Book review, "Dangerous Digestion: The Politics of American Dietary Advice" E.Melanie DuPuis (original) (raw)
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, journalism professor Michael Pollan argued, "There's an enormous amount of wisdom [.. . and] cultural authority contained in a cuisine." 1 Here, Pollan implies that valuing the localized cultural knowledge embedded in cuisine is one way of rethinking the authority surrounding food in the most intimate ways; that is, through understanding food sources, growers, growing locations, farmer practices, and values about the food consumers might buy or even grow. However, the interdisciplinary scholarship included in this review essay critically examines the "cultural authority" embedded in cuisine from entirely different perspectives, engaging the ways in which food, nutritional science, body politics, and dietary health pursuits are constructed within specific social, historical, and economic contexts. This is not to say that the authors do not consider themselves food activists. Each firmly situates themselves within an array of environmental and food activist work. Yet, using diet, body size, and nutritional health as lenses, and working across fields such as food studies, fat studies, critical nutrition studies, and political ecology, each of the texts reveals intersectional identity politics and diverse histories of naturalized social hierarchy. This is a moment of heightened awareness, anxiety, and political engagement with the far-reaching social implications of food, diet, and body politics. In the 2009 documentary Food, Inc., Stoneybrooke Farm CEO Gary Hirshberg notes, "When we run an item past the supermarket scanner, we're voting for local or not, organic or not." 2 Access to "good food is a right not a privilege" as Alice Waters suggests. Yet, some of the most prominent proposals and widely recognized "faces" of food tend to push "voting with the wallet" and lifestyle shifts-just buy organic grapes at the farmers' market rather than Nike shoes, Alice Waters argues on 60 Minutes; return to the land, eat locally, can your own tomatoes, as Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2008) suggests; cook and prioritize whole foods rather than processed, as Jamie Oliver argues in Jamie's Food Revolution (2011). While these may prove excellent options for some, food politics will remain within privileged, predominantly white, and firmly middle-class frameworks without increased intersectional scholarship and coalition-building to provide counter perspectives, and critically examine the social constructedness of key presumptions embedded in common understandings about food, health, and the body. 3 I do not here situate myself against criticisms of industrialized food systems or food movements writ large, nor do I suggest the scholarship included in this review essay claims such a stance. Research by the authors included in this review, Charlotte Biltekoff, Amy Farrell, Julie Guthman, and Alison Alkon and Julian Agyeman, pushes for more: from food systems, from dietary reform, from environmental movements, and from cultural presumptions about health and body politics. Amidst continued interdisciplinary scholarly interest in the burgeoning fields of food studies and fat studies, very little cultural studies scholarship has engaged the systemic dimensions of food, health, nutrition, and body politics through a critical lens. Likewise, there is a gap in scholarship addressing food
The Antipolitics of Food in Middle-Class America
2016
dissertation but who patiently served as my trusted resource during my many years at the Graduate Center. I am thankful for his support, dependable responsiveness, humor and good cheer. I am greatly indebted, too, to Jeff Maskovsky for his quick, keen and original insights, for suggesting key terms and my title, introducing me to fascinating new bodies of work and keeping vii the bar high. I am also grateful for Ida Susser's encouragement and the feminist lens she taught me to apply in my research and teaching. I am thankful to Sharon Zukin for getting me excited about the Graduate Center in the first place, for serving on my second exam committee and for remaining my champion despite the many years it took to finish. Many thanks, too, to Jane Schneider for serving on my second exam. I would also like to thank Don Nonini for graciously agreeing to serve as my outside reader and for his helpful comments. I am furthermore grateful for Ellen DeRiso, who provided incalculable administrative and logistical support with patience and kindness. The project has benefited greatly from the many conversations I had with friends and neighbors about food and parenting and the insights they shared with me. I thank Martha
Beyond the Sovereign Body: Taking Food Production Seriously
Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, 2014
This conversation is part of a special issue on ‘‘Critical Nutrition’’ in which multiple authors weigh in on various themes related to the origins, character, and consequences of contemporary American nutrition discourses and practices, as well as how nutrition might be known and done differently. In this section, authors reflect on the limits of standard nutrition in understanding the relationship between food and human health. Two authors explore the role of industrial food production in generating foodborne illness and environmental diseases. Such an approach draws attention to the limits of nutrition education per se as a way to encourage dietary health and suggests more emphasis on collective action to regulate how food is produced. Two authors focus on new scientific discoveries, such as the role of gut bacteria and epigenetic programming in bodily function and phenotype. In certain ways this emerging knowledge challenges the idea that health can actually be controlled through diet.
Syllabus You are What You Eat: Food, Health, and the Environment in the Americas, 1500-1800
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Course Summary: At first contact with the indigenous peoples of the 'New World', Europeans were not only confronted with so far unknown human societies, but also with unfamiliar environments that provided strange new foods. In the contemporary humoral-pathological medical understanding of the time, the human body and mind were imagined as permeable and changeable by cosmic, climatic and nutritional factors. Correct nutrition and one's geographic-climatic setting became defining aspects of personal and even collective identity. So, the-for us-humoristic title of this course in fact represents the early modern worldview on food, health, and the environment quite well.
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This article explores the rhetoric of milk in Mexico considering medical discourses, publicity campaigns, state programs, and women's experiences. I look at the difference in milk consumption across class and the lack of regulation in milk production and sale in 1940s and 1950s Mexico. I analyze the discourse of doctors and policy makers who worked at the Institute of National Nutrition (INN) and the Secretaría de Salubridad y Asistencia (Ministry of Public Health and Assistance; SSA). I explore the main programs through which powdered milk was distributed among Mexico's working classes. Finally, I present women's perceptions regarding fresh and powdered milk. At home, women had a key role in introducing milk to their family diet, as they were in charge of buying groceries and cooking daily meals. In the public sphere, women working as teachers, nurses, and social workers implemented state food programs promoting milk drinking. In order to provide a clearer picture, thi...