He is not at all alone in approaching food production through the romantic lenses of nature and the past. Combine that with basic puritanical fears of pleasure and the monotonic fallacy that if something is impure it must be totally avoided, and almost any popular dietary approach can be explained.

Foods are either natural or unnatural. They are good or bad. Bad foods harm you, and good foods cleanse you. Bad foods are sinfully delicious, or guilty pleasures. Good foods are whole, real, clean, and natural. Bad foods are fake, unnatural, and processed.

The terms we use reflect idiosyncratic dietary faiths, the religion scholar Alan Levinovitz explains in his new book The Gluten Lie, in which he examines why people tend to put moral and religious lenses on food terminology. Much of people’s relationships to food can be explained by religious patterns of thought.Our words are often more philosophical than scientific. And our words inform approaches to eating, and overall well-being, in deeply consequential ways.

What happens, then, if you reject these words and frames entirely?

Levinovitz recounts a confrontation at a farmer’s market, where he asked a vendor whether her juice was processed. She impressed upon him that processing fruit into juice doesn’t result in processed food, that only corporations are capable of making processed food.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that he confronted the juice vendor. He probably laughed out loud, too, and not in a mean-spirited way. Levinovitz—who not long ago took a faculty position at James Madison University, after finishing his doctoral work at the University of Chicago—is a student of logic and argument. He delights in challenging beliefs. And that is what he accomplishes in The Gluten Lie, which dismantles popular arguments for categorically avoiding fat, sugar, salt, and, maybe most contentiously, gluten.

When Levinovitz was studying in China, during the era when everyone in the U.S. was terrified of monosodium glutamate (MSG), he talked to local people who were wholly unconcerned. MSG was everywhere, and it was fine. It was simply, Levinovitz writes in the book, “a sodium salt first extracted from seaweed by Japanese scientists in 1908, and a staple seasoning in the cuisine of long-lived East Asians. But health-conscious Americans knew better.” In the states, MSG was an interloper.

Through study of people like Daoist monks who practiced ritualistic avoidance of grains—long before the recent best-selling books Grain Brain and Wheat Belly told fantastical tales of the havoc grains wreak on the body—Levinovitz came to think that maybe we can account for a lot of food beliefs by applying mythical, superstitious patterns of thinking. And it turned out, he was right.

“I was shocked to learn that people thought sugar was bad in the late 1700s,” he said, still appearing genuinely shocked as he told me when we met recently in D.C. “Basically as soon as it was introduced, people said it was bad.”

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