"Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food"
About this Quote
Technocrats love to pretend the body is a spreadsheet: protein here, micronutrients there, calories as clean little units of control. Mary Catherine Bateson punctures that fantasy with a single, stubbornly ordinary word: food. It’s not anti-science; it’s a warning about what gets lost when science is filtered through industry, policy, and self-help culture.
The intent is corrective. Nutrition talk often abstracts eating into an optimization problem, as if humans were interchangeable engines that can be tuned with the right inputs. Bateson pushes back on reductionism: meals arrive bundled with texture, memory, ritual, cost, labor, and social meaning. You don’t “consume vitamin C”; you drink orange juice someone squeezed, or you eat fruit you can afford, or you skip it because your shift ends at midnight and the only option is a drive-thru.
The subtext is also political. When we speak in nutrients, we invite solutions that are easy to patent, fortify, and market: powders, bars, supplements, “functional” products that promise health without changing the conditions that shape diets. “Food” drags the conversation back to agriculture, cooking skills, time poverty, and cultural belonging. It implies that advice divorced from kitchens and communities is advice designed for an imaginary person.
Context matters: Bateson, an anthropologist steeped in systems thinking and human ecology, is reminding us that bodies live inside cultures. The line works because it’s deceptively simple, almost childish, and therefore hard to argue with. It turns the expert gaze back on itself: if your framework can’t account for actual eating, it isn’t realism, it’s ideology dressed as data.
The intent is corrective. Nutrition talk often abstracts eating into an optimization problem, as if humans were interchangeable engines that can be tuned with the right inputs. Bateson pushes back on reductionism: meals arrive bundled with texture, memory, ritual, cost, labor, and social meaning. You don’t “consume vitamin C”; you drink orange juice someone squeezed, or you eat fruit you can afford, or you skip it because your shift ends at midnight and the only option is a drive-thru.
The subtext is also political. When we speak in nutrients, we invite solutions that are easy to patent, fortify, and market: powders, bars, supplements, “functional” products that promise health without changing the conditions that shape diets. “Food” drags the conversation back to agriculture, cooking skills, time poverty, and cultural belonging. It implies that advice divorced from kitchens and communities is advice designed for an imaginary person.
Context matters: Bateson, an anthropologist steeped in systems thinking and human ecology, is reminding us that bodies live inside cultures. The line works because it’s deceptively simple, almost childish, and therefore hard to argue with. It turns the expert gaze back on itself: if your framework can’t account for actual eating, it isn’t realism, it’s ideology dressed as data.
Quote Details
| Topic | Food |
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