Food, Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating

Food, Morals and Meaning By using current fascination with the science of nutrition in many Western cultures, Food, Mo...

Author: John Coveney

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Food, Morals and Meaning

By using current fascination with the science of nutrition in many Western cultures, Food, Morals and Meaning will examine our need to discipline our desires, our appetites and our pleasures at the table. It will be argued that, as well as providing a scientific rationale for eating, nutrition forms the moral basis of modern food choice, requiring us to rationalise our food pleasures. Food, Morals and Meaning first explores the way that concerns about food, the body and pleasure were prefigured in antiquity and then how these concerns were recast in early Christianity as problems of ‘natural’ appetite which had to be curbed. The following chapters discuss how scientific knowledge about food was constructed out of philosophical and religious concerns about indulgence and excess in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. By analysing current strategies to promote healthy diets, the book provides an original insight into the construction of social categories like ‘good eaters’, ‘responsible parents’ and ‘healthy children’. Finally, by using research collected from in-depth interviews with families, the last section focuses on the social organisation of food in the modern home to illustrate the ways that the meal table now incorporates the principles of nutrition as a form of moral training, especially for children. Food, Morals and Meaning will be essential reading for those studying nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body.

John Coveney is a Senior Lecturer in nutrition and public health at Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia.

Food, Morals and Meaning

The pleasure and anxiety of eating

John Coveney

London and New York

First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 2000 John Coveney All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-415-20748-7 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-203-02594-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-17317-1 (Glassbook Format)

Contents

List of tables Preface 1 Foucault, discourse, power and the subject

vi vii 1

2 Governmentality of modern nutrition

18

3 Greeks to the Christians: from ethics to guilt

30

4 Religion and reason: the emergence of a discourse on nutrition 5 Paupers, prisoners and moral panics: refining the meaning of nutrition 6 The nutritional policing of families

56 79 93

7 Nutrition landscapes in the late twentieth century

112

8 Nutrition homescapes in the twentieth century

131

9 An ethnography of family food: subjects of food choice

149

10 Conclusions

172

Appendix

178

Notes

181

References

182

Index

198

Tables

4.1 An example of the amount of food and nutrients that could be bought for 25 cents in 1895 A.2 Family members (including income and self-described employment)

75 179

Preface

This book will examine the development of our current attitudes to food, pleasure and the body. Our aim is to explore the way that the pleasures we derive from food are also the sources of anxieties around eating. We will see how eating became a problem for the individual body, and, importantly, how it became a problem for the social body. We will show that anxieties about our appetite for food have given and continue to give rise to concerns about the very moral fabric of society. We will see that they have a long-standing place in Western history. The heart of the problem it seems is that food pleasure challenges self-control. There is only one other pleasure that matches food in this way. That is sex. Indeed, it is no coincidence that for the ancient Greeks, pleasure from food and pleasure from sex were considered in much the same terms. Both were natural appetites and both required the exercise of moderation in order to demonstrate that one was truly civilised. Nor was it any coincidence that the early Christian fathers considered the appetite for food to be more harmful and distracting than an appetite for sex in the quest for spirituality. Satisfying the appetite for food, and any pleasures derived from that satisfaction, was a source of great anxiety for the early monks. It could be said that these things may have been true for superstitious ancients, but today don’t we live more rational, more sophisticated, more informed lives? This is indeed far from the case. Look at the following example: we live at a time when food choices seem endless. Modern food production systems churn out a wide range of foodstuff at a breathless pace, with thousands of new food items launched each year onto the Australian market. But has there ever been a time when we have been required to demonstrate so much concern about our eating habits? Warnings and admonitions constantly alert us to the fact that we could be

viii Preface

digging our own graves with our knives and forks. These concerns are usually couched in terms of our health, especially in terms of the scientific, calculated understanding of food that we recognise as the field of nutrition. However, nutritional knowledge does not merely consist of facts, figures and recommendations from scientific experts. As a knowledge about what, when, and how much to eat, nutrition provides a guide for individuals to assess their eating habits in terms of what is ‘good’. Indeed, the term ‘good food’, once reserved for notions of tables laden with tasty dishes of food, now suggests something entirely different. Today good food requires one to show less concern with the physical pleasure of eating, and more interest in the good health that results from our dietary habits. Think about the number of times people describe themselves as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in relation to the nutritional quality of the food they have eaten (‘I’ve been very bad today, far too much fat and sugar in that chocolate bar’ or, ‘Actually, I deserve this gooey, sugary treat because I’ve been very good so far this week’). These comments signal the way in which scientific and technical knowledge forms the basis for the moral judgements we make about ourselves and others. It is this moral imperative which is encoded in nutrition that makes it so compelling, so engaging, so judgemental, and so strangely popular. Much of this interest stems from the fact that many of the foods that give us pleasure are the very foods that – in a nutritional context – cause us anxiety, and often guilt. And yet instead of shrugging off recommendations and proscriptions as gratuitous preaching from a bunch of scientific do-gooders, we have allowed – indeed, welcomed – nutrition into our lives and into our minds. For even the most ardent hedonist (‘I just eat anything I like and enjoy’) knows about good nutrition principles, even if he or she chooses not to practise them. If the popularity of nutrition is gauged by the media coverage it commands, it would seem that we are fascinated by the moral dimensions of food choice: what we should and should not be eating. It is the emergence of nutrition, as a science and a morality, that is the subject of this book. As we shall see, concerns about the pleasure and anxiety of eating have been variously structured at different times in different Western systems of thought. We need to acknowledge that nutrition did not invent a morality about eating, even if it rehearses it. Nutrition merely mapped onto existing concerns about food and pleasure that have been part of Western culture since antiquity. Nutrition, that is to say, is the most recent manifestation of this concern. It is the

Preface ix

purpose of this overview to introduce the general themes, key concepts and broad issues of this book which will be developed in subsequent chapters.

Histories of nutrition and their problems Some commentators have taken an interest in the emergence of nutrition, and attempts have been made to study how it developed, and where and why it currently circulates in contemporary discourse on health. These studies may be broadly described under three headings. First, there are histories of the scientific discoveries of nutrition; second, there are sociological interpretations of the development of nutrition; and, last, there are histories which have examined changes in medical opinion about diet since the nineteenth century. In Australia, recent examples of these three approaches are, respectively, The History of Human Nutrition in Australia (Clements, 1986), Good Nutrition? Fact and Fashion in Dietary Advice (Crotty, 1995), and What the Doctors Ordered: 150 Years of Dietary Advice in Australia (Santich, 1995). Typically, these accounts of nutrition take as their starting points people and events in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, Clements has explained the development of nutrition through the scientific discoveries of Lavoisier (1743–1794), Liebig (1803–1873) and Voit (1841–1908). With a more sociological orientation, Crotty has examined the role of so-called nineteenth-century middle-class social reformers, such as Wilbur Atwater in the United States, in the application of nutritional science to the social problems of poorer classes, while Santich has looked at the changing nature of medical advice on diet, especially as this has reflected social concerns. The problem with these approaches to the development of nutrition will be fully discussed later. At this point, we will propose that histories of nutrition which begin with the ‘bright and creative minds’ of scientists or social reformers (or, indeed, the populations for whom nutrition was expected to be of benefit) impose unnecessary limits on a fuller conceptualisation of nutrition. For one thing, they require us to explain the increasing interest and spread of nutrition discourses either in terms of humanistic, progressive, scientific rationality or through a political economy of food choice aimed at manipulating the poorer classes. Left totally unproblematised in these accounts, however, is the nature of the knowing individual, or subject, who has the capacity for making food choices or recommending them. This subject is easily recognisable in the aforementioned histories as the scientist who makes discoveries about food and nutrients, as the social reformer whose knowledge about food choice allows them to inform the

x Preface

poor about ways to improve their eating habits (no matter how misguided some may see this to be), or indeed, as the individuals or groups who, with the correct training, will know and understand what foods to eat. This individual, or subject, which we will call the ‘modern subject of food choice’, is the point from whom all knowledge about nutrition radiates, and around which this knowledge circulates. In order to examine some of the central questions about our current attitudes to food and pleasure, it is necessary to ask other questions which are: how and why did food choice become so problematic, and when and under what conditions did the modern subject of food choice emerge? Answers to these questions would shed light – a very different light – on the development of nutrition and the way it currently operates in the context of the pleasure and anxiety of eating. At this point it is worth making clear what is meant by the term ‘subject’ in this book. For our purposes we can understand this to mean a self-conscious, self-reflecting and self-knowing individual. The modern subject is principally characterised by a belief in its own capacity for reason, autonomy, freedom and choice. A related term, ‘subjectivity’, is useful because as Barrett (1991) points out, it connotes not only the conscious aspect of private experiences (and the ability to reflect on them) but also more affective qualities such as emotions, pleasures, and anxieties. Sometimes the term ‘soul’ is used, more to indicate the individual who is both self-conscious and ‘conscienced’. Using the work of Michel Foucault we will see how the modern subject of food choice has been a product of interdependent historical forces. It is a subject that emerged at a period known as the Enlightenment, and who is, characteristically, defined by his/her capacity for reason, self-reflection, moral autonomy, and selfregulation. This is not to say, of course, that people did not choose their food before this time, it is to say, rather, that their choices were constructed according to a very different index of concerns and constraints. Some of these involved the availability and accessibility of food. Others involved an entirely different understanding of food conduct.

A Genealogy of Nutrition Foucault coins genealogy to mean: a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc. without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation

Preface xi

to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history. (Foucault, 1980a: 117) In other words, genealogy is a form of investigation which does not take as its starting point individuals or subjects who are generators of ideas, creators of knowledge, and discoverers of things. It examines instead the contexts from which they are constructed. Throughout this book we will certainly discuss the role of individual thought and action in the development of scientific advances important to the knowledge of food. Our main concern, however, will be to show how these bright minds are the product of a number of historical developments and social procedures. We should, therefore, analyse them as complex and variable functions of discourse, operating within highly particular historical and cultural contexts, rather than as omniscient, ahistorical, universal creators of texts or ideas. For Foucault, subjects are constructed through relations of knowledge and power, and we will examine these ideas about power in the next chapter. For the moment, however, we should note that Foucault does not understand power to be oppressive or dominating. For him, power is productive: it produces ‘subjects’, for example, subjects of food choice; it produces ‘objects’, for example, bodies that require nutrients; and it produces facts or ‘regimes of truth’, for example, nutritional knowledge. Thus we can begin to see how Foucault offers the possibility of a different account of nutrition, one that renders other histories of nutrition problematic because it takes as its ‘object’ the very individual that has been fundamental to them: the modern subject of food choice. In this history we will see, for example, how the calculated, scientific understanding of food which started to emerge during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which came to fruition during the nineteenth century, is part of a panoply of technologies and strategies designed to better manage populations. Nutrition was produced from a concern for what Foucault calls ‘governmentality’, which refers to the governing of the complex of ‘men and things’ (Foucault, 1991a: 93). It was produced at a time when a range of population sciences such as social statistics, social sciences and population medicine informed the regulation of the law, property, health, life and conduct of individuals through the normalisation of mundane activities. These population sciences gave birth to what Hunter terms an ‘archipelago of

xii Preface

calculative institutions’ (statistical societies, administrative bureaus and university departments and so on), where the management of the population developed (Hunter, 1994: 43). It was out of this concern for the control of populations that a scientific, rational view of food emerged. According to this view, food pleasure was considered to be problematic, principally because pleasures derived from food undermined a more rational and reasoned approach to eating.

Ethics and the problem of pleasure As we hinted earlier, food and the body have posed a problem for Western thought since antiquity. This problem has required different forms of individual concern and conduct during different historical periods. Foucault terms these concerns rapports à soi (Foucault, 1986: 342) or ‘ethics’, which involve the relationship an individual subject has with him or herself: ‘Ethics determine how the individual is supposed to constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions’ (Foucault, 1986: 352). However, ethics are not invented by the individual, but are socially and historically patterned (Foucault, 1989: 11). For example, the concern about food in relation to the body and pleasure in ancient Greece required individuals to develop a range of ethical considerations and practices in order to be proper citizens. Individuals who did not observe these ethical practices were believed to be unfit to take part in civic duties. For early Christians, the problem of food and ‘appetite’ was linked to sins associated with lust and the ‘pleasures of the flesh’. Furthermore, illness and disease were considered to be manifestations of evil and sin, the treatment of which was tantamount to the purification of the soul. Thus a range of ethical practices was required by Christians in order to render themselves pure and godly. These examples of the Greeks and the Christians illustrate two of the ways that past Western cultures have dealt with problems of pleasure derived from food and eating. Yet each period understood the body and pleasures differently, and thus required different ethical considerations. For the Greeks it was moderation, whereas Christians sought to extinguish pleasure altogether. If we apply these considerations to our present concerns we can understand that nutrition is not only a science but also an ethos which presents a problem for modern individuals in regard to their food choices and pleasure. We shall explore these issues later in detail, but here we might usefully summarise by saying that nutrition functions for modern subjects – subjects of food choice – as both a

Preface xiii

scientific and a spiritual (in so far as it assumes an ethical consciousness) discipline. In other words, it serves a dual function by providing a range of scientific knowledges about food and the body through which individuals can be ‘objectified’, and by providing them with rapports à soi; or ‘spiritual’ discipline. ‘Spiritual’ here does not necessarily equate with ‘theological’ but refers to the means by which individuals are required to construct themselves with a ‘correct’ concern for the ‘proper’ way of behaving in relation to eating.

The parameters of this book Our task in this book will be to examine the range of historical events and contingencies which have been important to our current attitudes to food, manifested currently in our preoccupation with nutrition. In the first chapter of this book we examine Foucault’s explanation of the production of the modern subject by summarising his work on discourse, power and ethics. In chapter two we develop the notion of ‘governmentality’ as a process whereby individuals are required to meet certain obligations in relation to food set out by authorities, and, importantly, where individuals require themselves to meet these obligations. The origins of these obligations are found in antiquity, so chapter three examines the relationship between food, the body and the self in early Greek (fourth century BC), Imperial Roman (up to the second century AD), and Christian (from the low Middle Ages to the sixteenth century) attitudes. Chapter four looks at the conditions in which the modern subject of food choice emerged, how the notion of choice was important to nutrition. Chapter five examines the way rations in institutions like prisons and workhouses promoted the development of a rational basis for the feeding of populations, while chapter six is concerned specifically with the emergence of the family as a principal site of nutritional control. Chapter seven deals with the development of nutrition over the past fifty years with a particular focus on how nutrition discourses amplify, and are amplified by, other discourses, especially discourses on affluence and lifestyle. Chapter eight looks at the way that the modern ‘home’ has been central to the further mobilisation of nutrition. This leads to chapter nine in which detailed interviews with families examine the way nutrition discourses construct modern subjects. The last chapter summarises the major themes that the book has developed. This overview has attempted to explain the background, aims and concerns of this book. It may be useful to state its limits. First, we are not engaged primarily with ‘gastronomy’, if by that term we mean the study of cuisines of

xiv Preface

different cultures. We are not concerned here with geographical or regional differences in foods. This field has already been studied, albeit with a different methodology from the one used here (see, for example, Sokalov, 1991). Second, we are not concerned with the food habits of individuals on the basis of gender, socio-economic status or culture. In other words, we are not trying to understand the differences in, say, the foods eaten by men as compared to those eaten by women. These topics have been covered by some other authors (see, for example, Murcott, 1982; Charles and Kerr, 1988; DeVault, 1991). Third, while this book recognises that concepts of food as nutritional science have been ‘exported’ to the developing world, it will focus predominantly on the mobilisation of nutrition in developed countries. Fourth, while we will discuss food pleasure and the anxieties it invokes, we will not be dealing with the growing literature which analyses pleasure coming from the fields of psychology or anthropology. Each of these inquiries has its own approaches to food choice, albeit with differing methodologies and orientations. Common to all, however, is the assumption of a pre-existing individual (or collective in the form of ‘society’ or ‘culture’) in the act of choosing food. In other words, these understandings of food choice from within the human sciences are strategies which invest the choosing subject with meaning. To reiterate, our primary focus is to answer the following questions: • • •

What were the considerations that were made regarding food and pleasure prior to the emergence of nutrition? What were the conditions that made the emergence of modern understandings of food and health possible? How does nutritional discourse circulate today, how is it produced and reproduced, and in what ways does contemporary nutritional discourse produce modern subjects?

Chapter I

Foucault, discourse, power and the subject

One of the points made in the Preface was that an analysis of our understanding of food choice should not begin with the minds of the discoverers or the inventors of nutritional wisdom. We should rather examine the construction and fabrication of this entity, known here as the modern subject of food choice. There is a very good reason for this. As we said in the Preface, the science of food and eating serves as the basis for many of the judgements we make about ourselves and others as eaters. That is to say, the moral decisions we make of ourselves (as ‘good’ or ‘bad’) are directly related to the technical and rational knowledge of science. Science then has taken on the role that was once the province of religion in that it articulates the basis of our moral concerns. Given the status now accorded to science it is very easy to see expertise – or the public or private instrumentalities who fund it – as being in the business of manipulating and controlling an unsuspecting public. However, this form of critique leaves us with a number of unanswered questions. Some of these have been raised by Smith and Nicholson (1995) who point out that the expansion of nutritional science in Britain during the early part of this century cannot simply be explained by reference to a conservative rhetoric about the ignorance of and, therefore the need to educate, the population – especially the poorer classes. Indeed, education and training in nutrition was part of the rhetoric of many left-wing groups who placed a high value on increasing knowledge of science as a progressive social force. The concern – some would say moral panic – that reverberated across the political spectrum in Britain and elsewhere about the effects of diet-related illness on the health and efficiency of the population can be better understood by examining the empirical and moral problems that were, and indeed still are, fundamental to the modern subject of food choice. Our task in this chapter is to examine the work of Foucault to see how this subject is constructed.

2 Foucault, discourse, power and the subject

Food choice and the human sciences The daily experience of obtaining food is seen by the human sciences as a uniquely human experience inasmuch as we make a ‘choice’, either consciously or innately, about what foods to eat. Biologists might argue that food choice can be explained at the level of the cell or physiological systems. Psychologists may counter this by observing that it is personal values and beliefs that condition an individual to make certain food choices. And anthropologists debate whether food choice is either the product of so-called ‘materialist forces’ (for example, social class and economics), or the product of ‘idealism’ which represents the ‘exquisitely human capacity both to deal in symbols and to confer symbolic significance on objects that surround them’ (Murcott, 1988). Instead of entering into these debates here we will look at these different standpoints in another way to allow us to appreciate the application of the work of Foucault to the area of food choice. Simply put, it may be that the whole notion of ‘choice’ at the cellular, the psychological and the cultural level is actually part of the same system of thought, or episteme, which has a specific history and periodisation. A useful way of understanding this is by challenging the view that the external world is perceived through various ‘prisms’ which allow objects certain realities, and that these realities can change accordingly. Much of the debate in the human sciences concerns which ‘prism’ (paradigm or theory) best explains what we see. However, this view merely prioritises the already-formed subject, or consciousness, as the point from which the perceptual views of the world radiate. To continue the metaphor, we should not give priority to the subject who has the capacity to hold up the prisms up for viewing. Foucault’s argument is that the subject itself requires problematising. Armstrong uses the following analogy: A hundred years ago physicists debated the nature of the ether, the unknown substance which exists throughout the universe between the planets. Einstein solved the problem by dismissing the question: because all planets were moving relative to one another there was no absolute point from which this unknown substance could be measured, the existence of nature of the ether becomes an unanswerable question according to the theory of relativity.

