The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840-1940 for the first time looks at the ways in which scientific theories and investigations of nutrition have made their impact on a range of social practices and ideologies, and how these in turn have shaped the priorities and practices of the science of nutrition.

Modern nutrition science is usually considered to have started in the 1840s, a period of great social and political turmoil in western Europe. Yet the relations between the production of scientific knowledge about nutrition and the social and political valuations that have entered into the promotion and application of nutritional research have not yet received systematic historical attention. The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840-1940 for the first time looks at the ways in which scientific theories and investigations of nutrition have made their impact on a range of social practices and ideologies, and how these in turn have shaped the priorities and practices of the science of nutrition. In these reciprocal interactions, nutrition science has affected medical practice, government policy, science funding, and popular thinking. In uniting major scientific and cultural themes, the twelve contributions in this book show how Western society became a nutrition culture.

The nineteenth-century West saw extraordinary economic growth and cultural change. This volume explores and explains the birth of the modern world through the food it produced and consumed. Food security vastly improved though malnutrition and famines persisted. Scientific research radically altered the ways in which food and its relation to the body were conceived: efficiency became the watchword, norms the measure, and standardized goods the rule. At the same time, the art of food became a luxury pursuit as interest in gastronomy soared. A Cultural History of Food in the Age of Empire presents an overview of the period with essays on food production, food systems, food security, safety and crises, food and politics, eating out, professional cooking, kitchens and service work, family and domesticity, body and soul, representations of food, and developments in food production and consumption globally.

Benjamin R. Cohen uses the pure food crusades at the turn of the twentieth century to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods in the United States. In the latter nineteenth century, extraordinary changes in food and agriculture gave rise to new tensions in the ways people understood, obtained, trusted, and ate their food. This was the Era of Adulteration, and its concerns have carried forward to today: How could you tell the food you bought was the food you thought you bought? Could something manufactured still be pure? Is it okay to manipulate nature far enough to produce new foods but not so far that you question its safety and health? How do you know where the line is? And who decides? In Pure Adulteration, Benjamin R. Cohen uses the pure food crusades to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods and the perceived problems they wrought. Cohen follows farmers, manufacturers, grocers, hucksters, housewives, politicians, and scientific analysts as they struggled to demarcate and patrol the ever-contingent, always contested border between purity and adulteration, and as, at the end of the nineteenth century, the very notion of a pure food changed. In the end, there is (and was) no natural, prehuman distinction between pure and adulterated to uncover and enforce; we have to decide. Today’s world is different from that of our nineteenth-century forebears in many ways, but the challenge of policing the difference between acceptable and unacceptable practices remains central to daily decisions about the foods we eat, how we produce them, and what choices we make when buying them.

Reveals how Perus early-twentieth-century labor reforms excluded the majority of the countrys laborers. They were indigenous, and the nations elites saw indigeneity as incommensurable with work, modernity, and industrial progress.

In her insightful interdisciplinary history, physician and historian Mical Raz examines the interplay between psychiatric theory and social policy throughout the 1960s, ending with President Richard Nixon's 1971 veto of a bill that would have provided universal day care. She shows that this cooperation between mental health professionals and policymakers was based on an understanding of what poor men, women, and children lacked. This perception was rooted in psychiatric theories of deprivation focused on two overlapping sections of American society: the poor had less, and African Americans, disproportionately represented among America's poor, were seen as having practically nothing.

Provides an alternative history of nutrition in the U.S. that focuses on the power of scientific language.