Nutrition and Tradition

The Science of Food and the Culture of Cooking
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When George de Mestral went out for a walk on that Swiss summer day in 1941, he wasn’t looking for an inspiration to invent the world’s most famous fabric fastener; the germ of the idea just came to him — literally. Those seed-bearing burrs that clung to his pants and his dog’s fur were, he saw when he came home and examined them under a microscope, covered with tiny hooks, which enabled them to cling perfectly to the loops in his pants’ fabric and the dog’s hair. And a few years later, with the help of a textile designer in France, the product now known universally as “Velcro” was born.

De Mestral’s moment of discovery may have been instantaneous and was certainly marked by great ingenuity, but the millennia-long process that developed its inspiration was neither. The marvelous hooks on the burrs that stuck to his legs were the outcome of countless accruals of evolutionary accidents (first a bump, perhaps, on the seed casing; then a little needle; and finally a microscopic hook on the end), each preserved because it happened to help the plant spread its seeds or otherwise increase its fitness. The outcome of a biological process that did not even rise to the level of true trial and error was the inspiration for one of our century’s most famous technologies; science imitated nature, but nature’s route was as unscientific as could be.

This little anecdote carries with it any number of lessons, but in an age as professedly Darwinian as ours it’s remarkable to observe the extent to which we’ve forgotten that human custom, too, in all its glorious diversity, is the product of the same sorts of selection mechanisms that gave de Mestral’s burrs their sticking power. What we refer to disparagingly as “conventional wisdom” is wisdom indeed: not the kind of wisdom, whether real or merely apparent, dreamed up within the walls of the laboratory or the ivory tower, but rather the piecemeal accumulation of folk intuitions and commonsense tricks that encourage personal and societal flourishing in ways that abstract theories and appeals to first principles very rarely can. And it is often at our peril that we allow such conventions to be displaced.

Nowhere are the dangers of ignoring the wisdom of custom more evident than in the disastrous effects of our modern worship of the science — and pseudo-science — of food. As Michael Pollan ably documents in the opening chapters of In Defense of Food (2008), the reductive ideology that he follows the Australian sociologist Gyorgy Scrinis in terming “nutritionism” — roughly, the idea that we can fully understand the nourishing effects of foods purely in terms of the qualities of their component parts — has fared much less well than tradition and convention in picking out the kinds of meals that are genuinely conducive to human health. Knowing how many fats, carbs, and calories one is consuming is all fine and good, but such knowledge is of little real use unless one knows, as we simply don’t, precisely how those components work together with our bodies and the rest of the substances they are combined with in the intricate dances that are the preparation, consumption, and digestion of food.

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John Schwenkler, "Nutrition and Tradition," The New Atlantis, Summer 2009, pp. 125-128.
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