A network for those interested in the history of nutrition and related fields. This network is intended for the growing number of scholars, teachers, documentary filmmakers, and museum and library professionals engaged with the history of nutrition in any time period or region.

Recent Content

Source of the Month: Mill City Museum Test Kitchens Oral History Project, Minnesota Historical Society

November’s source of the month is the Mill City Museum Test Kitchens Oral History Project, which aimed to gain insight into the work of the General Mills and Pillsbury test kitchens. Interviews, conducted in 2002, featured five women employed as home economists between 1952 and 1996.

Course Readings/Assignments

Hey folks,

As many of us have recently revisited/revitalized/revised courses for this fall semester, the H-Nutrition editors are hoping to start an exchange of ideas about key sources to help students understand the history of nutrition, diet, and health.

Author Interview: Jonathan Rees, The Chemistry of Fear: Harvey Wiley’s Fight for Pure Food

Join the Library of Congress Manuscript Division on November 2, 2022 for a conversation with author Jonathan Rees about his recent biography of controversial pure food crusader and influential USDA chemist Harvey Washington Wiley, The Chemistry of Fear: Harvey Wiley’s Fight for Pure Food (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).

Source of the Month: London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Nutrition Collection

October’s source of the month is a primary source archive of historical records relating to scientific investigations in the field of nutrition, created and collected by staff at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine between the 1940s and 1990s. This collection consists of 310 boxes of materials relating to LSHTM nutrition research. Although the vast majority of the collection is not available online, portions have been digitized and can be made available to researchers by staff.

Re: Webinar: Going Beyond Weight-Watchers: Santorio and the Role of Medicine in the Quantification of Nature

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I missed Jonathan Barry's part due to an interview, but Fabrizio Bigotti's talk was truly fascinating to this modernist, who is used to describing "modern medicine" since the late 18th century as fixated on quantification and increasingly reductive. He described Santorio Santori's 4 instruments: the famous weighing chair but also a thermometer, hygrometer, and a pulsilogium. He was trying to quantify physiological phenomena, determine the range of normal, and at what "latitude" disease began.

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