This conversation is part of a special issue on “Critical Nutrition” in which multiple authors weigh in on various themes related to the origins, character, and consequences of contemporary American nutrition discourses and practices, as well as how nutrition might be known and done differently. In this section authors discuss the impoverishment of nutritionism as a way of knowing and engaging with food, highlighting how nourishment is not amenable to either simplification or standardization. Some call for alternate ways of knowing food, through revitalizing tradition and culture, for example, and some emphasize engaging food through the senses. One author is skeptical that these other ways of knowing food can address real nutritional deficiencies.

This conversation is part of a special issue on “Critical Nutrition” in which multiple authors weigh in on various themes related to the origins, character, and consequences of contemporary American nutrition discourses and practices, as well as how nutrition might be known and done differently. In this section authors focus on the hegemony of reductionism and quantification in modern-day nutritional knowledge by discussing the historical foundations and ethical dimensions, as well as the scientific absences, in this knowledge. Reviewing various challenges to the energy balance model, they all suggest that the promotion of good nutrition is far from simple. Some authors also discuss why various “invisible” nutrients and measures of good nutrition continue to hold so much sway in nutrition discourse.

This essay introduces and defines the ideology or paradigm of nutritionism, which is generally characterized by a reductive focus on the nutrient composition of food. More specifically, it is where the nutri-biochemical level of engagement with food and the body becomes the dominant way of understanding the relationship between food and bodily health, and at the expense of other levels and ways of understanding and engaging with food. Nutritionism is the dominant paradigm within nutrition science, informs much dietary advice, and has become a primary means for the engineering and marketing of food products. A number of characteristics of nutritionism are defined, including nutritional reductionism, biomarker reductionism, genetic nutritionism, the functional body, the myth of nutritional precision, the nutritional gaze, and nutritional tinkering, nutri-quantification, the erasure of qualitatative food distinctions, nutrient fetishism, the 'good and bad nutrient' discourses, nutri-commodification, and the nutricentric person. A number of types of foods and types of food marketing are also introduced and defined, including nutritionally engineered foods, transnutric foods, nutritionally marketed foods and functionally marketed foods.