Beyond Science and Scientism: Learning to Hear Through the Noise
In the past few weeks, I’ve been exploring some of the deeper dynamics beneath our food and health debates. First, I wrote about why food is so polarizing: how our strongest disagreements are often less about facts than about identity, trust, and belonging. Then I turned to food as a mirror of the metacrisis, a way to see how overlapping breakdowns in health, ecosystems, and democracy are not separate problems, but entangled expressions of a deeper unraveling.
This week, I want to add another layer: the difference between science and scientism, a distinction that helps explain why conversations about nutrition, agriculture, and public health so often break down. When we conflate science with certainty, or dismiss other ways of knowing as illegitimate, we lose the very spirit of inquiry that makes science valuable in the first place.
Science is a process that is open-ended, humble, provisional. It is about inquiry, observation, revision, and dialogue. It invites multiple ways of knowing, including Indigenous sciences grounded in generations of careful observation and relationship with ecosystems.
Scientism, by contrast, is an ideology. It treats science not as a method, but as an unquestionable authority. It insists on certainty, collapses complexity, and often dismisses cultural knowledge, lived experience, or traditional practices as irrelevant. Where science is a practice of curiosity, scientism is a posture of arrogance.
This distinction matters because so many of our fiercest food and health debates are actually fights about trust, and whether what’s being presented as “science” is science at all. MAHA-aligned voices distrust public health institutions that have been influenced by corporate interests or political expediency. They hear “trust the science” as scientism that is top-down, dismissive, and compromised. Some public health professionals, meanwhile, feel under siege. From their perspective, decades of peer-reviewed research on nutrition, vaccines, and toxicology are being rejected in favor of influencers, anecdotes, or conspiracy. In their frustration, they sometimes double down on certainty, slipping into scientism themselves.
When we talk across divides about food and health, what people hear often isn’t what the speaker intended. Raising concerns about GMOs can be dismissed as being “anti-science” or indifferent to global hunger. Pointing out the health harms of ultra-processed foods may be heard as shaming parents for their choices. Warnings about pesticides can feel like accusations that farmers are poisoning children.
These mishearings don’t happen because people aren’t paying attention. They happen because food is never just about nutrients or chemicals. It is bound up with identity, culture, survival, memory, and belonging. A rancher in Wyoming, a pediatrician in Boston, and a climate activist in Oakland are all speaking from different lived realities and different truths.
And yet, beneath the clashes, there is shared ground. Parents across the spectrum want their kids to grow up healthy. Farmers want to make a living without being trapped in cycles of debt or dependence on volatile markets. Communities want clean water, safe food, and opportunities for the next generation. Most of us, if asked directly, agree that corporations should not be able to mislead the public or capture regulators.
What gets lost when conversations harden into caricature is the practice of science itself: curiosity, humility, openness to revision. The willingness to sit together, ask questions, and learn from both rigorous research and lived experience. If we could practice that spirit, we might discover that our disagreements often hold the seeds of deeper alignment than the soundbites suggest.
Take a few examples:
Calls to cut back on beef consumption to reduce emissions can sound like an attack on ranchers’ livelihoods and culture. Yet many people share concern for both farmer viability and environmental stability. The shared question is how to ensure ranchers and farmers can thrive while reducing ecological harm.
Raising questions about GMOs can be heard as hostility toward science or indifference to hunger. But both sides care about food security and feeding people well. The real issue is how to ensure farmers have choices and innovation doesn’t come at the expense of ecological resilience.
Suggesting that subsidies should reward regenerative practices can feel like an attempt to bankrupt conventional farmers. But almost everyone agrees farmers need stability and fair support. The question is how to design policies that reward stewardship while keeping farms economically viable.
Critiques of corporate consolidation can sound like attacks on free markets. Yet distrust of monopolies runs across ideologies. Communities want fair markets where small and mid-sized farms and businesses can compete.
Pointing to the harms of sugar or food dyes often gets heard as criticism of parents. But parents everywhere want their children to be healthy. The real challenge lies in reshaping food environments, not questioning parental love.
Expanding plant-based options is often caricatured as moral condemnation of meat eaters. Yet what most people want are healthy, tasty, affordable choices. The shared question becomes how to expand options without shaming traditions or livelihoods.
Food is polarizing not because we disagree on whether our children should be healthy, our farmers resilient, or our ecosystems thriving. It polarizes because we interpret each other through filters of fear and assumption. Recovering the practice of science as inquiry, humility, and dialogue could help us sit with these differences long enough to recognize common ground.
We can then shift our questions from “whose science do you trust?” to:
How do we create conditions where evidence can be held with humility?
How do we make space for multiple ways of knowing without sliding into magical thinking or denial of basic biology?
How do we build enough trust to inquire together, rather than weaponize “facts” against each other?
If we can do that, food might become not just a site of division, but one of our most powerful places of reconnection. Because food is where science and lived reality intersect most directly, in our bodies, our ecosystems, and our daily bread.
