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Created: July 19, 2002
Latest Update: July 19, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Nutrition and the Arrogance of Knowing

Teaching Essay Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individaul Authors, July 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay was prompted by a news report on NBC-TV by Chip Reid: Seeking Sound Nutrition Advice Scroll down a couple of inches to find a printed version of Chip Reid's report. You can find information on the Registered Dietitian (RD) at The American Dietetic Association, and locate one within your own geographic area..

This topic has become increasingly important as news has continued to break over the medical field's uncertainty over dietary issues in weight lost. Even though we are being constantly bombarded by messages that Americans as a people are overweight and must cut down on our nutritional intake. The current dilemma is an understanding of which "diet" plans are correct, those that demand the elimination of fat in our diet, or those that insist that we must lower our carbohydrate intake. At this site you can find a nutritional specialist with registered dietitian training in your locla geographic area.

Now, how does all this fit into peace and social justice? Well, figring out what to eat and how much to live the "good life" is increasingly important in the 21st Century as we learn that the faith we had in the food pyramid all these years might have been a prime example of the arrogance of knowing on the part of the medical field. As in every other field, we are learning that we cannot afford to be arrogant about what we are so sure we know, for tomorrow we may get more information that tells we were wrong in the first place. The more we actually do know, the more we recognize the need to tolerate the opinions of the other, for there is no absolute truth that we are capable of discerning within the natural limits of human intelligence as it presently exists.

Jonathan Lear makes this point in Open-Minded, which for me serves always as a reminder that I must never be closed to new information, never be arrogant in the security of being sure that "I know," for ambiguity is part of our condition, just like our inability, as yet, to prove that God exists. We can believe. But we cannot prove, for there is always the need to interpret the evidence, and that interpretation is always ultimately that of the individual. We are responsible, or as Bakhtin says, answerable, for our interpretations.

Freire calls this arrogance of knowing a "circle of certainty." And reminds us that once we are certain that we "know" what students "must" learn, like the food pyramid, we discover that our knowledge wasn't so secure after all, and that we should better have listened to the "other," who might have had something of significance to say in his alternate validity claim. He also reminds us that once we indulge in such arrogance we have ceased to be effective as teachers, or as he experienced it, as revolutionaries. Freire insisted that the Brazilian peasants he led in the revolution against oppression had the ability to realize self-determination, and, that as the "other" they fully deserved our respect for that self-determination. The revolutionary who ceases to respect the dignity and right to decide of the "other" has ceased to be a revolutionary. (See also: "Knowingness" and Forms of Oppression

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