Nutritionism Quotes

What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism - its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure. ~ Michael Pollan

The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the "-ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's still exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather
all pervasive and so virtually impossible to escape. Still, we can try. ~ Michael Pollan

The entire history of baby formula has been the history of one overlooked nutrient after another ... and still to this day babies fed on the most "nutritionally complete" formula fail to do as
well as babies fed human milk. Even more than margarine, formula stands as the ultimate test product of nutritionism and a fair index of its hubris. ~ Michael Pollan

Eating is an agricultural act," Wendell Berry famously wrote, by which he meant that we are not just passive consumers of food but cocreators of the systems that feed us. Depending on how we spend them, our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and "value" or they can nourish a food chain organized around values
values like quality and health. Yes, shopping this way takes more money and effort, but as soon as you begin to treat that expenditure not just as shopping but also as a kind of vote
a vote for health in the largest sense
food no longer seems like the smartest place to economize. ~ Michael Pollan