(Armstrong, 1985: 111) In a similar vein, the arguments of the biologist, the psychologist and the anthropologist set out above can be understood, through Foucault’s work, in a

Foucault, discourse, power and the subject 3

different light. In talking about food choice in its various manifestations, they sustain a view of subjects (or indeed cells) as prior to the food choices they make. By contrast, a Foucauldian reading allows us to recognise that the modern subject and food choice are both targets and effects of the system of thought which inform these disciplines. The subject is a target in the sense that knowledge about food choice attempts to unravel more and more facts about human habits, desires, deficiencies, motives, bodily constituents and so on. But the subject is also an effect because, at the same time, it is the product of that knowledge. In order to clarify this somewhat difficult concept let us briefly look at some work which has used Foucault’s ideas. In his work on the development of medical knowledge, Armstrong (1983) asks why is it that some things so obvious to current medical knowledge – modern illnesses, organs and simple diagnostic tests and procedures to locate disease – remained hidden to pre-Enlightenment generations. Instead of explaining this simply by reference to the primitive minds of early physicians, their lack of technology and their failure to ask intelligent questions, Armstrong asks us to consider the way that the body as examined by modern medicine became an analysable space – an object formulated within a highly descriptive language and taxonomy – at roughly the same time as the developments of other sites of surveillance: the prison, the school, the workplace. The disciplinary apparatus which developed to enable this surveillance fabricated discrete individuals in the form of the prisoner, the schoolchild and the worker. Indeed, the whole notion of the individual was predicated on the possibility of bringing into focus ‘individuality’ from below the threshold of description. Thus the patient or the ‘sick’ community arises from a form of examination which seeks to separate, categorise and distinguish specific characteristics, attributes and pathologies. As Armstrong says: Thus, every time medicine had cause to deploy its new techniques and treat an illness, it drew an outline of a particular anatomy, a docile body. At first the procedure was unsure and the outline hazy but with time and with refinement the shape became more clear. As the nineteenth century progressed each and every consultation of the new pathological medicine functioned to imprint, by its sheer repetition, the reality of a specific anatomy on a social conscience.

(Armstrong, 1983: 6)


In short, modern medical knowledge does not simply describe the body. It constructs it. In a similar manner, Nettleton’s analysis of dentistry (1992) demonstrates the way that our current understandings of healthy teeth, gums and oral disease and so on were not merely hidden in wait for scientific discovery earlier this century. They were instead the product of totally different understandings about personal hygiene, environmental agents and new mechanisms for watching over the population. In other words, the knowledges of dentistry do not simply describe mouths. They invent them. Armstrong and Nettleton essentially argue that modern knowledges of bodies or mouths were not part of the gradual unfolding and perfecting of our understanding of reality. Bodies and mouths that we currently know were not inevitable, they were not goals at the end of an ineluctable journey of discovery. They are instead objects constructed by specific knowledges. Foucault’s work allows us to understand this process because it focuses on the contingencies, ruptures, discontinuities and historical fragility of events, rather than as stages on a fixed immutable path to enlightenment and progress. Foucault’s work allows us to appreciate that things could easily have been otherwise. For as we shall see in future chapters, things were indeed different in relation to food and choice for people of past Western cultures. The whole notion of a modern subject of food choice, especially in relation to nutrition and health, is based on the philosophical foundations of humanity which Foucault problematises. This chapter will summarise Foucault’s major work, especially on the subject, thereby providing a theoretical basis for the following chapters.

Foucault’s modes of analysis of the subject Foucault has examined the fabrication of the subject in a number of ways or modes. In his first mode of analysis Foucault looks at the production of the subject through the knowledges of humanity, ‘the human sciences’ which emerged during the eighteenth century. In the second mode, Foucault looks at the way subjects are produced through objectifying and normalising processes in relation to institutionalised knowledges about what it means to be human. In the third mode of analysis, Foucault examined the extent to which individuals produce themselves as subjects. He wanted to explore the ways in which we set aside a part of our ‘selves’ as a basis for our moral goals. These three modes of inquiry, which in some ways periodise Foucault’s work, allow him to deal with the relationship between discourse, power and the subject. These are summarised


below, rather than fully explicated because we are mainly interested in how Foucault’s ideas will help us form an understanding of what is to come in subsequent chapters.

The subject and the episteme In The Order Of Things Foucault (1982b) demonstrates how the human sciences emerged at the beginning of the modern age in the eighteenth century with a new object of interest: Man or humanity.1 He argues that ‘before the end of the eighteenth century man did not exist’ (1982b: 308), and before the Modern period there was no ‘epistemological consciousness of man’ (Foucault, 1982b: 309). By this, Foucault means that in earlier systems of thought what was considered to be knowledge about humans was interwoven with knowledge about nature. This is not to say that within this knowledge there were no descriptions of men and women. There was, for example, natural history which dealt with humans as a species or a genus; general grammar was used as a way of categorising language; and the analysis of wealth provided an understanding of labour and production. However, Foucault argues that in all these analyses there is no space marked out as a specific domain proper to Man. In other words, this was a time when ‘humanity’, as it is now understood, had no way of conceptualising ‘its’ separateness (McHoul and Grace, 1993: 32). Foucault makes the point that the sciences of Man and the notion of the uniqueness of Man, his individual qualities, which separated him from nature and so on, were not so-called ground-breaking ‘discoveries’. The ‘Enlightenment’ did not ‘roll back the frontiers of ignorance’ and provide a means of knowing the ‘truth’. In fact, ‘truth’ was the product of discourse. Discourses may be understood as bodies of knowledge or disciplines which are in themselves the form of disciplinary practices. In this sense, discourse may be taken to mean ‘whatever constrains – but also enables – writing, speaking and thinking within specific historical limits’ (McHoul, 1994: 944). Discourses are therefore ‘productive’ in the sense that they produce knowledges. In fact, whatever is known is made knowable through discourses. It is out of this relationship that ‘truth’ arises. As Foucault (1991b) puts it ‘Truth consists of a certain relationship that discourse or knowledge has with itself’. And, importantly, such knowledges or disciplines are historically constituted (Foucault, 1992a). The very fact that these knowledges are historically constituted calls into question all assumptions that knowledge is progressive and impartial (McHoul, 1994).


During the Modern era, then, we see the emergence of a subject who is the product of knowledge about itself. And because Man is now knowable, an endless journal now ensures for Man to know humanity. As Foucault puts it ‘Man, in the analytic of finitude, is a strange empirico-transcendental doublet, since he is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible’ (1982b: 318). The ‘strange empirico-transcendental doublet’ to which Foucault refers is the Cartesian subject who simultaneously is both the object of Man’s understanding and the subject of Man’s contemplation. It is the arrival of the Cartesian subject at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and its endurance over the next two hundred years, that signifies the ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’ to which Foucault refers. The Cartesian subject is characterised by an individual self-consciousness which makes possible objective knowledge of the world. We need to remember that for Descartes the mind was seen to be responsible for intellectual meditation whose proper activity was the study of its own contents. Consciousness could thus now be seen not only as understanding input into the mind from the outside world, but also understanding input from itself through self-reflection and meditation. The Cartesian cogito, therefore, signifies the auto-constitution of the subject, as both ‘subject’ and as ‘object’. And while for Descartes the cogito was a substance to be known, Kant was able to further develop the cogito from ‘empirical’ and ‘pure’ meanings constructed through the concepts of the ‘phenomenal’ and the ‘noumenal’. The phenomenal represents the empirical, historical self; the noumenal represents the pure, essential, ahistorical, universal self which Kant believed to reside in the eternal and unalterable laws of reason (Greenfield, 1984). Cartesian and Kantian subjects signify the enduring features of the self as both empirical and transcendental, a formulation of humanity which became the basis of Western philosophy. For Foucault, as we have said, the understanding of humanity which emerged during the late eighteenth century was the product of discourses. Foucault sees these discourses as superordinate, or anterior to, the social institutions and the subjects within them. In other words, according to Foucault discourses do not represent ‘things’, they produce them. Thus, by looking at discourses in The Order of Things, Foucault shows that certain knowledges became possible by recourse not to their growing perfection over time but to events which gave them the opportunity for expression within a certain historical moment. By describing the historical appearance of the human sciences, Foucault draws our attention to several important points. First, he notes that before the


emergence of the human sciences there was no a priori of Man, there was no problem left empty from earlier systems of thought that the human sciences were expected to fill. As Foucault says, the human sciences did not appear when, as a result of some pressing rationalism, some unresolved scientific problem, some practical concern, it was decided to include man (willy-nilly, and with a greater or lesser degree of success) among the objects of sciences – among which it has perhaps not been proved even yet that it is absolutely possible to class him; they appeared when man constituted himself in Western culture as both that which must be conceived of and that which must be known.

(Foucault, 1982b: 344) Second, Foucault maintains that all knowledge of Man by Man is, and only is, made possible solely by the manifestation of that knowledge. In other words, knowledge in the human sciences is not a pale reflection of what knowledge of Man’s true nature really is. Following from this, we can say that because the modern subject is produced by the discourse, knowledges and the practices of the human sciences, modern Man is modern Man and not a mere representation of some hidden truth which represents ‘real Man’. This is why the concept of ideology is so foreign to Foucault. While it is true that in The Order of Things Foucault is critical of modern philosophical efforts to forge an understanding of Man, as an entity that is both the source of the world and an object in the world (Gutting, 1994: 12), for Foucault there is no extra-discursive point outside of the discourses of the human sciences from which we can seek ‘real’ empirical facts or epistemological truths. The final point of Foucault’s work relevant to this discussion is that the human sciences developed out of the problems and obstacles (practical or theoretical) that they posed for themselves. In other words, the human sciences did not just appear out of the ether but were fashioned in relation to problems that arose according to the way individuals, groups and populations were viewed and viewed themselves. As Foucault explains, ‘The new norms imposed by industrial society upon individuals were certainly necessary before psychology, slowly, in the course of the nineteenth century could constitute itself as a science’ (Foucault, 1982b: 345). Thus for sociology to appear, problems in relation to social order and the threats posed by certain imbalances were required. In other words, Foucault is saying that the problems that Man posed to himself about


himself gave rise to concerns and considerations through which sciences – psychology, sociology, anthropology, and so forth – became formalised. We can see an example of the way that social practices condition cognitive discourse in the development of a subjectivity of food choice from the 1700s onwards, when a specific problematisation of food choice became a possibility under two main influences. The first influence was a general increase in the availability of foodstuff – principally for the élite classes – from the eighteenth century onwards because of a greater stability of European life. The second influence came from the Church which continued to enforce rituals of abstinence such as fasts, aimed at curbing indulgence and thereby promoting spirituality. The result was a problematisation of food and eating which emphasised the failure of individuals to exercise control and self-restraint. From these concerns emerged a discourse, produced and reproduced in writings and treatises, about the moral degeneration of society, a discourse which spread through Europe and profoundly shaped the thoughts of a number of influential people.

The subject and power/knowledge In Foucault’s next mode of analysis, he studies the relationship between power and knowledge or rather the analytics of power (Foucault 1980b). Foucault is interested in the way in which power relationships subjugate by means of the objectification of bodies through various strategies of disciplinary power. He is also interested in the way people are subjected to self-examination in terms of techniques which incite them to speak about themselves or ‘confess’ through strategies of pastoral power. As we shall see shortly, pastoral power derives from the principles used by the Christian church, principles organised around notions of sacrifice by pastors in their commitment to the salvation of individuals. In Discipline and Punish (1979), Foucault explores the way in which the exercise of power changed through a historical reversal of ‘visibility and invisibility’. In ancient times power functioned through its visibility in the form of the spectacle of torture and public execution observed by mass gatherings. The visibility of the ceremony was instrumental in making the power of the sovereign utterly clear. By contrast, in the Modern era power functions in a less visible way; in fact, it is those who are the object of the power that are made most visible. Using the metaphor of the ‘panopticon’, an architectural design for prisons which allows maximum visibility of prisoners by guards, Foucault describes various arrangements – architecture, programmes, strategies – of common settings, for


example, hospitals, schools and classrooms, and workplaces, and is able to demonstrate how the panopticon structures human subjectivity. Precisely because they know they are always visible, individuals assume responsibility for the constraints of power and begin to discipline themselves: ‘He [the subject] inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection’ (Foucault, 1979: 203). Foucault believes this to be an ingenious form of power instituted at practically no cost: ‘No need for arms, physical violence or material restraint. Just an observing gaze that each individual feels weighing on him, and ends up internalising to the point that he is his own overseer’ (Foucault, 1980c). Modern forms of power, that is to say, do not work solely by punishing the body. They work at the level of the conscience: the ‘soul’. As Foucault says [The soul] exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of power. . . . This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment but is born of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint.

(Foucault, 1979: 29) Thus Christian doctrine, as a moral force shaping the way in which people think about themselves, has been supplanted by knowledge of what it means to be truly human: the human sciences. And new techniques – surveillance, normalisation and supervision – are used to establish the ‘humanness’ of individuals. Foucault called these techniques ‘technologies of power’ and he explains their pervasiveness with reference to the early pastoral practices of the church. For Foucault, [Pastoral power] is a form of power that cannot be exercised without knowing the insides of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of conscience and ability to direct it. This form of power is salvation oriented (as opposed to political power). It is oblative (as opposed to the principle of sovereignty); it is individualised (as opposed to legal power); it is coextensive and continuous with life; it is linked with a production of truth – the truth of the individual himself.

(Foucault, 1982a; 214)


Pastoral power is exercised through, for example, the confession, this extraordinary expectation that we have of ourselves and others to speak about our trials and tribulations. For Foucault, confession is part of everyday life. It is used to ‘tell the truth’ in a wide range of situations and instances: ‘One confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles’ (Foucault, 1990a: 59). And one makes these confessions in the areas of justice, medicine (including nutrition), education, family relationships, and love relations. We should recognise that Foucault’s view of power is radically different from one which seeks to dominate or oppress. He does not see power as necessarily negative. In describing the way in which power relates to knowledge he contends that ‘power and knowledge directly imply one another; there is no power relationship without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations’ (Foucault 1979: 27). Furthermore, power produces pleasure, desire and fulfilment, ‘[Power] needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is to repress’ (Foucault, 1980a: 119). We can see Foucault’s understanding of power operating in current sciences which problematise food choice, like nutrition. It might seem odd that a discipline which purports to train people in ‘correct’ ways of eating, often by asking them to relinquish the pleasure and enjoyment of things they like to consume, is so popular. Indeed, if popularity is judged by the amount of time, space and money expended in attempting to know and understand it, nutrition has a high approval rating. The latest discovery about what to eat and how to eat it is quickly turned into books and articles, receives immediate media coverage and finds a ready market with professional and popular audiences. Apparently people cannot wait to be told what they are doing wrong; they readily confess to their alimentary sins; and they eagerly attempt to put things right. The fact that this does not always translate into the course of action that experts recommend is actually beside the point. There are good reasons for this as we shall see in later chapters. What concerns us here is the way in which nutritional knowledge is made available through practices and techniques (such as surveys, examinations, comparisons, and normalisations) as well as the way in which this produces new knowledges, problems, concerns and strategies for correction. We should also recognise how these attempts to transform or ‘improve’ themselves provide individuals with pleasure, fulfilment and happiness. It is, of course, our moral failings, our weaknesses and the ensuing guilt that provide


for us the anxiety of eating. In short, nutrition knowledges, practices and techniques resonate with individual concerns about the transformation of individual conduct. To fully understand individual conduct we need to turn to Foucault’s third mode of analysis which is most explicit in his work on the ‘technologies of the self’. The technologies of the self are those strategies by which one develops, as Foucault puts it, rapports à soi or ‘ethics’ (Foucault, 1986: 352). The notion of ethics here relates to our individual forms of conduct, especially in relation to moral imperatives, such as a ‘work ethic’. It is the production of ‘the self by the self’ that Foucault examines.

The production of the subject by the self The theme of individual conduct and its relationship to subject production is taken up in some of Foucault’s last works, especially the History of Sexuality Volumes Two and Three (Foucault, 1992b, 1990b). In the introduction to The Use of Pleasure: History of Sexuality Volume Two (1992b) Foucault makes it clear that, after studying the empirical sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, his attention is now focused on the relationship of self with self and the formation of oneself as a subject (Foucault, 1992b: 6). It is in regard to the production of the self by the self that Foucault examines how, by way of specific techniques, practices, thoughts and beliefs, we transform ourselves into beings with certain concerns and ethics. That is, he investigates the ways in which we comport ourselves in relation to certain problems. Foucault chooses to study sexuality because he believed that we currently form ourselves as subjects, using technologies of the self, to produce ‘games of truth’ derived from our sexual preferences. He states that ‘Since Christianity, the Western world has never ceased saying: “To know who you are, know what your sexuality is”’ (Foucault, 1977: 111). Foucault’s study of sexuality helps us to understand better the pleasure and anxiety of eating because both sex and food have been part of a ‘problem of pleasure’ since antiquity. In order to track the formation of the Christian self, Foucault needed to study another culture where the self and sexuality, especially in terms of one’s sexual preferences, were connected in ways different from modern times. He chose to study Greek culture in the fourth century BC where the problems of sex were placed on a different register (Poster, 1986: 209). Foucault shows that sexual acts in ancient Greece were not controlled by judicial laws, but that they were regulated in the sense that there were common understandings about a


number of concerns about sexual partners, sexual roles and the frequency and timing of sexual acts. With regard to pleasure, Foucault demonstrates that desire, especially natural desire for sex, aphrodisia, was managed for the early Greeks by the regimen, known as the dietetics. The dietetics was a set of rules for living concerned with sex, eating, drinking, exercise and sleeping, the specificity of which depended on the exact activity. For the Greeks having sex, like eating and drinking, was considered one of the natural energies, the careful use of which required moderation, or sophrosyne, through which one achieved self-mastery (or enkrateia). Diligence and training, or askesis, were required in order to achieve moderation and selfmastery. Through these practices subjects aspired to a state of conduct whereby they attained freedom and the status of ruler in the home or city (McHoul and Grace, 1993: 102–3). Foucault’s point here is to emphasise that, even without external control in relation to sexual practices, in ancient Greece some form of control nevertheless took place vis-à-vis the ethical relationship one has with oneself. These controls were experienced through careful use of pleasure played out via the management of the dietetics. In The Care of the Self: History of Sexuality Volume Three (1990b), Foucault traces ethical practices around sexuality through to the Imperial Roman period where he finds little had changed in regard to askesis and the dietetics. However, the Roman ‘culture of the self’ had shifted the emphasis, first, from the love of boys (a central concern for the Greeks) to the importance of love within marriage and conjugal fidelity and, second, from a concern with the self aimed at proving oneself to be an appropriate ruler to an intensified concern with the self simply for its own sake. According to Poster (1986: 215) Foucault relates this intense preoccupation with the self to changes in political life. The Roman élite were under the control of an administration rather than in the direct command of society, as was the case for the early Greeks. The new arrangements, in which one’s position in society was often less clear, required more self-scrutiny. This new scrutiny took on forms such as writing about and reflecting on one’s daily experiences and activities. In regard to sex, new concerns emerged over the undesirable effects of sex on health with a number of pathologies attributed to sexual activities (Foucault, 1990b: 113–18). Foucault therefore sees some fundamental differences between the technologies of the self in the fourth century BC and those of the Graeco-Roman period of the second century AD, especially around fidelity in marriage and problems associated


with specific sexual acts. It would be easy to interpret these differences as influenced by Christian concerns about sexuality, where sexual desire was considered evil and where there were specific requirements regarding sexual preferences and marriage. However, according to Foucault, care should be taken in linking pagan and Christian morals. This is because within Graeco-Roman morality, marriage did not resolve the problem of sexuality, as it did in Christianity. And, while Graeco-Roman morality found the love of boys problematic, as did the early Greeks, that love was never considered ‘unnatural’, as it was for Christian ethics (Foucault, 1990b: 239). Christian morality clearly defined other modalities of the relation to the self, which were, according to Foucault, A characterisation of the ethical substance based on finitude, the Fall, and evil; a mode of subjection in the form of obedience to a general law that is at the same time the will of a personal god; a type of work on oneself that implies a decipherment of the soul and a purificatory hermeneutics of the desires; and a mode of ethical fulfilment that tends towards self-renunciation.

