The Flavor-Nutrition Paradox
The Quiet Crisis
There is a quiet crisis in our modern day food culture in America, one in which the explosion of interest in food in recent years has grown and proliferated in parallel with the normalization of nutrition as the dominant paradigm that links food to health. On the one hand interest in gastronomy is experiencing a strong revival - people are becoming less interested in cheap, convenient, processed foods and more interested in cooking, cuisines, and other gastronomic activities. Farmer’s markets have proliferated across the United States signaling a reconnection of consumers to producers. Businesses such as Whole Foods, which once started out as a small hippie-dippie grocery store, have become a huge success catering to shoppers who want to promote environmental and human health. And on television food shows, celebrity chefs who work with ingredients that can be described as local, sustainable, fair trade and seasonal are reflective of the current trend. People may still want convenience, but convenience made from healthy scratch.
While this movement has grown and fostered a vibrant new food culture, the medical and public professions have simultaneously institutionalized the science of nutrition as the modus operandi to improve individual and public health. The food pyramid, which has now become the food plate, is and has been the guiding public authority whose knowledge base is backed by decades of nutritional research and whose food policies across the U.S. are directly and/or indirectly connected to. These two streams of development which began and evolved at different points in time exist quietly at odds with one another. They exist in an awkward space where the desire for deliciousness is strangely and loosely detached from the desire for nutrition.
It is precisely a crisis because the coevolution of the new food culture and scientific eating are socially incompatible. The two frames of food - human gastronomy and the paradigm of nutrition - have inherent modalities that although related, have been playing out in domains that have cultivated eating behaviors that distort people’s relationships to food and hinder public efforts to improve human health (i.e. combat obesity). These paradigms clash and perpetuate a host of social incongruences that lead to what I consider as the institutional oppression on the freedom of taste. In its developmental path, the implementation of all things nutritional - studies, literature, departments, institutions, diets, and industries - has fostered an economy of moralities that permeated homes, schools, hospitals, supermarkets, restaurants and other spaces both public and private. The intersection of what people want to eat versus what one should eat sits in a quiet, turbulent juncture.
In order articulate this crisis more concretely, it is necessary to compare the ways in which gastronomy and nutrition functions. One must discuss its measures and mechanisms by which gastronomy and nutrition operate to get at the “meat” of the matter. It requires a deep look at the differences between how chefs and scientists work, how families and nutritionists cook, and how the desire for culinary aesthetics differs from the desire for scientific precision. The distinctions between how satisfying meals are constructed in the context of cuisine versus nutrition differ in fundamental ways both philosophically and functionally. Although there are many ways to articulate these differences, I will initiate one articulation of this crisis and hope that it will inspire conversations about how to address this paradox. This is by no means a comprehensive examination nor a philosophically sound argument but rather an effort to mobilize awareness around this unarticulated phenomenon.
The Flavor-Nutrition Paradox
Taste and Flavor
The primary tastes as we know it have been grouped into 5 major flavors - salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and savory (or unami). Each taste is detected by specific regions of the tongue and with steady conviction most eaters can identify the main flavors in a bite of food. Whether a food is salty, sweet, savory, bitter, sour, or a combination thereof, a person can generally describe in his or her language how a food tastes, what it tastes like, what undertones are present, and perhaps what is needed to make it taste better.
Primary tastes, when combined in different proportions and ratios, can yield an infinite number of possible taste experiences. Similar to color, the blending of primary colors can result in many spectrums of hues, tones, and shades. Food is almost never a singular taste but rather a combination of tastes; or in other words the separation and segregation of food into uni-dimensional flavors is not the usual experience of eating. The taste receptors of the mouth are accustomed to tasting intricate, multi-layered notes of food and to the extent that taste has been socialized, there is judgement of taste that adheres to the highs and lows of a particular taste preference. Human gastronomy with its omnivorous appetite can consume a galaxy of combinations of food flavors that satisfies a culture’s discerning appetite.
The miscible nature of primary tastes provides a powerful creative engine for human gastronomy. Ratios of ingredients and their respective characteristics change in proportion to give way to foods that are labeled as appetizers, entrees, soups, beverages, or desserts. Each classification has within its repertoire an unending list of possible dishes composed of an unending possible combination of ingredients. And these ingredients, which are sourced from the soil, sea or sky, are merged in the kitchen space to become dishes that are served as part of a so-called “meal.” Our so-called “meals” can vary in sequence, timing and order - breakfast, lunch and dinner have culturally assigned foods; what one eats at the beginning, middle and end of a meal vary across cuisines; and as seasons change so does our appetite. Even within the meal structure, what I chose to eat can be combined and recombined to satisfy the hunger of the moment.
