one’s sake, make a good living so you can afford to eat healthy because healthy whole foods are expensive, but that’s the situation. Empower yourself. Develop food literacy. Develop knowledge about health because knowledge is power and you’re responsible for gaining that power.

Harriet Brown’s sob story won’t give it to you. 

Learning to eat healthy foods may not give you a hot Instagram bod, but you’ll be vastly healthier than if you give up and go on an Eat- Everything Diet.  

Weaknesses in Harriet Brown's Essay

While Harriet Brown’s thoughtful and insightful essay “The Weight of the Evidence” makes some irrefutable points about the profiteering of the weight-loss industry and society’s body shaming, her doomsday analysis of weight loss has some glaring weaknesses, including her failure to address the health dangers of being overweight, her inclination to cherry-pick evidence to support her claim that weight loss doesn’t improve vital health specs like cholesterol, insulin, and triglyceride levels, and her failure to seriously look at any useful tools to combat excessive weight gain. 

Notice the above has 3 mapping components:

One: her failure to address the health dangers of being overweight

Two: her inclination to cherry-pick evidence to support her claim that weight loss doesn’t improve vital health specs like cholesterol, insulin, and triglyceride levels

Three: her failure to seriously look at any useful tools to combat excessive weight gain. 

Summary of Harriet Brown's Strengths and Weaknesses

1. Brown does a good job of showing how using BMI to measure obesity is unreliable.
2. She does a good job of showing how futile dieting is.
3. She does a good job of showing how the dieting industry is profit-driven more than health-driven and shows how this industry dates back to a hundred years. 
4. She fails, though, in addressing the real health concerns of obesity, which is a growing problem in America.
5. She also fails in using a large brush to pain dieters as unrealistically aspiring to some glamour image when many of us have real health concerns. Using such a large brush is in critical thinking language called using an oversimplification. 
6. She cherry-picks evidence to make exaggerated claim that maintenance weight-loss exercise program is hell on earth and to cast doubt on link between obesity and disease.
7. She ignores huge body of evidence that connects obesity to disease and premature death.
8. She uses a Straw Man argument to argue that being skinny doesn't guarantee good health. 

"Why Diets Fail" on Netflix

See Netflix Explained: Why Diets Fail and linked to Vox. 

Review of "Why Diets Fail":

One. Our body has a skinny rebel, the hormone leptin. 

Two. Snack industry brainwashed us into snacking so that we constantly have elevated insulin, resulting in obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, etc.

Three. Food industry has us addicted to processed foods, which are higher profit than whole foods.

Four. After World War II, calories became "low-hanging fruit," easy pickings.

Five. "Normal" is eating in excess of 3,000 calories a day when, from an evolutionary level, we're more suited to under 2,000. 

Six. Diets may or may not work. It doesn't matter because most of us don't stick to them in the long term.

Seven. Related to Six, most people don't stick to diets because weight-loss management is a full-time job not suited to people who have to work, go to school, parent, etc. If you're rich and have the whole day to focus on your navel and hire a personal trainer and have an Instagram account showing off your Hot Bod, then perhaps you will be a string bean. But that's not most of us.

Eight. The only people who tend to manage their weight find a way to enjoy eating whole foods for their lifetime.

Summary of Harriet Brown's Essay

Reasons for Making Claim That Diets Don't Work

One. 80-97% of dieters gain all their weight back and more.

Two. We have an unrealistic notion of a good skinny body.

Three. Skinny=healthy=good person

Four. Maintaining weight loss is a full-time job; it's just too hard to maintain this over the long run.

Five. Curing obesity is a money-driven industry, so a lot of claims about who's obese are inflated.

Six. Obesity=lazy=bad person.

Seven. Biggest Loser Failure Argument

Eight. No one diet works for everyone

Nine. Eating Western Diet (sugar and processed foods) is cheaper than eating a healthy diet.

Ten. We have a Set Point.

Eleven. There is no Magic Bullet. We don't want to know the boring truth: Cut down on sugar and exercise more. 

Success Factors for Weight Loss

One. You have a health need. You might die if you don't find religion and find a way to lose weight. There is a gun to your head. Now you're moving in the right direction. 

Two. You did research or due diligence. 

Three. You desire to change.

Four. You like your new diet enough.

Five. You have healthy outlets so you don't rely on junk food as your exclusive drug.

Risk Factors that Make Weight Loss Unlikely

One. You have stress.

Two. You live in poverty.

Three. You suffer from depression.

Four. You suffer from learned depression. 

Five. Your diet was triggered by an act of caprice, whim, or compulsion and therefore lacked due diligence.

Six. You lack basic food education so that you don't know difference between whole food and processed food. 

Seven. Peer pressure doesn't give you support you need to eat well. 

Strengths and Weaknesses in Harriet Brown’s Essay

Strengths:

Brown does a good job of showing that diets are futile, that the glamour industry dictates unrealistic standards of beauty, that there is fat stigma, and that the diet industry is focused more on making money than being effective.

Weaknesses:

Brown doesn’t address people who have urgent health needs that require drastic weight loss, she doesn’t address any kind of middle ground of healthy eating, she doesn’t persuade me that adiposity (being fat) is not a health risk since I can show her statistics that contradict the studies she provides us.  

Using Sturgeon’s Law to Disagree with Harriet Brown:

Sample Essay That Responds to Option A

The High Failure Rate of Dieting Is No Excuse

Stuck at 220 pounds for nearly four weeks, my Inner Fat Man was whispering in my ear, “Give up, dude. Game over. Your metabolism is adapting to your sugar- and gluten-deprived diet. Your metabolism is essentially shutting down. It’s a protest, dude. Don’t you see? Your body is telling you and your diet to go to hell. But no need to feel ashamed. Over ninety-five percent of dieters regain all their weight and get even fatter. Just surrender and admit you’re in the Fat Man Club.”

My Inner Fat Man had a point. The odds were against me. All the research showed that my body would eventually rebel and make my Fat Man triumph over my attempt at gaining control of my tendency toward fatness with all of its related health catastrophes.

Writing for Time, Alexandra Sifferlin in her article “The Weight Loss Trap: Why Your Diet Isn’t Working” describes the findings of scientist Kevin Hall, who doing research for the National Institute of Health, studied the reality-show The Biggest Loser to see if the contestants’ successful weight loss could be studied to help the population at large. Their weight loss was dramatic. Hall observed that on average they lost 127 pounds each, about 64% of their body weight. But Hall soon discovered that transferring the rigid training and dieting to the real world was not a realistic proposition. Sifferlin writes:

What he didn’t expect to learn was that even when the conditions for weight loss are TV-perfect–with a tough but motivating trainer, telegenic doctors, strict meal plans and killer workouts–the body will, in the long run, fight like hell to get that fat back. Over time, 13 of the 14 contestants Hall studied gained, on average, 66% of the weight they’d lost on the show, and four were heavier than they were before the competition.

Like other studies I’ve read, people who go on weight-loss programs do indeed lose the weight, but they always gain it back and even get heavier. But worse, after they soar to an even fatter version of themselves before they went on a diet, their metabolism is set at a lower speed, so they’re worse off than before. As Sifferlin explains Kevin Hall’s research,

As demoralizing as his initial findings were, they weren’t altogether surprising: more than 80% of people with obesity who lose weight gain it back. That’s because when you lose weight, your resting metabolism (how much energy your body uses when at rest) slows down–possibly an evolutionary holdover from the days when food scarcity was common.

With research like this, we can see why any reasonable person would conclude that dieting is not only futile but self-destructive. Driving this point home, Syracuse University journalism professor Harriet Brown in her Slate article “The Weight of the Evidence,” beseeches the 45 million Americans who go on a diet every year to not do so. She warns: “You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chance of keeping if off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.”

In agreement with Harriet Brown is Sandra Aamodt, author of Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession with Weight Loss. Aamodt cites studies that show the overwhelming majority of dieters get fatter and mess up their metabolism, making them even more vulnerable to obesity. All one can do is let go of society’s unrealistic body images, eat sensibly, exercise, stop weighing oneself, and let the chips fall where they may.

I will concede that these intelligent writers make a strong case for not dieting and for not embarking on a fool’s errand to aspire to society’s unrealistic slender body images.

However, I find their arguments that we are doomed to fail to lose and keep our weight off ultimately unconvincing. High failure rates of anything don’t impress me because I am a disciple of Sturgeon’s Law, the belief that over 90% of everything is crap.

Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of aspiring novelists write crappy novels. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to discourage one of my brilliant students from becoming a novelist.

Sturgeon’s Law dictates that 90% of books that are published today aren’t even real books. They’re just gussied-up, padded short stories and essays masquerading as books. But that doesn’t mean I don’t search for literary gems.

Sturgeon’s Law dictates that if you’re part of the dating scene, over 90% of the people you’re dating are emotional dumpster fires, unctuous charlatans, and incorrigible sociopaths. But that doesn’t you can’t eventually find through dating a legit human being for whom you find true love.

Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of marriages are cesspools of misery, toxicity, and dysfunction. But that doesn’t mean that I would discourage two people who are both well-grounded with strong moral convictions, sincere motivations, and a realistic grasp of what is in store for them to not marry each other.

Sturgeon’s Law dictates that most home-improvement contractors are hacks, fugitives, pathological liars, and snake-tongued mountebanks. But that doesn’t mean you don’t bust your butt looking for a solid referral to find a credible contractor who will redo your kitchen.  

I could go on. The point is that if you are looking to do something that is exceptional and long-lasting, you are going to have to commit yourself to hard study and hard work. You’re also going to have to endure a lot of trial and error. Since Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of people don’t do the necessary groundwork for embarking on any project in a worthwhile manner, then you’re not surprisingly going to have a high failure rate in the realm of dieting.

What we must do to be successful is not point to the high failure rate as an excuse for our own failures, as our Inner Fat Person is want to do. What we must do is study the small amount of successful people and analyze their methods of excellence. There are powerful, life-changing books on this subject. One helpful example is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers: The Story of Success, which propounds the 10,000 Hour Rule, the principle that you need a minimum of 10,000 hours of concentrated work to achieve a base level of competence in your craft. Other books that help us study the methods of success come from Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport. He has written Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. In both both books, Newport advocates a “craftsman mindset,” in which you achieving mastery in a craft through “deep work.” This mastery is rare and therefore highly marketable and valuable. But only people who have the fortitude, commitment, and proper habits of “deep work,” performing long chunks of focused work on their craft, rise to the top. Newport argues that this kind of achievement is exceptional and therefore highly prized.

Of course it is. Sturgeon’s Law dictates that this be so.

When we look at everything through the prism of Sturgeon’s Law, we see we have no excuses for our failures, including our diet failures.

Studying failures is not an excuse for failure. Studying failures is a warning for us not to follow the footsteps of those who fail. Once we’ve examined the don’ts of the failures, then we must study the dos of the successes.

To find how to be successful at killing our Inner Fat Person, we can return to Alexandra Sifferlin’s essay “The Weight Loss Trap.” Sifferlin points out that there are some people, over 10,000 in fact, who successfully lose their weight. Their success is recorded in The National Weight Control Registry, headed by Brown University professor Rena Wing and obesity researcher James O. Hill from the University of Colorado. To be a member of the registry, one has to have lost 30 pounds and have kept it off for at least a year. Registry members don’t all stick to one diet. They have different diets, but the one common denominator is that whatever diet they’re on, the new diet is making them mindful of what they’re putting in their mouth. They also exercise regularly. So against the odds, thousands of people are losing and keeping their weight off.

What separates the successful dieters from the failures is consistency, mindfulness of what they’re eating, and a realistic approach so that they don’t get discouraged and burned out over the long haul.  

Another success factor is to find a reliable mentor, either a person you know or an author whose realistic dieting goals can stick with you for a lifetime.

I have an exceptional mentor, Max Penfold, who embodies the “craftsman mindset” described by Cal Newport.

Max Penfold is a United States powerlifting champion, former Navy Seal, and executive chef for arguably the most disruptive tech company in the world.

Also Max Penfold has lost 70 pounds, and he has kept if off for seven years. That qualifies him for membership in The National Weight Control Registry.

If I lose just five more pounds and keep it off for a year, I too can enter the realm of success.

I say the hell with failure.

The hell with the doomsday prophets who say failure is inevitable.

And the hell with my Inner Fat Man.

 

Ethos, Logos, Pathos: The 3 Pillars of Argument

Adapted from Diana Hacker's Rules for Writers, Eighth Edition (99)

Ethos

Ethos is an ethical appeal based on the writer's character, knowledge, authority, savvy, book smarts, and street smarts. The latter is evidenced by the author's savvy in using appropriate, not pretentious language to appeal to her readers.

Ethos is further achieved through confidence, humility, and command of language and subject. 

Confidence without humility is not confidence; it is bluster, bombast, and braggadocio, elements that diminish logos.

Real confidence is mastery, detailed, granular, in-depth knowledge of the topic at hand and acknowledgment of possible limitations and errors in one's conclusions. 

Ethos is further established by using credible sources that are peer-reviewed. 

Logos

Logos is establishing a reasonable, logical argument, appealing to the reader's sense of logic, relying on credible evidence, using inductive and deductive reasoning, and exposing logical fallacies. 

Logos is further achieved by using sources that are timely, up-to-date, current, and relevant. 

To strengthen logos, the writer considers opposing views, concedes where those opposing views might diminish the claim, and make appropriate rebuttals to counterarguments. 

Pathos

Pathos is achieved by appealing to the reader's emotions, moral sense, and moral beliefs. 

Pathos gets away from the brain and toward the gut. It makes a visceral appeal. 

Appropriate pathos uses emotion in a way that supports and reinforces the evidence. It does not manipulate and use smokescreens that depart from the evidence. 

Introduction to Critical Thinking English 1C (2-15-23)

McMahon English 1C Syllabus Spring 2023

Welcome to English 1C

Hello, I'm Jeff McMahon, your English 1C instructor for this semester. I want to help you be successful in your college writing, not just for this class, but for any other college and non-college endeavors.

Our mission is to write college-level essays in the context of critical thinking, informed opinions, and credible sources in a world rife with deception and logical fallacies.

This class is divided into 4 units with each unit addressing a different 4- or 5-page essay assignment, so we are writing 4 essays in this class.

There will be no quizzes or tests. Instead, we will focus on writing paragraphs that we can use to build our essays. 

 

I have assigned no books in English 1C.

We will read online essays and watch various media for our source material. 

Your 4 Essay Assignments

Unit 1: Is losing weight a fool's errand?

Addressing Harriet Brown’s “The Weight of the Evidence” and Sandra Aamodt in “Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet,” compare and contrast the effectiveness of their persuasion in terms of ethos, logos, and pathos. Your essay should be about 1,200 words with a Works Cited page and a minimum of 4 sources. 

Unit 2: How could a movie that looks so good be so bad at critical thinking?

Develop an argumentative thesis that explains how persuasive the vegan-promoting Netflix documentary The Game Changers is in terms of ethos, logos, and pathos. Your essay should be about 1,200 words with a Works Cited page and a minimum of 4 sources.

 

Unit 3: Can racial stereotypes become a chimera that drives people insane?

In the context of the Netflix comedy special Homecoming King, the HBO documentary 38 at the Garden, and the Netflix documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercombie & Fitch, develop an extended definition of the chimera as a racist stereotype that hijacks people’s brains. You might address how these negative stereotypes hijack the brain and become internalized, resulting in a sense of shame and a desire for self-abnegation and the only cure is reconnecting to one’s genuine pride, identity, and hope for new possibilities. Your essay should be about 1,200 words with a Works Cited page and a minimum of 4 sources.

 

Unit 4: What is the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation?

Our fourth essay will be an argumentative essay that defends, refutes, or complicates food and culture writer Gustavo Arellano’s claim in his essay “Let White People Appropriate Mexican Food” and elsewhere that in the realm of food, especially Mexican food, we must step away from the Cult of Authenticity and embrace the idea that the greatness of Mexican food is related to its constant evolution from stealing, borrowing, synthesizing, and even culturally appropriating from one ethnic culture to another and that cuisines that fail to evolve lack relevance and vitality. 

Here is the essay prompt: Develop an argumentative thesis that explains how effectively Gustavo Arellano uses ethos, logos, and pathos to support his claim that white people should be able to steal Mexican food. Your essay should be about 1,200 words with a Works Cited page and a minimum of 4 sources. 

Contact Information: 

If you have any questions, please email me at jmcmahon@elcamino.edu, and I will respond as quickly as I can, usually in 24 hours of time as I check my emails frequently. 

Office Hours:

I will be in my office HP121 on Wednesday from 12:30-2:20 and Thursday from 12:15-1:15.

The Zoom hours are the following: Tuesday from 2-3:15. 

Your Participation Requirements:

This online course is the equivalent of an interactive how-to manual, which means you will be going through a sequence of reading and writing activities and getting feedback from me, your instructor, as you build your essay.

With four 1,200-word essays over the semester, you will find yourself turning in parts of your essay as you go through the writing process in accordance with the timeline on the course calendar through your Assignments.  In a writing class, when we  build the essay, brick by brick so to speak, we call the process "scaffolding." The two smaller assignments that lead up to the completed 1,200-word essay are part of the scaffolding process. To earn full points, it is essential to turn in these assignments on time so you can keep up with the class and maximize your success.  

Instructor Communications Requirements: 

Part of your communications with me will be the feedback you get from your assignments, not just your completed essays, but the smaller assignments that go toward building your essays. You are also encouraged to contact me with any questions or feedback. Please email me at jmcmahon@elcamino.edu, and I will respond as quickly as I can, usually in 24 hours of time as I check my emails frequently. 

Student Must be Active in the Class Or be Dropped

Students must keep up with the assignments. If students haven't turned in the first two 5-page essays by Week 9 of the semester, they can be dropped. 

Total Points for the Semester

There are a total of 1,000 points for the semester. 

Each 1,200-word essay is worth 200 points for a total of 800 points.

Each 1,200-word essay is preceded by two smaller building-block assignments that can be used toward your completed essay, such as an introductory paragraph, a thesis paragraph, or a counterargument-rebuttal paragraph. There a total of 8 of these smaller assignments, and each of these assignments is worth 25 points for a total of 200 points.  

900 points is the minimum for an A grade; 800 points for a B; 700 for a C; 600 for a D.

What about late essays?

I give you 5 days of grace after the due date. After 5 days, I take a grade off the essay for being late.

You can’t snowball the instructor with assignments at the end of the semester:

You have to keep up with the class. Getting one or two assignments sometimes happens. However, what cannot happen is that you do nothing all semester and then upload the assignments during the last week of the semester. That is not the type of education that fulfills the Student Learning Outcomes of any college writing class. Therefore, the Canvas assignments are closed once we reach the next phase of assignments. 

Why would the instructor initiate a student drop?

To learn the writing process, the students are expected to keep up with the material. If students haven't completed the first two essays by Week 9, they are considered inactive and I will drop them.  

What if you are not happy with your essay and want to do a revision for a higher grade?

You can get feedback from me and resubmit once for a higher grade. 

 How I Grade Your Completed Essays:

I grade your assignments based on how well you fulfill the course objectives and what are called Student Learning Outcomes. While there are some variations on how I break down the grading based on the type of essay (argumentative, cause and effect, extended definition, comparison and contrast), the grading is more or less the same based on the following model:

Each essay has a maximum 200 points. You earn points through the following:

One. A meaningful thesis statement that generates compelling body paragraphs a strong exposition driven by a distinct writing voice (authorial presence). This thesis produces meaningful content and a powerful writing voice that passes the “So what?” question, meaning that the writing matters, is significant, and elevates the reader to a higher understanding of an urgent topic. 80 points maximum.

Two. Clear organizational design, also called an expository mode, that has a logical sequence and follows a clear structure. 40 points.

Three. The use of signal phrases and correct MLA in-text citations whenever you cite paraphrased, summarized, or quoted material. 30 points.

Four. The essay has sound sentence mechanics, sentence variety, correct spelling, and correct grammar usage suitable for college-level writing. The most common grammar errors students make that diminish their essay grades are comma splices (Links to an external site.) and sentence fragments (30 points.

