Fiction: It’s only about what foods are good for you.
Fact: Nutrition is really about knowing where your food comes from, what your food is made of, and why you eat it (besides staying alive).
We’ve all heard of emotional eating, right? That’s when people turn to food if things go wrong in their lives, and even if things are looking up. Reducing it to mere gluttony doesn’t take everything into account. The fact is, some people have a relationship with food. They associate it with a certain level of comfort. But what makes them do that?
Though not everybody eats emotionally, the study of nutrition looks at our particular rapport with food and places it in a larger framework. It considers the social and political contexts that drive what, where and when we eat.