Hi team,
Could you please have a review of my answer for this question
. Thanks in advance for the help!
Prompt:
“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 argument claims that people are not as concerned about regulating their intake of red meat and fatty cheeses as they were 10 years ago. Stated in this way, the argument manipulates facts and conveys a distorted view of the situation, and reveals examples of poor reasoning. The conclusion of the argument relies on assumptions for which there is no clear evidence. Hence the argument is unconvincing and contains several flaws.
Firstly the argument puts forward as evidence the fact that Heart's delight (an organic store) sells a wide selection of cheeses made with a high butterfat content. This does not provide any support to the argument's main claim as no data is provided in changing trends of the amount of cheese turnover of the last decade from this establishment. Just because the fatty cheeses are available for purchase at a health store provides no indication of whether this is as the result of a trend from consumers choosing to consume a higher amount of the product. The argument could have been much clearer if it explicitly stated that Heart's Delight had only started selling these fatty cheeses for the first time in their history in the last decade as a result of changing consumer preferences.
Second, the argument claims validity to its main statement by demonstrating that the owners of the new House of Beef are millionares whereas the owners of Good Earth Cafe are merely making a modest living. This is again a very weak and unsupported claim as the argument does not demonstrate any correlation between the change in consumer habits and income of the two stores. For example, just because Good Earth Cafe is vegetarian, it could still have fatty cheeses on its menu. What is the quality of the food at this cafe? what is its business model? without answers to these questions it is unfair to put this example forward as evidence. The argument also claims that the owners of the House of Beef are millionares resulting from the change in trend of consumers. We are not giving any background on this. Were the owners already millionares prior to purchasing this facility? We are also not told what House of Beef actually is. Is it a butchery or a restaurant? Is red meat its main income source? If the argument had gone into more detail around these unknowns then perhaps the evidence could have been used fairly and the argument would have been a lot more convincing.
Finally, the argument fails to mention a number of key points of evidence. What is defined as regulating one's uptake of red meat and fatty cheeses? Is this statement only applicable to a certain region, or are we speaking in global terms? How has the per capita consumption of the mentioned commodities changed during the last decade? Without convincing answers to these questions, one is left with the impression that the claim is more wishful thinking rather than substansive evidence.
In conclusion, the argument is flawed for the above mentioned reasons and is therefore unconvincing. It could be considerably strentghened if the author clearly mentioned all the relevant facts pertaining to the pieces of evidence that were presented. In order to asses the merits of a certain claim, it is paramount to have full knowledge of all contributing factors. In this particular case what the definition of regulating one's intake is, what area the argument is claiming about and what proportional changes have been observed in cheese and red meat intakes. Without this information, the argument remains unsubstantiated and open to debate.