The schedule indicated on this page is always accurate for the upcoming week, but some details beyond that may be tweaked a bit. If you keep this page open in your browser tab, make sure you refresh at least each week (every day is best, just in case!). There will never be any significant changes to the workload or general assignment timing.
This first week gives us two things we’ll use all month: a way to analyze dietary advice, and a long historical baseline. We start with a modern historian asking how the language of nutrition shapes what we think food is and calling attention to the “rhetoric of science”–that is, how we talk about diet and health, not just the science itself.
Then we go back to ancient and premodern medicine, where diet was central to health long before calories, vitamins, or nutrition labels existed. The goal is not to memorize old medical advice. The goal is to notice that food advice has always been about bodies, habits, authority, evidence, and culture. If some of the older readings feel strange, great! Strange is useful. It helps us see assumptions that are usually invisible in our own world.
Welcome! Today is mostly about getting oriented. Since this is a compressed online course, the first job is simply to make sure everything is wired up and that you know where to find things. Please do the introductory work as soon as you can, but make sure it is done BEFORE WEDNESDAY. Normally assignments are due the day they appear on the syllabus, but we have a little extra room at the beginning to get settled.
The short reading for today previews the basic attitude of the course: curiosity plus skepticism. We are not trying to become nutrition experts in four weeks. We are learning how to ask better historical questions about health advice, expertise, and trust. It covers a lot of themes and some sources we read, so it’s a great preview of the course.
Take the Syllabus Quiz. It’s not really a test, but just a way to confirm and highlight important logistics of the course to avoid problems later.
Just as a quick way to get to know each other a tiny bit, please post a brief hello (name, major, favorite food), and let us know your opinion on the question, ‘Do we need a definition of healthy?’ Please have an INFORMED opinion based on the readings for the first day. Your post should show you’ve put some effort into those, but don’t summarize them—use them to justify your own opinion. Aim for ~150 words or so.
Remember all readings are in the Zotero library. To access them, you need to be logged into Zotero.org and visit our group library. If you can’t see the PDFs, you either 1) are not logged in, or 2) never requested to join the library. Instructions are on the syllabus home page.
This is probably the most abstract reading of the first week, so don’t worry if it feels a little slippery. Jessica Mudry argues that modern nutrition advice often tries to make eating scientific by turning food into numbers: calories, grams, percentages, serving sizes, nutrients, daily values, risk scores, and recommended limits. We’ll return to these ideas in week 3, but her bigger point is even more important.
We’re reading this chapter because she draws attention to the “rhetoric of science.” By that she means we have to pay attention not just to what dietary advice says, but how it says it. In other words, talking about diet is never just about the “facts.” It is also about how those facts are framed, simplified, measured, and made persuasive. Language does not simply report knowledge; it helps shape what counts as knowledge in the first place.
Today we go way back to ancient Greece and Rome because it helps us see how durable some basic diet-health questions are. What kind of body do we have? What makes it healthy or sick? Who knows enough to give advice? What makes that advice believable?
Our primary source Galen (died c. 215 CE), a famous physician who wrote about medicine so much and so thoroughly, he was the main medical authority in Western culture for over 1500 years. His work may seem strange at first, but don’t read him as simply “wrong science.” Read him as someone working inside a coherent medical world. His details about foods, bodies, qualities, and balance show us what counted as evidence. The way he tries to convince readers he knows more than other physicians shows how expertise was created in his day, and still is in some ways.
Today extends the world we began with Galen. The details change across ancient, medieval, and Renaissance medicine, but the big picture remains surprisingly stable: diet is a way to manage the body, respond to environment, maintain balance, and cultivate a certain kind of life.
As you skim Albala, don’t get stuck trying to master every term. Instead, watch how food sits at the intersection of medicine and culture. What counts as healthy depends not only on ideas about bodies, but also on climate, class, habit, taste, and common sense.
Continuity and Change Using Albala’s text, what struck you as a few things that remained constant from Galen’s writing through Early Modern Europe, and what things seemed a bit different?
The ‘Fact vs. Fiction’ Challenge Many people have stereotypes about premodern medicine being ‘barbaric’ or ‘superstitious.’ Based on the visuals, pick one image that surprised you or challenged your assumptions. What does this specific artifact tell you about the intellectual life of the Middle Ages?