(Foucault, 1990b: 239–40) In other words, we move from a problematisation and anxiety about sexuality in the Graeco-Roman period, requiring a philosophical discipline of one’s conduct in order to lead a noble and beautiful life, to a concern about the evil of desire in the Christian period, necessitating the deployment of a persistent decipherment (interpretation or searching), renunciation and purification of the self in order to submit to God’s law (Mitchell, 1994: 159). These different modes of morality imposed different technologies through which one constituted oneself as a subject of one’s sexual behaviour: they required a different ethical relationship with oneself. In a later chapter we will examine more closely these different techniques since they are important when understanding the transition from ancient to modern forms of ethics. Foucault’s later work elucidates his concept of the subject, since it allows him to explain how subjectivity for the modern individual is constituted not only through technologies of power but also technologies of the self. In other words, subjectivity is produced not only through the relationships we have with discourses of power that ‘normalise’ and ‘objectify’ us, but also through practices in which we actively constitute ourselves by self-regulation. These practices are not invented by the individual but are ‘patterns that [the individual] finds in his


culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group’ (Foucault, 1989: 11). There are two themes that could be said to unify Foucault’s work on the technologies of power and the technologies of the self. These are the concepts of ‘problematisation’ and ‘control’ (Foucault, 1990c). In his work on madness, the clinic, and the prison, Foucault says he was interested in the ways in which technologies of control were put in place and in how people were controlled. In his later work on techniques of the self, Foucault was interested in how one controls oneself. It is through Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ that we can appreciate his approaches to ‘problem’ and ‘control’.

Foucault and governmentality By governmentality, Foucault refers to the emergence in mid-sixteenth century Europe of a concern for the governance of a complex of ‘men and things’. Here the phrase ‘men and things’ refers to men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc.; men in their relation to that other kind of things, customs, habits, ways of acting, and thinking, etc.; lastly, men in their relation to that other kind of things, accidents, misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, etc.

(Foucault, 1991a: 93) Governmentality emerged from a concern for populations, which we now attribute to the state. Indeed, Foucault’s point is that governmentality is an art around which crystallized the organising technologies and concepts of the modern state. Within governmentality there developed a range of techniques for knowing the population, and managing it through that knowledge. Thus statistical surveys, demography, medicine, discourses on sanity and reason were deployed in order to take care of the population’s health and welfare. Foucault’s analysis of the mobilisation of these new disciplines focuses principally on the technologies of power. But for Foucault governmentality does not only mean the government of others; it also means the government of oneself. And, as we have seen, Foucault shows how government of the self is undertaken through ethical selfformation whereby individuals seek to know and act on themselves. In other


words, individuals come to know themselves through an askesis, self-discipline and training. Foucault notes that the appropriate form of askesis available during the emergence of governmentality was that administered by the Christian church, that is, pastoral care, in which individuals sought to know themselves through techniques of self-reflection, prayer, training of memory and confession. We should note, however, that in this regard the state was not subject to principles of wisdom derived solely from religion: it was not in the business of doing God’s will (Hunter, 1994: 40). Indeed, the modern state was formed to transcend many of the social problems that religious civil war had wrought on European society during the seventeenth century. According to Hunter (1994: 37), what happened was that the state happened to inherit the moral training of the Church in the absence of other pedagogical models. The new form of political technology ushered in by governmentality comprised two adjacent but autonomous forms of ‘technologies for living’. These were ‘the government of the state, and the Christian (soon to be humanist) spiritual perfection of the self’ (Hunter, 1994: 42), encouraged by pastoral care. And while we may recognise that the pastorate lost its vitality as an institution from the eighteenth century onward, the practices of ‘spiritual’ perfection have multiplied and spread outside of the ecclesiastical institution; they can be identified in many modern secular institutions, such as the family, the school and the clinic in which they are practised in terms of the ethical comportment of individuals (Foucault, 1982a). In other words, the technologies of the self were appropriated from practices, such as self-observation, selfexamination, confession, and self-renunciation, relating to the formation of the Christian soul. These practices constitute the modern subject as one who knows him or herself; the self-reflective, self-regulating individual.

Conclusion This chapter has examined Foucault’s work on the formation of the modern subject. We can now appreciate the constitution of the ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’, the development of which Foucault highlights in his early work. It is a subject which knows and understands itself as an object through technologies of knowledge/power and one which knows itself through technologies of the self on the self via ethical practices. In bringing these ideas to bear on food choice, we should note that links between Foucault’s work and Western dietary regimes have been posited by


Turner. In two essays on diet (1982a, 1982b), Turner introduces Foucauldian concepts of discourse and power identifying a historical moment in the middle of the eighteenth century when a rationalisation of the diet became widespread. Turner cites George Cheyne, an eighteenth-century physician in London, as influential and central to the development of Western discourses on diet, especially among the élite classes. Turner also sees Cheyne as a catalyst for the spread of ascetic dietary regimes to religious groups like Methodists who, with a specific concern for a sober labour force, promoted them to a wider audience. In his analysis Turner reads Foucault’s work as ‘indirectly and covertly, a return to the central theme of Weber’s work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ (Turner, 1982a: 24). Turner’s work was undertaken before Foucault’s later publications on the formation of the subject. It does not refer to, nor benefit from, Foucault’s analysis of the technologies of the self or governmentality. Thus, instead of an understanding of nutrition through an examination of technologies of power and the construction of the self by the self, we have a thesis from Turner on the history of the modern diet which owes a greater intellectual debt to Weber than to Foucault. For example, contemporary nutrition concerns – obesity and dieting, slimming and anorexia, eating and allergy – are, Turner claims, the product of eighteenth-century middle-class dietary practices which now ‘embrace all social groups in a framework of organised eating, drinking and physical training’ (Turner, 1982b: 267). By focusing on medical concerns about diet, Turner overlooks other important aspects of the development of nutrition. Aronson (1983), for example, takes Turner to task by pointing out that nutrition emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century through Leibig’s research on organic chemistry, in particular its application to physiology. Later work by scientists, Aronson believes, showed that the body could be thought of as a thermodynamic system in which food constituents provided energy for caloric output as work. Aronson maintains that the ‘origins of rationalisation of diet’ were therefore located, not in Cheyne’s ascetic dietary regimes, but in the calculations about the food needs of institutional populations in jails, armies and workhouses. We have here, then, a debate about the history of food choice based on either asceticism or rational science. Turner and Aronson ask us to consider the emergence of nutrition resulting from either moral and medical concerns about the body or through scientific concerns about the feeding of populations. In


fact, these positions arise from the same system of thought. They are part of the question of food choice in which diet was constructed as both a problem of moral asceticism and as a scientific problem. In future chapters, we will examine the development of this system of thought. In the next chapter, however, we take a closer look at some of the contradictions inherent in modern nutrition.

Chapter 2

Governmentality of modern nutrition

In a recently published book about the current nutrition discourse in Western cultures, Crotty (1995) describes what she calls ‘good nutrition’ – that is, current views about food and health promulgated by experts such as doctors, scientists, and nutritionists – as a form of social control. Crotty sees this form of social control as not necessarily a conspiratorial state of affairs, but more to do with control ‘exercised by any social institution which attempts to ensure that people follow the rules it sees as acceptable’ (Crotty, 1995: 65). Crotty points out that current nutrition strategies engender a form of control which is scientistic: where a population is encouraged to adopt specific conduct in regard to food based upon assumptions that it is a ‘sick population’ and, as such, everyone is in need of dietary reform. These assumptions are based on dietary surveys which indicate that, as a whole, the population is not following dietary recommendations. Diagnosed as ‘sick’ and ‘non-compliant’, the population is subjected to rational, scientific, dietary modifications through mass education strategies. Crotty’s argument, which is supported by others (see for example, McKie et al., 1993), is that the scientific, authoritarian rules which underpin many modern public health nutrition programmes are symptomatic of a dominant medical culture, which as well as being moralistic, sexist and class prejudiced, is highly fallible to boot. For example, according to Crotty, current theories which encourage the reduction of fat in the population’s diet are based on studies which exclude women, the elderly, and children. In other words, the health problems of middleaged men have been used as models for health problems affecting the population as a whole. Crotty goes on to say that while low-fat diets may be of use in preventing or treating diseases in the middle-aged male population, we should remain sceptical about the health benefits of these dietary recommendations for other groups. Crotty is also critical of current nutrition promotion because it

Governmentality of modern nutrition 19

‘lacks a social perspective and compassion’ (1995: 1). It fails to take into consideration the everyday realities of life which, according to Crotty, inform food decision-making for most people.

The problems of principled criticism In arriving at the moralistic attitudes of today’s nutrition reformers, Crotty tracks modern nutritional science back to nineteenth-century welfare crusades in America and Britain. At that time, middle-class concerns about the degenerate nature of the poorer classes saw philanthropic bodies, many of whom were affiliated with the Church, endeavouring to educate the working classes about food and health, amongst other things. The concerns of the middle classes gradually were embraced by the state through, what Crotty believes was, a ‘politicisation’ of health, as for example, ‘good nutrition’ and scientific eating became viable arguments against the demands by workers for higher wages. Early nutrition reformers, many of whom were critical of the wastefulness of the working classes, were thus able to secure government funding for research, and nutrition became a concern for the state. Educational strategies to improve nutrition and health were institutionalised as home science classes for girls in schools. And attempts at reforming the eating of the masses along scientific lines became more common. Crotty’s accounts of the development of nutrition is quite different from a number of others. Clements (1986) for example, describes historical events in nutrition as a series of unfolding discoveries and progress. First, there was the scientific discovery of nutritional elements in the laboratory and, second, there was the discovery of poor eating habits and malnutrition in children in the poorer classes of rural and urban England. Nutrition history continues with an application of the scientific discoveries to the sociological ones, so that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, a country like Britain was ‘leading the world in the practice of preventative medicine’ through the work of ‘a long line of humanitarians [who] led to many legislative reforms designed to improve health and living conditions’ (Clements, 1986: 19). In a country like Australia, these humanitarian efforts were realised in, for example, the establishment of baby health clinics, where scientific discoveries about proper infant feeding were turned into recommendations for parents to follow. According to Clements,


In the first decade of this century [in Australia] the message from the leaders in the field of dietetics began to reveal the discoveries which had been made in Europe and North America. Professor W. A. Osborne, who occupied the Chair of Physiology in the University of Melbourne, issued a small book on dietetics which incorporated the then known facts. This was one of the first, if not the first, authentic publication on the subject in Australia. The publication date was 1910. It was men and women of this calibre who supplied the scientific information to the staff of the Baby Health Centres and to the leaders of the kindergarten movement.

(Clements, 1986: 64) Clements sees nutrition as the application of scientific facts about food to health problems in the community. Central to his thesis is the expertise of nutrition, in the form of scientists and doctors. It is the present-day manifestation of this model – sometimes called the ‘medical model’, where scientific knowledge about disease processes is translated into appropriate behaviours for individuals to improve health – that Crotty is so critical of. She has some suggestions for improving the present approaches to nutrition promotion which she believes will make it ‘a more humane and effective approach’ (Crotty, 1995: 110). The scientific approach, she believes, needs to be made more relevant to the everyday concerns that people have about food and eating. She believes that this would be achieved by ‘active participation’ at the level of the community. Community involvement, or ‘bottom up’ approaches, Crotty argues, facilitate social action, which will help ensure that nutrition promotion programmes remain more relevant to the people for whom they are intended to be of benefit. As part of this process, Crotty recommends the use of ‘reflection in action’ (Crotty, 1995: 107) where individuals – health professionals and community members – focus on a problem and develop an understanding of the problem through ‘reflection in action’ to help them decide upon an appropriate approach. By encouraging communication and reflexivity, links are strengthened between experts and non-experts through a mutual understanding of each others’ problems. In short, Crotty appeals for more control by non-experts over the focus of nutrition promotion programmes which are currently seen as ‘top down’, authoritarian, dietary doctrines based not only on a form of moral philosophy but on dubious science. Crotty is right to point out that current approaches to public health nutrition are ‘unrepresentative’ in terms of community input; that is, input from those to


whom nutrition promotion programmes are directed. She is also correct in finding aspects of the present mode of operation for nutrition education in nineteenthcentury discourses about health and behaviour. In fact, the next chapter of this book will look at the development of these discourses in some detail. For the present, though, we should look more closely at the different models of nutrition promotion – the medical model and the social model – which Crotty describes, since the debate around these models is not confined to nutrition. Within public health generally there is a tension around the ideology of health promotion. On one hand we have what might be called the position of medical science, which some have seen as liberalistic. For example, Tesh (1988: 154) describes the way that the science-based approach to health promotion is individualistic. Tesh believes that, far from being ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’, this approach is ideological in that it promotes individual rights and individual choices on the basis of scientific fact. Accordingly, ‘Unhealthy behaviours result from individual choice, the ideology implies, so the way to change such behaviour is to show people the error of their ways and urge them to act differently’ (Tesh, 1988: 161–2). At the other end of the spectrum, what may be called a social account, there is the view which believes in action at the level of ‘community’. The principles of this version of public health have been documented by two leaders in the so-called ‘new’ public health, and are summarised here. First, actively involving the population in the setting of everyday life; second, directing itself towards action on the cause of ill-health; third, using many different approaches including education and information, community development and organisation, health advocacy and legislation; fourth, actively engaging public participation; and fifth, enlisting the help of health professionals – especially those in ‘primary health care’ – who have an important role to play in nurturing health promotion and enabling it to take place (Ashton and Seymour, 1990: 25). In this context, ‘primary health care’ is especially interested in the social and political settings in which individuals and populations exist and, as such, it is believed to go much further in addressing health problems than medical care which is focused mainly on the disease state and clinical intervention of the individual (Ashton and Seymour, 1990: 32). In taking to task the dominant Western (medical) model of health care, Ashton and Seymour believe that ‘there is a real conflict between the clinical model based on individual transactions and the


public health model based on a social contract with the entire community’ (Ashton and Seymour, 1990: 37). What concerns us here is not so much the differences between the so-called ‘individualistic scientific model’ and the ‘community model’, as their sameness. In terms of the interaction with people – what we might call the relationship of each model with individuals or communities – there is a striking similarity in what each side is striving for in relation to food and nutrition. With the scientific model individuals are required to make informed choices about their eating habits after having learned and considered the scientific facts about food and health. The scientific information, provided by expertise, is designed to raise the consciousness of individuals in relation to those factors in food that promote health and reduce disease. In other words, what is needed for this approach to be successful is a self-reflective, self-regulating individual with the correct concern for themselves. For the social model too the requirement is for a self-reflective individual, but one who, in this case, actively participates in the community in order to identify problems and reflect on the consequences for themselves and for others. There are of course differences in the ways that medical and social models operate in order to make either individuals or communities aware of the problems they face. Thus while the scientific model relies on rational decision-making by the individual, the social model favours ‘community development’, as Ashton and Seymour note above. Community development is a process by which ‘equity’, ‘empowerment’, ‘collective action’ and ‘community building’ are all encouraged (Petersen, 1994a). As we have heard, health professionals play a vital role in fostering community development. They do this by acting as enablers, catalysts, co-ordinators, teachers of problem-solving skills, small group facilitators, and advocates for members of the community. Often the first step in community development is consciousness raising, whereby people come to see their problems rooted in social, political and economic structures which constrain their lives and that of the community (Wass, 1994: 132). The outcome of this critical reflection is someone who can become a member of a ‘competent community’, defined as a community which is able to recognise and address its problems (Minkler, 1991: 268). We can now look more carefully at Crotty’s examples of what currently are ‘good nutrition’ practices, and what Crotty feels should be. Currently ‘good nutrition’ is acquired after individuals have been exposed to, or have participated


in campaigns which focus their attention on the role of food and nutrition in bodily processes. The emphasis is on the development of chronic diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and so on. In other words, through the participation of the expert, the individual is the subject of ‘material practices and technologies of reflection and introspection’ (Barker, 1994: 196). In the case of what Crotty feels should be ‘good nutrition’, we can see that this requires active participation of a group of individuals who, by means of self-reflection over everyday life matters, understand the problems and evaluate their solutions. Importantly, the involvement of the expert is no less crucial here since, as we have heard, the community should be helped and guided in its decision-making. This help and guidance is important. For example, it would be almost unthinkable – and for some, unethical – for nutrition and other health professionals to support and advocate more American-owned hamburger fast-food outlets, even if this were the community’s expressed wish. The community’s wish in this case would be challenged, presumably on the basis that it lacked a critical and informed understanding of the promotion and advertising of foods with dubious nutritional value by powerful capitalist interests. For the social model to be successful, then, there is a requirement for a ‘collective’ subject, one with the capacity to make informed and proper decisions about itself, as a competent community. We can see, therefore, a striking similarity between these two positions of ‘good nutrition’. In each, the subject, or the collective subject (the community) is required to be self-reflexive and self-regulating in order to make ‘proper’ and informed decisions. But if the ‘subject’ of public health nutrition is the same for either side of the health promotion debate – a self-reflective, self-regulating individual or collective subject – might not there be some confusion, some overlapping, in the arguments about health promotion from liberal or socialist accounts? The answer is, of course, yes. And we can see this confusion and overlap arising in the criticisms nutrition promotion receives from both sides of the public health debate. We have already seen Crotty, from a socialist standpoint, voicing dissent about the way health promotion in nutrition is currently undertaken. From the other end of the spectrum, the UK Social Affairs Unit and the Australian Institute of Public Policy (both conservative ‘think tanks’), have also identified a number of shortcomings about the present methods of nutrition promotion (see Gibney, 1990; Johnstone and Ulyatt, 1991) which are not only seen to be overzealous in their scientific ambitions, but also to stifle individuals’ abilities to make rational choices on the basis of scientific evidence.


Historically, we can also identify some confusion in the heritage of the current model of nutrition promotion. As we have seen, Crotty attributes current moralistic attitudes within public health nutrition to nineteenth-century middle-class reformers. And Aronson (1982) has linked the development of nutritional science to capitalistic notions of improved productivity and worker output. It is clear, however, that the improvement of the poorer classes through better eating habits was not monopolised by rampant capitalists. Members of socialist/philanthropic groups were also at the forefront of dietary reform among the poorer classes. For example, while women from the Fabian Society in England were instrumental in bringing the food and nutritional plight of the working classes to the attention of a wider public (see, for example, Pember Reeves, 1980 [1913]), they were also responsible for attempting to instruct working-class families on ways to prepare nutritious foods. We should recognise that many of these attempts lacked the ‘social perspective’ that Crotty sees as deficient in contemporary nutrition strategies. For example, after repeatedly explaining to poorer families the nutritional benefits of porridge for breakfast, Fabian women were dismayed to find that it did not find its way onto the family menu. This was because it needed constant attention to stop it burning, attention which it did not receive, because of children milling at the mothers’ feet. The result was an unpalatable mess. Moreover, families just did not like it: ‘The children “’eaved at it” and one husband threatened more literally to heave it at his wife’ (Mennell, 1985: 228). And far from being victims of nutritional science, the poorer classes have often benefited from the rational calculation of food and nutrients. In Australia in 1906, Justice Higgins, with trade union support, handed down the ‘Harvester Judgement’, a milestone in Australian industrial relations because it established a basic wage for unskilled labourers (McCarthy, 1969). Todd (1998) shows that scientific calculations of diet and nutrition were major factors in arriving at the Higgins decision. We may conclude from the discussion so far that, in trying to understand the development of nutrition promotion, we cannot attribute the growing interest in nutritional science during the last century and throughout this one to either disinterested scientists busily discovering nutritional facts, or a morally indignant middle class set on reforming the less well off. Instead we might try to consider the knowledge of nutritional science and its ‘subjects’ – be they scientists, the philanthropists and reformers, or the poorer classes – as emerging from a certain understanding of food choice, the body and the health of the population before


the nineteenth century. In other words, instead of looking at the history of ideas about nutritional science and its relationship to society, we might want to look at the emergence of our current views of the individual body and the body politic with respect to food choice.

