I once saw a post that said “Eat organic food, or, as your grandparents called it, food.” Only a century ago, nourishing food did not require prefixes like real, whole-grain, pastured, free-range, wild, or grass-fed. That’s what food was. What is happening to the food supply? As you have probably surmised by now, I spend lots of time thinking about the differences between real food and manufactured calories.

One strategy I use is to avoid products invented in the 20th century, like cottonseed oil, or high-fructose corn syrup. Also, I stay away from products that tell me when to use them, like breakfast cereals, lunch meats, and TV dinners. No one needs to tell you when to eat a banana, or scrambled eggs, or oatmeal, or guacamole, or chicken noodle soup.

The author Michael Pollan avoids what he calls “processed, food-like items.” He says not to eat anything your great-grandparents [or ancestors] would not have eaten, but that you should feel free to eat anything you can make yourself. He also observes that items with nutritional advice on their package tend not to be real food.

Then I started thinking about the Deaf community’s use of a capital D. To be deaf is to have significant hearing loss. But “To be Deaf with a capital D,” says Julie Eldredge, a Deaf teacher of Deaf culture at Brigham Young University, “is to believe first and foremost that deafness is not a disability…. Sound and speech aren’t the goal; communication is.” You might hear someone say “Big D” and “little d,” where little d refers to the physical aspect of deafness, and Big D refers to a member of the Deaf Community that subscribes to and espouses Deaf values.

But this post is about eating. So what does D/deafness have to do with nutrition?

Imagine that “food with a lower-case f” refers to absolutely anything you can eat, procure, or purchase at the supermarket. Ultraprocessed items with long ingredient lists and many versions of sugar. Products that tell you when to eat them. High-fructose corn syrup. Contrast that with capital-F Food, which refers exclusively to nutrient-rich items from Earth’s biomass. While “Food” has provided nutrition to all its resident beings, including humans, from time immemorial, “food” includes all the manufactured items that did not exist prior to the past century.

Grammatically speaking, “food” is a common noun and “Food” is a proper noun. Mrs. Strzeszewski, my third-grade teacher, described a common noun as a person, place, or thing. A proper noun, however, is more than that. A proper noun is a unique entity. I propose this: Food is the nutrient-dense group of biomass we have eaten for the past ten thousand years, if not more. Turtle beans and barley, goats, milk, and trout. But not maltodextrin, cottonseed oil, or xanthan gum. Because those are not Food.