Cooking and Creativity
While tasting is one arm of the flavor experience, cooking represents the other. Tasting and cooking are part of the same gastronomic engine. One cannot exist without the other as they reinforce one another. One could say to cook is to taste and to taste is to cook. Because cooking is the outward projection of what was ingested inwards, it warrants a discussion of its stylistic approach that will help illuminate the paradox.
When a cook or chef works in the kitchen to transform ingredients into a dish, that person projects from his or her memory ideas of what food is and isn’t. From one corner of the mind are dishes consumed in past social gatherings, another corner holds dishes mom cooked as a child, in a separate part of the brain are the sensations of tastes and flavors that have been experienced, yet somewhere else in the mind, survival instincts labeled things that are disgusting and unfit for human consumption. Life on earth has provided a cosmos of food experiences that drew lines around all parameters related to what’s edible and the flavors that belong - the saltiness of a soup, the crunchiness of a pickled vegetable, the temperature of a dessert, the tenderness of a steak, the fishiness of a sauce, or the firmness of a bread. Everything from the ordinary to the extraordinary has been noted and whether the cook cooks with intention or subconscious manipulation of ingredients, culinary creations are projections of what one might call the gastro-mind.
This library of food experiences with all its nuanced parameters are referenced both consciously and unconsciously at each progression of the cooking process: Once a person decides what to cook, there are a multitude of factors to consider and while these factors may seem pedestrian, to an outsider they present itself as entire new bodies of knowledge to master. The selection of ingredients for example requires a qualitative attention to the roles they play - an ingredient can enhance, be the dominant flavor, act as a complementary taste, deliver aromatic qualities, blend with other herbs and/or spices, or perhaps contradict taste properties of other ingredients. And depending on which cuisine the selection process is embedded in, there are flavor profiles in which some ingredients are regarded as cohesive while others don’t match - the connoisseur will know exactly what to select. The chef or cook, like a music conductor, will procure all necessary ingredients, and orchestrate the chopping, mixing, soaking, marinating, steaming, strewing, baking, frying, etcetera to produce a plat du jour that aims to please the hungry appetite.
In food cultures across world, there are recipes to follow, cooking techniques to master, idealized tastes to aspire for, and the authentic to defend. But unlike nutrition, the craft of cooking is creative at its core, not scientific. In the history of world gastronomies, I cannot think of a single cuisine that is hatched from the incubation of science. Yes, cooking can be a precise endeavor but not a scientific one because truly how many chefs and cooks do we know who are also scientists? To the degree that cooking becomes precise is when an edible concoction within a culinary structure has been deemed desirable by the community who eats it, which leads to detailed cooking instructions laid out for the people, and then disseminated through the knowledge channels of a culture.
If we trace the history of the desire for the “perfect” slice, or examine the selective learning process for the most “tender” shoot, or the trials and tribulations of baking that produced the “fluffiest” loaf, or the cooking experiments that culminated to the most “succulent” slab, or the evolution of beverages that climaxed to the most “fragrant” infusion - gastronomy at its core is continuously spinning out new styles of food that become vogue at a particular time, in a particular place, for a particular people. This is the creative engine that crafted Sichuan ma po tofu, Sicilian pizza, Ethiopian shiro wat, French bouillabaisse, Jamaican jerk, and Mexican mole. And the continuous creations and reformulations are intrinsic to world cuisines as new dishes and tastes criss-cross culinary cannons, recipes, spice patterns, and taste structures into new flavors or perhaps old dishes reinvented with novel sensations. This epic evolution of food and flavor allows gastronomies to reinvent itself at different velocities of change - some fast, some slow. In essence, the search for deliciousness is one that requires diversification, integration, modification, assimilation, combination and synthesis of ingredients offered by the natural environment.
