Let's see how well he's doing after a year of living off the stuff. There's probably more complexity to food than breaking it up into vitamins, minerals, and calories.
A fairly stereotypical way to being an organic chemistry class is to start out with traditional vitalism and pivot into the historical first complete synthesis of urea, of all things...
I wasn't referring to vitalism so much as our ability to capture all of the components of food (given that we don't fully understand the effects of micro-levels of nutrients in our body) and determine exactly what we need (given that people vary and not everyone needs the same things in the same proportions).
So, instead of saying the complexity of food, I should have said the complexity of the entire system.
There's a certain arrogance within scientific/rational thinking that everything can be broken up in to parts and understood that way. Life is more complex than that.
