New Zealand Listener - May 26, 2018

LISTENER MAY 26 2018

THIS LIFE

BILL HAYES; GETTY IMAGES

The class war

in our kitchens

Healthy eating isn’t about

counting the nutrients in

your food or showing of

with your diet.

science is that it takes the nutrient

out of the context of food, the food

out of the context of diet, and the

diet out of the context of lifestyle.”

Clearly, then, food is about more

than nutrients. Is it simply the taste

enjoyment of food we’re overlooking

then? Yes and no. It’s more than that,

says former MasterChef judge Ray

McVinnie, who was also a gastron-

omy lecturer at AUT University.

“Food is not just about eating;

it’s used for all sorts of things:

sending messages, celebrating,

for drawing attention to yourself.

Basically, it’s really seen as a reflec-

tion of not only your culture, but

your character. People have a lot of

baggage when it comes to food.”

What we eat can be a very visible

display of wealth, says McVinnie.

“If you were a poor person living in

14th-century Europe, you didn’t have

a choice about drawing attention to

yourself, or showing you were special

by the food you ate. Rich people did,

and that’s how they showed they

were rich, by eating things like spices,

which cost a lot of money.”

Our traditional roast meal is a

fine example of societal aspirations,

says McVinnie, who references Tony

Simpson’s book A Distant Feast: the

Origins of New Zealand’s Cuisine.

“You can work out immediately

why the traditional New Zealand diet

was meat-based: the big excitement

on the plate was the hunk of meat.

“That came from the agricultural

workers who settled in New Zealand

and wanted an aspirational diet.

The only time they’d ever seen rich

people eat was at the local markets

once a week, where provincial farm-

ers ate what was called a ‘farmer’s

by Jennifer Bowden

NUTRITION

Marion Nestle and Ray McVinnie:

wary of conspicuous competence.

Question:

I enjoyed your advice to go ahead and enjoy eating

chocolate (Nutrition, May 19). Do you think some people

are too obsessed with healthy eating?

Answer:

I

s food the sum of its individual nutrient

parts? Vitamins, plus minerals, plus carbohy-

drates equals food. Now eat it.

If you ask me (and you did), this nutrient-

centric view of our diet-obsessed world is due

for an overhaul.

I never thought Life writer Bill Ralston and

I would be on the same page when it comes to

healthy eating advice. What with his self-confessed

“lifelong diet of fags, booze and inactivity”, we

were seemingly at opposite ends of the spectrum.

But from comments in many of his columns, I

think we both agree that nutritionism creates an

unhealthy relationship with food.

Nutritionism is an ideology that assumes it is

the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that

determine their value in our diet.

But as Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food

studies and public health at New York University,

explained to author Michael Pollan, there’s a catch:

“The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition