Bite Sized Nutrition

This was a question I got during a screening interview for an internship and it completely caught me off guard. I was half way through my master’s in nutrition and I had talked about my philosophy about food with so many of my peers, but what was my nutrition philosophy?

The answer I came up with on the spot, more or less, is what I still believe today (even after more than a year of thinking about this question). I told the interviewer I usually followed a Michael Pollen approach to nutrition. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” But I also think that food goes so far beyond simply nourishing our bodies. There’s culture and mood and our lives to consider when we think about eating. I have gone through months and even years of my life where I haven’t eaten meat, but every six months or so I would eat a cheeseburger because I was craving a cheeseburger. I eat chocolate pretty much every day and some may call it an addiction but it makes me happy. I also have the idea that every dinner should have a vegetable ingrained in my head from my mother.

There’s a balance when we think about food that gets lost in all of the conflicting opinions about what we “should” be eating. It can be hard to articulate that eating your grandmother’s chocolate chip cookies healthy for the soul even if you shouldn’t be eating cookies every day.

We can sometimes feel compelled to put a label on our diet or put the foods we eat into categories, and sure science is trying to do that too. But the discipline it takes to follow a singular diet or only eat “good” foods is exhausting.

So when considering my nutrition philosophy, I’ve decided to put equal weight on eating food the nourishes my body and honoring the foods that nourish my soul.