ABSTRACT
Editors’ Note: This chapter links with two of our thematic tabs – body and science – as well as sets a foundation for the critical examination of hegemonic nutrition, as described in the introduction. The chapter offers an expansive critique of nutritionism – Scrinis’s term coined for the nutrient-centered practice of nutrition – focusing on the taken-for-granted reductive focus on nutrients, and examining how such nutritionism has shaped the minded-bodies of contemporary consumers. The chapter helps to articulate a challenge to measurements of overweight and obesity such as the Body Mass Index as part of a broader paradigm that reduces bodily nutrition and wellbeing to a sequence of quantifiable biomarkers, and calls us to question more broadly what the body-food relationship has become.
