Welcome! Today we’re just getting up to speed with course logistics. There are a couple things to do just to make sure erverything is wired up for our month together. Please do them ASAP, but make sure these are done BEFORE WEDNESDAY. Normally stuff is due the day it appears on the syllabus, but we can take an extra day to get up to speed.
This chapter discusses the quantificaiton of dietary advice and the implications of such a change, which we dive into in week 3. The reason we start with it is because she calls direct attention to “the rhetoric of science”. Her point is talking about diet is never just about the “facts”—if there even is such a thing (and there isn’t)—but also about how they are discussed. Language itself is not just a reporter of knowedlge, but a direct shaper of it.
Her focus is on the language of quantification, but it can help us think about HOW WE TALK ABOUT HEALTH AND DIET. I want to set up this drame of analysis so we can be thinking about rhetoric of diet and health as we move through the course (even if the first few weeks don’t have anything about quantification).
Today we cover medical and dietary thinking from ancient Greece and Rome. Some of the medical thinking seems a bit bizarre to our modern sensibilities, but in terms of dietary advice, there is a remarkable consistency over the last 2000 years.
We explore the contours of medieval medicine, providing important context for understanding the long history of diet and health advice. While this course focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries, it’s crucial to recognize that physicians have been debating what constitutes healthy food and good nutrition for a very long time. This week’s lectures establish the foundation of the Western medical tradition as it pertains to diet, and helps us understand the close coupling between diet and culture.
The theme for next few days is how physicians beginning the 1700s started promoting dietary advice and their expertise in different ways than they did previously. We also see the early ties between dietary advice, moral authority, a common sense, a constellation of ideas we’ll come back to repeatedly in very different historical contexts.
You’ll find it’s actually not bad. But it’s still REALLY reductive (meaning it misses a lot). Your job is to skim the Shapin article for yourself and compare the impression you get from the actual text (even if skimming) compared to the AI summary.
After taking even a single upper-level history course, you should have a sense of what historians actually do. Today tries to show that working with historical sources is difficult! Like in any profession, good historians make the stories seem like they naturally emerge from historical sources. But when you go back at look at the original material—as we’re doing today—you immediately understand how much work and INTERPRETATION goes into even the most straightforward history. Nothing at all is truly obvious. There are no stories waiting to be told.
The dietary advice we just read was directed primarily toward the upper classes. By the early 1800s, however, dietary advice was increasingly directed at the emerging middle class. Physicians and moral reformers saw diets changing as a result of industrialization and urbanization as a distinct societal ill.
Over the next few days we look at how moral and dietary advice became even more tightly coupled throughout the 1800s. Later in the course, we’ll see how that link has persisted through today.
Same kind of drill as with Cheyne, except a century later and a VERY different kind of diet text to consider.
There has been no bigger shift in dietary advice than starting to understand health in terms of numbers, averages, and scales. This week examines some of the earliest developments in quantification of dietary knowledge and advice. We confront the implications of this paradigm shift each day as we see nutritional information labels, and watch-like computers that count our steps each day.
On p.64 Mudry concludes that “after the development of the science of nutrition, moral terms like “good” and “bad” became enumerated and objectified in discussions of food.”
What does this mean? Do you agree? How much are you convinced by her argument and evidence? I’m asking for your opinion here, but it should be carefully and clearly informed by the reading, and put in the context of other course readings.
Today we look at food reformers in the early 20th century, particularly Ellen Richards, with an emphasis on the links between diet and morality. Describe the link between home economics, nutrition, and immigration. How and why did these come to intersect as according to Biltekoff (and Mudry)?
Our goal with this text is to understand the tone of this work that was so often referenced in our readings this week. Skim but don’t totally skip the science details.
These two days we focus on a few diet books written between 1918 and 1922. They are all COMPLETELY different in their approach, style, and the way their authors try to establish their expertise.
Our goal is to understand how the same cultural context could yield such different texts and how they collectively illustrate several important facets of the history of diet/health/nutrition around the time they were written.
For each text, I’ve indicated specific pages you should read fairly carefully. IN ADDITION, carefully examine the table of contents and randomly sample pages or small sections throughout the book to get a feel for the text as a whole—like what is and what isn’t addressed in the text.
Lulu Hunt Peters, Diet and Health: With Key to the Calories (1918). Read the first 3.5 chapters, pp. 11–39 (these are tiny pages and the writing is rather breezy compared to what we’re used to).
John Harvey Kellogg, The New Dietetics, what to Eat and how: A Guide to Scientific Feeding in Health and Disease (1921). Read the Preface (pp. 5–7); skim the Table of Contents (pp. 8–21); read pp. 25–37.
Elmer McCollum, The Newer Knowledge of Nutrition (1922). Read the preface (xii–ix), skim the Table of Contents, and read 1–13.
Consider how these texts fit into the course narrative so far.
Fat gets a bad rap. Why is this? We’ve looked at the morality of dietary advice in several ways already, and one aspect that has persisted is the idea that a large body represents a moral deficiency. This week examines how the idea of fat and fat bodies became something to avoid during the early 20th century and how the legacy of vitamins and micronutrients came to define “proper” nourishment and bodily.
For this exercise, bullet points are 1-3 complete sentences that clearly express a complete idea, not cryptic phrases that no one but you can understand.
A. F. La Berge, “How the Ideology of Low Fat Conquered America,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 63.2 (2007): 139–77. If you’re interested in the popular discourse of low-fat diets (mostly 1970+, but with some earlier history, too), it’s got a lot of great information and shows how popular diet advice columns (like Jane Brody’s in the New York Times) become sources in which both outdated and cutting-edge nutritional research mingle together.
Let’s be clear: this article DOES NOT try to argue that personal choice is not a cause of obesity. But it does try to suggest other reasons that also matter. How does this course help explain WHY the author wrote this? According to the author, how should “science” be used to help understand obesity?
Dietary villains: gluten, lectins, fodmops
How can we really evaluate whether any diet could be useful? Is there a “right” diet that we just haven’t found? Have we known it all along?
This chapter is about EVALUATING dietary advice and dietary CRITIQUE. As you know from its overall goals, this course is all about learning to think critically about dietary advice and expertise in general, using history to gain a broader perspective. Today we turn our attention from evaluating the rhetoric of dietary advice to evaluating the rhetoric of dietary critique.
CRITIQUE (do NOT SUMMARIZE) the article for today: What does it do well? How does it disappoint? Describe how its use and effectiveness in using history. Can you tell what’s missing (in general, not a specific topic)?
TO REPEAT: Don’t get sidetracked by analyzing or critiquing the diet that is the subject of the article. Whether a meat-only diet is a good idea (spoiler: no!) is not the point here. CRITIQUE THE ARTICLE, NOT THE DIET.
Just a basic reading quiz for today that MUST BE DONE BEFORE MIDNIGHT on TUESDAY; afterwards, check out the quiz explanation / BIG POINTS video.
Post your final course reflection.