Nutritionism, Revisited

In 1968, anthropologist Margaret Mead testified before the US Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. Criticizing the lack of action in the face of growing rates of starvation and malnutrition worldwide, she insisted that “it was important to realize that people don’t eat nutrition. They eat food” (Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs 1969: 153). Mead’s punchy utterance is rarely quoted fully or accurately today, but a slightly altered version has made its way into science commentary, wellness blogs, and even the promotional and educational material of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization: the admonition that “people don’t eat nutrients, they eat food” (Kirby 1996; Association for Dietetics in South Africa 2015; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2015).Mead’s (mis)quote captures a sentiment that has been growing in the decades since Gastronomica first appeared in print in 2001: that our way of researching and relating to food in relation to health has focused too much on nutrients, on the minute constituents of what we cook and ingest, and not enough on everything else that is conveyed in the word “food.” In 2008, Gastronomica published an article that captured this sentiment and gave it a memorable name: nutritionism. Written by Science and Technology Studies (STS) and food studies scholar Gyorgy Scrinis, the article would go on to become Gastronomica’s most cited article of all time (Dimensions 2025). It argued that meals and ingredients, dietary patterns, the role of taste and pleasure, the religious and cultural functions of eating, the social and economic distribution of accessible and affordable staples, and the environmental implications of certain forms of producing and consuming food, had all been left out of the one-dimensional, nutrient-centric approach that had come to dominate not only the nutrition sciences but our everyday relationship with nourishment (Scrinis 2008).The article, in short, reflected the multi-dimensional approach to the study of food that the journal in which it appeared represented. You might say (I certainly would) that Gastronomica was then one of only a few journals in which the article could have appeared and made the impact that it did. At the time, Gastronomica was unique among academic journals in that it included a range of perspectives well beyond the bounds of food studies as a field and even beyond the realm of academic disciplines more broadly. The Winter 2008 issue alone featured contributions from a chef, a fine artist, a cookbook author, and several scholars. Then and now, Gastronomica publishes poems, creative writing, and photo essays side by side with book reviews and academic articles. Gastronomica was also unique among food writing venues in that it provided space for deeply researched, long-form articles proposing specialist scholarly interventions. This combination of professional, academic, and artistic voices made for a uniquely diverse readership and ensured that the article achieved broad resonance.Those of us who have lived a little longer than this journal have seen specific nutrients go in and out of fashion. We have been variously worried about vitamin C, cholesterol, omega-3-fatty acids, protein, and antioxidants. Cereal boxes, TV ads, and changing nutritional guidelines have reminded us to get enough of them or not too much of them. Product packaging told us how many nutrients were in certain foods and how much of a constituent we’d need for a “balanced diet” and a healthy life. The longstanding ubiquity of nutrients might make growing critiques of our nutrient-centric science and eating lives seem obvious in retrospect. But putting a finger on precisely what was wrong with our nutritional culture was neither self-evident nor uncontested at the time Scrinis first coined the concept nutritionism in 2002, and before he laid out the full implications of nutritionism as an “ideology” in his 2008 article, titled “On the Ideology of Nutritionism” (Scrinis 2002, 2008).There were certainly rumblings of various aspects of nutritionism before the article crystallized and laid them out in detail. Nutritionism was articulated amidst mounting critiques of the US food system and the close ties between the food industry and nutrition science. In 2002 (the same year Scrinis first wrote about nutritionism), Marion Nestle had published her influential Food Politics, an exposé of food industry tactics to influence nutritional guidelines and co-opt nutritional scientific inquiry (Nestle 2002). The same Gastronomica issue that housed the 2008 nutritionism article also featured a review by Krishnendu Ray of lawyer Michelle Simon’s Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back, a record of her history of litigation with Big Food companies and their dubious advertising tactics. In a previous issue, geographer Julie Guthman had begun to articulate her critique of calorie-centric models of obesity and reductionist measurement tools of the so-called obesity