Culinary Coda: Ending the Diet WARS

Part I: How Nutritionism Won the War on Hunger and Deficiency Diseases — and Lost the Peace

“The gods are jealous and bring low that which is exalted.”—Herodotus

It’s time to end the diet wars, not because one faction prevailed, but because the premises and strategies that won its early victories no longer hold. To understand why, one must observe it not through the lens of science—but Greek tragedy. It failed because of hubris. We declared war on history and culture—on nature herself—and nature exacted her awful retribution. Like many wars, it started innocuously and well-intentioned, the Vietnam of health & performance (The Second Indochina War [1], to be precise, and in case Professor Turley is reading), a legitimate war with a legitimate goal—feeding hungry, fatigued workers—with a legitimate strategy for victory—nutritionism, divorcing food from its broader historical and cultural contexts to identify those constituent parts that could best nourish the masses and bring victory.

The war’s opening barrage near the end of the nineteenth century was identifying, isolating, and quantifying whatever was causing the hunger and fatigue, under-nourishment, hypocalorism—not having enough food or energy—an important distinction from the misnourishment of deficiency diseases, not having enough of specific nutrients, a subsequent battle in the war’s chronology. Measurement and quantification were the natural strategies against hypocalorism. Counting was the zeitgeist of the era. Frederick Winslow Taylor was timing and standardizing factory labor into units. Across the pond in London, Charles Booth was tabulating and mapping poverty. There was so much data in the 1880 U.S. census that its input and analysis were not completed before the next census cycle in 1890, which prompted Herman Hollerith’s punch cards—direct technological ancestor of IBM’s mainframes. In the evolution of data, this is analogous to when the first multicellular organisms appeared, a precondition for the Cambrian explosion of big data, machine learning, generative AI, and now agentic AI a century later.

Whenceforth came Wilbur Olin Atwater’s directive from the U.S. Department of Agriculture pursuant to the Hatch Act of 1887¹ to determine the energy value of foods and the caloric requirements of American laborers. Armed with the respiration calorimeter refined from the German physiological tradition of Carl von Voit and Max Rubner and guided by the thermodynamic logic of the industrial age—that engines require fuel—he set out to identify the fuel that powered the human engine. He succeeded, identifying the calorie as the fundamental unit of energy and reducing protein, carbohydrate, and fat into interchangeable units—four calories per gram for protein and carbohydrate, nine for fat—transforming hunger for the first time in history from a failure of piety or leadership into an arithmetic problem.

There were several other forces working to alleviate widespread hunger too, chief among them Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch’s Haber–Bosch process (1909–1913), which enabled the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen at industrial scale and the mass production of synthetic fertilizer, dramatically increasing crop yields. Thus began the inexorable decline of hypocalorism. So successful was that expansion of caloric supply that it would, in time, give rise to the opposite pathology—hypercalorism and obesity—but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

Although hypocalorism persists to this day, albeit a shadow of its former self, it was soon overtaken as the primary nutritional concern by misnourishment—deficiency diseases not of too few calories, but of too few specific nutrients. The notion that certain foods could cure certain diseases was not new. British naval surgeon James Lind had given scurvy-stricken sailors citrus fruits—genesis of the epithet “limeys”—before the discovery of vitamin C. Christiaan Eijkman had observed that prisoners in the Dutch East Indies who ate brown rice were spared from the beriberi that afflicted those eating milled white rice before the discovery of thiamine. Edward Mellanby had found that children with bowed legs improved when given cod liver oil before the discovery of vitamin D. Joseph Goldberger had observed that orphans and prisoners in the American South recovered from pellagra when their corn-based rations were diversified before the discovery of niacin (or they could have just treated the corn with limewater, as the Aztecs had done for millennia, making the niacin in corn bioavailable in what remains a staple of the Latin American diet to this day: hominy). What was new was not the observation that food could heal, but the ambition to isolate the exact molecules responsible and weaponize the cure.

