My first AWA attempt - please can you provide feedback Thanks :-)

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.”

The argument states that people in general are not as concerned now as they were ten years ago about their intake of red meat and fatty cheeses. The argument is deeply flawed as the author fails to cite specific reasons upon which the conclusion can logically be drawn. Instead the author relies on very weak observations which hardly imply the conclusion let alone directly lead to it.

Firstly, the author uses the popularity of vegetarian restaurant against that of a meat restaurant in a particular street. As the author does not state what the set of the population is that he/she is referring to, the fact that he/she then goes on to discuss specific restaurants in a specific town/village is not appropriate. In order for the argument to be more believable, the evidence must relate to the same group of ‘people’. In this instance, that group is too general – is it a country population or a state-wide population or is it an article for a village magazine and therefore relating only to the population in the village? To then cite examples of restaurants in a street is insufficient (although would be more sufficient if indeed the ‘people’ the article is referring to is in fact the people who frequent that street, i.e. the villagers). Alternatively if the population that frequent those restaurants is considered representative of a wider population then it would also have more merit. Since neither of these are explicitly stated, this evidence is interesting at best and certainly doesn’t help to support the conclusion.

Second, the author states that the owners of the vegetarian restaurant continues to make a ‘modest living’ whilst the owners of the Beef restaurant are millionaires. By using this language, the author implies that the success/popularity of the beef restaurant has grown whilst the popularity of the vegetarian restaurant has dwindled. In fact, it could be that the vegetarian restaurant has grown its patronage over the last decade in order to sustain a modest income for the owners, as the economic climate worsened. In that instance one could actually argue that the continued popularity of the restaurant indicated people’s preference for vegetarian food over red meat. In the same vein, the meat restaurant may be making millions now, but that may be because it is wildly over-priced, or perhaps it only opened last year, or perhaps it is so well known for its special recipe that people come from far and wide to taste their meat. Again, there is no reference to how a similar restaurant fared ten years ago.

Overall, this argument is subject to serious criticism, some of which is discussed above. If the author could go some way to be more specific about the population he/she is referring to and introduce some data from ten years ago to compare to today then he/she would go some way to strengthen this argument. As it stands, it reads like three independent sentences, far from a cogent argument one would expect from a conscientious magazine journalist.