Genealogy and the modern subject In his book, Rethinking the School, Hunter (1994) undertakes a genealogy of the modern school. Hunter’s work, which has been used to structure much of the discussion of this chapter so far, shows how the present school system developed out of the overlapping of two historically autonomous technologies of human existence: ‘the pastoral guidance of Christian souls and the governmental training of national citizens’ (Hunter, 1994: 31). Hunter shows that this history is overlooked by theorists from both ends of the political spectrum, who, despite their differences, share a common goal for a pedagogical system that ultimately produces self-reflexive, self-governing individuals. His point is that the ‘mentality’ for the modern school, comes not from middle-class ideas about the need to properly educate children of the working classes to prevent them from becoming a menace to society. Nor did it spring from a way of democratising and emancipating the working classes through a pedagogy of self-activity, personal discovery and creative understanding. According to Hunter, the national school system emerged through a complex interaction of historical forces. On the one hand, there was the administrative state with a concern for its own survival and prosperity through the expert management of a territory and its resources, mainly the population. On the other hand, there were concerns, ethics and practices of the Christian church which had, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sought to ‘Christianise’ lay populations in Europe in order to concern them with their own spiritual being. This religious education was achieved by the pedagogical techniques and practices of Christianity through which individuals could ‘master the arts of selfproblematisation and self-concern, and in so doing acquire the means of relating to themselves as the reflective subjects of their thoughts and actions’ (Hunter, 1994: 37). In this way, the newly emerging governmental state appropriated Christian practices as a means of moral training of individuals. Hunter’s genealogy of the modern school is of use to us here for two reasons. First, Hunter transcends the ‘principled positions’ which have informed


the debate around the ‘failure’ of the current school system to be either one ‘derived from liberal political and moral philosophy, or [one] from dialectical (now mainly Marxian) social theory’ (Hunter, 1994: 1). He achieves this by demonstrating that the modern school is a historical ‘hybrid’, constructed through systems of social governance and spiritual guidance in order to produce an individual as a ‘self-reflective and self-regulating personality’. Hunter shows how this individual is the ideal manifestation of liberal education proponents, who believe in a system that produces citizens who consciously choose the form of their own social formation (i.e. individual choice). And the same system is sought by Marxian theorists who support an education where the collective ‘class’ subject becomes ‘conscious of its own economic determination and wins the right to freely choose the form of its own social formation, with the help of radical intellectuals’ (Hunter, 1994: 25). We can see how this examination of the subject assists us to overcome the contradictions we encountered earlier in the ‘individual’ and ‘community’ approaches to nutrition promotion. By fostering the means by which individuals become self-reflective, as either individual agents of scientific contemplation or by becoming members of ‘competent communities’, both sides of the nutrition promotion spectrum are part of a ‘hybrid’ which is both governmental and ethical. We recognise this subject as one who is, as Hunter terms it, ‘the reflective agent of all social conducts and capacities’ (1994: 32). However, Hunter’s second point is even more useful to us. By using Foucault’s understanding of governmentality, Hunter is able to show how the self-reflecting subject was a product of new intellectual techniques with a concern for the welfare of populations, which emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. It is within Foucault’s understanding of governmentality ‘that a pastoral school system could present itself as an appropriate instrument for transforming the capacities of the population into a problem and object of government’ (Hunter, 1994: 28).

Governmentality and the modern subject of food choice Foucault’s explanation of governmentality provides us with a way of understanding the emergence of a state with a concern for individuals and the management of populations. But this is not an understanding of a state with a concern to submit people to the rule of law: what we might consider to be the


state as a sovereign power. It is instead an understanding of state as ‘government’, where the concept of government is understood as a range of practices, that is, ‘tactics, strategies, techniques, programmes, dreams and aspirations of those authorities who shape beliefs and the conduct of the population’ (Nettleton, 1991: 99). Within this interest in the management of populations, in which an investment in food and health was foremost (Foucault, 1988b: 147), there emerged a range of population sciences like social statistics, social sciences, and population medicine which were used to inform the regulation of the law, property, health, life and conduct of subjects through the regulation and normalisation of mundane activities. These population sciences gave birth to a range of government institutions, for example, statistical societies, administrative bureaus, and university departments, where examination and decision-making about the management of population developed (Hunter, 1994: 43). The knowledges about the population manifested themselves as a panoply of regulations concerning the pragmatic and mundane activities of individuals. And, as we saw in chapter one of this book, Foucault explained the mobilisation of these knowledges through use of the metaphor of the ‘panopticon’ – a tool for surveillance of the population – which had the effect of making individuals objects of knowledge and power. This technology, described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1979), effectively ushered in a means by which individuals knew, understood and conducted themselves in relation to a variety of discursive practices. However, governmentality operated on another register since it incorporated a separate ‘technology for living’: that of Christian spiritual discipline and pastoral care. Using the techniques of Christian practice – like self-observation and inspection, confession and penance – ‘subjects’ of governmentality problematised themselves by becoming self-reflective, self-governing individuals. Again, returning to our examination of Foucault’s work in chapter one, what we can see in his analysis of governmentality is the emergence of the ‘empiricotranscendental doublet’ of the modern self: one that knows itself as object and, through the work of the ‘self on the self’ or ‘ethics’, one that knows itself as subject too. With respect to food, we can say that knowledges of, and concerns for, the welfare of the population that emerged with governmentality had a specific concern for food and health. These concerns began to manifest themselves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We can see nutrition, a study of the


metabolic fate of food, emerge later as part of a range of knowledges, strategies and calculations with one major aim: a will to govern. Initially drawing on physiology, chemistry and, later, medicine, nutritional science was eventually manifested in terms of a concern for food constituents, inputs and outputs of these constituents and the effects on bodily functions. As we shall see in future chapters, nutrition emerged as a concern for the population’s health and welfare through a problematisation of life and labour. We can understand nutritional science in terms of its deployment which was calculated to make individuals into ‘objects of nutrition’. This knowledge, however, did not emerge without its corollary technologies through which individuals problematised themselves in terms of food choice. It is no coincidence that many of the enthusiasts of the new scientific knowledge of food held deeply religious convictions. Many were members of traditional or non-conformist church groups. They promoted nutrition for a number of reasons, including its intrinsic appeal to pecuniary and physiological economics. Nutrition therefore promoted healthy habits and clean efficient living and it provided a set of problems around which individuals were required to self-problematise their thoughts and deeds. The combination of science and moral conduct – which in many ways forms the basis of governmentality – are never so apparent as in nutrition. In subsequent chapters we shall see how this combination became part of the same system of thought.

Conclusions From the discussions in this chapter we can see the problematisation of food through nutrition taking a number of forms. We have seen how both medical and social models of health strive for the same ends: the formation of a selfreflective, self-governing individual or collective subject. We have seen how this derives from modern forms of government through which populations are managed by, first, the dispersal of the human sciences which aim to normalise everyday activities and, second, fostering practices of self-reflection and self-regulation by practices found in Christian pedagogy. It should not surprise us therefore that some commentators have stated that nutrition fosters a morality whereby food produces for modern subjects feelings of guilt when they eat so-called ‘indulgences’ (Iggers, 1993). Santich (1995: 146) also describes the way nutrition encourages a ‘good’/ ‘bad’ food dichotomy by producing a food hierarchy based on what is considered to be nutritious’.


Murcott (1986) considers food and eating to be matters of morality, where beliefs about ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are expressed. In the next chapter we shall see that a food morality embedded in nutrition emerged from a Christian ethic that developed out of the problems of the ‘pleasures of the flesh’. This problematisation of food through a Christian ‘technology of living’ was crucial for the later emergence of nutrition as a discourse. In Western culture, however, diet has not always been a matter of obeying a strict moral code around good/bad/evil. In order to understand this, we need to examine concerns about food and eating before Christianity to see how they were selectively adopted by early Christian doctrine which shaped early Christian theology. This will give us a much better idea of systems of thought around food in pre-modern times and will show how moral structures emerged that created the conditions of possibility for nutrition and the modern subject of food choice that we can readily recognise today.

Chapter 3

Greeks to the Christians From ethics to guilt

In order to better examine the fabrication of the modern subject of food choice – especially with regard to nutrition and health – and its historical specificity, we look in this chapter at the way food and health were understood before the emergence of the modern subject of food choice. We will do this by examining the construction of food, health and the self at three historical moments in Western culture: ancient Greece (fourth century BC), Imperial Rome (second century AD), and early to high Middle Ages. It is important to state here that the purpose of this chapter is not to map out a seamless history of food conduct prior to the development of the modern science of food choice. The intention is, rather, to highlight historical (dis)continuities as important events in the way conduct around food has been understood. In other words, this chapter will, after Foucault, look at changes in understandings about food and the self from the perspective of difficult differences, rather than easy similarities (McHoul and Grace, 1993: 111). The descriptions used in this chapter will roughly follow the examinations undertaken by Foucault when he looked at ‘sexuality’ at different historical moments (Foucault, 1988a; 1990b; 1992b). For example, Foucault’s project on the history of sexuality examined practices in ancient Greece and Imperial Rome over a period covering the fourth century BC to the second century AD. And in Foucault’s work written up in ‘The technologies of the self’ (Foucault, 1988a) he refers to a later period, up to the fourth and fifth centuries of the Roman Empire. In undertaking this project, Foucault’s intentions were not directed at ‘history “for its own sake” but at history in the service of understanding “the modern soul”’ (McHoul and Grace, 1993: 92). The point of this aspect of Foucault’s work has been to show how sexual ethics in ancient Greece and Rome was so utterly different from our own in two important ways. First, as we have already

Greeks to Christians: from ethics to guilt 31

noted in chapter one, sexual acts in antiquity, especially ancient Greece, were not regulated by enforceable, legal or scientific discourses concerning which sexual acts could be done with whom, and there was little, if anything written about acts of so-called ‘perversion’. In spite of this, and this is the second point, subjects conducted themselves according to certain facilitative and prohibitive codes of sexual practice which were developed through an ‘internal’, ethical relationship with oneself. These codes were mainly to do with the active and passive aspects of sexual acts, with frequency and with timing. As Foucault points out, the principal aim of this kind of ethics was an aesthetic one; a question of personal choice in order to live a beautiful life (Foucault, 1986: 340). By throwing into relief some of the assumptions around current sexual behaviours – their supposed naturalness, teleology, and universality – Foucault shows that citizens of ancient Greece and Rome formed themselves ethically and sexually, even if liberally by today’s standards, without the presence of legislation, external prohibitions and so on. In illustrating this, Foucault often refers to the fact that, for these ancients, food played a much more important role in their lives – had much more written about it – than sex. Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality, then, is of use to us here as a kind of commentary on the history of food conduct in antiquity. We will also examine the role of food in the development of the Christian self. We will see that between the ancient Greek and early Christian period there were major changes in problems and conduct around food.

Ethical subjects and food conduct In The Use of Pleasure: History of Sexuality Volume Two Foucault details the way in which ‘sexual behaviour was considered by classical Greek thought as a domain of moral valuation and choice’ (Foucault, 1992b: 32). Foucault’s primary focus is on chresis aphrodision: the use of sexual pleasure. However, Foucault’s analysis also looks at the way common pleasures, especially those derived from food, were managed and controlled in the formation of an ethical subject through a process in which the individual delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice, defines his position relative to the precepts he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of being that will serve as his moral goal. And this requires him to act upon himself, to monitor, test, improve, and transform himself.

(Foucault, 1992b: 28)

32 Greeks to Christians: from ethics to guilt

So in order to be an ‘ethical subject’ in ancient Greece, an individual (which for the Greeks meant a ‘free man’) was required to develop ethics which were in agreement with certain morals. The management of conduct with respect to pleasure in ancient Greece was tied up with the manner, or ‘stylistics’, employed. ‘Use and pleasure were intimately bound together in the form of an ethics of style; a style of managing nature’s forces while simultaneously answering its calls’ (McHoul and Grace, 1993: 98–9, italics added). It is in this management of pleasure that the regime, or dietetics, was instrumental. In this sense, dietetics is not confined to diet as in current understandings of food. Dietetics related to the daily conduct of everyday life, a mode of living. It was an intimate combination of health, medicine and philosophy of living. The activities covered by the dietetics were exercise, food, drink, sleep, and sexual relations. The regimen for each of these activities differed in specificity. So, for example, in the codes of conduct around sexual acts there were no prescriptions in the sense of what acts were and were not allowable. For sex, it was more a question of who with, activity or passivity, and how often. However, the regimen for food differed from sexual relations in that a lot was said about which foods could and could not be eaten. As Foucault puts it: As far as thinking [in ancient Greece] on dietetics was concerned, the question of foods – considered in terms of their peculiar qualities, and of the circumstances in which they were consumed (whether the seasons of the year or the particular state of the organism) – was a good deal more important than sexual activity.

(Foucault, 1992b: 114) And concern for food was related to qualities of food, what foods for what occasions and climates, and the question of amounts. There was very little about which food should be cooked; it was not the art of cooking which was of concern (Foucault, 1986: 347); rather, it was the art of the self. For the Greeks, the dietetics had a number of important implications. First, concern for the body and health was considered to be a daily activity, not something undertaken only during sickness. And medicine – as ‘therapeutics’ for the purposes of curing ‘pathology’ – was considered to be important only inasmuch as it comprised another strategy of the daily regimen of care but, in this case, one for the sick. One’s health was considered to be most important and one was expected to be one’s own doctor (Foucault, 1988a: 31). Second,


while concern for one’s self was regarded as a daily activity, somewhat paradoxically, it was considered to be ‘improper’ to be excessive with a regimen. One always had to be mindful of one’s food and health, but it was important to retain flexibility so that the appropriate regime could be chosen according to different situations (Foucault, 1992b: 105), for example, seasons, hours, places, rooms of the house. Regime, then, implied the right amount (of food, sex, sleep and so on) at the right time. The importance of moderation, especially in regard to pleasure, was uppermost. Overindulging one’s appetite, whether it be in sexual acts or food, was considered to be ugly and ‘improper’. ‘Excess meant going beyond one’s clearly felt needs: inducing artificial desires for food, drink or sex where none really existed in the soul’ (McHoul and Grace, 1993: 99). However, there was a second aspect to moderation. Foregoing the appetite for more pleasure was a good indication of self-control or self-mastery, and because of that, a capacity to conduct oneself successfully in political life. Moderation and self-mastery were, then, important principles within dietetics. For the Greeks these ‘ascetics’ were fundamental in the formation of the self, an ethical subject. With these practices one was brought closer to the truth through the concept of a natural reason, or logos. As McHoul and Grace put it, ‘In developing one’s capacity for self-control one simultaneously develops the capacity for reason which is the implement of that control’ (1993: 105). Proper concern for food and the health of the body for the ancient Greeks was, then, a way to natural reason (logos) and truth. With this was an expectation to follow codes of conduct around food and eating which were, at one and the same time, prescriptive in terms of what was and was not allowed, but also flexible in order to accommodate certain situations. The primary focus given to food by the Greeks may be traced to the ways in which, for them, food and health were intimately connected. These connections are described in two Greek mythologies about food and health. In the first story, which comes from the Hippocratic collection, humans used to eat the same foods as other animals. However, this diet was too demanding for weak individuals, the young and the old. Consequently a more human diet was sought as part of the dietetics. With this came an understanding that, for sick people, special diets within the regimen were required. Thus medicine was purely focused on the use of a special food for the sick, an offshoot of the dietetics (Foucault, 1992b: 99). For the majority of the population, the diet should be as close to nature as possible. In the second story, of Platonic origin, ‘dietetics


came into existence as a kind of medicine for soft [unnatural] times; it was designed for mismanaged lives that sought to prolong themselves’ (Foucault, 1992b: 100), and thus the regime was borne of medical practice. Despite their differences, the stories share similarities in the problem that nature presents for food conduct, and indeed the proper ways of dealing with what was natural. The ethical question around food was how best to deal with what was natural: a natural appetite, or energia. The control of the appetite for what was natural becomes a central question. Food was problematic because, unlike sex, it has to meet daily needs, the desire for which we alone cannot satisfy. This was highlighted by Diogenes who justified his need for food and sex by eating and masturbating in the marketplace because each was a reasonable strategy for dealing with specific needs. While Diogenes’ manual arts could satisfy his own sexual needs, food presented a special problem for him. As Diogenes put it, ‘Would to heaven that it were enough to rub one’s stomach in order to allay one’s hunger’ (Foucault, 1992b: 55). It was, then, the daily attention that individuals were forced to give to food, and the moderation and self-mastery required of that attention, that made it such a problematic aspect of the dietetics for the Greeks. We shall see later that the naturalness of the appetite for food was also of major concern for early Christians, but for very different reasons.

The care of the self In The Care of the Self: History of Sexuality Volume Three, Foucault (1990b) covers the first two centuries AD where he finds that the regimes, the dietetics, are very similar to those of the ancient Greeks, except for a few important places. First, instead of a loose set of guidelines or codes which can be invoked according to one’s circumstances, in the Roman era there was a firmer, more developed, more detailed set of principles to guide the regimen (Foucault, 1990b: 103). Second, medicine was more important, not just as something resorted to when one is sick, but as a body of knowledge to define a way of living: ‘Medicine was expected to propose, in the form of a regime, a voluntary and rational structure of conduct’ (Foucault, 1990b: 100). Third, there was a shift from the ancient Greek ethics of care for the self – for self knowledge and natural reason or logos – to care for the self in order to be concerned for oneself. The austere practices of the Epicureans and the Stoics, for example, centred on the need to be concerned for the body and the self as an end in itself. As Foucault states


The new concern with self involved a new experience of self. The new form of the experience of self is to be seen in the first and second century when introspection becomes more and more detailed. A relation developed between writing and vigilance. Attention was paid to nuances of life, mood, and reading, and the experience of oneself was intensified and widened by virtue of this act of writing. A whole field of experience opened which earlier was absent.

(Foucault, 1988a: 28) Foucault points to a number of features that characterise this epoch. First, there was the increasing institutionalisation of the need to care for oneself by certain modes of knowledge and certain elaborations of science (Foucault, 1990b: 57). As we have already seen, medicine was emerging as a discipline with the purpose of informing the rational structure of everyday life. Second, there was an increasing medicalisation, even pathologisation, of bodily pleasures which could be brought about by the natural demands of the body. For example, while for the early Greeks the natural demands of the body were potentially dangerous in that they could induce hubris thereby putting moderation and self-control at risk, for the Romans there was an emphasis on the problems such excesses caused to health. Third, Foucault points to the ‘privatisation’ of daily life in this era. This was not the product of a tightening of public codes that defined permissible acts, but rather of an increasing interest in a private aspect of existence through an intensification of the relationship one has with oneself (Foucault, 1990b: 41). There was also at this time a valorisation of the conjugal bond, the equal importance of the wife, and a need to address the problematisation of political activity. Bernauer puts it like this: The emergence of what Foucault calls the Roman ‘culture of the self’ is rooted in the obligation its citizens felt themselves under to define new relations with the self. They felt the pressure of this obligation for two principal reasons. First, the greater prevalence and signification of marriage as an institution required an elaboration of the self in the new context of affective relations between the sexes. [Second], there was a need for the Roman citizen to clarify more fully his understanding of himself, for that self was challenged by an unparalleled multiplicity of potential identities and conflicts created by imperial offices held, powers exercised, and responsibilities shouldered.

(Bernauer, 1992: 173)


In regard to health, the importance of an alimentary regimen continued to take on huge significance in Roman medicine. As Foucault says, When, in the fifth century, Oribasius comes to edit his great collection of medical texts, he will devote four entire books to the qualities, disadvantages, dangers and virtues of the different possible foods and to the conditions in which one should and should not consume them. He will give only two paragraphs to sexual regimen, citing a text by Rufus, another by Galen. One may think that this limitation reflects, more than anything else, an attitude characteristic of Oribasius and his epoch. But it is a trait manifested by all Greek and Roman medicine to accord much more space to the dietetics of alimentation than to that of sex. For this medicine, the thing that matters is eating and drinking.