Five. The essay conforms to the updated MLA format for pagination, spacing,  and Works Cited page. 20 points.

How I Grade Your Smaller Assignments

These building-block assignments are much smaller and should and can be used to complete your 1,200-word essays. I grade them based on how useful they are to you and how well they conform to the requirements. Most of these smaller assignments are introductory paragraphs, thesis paragraphs, and counterargument-rebuttal paragraphs (if the essay is an argument). Since the point scheme varies, I will just give you an example of a typical 25-point assignment, which would typically be one paragraph long, sometimes two:

How I Break Down Your Grade for This Assignment of 25 Points

One. Clarity and usefulness of your paragraph for establishing the importance of the subject to your reader, 10 points. 

Two. Have sufficient details to establish a meaningful, authentic approach to the subject. A writer never wants to just “go through the motions,” that is to say, deliver a perfunctory effort. Deliver the degree of authenticity and meaning this subject deserves, 10 points. 

Three. Write full sentences and avoid sentence mechanics, spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Be especially mindful of avoiding comma splices and sentence fragments, 5 points.

Student Learning Outcomes:  

Upon completion of this course, students will:  

1. Compose an argumentative essay that shows an ability to support a claim using analysis, elements of argumentation, and integration of primary and secondary sources. 

1. Identify and assess bias, credibility, and relevance in their own arguments and in the arguments of others, including primary and secondary outside sources. 

1. Write an essay that is correct in MLA format, paragraph composition, sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and usage. 

 

Due Dates for the Assignments Totaling 1,000 Points:

 

Building Block #1 for Fool’s Errand: 2-25

Building Block #2 for Fool’s Errand: 3-4

Essay #1 for Fool’s Errand: 3-17

Building Block #1 for Game Changers: 3-25

Building Block #2 for Game Changers: 4-1

Essay #2 for the Game Changers: 4-8

Building Block #1 for Chimera: 4-22

Building Block #2 for Chimera: 4-28

Essay #3 for Chimera: 5-6

Building Block #1 for Cultural Appropriation: 5-20

Building Block #2 for Cultural Appropriation: 5-27

Essay #4 for Cultural Appropriation: 6-9

Essay #1 (Essay is worth 200 points, due March 17): 

Is Losing Weight a Fool’s Errand?

The Assignment:

Addressing Harriet Brown’s “The Weight of the Evidence” and Sandra Aamodt in “Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet,” compare and contrast the effectiveness of their persuasion in terms of ethos, logos, and pathos. Your essay should be about 1,200 words with a Works Cited page and a minimum of 4 sources.

Be sure to have a counterargument-rebuttal section. 

When you write an argumentative essay, most likely you will be required to write a counterargument-rebuttal section in which you address your opponents’ objections to your argument. The following are templates for counterarguments followed by rebuttals:

• Some people may object to my point X, but they fail to see Y.
• Some people will take issue with my argument X, and I will concede their point to some degree. However, on balance, my argument X still stands because______________________________.  
• It is true as my opponents say that my argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that Y, but I would counter-argue by observing that ___________________. 
• I would be the first to agree with my opponents that my argument can lead to some dangerous conclusions such as X. But we can neutralize these misgivings when we consider __________________________. 

 

 

How I Grade Your 200-Point Essay

One. The salience and effectiveness of your argument writing with a strong authorial presence and using logos, ethos, and pathos: 100

Two. The integration of signal phrases for quotations, summaries, and paraphrases and correct MLA in-text citations to introduce sources to support your claims: 35

Three. Writing clear, well-structured sentences with correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling: 35

Four. Presenting your manuscript with correct MLA pagination, headers, indent, double-spacing, and MLA Works Cited page with a minimum of 4 credible sources: 30

You can consult the following articles: 

Harriet Brown’s “The Weight of the Evidence” 

Sandra Aamodt’s “Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet”

James Hamblin’s “Body Weight, Clash of Ideologies” and 

Harriet Brown’s “How Weight Loss Became a Disease”

Derek Thompson’s “Where Does Obesity Come From?” and 

Olga Khazan’s “Why Scientists Can’t Agree On Whether It’s Unhealthy to be Overweight”

Rivka Galchen’s “Bariatric Surgery: The Solution to Obesity?” and 

Tommy Tomlinson’s “The Weight I Carry” and Julie Beck’s “You Can’t Willpower Your Way to Lasting Weight Loss”

Tamar Haspel’s “Why ‘Moderation’ Is the Worst Weight-Loss Advice Ever” 

Amanda Mull’s “The Latest Diet Trend Is Not Dieting” 

Netflix: "Why Diets Fail," Explained

Building Block Assignment #1 is worth 25 points and is due as an upload.  (Due Feb 25)

The Assignment: Write the first two paragraphs of your essay

Paragraph 1: Using appropriate signal phrases, compare the major points in Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence" and Sandra Aamodt's essay "Why You Can't Lose Weight on a Diet."

Paragraph 2: Develop a thesis that explains how the essays compare as works of persuasion in terms of ethos, logos, and pathos.

 

Templates for signal phrases, counterarguments and rebuttals, and concession thesis statements. 

Common signal phrases

We read in Author X’s essay that:

We read in Corbin Smith’s essay “Alan Ritchson’s ‘Reacher” Is a Gigantic, Unstoppable Force” that Jack Reacher embodies “The four virtues of Stoicism.”

According to Author X, and As Author X writes: 

According to Corbin Smith, the Stoical Hero balances his passion with his powers of reason. As Smith writes: “You are passionate, but not completely driven by your baser instincts.” 

Author X argues that and As Author X observes:

Corbin Smith argues that Reacher’s appeal rests largely in the sheer physicality of its star Alan Ritchson. As Smith observes: Ritchscon “is a slab of rock-hard marbled beef with an unnerving square jaw and blue eyes that cut holes through steel.”

 

There are many more signal phrases. When you use them in a research paper, you need to include parenthetical citations. For a brief primer, consult this video:

When you write an argumentative essay, most likely you will be required to write a counterargument-rebuttal section in which you address your opponents’ objections to your argument. The following are templates for counterarguments followed by rebuttals:

• Some people may object to my point X, but they fail to see Y.
• Some people will take issue with my argument X, and I will concede their point to some degree. However, on balance, my argument X still stands because______________________________.  
• It is true as my opponents say that my argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that Y, but I would counter-argue by observing that ___________________. 
• I would be the first to agree with my opponents that my argument can lead to some dangerous conclusions such as X. But we can neutralize these misgivings when we consider __________________________. 

Four. Using signal phrases to introduce textual evidence in the form of direct quotations, paraphrases, or summaries. For an elaboration of quotations, paraphrases, and summaries, you can consult this video:

The best video I have seen for integrating sources in your essay with correct format is the following:

Five. Correct MLA format for essays in a college writing class. I recommend you consult this video:

Six. You need reasonable authority and clear thinking about your subject based on developing an informed opinion. This informed opinion and clear thinking will result in confident, clear writing that has the whiff of someone who knows what they’re talking about. When you write with clear thinking and confidence, you present an essay that has the quality of authorial presence. You can only achieve authorial presence by reading, rereading, and comprehending the reading materials. 

***

Critique of Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence," Part 1

95-97% Failure Rate

Brown begins with the claim that diets are futile and that your chances of successfully losing weight and maintaining that weight loss is 5%.

Brown writes:

If you’re one of the 45 million Americans who plan to go on a diet this year, I’ve got one word of advice for you: Don’t.

You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chance of keeping if off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.

The reality is worse because obesity research doesn’t do long-term follow-ups. As Brown observes. “In reality, 97 percent of dieters regain everything they lost and then some within three years. Obesity research fails to reflect this truth because it rarely follows people for more than 18 months. This makes most weight-loss studies disingenuous at best and downright deceptive at worst.”

Harriet Brown and Her Unclear Obesity Definition

In the next section of her essay, Brown argues that the weight-loss industry profits from us aspiring to have glamorous, unrealistic bodies based on unreliable definitions of obesity. She writes: 

One of the principles driving the $61 billion weight-loss industries is the notion that fat is inherently unhealthy and that it’s better, health-wise, to be thin, no matter what you have to do to get there. But a growing body of research is beginning to question this paradigm. Does obesity cause ill health, result from it, both, or neither? Does weight loss lead to a longer, healthier life for most people?

Studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly find the lowest mortality rates among people whose body mass index puts them in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories. And recent research suggests that losing weight doesn’t actually improve health biomarkers such as blood pressure, fasting glucose, or triglyceride levels for most people.

A Potential Flaw in Brown’s Essay: Do Unreliable BMI Measures Mean Obesity Is Okay?

Brown may be correct that BMI is not a reliable measure of obesity. However, just because people with high BMIs may not be obese and therefore not suffer ill health effects doesn’t mean there is no causal link between real obesity and serious health concerns and morbidity. In other words, Brown’s claim that BMI is not an accurate measure of obesity is legitimate, but her attempt to conflate BMI with real obesity and then downplay the ill health effects of real obesity could be seen as a weakness in her argumentation and credibility. 

So, yes, let’s agree with Harriet Brown that BMI is unrealistic and probably not an accurate measure of obesity, but let us be skeptical about her attempt to conclude that therefore obesity rates are exaggerated. With or without BMI definitions, obesity and its ill health effects are a huge problem in our society, and Brown loses credibility in trying to deny that fact. 

The Glamour Ideal Behind the Dieting Industry

Brown makes a fair contention that a lot of dieting is profit-driven and that the diet industry relies on fear, anxiety, and vanity by making us want to be glamorous. She writes:

So why, then, are we so deeply invested in treatments that not only fail to do what they’re supposed to—make people thinner and healthier—but often actively makes people fatter, sicker, and more miserable?

Weight inched its way into the American consciousness around the turn of the 20th century. “I would sooner die than be fat,” declared Amelia Summerville, author of the 1916 volume Why Be Fat? Rules for Weight-Reduction and the Preservation of Youth and Health. (She also wrote, with a giddy glee that likely derived from malnutrition, “I possibly eat more lettuce and pineapple than any other woman on earth!”) As scales became more accurate and affordable, doctors began routinely recording patients’ height and weight at every visit.  Weight-loss drugs hit the mainstream in the 1920s, when doctors started prescribing thyroid medications to healthy people to make them slimmer. In the 1930s, 2,4-dinitrophenol came along, sold as DNP, followed by amphetamines, diuretics, laxatives, and diet pills like fen-phen, all of which caused side effects ranging from the annoying to the fatal.

The national obsession with weight got a boost in 1942, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company crunched age, weight, and mortality numbers from policy holders to create “desirable” height and weight charts. For the first time, people (and their doctors) could compare themselves to a standardized notion of what they “should” weigh. And compare they did, in language that shifted from words like chubby and plump to the more clinical-sounding adipose, overweight, and obese. The word overweight, for example, suggests you’re over the “right” weight. The word obese, from the Latin obesus, or “having eaten until fat,” conveys both a clinical and a moral judgment.

In 1949, a small group of doctors created the National Obesity Society, the first of many professional associations meant to take obesity treatment from the margins to the mainstream. They believed that “any level of thinness was healthier than being fat, and the thinner a person was, the healthier she or he was,” writes Nita Mary McKinley, a psychologist at the University of Washington-Tacoma. This attitude inspired a number of new and terrible treatments for obesity, including jaw wiring and stereotactic brain surgery that burned lesions into the hypothalamus.

Either/Or Fallacy? Health Concerns?

In critical thinking, we study logical fallacies. A very common fallacy is what is called the Either/Or Fallacy. In this case, the writer presents us with a false proposition of only two choices when there may be more.

In Brown’s case, she is arguing this: Either embrace the diet industry’s phony glamour ideal and live a life of neurotic anxiety and yo-yo dieting failure or embrace your natural self and stop dieting because most likely you’ll be fine. 

But Brown conveniently ignores another scenario: Millions of Americans suffer from malnutrition as a result of overeating processed foods and are at high risk for diabetes, cancer, lost work hours, and premature death. This scenario doesn’t fit with her argument, so she decides to pay it short attention if any at all. 

Summary of This Critique

1. Brown does a good job of showing how using BMI to measure obesity is unreliable.
2. She does a good job of showing how futile dieting is.
3. She does a good job of showing how the dieting industry is profit-driven more than health-driven and shows how this industry dates back to a hundred years. 
4. She fails, though, in addressing the real health concerns of obesity, which is a growing problem in America.
5. She also fails in using a large brush to pain dieters as unrealistically aspiring to some glamour image when many of us have real health concerns. Using such a large brush is in critical thinking language called using an oversimplification. 

Critique of “The Weight of the Evidence,” Part 2

Maintaining a skinny body is more difficult than losing weight:

Brown makes a fair point that even if we lose our desired weight, maintaining weight-loss is an even more excruciating task. She writes:

For instance, much of the research assumes that when fat people lose weight, they become “healthy” in the same ways as a thinner person is healthy. The evidence says otherwise. “Even if someone loses weight, they will always need fewer calories and need to exercise more,” says Skinner. “So we’re putting people through something we know will probably not be successful anyway. Who knows what we’re doing to their metabolisms.”

Cherry-Picked Evidence: Brown Portrays the Exercise Habit as Hell on Earth

In her essay, Brown shows people who have lost weight and then embark upon a maintenance program that looks like hell. Is she cherry-picking evidence? There are some people who exercise regularly and love it, thrive on it, and are even addicted to it. But Brown conveniently ignores such cases. Rather, she cherry-picks her evidence, as with this example:

Debra Sapp-Yarwood, a fiftysomething from Kansas City, Missouri, who’s studying to be a hospital chaplain, is one of the three percenters, the select few who have lost a chunk of weight and kept it off. She dropped 55 pounds 11 years ago, and maintains her new weight with a diet and exercise routine most people would find unsustainable: She eats 1,800 calories a day—no more than 200 in carbs—and has learned to put up with what she describes as “intrusive thoughts and food preoccupations.” She used to run for an hour a day, but after foot surgery she switched to her current routine: a 50-minute exercise video performed at twice the speed of the instructor, while wearing ankle weights and a weighted vest that add between 25 or 30 pounds to her small frame.

“Maintaining weight loss is not a lifestyle,” she says. “It’s a job.” It’s a job that requires not just time, self-discipline, and energy—it also takes up a lot of mental real estate. People who maintain weight loss over the long term typically make it their top priority in life. Which is not always possible. Or desirable.

Brown Addresses Link Between Disease and Obesity, Or Does She?

Brown has a section in her essay where she addresses health concerns that are linked to obesity. But she is skeptical about that link. She writes:

While concerns over appearance motivate a lot of would-be dieters, concerns about health fuel the national conversation about the “obesity epidemic.” So how bad is it, health-wise, to be overweight or obese? The answer depends in part on what you mean by “health.” Right now, we know obesity is linked with certain diseases, most strongly type 2 diabetes, but as scientists are fond of saying, correlation does not equal causation. Maybe weight gain is an early symptom of type 2 diabetes. Maybe some underlying mechanism causes both weight gain and diabetes. Maybe weight gain causes diabetes in some people but not others. People who lose weight often see their blood sugar improve, but that’s likely an effect of calorie reduction rather than weight loss. Type 2 diabetics who have bariatric surgery go into complete remission after only seven days, long before they lose much weight, because they’re eating only a few hundred calories a day.

Disease is also attributed to what we eat (or don’t), and here, too, the connections are often assumed to relate to weight. For instance, eating fast food once a week has been linked to high blood pressure, especially for teens. And eating fruits and vegetables every day is associated with lower risk of heart disease. But it’s a mistake to simply assume weight is the mechanism linking food and disease. We have yet to fully untangle the relationship. 

Straw Man Argument?

A Straw Man Argument is when you twist your opponent’s words or twist his or her argument so that your attack will be more convincing. In the following passage, Harriet Brown is attacking the notion that losing weight is no guarantee of not having a disease.

But who made that claim in the first place? No one claimed that being skinny guarantees lower rates of disease. She is making a Straw Man. As she writes:

Higher BMIs have been linked to a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers, especially esophageal, pancreatic, and breast cancers. But weight loss is not necessarily linked to lower levels of disease. The only study to follow subjects for more than five years, the 2013 Look AHEAD study, found that people with type 2 diabetes who lost weight had just as many heart attacks, strokes, and deaths as those who didn’t.

Not only that, since 2002, study after study has turned up what researchers call the “obesity paradox”: Obese patients with heart disease, heart failure, diabetes, kidney disease, pneumonia, and many other chronic diseases fare better and live longer than those of normal weight.

Throwing Doubt on Obesity as Precondition for Morbidity

Harriet Brown expresses confusion over studies that obesity is linked to morbidity and a precondition that puts us at high risk for things like influenza.

In the pandemic as we see that obesity is a risk factor for dying at the hands of Covid-19, Brown’s claimed skepticism doesn’t look very convincing. She writes:

Likewise, we don’t fully understand the relationship between weight and overall mortality. Many of us assume it’s a linear relationship, meaning the higher your BMI, the higher your risk of early death. But Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist with the CDC, has consistently found a J-shaped curve, with the highest death rates among those at either end of the BMI spectrum and the lowest rates in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories.

One epidemiologist finding doesn’t contradict the huge body of evidence that obesity is linked to diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cancer, fatty liver, and premature death. To act “confused” by the proposed link between obesity and death could strike some as disingenuous.

Summary of Harriet Brown's Persuasive Lapses and Fallacies

1. Brown does a good job of showing how using BMI to measure obesity is unreliable.
2. She does a good job of showing how futile dieting is.
3. She does a good job of showing how the dieting industry is profit-driven more than health-driven and shows how this industry dates back to a hundred years. 
4. She fails, though, in addressing the real health concerns of obesity, which is a growing problem in America.
5. She also fails in using a large brush to pain dieters as unrealistically aspiring to some glamour image when many of us have real health concerns. Using such a large brush is in critical thinking language called using an oversimplification. 
6. She cherry-picks evidence to make exaggerated claim that maintenance weight-loss exercise program is hell on earth and to cast doubt on link between obesity and disease.
7. She ignores huge body of evidence that connects obesity to disease and premature death.
8. She uses a Straw Man argument to argue that being skinny doesn't guarantee good health.  

"Why Diets Fail" on Netflix

See Netflix Explained: Why Diets Fail and linked to Vox. 

Review of "Why Diets Fail":

One. Our body has a skinny rebel, the hormone leptin. 

Two. Snack industry brainwashed us into snacking so that we constantly have elevated insulin, resulting in obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, etc.

Three. Food industry has us addicted to processed foods, which are higher profit than whole foods.

Four. After World War II, calories became "low-hanging fruit," easy pickings.

Five. "Normal" is eating in excess of 3,000 calories a day when, from an evolutionary level, we're more suited to under 2,000. 

Six. Diets may or may not work. It doesn't matter because most of us don't stick to them in the long-term.

Seven. Related to Six, most people don't stick to diets because weight-loss management is a full-time job not suited to people who have to work, go to school, parent, etc. If you're rich and have the whole day to focus on your navel and hire a personal trainer and have an Instagram account showing off your Hot Bod, then perhaps you will be a string bean. But that's not most of us.

Eight. The only people who tend to manage their weight find a way to enjoy eating whole foods for their lifetime.

 

***

Second Reading of Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence"

Headings are mine. 

(Diets are futile)

If you’re one of the 45 million Americans who plan to go on a diet this year, I’ve got one word of advice for you: Don’t.

You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chance of keeping if off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.

This isn’t breaking news; doctors know the holy trinity of obesity treatments—diet, exercise, and medication—don’t work. They know yo-yo dieting is linked to heart disease, insulin resistance, higher blood pressure, inflammation, and, ironically, long-term weight gain. Still, they push the same ineffective treatments, insisting they’ll make you not just thinner but healthier.

In reality, 97 percent of dieters regain everything they lost and then some within three years. Obesity research fails to reflect this truth because it rarely follows people for more than 18 months. This makes most weight-loss studies disingenuous at best and downright deceptive at worst.