Ready to meet the call, the army of chemists that sustained the Great War needed a new fight, and deficiency diseases supplied it. The First World War was a war of chemistry. Synthetic nitrogen, mentioned previously, fed nations and powered munitions, while Chaim Weizmann’s acetone fermentation process supplied the British Admiralty with explosive cordite (in exchange for the Balfour Declaration, which set in motion the creation of the State of Israel). With knowledge, laboratories, and factories intact, those chemists trained their sights on the new enemy, and within two decades they were able to isolate and synthesize vitamin C, thiamine, vitamin D, and niacin, turning once rampant epidemics into obscure academic curiosa.

Enter World War II (WWII) and the ethos of complete U.S. mobilization for victory. Everything had to be optimized and rationed: rubber, steel, gasoline, nylon—and nutrition. Soldiers were no longer just fed—they were engineered. Nutritionism was no longer just about public health—it was about national security. The Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA) were formalized in 1941 under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, not as lifestyle advice, but as wartime necessity—to ensure that troops, factory workers, and civilians alike met the minimum nutrient requirements for wartime production and combat. When foods as they were were insufficient, they were fortified: thiamine and niacin to flour, vitamin D to milk, iodine to salt. Reductive nutritionism achieved its theoretical apex in 1945 when University of Chicago economist George Stigler distilled all of food and nutrition into a single linear programming problem—the exact combination and proportion of foods that would provide the minimum adequate nutrition at the minimum cost. Linear programming is the same technique that would usher in a revolution in operations research and manufacturing efficiency soon after the war when George Dantzig’s simplex algorithm (1947) and the availability of computers made widespread application feasible.

The scientific mastery that had won the war, splitting the atom and birthing linear programming, had done little to alleviate the drudgery of domestic life, however. As late as 1940, only 44% of American households owned a refrigerator, just 40% owned a washing machine, and approximately 21% still didn’t have electric lighting [2]. Fortunately for them, FDR’s “Arsenal of Democracy”—which at peak production had turned out a bomber an hour—did not demobilize and wander out to pasture after the war. It remained intact and directed the machinery of total warfare inward, able and eager to supply infinite convenience to a depression- and war-weary America with an infinite appetite to receive it.

The WWII transition in corporate America wasn’t just an expansion in scale—but a metamorphosis in kind. The modern corporation had already begun replacing the “invisible hand” of market coordination with the visible hand of professional management, but the war expanded, entrenched, and normalized that managerial revolution in a few short years [3]. Production wasn’t only enlarged but systematized: vertically integrated, mathematically optimized, statistically monitored, and hierarchically coordinated across entire supply chains. Those mathematical and statistical techniques were often the same ones developed during the war and responsible for its victory, often deployed in the new corporate battlefront by the same men who developed and deployed them during the war, men such as “Bodycount Bob” McNamara of later Vietnam infamy, one of the Whiz-Kids from the United States Army Air Forces Statistical Control unit and post-war CEO of Ford Motor Company.

Wartime logic and know-how fused government and industry into a permanent architecture of planning, forecasting, logistics, and capital allocation, leaving behind not a temporary surge in output but a reengineered industrial order [4]—John Kenneth Galbraith’s “technostructure” [5]. The firms that had mastered metals, fabrics, rubber, chemicals, and munitions production at intercontinental scale did not revert to prewar merchant capitalism. The multi-division (M-form) corporate behemoths that emerged from the war were not the monolines that entered it. The difference was not just scale and scope but objectives and operating logic. Stability replaced profit maximization. Planning replaced price signals. Continuous throughput replaced transactional output. Internal capital markets replaced banks and external ones. And in the changing post-war political economy, scale, scope, and stability were becoming a matter of both competitive advantage in markets and existential survival in politics.

