Doing Nutrition Differently: Critical Approaches to Diet and Dietary Intervention

‘Hegemonic nutrition’ is produced and proliferated by a wide variety of social institutions such as mainstream nutrition science, clinical nutrition as well as those less classically linked such as life science/agro-food companies, the media, family, education, religion and the law. The collective result is an approach to and practice of nutrition that alleges not only one single, clear-cut and consented-upon set of rules for ‘healthy eating,’ but also tacit criteria for determining individual fault, usually some combination of lack of education, motivation, and unwillingness to comply.
Offering a collection of critical, interdisciplinary replies and responses to the matter of ‘hegemonic nutrition’ this book presents contributions from a wide variety of perspectives; nutrition professionals and lay people, academics and activists, adults and youth, indigenous, Chicana/o, Latina/o, Environmentalist, Feminist and more. The critical commentary collectively asks for a different, more attentive, and more holistic practice of nutrition. Most importantly, this volume demonstrates how this ‘new’ nutrition is actually already being performed in small ways across the American continent. In doing so, the volume empowers diverse knowledges, histories, and practices of nutrition that have been marginalized, re-casts the objectives of dietary intervention, and most broadly, attempts to revolutionize the way that nutrition is done.