The History of Nutrition: A Confession, a Case, and a Caveat

Lisa Haushofer Discussion

(This post is part of a series. Members of the H-Nutrition editorial team have written brief, reflective pieces on the history of nutrition as a field and our various perspectives on it. We have done this both to "introduce" ourselves and to begin a conversation about history of nutrition as a scholarly endeavor. Any H-Nutrition subscribers who would like to contribute a similar piece are welcome to do so!)

 

The History of Nutrition: A Confession, a Case, and a Caveat

 

Lisa Haushofer

 

When I was asked to be an editor for this new network on the history of nutrition, I immediately thought of the fact that I rarely introduce myself as a historian of nutrition. It’s not that I avoid the term exactly. Partly it might have something to do with my disciplinary home and background - in medicine and in the history of science and medicine, - partly it might stem from the fact that the history of nutrition is rarely considered its own field of study, often subsumed under the history of the body, of physiology, of food. I also didn’t set out to write my dissertation on the history of nutrition. Instead I became interested in how physiological ideas are translated into material procedures and products - first in the form of surgical techniques, and now, with my dissertation, in the form of commercial products.  I was interested in how the history of biology and physiology was communicated through commercial therapeutic products, and how these products, in turn, informed changing ideas of the body and reflected broader economic and social anxieties. So in a way, I have often found the label “history of nutrition” both too narrow and too broad to describe what I am up to.

 

But before I talk myself out of a job I have barely even started, I would like to make a case for the validity of studying the history of nutrition as a distinct field. One that is of course connected to the histories of food, commodities, the body, policy, but that also engenders its very own research questions and historiography. At the same time, I would also like to suggest a very important caveat for such an approach.

 

I take the history of nutrition to be the study of the creation of knowledge and beliefs about food and eating over time, especially as they pertain to health and disease.  As such, it is grounded, above all, in the scholarship and methods of the history of science and medicine, while also interacting with other fields. While food studies and the history of food provide valuable insight into how social eating patterns, food policies and their effects, food distribution and availability, and changing cultural and religious eating practices, influenced the kinds of things people ate over time, the history of nutrition can get us closer to an understanding of what people were told to think about what they ate, what fears and hopes they associated with eating this or that food, how they imagined it would interact with their bodies, and how they might have judged other people’s eating habits. In other words, the history of nutrition has the potential to make visible some of the most formative and intimate ways in which people in the past structured their relationship between themselves and the world around them.

 

At the same time, the study of nutrition’s past can illuminate how these innermost beliefs were formed, and thereby link the experience of individual eaters with the prescriptions and aspirations of scientific institutions, governments, industries, and social movements.  Through the study of nutritional research programs and concepts, nutritional regulations, health movements, commercial nutritional products and nutritionally literate advertising strategies, we can understand how knowledge about food was created, negotiated, and diffused, and brought to bear on individual eaters.

 

But perhaps the most important reason for developing specific approaches to the history of nutrition is the need to understand the changing and historically constructed nature of nutritional knowledge. Within food studies, such an approach has been embodied in the field of ‘Critical Nutrition Studies,’ but too often these accounts still assume that what is healthy or ‘good for you’ to eat has a sort of transhistoric quality, that the approaches that establish nutritional consensus are unchanging, that the way in which people imagine how food interacts with their bodies today has always been the way in which people imagined food to interact with their bodies. A history of nutrition, that is a history of food and eating that is informed by a history of science perspective, can therefore deepen our understanding of how food in the past was thought to produce health or disease, how the conditions of knowledge creation about food and eating changed over time, and how our current ideas and anxieties about food and eating in relation to health and our bodies were shaped.

 

While I believe the history of nutrition to be a very productive lens, both for its tendency to focus broader developments and for its ability to uniquely connect the private and the public, I am also aware that this belief relies on a broad and generous definition of “nutrition.” Nutrition per se is a modern concept, linked to a modern arrangement of scientific practices and knowledge, and a fairly recent conception of the body and of food. This network, however, does not limit its focus to the discussion of nutrition in this sense, but includes older systems and practices of knowledge concerned with eating and health, such as dietetics, regimen, humoral physiology, as well as alchemical, mechanical and naturalist approaches to food.