Enter the Cold War. Food wasn’t just a weapon against deprivation at home. It was an instrument of diplomacy abroad. Under Public Law 480, the United States provided wheat and rice to the developing world on concessional terms, often payable in their local currencies, stabilizing fragile governments, undercutting communist insurgencies, and binding developing nations to American agricultural science and supply chains. It wasn’t charity but instead part of the broader “hearts and minds” campaign to defeat communism—as nothing says goodwill to impoverished and hungry peoples like a big burlap sack of food stamped with the American flag. In a two-for-one deal, America also rid herself of the pesky domestic problem of low grain prices and surpluses, unforeseen consequences of New Deal agricultural policies [6].

Those forces, a repurposed war machine, corporate scaling and reordering, and the twin enemies of under-indulgence and communism, combined to produce the cornucopia of now commonplace products and innovations, some developed in the post-war period and some developed during the war but now domesticated for civilian consumption: spray-dried eggs, dehydrated soups, blast freezing, refrigerated railcars, refrigerated trucking fleets, bulk grain elevators, export grain terminals, corrugated shipping cartons, disposable paperboard containers, plastic squeeze bottles, aerosol food sprays, emulsifiers, industrial shortening, synthetic flavorings, phosphate additives, continuous slaughter lines, centralized meatpacking, hybrid seeds, feedlots, anhydrous ammonia applicators, chemical herbicides, national food advertising, franchised restaurants, supermarket chains, drive-ins, drive-throughs, distribution warehouses, industrial bakeries, high-speed bottling lines, frozen seafood plants, powdered drink mixes, boxed cake mixes, instant potato flakes, canned pasta, aluminum beverage cans, pull-tab tops, milk cartons, fish sticks, centralized dairy plants, cereal extrusion cookers, soybean crushing plants, vegetable oil refineries [7].

Then came the fall. Nutritionism had vanquished hunger and deficiency diseases in what would be its last victories, and the corporate scaling and reordering that had brought unprecedented abundance was about to metastasize. Instead of providing and persuading through its traditional channels, providing through grocery stores and restaurants, persuading through print and broadcast media, it was now set to capture and integrate all of society—cradle to grave—through coordination and control of all major U.S. institutions—the agribusiness-industrial complex. Comfort and convenience would morph into pathological excess—obesity and its associated disorders—an enemy for which nutritionism wasn’t the right weapon and the one that was wielded anyway—generals fighting the last war.

Special interest influence in politics wasn’t new, of course. It might be the world’s second-oldest profession: Greek pottery-shard ballots that all had the same candidate’s name written in the same handwriting, Roman patrons providing grain for influence, Medieval guilds writing municipal law. What changed was institutionalization and scale. Gone were the days of corporations “donating” grocery bags full of $100 bills to LBJ’s campaign just a few years prior [8], as campaign finance reform obviated the need for such subterfuge. Reforms didn’t just legalize—they transformed. Influence was no longer external, one-off transactions, a favor here, a vote there. It was now institutionalized, embedded, permanent: lobbying firms, public affairs divisions of corporations, industry trade associations, political action committees [9-11]. With the takeover of government complete, corporations began to insinuate themselves into all of civil society: foundations, think tanks, academic grants and chairs, sponsored conferences, public-private advisory panels, and industry-funded research bodies modeled after earlier efforts such as The Council for Tobacco Research, and it was there that agribusiness first borrowed from the tobacco industry’s playbook by funding favorable research and recruiting credentialed experts, emphasizing uncertainty and downplaying consensus about emerging health risks—manufacturing doubt [12].

That level of integration allowed agribusiness to move from external influence to internal control: schools, hospitals, prisons, military bases, stadiums, corporate cafeterias. Vending machines proliferated. Corporations contracted with schools for “pouring rights,” exclusive agreements to provide and sell soda and other ultra-processed foods (UPFs), replete with sales targets, quotas, and incentive payments. Schools offered not just captive bodies but captive minds. Channel One News, launched in 1989, delivered “educational” programming into classrooms in exchange for schools receiving free televisions and equipment—along with mandatory viewing of embedded soft drink commercials. Schools punished students for advocating competing soft drinks, up to and including suspension [13] in violation of the First Amendment.

