"In general, people are not as concerned as they were a decade ago abo

Question:

The following appeared in a magazine article on trends and lifestyles.

"In general, people are not as concerned as they were a decade ago about regulating their intake of red meat and fatty cheeses. Walk into the Heart's Delight, a store that started selling organic fruits and vegetables and whole-grain flours in the 1960's, and you will also find a wide selection of cheeses made with high butterfat content. Next door, the owners of the Good Earth Café, an old vegetarian restaurant, are still making a modest living, but the owners of the new House of Beef across the street are millionaires."

Answer:

The article is trying to convince the audience that people not as concerned about their red meat and fatty cheese intake as they were a decade ago by mentioning the fatty cheese variety offered by an organic supermarket and comparing the net worth or amount of money the owners of a vegetarian restaurant and the owners of a place called House of Beef make. This argument has a number of flaws in its reasoning. We are not told about how big the cheese section in the Heart’s Delight store is, neither is there mention about how that section has decreased. We are also not told anything about how the owners of House of Beef made their money nor what their place of business is and we are left to infer without information about these things.

First, we are told that Heart’s Delight offers a wide variety of high-fat cheeses but we don’t know big the cheese section is or how it has changed over the years. It is possible that they only have a small offering that has been getting smaller since demand has dropped as health concerns have increased. We could evaluate the article’s argument better if we knew when the store started offering high-fat cheeses, how big their cheese area is rather than how varied it is, and how that size has changed throughout the years.

Second, we get a comparison between the money the Good Earth Cafe owner’s make and the money the owner’s of House of Beef have. This is not an apples to apples comparison since we don’t really know if the money the House of Beef people have is due to their business growing or from other factors. It is possible that the House of Beef owners were already millionaires before opening the business and that Good Earth’s Cafe’s revenue has actually increased significantly throughout the last decade. We would need a lot more information to assess if this is an apt comparison. We could better evaluate the argument by asking where the majority of each owner’s income and net worth comes from, how the revenue of their respective establishments have changed over time, and what type of business each of their stores are.

Third, the article argues that since there are businesses that offer red meat and fatty cheeses and that some of those businesses seem to be booming that it means that people are not as concerned about their consumption of these items as before. This is a huge leap of logic since we know nothing else about the specific areas these businesses are located and we have no info about general consumption trends of red meat and fatty cheese of a population or of a sample that might be representative of the general population. It is entirely possible that these businesses are located in an area where its residents consume large amounts of beef and cheese but the the consumption of these items around the world is trending downward still. We would need to know more information about similar businesses in a wide range of areas in order to better assess if the observation has any merit.

In conclusion, the article makes an observation that might look logical at a glance but is clearly flawed under scrutiny since it leaves most of the information to be inferred by the audience. It is not necessarily true that concern about consumption of red meat and fatty cheese is lower now than it was a decade ago simply by noticing that a particular store offers cheese or that a vegetarian cafe in a certain area has owners that have less money than the owners of another establishment that sells meat in the same area. We would need more information about, not only these businesses, but other businesses like them around the world as well as general trends of consumption rather than factors such as the ones mentioned in the article. Until we know more about these points the argument’s conclusion is based on assumption and not fact.