The Scientific Study of Food in the Modern West · The Scientific Study of Food in the Modern West ... Asterisked items in the reading list are the ... Extracts from Justus von Liebig,

Spary—Food in the modern West

1

The Scientific Study of Foodin the Modern West

M.A. Option HMEDG017

Soup for the Poor, to serve 40 peopleAlexis Soyer, A Shilling Cookery for the People (1855)

2 oz dripping4 oz meat cut into 1 inch dice

4 oz onions, thinly sliced4 oz turnips, cut into small dice

2 oz leeks, thinly sliced3 oz celery

12 oz wholemeal flour8 oz pearl barley

3 oz salt¼ oz brown sugar

All boiled together in 18 pints of water

Convenor: Dr. Emma SparyRoom 563Telephone 0207679 8115email [email protected]


2

Course description

Food is of central relevance to our lives, but as inhabitants of the so-called“developed” world, we are lucky enough to live in a society in which we rarely haveto worry about getting enough to eat. At the same time our lives are permeated withadvice about eating from all sides, coming from people we know personally,especially family members, friends and doctors, or from authoritative but impersonalsources such as the media or the government. This course studies the development ofnutrition and dietary sciences after 1800 into one of the most powerful kinds ofscientific and medical authority: not only directed at treating diseased bodies,nutrition science has an immediate relationship with our daily lives, in attempting toprescribe what and how we eat. We will explore how scientific approaches tonutrition came to be central to the medical management of modern Westernpopulations by becoming allied with government. What counted as a “scientific” or“medical” approach to nutrition and diet has varied in the past, in keeping withchanging standards of bodily shape, morality and public order; we will investigate theinterrelations between these and the perceived political consequences of altering diets.We will also explore how apparently timeless nutritional categories and concernsincluding vitamins and anorexia came into existence. Finally, we will consider thestatus of expert nutritional advice in responding to, or even fashioning, current foodissues such as the fast food crisis and the “obesity epidemic”.

Course requirements10 x 2 hour seminars, weekly2 x essays (min. 3000 words; max. 4000 words)

For details of essay style, submission requirements, and how to avoid plagiarism,please consult your M.A. Handbook.

A note on the readingsAsterisked items in the reading list are the week’s essential readings. (Virtually) allshould be available online, either as scanned texts on Moodle (log in using your UCLusername and password) or via the UCL Athens database of periodical publications.Some are freely available on the Internet. If you have any problems, please contact mea.s.a.p.

I’ve appended some questions for you to think about while preparing the reading foreach seminar.


3

Week 1: Introduction: The history of food: how and why?

We will explore some different approaches to writing the history of food and relatedissues which have developed in recent years, and reflect on some of the problems andpossibilities that arise from bringing the history of food and the history of medicinetogether.

GeneralCarole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, eds, Food and Culture: A Reader. NewYork: Routledge, 1997. Read articles by Lévi-Strauss and Goody, or more widely.Harmke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham, eds, The Science and Culture ofNutrition, 1840-1940. Rodopi, 1995. The *Introduction is essential reading.

Approaches to the history of food and diet:SociologicalStephen Mennell, Anneke H. van Otterloo and Anne Murcott, The Sociology of Food:Eating, Diet and Culture. SAGE Publications, 1992.Wendy L.H. Leynse, “Journeys Through ‘Ingestible Topography’: Socializing the‘Situated Eater’ in France”. European Studies 22 (2006): 129-158.Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers ThroughSociety. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987.

Anthropological*Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, Chapter 2.

Biological*E. B. Ross, Food and Evolution: Toward a Theory of Human Food Habits,Philadelphia 1987, Chapter 1.Helen Macbeth, ed. Food Preferences and Taste: Continuity and Change. Providenceand Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997.Peter S. Ungar and Mark F. Teaford, eds, Human Diet: Its Origin and Evolution.Westport, Conn. / London: Bergin & Garvey, 2002, introduction.

HistoricalAlessandro Stanziani, “Municipal Laboratories and the Analysis of Foodstuffs inFrance under the Third Republic: A Case Study of the Paris Municipal Laboratory,1878-1907”, in P. J. Atkins et al., eds, Food and the City in Europe Since 1800,Aldershot / Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2007, 105-115.

