Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the discursive landscape of nutrition and human microbiome science, with attention to how knowledge about microbes is expressed in and through concerns about the modern diet and how dietary 'rules' are changing in response to conceptualizing bodies as multi-species ecologies.

Paper long abstract:

Human microbiome science presents a paradigm shift in the biological sciences and popular culture - away from thinking of microbes as largely pathogenic and toward the commensal work of microorganisms (Paxson, 2008) - which has produced new ways of understanding the human body, and enlisted different metaphors, narratives, and conceptual framings to explain the relationship between food, humans, and microbes. This paper takes a critical nutrition studies perspective to recognize the ways that scientific knowledge about food is not neutral, natural, or objective; rather, particular biomedical conceptualizations of the body produce forms of dietary advice aligned with and bounded by that particular understanding of what the body is, what food does, and how this impacts health.

I examine the discursive landscape of nutrition and human microbiome science with a focus on the ways in which knowledge of microbes is expressed through concerns about the modern diet, and how dietary 'rules' are changing in response to conceptualizing bodies as multi-species ecologies. In particular, this paper challenges a dominant thread of human microbiome research in which scientists warn that "western guts" are in trouble. How is the promise of microbiome science shaping contemporary dietary advice, and how have concerns about diet framed human microbiome research? What different forms of social relations are possible in thinking of our microbiome as an 'organ' or 'garden'?