The products and their ease of delivery were changing too. Taste was no longer the sole means of increasing demand. Borrowing again from the tobacco industry’s playbook for making cigarettes more addictive, food was engineered for hyperpalatability and repeat consumption: calibrated salt, sugar, and fat ratios; texture engineering; flavor enhancement; portion optimization [13]. Whether “addiction” is too strong a word is debatable, but those scientists in white coats in laboratories were a clear departure in kind from their predecessors: chefs in aprons in test kitchens.

In addition to the ubiquitous UPFs in vending machines and cafeterias, the culinary landscape of both household and commerce was changing too. Microwaves dropped the time-cost of calorie consumption, and the refined fats and carbohydrates required to make those microwave meals and snacks shelf-stable and palatable increased their caloric density. Gas stations and fast-food restaurants realized that they had fixed-cost assets that were being underutilized: real estate that required rent and mortgage payments regardless of whether that real estate was generating revenue or sitting idle. In addition to gas, gas stations began to sell food and drink. In addition to lunch and dinner, fast-food restaurants began to sell breakfast. Food was now omnipresent and portions exploded. In his magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence, cultural historian Jacques Barzun noted the rise of “no eating” signs in libraries and museums toward the end of the twentieth century. In a cultural history covering the Modern Era, approximately 500 years, he thought the advent of “no eating” signs worth noting because the logistics of eating in such places had theretofore made it impractical and the thought of doing so had been outright foolish [14].

The bloom was coming off the nutritionism rose abroad too, as goodwill faded and was soon replaced by resentment and epidemic. The hybrid rice strains that the United States tried to export to Vietnam as part of its modernization campaign didn’t account for local customs and traditional agricultural practices—didn’t taste good either. In addition to the failure to win hearts and minds, add bellies. That animosity was shared by her former colonial master across a continent too, as France’s José Bové would strangle the icon of U.S. agribusiness imperialism in its crib by dismantling a McDonald’s still under construction. Instead of being labeled as a misfit or vandal, he was lionized as a national treasure, going on to serve in the French Parliament and be received by several European heads of state. It was too little too late, though, as UPFs had already established their beachhead and obesity patterns outside the United States would begin to mirror those within.

With the belligerents and their strategies entrenched, the next phase was predictable: obesity, cancer, and cardiometabolic disease skyrocketed. Nutritionism countered with the only arrow in its quiver and agribusiness—now ingrained in government and civil society—worked in stealth to secure blamelessness and ensure survival. Partly because it had worked before, partly because they didn’t know how to do anything else, the logic of nutritionism was reflexively wielded against the new foe: observe which foods appear to prevent or alleviate the pathology, isolate the responsible molecules, and weaponize the cure—except this time it didn’t work. Foods with vitamin E appeared to prevent atherosclerosis, but vitamin E supplementation did not [15]—and might actually increase all-cause mortality at high doses [16]. Foods with beta-carotene appeared to prevent cancer, but randomized controlled experiments with isolated beta-carotene made it worse [17]—so much so that at least one experimental trial had to be stopped [18].

In the apogee of nutritionism hubris, cardiovascular disease (CVD) was reduced to a plumbing problem: CVD occurs when the pipes clog or burst; ergo, reduce the pressure in the pipes and reduce the pipe-clogging substrate, cholesterol. Reduce blood pressure by reducing salt consumption. Reduce cholesterol by reducing cholesterol consumption, because like causes like, supposedly, and then when that house of eggshells collapses, train the ire of establishment nutritionism on cholesterol boogeyman number two, saturated fat. The result? The United States now spends over $200 billion a year to treat CVD and CVD remains a leading cause of death.

Having co-opted every legacy institution that mattered, including regulators, agribusiness now invented new ones—astroturf organizations—agribusiness fronts masquerading as grassroots efforts, and then staged a fictitious debate with itself—both agitating for policy reform and writing it. As agitator, the Coca-Cola-funded Global Energy Balance Network blamed inactivity and not calories as the culprit, and the industry-funded Center for Consumer Freedom demonized “food police” as a threat to individual freedom. As regulator, it heeded the cries of its agitator self by drafting its own complaints into the ever-devolving food plate/pyramid/trapezoid/whatevers.