Material cultureFred R. Myers, “Introduction: The Empire of Things”. In id., ed. The Empire ofThings: Regimes of Value and Material Culture. Santa Fe: School of AmericanResearch Press / Oxford: James Currey, 2001, 3-61.Ken Alder, “Introduction.” In Focus: Thick Things. Isis 98 (2007), 80-83.

ExpertiseIntroduction to Christelle Rabier, ed., Fields of Expertise: A Comparative History ofExpert Procedures in Paris and London, 1600 to Present. Newcastle: CambridgeScholars Publishing, 2007.


4

Discussion questions

What are the advantages and disadvantages of the different methodologies that havebeen used to write the history of food?

How does a focus on scientific and medical knowledge alter the kinds of histories wemight write about food—what might be included or excluded?

Is a biological explanation sufficient to account for food use in the past? If not, whynot?


5

Week 2: Additives or adulteration?

From the 1820s onwards, the technology of chemical analysis began to be widelyutilised in the detection of food adulteration. This lecture considers how the practicesof food analysis served to redefine the meaning of alimentary purity, and how foodchemists used analysis as an instrument to involve themselves in the regulation of thefood industry, culminating in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

Primary*Friedrich Accum, A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons.Longman & Co., 1820. Available online from Project Gutenberg. Pp. 1-27 and thesection on coffee.

GeneralSuzanne White, “The Chemogastric Revolution and the Regulation of FoodChemicals”, in Seymour Mauskopf, ed., Chemical Sciences in the Modern World.Philadelphia, Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1993, 322-355Madeleine Ferrières, Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears. New York:Columbia University Press, 2006.Bertomeu-Sanchez and Nieto-Galan, eds, Chemistry, Medicine, and Crime. ScienceHistory Publications, 2009.

BritainE. J. T. Collins, “Food Adulteration and Food Safety in Britain in the 19th and 20th

Centuries”, Food Policy 18 (1993): 95-109.John Burnett, Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to thePresent Day. London: Scolar Press, 1979, Chapter 5.Derek J. Oddy, “Food Quality in London and the Rise of the Public Analyst, 1870-1939”, in Peter J. Atkins, Peter Lummel, Derek J. Oddy, eds, Food and the City inEurope Since 1800, Aldershot / Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2007.

France*Alessandro Stanziani, “Municipal Laboratories and the Analysis of Foodstuffs inFrance under the Third Republic: A Case Study of the Paris Municipal Laboratory,1878-1907”, in Peter J. Atkins, Peter Lummel, Derek J. Oddy, eds, Food and the Cityin Europe Since 1800, Aldershot / Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2007.Alessandro Stanziani, “Negotiating Innovation in a Market Economy: Foodstuffs andBeverages Adulteration in Nineteenth-century France”, Enterprise and Society 8.2(2007): 375-412. Available online from Oxford Journals.Hans Jürgen Teuteberg, “Food Adulteration and the Beginnings of Uniform FoodLegislation in Late Nineteenth-century Germany”, in John Burnett and Derek J. Oddy,eds, The Origins and Development of Food Policies in Europe. Leicester UniversityPress, 1994, 146-160.

America*Loraine Swainston Goodwin, The Pure Food, Drink and Drug Crusaders, 1879-1914. McFarland, 1999, Chapter 2.


6


What difference did the rise of analysis make to the credibility of food science?

Why is the notion of ‘adulteration’ historiographically problematic?

Can knowledge and commerce be disentangled in looking at the history of the foodindustry?


7

Week 3: Hunger and the political management of new publicsSoon after 1800, European governments seemed to have resolved the problem of thefood crises which regularly afflicted early modern cultures. The political conquest ofhunger depended upon new scientific strategies for quantifying food supplies andcalibrating minimum dietary requirements, the basis for modern nutrition science.

Primary*Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, Essays: Political, Economical, andPhilosophical. Vol. I, 104-119. Online at Google Books. To see how this ties intopoor management policy, you might also like to look at vol. I, chapter V of the samework.

