Nutritionism and Orthorexia
9/4/08 21:58![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darkemeraldsI wish I'd had access to In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, Michael Pollan's wonderful book about the intrusion of science and marketing into the Western diet, three years ago when I was first formulating my own ideas about fatness, metabolic illness, and problems with the food supply.
I felt in my bones that there had to be some environmental cause for the overwhelming epidemic of obesity that has flourished since I came of age. Simply writing the problem off as one of essentially a moral nature didn't make any sense to me. Two-thirds of Americans didn't suddenly become lazy, weak-willed, and gluttonous in a single generation.
I suspected that artificial additives and soil depletion were screwing up the collective metabolism, and Michael Pollan agrees, while also providing a lot of missing pieces of what I was trying to puzzle out.
There are profound ideas like these on nearly every page.
What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship? In nature that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in systems we call food chains, or food webs, that reach all the way down to the soil.
He expands on this idea of food as a relationship throughout the book, pointing out that eating is one of the most complex systems in the world, and therefore very hard to break down and study scientifically. He refers throughout the book to "nutritionism", food dogma that masquerades as science.
...to this day, babies fed on the most "nutrionally complete" formula fail to do as well as babies fed on human milk. Even more than margarine, baby formula stands as the ultimate test product of nutritionism and a fair index of its hubris.
Health depends heavily on knowing how to read these biological signals [sensory data emanting from whole food]: This looks ripe; this smells spoiled; that's one sick-looking cow. This is much easier to do when you have long experience of a food and much harder when a food has been expressly designed to deceive your senses with, say, artificial flavors or synthetic sweeteners. Foods that lie to our senses are one of the most challenging features of the Western diet.
The outcomes of nutritionism in America include an entirely skewed relationship with food--what Pollan refers to as "orthorexia," "an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating." (Sound like anyone you know?)
In one experiement, [Rosin] showed the words "chocolate cake" to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. "Guilt" was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: "Celebration." (Oh, yeah.)
Having lived in France, I can say that I prefer their way. Of course, their chocolate cake is better than ours...
I felt in my bones that there had to be some environmental cause for the overwhelming epidemic of obesity that has flourished since I came of age. Simply writing the problem off as one of essentially a moral nature didn't make any sense to me. Two-thirds of Americans didn't suddenly become lazy, weak-willed, and gluttonous in a single generation.
I suspected that artificial additives and soil depletion were screwing up the collective metabolism, and Michael Pollan agrees, while also providing a lot of missing pieces of what I was trying to puzzle out.
There are profound ideas like these on nearly every page.
What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship? In nature that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in systems we call food chains, or food webs, that reach all the way down to the soil.
He expands on this idea of food as a relationship throughout the book, pointing out that eating is one of the most complex systems in the world, and therefore very hard to break down and study scientifically. He refers throughout the book to "nutritionism", food dogma that masquerades as science.
...to this day, babies fed on the most "nutrionally complete" formula fail to do as well as babies fed on human milk. Even more than margarine, baby formula stands as the ultimate test product of nutritionism and a fair index of its hubris.
Health depends heavily on knowing how to read these biological signals [sensory data emanting from whole food]: This looks ripe; this smells spoiled; that's one sick-looking cow. This is much easier to do when you have long experience of a food and much harder when a food has been expressly designed to deceive your senses with, say, artificial flavors or synthetic sweeteners. Foods that lie to our senses are one of the most challenging features of the Western diet.
The outcomes of nutritionism in America include an entirely skewed relationship with food--what Pollan refers to as "orthorexia," "an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating." (Sound like anyone you know?)
In one experiement, [Rosin] showed the words "chocolate cake" to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. "Guilt" was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: "Celebration." (Oh, yeah.)
Having lived in France, I can say that I prefer their way. Of course, their chocolate cake is better than ours...
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(no subject)
10/4/08 06:37 (UTC)I hope everyone has a chance to truly reconnect with the food that nourishes them.
Sacred banquet
10/4/08 19:21 (UTC)Since then, I've also made it a rule never to eat on the street, or while walking or standing. If I could realistically promise myself never to eat alone, I would, but I do try to eat in company whenever possible.
Pollan has a great deal to say about the social component of food and health. "Conviviality" is a very fundamental concept, and a word I love. Though I'm very far from being a religious person, I note that conviviality is built into the very foundation of Christianity--the last thing Jesus did with his people was to have supper with them. Not take a drive or watch a show or go fishing, but eat.
I remember singing at least one motet on the text of "O Sacrum Convivium" back in my Latin Mass days:
O sacrum convivium, in quo Christus sumitur: recolitur memoria passionis eius; mens impletur gratia et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur.
O sacred banquet, in which Christ is received, the memory of His Passion is renewed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory given to us.
I think the mind is filled with grace at good meal shared, don't you?
(no subject)
10/4/08 08:23 (UTC)I always assumed 2/3 of Americans (okay, and Brits too) have always been lazy,weak-willed and gluttonous, it just took them a while to invent MacDonalds.
(no subject)
10/4/08 19:08 (UTC)I think I'd opt for "greedy" over "lazy" in that perspective, however. Nothing particularly lazy about the industry that spews out 17,000 new "food" products per year, and all the medical products that we need to cope with the outcome of eating them.
Yes, "greedy" fits the model, and my experience, much better.
(no subject)
10/4/08 11:11 (UTC)This has got to be true. Looking at maps of the spread of obesity it almost looks like a virus - I'm not saying it's literally one, but it looks so strange. A lot of people blame the addition of corn syrup to processed foods, I notice.
(no subject)
10/4/08 19:05 (UTC)The spread of the problem does seem to have a sort of viral vector character, doesn't it? Western food as virus...interesting idea!
I was also struck by an analogy with language. Pollan talks about the simplification of the diet--that is, the reduction in the number of whole foods the diet starts with (something like 70% of all American agriculture is now devoted to corn and soy, for instance). I was reminded of the notion that language grows simpler over time--there's a reduction in the number of grammatical "things" like cases and tenses.
It's not an analogy I'm prepared to push very far, but it got me thinking about the whole concept of complexity-to-simplicity...entropy, in a way.