This is something I mention repeatedly on (what may seem to be) rather disparate topics. In the way of sprawling projects that are directed according to one's interests at the time, there's no particularly direct or succinct way to describe it—I'll do my best organization-wise, but feel free to ask questions too.
The driving force behind all of this is a desire to help repair modern (mostly White, but it spreads) America's relationship with food, food systems, and diet culture. As someone who firmly believes that most human behavior serves a need, however misguided that behavior may be, I believe that understanding the sources of the problem will help give us tools to address the need in a less damaging way.
But also, I'm just plain having a lot of fun learning and considering new things.
Where it started
Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (Helen Zoe Veit, 2013)
I'm going to be honest with you: I read this book long enough ago (2014?) that I have no idea how it initially came to my attention. If I had to guess, I heard about it from a feminist blog or on Twitter, likely from Michelle Allison (@fatnutritionist) or someone similar.
Modern Food, Moral Food is an absolute banger I would recommend to anyone interested in American diet culture, and to a lesser extent American health culture. I believe Veit is right on when she argues that the late 19th through early 20th centuries really set the pattern for American relationships with food and the body, and that much food moralizing has as much or more to do with social context as it does "health". For an example, check out this thread from Michelle Allison.
I read it, I enjoyed it, but (at the time) didn't engage more fully with these ideas. I'd been interested in fat politics for a while, and mostly read it through that lens.
a personal interlude
An important starting point: I am a city child. I was born and raised and currently live in Seattle (with some excursions into living in the greater Seattle MSA). Growing up, my parents knew that it was really important for me to know where food came from—and where food actually came from, not "the grocery store" or "a picturesque little farm with ten chickens a pig and two rows of peas", but the huge agricultural enterprise that takes up a significant portion of Central and Eastern Washington (and, you know, the American Midwest). So, too, they thought it was important for me to understand rural agricultural communities in a political and economic way (that is to say, how the structure of American farming enterprise influences community dynamics and policy on a state and federal level) and how this also gets turned into an Eastern vs. Western Washington divide that is a lot more complicated than people give it credit for1.
As a 90s kid, I also saw the vast wave of newspaper and magazine articles about food and agricultural policy (GMOs especially) and witnessed the rise of Michael Pollan2 and that crowd. I read those articles, I read The Omnivore's Dilemma, I read some breathless books about genetically modified crops. It's all part of understanding the food system, right? (Right.)
In college, I start getting into reading the feminist blogosphere3, from which I found intersectional feminism and black feminism and fat liberation and food justice. I learn a lot about diet culture and food access and how people (including non-white people!) interact with food. I don't do a lot about them, but it starts ideas churning.
Prohibition: The Era of Excess (Andrew Sinclair, 1962)
Unlike Modern Food, Moral Food, I can tell you exactly where I got Prohibition: as a used copy on the shelves at Powell's City of Books on my honeymoon with Natalie (June 2016). Prohibition (appropriately imo) thinks that the best way to explain national Prohibition is to start in the 1830s/40s with the Second Great Awakening and the rise of moral campaigning, from antislavery to prohibition. I'm hooked. It's way more compelling to me to explore an issue as the confluence of factors that led to it, rather than a single-issue "wow people were weird about booze, huh?".
From here, I read a bunch of books about Prohibition. At this point, I think my special interest is Prohibition and the social factors leading thereto. Pretty cool stuff!
interlude the second: on Systems
Like I said, I am a Systems Girl. I have always loved puzzles, especially ones that involve taking disparate information and contrasting it to elucidate either gaps in between or (even better) conclusions I can draw about the relatedness of these two things.
This leads me to my two favorite academic disciplines: ecology and sociology. In a lot of key ways, they're the same discipline—as it is some combination of unethical and impractical to make experimental interventions, they're largely based on using observational data to draw conclusions about things you can't directly measure. Sure, ecologists are (on the whole) muddier than sociologists, but to me the way of looking at problems is basically the same. I studied both ecology and sociology in college for exactly this reason.
So when I find a new topic that lets me sink my teeth into a good old Systems Problem? And one that relates to my interests in diet culture and food justice and agriculture? Let's go.
kicking into gear
Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat (Harvey Levenstein, 2013)
The year: 2020. The setting: the University of Chicago press sale. Check out that title! Directly relevant to what I'm interested in—the foundations of modern American diet culture. This is what we call "lucking out at the book sale". Harvey Levenstein is a highly respected, and I believe pioneering, social historian of American foodways. Basically any American food history you read is going to cite him somewhere. Jackpot.
But. BUT. That's not the book. That's not the book at all. This is not "why we worry about what we eat", this is "some times someone successfully convinced the (White) American public there was a Problem with their diet". Unfortunately, the best answer we ever get to "why" for most of those is "because people believed it". Like, yeah, sure, that's logical. But why did they believe that person, at that time? What about Americans' relationship with food made them susceptible to these fads?
I have no particular problem with keeping things on a surface-ish level. I understand that this is but one smallish book (230 pages in the paperback), and it can't cover everything. However, as an academic, I believe Levenstein has an obligation to mention when he cannot or will not engage with a topic. For example, Levenstein mentions more-or-less offhand that while men had trouble sticking to new low-fat diets, women were much more capable of maintaining dietary changes due to already being accustomed to dieting. It may just be me, but I think that leaving female diet "success" at an "eh well they had practice at it already"—without even a footnote saying "this is out of scope for this book but is relevant"—in a book called Fear of Food is... an oversight. Perhaps even one that decreases the explanatory power of your book.
