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Over the past couple of years I’ve found myself having heated discussions with people online about food and the politics of food, and invariably the biggest douchebags quote Michael Pollan, usually as their sole point of reference.

I’ve been writing about the politics of food since before Michael Pollan started, so I’ve paid attention to his increasingly quackish claims, and even read one of his stupid fucking books (In Defense of Food; I couldn’t stomach another). I’m not a fan, to be frank. But criticism of Michael Pollan leads to invariably aggressive attacks from his fans/followers, with an intensity that is nothing short of religious fervour.

Which makes me wonder: what is it that makes Michael Pollan’s most ardent fans such total douchebags?

I’ve thought about it, and I have a couple of ideas. The first reason, I suspect, is that most Michael Pollan fans have almost no pre-existing knowledge of the subjects that he makes pronouncements about. I suspect that few of them have any scientific training, or first-hand familiarity with food production methods. Many of them have probably never seen a feed animal up close, let alone slaughtered one. Mostly, their knowledge of nutrition will have come from two main sources: advertising and, since his audience is predominantly middle-class, the lifestyle sections of newspapers, neither of which provide a terribly useful or reliable framework for understanding a very complex subject.

Without any sort of structured understanding of the issues, one relies on feelings or hunches about things; prejudice, in other words. And that’s where Michael Pollan is a viking. There is nothing in his work that challenges any of the prejudices or values that you could expect your average white, middle-class urban dweller to already be convinced are self-evident truths.

Very few of his claims stand up to any sort of rigorous inspection, claims that we are all getting sicker, that the great unwashed masses make poor food choices, and so on. But to a person who instinctively believes these things to be true, to whom these claims ‘feel’ right, having them reinforced by reading them in print bolsters what is, essentially, bigotry.

My partner writes about issues of faith from a sympathetic but outside perspective. While now a firm atheist, she was brought up in missionary communities, wrote a book about English missionaries in the Gobi, and has a pretty firm understanding of the mentality of evangelicals.

Many evangelicals feel confused that non-believers are not convinced by quotations from the Bible. They find it very hard to put themselves in the shoes of someone who doesn’t accept that the Bible is the final arbiter of all things, the written word of God. Pollanites are hardly different. There’s the same failure to accept that, perhaps, there’s a whole world of different, often conflicting, research and conclusions and opinions. But, since the word of Pollan is the only authority they are at all familiar with, most discussions end up as little more than a series of increasingly louder repetitions of the same paraphrased arguments. In other words, it’s like trying to make sense to an angry parrot.

But perhaps the worst bit of intellectual charlatanry is the way that Pollan denies authority. Now, as someone with a background in the hard sciences, I understand that you should never accept an argument from authority. But dismissing authority is a different matter altogether. He writes:

So on whose authority do I purport to speak? I speak mainly on the authority of tradition and common sense. Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know, or once did until we allowed the nutrition experts and the advertisers to shake our confidence in common sense, tradition, the testimony of our senses, and the wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers.

The authority of tradition and common sense or, in other words, mindless conformity and prejudice. He both dismisses all others as false prophets and sets up the readers themselves as ‘authorities’ with no need for further qualifications: they already know everything there is to know, and all else is lies and trickery. This, I think, is the real reason why Pollanites are douchebags.