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I trust Pollan when I feel like I am able to draw my own conclusions about the information he provides. Most of the time, I feel that Pollan does not argue in favor of a particular answer to the questions he poses (this may be because I have not read the whole book-- I wonder if by the end he develops a comprehensive eating theory?), and so I feel that Pollan allows me to do my own thinking about the issues he presents. Of course, I have pretty much no background knowledge about corn's mating habits or the workings of the organic food industry, so the decisions Pollan makes behind the scenes about what information to present and how to present it are difficult for me to recognize or judge. In this area, I have been trusting Pollan to make fair and truthful decisions for reasons that are probably not entirely sound-- he cites sources, he sounds impartial, he seems to come at environmental issues from a similar angle to mine, etc.

As I read the chapter on vegetarianism, a subject which I actually know something about (or, at least, more than I do about corn biology), I was much more conscious of a bias present in Pollan's writing. Since this was the first chapter in which he expressed views directly contrary to ones I hold, I'm wondering now how much bias was present in the earlier chapters that I didn't notice because I felt the same way-- and/or whether I percieved his bias as much larger/more significant because I disagreed with it. In this chapter, though, since I was familiar with Pollan's subject matter, I still felt able to draw my own conclusions from the data he presented when I combined it with my own thoughts, so I still more or less trusted Pollan's words. That is, I understood them to be a valid and valuable analysis that I take in and do with what I wanted.