(Author questions if obesity is linked to bad health)

One of the principles driving the $61 billion weight-loss industries is the notion that fat is inherently unhealthy and that it’s better, health-wise, to be thin, no matter what you have to do to get there. But a growing body of research is beginning to question this paradigm. Does obesity cause ill health, result from it, both, or neither? Does weight loss lead to a longer, healthier life for most people?

(BMI is a different issue than true obesity; don't use a bait and switch.)

Studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly find the lowest mortality rates among people whose body mass index puts them in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories. And recent research suggests that losing weight doesn’t actually improve health biomarkers such as blood pressure, fasting glucose, or triglyceride levels for most people.

(What are the causes of our weight obsession? Glamour, privilege, wealth, success, self-esteem, etc.)

So why, then, are we so deeply invested in treatments that not only fail to do what they’re supposed to—make people thinner and healthier—but often actively makes people fatter, sicker, and more miserable?

Weight inched its way into the American consciousness around the turn of the 20th century. “I would sooner die than be fat,” declared Amelia Summerville, author of the 1916 volume Why Be Fat? Rules for Weight-Reduction and the Preservation of Youth and Health. (She also wrote, with a giddy glee that likely derived from malnutrition, “I possibly eat more lettuce and pineapple than any other woman on earth!”) As scales became more accurate and affordable, doctors began routinely recording patients’ height and weight at every visit.  Weight-loss drugs hit the mainstream in the 1920s, when doctors started prescribing thyroid medications to healthy people to make them slimmer. In the 1930s, 2,4-dinitrophenol came along, sold as DNP, followed by amphetamines, diuretics, laxatives, and diet pills like fen-phen, all of which caused side effects ranging from the annoying to the fatal.

The national obsession with weight got a boost in 1942, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company crunched age, weight, and mortality numbers from policy holders to create “desirable” height and weight charts. For the first time, people (and their doctors) could compare themselves to a standardized notion of what they “should” weigh. And compare they did, in language that shifted from words like chubby and plump to the more clinical-sounding adipose, overweight, and obese. The word overweight, for example, suggests you’re over the “right” weight. The word obese, from the Latin obesus, or “having eaten until fat,” conveys both a clinical and a moral judgment.

In 1949, a small group of doctors created the National Obesity Society, the first of many professional associations meant to take obesity treatment from the margins to the mainstream. They believed that “any level of thinness was healthier than being fat, and the thinner a person was, the healthier she or he was,” writes Nita Mary McKinley, a psychologist at the University of Washington-Tacoma. This attitude inspired a number of new and terrible treatments for obesity, including jaw wiring and stereotactic brain surgery that burned lesions into the hypothalamus.

(Desperation results in bariatric surgery)

Bariatric surgery is the latest of these. In 2000, about 37,000 bariatric surgeries were performed in the United States; by 2013, the number had risen to 220,000. The best estimates suggest that about half of those who have surgery regain some or all of the weight they lose. While such surgeries are safer now than they were 10 years ago, they still lead to complications for many, including long-term malnutrition, intestinal blockages, disordered eating, and death. “Bariatric surgery is barbaric, but it’s the best we have,” says David B. Allison, a biostatistician at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

Reading the research on obesity treatments sometimes feels like getting stuck in an M.C. Escher illustration, where walls turn into ceilings and water flows upward. You can find studies that “prove” the merit of high-fat/low-carb diets and low-fat/high-carb diets, and either 30 minutes of daily aerobic exercise or 90 minutes. You’ll read that fen-phen is safe (even though the drug damaged heart valves in a third of those who took it). Studies say that orlistat (which causes liver damage and “uncontrollable” bowel movements) and sibutramine (which ups the risk of heart attacks and strokes) are effective. After reading literally more than a thousand studies, each of them claiming some nucleus of truth, the only thing I know for sure is that we really don’t know weight and health at all.

“We make all these recommendations, with all this apparent scientific precision, but when it comes down to it we don’t know, say, how much fat someone should have in their diet,” says Asheley Skinner, a pediatrician at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill School of Medicine. “We argue like we know what we’re talking about, but we don’t.”

(Maintaining a skinny body is more stressful than healthy)

For instance, much of the research assumes that when fat people lose weight, they become “healthy” in the same ways as a thinner person is healthy. The evidence says otherwise. “Even if someone loses weight, they will always need fewer calories and need to exercise more,” says Skinner. “So we’re putting people through something we know will probably not be successful anyway. Who knows what we’re doing to their metabolisms.”

Debra Sapp-Yarwood, a fiftysomething from Kansas City, Missouri, who’s studying to be a hospital chaplain, is one of the three percenters, the select few who have lost a chunk of weight and kept it off. She dropped 55 pounds 11 years ago, and maintains her new weight with a diet and exercise routine most people would find unsustainable: She eats 1,800 calories a day—no more than 200 in carbs—and has learned to put up with what she describes as “intrusive thoughts and food preoccupations.” She used to run for an hour a day, but after foot surgery she switched to her current routine: a 50-minute exercise video performed at twice the speed of the instructor, while wearing ankle weights and a weighted vest that add between 25 or 30 pounds to her small frame.

“Maintaining weight loss is not a lifestyle,” she says. “It’s a job.” It’s a job that requires not just time, self-discipline, and energy—it also takes up a lot of mental real estate. People who maintain weight loss over the long term typically make it their top priority in life. Which is not always possible. Or desirable.

While concerns over appearance motivate a lot of would-be dieters, concerns about health fuel the national conversation about the “obesity epidemic.” So how bad is it, health-wise, to be overweight or obese? The answer depends in part on what you mean by “health.” Right now, we know obesity is linked with certain diseases, most strongly type 2 diabetes, but as scientists are fond of saying, correlation does not equal causation. Maybe weight gain is an early symptom of type 2 diabetes. Maybe some underlying mechanism causes both weight gain and diabetes. Maybe weight gain causes diabetes in some people but not others. People who lose weight often see their blood sugar improve, but that’s likely an effect of calorie reduction rather than weight loss. Type 2 diabetics who have bariatric surgery go into complete remission after only seven days, long before they lose much weight, because they’re eating only a few hundred calories a day.

Disease is also attributed to what we eat (or don’t), and here, too, the connections are often assumed to relate to weight. For instance, eating fast food once a week has been linked to high blood pressure, especially for teens. And eating fruits and vegetables every day is associated with lower risk of heart disease. But it’s a mistake to simply assume weight is the mechanism linking food and disease. We have yet to fully untangle the relationship. 

(But no one said weight loss is a panacea or cure all; is the author using a Straw Man argument?)

Higher BMIs have been linked to a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers, especially esophageal, pancreatic, and breast cancers. But weight loss is not necessarily linked to lower levels of disease. The only study to follow subjects for more than five years, the 2013 Look AHEAD study, found that people with type 2 diabetes who lost weight had just as many heart attacks, strokes, and deaths as those who didn’t.

Not only that, since 2002, study after study has turned up what researchers call the “obesity paradox”: Obese patients with heart disease, heart failure, diabetes, kidney disease, pneumonia, and many other chronic diseases fare better and live longer than those of normal weight.

Likewise, we don’t fully understand the relationship between weight and overall mortality. Many of us assume it’s a linear relationship, meaning the higher your BMI, the higher your risk of early death. But Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist with the CDC, has consistently found a J-shaped curve, with the highest death rates among those at either end of the BMI spectrum and the lowest rates in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories.

(Treating obesity is a big money industry)

There’s a lot of money at stake in treating obesity. The American Medical Association—against the recommendations of its own Committee on Science and Public Health—recently classified obesity as a disease, and doctors hope insurers will start covering more treatments for obesity. If Medicare goes along with the AMA and designates obesity as a disease, doctors who discuss weight with their patients will be able to add that diagnosis code to their bill, and charge more for the visit.

Obesity researchers and doctors also defend what appear to be financial conflicts of interest. In 2013, the New England Journal of Medicine published “Myths, Presumptions, and Facts About Obesity.” The authors dismissed the often-observed link between weight cycling and mortality, saying it was “probably due to confounding by health status” (code for “We just can’t believe this could be true”) and went on to plug meal replacements like Jenny Craig, medications, and bariatric surgery.

Five of the 20 authors disclosed financial support from sponsors in related industries, including UAB’s David Allison. I asked him how he would respond to allegations of financial self-interest. “It would be no different than anybody saying about any other person who puts forth an idea, ‘I want to comment that you have this background or personality, this sexual orientation, weight, gender, or race,’ ” he argued. “These conflicts were disclosed, we didn’t hide them, we weren’t ashamed of them. And what’s your point?”

(Fat stigma affects doctors' judgments)

Another layer to the onion may lie in our deeply held cultural assumptions around weight. “People, journalists, and researchers live in a world where it’s taken for granted that fat is bad and thin is good,” says Saguy.

Doctors buy into those assumptions and biases even more heavily than the rest of us, which may explain in part why they continue to blame patients who can’t keep weight off. Joseph Majdan, a cardiologist who teaches at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, has lost and regained the same 100 or so pounds more times than he can count. Some of the meanest comments Majdan has heard about his weight have come from other doctors, like the med-school classmate who asked if she could project slides onto a pair of his white intern’s pants for a skit. Or the colleague who asked him, “Aren’t you disgusted with yourself?”

“When a person has recurrent cancer, the physician is so empathetic,” says Majdan. “But when a person regains weight, there’s disgust. And that is morally and professionally abhorrent.”

(Obesity is seen as a moral choice, evidence of poor character.)

The idea that obesity is a choice, that people who are obese lack self-discipline or are gluttonous or lazy, is deeply ingrained in our public psyche. And there are other costs to this kind of judgmentalism. Research done by Lenny Vartanian, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales, suggests that people who believe they’re worthless because they’re not thin, who have tried and failed to maintain weight loss, are less likely to exercise than fat people who haven’t strongly internalized weight stigma.

(In conclusion, author asks us to "let go")

Not that abiding by competent eating, which fits the Health at Every Size paradigm, is easy; Robin Flamm would tell you that. When her clothes started to feel a little tighter, she panicked. Her first impulse was to head back to Weight Watchers. Instead, she says, she asked herself if she was eating mindfully, if she was exercising in a way that gave her pleasure, if she, maybe, needed to buy new clothes. “It’s really hard to let go of results,” she says. “It’s like free falling. And even though there’s no safety net ever, really, this time it’s knowing there’s no safety net.”

One day she was craving a hamburger, a food she wouldn’t typically have eaten. But that day, she ate a hamburger and fries for lunch. “And I was done. End of story,” she says, with a hint of wonder in her voice. No cravings, no obsessing over calories, no weeklong binge-and-restrict, no “feeling fat” and staying away from exercise. She ate a hamburger and fries, and nothing terrible happened. “I just wish more people would get it,” she says.

Summary of Harriet Brown's Essay

Reasons for Making Claim That Diets Don't Work

One. 80-97% of dieters gain all their weight back and more.

Two. We have an unrealistic notion of a good skinny body.

Three. Skinny=healthy=good person

Four. Maintaining weight loss is a full-time job; it's just too hard to maintain this over the long run.

Five. Curing obesity is a money-driven industry, so a lot of claims about who's obese are inflated.

Six. Obesity=lazy=bad person.

Seven. Biggest Loser Failure Argument

Eight. No one diet works for everyone

Nine. Eating Western Diet (sugar and processed foods) is cheaper than eating a healthy diet.

Ten. We have a Set Point.

Eleven. There is no Magic Bullet. We don't want to know the boring truth: Cut down on sugar and exercise more. 

Success Factors for Weight Loss

One. You have a health need. You might die if you don't find religion and find a way to lose weight. There is a gun to your head. Now you're moving in the right direction. 

Two. You did research or due diligence. 

Three. You desire to change.

Four. You like your new diet enough.

Five. You have healthy outlets so you don't rely on junk food as your exclusive drug.

Risk Factors that Make Weight Loss Unlikely

One. You have stress.

Two. You live in poverty.

Three. You suffer from depression.

Four. You suffer from learned depression. 

Five. Your diet was triggered by an act of caprice, whim, or compulsion and therefore lacked due diligence.

Six. You lack basic food education so that you don't know difference between whole food and processed food. 

Seven. Peer pressure doesn't give you support you need to eat well. 

Strengths and Weaknesses in Harriet Brown’s Essay

Strengths:

Brown does a good job of showing that diets are futile, that the glamour industry dictates unrealistic standards of beauty, that there is fat stigma, and that the diet industry is focused more on making money than being effective.

Weaknesses:

Brown doesn’t address people who have urgent health needs that require drastic weight loss, she doesn’t address any kind of middle ground of healthy eating, she doesn’t persuade me that adiposity (being fat) is not a health risk since I can show her statistics that contradict the studies she provides us.  

Using Sturgeon’s Law to Disagree with Harriet Brown:

Sample Essay That Responds to Option A

The High Failure Rate of Dieting Is No Excuse

Stuck at 220 pounds for nearly four weeks, my Inner Fat Man was whispering in my ear, “Give up, dude. Game over. Your metabolism is adapting to your sugar- and gluten-deprived diet. Your metabolism is essentially shutting down. It’s a protest, dude. Don’t you see? Your body is telling you and your diet to go to hell. But no need to feel ashamed. Over ninety-five percent of dieters regain all their weight and get even fatter. Just surrender and admit you’re in the Fat Man Club.”

My Inner Fat Man had a point. The odds were against me. All the research showed that my body would eventually rebel and make my Fat Man triumph over my attempt at gaining control of my tendency toward fatness with all of its related health catastrophes.

Writing for Time, Alexandra Sifferlin in her article “The Weight Loss Trap: Why Your Diet Isn’t Working” describes the findings of scientist Kevin Hall, who doing research for the National Institute of Health, studied the reality-show The Biggest Loser to see if the contestants’ successful weight loss could be studied to help the population at large. Their weight loss was dramatic. Hall observed that on average they lost 127 pounds each, about 64% of their body weight. But Hall soon discovered that transferring the rigid training and dieting to the real world was not a realistic proposition. Sifferlin writes:

What he didn’t expect to learn was that even when the conditions for weight loss are TV-perfect–with a tough but motivating trainer, telegenic doctors, strict meal plans and killer workouts–the body will, in the long run, fight like hell to get that fat back. Over time, 13 of the 14 contestants Hall studied gained, on average, 66% of the weight they’d lost on the show, and four were heavier than they were before the competition.

Like other studies I’ve read, people who go on weight-loss programs do indeed lose the weight, but they always gain it back and even get heavier. But worse, after they soar to an even fatter version of themselves before they went on a diet, their metabolism is set at a lower speed, so they’re worse off than before. As Sifferlin explains Kevin Hall’s research,

As demoralizing as his initial findings were, they weren’t altogether surprising: more than 80% of people with obesity who lose weight gain it back. That’s because when you lose weight, your resting metabolism (how much energy your body uses when at rest) slows down–possibly an evolutionary holdover from the days when food scarcity was common.

With research like this, we can see why any reasonable person would conclude that dieting is not only futile but self-destructive. Driving this point home, Syracuse University journalism professor Harriet Brown in her Slate article “The Weight of the Evidence,” beseeches the 45 million Americans who go on a diet every year to not do so. She warns: “You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chance of keeping if off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.”

In agreement with Harriet Brown is Sandra Aamodt, author of Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession with Weight Loss. Aamodt cites studies that show the overwhelming majority of dieters get fatter and mess up their metabolism, making them even more vulnerable to obesity. All one can do is let go of society’s unrealistic body images, eat sensibly, exercise, stop weighing oneself, and let the chips fall where they may.

I will concede that these intelligent writers make a strong case for not dieting and for not embarking on a fool’s errand to aspire to society’s unrealistic slender body images.

However, I find their arguments that we are doomed to fail to lose and keep our weight off ultimately unconvincing. High failure rates of anything don’t impress me because I am a disciple of Sturgeon’s Law, the belief that over 90% of everything is crap.

Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of aspiring novelists write crappy novels. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to discourage one of my brilliant students from becoming a novelist.

Sturgeon’s Law dictates that 90% of books that are published today aren’t even real books. They’re just gussied-up, padded short stories and essays masquerading as books. But that doesn’t mean I don’t search for literary gems.

Sturgeon’s Law dictates that if you’re part of the dating scene, over 90% of the people you’re dating are emotional dumpster fires, unctuous charlatans, and incorrigible sociopaths. But that doesn’t you can’t eventually find through dating a legit human being for whom you find true love.

Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of marriages are cesspools of misery, toxicity, and dysfunction. But that doesn’t mean that I would discourage two people who are both well-grounded with strong moral convictions, sincere motivations, and a realistic grasp of what is in store for them to not marry each other.

Sturgeon’s Law dictates that most home-improvement contractors are hacks, fugitives, pathological liars, and snake-tongued mountebanks. But that doesn’t mean you don’t bust your butt looking for a solid referral to find a credible contractor who will redo your kitchen.  

I could go on. The point is that if you are looking to do something that is exceptional and long-lasting, you are going to have to commit yourself to hard study and hard work. You’re also going to have to endure a lot of trial and error. Since Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of people don’t do the necessary groundwork for embarking on any project in a worthwhile manner, then you’re not surprisingly going to have a high failure rate in the realm of dieting.

What we must do to be successful is not point to the high failure rate as an excuse for our own failures, as our Inner Fat Person is want to do. What we must do is study the small amount of successful people and analyze their methods of excellence. There are powerful, life-changing books on this subject. One helpful example is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers: The Story of Success, which propounds the 10,000 Hour Rule, the principle that you need a minimum of 10,000 hours of concentrated work to achieve a base level of competence in your craft. Other books that help us study the methods of success come from Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport. He has written Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. In both both books, Newport advocates a “craftsman mindset,” in which you achieving mastery in a craft through “deep work.” This mastery is rare and therefore highly marketable and valuable. But only people who have the fortitude, commitment, and proper habits of “deep work,” performing long chunks of focused work on their craft, rise to the top. Newport argues that this kind of achievement is exceptional and therefore highly prized.

Of course it is. Sturgeon’s Law dictates that this be so.

When we look at everything through the prism of Sturgeon’s Law, we see we have no excuses for our failures, including our diet failures.

Studying failures is not an excuse for failure. Studying failures is a warning for us not to follow the footsteps of those who fail. Once we’ve examined the don’ts of the failures, then we must study the dos of the successes.

To find how to be successful at killing our Inner Fat Person, we can return to Alexandra Sifferlin’s essay “The Weight Loss Trap.” Sifferlin points out that there are some people, over 10,000 in fact, who successfully lose their weight. Their success is recorded in The National Weight Control Registry, headed by Brown University professor Rena Wing and obesity researcher James O. Hill from the University of Colorado. To be a member of the registry, one has to have lost 30 pounds and have kept it off for at least a year. Registry members don’t all stick to one diet. They have different diets, but the one common denominator is that whatever diet they’re on, the new diet is making them mindful of what they’re putting in their mouth. They also exercise regularly. So against the odds, thousands of people are losing and keeping their weight off.

What separates the successful dieters from the failures is consistency, mindfulness of what they’re eating, and a realistic approach so that they don’t get discouraged and burned out over the long haul.  

Another success factor is to find a reliable mentor, either a person you know or an author whose realistic dieting goals can stick with you for a lifetime.

I have an exceptional mentor, Max Penfold, who embodies the “craftsman mindset” described by Cal Newport.

Max Penfold is a United States powerlifting champion, former Navy Seal, and executive chef for arguably the most disruptive tech company in the world.

Also Max Penfold has lost 70 pounds, and he has kept if off for seven years. That qualifies him for membership in The National Weight Control Registry.

If I lose just five more pounds and keep it off for a year, I too can enter the realm of success.

I say the hell with failure.

The hell with the doomsday prophets who say failure is inevitable.

And the hell with my Inner Fat Man.

 

Ethos, Logos, Pathos: The 3 Pillars of Argument

Adapted from Diana Hacker's Rules for Writers, Eighth Edition (99)

Ethos

Ethos is an ethical appeal based on writer's character, knowledge, authority, savvy, book smarts, and streets smarts. The latter is evidenced by author's savvy in using appropriate, not pretentious language to appeal to her readers.

