This article explores the dynamics of a discursive contest between a “Real Food” frame in which, for concerned consumers and activists, processed food is an unhealthy product of a troubled food system, and a “Real Facts” frame in which, for food science and food industry advocates, processed food is a solution to the need to provide abundant, safe, and nutritious food. The analysis focuses on two school curricula that are vying to teach children “where food comes from.” I argue that the “food” in these two curricula is not the same thing. Within the Food, Inc . Discussion Guide, food is connection, responsibility, and politics. The Alliance to Feed the Future curricula respond with a strategic anti-politics of food, asserting that food can only be “what it obviously is” and framing Real Food's challenge as scientific and technical ignorance.

In 2015, controversy over the Dietary Guidelines for Americans reached a new level when the government-appointed Dietary Guidance Advisory Committee (DGAC) recommended that those guidelines promote more sustainable diets, particularly those lower in animal-based foods. Although the committee found ample scientific evidence that such a shift would be a “win-win” for Americans' health as well as the environment, it met with fierce opposition on both counts, and not only from the livestock industry. This suggests how sustainable diet guidance poses a classic wicked problem, meaning one characterized by high levels of complexity, uncertainty, and epistemological conflict. While relationships between food, bodies, and environments are inevitably complex and uncertain, the controversy surrounding DGAC's recommendation offers an opportunity to explore how the scientific evidence on dietary sustainability is actually produced, and how it does or does not speak to other knowledge about eating for bodily and ecological health. To do this I look first at the research behind DGAC's endorsement of diets high in plant-based versus animal-based foods, and then at select responses in the public comments. The contrast not only highlights the incommensurability of modeled versus experiential evidence, but also suggests that efforts to promote more sustainable food consumption cannot credibly ignore questions (however unresolved) about what constitutes more sustainable production.