Across the planet, an amazing array of creative and determined people are building sustainable food systems that challenge the assumptions and methods of industrial agriculture. new food-like substances in the lab and then marketed to targeted groups. Thus, busy workers on the go get cereal bars they can eat while commuting, overweight secretaries get low-carb microwave lunches in boxes, and constipated seniors get little cans of high-fiber drinks to snack on before napping. And if the malnourished masses object, hey, let them eat Twinkies. This drive towards lab-born, market-tested, amalgamated, food-like items was facilitated by an ideology Pollan calls “nutritionism.” Not a science but an ideology, nutritionism assumes that the key to understanding food is to understand the nutrients within the food. There are good nutrients like antioxidants, for example, and bad nutrients like cholesterol. Nutrients become fashionable, too. Fiber was once the rage but now the omega oils are trendy. Nutritionism tells us that we eat in order to maintain and promote body health. If this seems like a no-brainer to you, then and you have so successfully incorporated nutritionism into your worldview and, like all powerful ideologies, it has become transparent. Because nutrients are invisible, we need experts to tell us what to eat. We no longer eat what our culture tells us to eat like we did for hundreds of years when we ate according to this or that traditional ethnic diet, instead we eat according to the findings of the latest studies. The processed food industry takes this information and manipulates us into believing that the chocolate-covered cereal you feed to your kids is okay because the marshmallows in it are “fortified” with the good stuff that the experts have identified and endorsed. The flaw in nutritionism is that real foods—whole foods—are more than the sum of their nutrient parts.
The distinction between a whole food and a food-like product, say between an apple and a hotdog, disappears when the focus is on nutrients alone. The nutrient focus also obscures food’s other contexts – whether, for example, it was produced in a fair and sustainable way or whether its production contributed to soil depletion, feedlot pollution, wasted water, shredded biodiversity, exploited farm labor, and so on. We have identified only a fraction of the nutrients available in food and we are not sure how those nutrients interact with one another within the foods we consume. We have often misunderstood how those nutrients are absorbed into our bodies once we eat them. For example, when we realized that high levels of cholesterol in our bloodstreams are harmful, we cut back on foods that contain cholesterol. But now we find there may not be a link between the cholesterol we eat and the levels in our blood. Nutritional science, Pollan claims, is about where surgery was in 1650. Is all this “science” making us healthier? No. The Western diet is clearly linked to an obesity epidemic, skyrocketing rates for diabetes, and those familiar killers, cancer and heart disease. Americans suffer those chronic illnesses more than
Nutritional science, Pollan claims, is about where surgery was in 1650. others in the world and when traditional cultures abandon their diets for ours, they also experience a sharp increase in those maladies. If you unpack the prevailing empire of belief about food and diet, here’s what you find in the center: reductionism. Reductionism holds that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. So if you want to understand something, break it down into parts, farther and farther. You can then reassemble those pieces into unique new products. That, after all, is what we do with a barrel of crude oil or a lump of coal. Unfortunately, this philosophy— this habit of perception, if you will—serves us better when we pour the result into our cars than into our stomachs (or, considering glob-
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