"The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the "-ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's still exerting its hold on your culture. In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put in another way: Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts.
This brings us to another unexamined assumption of nutritionism: that the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health. [This assumption] is not shared by all cultures and, further, that the experience of these other cultures suggests that, paradoxically, regarding food as being about things other than bodily health - like pleasure, say, or sociality or identity - makes people no less healthy; indeed, there's some reason to believe it may make them more healthy." - Page 28
I couldn't agree more
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