Critical Nutrition Revisited

This essay serves as a follow-up to a 2014 special issue of Gastronomica on the topic of “critical nutrition,” an approach to nutrition scholarship that aims to rethink the purported objectivity of nutrition facts and advance a more nuanced, ecologically-oriented approach to the assessment of “good food.” It suggests that the NOVA framework—a construct that evaluates the quality of foods based on their extent of food processing and raises particular concerns about the problems of “ultra-processed foods” (UPFs)—initially offered some advantages over the reductive norms of mainstream nutritional discourse. However, as the principles of NOVA have become prominent across the domains of science, policy, and media in the United States, the framework has actually reinforced many of the counterproductive characteristics that critical nutrition scholars have long criticized. The essay outlines how NOVA advocates’ tendency toward quantitative oversimplification and their failure to adequately incorporate foods’ ecological impacts, alongside the consistent incitement of fear in UPF-related media coverage, have perpetuated key aspects of hegemonic nutrition. It calls on those who see value in NOVA and the UPF concept to do more to engage with the uncertainty and lack of universal applicability that is inherent to any nutritional framework, as well as to recognize the diversity of potential good reasons why eaters choose to eat various foods, ultra-processed or otherwise.