Nutritionism, Cooking and the Paradox
Sadly, the ideology of nutrition lacks taste; or to be more precise, the ideology of nutrition has no taste; or be more critical, the ideology of nutrition doesn’t care about taste. The language of nutrition consists of vocabularies such as calories, total fat, grams of salt, micro-nutrients, macro-molecules, vitamin A, calcium, daily intake, and gluten-free. Nothing about these words indicate the qualitative aesthetics of food that is so critical to eating practices around the world. These terms are devoid of culture, taste, and flavor. Note: From a certain perspective, the absence of cultural referencing makes the science of nutrition attractive. Many may praise this paradigm as a universal way to think about food that despite what one group of people may eat versus another, nutritionism presents a paradigm that cuts across all cuisines and cultures offering scientific evidence on what’s good or bad for human health. To some, nutritionism is viewed as a unified and objective lens that links food to individual health.
However, to followers of the latest nutrition advice, the pragmatic approach is clear: When assembling a meal, forget culture, forget taste, forget what delicious means, and forget all the yummy things that people are crafting all around us - eating and cooking under the paradigm of nutrition require the most astute attention to the chemistry of food and all the protons and electrons found on the subcellular level beyond the detection of our eyes, mouths and nose. What our senses tell us doesn’t matter much, it’s what’s counted and measured at the sub-food level. Maximizing health is a jigsaw puzzle where a “healthy meal” is the sum of all nutrients that add to the 100% recommended daily intake set by the “experts.” Most of us who are not experts must rely on nutritional fact labels printed on food packaging across supermarkets. Perhaps if we study these percentages, grams, calories and servings hard enough, we might figure it all out.
Or not.
As hard as many of us try to grasp nutritional quantification of food, our taste buds will always seek flavors that satisfy and resonate with cultural deliciousness. If we ask our favorite cook (e.g. mom) or celebrity chef (e.g. Julia Childs) what meals representing 100% recommended daily intake looks like, they will probably give us a blank stare. I know mine will. Does this mean my mother and Julia had it all wrong? That they have been feeding us indiscriminate foods rather than nourishing with proper nutritional profiles? I don’t think so.
What many cooks and our favorite chefs have been showing us unconsciously or perhaps consciously in an unconscious way is that the art of cooking is in essence incompatible with the science of nutrition. Creative cooking is an act of liberation, play, freedom and expression. It is a dance of ingredients that has no set rules but is integrally tied to the socialized senses of the body and mind. This cultural fluidity of food is in contradiction with the science of nutrition. The art of nutritionism - if there’s such a thing - require the segregation, compartmentalization, and reduction of food into non-tasty building blocks that incapacitates the sensual and gastronomic engines of creative cooking.
Want to flavor what you're cooking with salt? Well how much are you exactly allowed to add given the daily recommendations, especially if you’re cooking from scratch?
Does the recipe require seasonings such as cumin, turmeric and garam masala? Do you even know what nutrients they contain and if too much will hurt you?
Making sourdough bread? How will fermentation affect the nutrients of the dough? And didn’t you read somewhere gluten is bad for you?
Ready to start making your stew? Did you total up all the fiber, fat, sodium, sugar, and whatever-else-you-should-be-counting in your raw ingredients? And once you’re done, what does a serving look like anyways?
Bought ingredients that do not have a nutritional fact label? Well how are you going to figure out what nutrients are in your farmer’s market purchases?
Nutritional cooking requires nutritional information. And in order to obtain nutritional information, scientific instruments and technologies must be available to quantify what is found in food. Additionally, the cook or chef must possess the knowledge base of dietary requirements in order to make decisions on the quantity limits of how ingredients can be assembled. This is simply not food nor cuisine as we know it in human history, hence there exists the flavor-nutrition paradox. It is very difficult to simultaneously orchestrate flavorful flavors and correct nutritional profiling when on the one hand gastronomic creativity is exploring the pleasure boundaries of a community-driven cuisine and on the other hand dietary guidelines are recommending assembling meals that amount to nonsensical tastes and flavors.
Surely there have been some tasty meals that have been assembled under the guidance of nutritional knowledge. With carefully measured ingredients, meals have been created that are yummy and also satisfy all specs of daily recommendations. But don’t be fooled, this is not a testament that yes, of course it is possible to make delicious meals under the paradigm of nutrition but rather a testament of the fact that no matter how hard “experts” try to limit what humans may or may not eat, the creative engines of gastronomy will always be at play. Regardless of the restrictions on creative expression, the desire to express will always find a way to present itself under any structured regime. Unfortunately, the delicious meals that are nutritionally engineered are in no way close to the full spectrum of culinary deliciousness that can be imagined and cooked by peoples of the world.
