{"id":1514,"date":"2012-02-15T09:17:17","date_gmt":"2012-02-15T14:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gastronomyatbu.wordpress.com\/?p=1514"},"modified":"2018-03-28T17:53:18","modified_gmt":"2018-03-28T21:53:18","slug":"a-dietitians-digestion-of-gastronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/2012\/02\/15\/a-dietitians-digestion-of-gastronomy\/","title":{"rendered":"A Dietitian\u2019s Digestion of Gastronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Emily Gelsomin<\/p>\n

\u201cIs this good for me<\/em>?\u201d \u00a0As a dietitian, I get this question quite often. Yet, such simple sounding inquiries are never straightforward.\u00a0 Are you trying to lose weight?\u00a0 Improve your irritable bowel syndrome?\u00a0 Run a marathon?\u00a0 It all depends.\u00a0 Nutrition can easily become a complex science of food dissection.\u00a0 Red ripe tomatoes become a way to protect your eyesight (lycopene!).\u00a0 But not if you have heartburn.\u00a0 Aged blue cheese becomes a way to clog your arteries (saturated fat!).\u00a0 But not if you need more calcium.\u00a0 Things only get maddeningly more complicated from here once you remember that we are humans, not machines.\u00a0 Humans\u2014no less\u2014that eat food in social settings, not vacuums.\u00a0 It is also here where things get increasingly more interesting; and it is here where the gastronomy program picks up the crumbs of science and transforms food into language.<\/p>\n

\"Emily<\/a>A fork and knife have never been, ahem, lonely in my presence.\u00a0 Similarly, foods like cheese\u2014touted health perils and all\u2014have always charmed me.\u00a0 But now I\u2019ve become charmed by the likes of Elizabeth David and Emile Zola.\u00a0 I\u2019ve also become a bit more cynical about the power of food thanks to Karl Marx and Pierre Bourdieu.\u00a0 As for Brillat-Savarin? Well, let\u2019s just say he and his aphorisms have caused some renewed anxiety on the science of hosting dinner parties.<\/p>\n

It is precisely here where gastronomy\u2014and, debatably, Brillat-Savarin\u2014shines, straddling the line between science and art.\u00a0 Gastronomy transforms food into a holistic language.\u00a0 A language for which there are many dialects.\u00a0 While cuisines can offer unique cultural expressions, we all use food to communicate.\u00a0 We use it to assert agency, apathy, love, and loneliness.\u00a0 It is here that gastronomy makes the very question of \u201cgood for me\u201d insanely more complex.<\/p>\n

The question of whether blue cheese is \u201cgood for\u201d something is thus no longer a debate solely on its medical merits.\u00a0 Where did the cheese come from?\u00a0 What are its food miles?\u00a0 How were the cows treated?\u00a0 Were they soothed with jazz music?\u00a0 Were they given growth hormones?\u00a0 Did the dairy farmer receive a fair price for it?\u00a0 Are you feeding it to someone special (love!)?\u00a0 Are you eating your feelings (grad school is ruining my social life!)? Are you demonstrating your wine pairing savvy (Sauternes!)?\u00a0 Or your hip, counter-culture indifference (PBR!)?\u00a0 What makes this program so enriching is that it opens the oven door up to a banquet of questions. \u201cIs this good for me?\u201d becomes \u201cis this good for my being, my trajectory, my gender, my planet?\u201d\u00a0 What I\u2019m learning is that such questions are not only good for dietitians: they are good for everyone.\u00a0 Which has made digesting gastronomy invaluable, each and every bite.<\/p>\n

Emily Gelsomin is a registered dietitian, gastronomy student, and lover of all things food-related.\u00a0 She also writes a food blog called A Plum By Any Other Name<\/a>, which touches on the joys of cooking and \u2013<\/em>\u00a0with any luck \u2013 offers a little comfort when the pot of life boils over.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Emily Gelsomin \u201cIs this good for me?\u201d \u00a0As a dietitian, I get this question quite often. Yet, such simple sounding inquiries are never straightforward.\u00a0 Are you trying to lose weight?\u00a0 Improve your irritable bowel syndrome?\u00a0 Run a marathon?\u00a0 It all depends.\u00a0 Nutrition can easily become a complex science of food dissection.\u00a0 Red ripe tomatoes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14625,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8492,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514\/revisions\/8492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}