Ethos is further achieved through confidence, humility, and command of language and subject. 

Confidence without humility is not confidence; it is bluster, bombast, and braggadocio, elements that diminish logos.

Real confidence is mastery, detailed, granular, in-depth knowledge of the topic at hand and acknowledgment of possible limitations and errors in one's conclusions. 

Ethos is further established by using credible sources that are peer-reviewed. 

Logos

Logos is establishing a reasonable, logical argument, appealing to the reader's sense of logic, relying on credible evidence, using inductive and deductive reasoning, and exposing logical fallacies. 

Logos is further achieved by using sources that are timely, up-to-date, current, and relevant. 

To strengthen logos, the writer considers opposing views, concedes where those opposing views might diminish the claim, and make appropriate rebuttals to counterarguments. 

Pathos

Pathos is achieved by appealing to the reader's emotions, moral sense, and moral beliefs. 

Pathos gets away from the brain and toward the gut. It makes a visceral appeal. 

Appropriate pathos uses emotion in a way that supports and reinforces the evidence. It does not manipulate and use smokescreens that depart from the evidence. 

ChatGPT Attempts to Write My First Essay Assignment with Mixed Results

ChatGPT Essay Prompt: In 1,200 words, address Harriet Brown’s “The Weight of the Evidence” and Sandra Aamodt in “Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet,” compare and contrast the effectiveness of their persuasion in terms of ethos, logos, and pathos.

ChatGPT Response:

In "The Weight of the Evidence" and "Why You Can't Lose Weight on a Diet," both authors, Harriet Brown and Sandra Aamodt, address the issue of weight loss and diets. While Brown focuses on the flawed assumptions and misinterpretations of the scientific evidence related to weight loss, Aamodt addresses the fundamental flaws in diets as a method of weight loss.

In terms of ethos, both authors present a strong case for their respective arguments. Brown, who holds a PhD in journalism and is an expert in health and science reporting, brings credibility to her argument by drawing on scientific research and presenting it in a clear and concise manner. Aamodt, who has a PhD in neuroscience and is a former editor-in-chief of the journal "Nature Neuroscience," similarly brings credibility to her argument by drawing on her own expertise and experiences in the field.

In terms of logos, both authors make a compelling argument through their use of logic and reason. Brown effectively uses statistics and scientific studies to demonstrate the flaws in the weight loss industry's claims and assumptions. Aamodt similarly uses research and data to show why diets are not an effective method for long-term weight loss. Both authors present their arguments in a clear and well-structured manner, making it easy for the reader to follow their logic and understand their perspectives.

In terms of pathos, both authors make an emotional appeal to their readers. Brown touches on the emotional toll that the weight loss industry can have on individuals by perpetuating unrealistic expectations and promoting harmful methods for weight loss. Aamodt similarly appeals to the emotions of her readers by highlighting the frustration and disappointment that many people experience when they are unable to achieve the desired results from their diets. Both authors effectively use emotional appeals to connect with their readers and reinforce their arguments.

Overall, both authors are effective in their use of ethos, logos, and pathos in their respective essays. While Brown focuses more on the logical and scientific aspects of the weight loss industry, Aamodt focuses more on the emotional and psychological effects of diets. However, both authors present strong and convincing arguments that support their perspectives on weight loss and diets.

In conclusion, "The Weight of the Evidence" and "Why You Can't Lose Weight on a Diet" are two powerful essays that address the issue of weight loss and diets. Both authors effectively use ethos, logos, and pathos to make their respective arguments and offer insights into the flawed assumptions and approaches of the weight loss industry. Whether through scientific research and analysis or personal experience and emotion, both authors provide a thought-provoking and compelling argument for the reader to consider.

Failed Essay But Useful Learning Tool

While a useful learning tool that helps us organize our ideas and give us a thumbnail sketch of the essay topic, the “essay” fails for dozens of reasons, but I’ll focus on seven:

1. The essay is only 445 words; the requirement is 1,200.
2. The paragraphs are tiny, paltry, and stingy. Paragraphs should be generous in their details and be about 130-150 words long. 
3. The essay has no authorial presence. By this, I mean a strong writing voice from a human being.
4. The essay lacks sufficient signal phrases and in-text citations. 
5. The essay lacks an MLA-format Works Cited page with 4 sources. 
6. The essay doesn’t have a salient title.
7. The essay uses the lame “In conclusion,” which is considered a substandard way to start a conclusion paragraph. 

 

 

 

Authenticity Lecture #6: Do Social Justice Warriors Go to Far?

Sample Theses That Refute and Defend Gustavo Arellano’s Argument

 Refutation

 Gustavo Arellano is a prestigious, beloved Los Angeles culture writer. Unfortunately, his argument that attempts to ease the collective white conscience to steal Mexican food is a sad, unconvincing affair. His argument is crippled with egregious moral, legal, and logical fallacies. He knows all too well that American history is rife with white people exploiting Mexicans’ hard work and ingenuity. To defend whites because “everyone steals” is a childish remark that fails basic moral teachings, specifically the infantile notion that two wrongs make a right. Second, if Arellano wants us to take him seriously, he must give us a more narrow definition of cultural appropriation. There is no moral equivalence between a Salvadorean husband respectfully learning the finer points of making Jahuacatas from his wife who hails from Michoacan and the white El Torito manager who hires a Mexican worker, steals the worker’s recipes over a period of two months, and then unceremoniously fires the worker.  A third most regrettable error on Arellano’s part is how he conveniently ignores the atrocious fact that the majority of white stealing of Mexican food is done in the cynical service of making money by white-washing and in effect destroying delicious food to make it palatable for philistines, tourists, and other types of phony people who fancy deluding themselves into “going out and getting some ethnic food.” The bad scenarios described above are more than just bad; they are abominations of the tastebuds and the soul, and for Arellano to omit these abominations from his argument is a form of intellectual dishonesty for which I cannot forgive. 

 

Defense

 

I feel bad for the above writer who has morally excoriated Gustavo Arellano for his supposed moral failings. This writer’s spiritual purity and moral self-righteousness have blinded him from the gustatory pleasures that result from Arellano’s “free-stealing” philosophy. By “free-stealing,” I refer to a degree of healthy chaos that exists in the food industry. Recipes are flying from one town to another; variations are infinite based on quirks, available food, cross-cultural pollination, and a synthesis of cooking techniques from the many cultures that inevitably converge in great cosmopolitan cities such as Los Angeles. Moreover, the relevance of Mexican cooking makes it the most popular, fastest-growing cuisine in the world. Contrary to the above passage which attempts to put a big stink on Gustavo Arellano and which would have us believe that Mexican food is pure, sacrosanct, and unchanging, real Mexican food is constantly evolving through ruthless stealing, borrowing, mutations, and respectful homages to its sacred origins. Thank God, Gustavo Arellano acknowledges the vibrancy of Mexican cooking and its complicated, sometimes morally questionable origins, for finally, a food writer has exposed the truth about the wonders of Mexican food. The above writer, on the other hand, gets a medal for moral self-righteousness but loses points for being a boring, propaganda writer for the Cult of Authenticity. 

Refutation

Gustavo Arellano is gung-ho about white people stealing from Mexicans for three reasons. One, since Mexicans steal, everyone else should be able to. Two, stealing Mexican food is great for popularizing Mexican food throughout the world. Three, dishing up substandard debased Mexican food is a great “gateway drug” to getting people hooked on real Mexican food. All three of his reasons are so ludicrous and asinine as to strain credulity. For one, that Mexicans interacted with other cultures, some who colonized them, and created amazing food is not morally equivalent to privileged classes of people today stealing Mexican food and exploiting Mexican workers. For two, while it’s true that stealing Mexican recipes popularizes Mexican food, this popularization for at least 99% of the time is a disrespectful corruption of true Mexican cooking. So Mexican food has been watered-down to suit the tastes of tacky tourists. Am I supposed to celebrate that fact? I think not. Finally, Arellano would have us applaud the serving of crappy food as the “gateway drug” to real Mexican food. Arellano’s reasoning is based on the optimistic and fallacious assumption that the tasteless hordes will get one taste of abysmal phony Mexican food and want to pivot to something more authentic when in fact the evidence proves otherwise. Look at the popularity of Taco Bell, El Torito, and other shambolic soul-crushing food chains and you’ll see that the masses are quite content with eating phony soulless Mexican food and have complete disregard for the real thing. One last thing I must mention is that Arellano's argument is hypocritical and disingenuous. What do I mean? You won't see Arellano eating and praising Mexican food from white establishments or food chains. He himself goes to hole-in-the-walls owned by Mexicans and other ethnic people and finds his favorite foods from these delicious remote places. These are the places he celebrates in his columns. In other words, Arellano can't even put his money where his mouth is. So while I will read Gustavo Arellano’s cultural criticism, I will index his defense of white people stealing Mexican food in my Rejection and Nonsense File. 

Are Social Justice Warriors Overdoing Their Mission to Defend Authenticity?

As we have studied, there are many motivations for cultural appropriation. There are respectful homages, disrespectful rip-offs, and everything in-between. Some cases aren’t so clear cut. Take, for example, the case of two white ladies who went to Mexico to learn how to make street food, returned to Portland, were accused of being thieves, and were forced to shut down. 

Their rise and fall is described in the article “Kooks Serves Pop-Up Breakfast Burritos with Handmade Tortillas Out of a Food Cart on Cesar Chavez.” 

We find that Kali Wilgus and Liz “LC” Connelly left Portland for Puerto Nuevo, fell in love with the handmade tortillas, “peeked” at the methods used when the locals wouldn’t unload their secrets, returned to Portland and experimented with what knowledge they had, and they served breakfast burritos partly inspired by Puerto Nuevo and party inspired by the “SoCal burrito.”

In many ways, their synthesis of ingredients and methods make them poster children for Gustavo Arellano. They were innovating and, yes, stealing in Arellano’s “Darwinian” sense,  and were making some of the most “decadent” mouth-watering breakfast burritos in Portland, compelling people to stand in long lines. 

But if you’ll notice, the article has an “Update: Koos has closed” caption on it. 

What happened?

According to Caroline Moreno who wrote “Portland Burrito Cart Closes After Owners Are Accused of Cultural Appropriation,” the publicity surrounding Kali Wilgus and Liz “LC” Connelly grew and grew until enough people were offended by the fact that Wilgus and Connelly admitted to stealing the tortilla recipe and methods. 

Many objected to the fact that Wilgus and Connelly didn’t show any remorse or desire to compensate the Mexican women whose recipes the two Anglo women stole before returning to Portland to strike it rich. 

The narrative rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. As you can imagine in the age of social media where cancel culture is rampant, social justice warriors went on the rampage and forced the closure of Kooks. 

While a moral principle was enforced, the Mexican women are not a penny richer, the people of Portland are being deprived of what were the best burritos available, and fewer Americans can now taste a part of authentic Mexican delicacy. Is all this worth it to enforce a moral principle? There is probably no clear right or wrong answer. I’ll let you decide. But based on what we’ve read from Gustavo Arellano, we can infer that he defends Wilgus and Connelly. 

But don’t take my word for it. Here is Gustavo Arellano reiterating many of the ideas we’ve covered as he discusses the closure of Kooks on the KCRW Good Food podcast. 

Arellano observes that Portland’s social justice warriors went overboard and that a lot of their extreme behavior is more of a response to the political climate than the women’s behavior. Further, Arellano agrees with Good Food host Evan Kleinman that there is an “authenticity fallacy” that makes a lot of white people reduce Mexican food to a narrow, fallacious definition of authenticity. 

 

Attitude Counts

In Gustavo Arellano’s article “The Problem Isn’t Rick Bayless Cooking Mexican Food--It’s That He’s a Thin-Skinned Diva,” Arellano defends Rick Bayless for cooking Mexican food, but he excoriates Bayless for painting himself as a White Messiah who is America’s Mexican food champion. It is Bayless’ arrogance and condescension that piques Arellano, not Bayless’ cultural appropriation.

Race and Privilege

The controversy surrounding Rick Bayless and the aforementioned Portland women who made breakfast burritos of the now closed Kooks has steered the debate about authentic Mexican food to the subjects of race and privilege. 

Tim Carman weighs in with his article “Should White Chefs Sell Burritos?” We read that racial shaming in Portland is a powerful political and economical tool and that social justice warriors have even made a list of white Portland restaurants owners whose businesses should be avoided and a list of similar restaurants of people of color who should be visited instead.

As Carman writes: “Someone in the City of Roses has even created a Google doc, listing the white-owned restaurants that have appropriated cuisines outside their own culture. For each entry, the document suggests alternative restaurants owned by people of color.”

Social Justice Warriors Impose Totalitarianism on the Food World

Both Tim Carman and Gustavo Arellano agree that this scrutiny of restaurants in which social justice warriors dictate what is authentic by matching a person’s race with the cuisine is extremist, limits the freedoms of what people do in the kitchen, including their culinary creativity, puts people in racial boxes, fails to recognize that there are fusion cuisines that defy categorization, and in general push a totalitarian mentality on the food world. 

In other words, there is a totalitarian streak in the Cult of Authenticity movement. In an argumentative paper, this would be one of the grounds or reasons for defending Arellano’s claim that the Cult of Authenticity is bogus. 

Throw a Wrench into the Argument

But there are arguments against Gustavo Arellano and Tim Carman. In a critical thinking class, we have to look at both sides. We have always to throw a wrench into the argument. Here is one:

In rejecting the social justice warriors’ rejection of cultural appropriation, are there abuses that cannot be ignored? Indeed, some abuses can be identified.

The “White-Washing” of Ethnic Cuisine

In the Katie Donovan article “Culinary Appropriation,” she contends that Rick Bayless and other prominent white chefs appoint themselves as translators of ethnic cuisine for a white consumer base in the interests of making money. By translating ethnic cuisine, these white chefs are appropriating the cuisine for their profits, misrepresenting the original foods and thereby diluting their authenticity, and egotistically claiming culinary greatness when the credit should be given to those who remain in obscurity. As Donovan writes:

“Bayless has had several transgressions against the Mexican culture through his response to critics.  However, his description of ‘translating’ certain traditional Mexican ingredients for his Midwestern clients is borderline offensive.  He is personally contributing to the white washing of the Mexican culinary culture in highlighting terms that would be more appealing to non-Mexican consumers.  In order to market Mexican cuisine to a different audience, it seems as though Rick Bayless puts profits above respect for culture in his restaurants.”

“White-Washing” or “Innovation”?

Gustavo Arellano would agree with some of the above, especially the egotism of self-appointed Food Messiahs for ethnic cuisine. But Gustavo Arellano doesn’t think ethnic foods get “white washed” so much as innovated, and that this innovation keeps Mexican food relevant and dynamic whereas Italian and German food are stagnant and losing relevance in the American dining scene. 

Language and Semantics

One of the most mind-boggling areas of argumentation is language or semantics: How we use language and the very words we choose to deliver our argument. If we use “white-washing” we will surely be more likely to be strongly opposed to cultural appropriation; if we use “innovation,” we will surely be more likely to defend, along with Gustavo Arellano, cultural appropriation. 

Again, Not all Cultural Appropriation is the Same

A white chef “translating,” stealing, appropriating (or whatever word you want to use) from an ethnic community and profiteering from it is a very specific kind of cultural appropriation. But on a broader level, all food preparations borrow methods and ingredients from all over the world so that the evolution of food is built on a large degree of cultural appropriation. This point is made in the Matt Gross article “The Cultural Appropriation of Food.” Gross observes that pizza, ramen, Cajun-style Gumbo, and an endless list of foods come from trans-migration, innovation, improvisation, and, yes, cultural appropriation. That in fact is the history of food. As Gross writes:

“Ancient history: Cultural appropriation has given us the best food in the world. Pizza, for example, is unthinkable without tomatoes, which originated in the New World and so came to Italy as a result of Christopher Columbus’s voyages. Ramen did not become a big deal in Japan until the postwar American transitional authority brought tons and tons of wheat to the islands. Chili peppers, as this awesome story from Vincent Bevins at The Awl beautifully explained, originate in Latin America, so whenever a Thai curry or Sichuan hotpot sets your mouth aflame, you have the Spanish and especially the Portuguese to thank for bringing that fruit around the world. Oranges probably came from Southeast Asia. Wheat from southeastern Turkey. Apples from Kazakhstan. Last week, some Facebook friends and I determined that Cajun-style gumbo may be the most international food in the world, all of its essential ingredients having originated in farflung corners of the world.”

Your Nuanced View of Cultural Appropriation & Culinary Authenticity Will Influence Your Argument

As you consider the many definitions of cultural appropriation and culinary authenticity, you must also consider that the more complex and nuanced your definitions of these terms are the more sophisticated and impressive your essay will be. 

 

Introduction

We have been looking at Gustavo Arellano’s claim that when it comes to Mexican food the Cult of Authenticity is a bad thing rife with fallacies and misconceptions. Let us, again, take a look at Arellano’s arguments before we examine counterarguments that challenge Arellano’s claim.

Review of Gustavo Arellano’s Arguments Against the Cult of Authenticity

(Pro Tip: The following arguments would make an excellent body paragraph outline for Essay 4) 

1. In spite of some phony white chefs who wrongly anoint themselves as ambassadors of Mexican food, mainstreaming Mexican food is on balance a good because it exposes more people to the greatness of Mexican food and encourages cultural respect and cultural celebration of Mexican contributions. 
2. Much of the purity cult behind the notion of authenticity is from whites on the Left and Right who don’t understand Mexican food or the Mexican people. 
3. Letting social justice warriors dictate what is authentic can lead to food totalitarianism and absurdly narrow, reductionist definitions of authenticity.
4. The lines are blurred between innovation, cross-cultural synergy, and cultural appropriation, which has occurred since the beginning of time and is an inevitable part of how food evolves into amazing dishes. 
5. It’s absurd to reject Tex-Mex or Cal-Mex food when we consider that these fusions are about embracing the greatness of Mexican cuisine and that no food is good or bad per se; rather, how a chef executes the dish determines whether it’s good or not. It’s all about execution. A bad taco could put you in a bad mood for a week. An exceptional taco could “change your life” and inject your brain’s amygdala with euphoric endorphins. 

Counterarguments that challenge Gustavo Arellano’s claim that we should reject the Cult of Authenticity

1. Plagiarism Argument: When we steal intellectual or creative property, there should be consequences. We call this type of stealing plagiarism. Students who commit plagiarism get into big trouble. Shouldn’t cooks who steal creatively and in effect commit culinary plagiarism be subject to some kind of penalties? Should not these chefs who engage in stealing or cultural appropriation at the very least be required to ascribe credit to their sources? Should not these chefs who commit acts of culinary plagiarism at least be required to give a portion of their profits to the areas they stole from? 
2. Moral Argument: Cultural appropriation, the kind where privileged people go to a small town in the United States, Mexico or Latin America and then steal recipes and cooking methods, offends our common sense of morality, fairness, honesty, and justice. When Gustavo Arellano says, “Everybody steals,” and that’s just the “Darwinian” way in the hyper-competitive restaurant industry, could we not accuse Arellano of using a “two rights make a wrong fallacy”? This fallacy is commonly referred to as argumentum ad populum or appeal to the majority fallacy. In other words, just because the majority engage in immoral behavior doesn't make that behavior right. 
3. Quality Control or “Wannabes” Argument: Sure, Gustavo Arellano points out all these great examples of cultural appropriation, but those examples don’t diminish the exponential growth of phony Mexican restaurants that serve the most crass, disgusting, abominable “Mexican food” imaginable. Violating the Cult of Authenticity comes with a steep price: A bunch of wannabes steal some recipes and think they know how to make Mexican food when in fact what they are serving is an insult to Mexican food and to Mexican culture. 
4. Grandmother argument: A student told me he had some very mediocre Molcajete at an expensive Mexican restaurant. He told me, “When I visit my grandmother in Guatemala, she makes me Molcajete that blows all the other ones away. I can’t get excited paying premium dollar for a bunch of sad food that goes under the name of ‘Mexican food.’” What this student is saying essentially is that the tradition, experience, and love his grandmother puts in her homemade Molcajete cannot be compared to the vastly inferior substitutes. Grandmother’s cooking, in other words, is an argument for authenticity.  

