Food control or food democracy? Re-engaging nutrition with society and the environment Tim Lang* Centre for Food Policy, City University, Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB, UK Abstract Objective: To explore the terms on which nutrition should engage with the global challenges ahead. Design: Analysis of current orientation of nutrition and policy. Result: Nutrition faces four conceptual problems. The first is that nutrition has fissured into two broad but divergent directions. One is biologically reductionist, now to the genome; the other sees nutrition as located in social processes, now also requiring an understanding of the physical environment. As a result, nutrition means different things to different people. The second problem is a misunderstanding of the relationship between evidence, policy and practice, assuming that policy is informed by evidence, when there is much evidence to the contrary. The third problem is that nutrition is generally blind to the environment despite the geo-spatial crisis over food supply, which will determine who eats what, when and how. How can we ask people to eat fish when fish stocks are collapsing, or to eat wisely if water shortage dominates or climate change weakens food security? The fourth problem is that, in today’s consumerist and supermarketised world, excess choice plus information overload may be nutrition’s problem, not solution. Conclusion: Nutrition science needs to re-engage with society and the environment. The alternative is, at best, to produce an individualised approach to public health or, at worst, to produce brilliant science but be policy-irrelevant. Keywords Food policy Environment Evidence Paradigms Life science Nutrition science, like all sciences, does not live in a vacuum; science is framed by context. Nutrition sits in a triangle of food policy-making, fought over by competing forces: the state, food supply chain and civil society (see Fig. 1). Forces within each side of this triangle also compete. Currently, within the supply chain, retailers hold power. State involvement, meanwhile, is fragmenting between different levels of governance: local, national, regional and international. Within civil society, there are tensions over who speaks for civil society: ‘ordinary’ consumers through polls (but who asks the questions?) or the weekly shopping purchase (the ‘consumer votes’ theory) 1 ? Or ‘champions’ and partisan activists such as civil society non-government organisations? The future of nutrition requires some clarity about the terrain, players, purpose and options for which nutritional strategy and policy are to be formulated. This paper explores this challenge, identifying four problems about the role of nutrition. Discussion Problem 1: Nutrition or nutritions? In recent years, nutrition science has gradually, but not necessarily irrevocably, split. As a result, nutrition means different things to different people and it might be counter-productive to try to corral all nutrition into one perspective. There is no ‘real’ or one nutritional canon; there are nutritions. Nutrition science from its earliest formulation has pictured itself as a progressive force, a tool for improvement and social good. Over the last two centuries, nutrition researchers have attempted to system- atise knowledge that previously was cultural, which is therefore relativist and lacking universality. It moved from ‘folk’ knowledge to ‘science’. Today nutrition is highly fragmented intellectually. It ranges across social nutrition (studying the interface of nutrition and society; for instance, differences between social groups), nutritional epidemiology (plotting the contribution of diet to diseases), biochemistry (exploring the biochemical interaction of nutrients and physiology), sports nutrition (optimising performance), animal nutri- tion (ditto) and psychophysiology (including the study of attitudes and food choice), and more. Nutrition, like other sciences, pulls apart at the margins. So can we speak meaningfully of nutrition? Two broad directions or paradigms for nutrition are discernible today. One is biologically reductionist and with an interest in nutrients as key factors in individually determined health, the better understanding of which will q The Author 2005 *Corresponding author: Email t.lang@city.ac.uk Public Health Nutrition: 8(6A), 730–737 DOI: 10.1079/PHN2005772