The ‘Modern Analog’ Reflection The video explains how ‘regimens of health’ were the most popular medical texts. If you were writing a ‘Regimen of Health’ manual for college students today, what are three daily routines or dietary rules you would include to maintain balance? What would premodern university students do?
This week is about trust. Beginning in the 1700s, physicians and reformers promoted dietary advice in ways that look more familiar to us than Galen does: they appealed to experience, social status, common sense, moral discipline, personal testimony, and claims about modern life gone wrong.
The big shift to watch is not simply from “old medicine” to “new medicine.” It is a shift in audience and persuasion. Diet advice moves through elite medical networks, printed books, reform movements, religious culture, and middle-class anxieties. By the end of the week, you should be able to explain how an author makes dietary advice feel authoritative even when the evidence looks very different from modern science.
After taking even a single upper-level history course, you should have a sense of what historians actually do. The next two days show that working with historical sources is difficult! Like in any profession, good historians can make stories seem like they naturally emerge from historical sources. Today we ‘read’ a long but informative article about an 18th-century physician. But when you go back and look at the original material—as we do on Tuesday—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.
Steven Shapin, “Trusting George Cheyne,” 263–97. This article is clear and informative, but way longer than it needs with too much detail. (yay academic writing!) So, let’s use AI to help us sort it out. And help us learn how to use AI as a reading partner. Shapin’s article can feel dense, but the basic question is wonderfully simple: why did people trust this person? We’re going to use AI to help us understand how he answers that question and the evidence he uses.
Use the AI Reading Investigation guide for this assignment. We’ll use AI in a deliberately investigative way. It can help you get oriented, clarify concepts, generate possible interpretations, and identify passages to reread. But it also flattens the texture of historical argument. Your job is to use it to ask better questions, then verify its claims against Shapin’s text.
Work through the AI Reading Investigation guide, then post a short response that includes:
Today we read Cheyne himself. Do not worry about understanding every sentence perfectly. Read for voice, posture, and rhetorical effect. How does he want to sound? Reasonable? Learned? Pious? Practical? Scientific? All of the above? How does he establish his expertise?
This looks like a lot, but you are not reading five books! You are sampling a historical landscape. Pick TWO texts and read them like artifacts: what problems do they think diet solves, who are they talking to, and what kind of authority are they trying to project?
You should use AI to get oriented, but do not let it do the comparison for you. Before asking AI, spend a few minutes with the title page, preface/introduction, table of contents, and several sampled pages so you have your own first impression. Then ask AI for a basic overview of the two texts you chose: what each author seems to argue, what audience each text addresses, and what kind of dietary authority each author projects. Treat that answer as a rough second opinion, not as reliable interpretation.
Then go back to the original texts yourself. Find specific examples that confirm, complicate, or challenge the AI overview. Pay special attention to tone, style, voice, audience, and the kinds of evidence the authors use. These are exactly the things AI often smooths out. For a walk-through, check out the Primary Source Comparison Methods Video.
Compare TWO texts from above. Your post should explain both what AI helped you notice and what you saw for yourself in the original sources (as the video drones on about).
In your response, include:
Guiding questions:
Today we meet Sylvester Graham, whose name survives most obviously in Graham crackers, although the crackers in your pantry (with sugar, cinnamon, etc) are not exactly what he had in mind. Graham matters because he turns diet into a broad program for moral, bodily, and social reform.
As you read Shprintzen, focus on Graham and his context. The earlier religious material matters because it shows that Graham did not invent moral vegetarianism from nothing. But the key question is how Graham made diet reform feel urgent, authoritative, and practical in a moment of social anxiety.
Same kind of drill as with Cheyne, except a century later and a VERY different kind of diet text to consider.
Now that you have Shprintzen’s context, read Graham himself for style and persuasion. He is not just giving food tips. He is offering a way to understand modern life, bodily discipline, moral danger, and reform. Compare him to Cheyne not because they are identical, but because both show how dietary authority depends on much more than “facts.”
This week is about one of the biggest changes in the history of dietary advice: food becomes numerical. We already got a preview of this in the first few days of class, and now we look at the shift in historical context. Calories, nutrients, averages, standards, tables, and labels became the way to make eating and health more precise and scientific. They also make food choices easier to compare, regulate, moralize, and argue about.
