The Problem with Good Food

Key Take Aways

1. Diverse Definitions: Understands "good food" through the lens of Nutritionism, which is often narrow and reductive.

2. Reductionist Approach: Focuses excessively on nutrients at the expense of other important aspects like taste, culture, and personal experience.

3. Societal Implications: Creates confusion, dependency on scientific expertise, and anxiety about food choices.

4. Embodied Eating: Stresses the importance of eating with an understanding of personal and cultural background, rather than just nutritional content

We are going to approach this question from the framework of Nutritionism. Which I believe, observe, to be the most common lens through contemporary Western Culture knows food - especially when standing among the fitness community.

Nutritionism

To understand this topic let’s first look at the definition of Nutritionism -

“Nutritionism refers to the contemporary understanding of, marketing of, and decision making about food in terms of the role constituent nutrients and substances play in human health at the expense of other possible means of assessment such as levels of processing, means of agricultural production, sensual properties and cultural or historical significance (Scrinis 2013; Pollan 2008)”

You can begin to understand nutritionism by looking at the superfood crazes of the 2010’s which determined the food trends of what to eat and why to eat something; think avocado, acai, chia seeds, goji berries and walnuts. What was the reason you were told to eat these foods? You were told to eat these foods for the prophylactic nutrient/s they contained - the specific nutrient which you were to consume in order to prevent something bad happening to your body rather than focusing on the whole food and its place within an overall diet.

Knowing Food, Knowing You

While this singular focus on nutrient, caloric and even macronutrient profile of food is popularised not only nutrition scientists, dieticians, nutritionists, media and even government guidelines. It is described by historians, anthropologists and journalists as an “impoverished” or “reductive” way of knowing food, body and bodily health. Due to the absence of the embodied experience of knowing food.

The embodiment of knowing food is to eat with an understanding of your own palate, an importance on cultural background, traditions and social health also from the eater. It is a learned knowledge of food through your own experiences. What is “good food” from a nutrition science perspective - say broccoli for its vitamin K and high fibre content - may be a bad food for the eater due to simply disliking the texture or taste.

With a food-level reductionism framework of eating which is focused only on consuming nutrients for the prevention of disease we seemingly only create a population with food anxiety and angst. Enhanced confusion around ever changing nutrition science on what it is we should actually eat. From a marketing perspective a confused buyer acting within a nutritionism framework is an easy target.

A studied example of nutritionism marketing is the promotion of “probiotic yogurt”, “cholesterol lowering margarines” or “low GI rice”. Rather than experiencing the food you will consume here as a sensory experience, the enjoyment and pleasure, you’re encouraged to purchase the item over another for prophylactic reasoning. That is lining your stomach with “good” bacteria, changing your cholesterol levels or diminishing the time it takes for that rice to digest and release sugar into the bloodstream.

Thus promoting the idea that what is “good” in the contemporary comes down to the various engineering of nutrients within foodstuffs rather than the larger changes in the entire context of diet or types of foods eaten.

The reductionism of eating comes with greater impacts as the discourse sets a dogma to be followed by all. That is there is only one way to know food - through its nutrients and what those nutrients do to the body and bodily health. Touched on earlier, this is the disembodiment of the food experience. The removal of eating for enjoyment, socialisation and cultural traditions but enhancing the idea that cravings and desires should something be entirely controlled.

Don't Trust the Body

This notion created separation of the mind and body; the ‘rational’ mind and the ‘irrational’ body. While this at face value only impacts the individual, in that we cannot trust our body, the actual implications impact society on a far greater level. What the rhetoric here tells us on a greater level is those with a skinny physique, who control their bodily desires more, are “better” individuals . These claims about cravings often angle towards those suffering from obesity or dietary diseases having a lack of willpower - while it is studied that obesity has little to do with willpower.

As mentioned in Other Ways of Knowing Food (Murdy et al) the discussion turns to a psychologist, B Wansink, who claims that (all) people eat mindlessly. Whether intended or not this reads as a way to promote the skinny physique as one which eats more mindfully than those who do not habit such physique. This increases our knowing of the body as the enemy and enhances disembodiment. The pressure to eat mindfully also places the near impossible task onto the eater of maintaining an up to date encyclopaedia of the ever changing nutritional science and dietary recommendations of the time.

“Nutritionism creates ambiguous tendencies towards a disempowered, confused, and dependent individual on the one hand, and an active, empowered and critically informed individual on the other. It creates the conditions for nutritional confusion, a dependance on scientific expertise, a susceptibility to food marketing claims, and a general sense of anxiety about “what to eat.” (Scrinis)

When we look in the context of knowing mind and body as one it is studied that those who do not have a sense of embodiment are at a greater risk of negative self talk, objectification of the body, and body dissatisfaction; which all can lead toward dietary restriction.

In Conclusion

When we approach food from solely the lens of Nutritionism we reduce food to something we consume only as a mechanism to prevent bad things happening to the body. While at face value this does not seem a harmful way to decide what and how we eat. It is through understanding the deeper implications of such reductionism that we can acknowledge the problems. These problems include the creation of food confusion and anxiety, distrust in our bodies and enhancing societal rejection of body types other than skinny.

Understanding food to only be something medicalised, functionalized and seeing nutrition as one size fits all’ removes us from knowing good food through sense, culture, tradition, socialisation and self. All incredibly important aspects of the human experience and health, which extends far beyond the physical body.

References

Beer, S. (2021) “Positive Body Image,” in A Comprehensive Consideration of Body Image, Part 3 pp. 20–24.

Mudry, J. et al. 2014 “Other ways of knowing food” Gastronomica, 14(3), pp. 27–33. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2014.14.3.27.

Pollan, Michael. 2008 In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto New York: Penguin

Scrinis, Gyorgy 2008 “On the ideology of Nutritionism,” Gastronomica, 8(1), pp. 39–48.

Available at: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2008.8.1.39.

Scrinis, Gyorgy. 2013 Nutritionism: The Science and Politics of Dietary Advice, New York: Columbia University Press.

Ruby Cooke Nutrition