This was a very interesting lesson, I have been trying to eat healthier and learn about nutrition this past year. After reading the book many of the questions I had about health became clear. For example, why are there so many differing opinions on health? Because we don’t know as much as we think we do about nutrition. I… Read more »
I was a child of a single father whose signature dishes included boxed mac’ and cheese with hotdogs and ramen noodle stir-fry. McDonald dinners were a regular occurrence. I carried this diet into my young adulthood. After taking a nutrition class during my first year in college, I was dismayed to find that most of what I considered food was… Read more »
As a professional chef, avid world traveler, and conscious global citizen, analyzing the industrialization of food is of particular interest to me, and equal parts fascinating and disturbing. Humans’ relationship to the food they eat, for most of history, was based on what food was available in a given geographic area. That same type of relationship continued as humans became… Read more »
In his book, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan describes the phenomenon of nutritionism as the defining ideology of the Western diet. “In the case of nutritionism,” he writes, “the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put another way: Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts.” The emergence… Read more »
Kloven, Leah. “Healthy Foods.” 2017 PNG file What does real food look like to you? On a recent road trip, I stopped at the store a bought some car snacks. A lemon vitamin water and a pack of corn nuts. As someone who tries to eat healthy, this has always seemed like a decent snack. Sure it’s not organic veggie… Read more »
Consciously or unconsciously, science, like a religion, requires a leap of faith to be allowed to guide our life. In the case of food culture, the public has been blinded by food science; what we really need is the nutrients in the food, not necessarily the real food, which is our current epidemic ideology, called nutritionism. In In Defense of… Read more »
In analyzing this week’s materials what stands out the most for me is the concept and practice of reductionist science in nutritionism. While I recognize in myself a belief and/or trust in science and it’s processes, I am concerned about the limited nature of reductionist science, or the breaking down into components a whole system whose purpose is not completely… Read more »