(Foucault, 1990b: 140–1, emphasis added) And so for the Romans, although medicine was more of a separate body of knowledge around ‘sickness’, there was still an understanding that proper attention had to be paid to one’s health, and the role of eating and drinking in this was highly significant. Also, in the late Roman period, the concern with the self through self-mastery was often in preparation for some kind of suffering. Fasting and austerity with respect to food were practised by the Epicureans and the Stoics as a way of showing how they could prepare and train themselves in the face of certain privations, and to illustrate that one had complete control of oneself (Foucault, 1986: 358). One was indeed one’s own master. Through Foucault we have, then, an understanding of conduct around food, medicine and health in ancient history which is so different from that of today. Foucault refers to the concerns for the ancients about diet – as opposed to concerns about sex – in order to emphasise the sheer difference with that of ‘modern souls’. A concern for the self in antiquity was expressed though moderation and self-mastery over one’s daily practices, such as eating and drinking. Balancing need, use and desire through moderation and self-mastery was considered to enhance one’s pleasure (McHoul and Grace, 1993: 99), and were part of an art of existence, an appreciation of living. This is quite different from today when moderation is invoked to limit pleasure. Also, as Foucault points out, the difference between the current technologies of the self and those in antiquity is that in the contemporary forms, there is a desire to discover one’s true self and, in order to decipher its truth, to separate it from that which


may obscure or alienate it (Foucault, 1986: 362). Foucault believes that this developed from Christianity and the idea of the search for a self which one then had to renounce. As we shall see in the next section of this chapter, in early Christianity an understanding of self was achieved through the disclosure of self and through the ‘sacrament of penance and the confession of sins’ (Foucault, 1988a: 41). As we move into this period a number of differences will be highlighted. For example, the emphasis on concern for the care of the self and for self-knowledge in the Graeco-Roman period was transformed to one which emphasised a purification of the soul through a declaration and disclosure of self. Also there was a change in the importance of askesis, training and exercise, as a route to knowledge and truth in antiquity, to the importance of askesis as self-discipline and deprivation and denial in Christianity as a means of deciphering oneself as a subject of desire. There was an emergence of a hermeneutics of the self: reading one’s own thoughts and feelings in order to examine oneself and to renounce evil. We shall also see how early Christian morality about food was less a personal concern in order to acknowledge oneself as a proper and fit person to role, than a duty to God.

Food conduct and early Christianity In his essay ‘The technologies of the self’ (1988), Foucault discusses the development of the Christian self, thereby foregrounding his unpublished Confessions of the Flesh: History of Sexuality Volume Four. In this essay, Foucault points out the break in the connection between ethics and moral conduct between Graeco-Roman antiquity and Christianity, and he alerts us to the two guiding principles of conduct for early Christian monastic life. These were exomologesis, or showing forth oneself through punishment and penance (as Foucault (1988a: 48) puts it ‘where the sinner had to kill himself through ascetic maceration’) and exagorusis, the verbalisation of one’s thoughts to a master to whom one showed obedience. With exomologesis the dramatic recognition of penance took the form of a display of self-punishment, in which the penitent is allowed to reveal himself. Penance is not nominal but dramatic: to prove suffering, to show shame, to make visible humility and exhibit modesty – these are the main features of punishment. Penitence in early Christianity is a way of life acted out at all times by accepting the obligation to disclose oneself.

(Foucault, 1988a: 42)


One important method of punishing oneself in early Christianity was by fasting and enduring hunger. ‘The spiritual act of fasting in archaic societies manifests itself in a series of mystical practices – the confession of sins, prayer, reclusion, humiliation, contrition, isolation which were always associated with abstinence from food’ (Tremolieres, 1975: 74). Fasting was a form of exomologesis; it was a public display of oneself as a sinner, a public display of penance. Within early Christian practices, as with the Greeks, there were tensions between asceticism and indulgence. For the Greeks, these tensions arose from the importance of maintaining a balance so that one was neither too rigid nor too profligate in one’s conduct around appetite. For the Christians, though, the tensions were to do with the ‘leashing of emotions and passions, and a taming of the flesh’ (Curran, 1989: 105), and so food and eating represented a problem for early Christians in a number of ways. First, as outlined by the early Christian John Cassian (AD 360–435), greed – especially with food and drink – is associated with fornication on the basis of the following. In the first place, both food and fornication are products of a ‘natural’ appetite, a certain innateness. They are, therefore, very hard to cure. In the second, both involve participation of the body in achieving their object. And last, an overindulgence in food and drink fuels the urge to commit fornication (Foucault, 1990e: 228). Second, food was a problem for early Christians because of its externality (Curran, 1989: 104). In early Christian movements, especially those which sought a separate and harsh existence in the desert (as a permanent re-enactment of Christ’s toils of forty days), contact with the ‘outside’ world was considered to be a form of pollution, especially by polluting one’s thoughts and ideas. There was a parallel with pollution of thought in matters of food, a substance also taken in from outside. The problem of self-pollution, through impure thoughts and erotic dreams or through deeds such as excessive eating, was of major concern for early Christians (Foucault, 1990e: 236). A third reason for the problem of food for the early Christian monks is explained in terms of Augustinian theology, which believed in the power of original sin. For Augustine, life was a struggle in which the body and the soul could either co-operate or compete for available energy, the supplies of which were limited. Thus, life for the body robbed the soul of power. Body and soul are therefore antithetical forces, where ‘passions entice the soul from the things of the spirit and focus attention on the things of the senses’ (Hinnebusch, 1965: 133). Fasting and celibacy redirected the power to the soul, a process which


could be augmented by listening to edifying verse while eating in order to enliven the mind, nourish the spirit and strengthen the individual in the life of grace. The fifth-century writings of John Cassian, The Conferences, were, and for many monastic orders still are, required to be read in refectories during mealtimes (Curran, 1989: 55). For early Christians, strict conduct limiting pleasures of eating provided solutions to the ethical concern that food represented. We have already seen that for the Greeks, self-restraint through moderation gave one a freedom from enslavement to oneself and, indeed, was a sign that one was able to rule others. In Christian codes of conduct, freedom through moderation and self-mastery was related to the ability of the monk to free himself from the ‘flesh’, thereby allowing him passage to purification and perfection (Curran, 1989: 104). These freedoms have very different kinds of purposes or outcomes. For the Greeks, the goal was a freedom to lead a beautiful existence in this life. For early Christians, it was freedom to live a beautiful existence for eternity in the afterlife. For early Greeks, excess or hubris was not punishable in any sense; it was instead considered to be ugly but rectifiable through exercises which restored one’s mastery over oneself (Foucault, 1986: 349), thereby restoring pleasure to its proper place. By contrast, an excess of pleasure for the Christians was considered to be a mortal sin requiring penance and punishment. Pleasure had to be denied. We can therefore start to see a development of a Christian selfhood around food and pleasure as these fundamental differences had an effect on the way subjects’ experiences were integrated into an understanding of themselves (Foucault, 1990b: 144). A further issue around food presented itself to Christianity which was outside the realms of experience of ancient Greece. This involved the role of food in a fundamental aspect of Christian doctrine: that of giving food as love, celebrated initially as the agape, but utterly transformed and rehearsed today as the Eucharist.

The love feast The importance of the meal in Christianity has been described by McFague (1987: 172) as the central motif in Jesus’ ministry, and much has been written about the table fellowship of Christ. For example, Symons (1991) draws attention to such works as The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (Capon, 1969), Eating and Drinking with Jesus: An Ethical and Biblical Inquiry (Cochrane, 1974), and New Testament Hospitality: Partnerships with Strangers as Promise


and Mission (Koenig, 1985), all of which examine the table-fellowship of Christianity. Symons argues that the Christian focus on table-fellowship originated with the agape, the love feast, which he regards as ‘The primary requirement and guide for conduct and character in Christian ethics’ (Symons, 1991: 147). Symons explicates the agape through reference to early Greek understandings of love. In Plato’s Symposium love, eros, is generalised into a number of varieties, ranging from sexual passions through to physical beauty and to a much higher spiritual procreation (Plato, 1965: 21–6). It was this higher level, the level at which minds come together in connection with the truth, that Plato admired so much. But, for the Greeks, there was another kind of love known as agapan. The difference between eros and agape is that eros is a possessive love; it registers acquisitive desire and longing; it recognises values in its objects. By contrast, agape is sacrificial love; it is giving, and it creates values in its objects (Symons, 1991: 148). These acts of giving or sharing of food were taken to be central to the ethics of early Christianity. In a key biblical text, St Paul asserts that ‘Those who share the meal are companions of Christ’ (1 Corinthians 10: 16–22), and Symons notes that throughout the New Testament we find, Evidence of a strong feeling of sharing, of communion, of belonging to one body of Christ . . . The joy reported by the first Christians at meals might be seen as the exhilaration at the formulation of new bonds, and mutual understandings, which, in ensuring continued physical sustenance, are the most authentic possible.

(Symons, 1991: 149) Bonds, friendships and companionships in early Christianity were founded on sharing food. The word ‘company’ derives from communis meaning ‘common’ and panis, meaning ‘bread’. Christian communion, therefore, begins with sharing, or breaking, bread (Barbotin, 1975: 329). Sharing of food is, of course, not confined to Christianity. Many religious traditions focus on the importance of sharing food. However, Symons contends that agape love, through the giving of food at mealtimes, was of central importance to early Christians. And the joy to be shared through giving food at the communal agape feast appears to be a feature of early Christian doctrine. Christ himself, rebuking those who questioned his faith for not washing his hands before a meal,


replied that evil designs and actions are the cause of impurity: diet can never make a person unclean (Matthew, 15: 1–21). And Peter questioned the dietary laws of the Jews by making it clear that food and eating were to be celebrated. He was said to hear a voice telling him ‘What God has made clean, you have no right to call profane’ (Acts, 10: 15). For the early Christians, the agape signified the importance of fellowship. It was a ritual to celebrate the joy of eating, pleasure and company. And perhaps as a Christian public ritual, there might also have been elements of exagorusis in the love feast; that is, a public display of codes or requirements of behaviour around food. The apparent contradiction between the austerity of Christianity and the celebration of pleasure in the agape serve to remind us that the early beginnings of Christianity in the Roman world were utterly different from later developments in the Christianity of the Middle Ages and the modern Christian church (Brown; 1988: xv – xvi). Bevis et al. (1989) commenting on these contradictions note that a small number of early Christian sects existed for whom a worship of love was predominant, and where ‘sexual intercourse verged on the sacramental, so that far from being some unfortunate necessity, a means to a higher end, sexuality itself took its place alongside the Eucharist as a central feature of the life of a good Christian’. Yet these same practices existed alongside a cult of Mariology which revered virginity (Benko, 1993: 196). Thus the doctrinal picture we have of this early time in Christianity is very unclear. What we do know is that austerity became an increasing feature of early Christianity through figures like Clement of Alexandria (AD 150–215), Origen (AD 185–254), Plotinus (AD 205–270), Evagrius of Pontus (AD 346–399), Gregory Nazianzen (AD 323–389) and Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) who wrote widely about the importance of an ascetic life in the belief they were drawing on Platonic versions of morals for life (Brown, 1988: 163–76). According to Foucault, the underlying theme which drew the early Christians back to Plato was the reference to take ‘care of the self’, which became important for Christians as ‘knowing thyself’. As Foucault puts it, The Neoplatonists in the third and fourth century AD show the significance given to [Plato’s Alcibiades I] and the importance it assumed in the classical tradition. They wanted to organise Plato’s dialogues as pedagogy and as the matrix for encyclopedic knowledge.

(Foucault, 1988a: 23)


What we see, then, is Greek thought, and the importance placed on moderation and self-control, transformed into codes, disciplines and inspections of practice during the Graeco-Roman period, and integrated into early Christian practices. Again, we need to be mindful that the justification for these practices was very different. For the Greeks, the concern for the self was important in order to understand oneself as a proper ethical subject; a subject fit to rule others and to find the truth. It was an understanding of the truth that is within (Foucault, 1988a: 35). For the citizens of Imperial Rome, concern for oneself was important in order to ‘know thyself’, and with that knowledge came a concern for experiences of the self. For the Christians, however, the importance of ‘knowing thyself’ through a variety of ascetic practices was aimed at renunciating that self which was articulated. ‘For the Christians, the truths of the self were always precarious, for they always related to the soul’s continual conflict to the evil within itself’ (Bernauer, 1992: 174). Evil always resided within and, for many early Christian fathers, all food represented evil. Indeed, for some the first sin which resulted in the Fall was gluttony. According to Maximus of Turin (c. 420) ‘What the first man lost by eating, the second Adam recovered by fasting. And he kept in the desert the law of abstinence given in Paradise’ (Bynum, 1987: 36). And Abbot Nilus (c. 430) refers to Adam’s sin in the following way: It was the desire for food that spawned disobedience; it was the pleasure of taste that drove us from Paradise. Luxury in food delights the gullet, but it breeds the worm of licence that sleepeth not. An empty stomach prepares one for watching and prayer; the full one induces sleep.

(Bynum, 1987: 36) The agape, a ritual of food enjoyment and sharing, was thus problematic for a number of early Christians for whom a lust for food was the original sin. A resolution of the agape was required, and Symons (1991: 168–170) attributes this to Clement of Alexandria ( AD 150–215) whose writings, especially Paedagogus, announced the replacement of the love feast meal with the spirituality of the Eucharistic practice of wine and wafer. Clement was clear that the agape was not, in any way, a feast. Symons summarises Clement as saying, ‘If anyone dares mention the agape with shameless tongue as he indulges in a dinner exhaling the odour of steaming meats and sauces, then he profanes


the holy agape, sublime and saving creation of the Lord, with his goblets and servings of soup. The one is excessively rich, the other simple, plain and restrained; the one is gluttonous, the other is frugal; the one encourages irrationality, the other reason’. While he [Clement] recognises that food cannot be done away with, [he believes that] ‘our Educator has given the command that we eat only to live’ and not live to eat, food being only a temporary necessity in this world. Therefore, the Christian’s food should be ‘plain and ungarnished’, in keeping with both the truth and its children. ‘We must shun gluttony and partake of only a few things that are necessary.’

(Symons 1991: 170) So according to Symons, Clement resolves the problem of the love feast by emphasising the imperatives of austerity and by ‘deliberately sacralising the ideal at the expense of the material. [Clement] differentiates and objectifies the very reason and love which originated in the meal’ (Symons, 1991: 172). And, ‘As Christianity develops, the original love-feast quickly becomes transfigured . . . Table-fellowship now loses its material content, while its form becomes enhanced, the banquet evaporating into the slimmest of wafers and most reverential sips of wine’ (Symons, 1991: 140). The Eucharist became a representation of the agape, the shared feast of Christ. What remained was the display of ritual around food, exomologesis, in which one presented oneself as a Christian through certain codes of behaviour.

Practices of the monastery – and beyond Clement’s insistence that all pleasures were to be extinguished in order that Christians experience spiritual purity is illustrated by his reference to the Greeks: The human ideal of continence, I mean that which is set forth by the Greek philosophers, teaches one to resist passion, so as not to be made subservient to it, and to train the instincts to pursue rational goals. [But] our ideal is not to experience desire at all.

(Brown, 1988: 31, emphasis added) As we have seen, the effacement of pleasure and desire in early Christianity translated to the conditions or rules of behaviour, exomologesis and exagorusis,


through which subjects discovered and deciphered themselves by renouncing the self. These conditions formed the basis of early monastic life. The Rule of St Benedict, written around AD 500, specifies the behaviours and attitudes required by monks. In Benedict’s ‘Instruments of Good Works’, we see alongside such edicts as ‘Not to kill’, ‘Not to steal’, ‘Not to commit adultery’, rules such as ‘To chastise the body’, ‘Not to be fond of pleasure’, ‘To love fasting’. Benedict’s Rule is very specific about food for monks: only one meal a day is necessary, served at either the sixth or ninth hour, and this meal should comprise not more than two dishes. Surfeit of any kind is to be avoided at all cost since ‘nothing is more contrary to the Christ spirit than gluttony’ (St Benedict, 1966: 73). The life of the monk was one of frequent fasting. Fasting joined Christians to God through exomologesis, and it joined Christians together. Moreover, as Bynum notes, fasting was also believed to unite the monks with ‘the vulnerability to famine that threatened all living things, in order to induce from the creator and provider of blessings the gifts of fertility, plenty and salvation’ (Bynum, 1987: 33). The understanding that fasting was an inducement to fertility were present in the Mediterranean world before the coming of Christianity. However, the importance of fasting for Christians was that it could also be penitential: ‘By fasting, the Christian joined with Christ, who, in the garden and on the cross, kept the rule of abstinence that Adam had violated in Paradise and became himself sacrificial food, propitiating God, and saving sinners’ (Bynum, 1987: 35). So voluntary hunger, perhaps the ultimate denial of food pleasure, was a required practice for Christians, and during the early Middle Ages, people within and outside the monastery were expected to fast on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. These occasions took on special seriousness during Lent, after Pentecost, in September and during Advent (Tait, 1993). Essentially, strict fasting meant eating only one meal in twenty-four hours, and then only bread and water was preferred after the Vespers (Mennell, 1987). However, the austerity of fasting was, apparently, fairly flexible. Even on so-called fasting days, vegetables and even fish were permitted for all but the most ascetic. As Christian practices spread throughout the early Middle Ages their influence on food reached a wider audience. In terms of the everyday significance of ascetic practices around food in the Middle Ages, Mennell (1987) thinks that it might be a mistake to believe that the church had an enormous influence over what was actually eaten, since for most people, the uncertainty of food availability was of major importance. Mennell’s point is a good one and cautions


against perhaps putting too great an emphasis on the role of the Church in people’s everyday lives. But in trying to understand the development of a self around food in the Middle Ages, we might be interested not so much in what people ate so much as the problems that surrounded their ethical conduct around food, or what Foucault has called the ‘problematisations through which being offers itself to be thought’. In other words, what we are interested in here are the ways that systems of thought around food become available, and how problems about conduct become concerns for the self. Foucault put this concern in the following way, ‘But after all, this was the proper task of the history of thought, as against the history of behaviours or representations: to define the conditions in which human beings “problematise” what they are, what they do and the world in which they live’ (Foucault, 1992b: 10). We can now start to understand how, through Christianity, a self developed with a major concern about the effects of food on the purity of the soul. A self for whom there is contempt for material things, like food, which can become obstacles to inner calm and tranquillity. A self that sees as evil and sinful the bodily pleasures which food can invoke. It was a self that was able to renounce itself through suffering, fasting and austerity. Hunger facilitated spirituality because it imitated Christ’s suffering. We shall now see how, in the high Middle Ages, Christian concerns about food and hunger became general concerns about the nature of appetite.

The problem of appetite While the myth of Gargantuan celebrations in medieval Europe may portray an image of occasional plenty, most historians emphasise the insecurity of food at that time. It is extremely difficult to know what most people ate during this period, since the information available describes the élite classes only (Appleby, 1979). In other words, the question ‘Did the peasants really starve?’ (Walter and Schofield, 1989) is actually quite difficult to answer. We know that famine was an ever-present threat, but it was also very specific to certain areas of Europe, and to those communities which were dependent on a very few sources of food. What is more certain is that crop failures were common, and that food availability was a problem for most people. European folk tales such as Hansel and Gretel remind us that families in early times had to confront the problem of too many mouths to feed and too little food with which to do it (Walter, 1989).


