This paper invites readers to consider how the ideals, concepts, and language of nutrition justice may be incorporated into the everyday practice of clinical dietitians whose work is often carried out within large, conservative, primary care institutions. How might clinical dietitians address the nutritional injustices that bring people to their practice, when practitioners are constrained by the limits of current diagnostic language, as well as the exigencies of their workplaces. In the first part of this paper, I draw on Cadieux and Slocum’s work on food justice to develop a conceptual framework for nutrition justice. I assert that a justice-oriented understanding of nutrition redresses inequities built in to the biomedicalization of nutrition and health, and seeks to trouble by whom and how these are defined. In the second part of this paper, I draw on the conceptual framework of nutrition justice to develop a politicized language framework that articulates nutrition problems as the outcome of nutritional injustices rather than individuals’ deficits of knowledge, willingness to change, or available resources. This language framework serves as a counterpoint to the current and widely accepted clinical language tool, the Nutrition Care Process Terminology, that exemplifies biomedicalized understandings of nutrition and health. Together, I propose that the conceptual and language frameworks I develop in this paper work together to foster what Croom and Kortegast (2018) call “critical professional praxis” within dietetics.
Medical nutrition therapy planning