General*Dietrich Milles, “Working Capacity and Caloric Consumption: The History ofRational Physical Economy” in Kamminga and Cunningham, eds, The Science andCulture of Nutrition, 75-96.A. de Knecht-van Eekelen and A.H. van Otterloo, “‘What the Body Needs’:Developments in Medical Advice, Nutritional Science and Industrial Production in theTwentieth Century”, in A. Fenton, ed., Order and Disorder. Tuckwell Press, 2000.Valerie Garland, Diet in Workhouses and Prisons, 1835-1895, New York: Garland,1985.

Rumford and the poor soup movementSandra Sherman, Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism.Ohio State University Press, 2001, Chapters 5 and 6.M. Norton Wise, “Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural Philosophy inNineteenth-Century Britain (III)”. History of Science 28 (1990): 221-261.Frederic L. Holmes, Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry: The Emergence of aScientist. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974, Chapter 1.

The industrial body*Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins ofModernity, University of California Press, 1990, esp. his introduction and Chapters 2and 5.Richard Gillispie, “Industrial Fatigue and the Discipline of Physiology”, in GerryGeison, ed., Physiology in the American Context, 1850-1940, Bethesda, MD:American Physiological Society, 1987, 237-262.

Hunger historiographyR. W. Fogel, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2004.Lucile F. Newman, ed. Hunger in History: Food Shortage, Poverty, and Deprivation.Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995. Essay by Millman and Kates.Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds. Hunger and History. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1985. Introduction, by Rotberg.*James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History. Cambridge, Mass. and London: TheBelknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007, esp. Chapter 1.


8


How did claims about hunger and an adequate diet manifest particular models ofsociety in the past?

What power did quantification confer upon food experts?

Discuss the shortfalls and strengths of existing historical approaches to hunger.


9

Week 4: The invention of food groupsA necessary accompaniment to the entry of alimentary experts to positions of publicauthority in the nineteenth century was a new set of techniques for describing,analysing and classifying foods and for predicting their effects on the human body.

Primary*Justus von Liebig, Animal Chemistry, or Organic Chemistry in its Applications toPhysiology and Pathology, ed. William Gregory. London: Taylor and Watson, 1842,part I, sections II, III, XI-XV. Available as a facsimile reprint (Kessinger Publishing,2007). Also at Google Books.Extracts from Justus von Liebig, Researches on the Chemistry of Food, London :Taylor and Walton, 1847.

General*Frederic L. Holmes, “The Transformation of the Science of Nutrition”. Journal ofthe History of Biology 8.1 (1975): 135-144.Kenneth J. Carpenter, Protein and Energy: A Study of Changing Ideas in Nutrition.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, Chapters 3 and 4.Ursula Klein, “Technoscience Avant la Lettre”. Perspectives on Science 13.2 (2005):226-266.Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UniversityPress, 1993 (for comparison with biographical approaches).

FranceFrederic L. Holmes, Lavoisier and the Chemistry of Life: An Exploration of ScientificCreativity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, Chapter 16.Frederic L. Holmes, Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry: The Emergence of aScientist. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974, Chapter 3.

GermanyWilliam H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997, especially Chapter 8.Frederic L. Holmes, “Justus Liebig and the Construction of Organic Chemistry”, inSeymour H. Mauskopf, ed., Chemical Sciences in the Modern World, Philadelphia :University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.*Mark R. Finlay, “Early Marketing of the Theory of Nutrition: The Science andCulture of Liebig’s Extract of Meat”, in Kamminga and Cunningham, eds, TheScience and Culture of Nutrition, 48-74.

Marika Blondel-Mégrelis, “Liebig or How to Popularize Chemistry”, in JoachimSchummer et al., eds, The Public Image of Chemistry, Singapore : World Scientific,2007.


10


How crucial was Liebig to the emergence of modern nutrition science?

Discuss the relationship between knowledge and commerce in Liebig’s claims aboutfood.

Explain how new nineteenth-century theories of digestion can be labelled ‘industrial’.


