Food SenseChristopher GardnerAllen & Unwin (UK), 15 October Simon Element (US), 13 October If you are one of the tens of millions of people who watched the award-winning Netflix documentary series You Are What You Eat, you’re already somewhat familiar with Christopher Gardner’s work. The show followed four pairs of identical twins as they participated in an experiment – a real one, not a TV one – to test the health effects of switching from a standard US diet to a vegan one. Unsurprisingly, the twins who went vegan for eight weeks saw health improvements across the board.
That’s what nutrition scientists do – they run experiments on the health benefits (or otherwise) of diets, foods and individual nutrients. But Gardner isn’t a cookie-cutter nutrition scientist. Yes, he is a distinguished researcher at Stanford University in California, which certainly qualifies him to write a book like Food Sense.
But he brings other things to the table, too. He started his academic life as a philosophy major, worked in restaurants for six years and is an accomplished chef. This peripatetic CV gives him a refreshingly different take on the question in the subtitle of his book: What to eat and why.
Gardner found that food-adjacent issues were actually strong motivators of positive dietary change If you’re expecting a prescriptive answer to that question, you won’t find it here. Gardner’s stated aim is to teach us how to think about food, not tell us what to eat. That obviously includes understanding which foods and diets are healthy, but also the other factors that drive our food choices: pleasure, values and culture.
The result is a holistic picture that goes above and beyond the narrow questions that dominate nutrition science. Out of methodological necessity, scientists ask constrained questions such as “does consuming X at a dose of Y for a duration Z help this specific population to improve A or B?” X might be a nutrient such as sugar, or a specific food such as red meat. But that isn’t how humans eat in the real world.
We don’t just consume nutrients and specific foods in isolation; we eat meals and snacks, and choose what to eat and what not to eat for a variety of shifting reasons. We indulge sometimes, and generally find it hard to stick to diets. In any case, people’s food choices are rarely dictated by discoveries about health harms or benefits.
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