 

Pro Writing Tip for Essay 4: Consider Legit Food Innovation Principle Vs. Flagrant Thievery Principle

Hello Everyone,

As I pore over Gustavo Arellano’s claim that the rigid orthodoxy of food authenticity should be shattered in favor of more flexible food guidelines, I am struck by something that I believe will help you with your argumentative essay. 

I am struck by the fact that Arellano uses not one but two arguments to support his claim, and these arguments do not dovetail conveniently to support his claim. To the contrary, his two arguments are divergent: They split and move in opposite directions and as such these diverging arguments weaken his overall claim.

Legit Food Innovation Principle Vs. Flagrant Thievery Principle

What are these two arguments?

The first argument, the one I agree with, is what I’ll call the Legit Food Innovation Principle. This principle states that we have food traditions based on our family, culture, and region, and natural forces cause us to make innovations. For example, we move and in moving we make natural adaptations and innovations based on the original recipe. Or our love and respect of the tacos compels us to be “taco artists” who experiment and make variations to put a spin on old classic style recipes.

I’ll give you two examples.

First, let us say a woman from Chihuahua, Mexico, moves to El Paso, Texas. In Chihuahua, she made tacos with cotija cheese, but in El Paso she can mostly access cheddar cheese, so she goes with the cheddar. Let us say the peppers and other ingredients that grow in her El Paso backyard are different from the plants that grow in her Chihuahua backyard, so she uses the ingredients that are local to her. 

These innovations and adaptations, Arellano claims, are legit and totally support his claim that we should challenge food authenticity, which would dictate that we must rigidly adhere to the original recipe. 

Here is a second example. Head chef of Guerrilla Tacos in downtown Los Angeles is Pico Rivera native Wes Avila. Mr. Avila is also featured in Netflix’s The Taco Chronicles. Wes Avila celebrates the diversity of tacos, he celebrates the various regions of tacos, and in doing so he is what I’d call a Taco Story-Teller, a craftsman, and an artist who looks at the corn tortilla as a “blank slate” on which to make his artistic creations. His Guerrilla Tacos menu is a testament to this fact. I would consider his approach to tacos part of the Legit Innovation Argument. 

However, we must now arrive at another one of Arellano’s arguments, one that I disagree with. I call this the Flagrant Thievery Principle. Regarding the stealing of recipes, Arellano says “everyone does it” and it’s a smart money-making technique in the cutthroat restaurant business. 

Here I must depart with Arellano for several reasons. 

First the argument that “everyone does it” is a logical fallacy and any critical thinking instructor worth his salt will tell you that two wrongs never make a right. If everyone is stealing computer equipment at your workplace, that doesn’t mean it’s right for you to do the same. Our integrity demands that we never succumb to the “everyone does it” fallacy. 

My second disagreement with Arellano is that I find it morally bankrupt for privileged predatory philistines to go down to Mexico, sneak around, steal recipes, and then repackage those recipes for their own profit. Many of my students have pointed out that such behavior smacks of systemic racism and exploitation. I personally wouldn’t want that bad mojo over my restaurant or my conscience. 

My third disagreement with the Flagrant Thievery Principle is that Taco Bell got rich stealing from Mitla Cafe, and so according to Arellano, it must be good Sorry, but getting rich is not a moral defense of anything. Making an abomination of real Mexican food and contributing to the depersonalization of food culture through fast-food service is not a moral defense of food theft. My wife told me that Taco Bell and Jack in the Box exist, not for quality food, but because people get stoned and get the munchies. While she may be making an oversimplification, she may be on to something. In any event, making cheap soulless food for profit is hardly a defense of food theft and cultural appropriation. 

Conclusion

I agree with Arellano’s Legit Food Innovation Principle, but I vehemently reject his Flagrant Thievery Principle. The latter argument tailspins out of control, careens off the road, and splashes into the Pacific Ocean where it belongs.

I want to thank my students who visited me during my Zoom office hours and asked me thoughtful questions, which made me pore over Arellano’s claim with more granular rigor and intensity. 

 

Gustavo Arellano Is 75% Right

Gustavo Arellano has made many compelling, insightful points in his essay “Let White People Appropriate Mexican Food,” but do I agree with him? I’d say he’s 75% right.

He’s right that stealing or appropriating food is a reality in the Darwinian restaurant industry where creating buzz and mouth-watering dishes is a cut-throat business. He’s right that stealing and innovating food makes Mexican food relevant, vibrant, current, and popular. He’s right that stealing Mexican food in a way promotes it and helps scale it to the point that it’s the fastest-growing food globally.

However, Arellano has two glaring weaknesses in his argument. For one, he conveniently doesn’t address the sad fact that stealing food too often ruins the food. American bland tastebuds want bland foods, so too often restaurateurs cater to those bland tastebuds by Americanizing Mexican, Thai, Indian, Chinese, Korean, and other foods so that in America we get inferior, insipid versions of the original. Arellano’s argument would have been more credible had he addressed this issue. 

Another weakness in Arellano’s argument is his avoidance of white rebranding of ethnic food. Take the Netflix series High on the Hog, for example, which teaches us that during slavery and the African Diaspora many African dishes were carried to America and then rebranded “Southern Cuisine,” which is a euphemism for white cuisine. Such rebranding is a moral abomination. Arellano should have addressed this type of appropriation to give his essay more credibility.

So on balance, Arellano makes some great points about how cultural appropriation can be a form of cultural appreciation that champions Mexican cooking. But he should have shown the unsavory underbelly of cultural appropriation: watered-down bland dishes like Taco Bell and white people rebranding ethnic cuisine as “white food.” Both of those scenarios are unacceptable. 

 

To stimulate ideas for your essay, in a paragraph, present your reaction to the following counterarguments that challenge Gustavo Arellano’s defense of cultural appropriation. 

1. Plagiarism Argument: When we steal intellectual or creative property, there should be consequences. We call this type of stealing plagiarism. Students who commit plagiarism get into big trouble. Shouldn’t cooks who steal creatively and in effect commit plagiarism be subject to some kind of penalties? Should not these chefs who engage in stealing or cultural appropriation at the very least be required to ascribe credit to their sources? Should not these chefs who commit acts of culinary plagiarism at least be required to give a portion of their profits to the areas they stole from? 
2. Moral Argument: Cultural appropriation, the kind where privileged people go to a small town in the United States, Mexico or Latin America and steal recipes and cooking methods, offends our common sense of morality, fairness, honesty, and justice. When Gustavo Arellano says, “Everybody steals,” and that’s just the “Darwinian” way in the hyper-competitive restaurant industry, could we not accuse Arellano of using a “two rights make a wrong fallacy”? This fallacy is commonly referred to as argumentum ad populum or appeal to the majority fallacy. 
3. Quality Control or “Wannabes” Argument: Sure, Gustavo Arellano points out all these great examples of cultural appropriation, but those examples don’t diminish the exponential growth of phony Mexican restaurants that serve the most crass, disgusting, abominable “Mexican food” imaginable. Violating the Cult of Authenticity comes with a steep price: A bunch of wannabes steal some recipes and think they know how to make Mexican food when in fact what they are serving is an insult to Mexican food and Mexican culture. 
4. Grandmother argument: A student told me he had some very mediocre Molcajete at an expensive Mexican restaurant. He told me, “When I visit my grandmother in Guatemala, she makes me Molcajete that blows all the other ones away. I can’t get excited paying premium dollar for a bunch of sad food that goes under the name of ‘Mexican food.’” What this student is saying essentially is that the tradition, experience, and love his grandmother puts in her homemade Molcajete cannot be compared to the vastly inferior substitutes. Grandmother’s cooking, in other words, is an argument for authenticity.  

Sentence Fragments 

Sentence fragments are incomplete thoughts presented as dependent clauses or phrases.

A dependent clause or a phrase is never a complete sentence.

Types of dependent clauses:

Whenever I drive up windy mountains,

Because I have craved pizza for 14 months,

Unless you add coffee to your chocolate cake recipe,

,which is currently enjoying a resurgence. 

 

Phrases

Enamored by the music of Tupac Shakur,

Craving pesto linguine with olive-oil based clam sauce, 

Flexing his muscles with a braggadocio never seen in modern times,

Lying under the bridge and eating garlic pepper pretzels with a dollop of cream cheese and a jug of chilled apple cider, 

To understand the notion of Universal Basic Income and all of its related factors for social change in this disruptive age, 

Running into crowded restaurants with garlic and whiskey fuming out of his sweaty pores while brandishing a golden scepter, 

 

Examples

I won't entertain your requests for more money and gifts. Until you show at least a modicum of responsibility at school and with your friends. 

I won't consider buying the new BMW sports coupe. Unless of course my uncle gives me that inheritance he keeps talking about whenever he gets a bit tipsy. 

I can't imagine ever going to Chuck E. Cheese. Which makes me feel like I'm emotionally arrested. 

I am considering the purchase of a new wardrobe. That is, if I'm picked for that job interview at Nordstrom. 

Human morals have vanished. To the point at which it was decided that market values would triumph. 

No subject 

Marie Antoinette spent huge sums of money on herself and her favorites. And helped to bring on the French Revolution.

No complete verb

The aluminum boat sitting on its trailer.

Beginning with a subordinating word

We returned to the drugstore. Where we waited for our buddies.

A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a complete sentence. Reading your draft out loud, backwards, sentence by sentence, will help you spot sentence fragments.

Sentence Fragment Exercises  

After each sentence, write C for complete or F for fragment sentence. If the sentence is a fragment, correct it so that it is a complete sentence. 

One. While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her. 

Two.  In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance.

Three. My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market. 

Four. Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto.  

Five. Winding quickly but safely up the treacherous Palos Verdes hills in the shrouded mist of a lazy June morning, I realized that my BMW gave me feelings of completeness and fulfillment.   

Six. To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming. 

Seven. The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar. 

Eight. When my cravings for pesto pizza, babaganoush, and triple chocolate cake overcome me during my bouts of acute anxiety. 

Nine. Inclined to stop watching sports in the face of my girlfriend’s insistence that I pay more attention to her, I am throwing away my TV. 

Ten. At the dance club where I espy my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel. 

Eleven. The BMW speeding ahead of me and winding into the misty hills. 

Twelve. Before you convert to the religion of veganism in order to impress your vegan girlfriend. 

Thirteen. Summoning all my strength to resist the giant chocolate fudge cake sweating on the plate before me. 

Identify the Fragments Below

Identify the Fragments Below

I drank the chalky Soylent meal-replacement drink. Expecting to feel full and satisfied. Only to find that I was still ravenously hungry afterwards. Trying to sate my hunger pangs. I went to HomeTown Buffet. Where I ate several platters of braised oxtail and barbecued short ribs smothered in a honey vinegar sauce. Which reminded me of a sauce where I used to buy groceries from. When I was a kid.

Feeling bloated after my HomeTown Buffet indulgence. I exited the restaurant. After which I hailed an Uber and asked the driver for a night club recommendation. So I could dance off all my calories. The driver recommended a place, Anxiety Wires. I had never heard of it. Though, it was crowded inside. I felt eager to dance and confident about “my swag.” Although, I was still feeling bloated. Wondering if my intestines were on the verge of exploding.

Sweating under the night club’s outdoor canopy. I smelled the cloying gasses of a nearby vape. A serpentine woman was holding the vape. A gold contraption emitting rose-water vapors into my direction. Contemplating my gluttony. I was suddenly feeling low confidence. Though I pushed myself to introduce myself to the vape-smoking stranger with the serpentine features. Her eyes locked on mine.

I decided to play it cool. Instead of overwhelming her with a loud, brash manner. Which she might interpret as neediness on my part.

Keeping a portable fan in my cargo pocket for emergencies. When I feel like I’m overheating. I took the fan out of my pocket, turned it on, and directed it toward the serpentine stranger. Making it so the vapors were blowing back in her face.

“Doesn’t smell so good, does it?” I said. With a sarcastic grin.

She cackled, then said, “Thank you for blowing the vapors in my face. Now I can both enjoy inhaling them and breathing them in. For double the pleasure. You are quite a find. Come home with me and I’ll introduce you to my mother Gertrude and her pitbull Jackson. I’m sure they’ll welcome you into our home. Considering what a well-fed handsome man you are.”

“Thank you for the compliment,” I said. “I would love to meet your mother Gertrude and your mother’s pitbull Jackson. Only one problem. My breath smells like a rotting dead dragon. Right after eating spicy ribs. Which reminds me? Do you have any breath mints?”

“I don’t believe in carrying breath mints. On account of the rose-water vape. That cleanses my palate. Making my breath rosy fresh.”

“Wow. Your constant good breath counteracts my intractable bad breath. Making us a match in heaven.”

“I agree. Totally. You really need to meet my mother. Because she’ll bless us and make our marriage official. Since we really need her blessing. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Now let me smell your breath. So I can identify the hot sauce.”

“Why must you do that?”

“So I can use the same hot sauce on our wedding cake, silly. To celebrate the first night we met. Capisce?”

“Capisce.”

She approached me. Affording me a view of her long, tired face. Covered in scales. Reptilian. Evocative of something primitive. Something precious and indelible from my childhood lost long ago. I wanted to run from her, but I could not. Some mysterious force drew me to her, and we inched closer and closer toward one another. Succumbing to a power neither of us could fathom. 

 

Comma Splice Review

Identify the Comma Splices Below:

It’s not a question of will there be chaos or will there be destruction, it’s a question of how much?

MySpace was disruptive in its time, however, it’s a dated platform and to simply mention it is to make people laugh with a certain derision surely it’s a platform that has seen its time, another example is the meal replacement Soylent, its creator made a drink that says, “You’re too busy to eat,” so drinking this pancake batter-like concoction gives tech people street. I may laugh at its stupidity, instead I should admire it since the product has made millions for its creator. It’s proven to be somewhat disruptive.

To be sure, though, Facebook redefines the word disruptive, it has rapidly accrued over 3 billion users and will soon have half the planet plugged into its site, that is the apotheosis of a greedy person’s fantasy, imagine controlling half the planet on a platform that mines private information and targets ads toward specific personality profiles.  

One of the scary disruptions of Facebook is that billions of people have lost their personal agency, what that means that people have unknowingly been manipulated by Facebook’s puppeteers to the point that many Facebook users suffer from social media addiction, moreover, these same users prefer the fake life they curate on social media to the real life they once had, in fact, their previous real life is just a puff of smoke that has faded into the distance, many people no longer even know what it means to be “real” anymore, having lost their agency, having succumbed to their Facebook addiction, they have become zombies waiting for their next rush of social media-fueled dopamine, what a sad state of affairs.

Authenticity Lecture #5: With Sample Thesis

Sample Theses That Refute and Defend Gustavo Arellano’s Argument

 

Refutation

 

Gustavo Arellano is a prestigious, beloved Los Angeles culture writer. Unfortunately, his argument that attempts to ease the collective white conscience to steal Mexican food is a sad, unconvincing affair. His argument is crippled with egregious moral, legal, and logical fallacies. He knows all too well that American history is rife with white people exploiting Mexicans’ hard work and ingenuity. To defend whites because “everyone steals” is a childish remark that fails basic moral teachings, specifically the infantile notion that two wrongs make a right. Second, if Arellano wants us to take him seriously, he must give us a more narrow definition of cultural appropriation. There is no moral equivalence between a Salvadorean husband respectfully learning the finer points of making Jahuacatas from his wife who hails from Michoacan and the white El Torito manager who hires a Mexican worker, steals the worker’s recipes over a period of two months, and then unceremoniously fires the worker.  A third most regrettable error on Arellano’s part is how he conveniently ignores the atrocious fact that the majority of white stealing of Mexican food is done in the cynical service of making money by white-washing and in effect destroying delicious food to make it palatable for philistines, tourists, and other types of phony people who fancy deluding themselves into “going out and getting some ethnic food.” The bad scenarios described above are more than just bad; they are abominations of the tastebuds and the soul, and for Arellano to omit these abominations from his argument is a form of intellectual dishonesty for which I cannot forgive. 

 

Defense

 

I feel bad for the above writer who has morally excoriated Gustavo Arellano for his supposed moral failings. This writer’s spiritual purity and moral self-righteousness have blinded him from the gustatory pleasures that result from Arellano’s “free-stealing” philosophy. By “free-stealing,” I refer to a degree of healthy chaos that exists in the food industry. Recipes are flying from one town to another; variations are infinite based on quirks, available food, cross-cultural pollination, and a synthesis of cooking techniques from the many cultures that inevitably converge in great cosmopolitan cities such as Los Angeles. Moreover, the relevance of Mexican cooking makes it the most popular, fastest-growing cuisine in the world. Contrary to the above passage which attempts to put a big stink on Gustavo Arellano and which would have us believe that Mexican food is pure, sacrosanct, and unchanging, real Mexican food is constantly evolving through ruthless stealing, borrowing, mutations, and respectful homages to its sacred origins. Thank God, Gustavo Arellano acknowledges the vibrancy of Mexican cooking and its complicated, sometimes morally questionable origins, for finally, a food writer has exposed the truth about the wonders of Mexican food. The above writer, on the other hand, gets a medal for moral self-righteousness but loses points for being a boring, propaganda writer for the Cult of Authenticity. 

Refutation

Gustavo Arellano is gung-ho about white people stealing from Mexicans for three reasons. One, since Mexicans steal, everyone else should be able to. Two, stealing Mexican food is great for popularizing Mexican food throughout the world. Three, dishing up substandard debased Mexican food is a great “gateway drug” to getting people hooked on real Mexican food. All three of his reasons are so ludicrous and asinine as to strain credulity. For one, that Mexicans interacted with other cultures, some who colonized them, and created amazing food is not morally equivalent to privileged classes of people today stealing Mexican food and exploiting Mexican workers. For two, while it’s true that stealing Mexican recipes popularizes Mexican food, this popularization for at least 99% of the time is a disrespectful corruption of true Mexican cooking. So Mexican food has been watered-down to suit the tastes of tacky tourists. Am I supposed to celebrate that fact? I think not. Finally, Arellano would have us applaud the serving of crappy food as the “gateway drug” to real Mexican food. Arellano’s reasoning is based on the optimistic and fallacious assumption that the tasteless hordes will get one taste of abysmal phony Mexican food and want to pivot to something more authentic when in fact the evidence proves otherwise. Look at the popularity of Taco Bell, El Torito, and other shambolic soul-crushing food chains and you’ll see that the masses are quite content with eating phony soulless Mexican food and have complete disregard for the real thing. One last thing I must mention is that Arellano's argument is hypocritical and disingenuous. What do I mean? You won't see Arellano eating and praising Mexican food from white establishments or food chains. He himself goes to hole-in-the-walls owned by Mexicans and other ethnic people and finds his favorite foods from these delicious remote places. These are the places he celebrates in his columns. In other words, Arellano can't even put his money where his mouth is. So while I will read Gustavo Arellano’s cultural criticism, I will index his defense of white people stealing Mexican food in my Rejection and Nonsense File. 

Your Essay Assignment:

Do you agree or disagree with Arellano's defense of cultural appropriation?

Summary of the Essay's Main Arguments

• We are all rapacious creatures whose drive for success makes us to some degree cutthroat and ruthless. The more ruthlessly we steal a recipe the more we affirm the greatness of that recipe. Mediocre food isn't stolen. Only great food is. The theft of Mexican recipes is a tribute to its greatness. 
• "Stealing" is actually the natural human inclination for cross-cultural pollination. Such pollination enriches culture and in many cases actually changes culture for the better.
• To treat Mexicans as helpless victims whose delicacies are being stolen is to patronize them and to "rob them of human agency" (free will). In fact, Mexicans have been "stealing," or rather cross-pollinating, for thousands of years. Their history is rife with taking foods from other cultures such as Spain, France, and the Middle East, and making these foods their own. 
• From the Netflix series Ugly Delicious, "Tacos" episode, we find that respectful inspiration from the original dish is an acceptable form of cultural appropriation. 