Bynum (1987: 50) argues that the spectre of hunger that haunted the experiences of large sections of the population, influenced the Christian church and its practices during the high Middle Ages. Bynum shows how, for the very early Christians, Christ’s presence in the bread and wine of the Eucharist was not a consideration. However, between the ninth and twelfth centuries the presence of Christ in the Eucharist became a major issue, changing it from an austere pledge of Christian unity to an acknowledgment of Christ’s broken and suffering body. Hunger meant human vulnerability, which God comforted with food, or it meant human self-control, adopted in an effort to keep with God’s commandments. In the sermon and song, theology and story, of the high Middle ages, however, the food on the altar was the God who became man; it was bleeding and broken flesh. Hunger was unquenchable desire; it was suffering. To eat God, therefore, was finally to become suffering flesh with his suffering flesh; it was to imitate the cross.

(Bynum, 1987: 54) As represented as bread on the altar, Christ was able to bind Himself to the body of the hungry who consumed Him. This transformation was not without its own problems as new meanings of the Eucharist entered the experience of worshippers. For example, ‘Would not the pious draw the risible conclusion . . .that little bits of Jesus fell off if crumbs were spilled or that one hurt God by chewing the host?’ or was God present in the bread and wine before it was consecrated? (Bynum, 1987: 51–3). Notwithstanding these problems of interpretation, the symbolic nature of hunger changed. Hunger was made sacred, not just for the monks but for the masses, and the expression of piety through severe fasting was a practice that brought attention to Christians. Bynum’s work (1987) concerns the way that women were often made sacred by austere food practices. The stories of Catherine of Sienna, Claire of Assisi, Angela of Foligno, and Margaret of Cortona, some of whom died of starvation through prolonged fasting, were retold to audiences for many centuries as an indication of their religious inspirations (Tait, 1993). Compared to the early Greeks, where an expression of ‘natural’ appetite was considered ugly and unworthy of self-rule, for the Christians, hearty eating could be a mortal sin. The sin of food pleasure was most acutely felt by members of the monastery. And there is evidence that, throughout the high Middle Ages, austere


codes of conduct in relation to food were redrafted a number of times especially for members of the clergy. We have, for example, Archbishop Cranmer in sixteenthcentury England agreeing with his bishops to document the number of courses and dishes which members of the clergy could eat. ‘[B]ut Cranmer appends a sad little memorandum “that this order was kept for two for three months, till, by the disusing of certain wilful persons, it came again to the old excess”’ (Mennell, 1985: 30). This relationship between hunger and appetite was especially problematic for the élite who could afford to indulge themselves. In the late sixteenth century, Montaigne bemoans the fact that he has no self-restraint during eating, [I]f they preach abstinence once a dish is in front of me, they are wasting their time. . . . To eat greedily as I do, is not only harmful to health, and even to one’s pleasure, but is unmannerly into the bargain. So hurried am I that I often bite my tongue, and sometimes my fingers. . . . My greed leaves me no time for talk.

(Mennell, 1981) According to Mennell, a ‘civilising of the appetite’, and a code of conduct around food for a wider population, became apparent during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Mennell turns to Norbert Elias for an explanation of the development of self-control in history, and the implications of this understanding for appetite. In The Civilising Process, Elias (1978) looks at the way codes of manners and social standards of behaviour changed over a period of history spanning the early medieval period to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Elias links subjectivity and personal behaviours to changes in social structures in which there were long-term developments in the interdependence of various social groups. Conflict, changes in power relations and, as far as Elias is concerned, an increase in security of life through growth of trade and labour, informed and were informed by changes in social behaviour. According to Rose (1990: 221) the central point Elias makes is that power does not necessarily depend upon overall control of acts considered to be ‘antisocial’, such as uncivilised eating behaviour. Instead Elias argues that there was an increased organisation of society which regulated the minutiae of everyday life, personal conduct and personal ethics. Our earlier discussion allows us to see Elias’ explanation within the understanding of Foucault’s governmentality: the emergence of a mundane administration of citizens in terms of the collective welfare of the state. Thus, the gradual stability of European


life during this period led to an increasing ‘civilisation’ of the appetite (Mennell, 1987). The state as an authority itself, however, became actively involved in curbing the appetite of the population through, for example, the imposition of a number of sumptuary laws in the sixteenth century. Initially designed to discourage overelaboration in dress, banqueting and conspicuous consumption, the sumptuary laws in England and France were applied to most sections of the population. In sixteenth and seventeenth-century France, for example, a sumptuary law was drafted which specified in detail the types of dishes which could constitute a meal, and indeed prohibited private families from having meals of more than three courses (Mennell, 1987). We could wish for no better example than this of the emergence of a ‘government of food conduct’, where the management of the population is conflated with Christian ethics for spiritual being. Where the collective welfare of the state is also realised in terms of the identity and personal salvation of individuals. However, as we have noted in earlier explanations of governmentality, the state was not subject to principles of wisdom that were derived solely from religion; it was not in the business of doing God’s will (Hunter, 1994: 40). Instead the state was formed to transcend many of the social problems that religious civil war had wrought on European society during the seventeenth century. However, the state inherited the moral training of the Church because of the rarity of models available at that time. For example, in order for sumptuary laws to operate successfully, and in the privacy of their own homes, individuals would have needed to comport themselves according to Christian practices around food austerity, self-scrutiny, confession and penance. We can thus start to see the beginnings of a calculated and state authorised conduct around food. To summarise this section, for early Christians, understandings of food were problematised for a number of reasons. While food was considered to be valued as a gift from God, it carried opportunities for danger because of the sensate pleasures it evoked. Food also took away from ‘higher’ forms of learning and purity because of its material nature. Mortification of the body freed the mind and the spirit for contemplation of things holy. Conduct around food was required to be moderate and self-controlled in order to display gratitude towards God. Food was also exterior and therefore polluting to the body. So far we have looked at the problems of food as a moral problematisation of pleasure. We have also touched on the relationship between food and the health of the body and the health of the soul. These areas are further developed next.


Food and health in history For the Greeks and the Romans, health was of great importance, achievable through self-discipline. However, the Romans were generally less impressed by the Greek glorification of happiness and beauty through health, than with the importance of virtue or some other intellectual or moral quality achievable by following a regimen (Amundsen and Ferngren, 1982a: 89). While austerity was often a feature of the regimen for both the early Greeks and the Romans, suffering was not redemptive as it was for the Christians for whom pain could be a way of deliverance from sin and damnation. According to Amundsen and Ferngren (1982b: 93) there were fundamental principles about health and the body and the soul which, for the Christians, were axiomatic. These were: God is sovereign; Man and nature have fallen; all conditions of human life are thus abnormal; God’s providential care can be seen in human history and particularly the history of his people; salvation requires suffering; nature itself will ultimately be redeemed in some eschatological sense. Within a general Christian belief about illness was the idea that while selfinduced suffering promoted salvation, other kinds of suffering (for example, illness) were linked to evil, and evil to sin, and sin to the Fall. The problems of the ‘flesh’ profoundly shaped Christian views of health, and the relationship between the body and the soul was likened to that of the master and the servant (Amundsen and Ferngren, 1982b: 98). And while God was all-knowing and all-powerful, there was, perhaps understandably, some confusion as to why devout Christians appeared to suffer as much as pagans at times of plague and pestilence. Basil of Caesarea (AD 350) gave six reasons why Christians were not immune to illness. First, some illness (and in some cases the treatment of the illness) was corrective, and the goal of such suffering was to be of spiritual benefit; illness of the body was a pedagogy for the soul. Second, illness was often an outright punishment of wrong doing or sin. Third, infirmity often arose from faulty eating habits or some other physical origin. Fourth, illness sometimes came at Satan’s request. Fifth, God sometimes chose those able to endure tribulation as a model for the weak to follow. Sixth, illness was imposed by God so that no one would seem to exceed the limits of human nature and that no-one might think him or herself to possess anything exceptional in his nature (Amundsen and Ferngren, 1982b: 99). For Basil, only in two of the above cases – where illness was due to natural causes and when it was part of Christian correction – should the help of a


physician be sought. In all other circumstances, illness and pain should be endured in silence. And, unlike health concerns in ancient Greece and Rome – where there was congruence, indeed, a philosophy, between the health of the body and the soul – for Christians, there was a tension between the health of the body and the health of the soul. In Christianity, the making good of illness through medicine often detracted from the spiritual benefit of the soul. However, the distinction between what constituted medicine and what constituted theology for the early Christians was very blurred and one often meant the other. Basil, for example, believed that medical art was created by God as an analogy for Christians: it was a model for curing the soul. And Basil has been credited as an exemplar of Christian charity through building the Basileias in the year AD 372. This was a prototype of the early Christian hospital, staffed by physicians, priests, nuns and nurses (Amundsen and Ferngren, 1982b: 109). This form of Christian pastoral care, which has the care of souls as its object, is, for Foucault, a perfect example of the transformation of the care of the self from antiquity to Christianity; where the Greek care of the self became the Christian care of others (Foucault, 1986: 370). However, common to both the ethics of antiquity and Christian ethics was the importance of an austere way of life in order to find truth. As Foucault puts it ‘Truth always has a price; no access to truth without ascesis [askesis]’ (Foucault, 1986: 371). The importance of austerity for health was reinforced during the early Middle Ages. From the eleventh century onwards Greek manuscripts on health became more important in Europe as their Latin translations became available (Bevis et al., 1989). The notions of moderation and balance with respect to living habits (air, water, food) became the guiding principles for early European physicians. The Tacuinum Sanitatis was a popular medical text of medieval times. It drew on early Greek and Roman understandings about dietetics, but it reconstituted them within Christian ethics in, for example, spelling out the six things necessary for the daily preservation of health. The first is the treatment of air, which concerns the heart. The second is the right use of foods and drinks. The third is the correct use of movement and rest. The fourth is the problem of the prohibition of the body from sleep, or excessive wakefulness. The fifth is the correct use of elimination and retention of the humors. The sixth is the regulating of the person by moderating joy, anger, fear and distress. The secret of the preservation of health, in fact, will


be the proper balance of these elements, since it is the disturbance of this balance that causes the illnesses which the glorious and most exalted God permits.

(Arano, 1976: 6) Santich (1986) provides references to other works of the Middle Ages, such as the Regimen Santitatis Salernitanum, the De Proprietatibus Rerum, and the Secretum Secretorum, which echoed similar themes for health and which emphasised the centrality of food and diet for health. We can see then that throughout the European Middle Ages, health concerned balance, moderation and timeliness in the constitutive elements of the body. A concern for the body was a concern for the soul because sickness was often caused by evil. And physicians who were called to a patient’s side were always obliged to call a confessor before undertaking treatment. This requirement was laid down in the Summae Confessorum, a manual which encouraged confessional examination in every area of domestic, social and economic life. Remnants of the Summae were apparent in the late sixteenth century when Pope Pius V’s constitution declared that physicians were to discontinue treatment of a patient after day three if a signed confession, documenting that the patient had confessed all sins, had not been secured (Amundsen and Ferngren, 1982b: 128). It is, then, the relationship between health and illness as a consequence of good and evil – a relationship incidentally that was utterly missing in the understandings of the ancient Greeks – which characterised health care throughout the Middle Ages. The goal of dietary asceticism in Christianity was austerity which released the spirit from flesh. Truth was now available only after close scrutiny, selfexamination, confession of sin and renunciation of oneself before a master. And unlike the ethics of food for the Greeks, which applied to free men, Christian ideals about food concerned all men and women regardless of their position in society. Christian technologies of the self had a profound effect on medieval subjectivization with respect to food and eating. They provided a morality around which subjects problematised food in relation God’s will. Unlike the ancient Greeks for whom dietary transgression labelled a person ugly and unfit to rule home or city, for Christians, it was sinful and evil. As the mentality of ‘government’ starts to make its appearance during the seventeenth century we see the health of the population becoming a concern for the administrative apparatus of the state. It should perhaps be of no surprise to


us that, from this time, we start to see a moral concern about the health of the population. There was a growing belief that illness, and therefore evil, that can strike the individual, might exist in society itself (Turner, 1984: 167). The need to purge society, especially the society of the élite, of social pathology evident in poor health – itself due to intemperate eating – was expressed. So for example, we see advisers to the aristocracy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, like Leonard Lessius and Luigi Cornaro, raising alarm about the malaise and corruption of high society, and urging corrective treatments in the form of lifestyles founded on strict discipline and frugal diet. These issues will be further explored in the next chapter.

Conclusions Let us conclude this chapter by examining how an understanding of food and the self from antiquity to the Middle Ages may be of use to an understanding of modern subjectivities. We can, like Foucault, observe some easy similarities between ‘then and now’. But there are some difficult differences that also require comment. The easy similarities stem from the fact that moral codes and obligations are, according to Foucault, relatively stable across history. However, what changes is the justification for the ethical practices in relation to the code. So for example, in ancient Greece, the pleasure of the diet was a problem which requires a certain ethical comportment in order to show oneself to be a fit person to rule. For the Christians, food pleasure was also a problem (albeit a different problem), and the justification for one’s behaviour was explained in terms of the religion. In Christianity, this represented a form of law: a law of normalisation. When, after the Enlightenment, religion became less influential, juridical normative practices around pleasure (food and sex) became the province of the state. Now they are justified in terms of medical and scientific discourses (Foucault, 1986: 356–7). We can see easy other similarities between the historical periods described in this chapter and the present. For example, Turner comments on the transformation in today’s consumer society from an emphasis on dietary ascetic practices for internal control of perhaps a spiritual nature, to an emphasis on dietary practices for the athletic/beautiful body: in other words, a shift to the external body for reasons of aesthetics and style (Turner, 1992: 47). It would be tempting to see this trend as a return to Greek culture of health, beauty and happiness. Furthermore, the importance of ‘moderation’, ‘balance’ and ‘self-


control’ in respect to eating and diet are fundamental concepts within current health discourses around food (Coveney and Santich, 1997). Within contemporary Western society, conduct around food is problematic, and the pleasures of eating require careful consideration within today’s mores, where overt enjoyment of a gustatory nature is invariably modified by manners and customs which are to operate not only in public but also in private. Again it would be easy to relate these issues for the modern subject directly to food conduct of subjects in antiquity and pre-modern times. There are, however, a number of difficult differences which we should note. The first relates to autonomy or choice. In the Greek, Roman and Christian epochs there is nothing resembling a notion of the autonomy of food choice that we have today. There was no sense of dietary choice as a privileged, independent act. Of course, for most people food choice depended on food availability which itself was a product of material constraints as well as seasons, droughts, pestilence and so forth. But what we are interested in here is food choice as a concept in terms of ‘the conditions in which human beings problematise what they are, what they do, and the world in which they live’ (Foucault, 1992b: 10). In antiquity and pre-modern times this concept of ‘choice’ did not present itself for problematisation; there was no sense of ‘individual liberty’ (see Mauss, 1985: 21). Food conduct was always considered within an ‘order of things’ where autonomy as we know it did not exist. For the citizens of ancient Greece this order was a civic order related to one’s ethical conduct, one’s status as a free man. For the early Christians this order was based on a religiosity and the will of God. Stepping outside these orders was, for the Greeks, tantamount to losing the path to the natural reason and the ‘truth’, and for the Christians, mortally sinful. For modern subjects, however, the notion of choice in food is normative. In fact, not having choice is a problem in need of correction. For the modern subject, having no food choice is considered to be biologically precarious, psychologically enfeebling, sociologically oppressive and culturally impoverishing. Another difference is highlighted by modern understandings of subjectivity. The early Greeks did not recognise an authentic self against which the created self could be matched (Tait, 1993). The dietetics for them was the basis of the production of the self by the self in order to give one’s life the most beautiful form (Foucault, 1990d: 260). Within modern culture, however, there is a tendency to need to get back to a ‘true’ self; there is a need to decipher one’s self as a subject of desire. According to Foucault (1990d: 260) this is a fundamental


shift in subjectivity from antiquity to Christianity where there is constant search for the self, through attentiveness, concern, verbalisation. This hermeneutic of the self in Christianity – a constant decipherment of ‘who am I?’ – is always directed at renouncing the self who has been objectified in an effort to reveal the truth: a true self. Bernauer puts it well when he says the Christian understanding of the self is most clearly declared in the admission that ‘I am not who I am’ (Bernauer, 1992: 165). And the legacy of this Christian ethic can be found in so many modern, secular practices and techniques for self improvement. However, the difference between the secular self and the Christian self is that, while the aim of the latter was to identify the self and renounce it, the aim of the modern knowledges and technologies of the self ‘is to foster the emergence of a positive self; one which recognises and attaches oneself to a self made available through categories of psychological and psychoanalytic science, and through the normative disciplines consistent with them’ (Bernauer, 1992: 174 emphasis added). It is a self produced by administrative disciplines of power/knowledge as well as a hermeneutics of the self which, through Christian practices, brings forth a ‘hidden’ self. With regard to food there are some other difficult differences. First, in antiquity the ethical conduct around the correct use of the diet was, as has been said a number of times, a matter of personal ethics. For the Christians, the correct use of the diet was a duty to God. It was a means of managing the spirit, renouncing the flesh and thereby quenching bodily passions. However, Turner (1994: xii) believes that the contemporary obsessions with the body, which are supported and encouraged by medical discourses through secular morals of fitness and health, serve to amplify and elaborate sexuality, which in turn has become the focus of modern selfhood. Turner refers to the prominence of the image of the body in contemporary Western society where slimness is promoted through the mass media as an archetypal body shape especially for women, ‘It is the surface of the body which is the target of advertising and self-promotion, just as it is the body surfaces which are the site of stigmatization’ (Turner, 1994: xiii). If Turner is right then the use of diet today is quite unlike that in antiquity or Christianity, in which the soul or the self were the focus of the concern around food. However, it may be that Turner’s emphasis on sexuality here is misplaced. It may be that, instead of an amplification of sexuality, contemporary regimes of the diet are designed to produce a body that is itself a window to the soul, where, as Foucault put it, there is ‘no access to truth without ascesis [askesis]’ (1986: 371).


In other words, we might say that the modern subject of food choice is constructed at the level of the body via ‘regimes of truth’ of medicinal science and nutrition which justify the importance of health, longevity, youth and so on. But at the same time it is constructed at the level of the soul via an ethics, an askesis, as a way of individuals knowing themselves as morally acceptable eaters. We come, therefore, to Foucault’s ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’ as a description of the modern subject. These possibilities will be examined in more detail in the next chapter where we study the emergence of the science of nutrition, and look at its development from the eighteenth century to the middle of this century.

Chapter 4

Religion and reason The emergence of a discourse on nutrition

In the last chapter we looked at conduct around food in three historicallyspecific moments in Western thought: early Greek, imperial Roman and early Christian. We noted how, in relation to a moral problematisation of pleasure, this had changed from a conduct based on personal ethics in order to comport oneself as a free man fit to rule in ancient Greece, through an ethics centred on a self in Imperial Rome, to an ethics in Christianity where conduct around food was registered against problems of the flesh. In this chapter we will examine the emergence of a discourse on nutrition in the Modern era and we will see how it mapped onto some of the empirical and moral problems that have already been discussed. Before proceeding, however, we need to situate ourselves within the theoretical framework provided by Foucault. In The Order of Things Foucault examines three epistemic systems of Western thought. These were the Renaissance (or pre-Classical) Age, the Classical Age and Modernity. Foucault sees a distinct shift in the way each of these epochs understood ‘words’ and ‘things’. In the pre-Classical period, which lasted up to the beginning of the seventeenth century, there was no separation between words and things. Meaning was thus understood through resemblance in which language was not a problem; it was ‘one of the figurations of the world’ (Foucault, 1982b: 56). In the Classical period, up to the eighteenth century, there was a separation of words and things such that their reconnection was only possible through representation. As Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982: 20) describe it, ‘in the Classical era there was a world created by God, existing by itself. The role of man was to clarify the order of the world’. But there was no separation between human nature and nature as both were the product of God’s work. That separation was to come later when modern Man steps into the space – the Modern era – provided by discourses of the human sciences.

