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.
A number of scholars from the H-Nutrition community will be giving talks at the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society and Association for the Study of Food and Society Annual Meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, this week. If you are able to attend, you may want to check out the following sessions:
Thursday 08:30-10:10 Session 08A: Chains of nutrition: Feeding plants, animals, and humans
Call for Papers
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+1 to what Andrew wrote--and definitely thanks for highlighting these texts! An important aspect of the cultural context here is textual tradition. If an well-known authority (medical or religious) had written that a particular food or drug was a useful cure, that becomes "truth." Even such substances were/are not particularly efficacious from a physiological standpoint, it was easier to come up with a reason why it didn't work in a particular instance rather than to decide the long-standing belief was false or the authority was wrong.