The big question is not whether numbers are good or bad. Numbers are incredibly useful! But they are not neutral magic. This week, keep asking what quantification makes easier to see, what it hides, and how moral judgments about food and bodies survive inside scientific language.
Today, stay focused on the mechanics: what gets counted, measured, or standardized when eating becomes “scientific,” and what that leaves out. We’ll get to the moral and political stakes of all this tomorrow, when we pair Mudry with Biltekoff.
Yesterday Mudry showed how turning eating into numbers makes it feel objective and neutral. Today we add an important complication: that supposedly neutral science is doing moral and political work. Biltekoff is not saying science is fake or useless. She is showing how ideas about proper eating often carry ideas about proper citizenship, proper bodies, proper families, and proper behavior.
This should feel connected to Graham, Cheyne, and even Galen. The language changes, but diet remains a way to talk about self-control, responsibility, and social order.
Our goal today is to investigate for ourselves a work that was often referenced in our readings this week. Skim but don’t totally skip the science details. The detail is obviously not important per se but we should think about why it’s there. Also notice what’s NOT in this article as pointed out by our readings—there’s nothing about the subjective meanings of food. Taste, tradition, comfort are entirely unimportant in comparison to maximizing nutritive and economic value.
Today food enters the laboratory. Atwater’s article is not exciting because every scientific detail matters; it is exciting because of what the details do rhetorically. They make food look measurable, comparable, and manageable. As you read, ask what kind of world becomes possible when food is treated as fuel.
We focus on a few diet books written between 1918 and 1922. It’s a small window of time, but they are all COMPLETELY different in their approach, style, and the way their authors try to establish their expertise.
Peters, Kellogg, and McCollum are writing in the same era, but they sound like they live in different dietary universes. That’s the point. Scientific nutrition did not produce one single style of advice. It created new tools that different authors used for different audiences, anxieties, and promises.
Want more context before (or while) you read? This background and context guide walks through each author’s institutional base, audience, and claim to expertise, and gives you a quick-reference table to orient yourself. It won’t do the comparing for you, but it’s there if you want a head start.
For each text, I’ve indicated specific pages you should read fairly carefully. IN ADDITION, as we did before, 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. Read for patterns: tone, audience, evidence, promises, fears, and the way each author turns nutrition into practical advice.
Lulu Hunt Peters, Diet and Health: With Key to the Calories (1918). Read the first 3.5 chapters, pp. 11–39. Note these are tiny pages and the writing is rather breezy compared to what we’re used to, so it goes fast.
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 (ix–xii), skim the Table of Contents, and read 1–13.
As with last week, you should use AI to help you get oriented. This time, though, you’re in charge of the interrogation: come up with your own prompts rather than relying on the generic “compare these texts” request. Try asking AI to compare rhetorical strategies, surface assumptions about bodies or evidence, explain unfamiliar terms, or identify what each author seems most anxious about. Then go back to the primary sources yourself to confirm, complicate, or correct what AI told you.
This reflection is more substantial than a regular reading reflection because it asks you to compare three primary sources and connect them to course themes. As with last week, you ARE NOT reading these books in their entirety. This time I’ve provided more specific pages, but you should also develop a sense of each text as a whole. Use the skimming strategies outlined in the video from last week to find revealing parts that help you understand why the text is the way it is.
Your post should include:
To help you build that comparison, pick ONE OR TWO of these lenses to organize it around (you don’t need to answer all four):
No reading for today! Just images. We’re going to use AI to connect some images in a slide deck and use the course to critique / elaborate.
First, check out this slide deck.
Ask AI to write a sentence captioning and connecting each slide to the next (and give it the URL to the slides), so you end up with something like a bulleted list of sentences, one for each slide.
Then go back through the actual slides yourself with the AI captions. Your job is to notice what’s actually on each slide, visually or textually, related to the course so far that didn’t make it into the AI narrative.
Your post should include the following:
NOTE: you DO NOT need to post your AI captions themselves. They are just the basis for your analysis.
In the final week, we put the course to work on modern diet culture. By now, we’ve seen recurring patterns: experts make claims, evidence gets simplified, bodies become moral symbols, and dietary advice turns into common sense. This week asks what those patterns look like in the recent past and the present: thinness, low-fat advice, obesity science, government nutrition guidance, and AI-generated diet advice.
Our goal is not to decide once and for all what everyone should eat. Instead, we’re asking how different kinds of advice become believable, how science gets translated for ordinary people, and what a historical perspective helps us notice in modern arguments about food and health.