Emergence of a discourse on nutrition 57

As we have pointed out before the human sciences did not arise out of the ether. They arose from the problems and obstacles posed as individuals, groups and populations were problematised in certain ways. We can see this through an examination of the changes in systems of religious belief where theological debates after the Reformation began to prefigure the modern subject. In the rise of ascetic Protestantism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, knowledge of Man starts to become separate from a knowledge of nature. Prior to this time human beings understood themselves as part of nature through the doctrines held by the fathers of the Church who, as skilled theologians, acted as ciphers of God in regard to Man’s knowledge. The growing influence of Protestantism thus signals a time when knowledge of Man by Man was made possible. Within the Church tensions between the various doctrines became evident when, for example, the Roman Catholic Church came under increasing attack from Protestantism. Accusing Catholicism of practising forms of idol worship along the lines of that seen in the Graeco-Roman world, especially Mariology (the worship of the Virgin Mary), Protestants saw the need to return to a Christianity which was the vera religion: the true religion (Benko, 1993: 1). We see in Protestantism a turning away from the aesthetic art and culture of classical theology towards an ascetics which was believed to be more in keeping with the roots of Christianity. In this chapter we will begin by looking at the way certain systems of thought that emerged during the Enlightenment – and characterised here by Kantian philosophy – were influenced by a belief system founded on Christian austerity. We will then examine the way nutrition has developed as both a spiritual and a scientific discipline around food choice.

Ascetic Protestantism and the Enlightenment While Protestantism in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe took various forms, almost all of them emphasised a religion of a practical nature. For example, Deism stripped Christianity bare of unnecessary ritual, idolatry, and mystical revelation leaving a body of doctrine supposedly based on the reason of God. ‘Deists rejected priests, ceremonies, the miraculous suspension of Nature, superstitions and those parts of Christian doctrine which they regarded as incomprehensible’ (Goodman, 1974: 42). As Hooykaas puts it, for ascetic Protestants an emphasis on the general priesthood of all believers

58 Emergence of a discourse on nutrition

implied the right and the duty, for those who had the talent, to study the Scripture without depending on the authority of tradition and hierarchy, together with the right and duty to study the other book written by God, the book of nature, without regard to the authority of the fathers of natural philosophy.

(Hooykaas, 1972: 109) In other words, the book of Scripture (the bible) led to spiritual enlightenment and the book of nature (science) led to worldly enlightenment. It was no longer an affront to God to ask how the world worked, nor was this only the territory of skilled theologians. The general priesthood of all believers implied that these questions were the right of everyone. Hooykaas provides us with an example of this: The Huguenot Palissy was derided because he, a man ‘without letters’ . . . had dared to contradict the view of the ancients, who held that minerals grow like plants. A scholar. . . asked him in which book he has read this new opinion, and he retorted that he got his knowledge through the anatomy of nature and not by reading books: ‘I have had no other book but heaven and earth, which is known to everybody, and it has been given to everyman to know and to read this beautiful book’.

(Hooykaas, 1972: 109) Thus the position of Man in the dogma of ascetic Protestantism prefigures the celebrated Foucauldian empirico-transcendental doublet constructed by both the book of nature (empiricism) and the book of the Scriptures (transcendentalism), the latter being especially important for not only Christian beliefs but also Christian practices. These Christian beliefs were influential for many Enlightenment thinkers, like Immanual Kant. According to Greene (1960: xiv) the influence of Protestantism, especially Pietism, on Kantian philosophy was profound. Kant was introduced to Pietism through his family and his early education from about 1732 in the Collegium Fridericianum. Although Kant acquired a long lasting abhorrence of religious emotion, his admiration of Pietist views remained with him. In his old age, he wrote about Pietism to a friend, Even if the religious conscienceness of that time and the conceptions of what is called virtue and piety were by no means clear and satisfactory, it


yet contained the root of the matter. One may say of Pietism what one will; it suffices that the people to whom it was a serious matter were distinguished in a manner deserving of all respect. They possessed the highest good which man can enjoy – that repose, that cheerfulness, that inner peace which is disturbed by no passions.

(Kant quoted in Paulsen, 1902: 28) Throughout his education Kant came to know two opposing theological viewpoints. The first, derived from rationalist theological philosophy proposed by Christian Wolff, proposed that God is the absolute measure of goodness, wisdom and power. Following from this, rational human speculation, being His handiwork, must lead to the best of all possible worlds. Thus the speculative (transcendental) intellectualism of the human mind, becomes a moral imperative given by God to humans in the form of universal reason. The second viewpoint comes from Pietism in which it is acknowledged that since the Fall in the Garden of Eden, humans are born into sin. The moral status of men and women is therefore sullied, and a life of holiness therefore requires a withdrawal of pleasures, especially those of a carnal nature, leading to purification. Kant was able to incorporate these two viewpoints into his universal philosophy of moral reason. For Kant the ability to take in what the world gives us (experience) and subject this self-reflection – or critical-reflection – in order to achieve the rank of pure intellect (good or pure reason) is the greatest of human achievements. Indeed, it is what distinguishes humans from animals or mere brutes. In short, Kantian philosophy elevates pure reason, or ‘good’, as the universal form of humanity. The ethics of turning away from worldly ends towards a cultivation of a perfect will – a practice once reserved for the monastery – now becomes the heart of Kantian universal philosophy. As Hunter puts it, Kant can be regarded as engaging in the familiar reformation strategy of translating the practices of the monks into the mass pedagogies of Protestantism (Hunter, 1995: 11). Central to the Kantian philosophy is the notion of freedom and autonomy. But, as Hunter explains elsewhere (Hunter, 1994), this is not any kind of freedom or autonomy; only that exercised self-reflectively against moral judgement. And from where does moral judgement arise? Moral judgement in Kantian philosophy arises out of a rational knowledge of moral principles. Hunter continues ‘For Kant, we might say, the subject is founded in the subject – in the moral laws of its own constitution’ (Hunter, 1994: 52). In other words, the autonomy and choice of the ‘choosing’ subject are always mortgaged to the moral principles that the subject has set. We


are, therefore, left with a moral autonomy in which self-enacted principles are always registered against the subject’s rational knowledge (Cooke, 1992), especially knowledge of what is considered to be ‘right’, ‘proper’, and ‘good’. As we shall see, this ‘choosing’ subject has been important to the development of nutrition in which knowledge of a ‘good’ diet has been central. We can see a perfect example of Kant’s ‘choosing’ subject in the essay ‘On the highest moral-physical good’ published in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant, 1974 [1798]). Here Kant puts forward his view of the purpose of the dinner party (the ‘Tischgesellschaft’). In the essay Kant begins by reminding us that ‘The two kinds of good, physical and moral, cannot be mixed together for then they would neutralise themselves and not work at all toward the end of true happiness’ (Kant, 1974: 143). He then proceeds to describe the rules for the dinner party, specifying the number of guests (at least three, but no more than nine guests) and the composition of the company, which should be young and vital, and of diverse backgrounds so as to enrich the conversation over the meal. In fact, it is conversation which is the meal’s most important purpose. Dining alone is, for Kant, unhealthy for one who needs to philosophise. Unlike, say, the mathematician or the historian – for whom ideas can be written down and rearranged by using universal rules of reason – the philosopher does not build the sciences in that way. Their task instead is to search for wisdom, and the philosopher takes the ‘final end to all knowledge to be his object’ (Kant, 1974: 145). Thus, A man who, while dining, gnaws at himself intellectually during the solitary meal gradually loses his sprightliness; on the other hand he increases it if a table companion, by presenting him alternatives of his own ideas, offers him new material to stimulate him.

(Kant, 1974: 145) Hinske (1990) has reviewed Kant’s attitude to the dinner party in light of manuscripts contained in Kant’s estate in which Kant insists that the ‘Tischgesellschaft’ should provide good food and good wine, but, most importantly, it should provide good company. Eating and drinking, pleasurable as they are, should never detract from the real purpose of the ‘Tischgesellschaft’: that of spiritual enlightenment and the expansion of human reason and knowledge. According to Hinske, the ‘Tischgesellschaft’ met Kant’s central idea of general human reason whereby the sensuous experiences of the meal are in the service of


the advancement of knowledge and reason. Moreover, the good atmosphere provided by the ‘Tischgesellschaft’ tempered the ‘viciousness of the intellectual fight’, since argumentation can be interrupted by eating; one can oscillate between ‘the thought’ and ‘the bowl’. For Kant, the physical pleasure of eating is mortgaged to the need to advance ideas. Pleasure is subsumed to the attainment of reason and knowledge. Kant thus struggles to balance spirituality and sensuous experience, where spirituality (in the name and practice of Pietism) is always mortgaged to the ideals of pure reason. As Hunter points out, Kant’s universal philosophy – whereby one problematises one’s attachment to morally impure senses which are regarded as being in need of intellectual purification – becomes a moral duty, or ‘good’, rather than an act of free theoretical choice. In doing this, Kantianism rehearses a ‘government of the self’ by transposing a long-standing strategy of Christian spiritualism directly into the register of philosophical pedagogy (Hunter, 1995: 12). We need, however, to consider this development of human consiousness within the context of governmentality that we have discussed in previous chapters. Even with Enlightenment thinkers like Kant, who declared the motto of the Enlightenment to be ‘Have the courage to make use of your own intellect’ (Greene, 1960: xxxii), there was a recognition that intellectual freedom had to be mortgaged to the affairs of the state. According to Kant, in the business of the state ‘reasoning is not permitted: one must obey’ (Kant cited in Greene, 1960: xxxiii). Kant was therefore fully aware of the other armature of what we have described elsewhere as governmentality, that is, the need for the government of ‘men and things’. We can recognise in Kant an understanding of the role of the citizen and the role of the intellectual. This distinction can be found earlier in the writings of Hobbes who well understood that the role of the state was to permit the existence of the twin identities of subject and private person. The first needs to observe public obedience as a condition of social peace, the second might follow his or her own private conscience so long as this did not interfere with public duty. According to Koselleck, this private conscience ‘had been excised from the state and reserved for man as human being’. Enlightenment thought, such as Kantian philosophy, dissolved the distinction between subject and human being so that ‘publicly man was to realise himself as a human being’ (Koselleck, 1988: 39). Thus one’s public life becomes imbued with one’s personal ethics which, in Kantian thought, were based on the universal law of moral reason. In other words, the modern subject becomes at one and the same time empirical and transcendental. As Rose puts it ‘Kant [made] individual consciousness the sacred basis of Practical [moral] Reason’ (Rose,


1990: 318). The tension between the need for individual freedom and the needs of the business of state are central to our understanding of the various sites of rationalisation in which nutrition discourse emerged, which we will discuss later. Here though we can say that from the seventeenth century onwards there was a development of the art of governing, in which the faculties of calculation and reflection had to be improvised. Calculation was needed in order to develop expert technical knowledge about what needed to be governed (people and ‘things’), and reflection was permitted through the religious tolerance and freedom to worship (Hunter, 1994: 43). We will now go on to look at the way this system of thought operated in the development of the modern subject of food choice. While we will bear in mind Foucault’s point about the coexistence of technologies of the self and technologies of power, in what follows we will treat the development of a spirituality of food choice separately from its science in order to fully explicate the development of the modern subject of food choice. This heuristic device provides us with fruitful ways of tracing the heritage of nutrition and it helps us overcome two theoretical obstacles which have been problematic for earlier writers in this area. For example, the disagreement between Aronson and Turner mentioned in chapter one is directly related to this point. We saw that Turner (1982a, 1982b) believes the beginnings of modern dietary sciences in Western culture may be traced to the works of George Cheyne who promoted diet based on an asceticism to the élite classes of eighteenth-century England. It is Turner’s belief that these dietary practices were spread beyond the professional classes to the poorer sections of the population through religious affiliations between Cheyne and early Methodists like Wesley who preached the importance of hard work, and a sober, spare lifestyle. Turner also argues that a rationality of the diet was part of the ‘Protestantisation’ of the labouring classes which Weber considered to be crucial to the success of capitalism. Aronson (1983), on the other hand, argues that the rationalisation of the diet sprang from its scientific origins in chemistry which showed that food in relation to the body obeyed the laws of thermodynamics. With this new knowledge, food could be calculated in terms of productivity, labour, output and so on. Moreover Aronson claims that the rations of the workhouse, armies and prisons were more responsible for the development and popularisation of nutrition than were Cheyne’s dietary regimes, which were only directed to the élite. By examining the emergence of nutrition from empirical and transcendental positions we can, in fact, accommodate both


the science of Aronson and the spiritualism of Turner. The second theoretical obstacle relates again to Turner who over the past decade has written widely on contemporary concerns about diet and health. In the previous chapter we mentioned Turner’s belief that contemporary dietary discourses serve to amplify and elaborate sexuality through images marketed to mass audiences (Turner, 1984: 173–4). In other work Turner (1992: 22) emphasises current dietary concerns in relation to fitness and longevity. Elsewhere still (Turner, 1994: xiii) he sees dietary practices as symptomatic of a modern preoccupation with consumption and a rationalisation, or ‘McDonaldisation’, of the food supply. Furthermore he sees this rationalisation being echoed in the influence of nutrition and dietetics which promote scientific views of eating. And, most recently, Turner has said that our concerns about what to eat are dependent on the regard of others; what he refers to as the ‘looking-glass self’ (Turner, 1995: xiii). Turner’s accounts of the importance of diet in modern culture have thus included sexuality and attractiveness, mass marketing, health and fitness, longevity, and the rationalisation and efficiency of the food supply. These explanations appear to radiate in different directions from a centre whose character is unclear. We can, however, place Turner’s positions within the framework we are proposing here by saying that modern dietary concerns, characterised by nutrition, function for modern subjects by providing an empirical understanding of the body, health and food through an elaboration of knowledges about nutrients, pathologies and disease (and with these knowledges come normalising and disciplinary strategies about what, how much and when to eat in order to be fit and healthy). Nutrition also provides modern subjects with an ethic, an askesis, which allows them to produce themselves as moral individuals with a proper concern for their bodies and their souls. In short, nutritional discourse provides a daily conscience through a mode of living – a dietetics – which reminds individuals how to behave in regard to the rules of healthy living. Let us now look in detail at how this happened.

Nutrition as a spiritual discipline We will start by examining an early book of dietary advice offered in England in 1695 by Thomas Tryon. In his book A New Method of Educating Children Tryon provides parents and guardians with an account of the proper way to feed children. He starts by saying, P a r e n t s o u g h t t o b e v e r y c a r e f u l t o Te a c h t h e m [ c h i l d r e n ] Temperance in Eating and Drinking, and Moderation in their


Sleep and Exercise. By such Methods as these the Seeds of Vice might more easily . . . be subdued and a Foundation laid for the building upon an Excellent and Accomplished Person.

(Tryon, 1695: 6) Tryon continues by specifying those foods which are especially important for children: Simple Meats and Drinks, such in which no manifest Quality is too predominant; that is, not too sweet nor too bitter, too salt nor too sharp, etc. For all Extreams beget their own Qualities and Complections. . . . But Gruels, Paps, Rice, variously dress’d, are very wholsom . . . and for Drink, Midling Beer or Ale is the best, except for Water.

(Tryon, 1695: 7) Tryon also has advice for pregnant women, who should avoid all kinds of root vegetables, for example, turnips, parsnips, and ‘carret’, ‘For by reason of their Crude and Earthly Qualities they naturally beget Wind’. He says that in those countries where women live temperate lives, eat simple foods and drink mostly water ‘windy Diseases are hardly known to be found either in them [pregnant women] or their Children’. He concludes by saying, Above all things, they [pregnant women] ought to beware that they do not give place to Passion, to suffer those irregular Motions of the Mind to reign and get the Domination over them. These sort of Disturbances put the whole Constitution out of Tune, and make fierce and violent Invasions on the Sweetness of the good Powers and Qualities.

(Tryon, 1695: 10) Tryon’s advice alerts us to the fact that food and drink carry qualities and ‘complections’ which can either aid or arrest the constitution. These qualities can pose a special danger for children, and must therefore be avoided by using bland food (pap, rice, etc.). For pregnant women, the earthy qualities of some foods are a particular problem. Tryon leaves us in no doubt that ‘passion’ must be avoided otherwise the balance of the constitution is disturbed. For Tryon, the effects of food and drink are thus felt by the body and the soul. His advice on diet indicates the concerns that we discussed in the last chapter whereby food excited the


senses. As a general rule we must, according to Tryon, take up ‘all simplicity evident in Nature’s Operations’ when feeding children. He asks us to set aside ‘Bigotry’, ‘Custom’ and ‘Tradition’, because ‘so uncontrolled is the Domination they have obtained, that they sway and bias us against all reason and experience’. By observing what happens in nature we will see that All Seed partakes of the Nature and Quality of the Ground whereinto [it] is sown: If the Ground be good, and the seed good, you may reasonably expect sound and firm Fruit, without blemish or distemper. Proper methods must be observed, or all will be spoil’d. What Crop can the Husband-man hope for, if he neglects to Till and Manure his Land, or sows it with improper and unsuitable Seed? Or what Profit can he expect from his Horses, Cows, and Sheep, if particular Care be not taken about the wellordering of his Cattle, that they may bring forth their Young Ones with Strength and Health?

(Tryon, 1695: 12) In other words, if the correct diet is followed in pregnancy and in early childhood – if the ‘seeds are sown in good well-prepared soil’ – we can expect healthy children with correct temperaments. Proper attention to diet is especially important for children because for them ‘the Soul is most empty and consequently most susceptible for Impressions, and receiving any thing that is offer’d it’. But, diet is important for us all because, as Tryon points out: ‘The Soul of Man [contains] all the true Properties of the Elements, viz Earth, Air, Water and Fire, which are, as it were, the Mothers of the Body that nourish and sustain it’. Tryon’s work is no doubt typical of the advice given at that time where the correct food was believed necessary to nourish the soul as well as the body, and where human nature was believed to be directly affected by the diet. Tryon’s earlier book The Ways to Health, Long Life and Happiness Or a Discourse on Temperance (n.d.) was widely read in England and America. According to Barkas (1975: 134) Benjamin Franklin was much influenced by Tryon’s work, thereby becoming America’s first notable vegetarian. The justification of ‘good’ diet was, for Tryon, a healthy body and, just as importantly, ‘a Foundation laid for the building upon an Excellent and Accomplished Person’. According to Turner (1984: 167) the period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a time when a solution to individual


and social pathology was sought in the government of the body through diet and discipline. Earlier work by Luigi Cornaro (1475–1566) and Leonard Lessius (1554–1623) in Venice spelt out the importance of an ascetic lifestyle as an antidote to the ‘flabbiness’ of the rich. But a disciplined lifestyle was also seen as an appropriate way of addressing the falsity and corruption of the Italian court. The work by Cornaro and by Lessius found its way to England through translations by George Herbert in 1634. These concerns and understandings about the effects of the diet on the body and the soul, however, already existed in England through the Christian beliefs that were discussed in the last chapter. Furthermore, we can situate them within a growing awareness of the need for an art of governing, a governmentality, in order to administer the health and welfare of the population. As early as 1611 Turquet de Mayenne wrote about the importance of an administration of the moral order of the population: its habits, its health and its happiness. According to Foucault (1990f: 79) Turquet’s writings were an example of a huge literature circulating in most European cities of the day. As we have said elsewhere, governmentality drew explicitly on Christian spiritual discipline in the production of the self-reflective, selfregulating individual. Given the Christian precepts around disease and evil that were discussed in the previous chapter, it should not surprise us to see in writings about the body and lifestyle at this time a full expression of religiosity, especially ascetism. We can see this in Tryon, Cornaro, Herbert and, as we shall see shortly, George Cheyne in England. Their ideas and writings thus continue traditional beliefs about the body and disease that were familiar to Basil of Caesarea. We can also see in Cornaro and Cheyne the practice of exomologesis, showing forth oneself and penance. Both writers were incited to discourse about lifestyle after they had led lives of excess and gluttony. And both inherited what Foucault calls the tradition of Christian morality which makes selfrenunciation the condition of salvation (Foucault, 1988a: 22). George Cheyne’s most celebrated work was The English Malady, in which he wrote about the melancholy of English society, especially among the classes which could afford a life of luxury and leisure (Turner, 1982a). Cheyne’s written material included criticisms of the rich and exotic lifestyle now afforded by wealth accumulated from the expansion of trade and commerce. The new foods available through colonialisation were strong and spicy and were, according to Cheyne, playing havoc with the English digestion. As Cheyne put it,


Since our wealth has increas’d and our Navigation has been extended, we have ransack’d all parts of the Globe to bring together its whole Stock of Material for Riot, Luxury, and to provoke Excess. The Tables of the Rich and Great . . . are furnish’d with Provisions of Delicacy, Number and Plenty, sufficient to provoke, and even gorge, the most large and Voluptuous Appetite.

