With the rise of transnational corporations that produce and sell food on the world market, our foodways are being constrained by an ever more precise but one-sided form of cost-benefit reckoning. There is a common misunderstanding of optimization theories which will now be discussed. To say that a foodway represents an optimization of costs and benefits is not to say that it is an optimal foodway. Optimization is not the same as optimal. The differences will be discussed by through the examples of diet restrictions of pregnant women in India, and the case of food aversion and a disease of the eye which develops from a deficiency of vitamin A. At the heart of this discussion is the tension between two perspectives, one which views dietary deficiency as a result of ignorance or irrationality, and the other which considers whether regional preferences are rooted in pragmatic and situational realities.