11

Week 5: Industrial nutritionFood analysts also occupied themselves with the production of new substances fromexisting plant and animal materials which already served as foods or drugs. They werecentral to the rise of the great food and pharmaceutical companies, particularly fromthe 1880s onwards. This lecture will look at how claims to be able break down foodsinto their component parts and to create new foods and flavours through scientific andtechnological expertise gave nutrition specialists a place within the innovativemarketing practices of the food industry.

PrimaryNicolas Appert, The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances for ManyYears, 1811. Reprint, Kessinger Publishing, 2007.How Safe is Safe? The Design of Policy on Drugs and Food Additives. Washington:National Academy of Sciences, 1974.F. Perucca and G. Pouradier, The Rubbish on Our Plates, London: Prion Books, 1996.

GeneralH. J. Teuteberg, “The Birth of the Modern Consumer Age: Food Innovations from1800”. In Paul Freedman, ed., Food: The History of Taste. Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press, 2007, 232-261.A. Tull, Food Science and Technology. Oxford University Press, 1989.R. J. Forbes, “The Rise of Food Technology”. Janus 47 (1958): 101-127, 139-155.*S. Mennell, A. H. van Otterloo and A. Murcott, The Sociology of Food, Chapter 6.J. Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class, Chapter 5.

Britain*Sally M. Horrocks, “Quality Control and Research: The Role of Scientists in theBritish Food Industry, 1870-1939”, in J. Burnett and D. J. Oddy, eds. The Origins andDevelopment of Food Policies in Europe. Leicester University Press, 1994, 130-145.Sally M. Horrocks, “Nutrition Science and the Food Industry in Britain, 1920-1990”,in A. P. den Hartog, ed., Food Technology, Science and Marketing: European Diet inthe Twentieth Century. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1995.

France and the NetherlandsMartin Bruegel, “From the Shop Floor to the Home: Appertising and FoodPreservation in Households in Rural France, 1810-1930”, in M. R. Schärer and A.Fenton eds., Food and Material Culture. Tuckwell Press, 1998.Karen Montagne, “The Quest for Quality: Food and the Notion of ‘Trust’ in the GersArea in France”. European Studies 22 (2007): 159-177.*A. H. Van Otterloo, “The Development of Public Distrust of Modern FoodTechnology in the Netherlands” . In A. P. den Hartog, ed., Food Technology, Scienceand Marketing, 253-267.

AdditivesM. Smith, “Into the Mouths of Babes”, in M. Jackson, ed., Health and the ModernHome, New York: Routledge, 2007, 304-321.

**NB: Week 6: Reading week**


12


Identify some of the main problems with a linear history of food preservation.

Why has food technology had such a troubled past?

Have scientists historically conspired with or policed the food industry?

“Food additives are bad for your health.” Discuss. OR:What’s involved in proving the health risks of a given food additive?


13

Week 7: VitaminsThe “accessory food factors” were invented in a Cambridge physiology laboratoryand reinvented, in part by the public and the pharmaceutical and food industries, tobecome “vitamins”.

Primary*F. Gowland Hopkins, “Feeding Experiments Illustrating the Importance ofAccessory Factors in Normal Dietaries”, The Journal of Physiology 44 (1912): 425-460. Available on PubMed Central (via UCL Metalib, under databases).

Methodology/General*Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, “Alternative medicine: the cases of vitamin C andcancer”, in Dr. Golem: How to Think about Medicine. Chicago, 2005.Andrew Cunningham, “Transforming Plague”, in id. and Perry Williams, eds, TheLaboratory Revolution in Medicine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.H.-J. Teuteberg, “The Discovery of Vitamins: Laboratory Research, Reception,Industrial Production”, in A. Fenton, ed. Order and Disorder. Tuckwell Press, 2000.R. Apple, Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture. Rutgers University Press, 1996.R. Apple, “Vitamins Win the War”, in D. F. Smith and J. Phillips, eds, Food, Science,Policy and Regulation in the 20th Century. London: Routledge, 2000, 135-149.Paul Weindling, “The Role of International Organizations in Setting NutritionalStandards in the 1920s and 1930s”, in Kamminga and Cunningham, The Science andCulture of Nutrition. Also paper by Horrocks.*H. Kamminga, “‘Axes to Grind’: Popularising the Science of Vitamins, 1920s and1930s”, in Smith and Phillips, eds., Food, Science, 83-100.Adel P. den Hartog, “The Discovery of Vitamins and Its Impact on the FoodIndustry”, in Peter J. Atkins, Peter Lummel, Derek J. Oddy, eds, Food and the City inEurope Since 1800. Aldershot ; Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2007.