Some Caveats, Stipulations, or Conditions We Can Use from Ugly Delicious, "Tacos":

• Taking shortcuts is an abomination and degrades the original version of the food such as tortillas.
• Offering stereotypes of Mexican food is an abomination and shows ignorance of the depth of ingredients and creativity from the treasures of Mexican cooking. Don't play "Jingle Bells" on the piano when you should be playing Beethoven's 9th Symphony. 
• Making tourist food or white-washing food to make it bland for mass appeal will make you money but it is an abomination of authentic Mexican food. 
• Taking agua fresca and rebranding it as "spa water" is a form of racial plagiarism so egregious that I doubt Gustavo Arellano would defend such an act of shamelessness and arrogance. 

 

What are the two opposing sides of this argument?

The Great Debate: Innovation Vs. Tradition:

On one side, Gustavo Arellano’s side, is the argument that great food evolves through stealing and that stealing is a sign of the food’s greatness. Another side of food greatness is constant evolution and constant innovation. People are open to experimenting with foods and not tied to traditions and absolutes. Mexican food, moreover, is not a monolith. There is diversity based on regions and innovations, so there is no such thing as One Kind of Mexican Food, no One Burrito, No One Taco, etc. 

On the other side, the Cult of Authenticity, is the belief that food should be unchanged. Food is iconic and rooted in tradition and attempts at changing the food is equivalent to “blasphemy.” Also, when the food is taken and changed it accounts to the loathsome act of cultural appropriation.  Which side are you on?

Use the Toulmin Argument Model with a Counterargument-Rebuttal Section

From a design and structure standpoint, you are learning to write an argumentative essay in the tradition of the Toulmin Model, named after philosopher Stephen Toulmin. In the Toulmin Model, you address your opponents’ views in a counterargument-rebuttal section. 

 

What is Cultural Appropriation?

According to the Origin of Everything “What Is Cultural Appropriation?” video, there are many definitions of cultural appropriation, and we cannot use cultural appropriation as an argument about any debate concerning authenticity unless we are clear with our terms.

There are egregious, ambiguous, and benign forms and examples of cultural appropriation, so we cannot lump them all together as cancel culture (group shaming someone or an organization for committing some unforgivable sin or other) would have us do. 

Egregious or Really Bad Forms and Examples of Cultural Appropriation

1. Elvis Presley imitating soul music while he gets rich and the African Americans he stole from remain on the margins. 
2. A white guy putting on blackface and putting on a negative stereotype minstrel show under the name “Jim Crow.”
3. Hollywood showing a pattern of hiring white actors over ethnic actors to play ethnic roles.
4. Anytime the dominant culture steals something from marginalized culture for entertainment and profiteering purposes and obscures the original meaning, sacredness, and context of the thing that was stolen. 
5. Rachel Dolezal (shown below), a white woman, using a tanning bed and hair extensions to pass as black, lying about her racial identity, and using her identity as a “black woman” to be an authority on race, and even get a job at the NAACP, and edging out real African American women for the job. In putting on her charade, she became the consummate “wannabe.”

Controversial examples of cultural appropriation

Some actions are more controversial. For example, can a white writer assume the identity of an ethnic person in creating a narrator or character for a novel? 

Such a controversy has become huge in recent times with the best-selling novel American Dirt, by Anglo writer Jeanine Cummins (shown above). Some argue that a writer of any race should have artistic license to create any character they need to fulfill their artistic vision. Others accuse Jeanine Cummins of cultural appropriation and as a guilty party of this act, Cummins, as a white woman, cannot create an authentic experience about a Mexican mother who goes across the United States border with her son, and in fact is exploiting human suffering to make a buck. We read that some have accused, as cited in The Guardian article “Publishers defend American Dirt as claims of cultural appropriation grow,” of Cummins making “overly ripe stereotypes” from “the white gaze” and others say that the novel, cultural appropriation or not, is just bad writing, sensationalistic and formulaic, a cheap thriller. 

Defending Cultural Appropriation

New York Times Student Editorial Contest Winner seventeen-year-old Maggie Strauss defends cultural appropriation in her essay “‘Cultural Appropriation’ Is Critical to Human Progress.”

Strauss makes the point that not all cultural appropriation is alike. How we judge instances of cultural appropriation should be partly based on intention or motive. She concedes that many fashions take from different cultures, and sometimes this influence is done in good taste, but other times it is based on shallow stereotypes. As she writes:

“These fashion statements were clearly not designed to offend or degrade the cultures that influenced them. However, that is not to say that everyone who draws inspiration from different cultures is doing it with the right intentions. Issues arise when imitation is based on a shallow and offensive stereotype, which is just blatant racism.”

Syncretism

Strauss argues that cultural appropriation from a broad definition is inevitable and part of natural human progress. This broad definition of cultural exchange is called syncretism. As she writes: “From a historical perspective, the term that is typically used to describe the adoption of certain practices from one culture to the next is syncretism. Without syncretism, human progress would be next to impossible.”

We can’t put ourselves in boxes

An Irish person shouldn’t be forced to wear only Irish clothes, eat Irish food, and drink Irish beer. Such a boxing in is absurd and contrary to human nature. We are creatures who freely engage in cultural exchange. For cancel culture to lump all cultural exchange as some horrific sin of cultural appropriation is extremist and disconnected from reality.

But what about when white women go to Mexico, take recipes from the Mexican streets, and return to America to create a successful Mexican food eatery? 

 

Review of Gustavo Arellano’s Arguments Against the Cult of Authenticity

(Pro Tip: The following arguments would make an excellent body paragraph outline for Essay 4) 

1. In spite of some phony white chefs who wrongly anoint themselves as ambassadors of Mexican food, mainstreaming Mexican food is on balance a good because it exposes more people to the greatness of Mexican food and encourages cultural respect and cultural celebration of Mexican contributions. 
2. Much of the purity cult behind the notion of authenticity is from whites on the Left and Right who don’t understand Mexican food or the Mexican people. 
3. Letting social justice warriors dictate what is authentic can lead to food totalitarianism and absurdly narrow, reductionist definitions of authenticity.
4. The lines are blurred between innovation, cross-cultural synergy, and cultural appropriation, which has occurred since the beginning of time and is an inevitable part of how food evolves into amazing dishes. 
5. It’s absurd to reject Tex-Mex or Cal-Mex food when we consider that these fusions are about embracing the greatness of Mexican cuisine and that no food is good or bad per se; rather, how a chef executes the dish determines whether it’s good or not. It’s all about execution. A bad taco could put you in a bad mood for a week. An exceptional taco could “change your life” and inject your brain’s amygdala with euphoric endorphins. 

If we have any questions about the authenticity of Tex-Mex, this Eater YouTube video titled “How the World’s Most Authentic Tex-Mex Is Made” should quell those doubts:

How the World's Most Authentic Tex-Mex is Made — Cooking in America

8 Rules for Elevating Your Argumentative Thesis

Introduction

I’ve been reading journalist Gustavo Arellano’s articles for almost two decades now. He is always truthful, gut-punching, surprising, edgy, funny, smart, and relevant. When I think about his writing, it occurs to me that Arellano  often incorporates many of the 8 Rules for Elevating Your Argumentative Thesis. 

As we prepare for our essay, let us do a study of them: 

Rule #1: Write a claim that means something to you on both an intellectual and visceral level. 

If your claim is perfunctory or listless or weak or just plain boring, it is going to show up in your writing. You have to find an angle that you care about both intellectually and viscerally (from the gut). It is impossible to fabricate authentic passion for your topic, that is, unless you are a person of remarkable talent and acting skills. If that is true, you are the exception, not the rule. 

Rule #2: Write a claim that is debatable. 

If your claim is debatable, then you have the opportunity to test it against opposing views. This testing of your claim forces you to do an intellectual deep dive, which by necessity elevates the sophistication of your writing rigor. In contrast, a thesis that is too obvious and factual will be boring because you will be lecturing down to your reader something that is self-evident. For example, writing a claim or thesis that patience is necessary for a healthy marriage is, while true, so obvious that to read through such an essay would be a slog through a compositional snoozefest. 

Rule #3 Write a claim that is modified through the use of conditions or caveats. 

A caveat is a condition you place on a proposition. For example, if you are arguing for fighting Covid-19 through contact tracing, you might argue for contact tracing with some caveats in your thesis such as this:

“Provided we have measures to protect privacy and invasive government snooping, contact tracing is essential for fighting Covid-19.”

You are arguing for contact tracing if certain conditions are met. By placing conditions in your thesis, you are elevating your writing’s sophistication. 

Rule #4: Gain credibility for your claim by using a concession clause.

In Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky’s From Inquiry to Academic Writing, Third Edition, we read that  “Part of the strategy of developing a main claim supported with good reasons is to offer a concession, an acknowledgment that readers may not agree with every point the writer is making. A concession is a writer’s way of saying, ‘Okay, I can see that there may be another way of looking at the issue or another way to interpret the evidence used to support the argument I am making.’” 

Some examples of concessions that we place before the thesis:

“While it is true that . . .”

“While I agree with X that Y, it is also important to consider.”

“Yes, some studies have convincingly shown that __________; however, a closer look reveals that _________________” 

Rule #5: Be sure that important terms in your claim are clear and explicitly defined to your reader. 

Never assume your reader understands terms you might be putting in your essay. If you are using terms like “Cult of Authenticity,” “cultural appropriation,” or “hegemony” in your thesis, you will want to be sure to define those terms in your introduction; otherwise, you will alienate your reader. 

Rule #6: Be okay with having a working or tentative thesis at first and then making your thesis more definitive as you progress deeper and deeper into the topic.

Good writing is about the process of discovery, the surprise of discovery, and the writer throwing away preconceptions in his or her passion for finding the truth. Therefore, at the start of the journey, the thesis is going to be “iffy” or tentative; as you clarify your thoughts on the topic, your thesis will become more crsytalized. For example, I grew up hearing people stigmatize Tex-Mex as phony food, but it wasn’t until I did a deep dive on this topic for my English 1C Critical Thinking class that I learned that Tex-Mex has a deep history in the land of Mexico and Texas and that there are amazing chefs who have made Tex-Mex and exquisite art form. 

Rule #7: Use the Three Means of Persuasion to make your argumentative thesis more effective. 

According to Aristotle, there are Three Means of Persuasion that a speaker or writer can use to persuade his audience:

The appeal of reason and logic: logos

The appeal of emotions: pathos

The appeal of authority: ethos 

Logos, the use of logic in your argument: Smoking will compromise your immune system and make you more at risk for cancer; therefore, logic, or logos, dictates that you should quit smoking.

Pathos, the use of emotion in your argument: If you die of cancer, you will be abandoning your family when they need you most; therefore an emotional appeal, or pathos, dictates that you quit smoking.

Ethos, the use of credible sources in your argument: The surgeon general has warned you of the hazards of smoking; therefore the credibility of an authority or expert dictates that you quit smoking. If the writer lacks authority or credibility, he is often well served to draw upon the authority of someone else to support his argument.

You would want to use logos, pathos, and ethos all together if you were trying to persuade someone to quit smoking. To neglect one would be to compromise your argument. 

Rule #8: Having mapping components following your thesis gives you and your reader a clear roadmap of where your essay is going. 

A thesis should always have a clear direction that shows you and the reader the direction of the essay or the organizational plan. For example, if we argue that it is morally wrong to watch professional football. Here is an argumentative thesis with mapping components:

"While I am a lifelong football fan who has enjoyed the suspense of close games over the years, I am convinced after reading Steve Almond’s anti-football manifesto that I can no longer patronize the game I once loved because it is morally and intellectually bankrupt evidenced by its bloodthirsty violence, misogyny-fueled domestic abuse, parasitic taxpayer trickery, exploitation of the underclass, high risk of permanent brain trauma, and narcissism-inducing toxic masculinity."

Notice the essay's direction is indicated by the claim's mapping components:

1. bloodthirsty violence
2. misogyny-fueled domestic abuse
3. parasitic taxpayer trickery
4. exploitation of the underclass
5. high risk of permanent brain trauma
6. narcissism-inducing toxic masculinity

Many of these points are elaborated in Ashan R. Hampton's video "Write a Good Thesis Statement":

Write a Good Thesis Statement

Sentence Fragments 

Sentence fragments are incomplete thoughts presented as dependent clauses or phrases.

A dependent clause or a phrase is never a complete sentence.

Types of dependent clauses:

Whenever I drive up windy mountains,

Because I have craved pizza for 14 months,

Unless you add coffee to your chocolate cake recipe,

,which is currently enjoying a resurgence. 

 

Phrases

Enamored by the music of Tupac Shakur,

Craving pesto linguine with olive-oil based clam sauce, 

Flexing his muscles with a braggadocio never seen in modern times,

Lying under the bridge and eating garlic pepper pretzels with a dollop of cream cheese and a jug of chilled apple cider, 

To understand the notion of Universal Basic Income and all of its related factors for social change in this disruptive age, 

Running into crowded restaurants with garlic and whiskey fuming out of his sweaty pores while brandishing a golden scepter, 

 

Examples

I won't entertain your requests for more money and gifts. Until you show at least a modicum of responsibility at school and with your friends. 

I won't consider buying the new BMW sports coupe. Unless of course my uncle gives me that inheritance he keeps talking about whenever he gets a bit tipsy. 

I can't imagine ever going to Chuck E. Cheese. Which makes me feel like I'm emotionally arrested. 

I am considering the purchase of a new wardrobe. That is, if I'm picked for that job interview at Nordstrom. 

Human morals have vanished. To the point at which it was decided that market values would triumph. 

No subject 

Marie Antoinette spent huge sums of money on herself and her favorites. And helped to bring on the French Revolution.

No complete verb

The aluminum boat sitting on its trailer.

Beginning with a subordinating word

We returned to the drugstore. Where we waited for our buddies.

A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a complete sentence. Reading your draft out loud, backwards, sentence by sentence, will help you spot sentence fragments.

Sentence Fragment Exercises  

After each sentence, write C for complete or F for fragment sentence. If the sentence is a fragment, correct it so that it is a complete sentence. 

One. While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her. 

Two.  In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance.

Three. My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market. 

Four. Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto.  

Five. Winding quickly but safely up the treacherous Palos Verdes hills in the shrouded mist of a lazy June morning, I realized that my BMW gave me feelings of completeness and fulfillment.   

Six. To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming. 

Seven. The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar. 

Eight. When my cravings for pesto pizza, babaganoush, and triple chocolate cake overcome me during my bouts of acute anxiety. 

Nine. Inclined to stop watching sports in the face of my girlfriend’s insistence that I pay more attention to her, I am throwing away my TV. 

Ten. At the dance club where I espy my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel. 

Eleven. The BMW speeding ahead of me and winding into the misty hills. 

Twelve. Before you convert to the religion of veganism in order to impress your vegan girlfriend. 

Thirteen. Summoning all my strength to resist the giant chocolate fudge cake sweating on the plate before me. 

Identify the Fragments Below

Identify the Fragments Below

I drank the chalky Soylent meal-replacement drink. Expecting to feel full and satisfied. Only to find that I was still ravenously hungry afterwards. Trying to sate my hunger pangs. I went to HomeTown Buffet. Where I ate several platters of braised oxtail and barbecued short ribs smothered in a honey vinegar sauce. Which reminded me of a sauce where I used to buy groceries from. When I was a kid.

Feeling bloated after my HomeTown Buffet indulgence. I exited the restaurant. After which I hailed an Uber and asked the driver for a night club recommendation. So I could dance off all my calories. The driver recommended a place, Anxiety Wires. I had never heard of it. Though, it was crowded inside. I felt eager to dance and confident about “my swag.” Although, I was still feeling bloated. Wondering if my intestines were on the verge of exploding.

Sweating under the night club’s outdoor canopy. I smelled the cloying gasses of a nearby vape. A serpentine woman was holding the vape. A gold contraption emitting rose-water vapors into my direction. Contemplating my gluttony. I was suddenly feeling low confidence. Though I pushed myself to introduce myself to the vape-smoking stranger with the serpentine features. Her eyes locked on mine.

I decided to play it cool. Instead of overwhelming her with a loud, brash manner. Which she might interpret as neediness on my part.

Keeping a portable fan in my cargo pocket for emergencies. When I feel like I’m overheating. I took the fan out of my pocket, turned it on, and directed it toward the serpentine stranger. Making it so the vapors were blowing back in her face.

“Doesn’t smell so good, does it?” I said. With a sarcastic grin.

She cackled, then said, “Thank you for blowing the vapors in my face. Now I can both enjoy inhaling them and breathing them in. For double the pleasure. You are quite a find. Come home with me and I’ll introduce you to my mother Gertrude and her pitbull Jackson. I’m sure they’ll welcome you into our home. Considering what a well-fed handsome man you are.”

“Thank you for the compliment,” I said. “I would love to meet your mother Gertrude and your mother’s pitbull Jackson. Only one problem. My breath smells like a rotting dead dragon. Right after eating spicy ribs. Which reminds me? Do you have any breath mints?”

“I don’t believe in carrying breath mints. On account of the rose-water vape. That cleanses my palate. Making my breath rosy fresh.”

“Wow. Your constant good breath counteracts my intractable bad breath. Making us a match in heaven.”

“I agree. Totally. You really need to meet my mother. Because she’ll bless us and make our marriage official. Since we really need her blessing. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Now let me smell your breath. So I can identify the hot sauce.”

“Why must you do that?”

“So I can use the same hot sauce on our wedding cake, silly. To celebrate the first night we met. Capisce?”

“Capisce.”

She approached me. Affording me a view of her long, tired face. Covered in scales. Reptilian. Evocative of something primitive. Something precious and indelible from my childhood lost long ago. I wanted to run from her, but I could not. Some mysterious force drew me to her, and we inched closer and closer toward one another. Succumbing to a power neither of us could fathom. 

 

Comma Splice Review

Identify the Comma Splices Below:

It’s not a question of will there be chaos or will there be destruction, it’s a question of how much?

MySpace was disruptive in its time, however, it’s a dated platform and to simply mention it is to make people laugh with a certain derision surely it’s a platform that has seen its time, another example is the meal replacement Soylent, its creator made a drink that says, “You’re too busy to eat,” so drinking this pancake batter-like concoction gives tech people street. I may laugh at its stupidity, instead I should admire it since the product has made millions for its creator. It’s proven to be somewhat disruptive.

To be sure, though, Facebook redefines the word disruptive, it has rapidly accrued over 3 billion users and will soon have half the planet plugged into its site, that is the apotheosis of a greedy person’s fantasy, imagine controlling half the planet on a platform that mines private information and targets ads toward specific personality profiles.  

One of the scary disruptions of Facebook is that billions of people have lost their personal agency, what that means that people have unknowingly been manipulated by Facebook’s puppeteers to the point that many Facebook users suffer from social media addiction, moreover, these same users prefer the fake life they curate on social media to the real life they once had, in fact, their previous real life is just a puff of smoke that has faded into the distance, many people no longer even know what it means to be “real” anymore, having lost their agency, having succumbed to their Facebook addiction, they have become zombies waiting for their next rush of social media-fueled dopamine, what a sad state of affairs.

Authenticity Lecture #4: Not All Cultural Appropriation Is Alike

Highlights from Gustavo Arellano’s Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

 

The Cosmic Burrito

According to food writer and Los Angeles Times culture critic Gustavo Arellano, Mexican food has been assimilated and celebrated in the United States for 125 years. Tacos and burritos are America’s comfort food. 

The celebration of Mexican food in America has caused a worldwide appetite for Mexican food, from Dubai to Australia, which has its own Taco Bell, called Taco Bill’s, which specializes in fish tacos.

Arellano observes that for over 100 years, many Americans who are anti-Mexican in their prejudices are unaware of the contradiction between their racism and their undying love of Mexican food. They compartmentalize, loving the food yet inexplicably disliking the people who make it, turning Mexicans into negative stereotypes while having a relentless desire for Mexican food. 