epidemic such as the Body Mass Index (Guthman 2007b; see also Guthman and DuPuis 2006; Guthman 2007a; for Guthman’s full critique of obesity science and politics, see 2011). Historians and STS scholars had charted the discovery or “invention” of certain nutrients, analyzed their popularization and commercialization, and described the subsequent medicalization of eating (Apple 1988; 1996; Carpenter 1994; Horrocks 1995; Ackerman 2005). And various popular books and films—from Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me to The Omnivore’s Dilemma—held up the environmental and health effects of our modern industrial food system to a large audience (Schlosser 2001; Spurlock 2004; Pollan 2006).But the concept of nutritionism did more than simply organize these disparate complaints into a comprehensive diagnostic of an increasingly pressing scientific and societal condition. It provided, at once, a coherent system of analysis, a layered analytical terminology, and an innovative framework for problem-solving entrenched nutritional issues. Nutritionism drew on Science and Technology Studies, the history and philosophy of science, and social theory to identify a paradigm within nutritional research and thinking. Nutrients, the concept suggests, structure nutritional scientific research. They organize patterns of citation by centering nutrient-based analyses as the dominant form of scientific inquiry. Scientific cultures of measurement and experimentation are geared toward the isolation and quantification of nutrients in our food and the detection of nutritional biochemicals in our bodies. Science communication about nutrition has mirrored this tendency, prioritizing discrete claims about individual nutrients (e.g., “Vitamin D prevents illness,” or “avoid saturated fats”) rather than addressing whole foods or systems of eating. In the commercial sphere, the nutritionism of scientific research facilitated marketing strategies that emphasized nutrient content as health claims: cereals promoted for their fiber, beverages for added vitamins, snack foods for protein content. This made nutrients a powerful advertising language, enabling companies to rebrand or reposition products as healthy through the manipulation of their constituent parts, rather than through changes to overall quality. Nutrients also infuse conceptions of the body and the self. As eaters, we worry about getting enough of the right nutrients and avoiding the wrong ones. We connect our state of health to the amount of vitamins in our salads and of cholesterol in our blood and blame ourselves and others for exceeding or falling short of our recommended daily allowances.Nutritionism’s radical as well as rapid departure from previous ways of thinking about food and nutrition could not be overstated. Pre-eighteenth-century dietetics was about what foods were like—hot, cold, moist, dry—and not what they contained. It was about individual bodies in local environments who required tailored diets rather than large populations whose nutrient intakes could be measured, compared, and standardized. And it was about ways of reasoning grounded in analogy, cosmological hierarchy, and sensory experience rather than chemical laboratory apparatus and quantitative measurement. A variety of historical factors played a role in pushing the nutrition sciences toward an increasingly nutrient-based approach between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. New professional contexts of chemical inquiry, new chemical techniques of analysis, the growing role of science in the organization of emerging nation states, the expansion of empires and the growing number of edible materials bioprospected from imperial territories, and wartime food rationing needs,—all contributed to reinforcing a preference for reductionist models that could be quantified, measured, and communicated in mass campaigns (Holmes 1987, 1989; Albala 2002; Spary 2012; Mudry 2009; Veit 2013; Spary 2014; Shapin 2014; Haushofer 2022; Frohlich 2023; Shapin 2024).Clear and concise at the surface, the concept of nutritionism encompasses a rich vocabulary and captures many layers of meaning. It is characterized, above all, by nutritional reductionism. Out of a myriad of possibilities of evaluating the qualities of food—its freshness, agricultural mode of production, degree of processing, animal or vegetable nature, socioeconomic and taste profile—nutritionism chooses to equate foods’ nourishing properties with its biochemical constituents. This reductionism comes with a kind of nutritional determinism, the assumption that isolated nutrients alone are responsible for certain bodily processes and health functions, regardless of the form in which they are ingested. Together, reductionism and determinism create an illusion of control, or what the article names as the myth of nutritional precision. Cracking the nutrient code, it seemed to many nutrition scientists in the past, might be the crucial step toward unraveling and controlling nutritional health.No wonder this thinking was soon taken up by