Vitamin BKenneth J. Carpenter, Beriberi, White Rice and Vitamin B: A Disease, a Cause and aCure. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2000.Harmke Kamminga, “Credit and Resistance: Eijman and the Transformation of Beri-beri into a Vitamin Deficiency Disease”, in Kurt Bayertz and Roy Porter, eds., FromPhysico-Theology to Bio-Technology, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998, 232-254.

Vitamin CKenneth J. Carpenter, The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C, Cambridge, 1986.Ralph W. Moss, Free Radical: Albert Szent-Gyorgyi and the Battle Over Vitamin C,New York: Paragon House, 1988.*Evelleen Richards, Vitamin C and Cancer: Medicine or Politics? New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1991, pp. 1-71.

Vitamin DA. B. Davis. “The Rise of the Vitamin-medicinal as Illustrated by Vitamin D”,Pharmacy in History 24 (1982): 59-72.


14


Which was more important in the making of a culture of vitamin consumption:science or commerce?

What different historical factors contributed to making vitamins a key element ofmodern understandings of an adequate diet?

Are vitamins foods or medicines? Defend your answer.

How did a vitamin become a fact?


15

Week 8: Too much, or not enough?Ironically, the rise of plenty in the industrialised world has been accompanied by new,diet-related health problems. On the one hand, physicians defined new medicalconditions relating to eating, such as anorexia nervosa or bulimia, beginning in thelate nineteenth century. On the other hand, there are currently widespread claimsabout the effects of excessive eating, sometimes termed an “obesity epidemic”.

Primary*Sir William Gull, “Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica)”(1868), Obesity Research 5.5 (1997): 498-502.A. Gulick, “A Study of Weight Regulation in the Adult Human Body During Over-nutrition” (1922), Obesity Research 3.5 (1995): 501-512.*Marion Nestlé, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition andHealth. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2007,Introduction and Chap. 1.

MethodologicalSteven Shapin, “The Great Neurotic Art”, London Review of Books, vol. 26, no. 15, 5August 2004. Online at www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n15/shap01_html.

ObesityStephen Bayley, Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things. London / Boston: Faber andFaber, 1991.*Hillel Schwartz, “The Three-Body Problem and the End of the World”, in: M. Feher,ed., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, part I. Urzone, 1989, pp. 406-465.I. de Garine, “Obesity in a multicultural perspective”, in C. Geissler and D. J. Oddy,eds. Food, Diet and Economic Change Past and Present. Leicester University Press,1993, 174-182.Peter N. Stearns, Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West, New York;London: New York University Press, 1997, especially Chapters 1 and 2.Sander Gilman, Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity, Cambridge: Polity, 2008.Eric Oliver, Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America's Obesity Epidemic, Oxford;New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “The Culture of the Abdomen: Obesity and Reducing inBritain, Circa 1900-1939”, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 239-273.Barry M. Popkin, The World is Fat, New York: Avery, 2009.

AnorexiaJoan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as aModern Disease. Harvard University Press, 1988.*Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance ofFood to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, Chapter 6.


16


Why is it so hard to prove the link between obesity and ill health from a purelyscientific perspective?

Can we equate female fasting in the past with anorexia today?

Why haven’t eating habits and choices been left up to the individual?


17

Week 9: Food faddism and social renewalFrom the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, interest in “alternative” dietsbecame increasingly widespread, having previously been restricted to radical groups.We look at several of the prominent food reform movements of the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries, and view extracts from the 1994 film The Road to Wellville.

Primary*Extract from John Harvey Kellogg, The New Dietetics: A Guide to Scientific Feedingin Health and Disease. Battle Creek: Modern Medicine Publishing Co., 1927, 243-281: “Wholesome and Unwholesome Foods”.Horace Fletcher, Fletcherism: How I Became Young at Sixty. Athletic Publications,1929.