The Assault on the Freedom of Taste
I write this with many people in mind: My mother who cooked the tastiest meals from scratch as I was growing up, celebrity chefs I see on television innovating tastes that delight the imaginations of our taste buds, street vendors in places such as Bangkok and Taipei serving the latest Asian specialty, immigrant mothers in public housing of New York City cooking their traditional meals to nourish families and arouse nostalgia for places far away, and my college students who are forever confused yet willing to try the latest eating trend only to be told something contradictory later on. Eating for pleasure has become a moral hazard under nutritionism, which has become so apparent in the number of restrictive diets that I encounter at social gatherings in America.
The institutionalization of nutrition in health and public policy domains has sadly become an oppressive regime on the freedom of taste. It works by deploying a set of intelligence that is only intelligible to those who have studied in fields such as science, biology, chemistry, nutrition and medicine, which creates a power relation between the “experts” and the people. And because there exists the flavor-nutrition paradox where one paradigm cannot fully function in the presence of the other, what has materialized in recent American food history is a quiet assault on the freedom of taste.
The assault on the freedom of taste is an assault on democracy.
This is apparent in the ways public policies, social programs, weight-control diets, public school lunches, and commercial food industries have been created under the enterprise of nutrition. The newly prescribed configurations of food create an authoritative policing of food consumption in all places within American society. The institutionalization of this regime has become a lockdown on what the individual may or may not eat. Instead of encouraging people to tap into culinary treasures of their heritage to create community-driven meals, the paradigm of nutrition instills fear and guilt about eating anything that strays beyond the analysis of laboratory instruments, which sadly excludes almost all types of traditional eating practices around the world. What’s even more troubling is that this path of eating takes food decisions away from the sensory intelligence of people and sets up a platform for corporate companies to leverage this knowledge to profit from foods or food-like substances that meet nutritional specs. In this era of public-sanctioned “healthy” eating, more value is placed on laboratory analysis over recipes, dietitians over caretakers, health claims over terroir, nutrients over flavors, “experts” over community, and myopic meals over holistic food preparations.
Changing the Paradigm
Thomas Kuhn, an American philosopher of science, wrote about scientific paradigms in the history of science. According to Kuhn, scientific establishments arise through developmental phases that begin with a stage described as pre-science where people develop tools, instruments, measures and languages for a new establishment. Once foundations are set, the enterprise matures into normal science whereby problems are addressed by utilizing the new paradigm’s puzzle-solving techniques. If and when at some point the paradigm starts to fail at addressing problems of a particular pursuit, it sets the stage for a new paradigm to overturn the existing paradigm. Similar to political revolutions, scientific revolutions may take place when existing institutions do not adequately address the needs of a population using the operational norms of the paradigm. And similar to political revolutions, scientific revolutions usually begin with a small segment of the practicing community, which eventually expands into critical mass to overthrow the existing institutional structures.
The science of nutrition evolved out of a time when scientific discoveries made great contributions to human health. And in all fairness, nutritionism has served humanity well. Brilliant scientists who produced a vast array of nutritional knowledge have enabled the eradication of many ailments that plagued populations across the world. Knowledge about micro and macro nutrients has led to breakthroughs in understanding health problems that result from malnutrition. Thanks to the hard work of many scientists, societies now have the knowledge to eradicate diseases that result from missing nutrients in a person’s diet. Scurvy and pellagra are two examples of this.
But something went amiss when the tool to treat illnesses was also adopted as the tool to nourish the body. Treating a condition medically and nourishing the body holistically are two related but very different things. The reductionist approach to food is all too simplistic in the context of human gastronomy. In fact, I would argue that perhaps the reductionist approach is the wrong approach because as discussed the practice of gastronomy is one that requires synthesis and integration of ingredients at different proportions and rates of amalgamation. Eating is about the coming together of biological living things, not the separation, nor deconstruction.
In the end there is one unavoidable reality the ideology of nutrition has not done a good job of addressing, which is the reason for the flavor-nutrition paradox: The process of harnessing ecological endowments to produce edible living things that supply the human food chain to create delicious foods as we know it - this is a process that begins with the laws of nature and ends in the social fabric of culture.
Perhaps it’s time for a paradigm shift. A new paradigm that is inclusive and not exclusive, one that does not separate the “experts” from the everyday cook because truly the experts should be the caregivers and chefs of our communities. And one that will empower people to eat more freely, not control and confine the taste buds. But perhaps most importantly, it’s a time for a paradigm that is democratic, no one that assaults the freedom of taste.