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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 ofthe new House of Beef across the street are millionaires.”
The argument states that as compared to a decade ago, people today are not as concerned about regulating their intake of red meat and fatty cheeses. The argument is based on the premise that Heart's Delight, a store that was started in the 1960s with the aim of selling organic fruits and vegetables and whole-grain flours, also sells a wide selection of cheeses made with high butterfat content. The argument also makes a comparison between two restaurants, one selling vegetarian food and the other beef, and talks about how the owners of the restaurant selling beef are millionaires today, while the owners of the vegetarian restaurant are merely making a modest living. Stated in this way, the argument fails to mention several key factors on the basis of which it could be evaluated. It also modifies facts and presents a distorted view of the situation. Therefore, the argument is unconvincing and falls apart at the seams.
First, the author readily assumes that because Heart's Delight, a restaurant started in the 1960s to sell organic fruits and vegetables and whole-grain flours, has a wide selection of cheeses, people have therefore become unconcerned about their intake of fatty cheeses. The author makes an illogical correlation between the wide range of cheeses being sold to the nonchalance of people and their health. The author fails to provide any evidence regarding the number of cheeses that are on display as compared to the number of cheeses sold. There is also no information provided about whether such cheeses were being sold a decade earlier as well. We are told that this restaurant was opened in the 1960s and the author compares people's eating habits today to that of a decade ago. What about all the years in between the 1960s and today? The author seems to have conveniently missed making any such mention or comparison.
Second, the argument claims that people are not as concerned today as they were a decade ago about regulating their intake of red meat. This claim is based on the premise that because the owners of the new House of Beef restaurant are millionaires, people have increased their intake of red meat. This is again a very weak and unsupported claim as the argument does not provide any correlation between the restaurant's revenue and the increase of meat by people. What if the food is just better and the menu vaster than it is as the vegetarian restaurant next door? Or maybe the food at the vegetarian restaurant is just pathetic? Without any information provided comparing the two, or any statistics on the intake of red meat by the people over the years at House of Beef, this argument is highly weakened.
Finally, what is unclear is that the argument makes a generalized conclusion and states that "in general, people are not as concerned" when it really only makes a mention about two local restaurants and one store. How can the author make such a generalized statement, taking into account such little evidence and statistics? Had the author looked at over 100 restaurants in 30-40 different states or countries, and provided statistics and information on the same, this argument could have been a lot more convincing.
In summary, the argument is unconvincing due to the faulty assumptions, aforementioned. If the argument had drawn upon the examples and points as suggested and thereby plugged in the holes in the reasoning, it would have been far sounder on the whole.