BackgroundRichard Olson, Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Urbana, Ill.:University of Illinois Press, 2008, Chapter 10.Roy Porter, “Consumption”, in id. and J. Brewer, ed., Consumption and the World ofGoods, London: Routledge, 1993.

Returning to nature*J. Tanner, “Food, Fibres and Health”, in A. Fenton, ed., Order and Disorder. EastLinton: Tuckwell Press, 2000, 240-252. (See also the paper by Merta in ibid.)E. Meyer-Renschhausen and Albert Wirz, “Dietetics, Health Reform and SocialOrder: Vegetarianism as a Moral Physiology”, Medical History 43.3 (1999): 323-341.Colin Spencer, Vegetarianism: A History, London: Grub Street, 2000.L. M. Barnett, “‘Every Man his Own Physician’: Dietetic Fads, 1890-1914”, inKamminga and Cunningham, The Science and Culture of Nutrition.Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat. NewYork: The Free Press / London: Collier Macmillan, 1986, Chapters 3 and 6.John Money, The Destroying Angel: Sex, Fitness, and Food in the Legacy ofDegeneracy Theory, Graham Crackers, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and American HealthHistory. Buffalo, N. Y.: Prometheus Books, 1985, Chapter 2.Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: SylvesterGraham and Health Reform. Westport, Conn., 1980

Fletcherism*L. M. Barnett, “The Impact of ‘Fletcherism’ on the Food Policies of Herbert Hooverduring World War I”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66 (1992): 234-259.L. M. Barnett, “Fletcherism: The Chew Chew Fad of the Edwardian Era”, in DavidSmith, ed., Nutrition in Britain: Science, Scientists, and Politics in the TwentiethCentury, London: Routledge, 1997, 6-28.James C. Whorton, “Physiological Optimism: Horace Fletcher and the HygienicIdeology in Progressive America”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 55 (1981): 59-87.Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport and American Society,Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, Chapter 11.T. Armstrong, “Disciplining the Corpus: Henry James and Fletcherism”, in id., ed.American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique. Sheffield: Sheffield AcademicPress, 1996, 101-118.


18


Explain why food fads took the form they did between 1880 and 1930.

Is it meaningful to call Fletcherism a political enterprise?

“Food fads do not have to be taken seriously—only nutrition science should be takenaccount of.” Do you agree or disagree?


19

Week 10: Fast and slow foodFast food highlights the fragility of scientific and government authority over nutrition.The history of fast foods shows that their success was a consequence of broadertransformations in consumption in Western societies by industrialisation,urbanisation, and changes in transportation and technology. A typical Western diet,including a proportionately high level of meat and fat, is often taken as a marker ofthe spread of industrial society. But ironically, the slow food movement is equallydependent on industrialisation.

PrimaryMcDonald’s, The Facts About Our Food. London: McDonald’s, 2007.What’s Wrong With McDonald’s? Nottingham: Anti-McDonald’s Campaign, 2004.Annette Allen, The Facts About Eating at McDonald’s, East Finchley: McDonald’sHamburgers, 1985.*M. Boas and S. Chain. Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story of McDonald's. New York:Dutton & Co, 1976.*Carlo Petrini, Slow Food: The Case for Taste. Columbia University Press, 2003,introduction.José Bové, The World is Not for Sale: French Farmers Against Junk Food, London:Verso, 2001.

GeneralRichard Wilk, ed., Fast Food / Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of the Global FoodSystem. Lanham, Md. and Plymouth: Altamira Press, 2006.Steven Shapin, “Cheese and Late Modernity”, London Review of Books, 20 November2003. Online at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n22/shap01_.html.Revisit Stearns, Fat History and compare the discussions of the US and France.

U.S.A.J. A. Jakle and K. A. Sculle, Fast Food. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.*E. Schlosser: Fast Food Nation: What the All-American Meal is Doing to the World.London: Penguin, 2002, Chapter 10 and epilogue.

BritainDerek J. Oddy, “Eating without Effort: The Rise of the Fast-food Industry inTwentieth-century Britain”, in M. Jacobs and P. Scholliers, eds. Eating Out inEurope. Berg, 2003.John K. Walton, Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, 1870-1930. NewYork: Continuum, 2000.

