Eating is a political act.

Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most commonly afflicts the gardener.

Cooking for yourself is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from the food scientists and food processors, and to guarantee you're eating real food rather than edible foodlike substances, with their unhealthy oils, high-fructose corn syrup, and surfeit of salt.

In the end I'm still a writer. I'm still a journalist, and my first responsibility is to my readers. That's where I have to draw the line.

Stop eating before you're full.

Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of your milk.

The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the "-ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's still exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather--all pervasive and so virtually impossible to escape. Still, we can try.