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Pollan started by tracing the notion of “scientific eating” in America back to the mid-19th Century and showed how it taps into a Puritan heritage that has left us uncomfortable enjoying sensual activities, including eating. The past century and a half has seen a succession of foods and ingredients demonized, from the protein that Kellogg sought to drive out of the American colon with his newfangled breakfast cereals, to the red meat against which Sen. George McGovern inveighed, to the current ostracism of Omega-6 fatty acids as the enemy of “blessed” Omega-3 fatty acids. Good nutrients need to be promoted and evil nutrients must be purged from the food supply.
The resulting emphasis on “nutritionism” has diminished the role of food to a purely biological means of sustaining life rather than a cultural means of attaining pleasure, community, family, identity or ritual. That itself is a lot to lose, as proponents of the Slow Food movement have been tireless in explaining.
But there’s another implication. Foods reduced to the role of “carriers of nutrients” essentially become “the sum of their nutrient parts,” Pollan argued. “Since nutrients are invisible, therefore I need experts to tell me how to eat,” much as the priesthood mediates one’s relationship with the deity. People today have “lost the ability to eat without help.”
Pollan doesn’t think this emphasis on nutritionism works very well: not only does it ruin the pleasure of eating but it’s often based on weak science, since studying the effects of individual nutrients in isolation overlooks food’s identity as an extremely complex system.