Again probably an out-of-scope issue (...if I'm being fair), but the book also doesn't engage with diets that didn't take off, or only took off among a small population. We can learn a lot about what conditions people to care about diet if we can figure out why they sometimes don't, or why diets pop in and fade out.
I understand that I'm tilting at the windmill of the book title, but (Columbo voice) "just one more thing". While I don't remember this being explicitly acknowledged anywhere in this book, the "we" of the title is absolutely implicitly "non-recent-immigrant White Americans".
- This is very relevant to the conditions that lead people to behave in certain ways, and it's worth being explicit about it
- You are leaving a whole category of food fear 'on the table' (lmao). White Americans have long had issues with immigrant cuisines, from fears of contamination or indigestibility to "Chinese Restaurant Sydrome".
I was (am) so angry. Try harder.
interlude the third
I realize whiteness is largely unmarked in the United States (this is blessedly changing, albeit slowly) but I need social scientists and historians to get their act together and be explicit about it when it's relevant to their analyses.
Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (Helen Zoe Veit, 2013)
After Fear of Food, I needed a palate cleanser. A breath of fresh air. Cool water on a hot day. A re-read of Modern Food, Moral Food.
I don't need to gouge my eyeballs out with a spoon! This time I really focus on the social context of the dietary attitudes. I want explanations, not vague handwaving about "oh it's a mystery why this is true! anyway!".
Downplaying the pleasure of eating—and even renouncing pleasure altogether in some cases—seemed to make it easier to make rational food choices. Doing so, of course, demanded enormous self-discipline, and a growing number of Americans expressed the idea that self-discipline around food was a moral virtue. And it was a virtue not only in its own right but also because it bespoke a general ability to forego immediate gratification and to control animal impulses in the interest of what people knew, intellectually, to be good and right. (4)
Now we're getting somewhere.
This time around, though, what catches my eye is Veit's emphasis on food and diet as an emblem of White American status (which she is blessedly very explicit about), and as a project of Americanization of the 'other'. This is reminiscent of the social factors leading to Prohibition...
Some more important background: sometime around 2017 I'd picked up a copy of Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (Christopher Hill) and read it thanks to my interest in Early Modern England. However, Hill's work leads me to think a lot more about the "self-control" rhetoric around food than I used to. Where is this coming from? Could it be a religious (or secularized) Calvinist impulse? Are there benefits to this self-control beyond the personal?
I guess it's time to dig into American history. And Protestant theology.
So then...
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Max Weber, 1920 edition). Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Seth Perry, 2018). Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Thomas C. Leonard, 2016). Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (Sabrina Strings, 2019). The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (Linda Gordon, 2017). The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America (Virginia Sole-Smith, 2018). The Cooking Gene : A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South (Michael Twitty, 2017). White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf (Aaron Bobrow-Strain, 2012).
A lot of reading. I firmly believe that where we are now in 2023 was built on the back of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, and I love reading about them. History rhymes, and oh boy is it rhyming hard right now.
To sum up
I'm not fully sure where I'm going from here. It turns out that the book I was more-or-less researching my way towards writing already exists: Dangerous Digestion: The Politics of American Dietary Advice (E. Melanie DuPuis, 2015). Really can't recommend it enough if you've read this far and are still interested.
However, I think there's more to explore in connecting both religious and secularized Protestantism to American citizenship and food culture ideals.
I am currently on a deeper dive into Protestantism, both as it is expressed (Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (R. Marie Griffith, 2004), The Divided Mind of Protestant America, 1880-1930 (Ferenc Morton Szasz, 1982), The Bible Tells Them So: The Discourse of Protestant Fundamentalism (Kathleen C. Boone, 1989), White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (Anthea Butler, 2021)) and on a deeper basis (The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1986 (Stephen Neill, 1988), The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (Ernst Troeltsch, 1912)). Since I grew up both 1) awash in America's secularized Protestant culture and 2) attending Protestant churches4, I'm also trying to learn how to distinguish what religion even is and how it manifests (*Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (Brent Nongbri, 2013)).
I am also exploring the social needs that food and diet culture fill. Both The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care (Rina Raphael, 2022) and (for the most part, caveats listed here) Clean Living Movements: American Cycles of Health Reform (Ruth Clifford Engs, 2000) are working on this axis. This also ties into "clean eating" and GMOs and organic food and juice cleanses, disability justice, and the discourse around Personal Responsibility for One's Health. I have several other posts in me about that, but I'm going to leave it here for now. Thank you for sticking with me to the end!
-
I cannot stand the idea of Cascadia and I will fight you. on a moral level.
-
bleurgh
-
It was 2006, that's what we called it. Also, obligatory mourning of Google Reader, particularly its social features, which my friends and I used to pass around posts on all of these issues and discuss them.
-
Free Methodist and United Church of Christ. Both of these are essentially Arminian (Free Methodism explicitly, UCC in my experience), which is also why I'm struggling so much with understanding Calvinism.
I realized after I posted this that I did not ever explain the actual connection I see between self-control, citizenship, and Protestantism (Calvinism, really). So that'll be my next post on the topic.