This is the day when body size becomes impossible to treat as just a medical question. Veit helps us see thinness as a cultural achievement: modern, disciplined, efficient, and moral. That should sound familiar by now. The older themes of balance, moderation, self-control, and moralized eating have not disappeared; they have moved into new scientific and social settings.
As you read, keep asking how a body becomes evidence. Evidence of what? Health? Character? Modernity? Failure? That question will matter for the rest of the week.
Low-fat advice did not become powerful simply because scientists discovered something and everyone calmly followed the evidence. It became powerful because institutions, media, experts, food companies, and ordinary habits helped make it feel like common sense.
This is a long article, so read strategically. The most important issue is not remembering every event in the history of low-fat advice. The important issue is understanding how a scientific claim becomes a cultural default.
This article is a LONG (and dry, TBH) description of the history and rationale low-fat diets. There’s very helpful description, but not much analysis of how we should understand those things in the context of the broad history of diet and health. That’s where you come in!
You are NOT meant to read the whole thing carefully. You should skim/use AI as much as you need to—but do so iteratively and critically, not just lazily. Your challenge—what you should write about in your reflection—is to explain how we can understand how / why the “ideology of low fat” unfolded as it did USING THE COURSE SO FAR.
Berreby is useful because he challenges one of the most durable stories in diet culture: that body weight is mainly a story about individual choice. Whether or not you find every part of the argument convincing, read it as a critique of the assumptions built into modern obesity science.
This article also helps us think about what history can and cannot do. History does not replace science, but it can show why some scientific questions feel obvious, why others get ignored, and why certain explanations become morally satisfying.
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 how there are other reasons that also matter, and that there are potentially structural causes of ill-health that can be easily overlooked in modern research paradigms.
How does this course and the long history of diet and health help explain WHY the author wrote this? How should “science” be used to help understand obesity? Have you encountered other situations (not about diet) where personal choice was maybe more constrained than acknowledged?
Today we move from uncertainty to official advice. Aschwanden explains why nutrition knowledge is hard to produce and easy to overstate. The federal materials show what happens next: uncertain, contested, and evolving science still has to be translated into public guidance, labels, serving sizes, daily values, and claims about health.
Government guidelines and food labels may look boring, but they are some of the most powerful diet texts we encounter. They turn scientific debates into everyday language. As you read, ask what gets clarified, what gets simplified, and what kinds of authority are built into official advice.
Today is about what happens when uncertain nutrition knowledge has to become public advice.
Using the government publications for today, identify ONE SPECIFIC way official dietary advice has changed since 1980—a recommendation that reversed, a claim that disappeared or got added, a category that shifted, a number that changed.
Then use the COURSE (not just this reading) to explain the implicit rationale behind that change. What was really driving it: new science? industry pressure? a new cultural anxiety or a new ‘food villain’? Think back to how low-fat ideology, moralized eating, or quantification worked in earlier readings—does the same pattern show up here?
Finally, the harder question: Aschwanden argues nutrition science is genuinely uncertain, contested, and constantly revised. But each edition of the federal guidelines gets published as if it were definitive, not provisional. How do you reconcile those two things? Is that confidence dishonest, useful, necessary, or something else? Back up your answer with a specific examples.
Post your Complicate the Obvious assignment before midnight tonight. It’s ~600 words and works as a final reflection warm up.
The basic move is simple: ask AI what a healthy diet is, then use specific ideas and readings from the course to make that answer less obvious. What assumptions does it make about bodies, evidence, expertise, morality, culture, common sense, or responsibility? What gets left out? The goal is not to prove the AI right or wrong, but to show that you can use historical perspective to analyze modern diet advice.
We end by stepping back. The final reflection is not meant to be a list of topics you remember from the syllabus. It is a chance to explain what changed in how you think: about dietary advice, expertise, evidence, bodies, science, morality, and trust. You’re narrating your learning experience. Do not summarize the course; these reflections are about you.
Before you write, revisit the readings and videos enough to remind yourself of the course as a whole. Look for connections across weeks. The strongest reflections will not say, “I learned to be skeptical about diets” and stop there. They will show, with specific examples, how that skepticism became more historically informed. They will show how different readings connect with each other.
Our last thing! Post your final course reflection before midnight on Tuesday.