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Some words and standards can indicate quality. "Pasture Eggs" for example, are more expensive but also a better product. Also, going to a farmer's market and

Some words and standards can indicate quality. "Pasture Eggs" for example, are more expensive but also a better product. Also, going to a farmer's market and buying from producers directly instead of a supermarket is one way to shop for quality. I wouldn't want to use nutritionism as the definition of quality, because so far nutritionism has been too reductionist to capture the full picture. There's a wide variety of micronutrients that turn out to be useful, but are easily depleted from the soil in a monoculture. Are you getting your Vitamin K12? Selenium? Zinc? Copper? Choline? Are the animals you eat getting theirs?

maerF0x0 11y ago
While I agree with the idea that nutritionism is reductionist of complex systems, I see price per nutrition to be an improved model over price per lb. Maybe once upon a time price per lb made sense because not everyone could get enough lbs. But now we can get plenty of lbs, but not everyone can get enough nutrition. On the nutritionism note, I also think we'll increasingly improve the model to a point where something like Soylent v315 will actually be superior nutritionally to any complex diet that a human could eat. Right now its so simple that you can do better with a chicken salad, but someday soylent may encompass phytonutrients, chemical supplements, nanorobots, pre/probiotics, factors based on your genetics, medicines prescribed etc etc... IMO the complexity of nutrition will eventually outstrip the typical human's ability (or will) to eat very complex "meals".