FrancePierre Boisard, Camembert: A National Myth. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2003.Julia Csergo, “The Emergence of Regional Cuisines”. In Jean-Louis Flandrin andMassimo Montanari, ed., Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present.New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, 500-515.


20


How should we understand the claims of the slow food movement to represent ahealthier way of using (growing, cooking as well as eating) food?

Compare the ways in which the food industry and nutrition experts construct anutritional fact.

Why has McDonalds come to be synonymous with imperialism? How have healthclaims been enrolled to serve or refute that argument?


21

Week 11: Food and globalisation

In this final seminar, we will focus on some foods which have widely been taken toexemplify the positive and negative aspects of multinational food production,marketing and consumption, and consider the place of scientific and medical advice inmediating these claims. The foods chosen, Coca-Cola and infant formula, bothoriginated for the purposes of maintaining health—yet they have come to synonymiseill health and dubious trading practices.

PrimaryThe Milk of Human Kindness. 2nd edn, Crossroads Books, London 2002E. J. Kahn, The Big Drink: the Story of Coca-Cola. Random House, 1960.

General*Raymond Grew, ed., Food in Global History, Boulder, Col: Westview Press, 1999.Grew’s introduction and paper by Helsing.Kenneth F. Kiple, A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Introduction.*Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann, “Introduction: Mapping Food andGlobalization”, in id. eds., Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets andPolitics in the Modern World, Oxford: Berg, 2008.

MethodologyNicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government.Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.

Coca-ColaMark Pendergrast, For God, Country and Coca-Cola. Basic Books, 2000.J. C. Louis and H. Yazijian. The Cola Wars: The Story of the Global Corporate Battlebetween the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo. Everest House, 1980.John Burnett, Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain,London: Routledge, 1999.R. Foster, Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea,Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

FormulaA. de Knecht-van Eekelen, “The Best Substitute for Mother’s Milk”, in A. P. denHartog, Food Technology, Science, and Marketing. East Linton: Tuckwell Press,1995.*Rima D. Apple, “‘Advertised by Our Loving Friends: The Infant Formula Industryand the Creation of New Pharmaceutical Markets, 1870-1910”, Journal of the Historyof Medicine and Allied Sciences, 41 (1986): 3-23.


22


In what sense is Coca-Cola global?

For the case of EITHER colas or formula milk, what changes accompanied the shiftfrom a specialised medicinal product to a mass everyday food?

What is at stake in the replacement of breast milk with formula?


23

Essay questions

Essay 1

*PLEASE CHECK M.A. HANDBOOK FOR SUBMISSION DEADLINES ANDOTHER FORMAL COURSE REQUIREMENTS. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT, ASFAILURE TO ADHERE TO THEM MAY RESULT IN PENALISATION OFYOUR HARD WORK*

1. Explain how nineteenth-century chemists came to be public experts in analysingfood.

2. Why is hunger a problematic category for historians?

3. “The need for nutrition is biologically determined through the whole of humanhistory.” How does a history of eating affect our understanding of such a claim?

4. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a biographical approach to Justus vonLiebig’s work for explaining his role in the history of nutrition science.

5. What’s interesting for historians about food adulteration?


24

Essay questions

Essay 2

*PLEASE CHECK M.A. HANDBOOK FOR SUBMISSION DEADLINES ANDOTHER REQUIREMENTS. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT, AS FAILURE TOADHERE TO THEM MAY RESULT IN PENALISATION OF YOUR HARDWORK*

1. What can the case of Vitamin C teach us about how nutritional facts areconstructed?

2. Account for the rise of ‘food fads’ at the end of the nineteenth century.

3. “Fat has become a moral evil of modern society”. Discuss, from a historicalperspective.

4. What history lay behind José Bové’s attempt to bulldoze his local McDonald’s?

5. What is at stake in debates (past and present) over global diets?

Documents

The Scientific Study of Food in the Modern West · The Scientific Study of Food in the Modern West ... Asterisked items in the reading list are the ... Extracts from Justus von Liebig,