Tortillas are the preferred food of NASA astronauts, so there is now the “Cosmic Burrito” and variations of Mexican food pop up all over America, including the muchaco, a taco made with ground beef and pita bread at the Taco Bueno restaurant chain.

Hot Cocoa Comes from Mexico

Arellano observes that traditional desserts made with cocoa and vanilla to make chocolate and vanilla desserts, including hot cocoa, come from 1700s Mexico when the Virgin Mary statues in the cathedrals had offerings of various chocolate and vanilla desserts. This vanilla was cultivated to perfection and copied by the Europeans in Pico de Orizaba, a vanilla region in Veracruz, which is in eastern Mexico. 

As early as the 1500s, Spanish conquerors fell in love with Mexican foods made with corn or maize, which were made into various forms of masa cornmeal.

The Spaniards become obsessed with tortillas and tamales, the latter being a convenience food perfect for traveling with.

The Spanish invader Cortes demanded Mexican food in his court, and according to Arellano, this is the first documented case of cultural appropriation.

Moreover, the Spaniards introduced the Mexicans to wheat flour, which brought flour tortillas to the Mexican diet. 

This is our first known case of fusion. 

Chile Con Carne (soon to become Chili)

Arrellano observes that the first chili made with hot peppers and meat was around 1870 in the San Antonio region, not Texas, but pre-Texas: Tejas. 

Chile became so popular that by the 1880s, you could already find it advertised in Hawaii and Washington D.C. 

The world doesn’t understand how good Mexican food is. They take it for granted. This is one of Arellano’s main points.

Now Chile Con Carne is just “Chili.”

Tamalero

Tamales started to spread throughout America in the 1890s and were sold by European, Indian, and Arab immigrants who were often called “Mexicans.” These immigrants who sold the tamales on the streets were called Tamaleros, AKA “The Hot Tamale Man.”

They became part of American popular culture and folklore.

World Domination of the Taco in the 1950s

As big as tamales and chili were for about 70 years, they would be replaced by the world-dominating taco starting in the 1950s. 

Arellano contributes this growth to a place in Orange County called Irvine, the birth of Taco Bell, founded by Glen Bell. 

We now have many tacos including:

• The soft-shell taco
• The taco dorado (hard shell)
• The taquito (flautas)

Tacos have exploded all over the world, including Sweden, Japan, and South Africa. 

Birthplace of the American Taco and the Gateway Drug Argument

While Glen Bell popularized the taco, the birthplace of the American taco comes from downtown Los Angeles on Olvera Street, a tiny taco stand called Cielito Lindo, circa 1931. 

The second place is in San Bernardino, the Mitla Cafe, established in 1937. The restaurant served hard-shell tacos packed with beef and shredded cheese: taco dorado con carne molida.  

Glen Bell noticed the popularity of Mexican food among the white consumer base in the San Bernardino area, and he copied Mitla Cafe when he started various taco ventures before settling on Taco Bell. 

The owners of Mitla Cafe and Gustavo Arellano defend Taco Bell with its phony “Mexican food” because it’s the “gateway drug” to real Mexican food.

We can call this the Gateway Drug Argument for your essay. 

Challenges to Authenticity

In his book, Taco USA, Arellano tackles some challenges to the idea of authenticity in Mexican food:

• Since the 1980s, many white chefs have become Mexican food “experts,” writing cookbooks, opening Mexican restaurants, and having TV shows featuring Mexican food. 
• There was a type of food from New Mexico called “Southwestern Cuisine,” which could often be pretentious “gourmet” dishes with some loose connection to Mexican food. Other times, the food is very good, featuring local ingredients like hatch chilies. The enduring food from Southwestern Cuisine is the breakfast burrito. The craze started to die in the 1990s.
• Tex-Mex, a fusion that since the 1930s features fajitas and chili has been criticized as being inauthentic, “the lowest common denominator of Mexican food.” However, the actual term Tex-Mex wasn’t coined until the 1960s.

The Great Burrito Rivalry 

Gustavo Arellano adores the legendary Manuel’s Special at Manuel’s El Tepeyac Cafe in Boyle Heights. 

He compares the burrito to an encounter with God. The burrito is 5 pounds and filled with grilled chicken, carne asada, machaca, beans, rice, guacamole, and sour cream. 

The rival to Los Angeles for burritos is San Francisco, the Mission District, a place called “El Faro,” the Lighthouse. These are called Mission Style burritos. 

“Tracing the delicious history of San Francisco’s mission style burrito”

“Why are Restaurant Burritos Better Than Homemade?”

Holy Grail Mexican Food Destinations

• Arellano says his favorite burrito is the chile relleno burrito at Lucy’s Drive-In on Pico Blvd and La Brea in Los Angeles.
• His favorite tamales are at Pasquale’s Tamales, a trailer in Helena, Arkansa, owned by a third-generation Sicilian family. 
• His favorite lamb chicharrones are Angelina’s in Espanola, New Mexico. 
• He loves the Taco Acorazado (Battleship) at Alebrije’s Grill in Santa Ana, CA. He says the tortillas alone are a miracle. 

Not All Cultural Appropriation Is Alike: To Agree Or Not to Agree with Gustavo Arellano

The college students in my critical thinking class and I live in Los Angeles where some of the best food in the world is in our very backyards. I don’t want my students or me to take this for granted. I want us to do a deep dive into the Los Angeles food world, particularly Mexican food, the most popular cuisine in the world. So for our final essay assignment, we read Gustavo Arellano’s article “Let White People Appropriate Mexican Food--Mexicans Do It to Ourselves All the Time” and we write an essay that supports or refutes Arellano’s defense of cultural appropriation. 

Arellano defends cultural appropriation by explaining three things. One, that since the beginning of time restaurant owners have copied their competition; two, social justice warriors aren’t helping anyone when they patronize Mexicans by painting them as helpless victims when in fact Mexicans steal in the food industry just like everyone else; and three, what some might call appropriation or stealing can be in fact the healthy human impulse for cross-cultural pollination, evidenced by the fact that many of Mexico’s most famous regional dishes incorporate the food and ingredients from Spain, France, and the Middle East. 

Arellano’s argument forces us to question the very idea of authenticity. What is authenticity? In the context of Mexican food, authenticity is the traditions of regional Mexican cooking that bring labor-intensive cooking techniques, geographical richness, and time-tested rituals to produce some of the best food in the world. But authenticity is more than food. It is family and culture. I urge you to watch The Taco Chronicles on Netflix. When you see families in different parts of Mexico making carnitas, canasta, asada, pastor, barbacoa, guisado, suadero, cochinita, cabrito, birria, and pescado, you will find that the geography and family traditions make these dishes authentic. But just as importantly, these foods are so good that they are a miracle from God. Look at the love the community lavishes on the local taquero, the man selling tacos on the street corner. He is bringing love to the city, and he is appreciated for it. Look at the entire communities gathering together to make these authentic dishes and you will see that food is rooted in family and culture. What is most beautiful about this notion of authenticity is the expression of love for others by bringing them the food of the gods. There is a reason in Mexico why the taco is called madre. 

When we watch The Taco Chronicles, the sense of community combined with the making of the best food in the world wins our hearts and our stomachs. Any notion of violating this authenticity rightfully angers us and we are disinclined to agree with Arellano’s support of cultural appropriation. However, if you read Arellano’s book Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, you will get more context for Arellano’s defense of cultural appropriation. Arellano would never want us to violate the authentic regional traditions of Mexican cooking. Instead, he is arguing that the splendor of regional Mexican cooking spread to America by bringing food that is both desirable and affordable and that some, not all, of the magic of authentic Mexican cuisine became accessible to the American masses. Moreover, this Mexican food changed American culture for the better. Full-flavored Mexican food replaced the tasteless pablum of “American” food. Americans speak with their money and they spend so much money on Mexican food that they have made a statement that they want Mexican food in their culture. 

Is Gustavo Arellano defending all forms of cultural appropriation? Clearly not. If you read his articles and watch the Netflix series Ugly Delicious, “Tacos,” you will see that Arellano has contempt for “soulless” Mexican food, “Mexican” food chains that bastardize good-tasting Mexican food, food chains that disconnect the food they sell from the workers and from the Mexican culture; you will also see that Arellano has a healthy contempt for white-washed tourist food--phony overpriced Mexican food that has no spice and has been altered to appeal to the most infantile tastebuds. These counterfeit “Mexican” restaurants aren’t serving Mexican food at all. Rather, they are shamelessly serving overpriced tasteless codswallop. They are an abomination of Mexican food and the very idea of cross-cultural pollination. 

However, there are defensible iterations of cultural appropriation. Stealing recipes from Mexico and elsewhere and bringing affordable street food to America doesn’t hurt anyone and in fact brings the nectar of the gods to more people for affordable prices. Recipes are stolen all the time. Just don’t take aqua fresca and call it “spa water” on your Tiktok channel, as Gracie Norton did, which is a form of racial plagiarism. 

Some will argue that if some white ladies from Portland go to Mexico and steal taco recipes from grandmothers in Mexico City, those grandmothers are entitled to a cut of the action. But in reality, millions of recipes are stolen every day in the restaurant industry and any kind of compensation through accurate and detailed accounting is an impossibility. 

Another defense of Gustavo Arellano’s claim that cultural appropriation is a good thing can be found in Netflix’s Chef’s Table Pizza series. Specifically, there are two chefs, Chris Bianco and Ann Kim, who break the rules of tradition to show that there is a place for creativity and improvisation in making superior pizza that violates notions of tradition and authenticity. In fact, Italian pizza experts have visited Chris Bianco’s Pizzeria Bianco in Pheonix, Arizona, and have proclaimed that his pizza is superior to the traditional pizzas of Italy. In the case of Ann Kim, she puts kimchi on her pizza and serves Korean mung bean pancakes and her restaurant Pizzeria Lola is so famous that to meet demand, she opened three other restaurants: Hello Pizza, Young Joni, and Sook & Mimi. Incidentally, her most recent restaurant Sook & Mimi features handmade tortillas made in the tradition of Mexico. 

When we see successful restauranters such as Chris Bianco and Ann Kim make delicious food that is based on both authenticity and creativity, we see that making authentic food, or not, is not an either/or proposition. It is possible to do both. Again, this notion of combining authenticity with cultural cross-pollination supports Arellano’s defense of cultural appropriation.

Clearly, not all forms of cultural appropriation are alike. Some types are an abomination. Others are a celebration. The purpose of this assignment is to use our critical thinking skills to distinguish the good from the bad and to find nuance, shades of gray, and complexity. 

Just as the best tacos have a complexity of flavors, the best essays have a complexity of ideas.  

Authenticity Lecture #3

“Let White People Appropriate Mexican Food--Mexicans Do It to Ourselves All the Time” by Gustavo Arellano

My thoughts on cultural appropriation of food changed forever in the research for my 2012 book, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. One of my personal highlights was discovering the restaurant that Glenn Bell of Taco Bell infamy had cited in his autobiography as being the source of "inspiration" for him deciding to get into the taco business. How did he get inspired? He'd eat tacos at the restaurant every night, then go across the street to his hot dog stand to try and re-create them.

Bell freely admitted to the story, but never revealed the name of the restaurant. I did: Mitla Cafe in San Bernardino, which is the oldest continuously operating Mexican restaurant in the Inland Empire. I was excited to interview the owner, Irene Montaño, who confirmed Bell's story. I was upset for the Montaños, and when I asked Montaño how she felt that Bell had ripped off her family's recipes to create a multibillion-dollar empire, I expected bitterness, anger, maybe even plans for a lawsuit in an attempt to get at least some of the billions of dollars that Taco Bell has earned over the past 50-plus years.

Instead, Montaño responded with grace: "Good for him!" She pointed out that Mitla had never suffered a drop in business because of Taco Bell, that her restaurant had been in business longer than his and "our tacos were better."

It's an anecdote I always keep in mind whenever stories of cultural appropriation of food by white people get the Left riled up and rock the food world. The latest skirmish is going on in Portland, where two women decided to open up what Willamette Week called "a concept that fits twee Portland": a breakfast burrito pop-up located within a hipster taco cart. The grand sin the gabachas committed, according to the haters, was the admission that they quizzed women in Baja California about how to make the perfect flour tortilla.

For their enthusiasm, the women have received all sorts of shade and have closed down their pop-up. To which I say: laughable. The gabachas knew exactly what they were doing, so didn't they stand by it? Real gumption there, pendejas.

But also laughable is the idea that white people aren't supposed to—pick your word—rip off or appropriate or get "inspired" by Mexican food, that comida mexicana is a sacrosanct tradition only Mexicans and the white girls we marry can participate in. That cultural appropriation is a one-way street where the evil gabacha steals from the poor, pathetic Mexicans yet again.

As we say in Mexico: No se hagan.

What these culture warriors who proclaim to defend Mexicans don't realize is that we're talking about the food industry, one of the most rapacious businesses ever created. It's the human condition at its most Darwinian, where everyone rips everyone off. The only limit to an entrepreneur's chicanery isn't resources, race or class status, but how fast can you rip someone off, how smart you can be to spot trends years before anyone else, and how much money you can make before you have to rip off another idea again.

And no one rips off food like Mexicans.

The Mexican restaurant world is a delicious defense of cultural appropriation—that's what the culinary manifestation of mestizaje is, ain't it? The Spaniards didn't know how to make corn tortillas in the North, so they decided to make them from flour. Mexicans didn't care much for Spanish dessert breads, so we ripped off most pan dulces from the French (not to mention waltzes and mariachi). We didn't care much for wine, so we embraced the beers that German, Czech and Polish immigrants brought to Mexico. And what is al pastor if not Mexicans taking shawarma from the Lebanese, adding pork and making it something as quintessentially Mexican as a corrupt PRI?

Don't cry for ripped-off Mexican chefs—they're too busy ripping each other off. Another anecdote I remember from Taco USA: one of the lieutenants of El Torito founder Larry Cano telling me Larry would pay them to work at a restaurant for a month, learn the recipes, then come back to the mothership so they could replicate it. It ain't just chains, though: In the past year, I've seen dozens of restaurants and loncheras across Southern California offer the Zacatecan specialty birria de res, a dish that was almost exclusively limited to quinceañeras and weddings just three years ago. What changed? The popularity of Burritos La Palma, the Santa Ana lonchera-turned-restaurant. Paisa entrepreneurs quickly learned that Burritos La Palma was getting a chingo of publicity and customers, so they decided to make birria de res on their own to try and steal away customers even though nearly none of them are from Zacatecas.

Shameless? Absolutely.

And that's what cultural appropriation in the food world boils down to: It's smart business, and that's why Mexicans do it, too. That's why a lot of high-end Mexican restaurants not owned by Sinaloans serve aguachile now, because Carlos Salgado of Taco Maria made it popular. That's why working-class Mexicans open marisco palaces even if they're not from the coast—because Sinaloans made Mexican seafood a lucrative scene. That's why nearly every lonchera in Santa Ana serves picaditas, a Veracruzan specialty, even though most owners are from Cuernavaca. That's why a taqueria will sell hamburgers and french fries—because they know the pocho kids of its core clients want to eat that instead of tacos. And that's why bacon-wrapped hot dogs are so popular in Southern California—because SoCal Mexican street-cart vendors ripped off Mexicans in Tijuana, who ripped off Mexicans in Tucson, who ripped off Mexicans in Sonora.

To suggest—as SJWs always do—that Mexicans and other minority entrepreneurs can't possibly engage in cultural appropriation because they're people of color, and that we're always the victims, is ignorant and patronizing and robs us of agency. We're no one's victims, and who says we can't beat the wasichu at their game? And who says Mexicans are somehow left in the poorhouse by white people getting rich off Mexican food? Go ask the Montaños of Mitla how they're doing. Last year, they reopened a long-shuttered banquet hall, and the next generation is introducing new meals and craft beers.

They cried about Bell's appropriation of their tacos all the way to the history books.

This story originally appeared in OC Weekly.

Your Essay Assignment:

Do you agree or disagree with Arellano's defense of cultural appropriation?

Summary of the Essay's Main Arguments

• We are all rapacious creatures whose drive for success makes us to some degree cutthroat and ruthless. The more ruthlessly we steal a recipe the more we affirm the greatness of that recipe. Mediocre food isn't stolen. Only great food is. The theft of Mexican recipes is a tribute to its greatness. 
• "Stealing" is actually the natural human inclination for cross-cultural pollination. Such pollination enriches culture and in many cases actually changes culture for the better.
• To treat Mexicans as helpless victims whose delicacies are being stolen is to patronize them and to "rob them of human agency" (free will). In fact, Mexicans have been "stealing," or rather cross-pollinating, for thousands of years. Their history is rife with taking foods from other cultures such as Spain, France, and the Middle East, and making these foods their own. 
• From the Netflix series Ugly Delicious, "Tacos" episode, we find that respectful inspiration from the original dish is an acceptable form of cultural appropriation. 

Some Caveats, Stipulations, or Conditions We Can Use from Ugly Delicious, "Tacos":

• Taking shortcuts is an abomination and degrades the original version of the food such as tortillas.
• Offering stereotypes of Mexican food is an abomination and shows ignorance of the depth of ingredients and creativity from the treasures of Mexican cooking. Don't play "Jingle Bells" on the piano when you should be playing Beethoven's 9th Symphony. 
• Making tourist food or white-washing food to make it bland for mass appeal will make you money but it is an abomination of authentic Mexican food. 
• Taking agua fresca and rebranding it as "spa water" is a form of racial plagiarism so egregious that I doubt Gustavo Arellano would defend such an act of shamelessness and arrogance. 

 

What are the two opposing sides of this argument?

The Great Debate: Innovation Vs. Tradition:

On one side, Gustavo Arellano’s side, is the argument that great food evolves through stealing and that stealing is a sign of the food’s greatness. Another side of food greatness is constant evolution and constant innovation. People are open to experimenting with foods and not tied to traditions and absolutes. Mexican food, moreover, is not a monolith. There is diversity based on regions and innovations, so there is no such thing as One Kind of Mexican Food, no One Burrito, No One Taco, etc. 

On the other side, the Cult of Authenticity, is the belief that food should be unchanged. Food is iconic and rooted in tradition and attempts at changing the food is equivalent to “blasphemy.” Also, when the food is taken and changed it accounts to the loathsome act of cultural appropriation.  Which side are you on?

Use the Toulmin Argument Model with a Counterargument-Rebuttal Section

From a design and structure standpoint, you are learning to write an argumentative essay in the tradition of the Toulmin Model, named after philosopher Stephen Toulmin. In the Toulmin Model, you address your opponents’ views in a counterargument-rebuttal section. 

Sentence Fragments 

Sentence fragments are incomplete thoughts presented as dependent clauses or phrases.

A dependent clause or a phrase is never a complete sentence.

Types of dependent clauses:

Whenever I drive up windy mountains,

Because I have craved pizza for 14 months,

Unless you add coffee to your chocolate cake recipe,

,which is currently enjoying a resurgence. 

 

Phrases

Enamored by the music of Tupac Shakur,

Craving pesto linguine with olive-oil based clam sauce, 

Flexing his muscles with a braggadocio never seen in modern times,

Lying under the bridge and eating garlic pepper pretzels with a dollop of cream cheese and a jug of chilled apple cider, 

To understand the notion of Universal Basic Income and all of its related factors for social change in this disruptive age, 

Running into crowded restaurants with garlic and whiskey fuming out of his sweaty pores while brandishing a golden scepter, 

 

Examples

I won't entertain your requests for more money and gifts. Until you show at least a modicum of responsibility at school and with your friends. 

I won't consider buying the new BMW sports coupe. Unless of course my uncle gives me that inheritance he keeps talking about whenever he gets a bit tipsy. 

I can't imagine ever going to Chuck E. Cheese. Which makes me feel like I'm emotionally arrested. 

I am considering the purchase of a new wardrobe. That is, if I'm picked for that job interview at Nordstrom. 

Human morals have vanished. To the point at which it was decided that market values would triumph. 