Which brings us to the present. Nutritionism is now flawed and untenable as a strategy because it seeks to cure what it caused with more of what caused it—pharmakon—poison and cure. Spot-feeding specific nutrients—often synthetic and isolated—was sufficient for hunger and deficiency diseases, but became a catalyst for chronic ones. Efficiency in production did more than provide overabundance. It dismantled ancestral modes and patterns of grocery shopping, food preparation, communal ceremony and eating. Divorcing food from its dietary, historical, and cultural contexts produced not only diseases of the body but of the mind and spirit—orthorexia, the neuroses of eating born out of endless false dietary panics and panaceas. Each day brings a new short-term or over-interpreted observational epidemiological study proclaiming a new “superfood,” which a celebrity influencer then operationalizes with the pagan diet cult du jour: vegan, vegetarian, paleo, carnivore, Atkins, keto, DASH, Whole30, Mediterranean, Green Mediterranean. The result is the thricefold paradox of the American diet: we stress about food the most, enjoy it the least, and have the worst health outcomes.

The decadence in nutritionism is a microcosm of Barzun’s decadence in the Western world. His decadence is not sudden collapse but exhaustion of possibilities: motion without movement, innovation without progress, proliferation without synthesis, recombination of exhausted forms, experimentation without conviction—action growing more and more feverish not because of any strong conviction—but because of a lack of any conviction. The solution to nutritionism is not experimentation and incremental refinement but extirpation and renaissance, not a new diet—but an end to diets altogether and a new path forward…

[1] W. S. Turley, The Second Indochina War: A Concise Political and Military History, Second Edition ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.

[2] R. J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

[3] A. D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977.

[4] M. R. Wilson, Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

[5] J. K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State, First Princeton ed. (The James Madison Library in American Politics). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.

[6] N. Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

[7] E. Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

[8] R. A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume IV, First Vintage Books edition ed. (The Years of Lyndon Johnson). New York: Vintage Books, 2013.

[9] K. Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, First paperback edition ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

[10] L. Drutman, The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

[11] R. G. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

[12] N. Oreskes and E. M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, 1st U.S. ed. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

[13] M. Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, Revised and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition ed. (California Studies in Food and Culture). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

[14] J. Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.

[15] E. Lonn et al., “Effects of Long-term Vitamin E Supplementation on Cardiovascular Events and Cancer: A Randomized Controlled Trial,” JAMA, vol. 293, no. 11, pp. 1338-1347, 2005, doi: https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.293.11.1338.

[16] E. R. Miller, R. Pastor-Barriuso, D. Dalal, R. A. Riemersma, L. J. Appel, and E. Guallar, “Meta-Analysis: High-Dosage Vitamin E Supplementation May Increase All-Cause Mortality,” Annals of Internal Medicine, vol. 142, no. 1, pp. 37-46, 2005/01/04 2005, doi: 10.7326/0003-4819-142-1-200501040-00110.

[17] B. C. C. P. S. G. Alpha-Tocopherol, “The Effect of Vitamin E and Beta Carotene on the Incidence of Lung Cancer and Other Cancers in Male Smokers,” The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 330, no. 15, pp. 1029-1035, 1994, doi: https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199404143301501.

[18] G. E. Goodman et al., “The Beta-Carotene and Retinol Efficacy Trial: Incidence of Lung Cancer and Cardiovascular Disease Mortality During 6-Year Follow-up After Stopping β-Carotene and Retinol Supplements,” Journal of the National Cancer Institute, vol. 96, no. 23, pp. 1743-1750, 2004, doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/djh320.

1. The Hatch Act of 1897 is not to be confused with the later, more famous, Act (1939) of the same name that restricted the political activities of Federal workers.