One of the earliest statements on nutrition is Hippocrates’ oft-quoted “let food be thy medicine, and thy medicine food.” The goal of this issue of Global Food History is to highlight the ways in which food can affect our health, heal us, help us grow, and make us feel younger or more vibrant. Good scholarship, however, seeks to place these messages in social context, and these articles examine periods in the history of nutrition to show how physiological and biological justifications for eating one thing and not another are laced with influences from outside the medical or scientific laboratory.
These influences point to the rhetoric of science and medicine as underpinning the history of nutrition. Dressing up a diet in scientific justifications can make things like fasting, or boozing, or eating your greens, seem to be a necessity for a better body, a better mind, or better health. As our authors point out, however, these “diets” have much more to do with power, politics, and society than repeatable studies or the nebulous concept of health. Nutritional messages, furnished and espoused by the medical community, politicians and policy makers, religious figures, or even “quacks,” are constrained by language. As such, the timeliness and traction of the words used within the cultural or political zeitgeist gives nutritional advice real meaning.
Caroline Lieffers begins the issue with a compelling look at a moment in early modern England when science was not hegemonic in its epistemic authority. Using John Evelyn’s Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699), she observes how food was a rhetorical agora for ideas and publics, and a place where various kinds of authority, both artisans and learned men, could swap expertise about food. Evelyn relied on both the techne and episteme of food; practical agriculture (the garden) and theoretical science (the library) informed his advice to eat one way, and not another. Not surprisingly for the time, morality and religion also played a large part in Evelyn’s recommendation to eat more “sallets” and the way he situated eating habits within a rhetoric of spirituality played a large part in its appeal to readers.
The virtuosity of salads as a magic bullet that could achieve “health” recurred 200 years later in the essay by James Stark. Nevertheless, the context of this advice had changed dramatically, as scientific authority replaced religious morality and the practical knowledge of ordinary people was considered largely irrelevant by the medical profession. Stark examines the “vitaminization” of foods in the early twentieth century, as foods containing these heretofore unseen “powerful agents” came to be considered the key to longevity and rejuvenation. The First World War presented a moment in which strength, youth, and health became a rhetorical focus for countries, with national diets and dietary advice being an easy way for populations to take part in national war efforts without being on the battlefield. Britain’s focus on strength through food predates America’s “Eat for Victory” campaign but shares many themes. With a focus on youthfulness, Stark highlights the roots of the relationship between youthfulness and food. Our current obsessions with goji berries, or turmeric or kale as having age-fighting properties arose because the “physiological potential” in vitamins acted as rejuvenators.
But concerns for dietary health and longevity were not limited to the Atlantic world in the early twentieth century, as Hilary Smith demonstrates in her analysis of China’s encounter between nutritional science and traditional medicine. Focusing on a dietary advice book entitled On Eliminating Breakfast for Health and to Prevent Aging, published by Jiang Weiqiao in 1915, she shows that Chinese scholars at times rejected the specific recommendations of Western-style nutrition, such as the call to eat more foods such as meat, wheat, and dairy, and instead relied on traditional Daoist beliefs such as abstention from breakfast as the key to health. Nevertheless, the scientific framework linking diet and physiological function demonstrates a growing global dominance of a reductive approach to food and eating. Jiang relegated important concepts and organs in more traditional Chinese medicine like qi, weakness of blood, yin and yang, and the spleen to a secondary role, while the focus of Western nutrition on the intestines, the brain, and the nervous system became paramount. Indeed, one could imagine that this moment marks the marginalization of “alternative” forms of medicine in the Western context.
Jonathan E. Robins’s study of nutritional policy in West Africa during the first half of the twentieth century likewise examines cross-cultural encounters around food and health, but unlike Republican China, the hegemony of Western sciences was established early on in colonial Ghana. Nevertheless, British officials became concerned with the growing imports of wheat, rice, and canned foods, which were believed to undermine not so much the health but morality of urban workers who could afford to pay for these prestigious goods. As surveys revealed more about native diets in rural areas, however, experts began a longstanding campaign to transform the local foodways in accordance with nutritional ideals and cooking patterns. Moreover, the practices established by colonial officials in the Gold Coast, including a domestic education and nutritional policies that gave a preference to imported staples, were continued by national governments long after Ghana gained its independence in 1957.
Tanfer Tunc’s study of The Drinking Man’s Diet (1964) reminds us that much could be justified under a rhetoric of science. Published at the height of the Cold War, the diet sought to counter the specter of a softening masculinity – which could ultimately be dangerous during the conflict with global Communism – and allow aging American men to recapture their youth by dieting with drink. Salads were bunny food for women, and, despite federal nutrition policies exhorting the increase in consumption of fruits and vegetables, a diet of meat and booze would maintain strength, fitness and manliness – hardening arteries be damned. Situationally, such rhetoric made sense, with the Cold War placing a “premium on hard masculine toughness” and making femininity a threat to national security. As such, manliness, martinis, and immortality all collided in the The Drinking Man’s Diet.
Finally, Adele Hite’s article brings the issue to the inner policy workings of how the United States came to understand the very concept of healthy diet as preventative of chronic disease. As nutrition scientists addressed diseases of deficiency with food, with some degree of quantitative success, by the mid-twentieth century, diseases of affluence like heart disease, and high cholesterol, became fodder for nutritional science research. Hite addresses the rhetorical shift of the concept of “healthy diet” in this time frame from diseases of deficiency to diseases of excess, but points to how a healthy diet, as defined by U.S. federal nutrition policy, comes to reproduce white, middle-class professional American norms. As such, an entire epistemological shift in nutrition happens, and the field of nutritional epidemiology becomes emblematic of this conceptualization of the “healthy diet.”
The cover image, drawn by our artist Roxy van Beek, uses curly and symmetrical patterns characteristic of the seventeenth century to depict the liveliness of John Evelyn’s vegetable garden, with prolific growths of rainbow chard, carrots, cucumber, nasturtium, rocket, tomato, chives, and sunflower. The image also includes some of the friends and foes of the gardener, bees and slugs, thereby placing the garden in wider food chains of reproduction and consumption.