No subject 

Marie Antoinette spent huge sums of money on herself and her favorites. And helped to bring on the French Revolution.

No complete verb

The aluminum boat sitting on its trailer.

Beginning with a subordinating word

We returned to the drugstore. Where we waited for our buddies.

A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a complete sentence. Reading your draft out loud, backwards, sentence by sentence, will help you spot sentence fragments.

Sentence Fragment Exercises  

After each sentence, write C for complete or F for fragment sentence. If the sentence is a fragment, correct it so that it is a complete sentence. 

One. While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her. 

Two.  In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance.

Three. My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market. 

Four. Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto.  

Five. Winding quickly but safely up the treacherous Palos Verdes hills in the shrouded mist of a lazy June morning, I realized that my BMW gave me feelings of completeness and fulfillment.   

Six. To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming. 

Seven. The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar. 

Eight. When my cravings for pesto pizza, babaganoush, and triple chocolate cake overcome me during my bouts of acute anxiety. 

Nine. Inclined to stop watching sports in the face of my girlfriend’s insistence that I pay more attention to her, I am throwing away my TV. 

Ten. At the dance club where I espy my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel. 

Eleven. The BMW speeding ahead of me and winding into the misty hills. 

Twelve. Before you convert to the religion of veganism in order to impress your vegan girlfriend. 

Thirteen. Summoning all my strength to resist the giant chocolate fudge cake sweating on the plate before me. 

Identify the Fragments Below

Identify the Fragments Below

I drank the chalky Soylent meal-replacement drink. Expecting to feel full and satisfied. Only to find that I was still ravenously hungry afterwards. Trying to sate my hunger pangs. I went to HomeTown Buffet. Where I ate several platters of braised oxtail and barbecued short ribs smothered in a honey vinegar sauce. Which reminded me of a sauce where I used to buy groceries from. When I was a kid.

Feeling bloated after my HomeTown Buffet indulgence. I exited the restaurant. After which I hailed an Uber and asked the driver for a night club recommendation. So I could dance off all my calories. The driver recommended a place, Anxiety Wires. I had never heard of it. Though, it was crowded inside. I felt eager to dance and confident about “my swag.” Although, I was still feeling bloated. Wondering if my intestines were on the verge of exploding.

Sweating under the night club’s outdoor canopy. I smelled the cloying gasses of a nearby vape. A serpentine woman was holding the vape. A gold contraption emitting rose-water vapors into my direction. Contemplating my gluttony. I was suddenly feeling low confidence. Though I pushed myself to introduce myself to the vape-smoking stranger with the serpentine features. Her eyes locked on mine.

I decided to play it cool. Instead of overwhelming her with a loud, brash manner. Which she might interpret as neediness on my part.

Keeping a portable fan in my cargo pocket for emergencies. When I feel like I’m overheating. I took the fan out of my pocket, turned it on, and directed it toward the serpentine stranger. Making it so the vapors were blowing back in her face.

“Doesn’t smell so good, does it?” I said. With a sarcastic grin.

She cackled, then said, “Thank you for blowing the vapors in my face. Now I can both enjoy inhaling them and breathing them in. For double the pleasure. You are quite a find. Come home with me and I’ll introduce you to my mother Gertrude and her pitbull Jackson. I’m sure they’ll welcome you into our home. Considering what a well-fed handsome man you are.”

“Thank you for the compliment,” I said. “I would love to meet your mother Gertrude and your mother’s pitbull Jackson. Only one problem. My breath smells like a rotting dead dragon. Right after eating spicy ribs. Which reminds me? Do you have any breath mints?”

“I don’t believe in carrying breath mints. On account of the rose-water vape. That cleanses my palate. Making my breath rosy fresh.”

“Wow. Your constant good breath counteracts my intractable bad breath. Making us a match in heaven.”

“I agree. Totally. You really need to meet my mother. Because she’ll bless us and make our marriage official. Since we really need her blessing. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Now let me smell your breath. So I can identify the hot sauce.”

“Why must you do that?”

“So I can use the same hot sauce on our wedding cake, silly. To celebrate the first night we met. Capisce?”

“Capisce.”

She approached me. Affording me a view of her long, tired face. Covered in scales. Reptilian. Evocative of something primitive. Something precious and indelible from my childhood lost long ago. I wanted to run from her, but I could not. Some mysterious force drew me to her, and we inched closer and closer toward one another. Succumbing to a power neither of us could fathom. 

 

Comma Splice Review

Identify the Comma Splices Below:

It’s not a question of will there be chaos or will there be destruction, it’s a question of how much?

MySpace was disruptive in its time, however, it’s a dated platform and to simply mention it is to make people laugh with a certain derision surely it’s a platform that has seen its time, another example is the meal replacement Soylent, its creator made a drink that says, “You’re too busy to eat,” so drinking this pancake batter-like concoction gives tech people street. I may laugh at its stupidity, instead I should admire it since the product has made millions for its creator. It’s proven to be somewhat disruptive.

To be sure, though, Facebook redefines the word disruptive, it has rapidly accrued over 3 billion users and will soon have half the planet plugged into its site, that is the apotheosis of a greedy person’s fantasy, imagine controlling half the planet on a platform that mines private information and targets ads toward specific personality profiles.  

One of the scary disruptions of Facebook is that billions of people have lost their personal agency, what that means that people have unknowingly been manipulated by Facebook’s puppeteers to the point that many Facebook users suffer from social media addiction, moreover, these same users prefer the fake life they curate on social media to the real life they once had, in fact, their previous real life is just a puff of smoke that has faded into the distance, many people no longer even know what it means to be “real” anymore, having lost their agency, having succumbed to their Facebook addiction, they have become zombies waiting for their next rush of social media-fueled dopamine, what a sad state of affairs.

Cultural Pollination:

Grandmother's food to father's business to son's business

Authenticity Lecture #2

Your Job as a Restaurant Owner

Your job as a restaurant owner is to make food that has the Wow Factor. You will experiment, innovate, and rely on time-tested traditional recipes, some “authentic” and some that are modifications, but regardless of what you do, you must make food that has the Wow Factor, that captures people’s hearts, that hijacks people’s brains, and that makes people addicted to your food. That is your job.

Not All Stealing Is the Same

Not all stealing in the restaurant industry is the same. If John quits the very successful Restaurant Y and gets a new job at the less successful Restaurant Z that Y uses cumin and ghost chilies in their enchilada sauce, then the owner of Z is going to “steal” the recipe. This type of “stealing” happens all the time. But let us not equate this type of stealing with a white lady named Gracie Norton taking aqua fresca and promoting it as her own “spa water.” 

That is racial plagiarism, and it morally repulsive and morally indefensible. 

When Cultural Appropriation Results in Bland Food

Oftentimes a white restaurant owner takes ethnic cuisine and calculates that since his largely white customer base wants ethnic but doesn’t really want ethnic. These white customers want the excitement of saying, “Guys, we’re going to an ethnic restaurant,” but they don’t really want the true ethnic food experience. They want some watered-down crap that they call ethnic but in reality is the same tasteless pablum that defines their infantile tastebuds. 

This type of cultural appropriation incurs my loathing and abject contempt, but I don’t protest. I merely speak with my dollars. You will never see me a hundred feet from a phony ethnic cuisine restaurant. 

This is perhaps my biggest critique of Gustavo Arellano’s argument. Most of his argument I agree with, but object to his failure to address the white-washing of ethnic food and turning it into tasteless, insipid baby food. 

 

 

Review of Gustavo Arellano’s Arguments Against the Cult of Authenticity

(Pro Tip: The following arguments would make an excellent body paragraph outline for Essay 4) 

1. In spite of some phony white chefs who wrongly anoint themselves as ambassadors of Mexican food, mainstreaming Mexican food is on balance a good because it exposes more people to the greatness of Mexican food and encourages cultural respect and cultural celebration of Mexican contributions. 
2. Much of the purity cult behind the notion of authenticity is from whites on the Left and Right who don’t understand Mexican food or the Mexican people. 
3. Letting social justice warriors dictate what is authentic can lead to food totalitarianism and absurdly narrow, reductionist definitions of authenticity.
4. The lines are blurred between innovation, cross-cultural synergy, and cultural appropriation, which has occurred since the beginning of time and is an inevitable part of how food evolves into amazing dishes. 
5. It’s absurd to reject Tex-Mex or Cal-Mex food when we consider that these fusions are about embracing the greatness of Mexican cuisine and that no food is good or bad per se; rather, how a chef executes the dish determines whether it’s good or not. It’s all about execution. A bad taco could put you in a bad mood for a week. An exceptional taco could “change your life” and inject your brain’s amygdala with euphoric endorphins. 

Counterarguments that challenge Gustavo Arellano’s claim that we should reject the Cult of Authenticity

1. Plagiarism Argument: When we steal intellectual or creative property, there should be consequences. We call this type of stealing plagiarism. Students who commit plagiarism get into big trouble. Shouldn’t cooks who steal creatively and in effect commit culinary plagiarism be subject to some kind of penalties? Should not these chefs who engage in stealing or cultural appropriation at the very least be required to ascribe credit to their sources? Should not these chefs who commit acts of culinary plagiarism at least be required to give a portion of their profits to the areas they stole from? 
2. Moral Argument: Cultural appropriation, the kind where privileged people go to a small town in the United States, Mexico or Latin America and then steal recipes and cooking methods, offends our common sense of morality, fairness, honesty, and justice. When Gustavo Arellano says, “Everybody steals,” and that’s just the “Darwinian” way in the hyper-competitive restaurant industry, could we not accuse Arellano of using a “two rights make a wrong fallacy”? This fallacy is commonly referred to as argumentum ad populum or appeal to the majority fallacy. In other words, just because the majority engage in immoral behavior doesn't make that behavior right. 
3. Quality Control or “Wannabes” Argument: Sure, Gustavo Arellano points out all these great examples of cultural appropriation, but those examples don’t diminish the exponential growth of phony Mexican restaurants that serve the crassest, disgusting, abominable “Mexican food” imaginable. Violating the Cult of Authenticity comes with a steep price: A bunch of wannabes steal some recipes and think they know how to make Mexican food when in fact what they are serving is an insult to Mexican food and to Mexican culture. 
4. Grandmother argument: A student told me he had some very mediocre Molcajete at an expensive Mexican restaurant. He told me, “When I visit my grandmother in Guatemala, she makes me Molcajete that blows all the other ones away. I can’t get excited paying premium dollar for a bunch of sad food that goes under the name of ‘Mexican food.’” What this student is saying essentially is that the tradition, experience, and love his grandmother puts in her homemade Molcajete cannot be compared to the vastly inferior substitutes. Grandmother’s cooking, in other words, is an argument for authenticity.  

Two Weaknesses in Gustavo Arellano's Argument

One. Arellano doesn't address food plagiarism. For example, it is indefensible to take the original food, give it a new name, and claim it as yours as in the notorious case of Gracie Norton who promotes "her spa water" when in fact the water is aqua fresca. 

Two. Arellano doesn't address the white-washing effect: taking delicious meals and watering them down into soulless bland plates that insult the original dish. 

 

What are the two opposing sides of this argument?

The Great Debate: Innovation Vs. Tradition:

On one side, Gustavo Arellano’s side, is the argument that great food evolves through stealing and that stealing is a sign of the food’s greatness. Another side of food greatness is constant evolution and constant innovation. People are open to experimenting with foods and not tied to traditions and absolutes. Mexican food, moreover, is not a monolith. There is diversity based on regions and innovations, so there is no such thing as One Kind of Mexican Food, no One Burrito, No One Taco, etc. 

On the other side, the Cult of Authenticity, is the belief that food should be unchanged. Food is iconic and rooted in tradition and attempts at changing the food is equivalent to “blasphemy.” Also, when the food is taken and changed it accounts to the loathsome act of cultural appropriation.  Which side are you on?

Use the Toulmin Argument Model with a Counterargument-Rebuttal Section

From a design and structure standpoint, you are learning to write an argumentative essay in the tradition of the Toulmin Model, named after philosopher Stephen Toulmin. In the Toulmin Model, you address your opponents’ views in a counterargument-rebuttal section. 

Using Counterargument-Rebuttal Makes Your Arguments More Persuasive:

For an argumentative essay, providing compelling support paragraphs to make your claim or thesis persuasive is not enough. You also need a counterargument-rebuttal section. 

To earn credibility in an argument, good writers anticipate how opponents will disagree with their claim, so they actually provide an anticipated disagreement with their own thesis. Often they will write this counterargument-rebuttal section after their supporting paragraphs (and before their conclusion). 

To write an effective counterargument-rebuttal, good writers use a variety of sentence structures:

• Some people may object to my point X, but they fail to see Y.
• Some people will take issue with my argument X, and I will concede their point to some degree. However, on balance, my argument X still stands because______________________________.  
• It is true as my opponents say that my argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that Y, but I would counter argue by observing that ___________________. 
• I would be the first to agree with my opponents that my argument can lead to some dangerous conclusions such as X. But we can neutralize these misgivings when we consider __________________________. 

For Review:

For an argumentative essay, providing compelling support paragraphs to make your claim or thesis persuasive is not enough. You also need a counterargument-rebuttal section. 

To earn credibility in an argument, good writers anticipate how opponents will disagree with their claim, so they actually provide an anticipated disagreement with their own thesis. Often they will write this counterargument-rebuttal section after their supporting paragraphs (and before their conclusion). 

To write an effective counterargument-rebuttal, good writers use a variety of sentence structures:

• Some people may object to my point X, but they fail to see Y.
• Some people will take issue with my argument X, and I will concede their point to some degree. However, on balance, my argument X still stands because______________________________.  
• It is true as my opponents say that my argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that Y, but I would counter argue by observing that ___________________. 
• I would be the first to agree with my opponents that my argument can lead to some dangerous conclusions such as X. But we can neutralize these misgivings when we consider __________________________. 

Study the Templates for Counterargument-Rebuttal Section of the Essay 

• While the author’s arguments for meaning are convincing, she fails to consider . . . 
• While the authors make convincing arguments, they must also consider . . . 
• These arguments, rather than being convincing, instead prove . . . 
• While these authors agree with Writer A on point X, in my opinion . . . 
• Although it is often true that . . . 
• While I concede that my opponents make a compelling case for point X, their main argument collapses underneath a barrage of . . . 
• While I see many good points in my opponent’s essay, I am underwhelmed by his . . . 
• While my opponent makes some cogent points regarding A, B, and C, his overall argument fails to convince us when we consider X, Y, and Z. 
• My opponent makes many provocative and intriguing points. However, his arguments must be dismissed as fallacious when we take into account W, X, Y, and Z. 
• While the author’s points first appear glib and fatuous, a closer look at his polemic reveals a convincing argument that . . .

 

“Let White People Appropriate Mexican Food--Mexicans Do It to Ourselves All the Time” by Gustavo Arellano

My thoughts on cultural appropriation of food changed forever in the research for my 2012 book, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. One of my personal highlights was discovering the restaurant that Glenn Bell of Taco Bell infamy had cited in his autobiography as being the source of "inspiration" for him deciding to get into the taco business. How did he get inspired? He'd eat tacos at the restaurant every night, then go across the street to his hot dog stand to try and re-create them.

Bell freely admitted to the story, but never revealed the name of the restaurant. I did: Mitla Cafe in San Bernardino, which is the oldest continuously operating Mexican restaurant in the Inland Empire. I was excited to interview the owner, Irene Montaño, who confirmed Bell's story. I was upset for the Montaños, and when I asked Montaño how she felt that Bell had ripped off her family's recipes to create a multibillion-dollar empire, I expected bitterness, anger, maybe even plans for a lawsuit in an attempt to get at least some of the billions of dollars that Taco Bell has earned over the past 50-plus years.

Instead, Montaño responded with grace: "Good for him!" She pointed out that Mitla had never suffered a drop in business because of Taco Bell, that her restaurant had been in business longer than his and "our tacos were better."

It's an anecdote I always keep in mind whenever stories of cultural appropriation of food by white people get the Left riled up and rock the food world. The latest skirmish is going on in Portland, where two women decided to open up what Willamette Week called "a concept that fits twee Portland": a breakfast burrito pop-up located within a hipster taco cart. The grand sin the gabachas committed, according to the haters, was the admission that they quizzed women in Baja California about how to make the perfect flour tortilla.

For their enthusiasm, the women have received all sorts of shade and have closed down their pop-up. To which I say: laughable. The gabachas knew exactly what they were doing, so didn't they stand by it? Real gumption there, pendejas.

But also laughable is the idea that white people aren't supposed to—pick your word—rip off or appropriate or get "inspired" by Mexican food, that comida mexicana is a sacrosanct tradition only Mexicans and the white girls we marry can participate in. That cultural appropriation is a one-way street where the evil gabacha steals from the poor, pathetic Mexicans yet again.

As we say in Mexico: No se hagan.

What these culture warriors who proclaim to defend Mexicans don't realize is that we're talking about the food industry, one of the most rapacious businesses ever created. It's the human condition at its most Darwinian, where everyone rips everyone off. The only limit to an entrepreneur's chicanery isn't resources, race or class status, but how fast can you rip someone off, how smart you can be to spot trends years before anyone else, and how much money you can make before you have to rip off another idea again.

And no one rips off food like Mexicans.

The Mexican restaurant world is a delicious defense of cultural appropriation—that's what the culinary manifestation of mestizaje is, ain't it? The Spaniards didn't know how to make corn tortillas in the North, so they decided to make them from flour. Mexicans didn't care much for Spanish dessert breads, so we ripped off most pan dulces from the French (not to mention waltzes and mariachi). We didn't care much for wine, so we embraced the beers that German, Czech and Polish immigrants brought to Mexico. And what is al pastor if not Mexicans taking shawarma from the Lebanese, adding pork and making it something as quintessentially Mexican as a corrupt PRI?

Don't cry for ripped-off Mexican chefs—they're too busy ripping each other off. Another anecdote I remember from Taco USA: one of the lieutenants of El Torito founder Larry Cano telling me Larry would pay them to work at a restaurant for a month, learn the recipes, then come back to the mothership so they could replicate it. It ain't just chains, though: In the past year, I've seen dozens of restaurants and loncheras across Southern California offer the Zacatecan specialty birria de res, a dish that was almost exclusively limited to quinceañeras and weddings just three years ago. What changed? The popularity of Burritos La Palma, the Santa Ana lonchera-turned-restaurant. Paisa entrepreneurs quickly learned that Burritos La Palma was getting a chingo of publicity and customers, so they decided to make birria de res on their own to try and steal away customers even though nearly none of them are from Zacatecas.

Shameless? Absolutely.

And that's what cultural appropriation in the food world boils down to: It's smart business, and that's why Mexicans do it, too. That's why a lot of high-end Mexican restaurants not owned by Sinaloans serve aguachile now, because Carlos Salgado of Taco Maria made it popular. That's why working-class Mexicans open marisco palaces even if they're not from the coast—because Sinaloans made Mexican seafood a lucrative scene. That's why nearly every lonchera in Santa Ana serves picaditas, a Veracruzan specialty, even though most owners are from Cuernavaca. That's why a taqueria will sell hamburgers and french fries—because they know the pocho kids of its core clients want to eat that instead of tacos. And that's why bacon-wrapped hot dogs are so popular in Southern California—because SoCal Mexican street-cart vendors ripped off Mexicans in Tijuana, who ripped off Mexicans in Tucson, who ripped off Mexicans in Sonora.

To suggest—as SJWs always do—that Mexicans and other minority entrepreneurs can't possibly engage in cultural appropriation because they're people of color, and that we're always the victims, is ignorant and patronizing and robs us of agency. We're no one's victims, and who says we can't beat the wasichu at their game? And who says Mexicans are somehow left in the poorhouse by white people getting rich off Mexican food? Go ask the Montaños of Mitla how they're doing. Last year, they reopened a long-shuttered banquet hall, and the next generation is introducing new meals and craft beers.

They cried about Bell's appropriation of their tacos all the way to the history books.

This story originally appeared in OC Weekly.