In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

by Michael Pollan

Most of us no longer eat what our mothers ate as children or, for that matter, what our mothers fed us as children.

Nutritionism prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the various nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortifying processed foods rather than questioning their value in the first place. Nutritionism is, in a sense, the official ideology of the Western diet and so cannot be expected to raise radical or searching questions about it.

This brings us to another unexamined assumption of nutritionism: that the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health.

Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing.