by Edward Milford
28. June 2010 10:12
The Royal Society of Arts in London is a very active organisation with an extensive series of free lunchtime talks. The well-known writer and thinker on food issues, Michael Pollan, spoke there earlier this week during a visit to the UK. He’s a very engaging speaker with a refreshingly down to earth and understandable take on food and its role in our society.
He talks about how ‘nutritionism’ has taken over food science. This is essentially the view that food is only made up of the nutrients that it contains, and that all that we need to do is to understand how these components work to understand food. Food is thus simply a delivery service for nutrients. He argues that this has several inevitable consequences. As nutrients can’t be seen, only scientists who study these in a lab become able to talk about them. It sets up a view of nutrients as either good or bad, and a view that eating is only about health. In particular, he argues that nutritionism has failed – modifications of the Western diet have led to a much less healthy population in the last 20 years.
However, it was Pollan’s conclusion that struck me as having a parallel with publishing, albeit a tenuous one. He argues that another consequence of the nutritionist approach is that we forget the other , wider functions of food such as taste, its role in society when we eat together, and how it shapes cultures.
Much of the debate about electronic publishing focuses purely on the information in books and newspapers; the assumption is that if we can get this information in some other way that obviates the need for a book or a newspaper. Yet, as a publisher, I argue the book is more than just the information in it; it too is a physical object that if well made adds to the experience; books contribute towards culture. Above all though, I think the experience of reading is often about more than extracting information, and is about reflecting on it, collecting it at the right speed and in a logical order, and also about the location, the time and the mood of the activity. I think we ignore these at our peril, and a nutritionist approach to publishing could be as short-sighted as it is to food.
