Eat Whole Food, Not Nutrients

Why Nutritionism makes us sick & food in the USA vs. Czech Republic

I made my first podcast appearance last week on Liz Reitzig’s Nourishing Liberty podcast. We had a fruitful discussion on how Lucie and I became farmers, the history and differences of Czech agriculture, and the importance of beauty in landscapes. Though, I realized afterward there was a lot left unsaid about the differences between food and eating in the USA compared to the Czech Republic. I tried my best to lay it out here. Also, I recently shared an article about putting pieces behind a paywall. If you’d like to support this page and our farm, please have a look.

Oma, what did you eat as a snack when you were a kid?

I called her Oma because my grandfather, whom I never met, was from Germany.

We were sitting at the kitchen table. I was probably seven, and I was eating a bowl of low-sodium canned chili, cooked in the microwave, holding a slice of sandwich bread. I thought the meal was something a medieval knight would eat in a roadside tavern, and I wanted to be a knight in those days.

Oh, hun (she called me hun), we didn’t have much during the depression. I do remember what a treat it was when Dad would bring home butter and white sugar, and we’d (her five brothers and sisters) spread a thin layer of butter on the bread and sprinkle a little bit of sugar so that it’d stick to the butter. Other times we’d have a bulled egg (she was from Bal’more).

I was lathering I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter onto the slice of bread which had the consistency of a worn sponge.

Didn’t people know butter was bad for them back then? That it raised their collateral?

Cholesterol, hun. No, we didn’t know anything about that back then.

I felt sorry for those people back in the day. So ignorant. It wasn’t their fault, though.

Rather than dipping the bread in the chili, I got up from the table, went to the old cupboard, found a Sweet and Low packet, and poured it on the slice of bread that was lathered in something that I couldn’t believe it wasn’t - just like what my Oma used to eat as a snack, only healthier.

---

I used to stare at the poster of the food pyramid tacked to the wall as I waited in line for chicken fingers and french fries in our grade school cafeteria. The food pyramid has caught a lot of heat lately for being completely wrong, which isn’t fair. It’s not so much wrong as it got flipped upside down, and nobody in the USDA, or the vast halls of medical academia caught the error for forty years. But perhaps the real error is trying to represent a healthy diet through a triangle.

How have we become so confused about the relationship between food and health? How can people in countries that drink beer and wine like they’re soft drinks, smoke cigarettes, and inhale gelato, croissants, and cakes be healthier than Americans? Why is it that the more obsessed with nutrition, the unhealthier we become?

These are questions Michael Pollan addresses in his 2009 book, In Defense of Food. His thesis is that a cult has been created by so-called experts over the course of the last century. This cult is called Nutritionism, and it spreads so much confusion about what constitutes a good diet that people feel compelled to consult said experts in white coats as to what they should or shouldn’t put in their bodies.

Mr. Pollan lays out his own dietary advice at the end of the book. He says that we shouldn’t eat anything our grandmothers wouldn’t recognize. Due to his age, Mr. Pollan in older than I am. I’m not sure that rule applies for my grandmother, but it probably works for her mother, my great-grandmother. Most people in the USA, in my generation, are now three generations removed from this common-sense guide to eating well. Which is to say, it’s dead.

Here in the Czech Republic, Mr. Pollan’s rule still holds mostly true. But, to my immense despair, I see it slipping away with the grandparents. Nutrionism, the cult, the contagion, has arrived.