For International Day of Women and Girls in Science
When I think about the women who shaped my understanding of food science, I don't think about the ones who made nutrition simple. I think about the ones who exposed how multifactorial nutrition really is.
Marion Nestle exposed how the food industry manipulates dietary guidelines through lobbying and "research" funding. Joan Gussow—who passed away just last month—grew her own food in her backyard for decades and wrote that "organic gummy bears" shouldn't exist because some foods simply don't deserve organic status. Frances Moore Lappé connected the hamburger on your plate to global resource depletion and democratic failure. Alvenia Fulton, a Black naturopath working in Chicago during the civil rights era, taught Dick Gregory that fasting could be both political protest and personal healing.
None of them made their careers telling women what to eat. They made their careers showing us how to think about what we eat.
This matters because we're drowning in nutrition advice that treats food like a collection of isolated variables to optimize. Protein targets. Micronutrient gaps. Inflammation scores. But these women understood something fundamental: the food matrix of our every day choices matter more than the molecule.
Nestle's PhD in molecular biology didn't lead her deeper into reductionist nutrition science—it led her to study congressional lobbying records and corporate influence on the food pyramid. She recognized that understanding what's "healthy" requires understanding who profits from that definition.
Gussow, trained in nutrition at Columbia, spent her career arguing that eaters needed to know where food came from, not just what nutrients it contained. She called it "nutritional ecology"—the radical idea that a tomato grown in your backyard in August is fundamentally different from one shipped from another hemisphere in February, even if the nutrition label reads the same.
Lappé's "Diet for a Small Planet" wasn't a diet book. It was a systems analysis that happened to include recipes. She showed that our grain-fed-meat culture isn't just inefficient—it's a symptom of economic structures that prioritize profit over nourishment, growth over sustainability.
And Fulton? She understood that "clean eating" advice meant nothing if it couldn't account for structural racism, food access, and cultural food traditions that carried meaning beyond macros. She didn't ask Black communities to abandon soul food—she asked them to reclaim the vegetable-forward practices that slavery had stolen from their ancestors.
What these women share isn't a dietary prescription. It's a methodology: start with mechanisms, account for systems, refuse to mistake correlation for causation, and never forget that food exists in political, ecological, and cultural context.
This is the opposite of what most wellness content offers women today. We're told to optimize, personalize, biohack. But optimization requires accepting the current system's constraints as fixed. These women refused.
They asked: What if the problem isn't that we're eating the wrong foods, but that we've built food systems optimized for the wrong outcomes? What if "health" can't be separated from democracy, ecology, and justice?
On International Day of Women and Girls in Science, I'm thinking about how these women practiced science—not as a tool for individual optimization, but as a method for collective liberation. They used peer-reviewed research, yes. But they also used pattern recognition across disciplines. They trusted empirical observation over corporate-funded studies. They understood that the scientific method, applied honestly, often reveals that the most important variables aren't the ones we can isolate in a lab.
The food science that matters most right now isn't happening in ingredient lists or supplement protocols. It's happening in the questions we ask before we start measuring. Questions these women taught us to ask:
- Who profits from this definition of healthy?
- What does this food system optimize for—and at whose expense?
- What are we treating as "variables" that are actually symptoms of bigger structural problems?
None of these women are household names in the way that today's wellness influencers are. But their work endures because it was grounded in something deeper than trends: a commitment to understanding food systems as they actually function, not as marketing departments wish they functioned.
That's the kind of science worth celebrating. The kind that makes complexity visible (and actionable) instead of erasing it. The kind that trusts women to think for themselves.
Nicole founded Splendid Spoon and brings research training from work in metabolic biology to questions about how we build food systems that actually serve health.