governments and industry alike. The former created nutritional guidelines with seemingly straightforward prescriptive formulas for changing the fate of nations through the plates of citizens. The latter used nutritionism to create a nutritional façade—an illusion of healthfulness—around existing (but perhaps slow-selling) products and to devise new nutritionally-engineered foods through endless nutritional tinkering. Butter was replaced with cholesterol-lowering margarine while orange juice suddenly became a favorite vehicle for ingesting Vitamin D.But the effects of nutritionism were felt more broadly, as the article laid out. Nutritionism seeped into ordinary people’s relationship with food and reshaped their perception of their own bodies and their sense of self according to the logic of nutritionism. The nutricentric person with a nutritional gaze and a functional approach to their own body was the result. This was a very different way of being in the world than what had come before and what would follow. The functional body came with an optimizing imperative that was distinct from the harmonizing logic of the pre-eighteenth-century humoral body. It is also different from later frameworks that make sense of the relationship between ourselves and our food. Nutrient-centric notions of the body coexist with what Tripp Rebrovick has termed an “eco-dietetic” outlook, which places eating and digesting in the context of the ecological conditions in which food is produced (Rebrovick 2015). Nutritionism thinking is also distinct from Hannah Landecker’s notion of “exposure,” a model of the relationship between food and the self based on nutritional epigenetics, where food becomes a “conditioning environment” that impacts our genes and metabolism across generations (Landecker 2011). Though eco-dietetic and exposure frameworks might have provided new registers for eaters to construct their eating selves, nutritionisms’ technologies of embodiment—counting calories, tracking vitamins, avoiding bad nutrients—still inform most people’s relationship to food in a considerable way.One of the most insidious consequences of the nutritionism paradigm was its success in “displacing and undermining” other ways of knowing food. It cast assessments of food according to origin, taste, quality, and cultural significance as ignorant, romantic, naive, unenlightened, and fundamentally un-modern. Because of this, the article called for both the creation of new meaningful distinctions between various food qualities and an integration of different levels of approaching and assessing foods: on the molecular level but also on the level of whole foods, dietary patterns, and the larger socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental contexts in which foods are produced and consumed.A crucial driving force in popularizing the concept of nutritionism was the work of journalist and author Michael Pollan. His bestselling 2008 book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto made a simplified understanding of nutritionism accessible to an even broader readership and ensured that foodies, New York Times subscribers, and nutrition scientists alike took note (Pollan 2008). Though criticized for its lack of attention to the racialized and socioeconomic constraints that affect food systems, the book’s brevity and aphoristic flair appealed to common sense and assured eaters that knowing what was good for you to eat was not very complicated at all (Guthman 2007b).In 2013, Scrinis elaborated on the nutritionism framework articulated in the Gastronomica article in a book-length exploration of the concept, its applications, its periodization, and its implications. Nutritionism: The Science and Politics of Dietary Advice examined in detail the various historical manifestations of nutritionism (which also overlap and coexist), from a concern with nutrient quantities to an emphasis on harmful nutrients and, finally, a notion of functional components of food that enhance certain bodily functions (Scrinis 2013). It also provided a more detailed discussion of an alternative framework to replace nutritionism. This “food quality paradigm” offered new ways of thinking about the notion of “nutritiousness.” It integrated micro- and macro-levels of food—nutrients, whole foods, and dietary patterns—and placed the degree of processing at the center of assessments of nourishment.Within academia, nutritionism was taken up by a diverse range of scholars and inspired new concepts and new directions of study. Food studies scholars and food geographers welcomed nutritionism as a productive analytical category that made visible the limitations placed on ways of knowing food through modern nutritional scientific inquiry (Guthman 2011; Mudry 2009; Biltekoff 2013, 2024). With its critique of reductionism, nutrient-centrism, and quantification, the vocabulary of nutritionism became a key component of the new sub-field of critical nutrition studies (also discussed in this anniversary issue by Garrett M. 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