(Cheyne cited in Turner, 1982b: 261) Like Tryon, Cheyne saw a great deal of benefit in the consumption of food which was prepared without elaboration or unnecessary treatment. He was much in favour of food and lifestyles that were plain, simple, frugal and honest. According to Turner (1982b: 265) it was Cheyne’s allegiance to ascetic principles that brought his work to the attention of John Wesley and other Methodists. Cheyne’s advice about diet and lifestyle was incorporated into Wesley’s own work, Primitive Physick or an Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases (Maddocks, 1988: 143). For Wesley, health was affected greatly by passions, which themselves could be kept at bay by exercise and cold baths. The right food was extremely important, for it should sit ‘light and easy on the stomach’. Highly seasoned food, he said, is unwholesome. We can see in the work of Cheyne and, indeed, Wesley, the dietary ascetism of the early Christian fathers, for whom the absence of all sensual pleasures, especially those associated with food and drink, was a main method of religious discipline. As Davis puts it, for early Christian fathers ‘any self-torment short of suicide was considered excellent’ (Davis, 1984: 19). The emphasis on the rationalisation of diet by sixteenth and seventeenth-century writers thus concerned the health of the body, the elimination of disease and the purity of the soul. This theology and reverence of the body as the temple of God (and not as something subservient to spirituality as it is in the Hellenistic origins of Christianity) may be found in some of the reformist Protestant religions. For early reformers like Martin Luther, the embodiment of Christ in men and women meant that His temple, the body, was to be kept clean and pure (Braaten, 1976: 16–17). Such beliefs drew explicitly on Pauline doctrine (where the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit) and we can see a ‘theology of hygiene’ emanating from ascetic Protestant movements in which self-purification of the soul through Christian practices runs parallel


to self-purification of the body through strict dietary practices with invocations such as ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’. These themes on the body and food changed little during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Let us examine, for example, some religious groups that developed in America during the nineteenth century with an explicit philosophy of the wholesomeness of the body and the wholesomeness of the diet. Sylvester Graham, originally ordained as a Presbyterian minister, became a wholefood evangelist in Philadelphia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Emphasising the benefits of a vegetarian diet, Graham’s main attack was on the health and moral problems associated with meat eating. His publications, such as his ‘Lectures Concerning the Science of Human Life’, became the source of ideas about the importance of a diet free from any foods which might excite the body. Spicy foods in particular were believed to stimulate an inordinate appetite for sex (Levenstein, 1988: 5) as, of course, was meat which was felt to ‘excite vile tempers and habits’ (Deutsch, 1977: 331). Graham frequently lectured at the Boston Physiologic Society and was a visiting lecturer at Dartmouth College where he advanced the philosophy of ‘health, individualism and self-reliance’ in which people could, and indeed should, maintain their own health without the use of ‘unnatural’ medicines or doctors (Tesh, 1982: 332). The health and spiritual movement Graham instigated, in which a ‘natural’ diet was perhaps the most important strategy, provided a number of commercial foods such as Graham crackers, the modern-day equivalents of which are still available. The movement established by Graham was the first health organisation to be developed in the United States. Others followed. The Seventh Day Adventist movement – started in 1830 by William Miller – preached a ‘healthy, holy, happy’ theology (Maxwell, 1977: 8). The dietary rules which guided the movement were believed to have appeared in a vision from heaven to one of the founding members, Ellen White, on 21 May 1863 at a gathering near Battle Creek, Michigan. The vision covered a comprehensive list of items which were to be avoided. Animal food, especially meat from pigs, was chief among these as it was considered to be the cause of the decline of the human race (Maxwell, 1977: 207). The vision also spoke against alcohol, spices, tobacco, tea and coffee. As Deutsch notes, these proscriptions were very similar to those of Graham’s with an emphasis on the Christian duty to care for the body as for the soul (Deutsch, 1977: 55). Other Grahamite lifestyle prescriptions were also incorporated in the doctrine of Seventh Day Adventism. Maxwell states,


The elimination of these unwise foods, practices and prescriptions [specified in the vision] would surely have helped anyone to live better; but there was counselling on the positive side too: drink lots of water, exercise regularly out of doors, bring sunshine and fresh air indoors, and take a daily bath.

(Maxwell, 1977: 208) Shortly after the vision, Ellen White and her husband established the Western Health Reform Institute, a small sanatorium at Battle Creek. When John Harvey Kellogg joined the Institute in 1876, it had expanded its services only a little. Kellogg had graduated from medical school two years earlier and he took up the post of Medical Director at what is now the Battle Creek Sanatorium. Under Kellogg’s direction the Sanatorium expanded in size and reputation. Much of the treatment at the Sanatorium was diet-based, but patients were also given programmes of hydrotherapy, exercise, bedrest and enemas. In 1890 the Sanatorium began to produce a toasted wheat-flake breakfast cereal, and later a range of other products such as coffee substitutes. Although he produced little by way of the usual academic output, for example published research, Kellogg was gradually accepted as one of America’s leaders in science and medicine at the turn of the century (Levenstein, 1988: 92). There is little doubt that his reputation was gained through the work at the sanatorium which, by the early part of this century, was attracting thousands of patrons, including Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller (Powell, 1989). The regime of strict diet and other techniques were clearly popular, especially among the middle and upper classes. For the Seventh Day Adventist movement, however, the popularity of the Sanatorium, especially with the well-off, became a problem. Since Battle Creek Sanatorium’s original goals were that it should become a non-profit health refuge for the poor and needy, and a training centre for spirituality and health, the funds created by its wealthy patronage, and from its commercial products (breakfast cereals and coffee substitutes), undermined its original philosophy. In 1907, John Harvey Kellogg and the Battle Creek Seventh Day Adventists parted company. Kellogg continued to work at the sanatorium as an advocate for natural wholefoods, his reputation being strengthened by associations with Élie Metchnikoff, who was working on the function of white blood cells at the Pasteur Institute, and Russell Chittenden, who was undertaking research on human protein requirements at Yale University (Levenstein, 1988: 93–4). In 1908, Ellen White left America with a group of Adventists to establish missions


and sanatoria in Australia and New Zealand (Goldstone, 1980). Seventh Day Adventists have left a marked impression on the Australian food supply through ‘Sanatarium’ brand food products, the showpiece of which is Weetabix, Australia’s most popular breakfast cereal. The account of the Battle Creek Sanatorium provides an insight into the increasing interest, and indeed commercialisation, of an organised food movement with an overt philosophical belief in the power of nature and its effects on the body and the soul. To be sure, part of the success of the sanatorium was related to the medical credibility that Kellogg was able to bring to the various regimes. However, its success was also understood in terms of the ascetic principles that underpinned the treatments, especially the dietary regimes. These principles did not always accord with those recommended by the medical establishment. Despite his popularity, Kellogg was often derided by many in the regular medical profession who considered his work unorthodox (Levenstein, 1988: 92). While the regimes at the Battle Creek Sanatorium, and other establishments that followed suit, were not always considered to be sound by the scientific community, there is no doubt that the ascetic principles which supported them resonated with a wider temperance pedagogy that flourished in nineteenthcentury America, England and Australia. This movement focused on bodily habits and spiritual purity in the service of social hygiene. In Australia, this was most evident in the work of the Victorian Ladies Sanitary Reform Movement, later known as the Australian Health Society (Santich, 1995). Weindling (1989), explains the growth of a similar movement in nineteenthcentury Germany which, amongst other things, emphasised racial purity. We see then how a dietary ascetism that problematises the body is believed to purify the soul. For modern subjects this problematisation, a technology of the self, provided an ethical comportment through which they come to know themselves as moral individuals doing the ‘right’ and ‘proper’ thing. But as we have already seen, the modern subject is also produced by technologies of power, and it is to the development of these in relation to nutritional discourses that we now turn.

Nutrition as a scientific discipline We again start with the theological ruptures in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which a privileged place of Man and nature were


foregrounded in the rise of ascetic Protestantism. Here we are concerned with the way this system of thought privileged an empirical view of the world. The connection between ascetic Protestantism and the rise of science was first mooted by Weber in his work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1930). It was Weber’s belief that in order to nourish the spirit of capitalism, ‘worldly’ ascetism of the kind practised by ascetic Protestants was necessary in order to provide, first, support for entrepreneurial individualism and, second, a ‘work ethic’ for a diligent labour force. Weber’s thesis was taken up by Merton (1973 [1936]) who concluded that ascetic Protestant traditions, especially Calvinism and Puritanism in England, and Pietism in Germany played a large role in the development of science and technology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Merton’s thesis basically rests on the following. First, within ascetic Protestant religions there is, as we have seen, a strong belief in the source of nature itself, rather than in an authority or theological hierarchy. For Pietists, for example, God was represented in nature rather than in the form of higher church officials (for example, priests and the papacy). Second, within these traditions there was a freedom from ecclesiastical or other forms of censorship. This strongly influenced their educational philosophies which encouraged a worldly rather than a strictly theological viewpoint. The relationship between people and nature was to be understood through rationalism and empiricism, a view crystallized in Kantian philosophy. Last, Merton observes that the foundation of scientific groups in England in the mid-seventeenth century, such as the Royal Society, was largely in the hands of men like Robert Boyle, John Ray, John Wilkins and Thomas Sprat who all had strong ascetic Protestant beliefs. In the writings of these men Merton sees that ‘certain elements of the Protestant ethic had pervaded the realm of scientific endeavour and had left their indelible stamp upon the attitudes of scientists towards their work’ (1973: 22). Merton’s thesis has been the subject of much debate (see Turner, 1992: 196–213), and a number of criticisms have been made. Even amongst critics who take issue with Merton’s original argument, however, there is support for the idea that ascetic Protestant thought and the rationality of science share the same heritage (see Lawless, 1974). In other words, both belong to the same system of thought (Hooykaas, 1972: 100). Melton believes that wherever ascetic Protestantism spread its influence there was a large-scale introduction of science and technology into the educational system. In Germany the University of Halle, originally a Pietist institution (Greene, 1960: xiii), was the first university to introduce a thorough training in science (Merton, 1973: 37). The same emphasis on science was also


given at Königsberg, Göttingen and Altdorf. Merton tells us that the Realschule – in which study was centred on mathematics and the natural sciences – was a completely Pietist product (Merton, 1973: 38). Interestingly, Hunter locates in the same geographical area the prototype of the modern elementary school – the Volksschule –which was established in opposition to the Gymnasium or classic school (Hunter, 1994: xvi). The practical, utilitarian education that was provided in these institutions exemplified a worldly rather than a classical, theological education. In terms of the science of nutrition, these developments are very important since much of the early work in human physiology which formed the basis of nutritional science was undertaken at German universities in research funded by the state (Aronson, 1982). People like Voit, Rubner, and Pettenkofer, who are associated with the early research in the measurement of human metabolism, worked from German laboratories. These institutions were also considered to be training grounds for others from England and America. Some of the most influential work in early nutrition was undertaken by Justus von Liebig at the University of Giessen. Liebig’s department was unique in that it was the first in which students were taught to handle scientific apparatus and conduct experiments. Prior to this students were only allowed to watch the professor demonstrating (Clements, 1986: 11). No doubt these new procedures in chemical analysis ‘opened up’ organic substrates, like food, to the gaze of the chemist in much the same way that new medical procedures of physical examination ‘opened up’ the body to the gaze of the doctor. Voit, Rubner and Pettenkofer were all students of Liebig at Giessen. Liebig’s interest in physiology and agricultural chemistry was part of his overall enthusiasm for analytical organic chemistry. There is some support for the fact that his work was stimulated by population and agricultural problems (Rossiter, 1975: 27), and the resulting civil unrest (Walker, 1964: 40) that was evident in Giessen during the early nineteenth century. It was Liebig’s experiments on animals which provided him with early indications that food provided the body with the different constituents, some nitrogenous others carboniferous, required for proper human metabolism. And it was Liebig who ascertained that only those constituents (nutrients) that entered the blood could be valuable to the organism. On another front, Liebig was one of the first to put agricultural chemistry on a rational, analytical footing, opening the way for the use of modern mineral and organic fertilisers. In fact, Liebig’s solutions to agricultural problems made his name synonymous with the progress and usefulness of


science in nineteenth-century Europe and America (Rossiter, 1975: 26). In America, Liebig’s influence was instrumental in helping to garner federal support for the establishment of agricultural research stations in each state. These stations, originally established along the lines of those in Germany, were to be of practical assistance to farmers facing problems with crop yields and pest control. We will now turn to the work of Wilbur Atwater which usually commands a privileged position in the history of nutrition. It was Atwater who, as professor of chemistry at Wesleyan University, took responsibility for directing the first agricultural experimental station in America in 1875, in Connecticut. It was during this time that he began a comprehensive nutritional analysis of foods grown and processed in the United States (Aronson, 1982). Eventually some 2,600 analyses of American foods were published as the first comprehensive food composition tables in America (Widdowson, 1987). These were later used in his surveys of the dietary intakes of individuals and families. For his training in this work Atwater went to study in Germany under Rubner. He also studied with Voit and became interested in the measurement of human metabolism. Bearing in mind that, at that time, knowledge of nutritional requirements was mainly confined to energy and protein, the question that Voit, and later Atwater, addressed was: what are the minimum daily requirements of protein and energy for humans undertaking a range of activities? On his return to America in 1881, Atwater resumed his position at Wesleyan University and by 1885 had secured funding to allow him to commence work on the construction of a calorimeter for measuring human energy and protein requirements. The calorimeter is a chamber in which people live for various periods of time (usually amounting to a few days) while measurements are made of their inputs (food, drink, oxygen consumption) and outputs (excreta, carbon dioxide, body heat) while they undertake various activities. Atwater’s work focused on the role of food in the body especially in terms of thermodynamic principles. Atwater was attempting to illustrate that food could be measured as an energy ‘input’ and labour as an energy ‘output’: his project thus centred on the economy of food in the strict sense. Much of Atwater’s original work is still of relevance to nutritionists today. Indeed, the ‘Atwater factors’ are still used to calculate the amount of energy available from fat, protein and carbohydrate and are therefore an indirect assessment of the caloric value of food. Atwater is regarded as the father of modern nutrition through his work on human metabolism.


As Elsie Widdowson, another prominent figure in nutrition, put it: ‘I think I can safely say that Atwater contributed more to our knowledge about the energy value of food than anyone who has ever lived . . . he made a great contribution to other aspects of nutrition as well’ (Widdowson, 1987: 898). The ‘other aspects’ that Widdowson refers to are the dietary surveys that Atwater directed from 1894 onwards. In these surveys details of the dietary intakes of families were calculated. This was achieved first by weighing all the food in a household at the beginning of the study, including that brought in over a one-week period. An investigator was present at mealtimes to account for any waste. At the end of the week-long study all food left in the household was weighed and the amount consumed calculated by subtraction. In all 500 surveys were undertaken in twenty-two states and territories on families from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds (Shapiro, 1986: 164). The findings of each survey were published by the Department of Agriculture and circulated to the press, magazines, charities and other reform workers. Atwater’s work was of direct relevance to economists, statisticians and policy makers in the United States federal bureaucracy who, at the time, were addressing issues of labour reform. His calculations gave them a rational and scientific way of calculating a ‘standard of living’ since food purchases accounted for between 50 and 60 per cent of household income of working-class families (Crotty, 1995; 19). Moreover, his work was supported by philanthropic agencies, missionaries and settlement workers who helped him undertake surveys in impoverished areas to ascertain how much people were spending on food and how nutritious their meals were (Aronson, 1983). By relating nutrient intake to nutrient need, Atwater was able to estimate the wisdom of family food purchases. He related his findings to calculations of spending power in the manner presented in Table 4.1. Using information like this, in combination with estimates of daily requirement of nutrients for individuals, Atwater was able to calculate nutritious and economical menus for families. Atwater regarded fruits and ‘water rich’ green vegetables as unnecessarily extravagant purchases since, at the time, there was a limited understanding of the need for vitamins and minerals. Atwater was convinced that his work could remove the unnecessary waste in the food supply. By relating a ‘physiological economy’ to a ‘food economy’, Atwater believed that he had provided a nutritional accounting system in which each meal would meet nutritional requirements with minimum costs. The savings made by removing


Table 4.1 An example of the amount of food and nutrients that could be bought for 25 cents in 1895

Milk @ 8 cents per quart Cheese @ 18 cents per lb Potatoes @ $1.00 per bucket Sugar @ 5 cents per lb Dried beans @ 5 cents per lb Cornmeal @ 3 cents per lb Wheatflour @ 3.5 cents per lb Eggs @ 5 cents per lb

Total lbs

Protein lbs

Fat lbs

CarboCalories hydrate lbs

0.81 1.32 2.69 4.90 4.37 7.08 6.25 0.23

0.23 0.96 0.27 0 1.15 0.77 0.79 0.12

0.25 0.40 0.01 0 0.10 0.32 0.07 0.10

0.29 0.49 2.29 4.89 2.96 5.88 4.68 0

2,020 2,850 4,785 9,095 8,065 13,720 10,285 645

Source: McCollum, 1939:10

the unnecessary waste on food could be used to counter poverty. According to Atwater, The true Anti-poverty Society is the Society of ‘Toil, Thrift and Temperance’. One of the articles of its constitution demands that the principles of intelligent economy shall be learned by patient study and followed in daily life. Of the many worthy ways in which the charity we shall call Christian is being exercised, none seems to me more worthy of appellation than the movement in industrial education of which teaching the daughters of working-people how to do housework and how to select food and cook it forms a part.

(Atwater, 1888: 445) An important spin-off from Atwater’s work was the development of the field of domestic science or home economics. According to Rossiter (1980) American cities at the end of the nineteenth century, like many in Europe, had major public health problems which accounted for a large percentage of mortality and morbidity. Half of all deaths were children. The need for families to be taught better hygiene and nutrition appeared to be utterly self-evident. Thus began a training in science for women who, up to that time, had been prevented from doing scientific research; domestic science began as a tertiary degree. Training programmes taught topics such as cookery, nutrition, hygiene and mothercraft, the prerequisites for which were often sciences like chemistry, bacteriology and psychology. This scientific approach to home-management will be discussed later in this chapter, especially in an Australian context.


So far in this section of the chapter we have looked at the beginnings of modern nutrition as a scientific discipline. We should, however, examine carefully the work of Atwater since it is a good example of modern nutrition functioning as an empirical science and a spiritual discipline. Let us look at this more closely. As an empirical science, nutrition produced subjects who were both the targets and the effects of its discourse. By developing criteria for judging the adequacy of the diet, nutritional knowledge was able to establish for itself rational and calculative strategies for ‘knowing’ food. This knowledge about food was dispersed throughout the community by home economists, nutritionists and others. As a technology of power/knowledge, therefore, nutrition was productive in that it provided a new understanding of food with the potential to improve health. It was also productive in that it helped to define, and to some extent create, the social problems it sought to solve. Within this rational view of eating, the sensuous properties of food – taste, flavour and pleasure – became a matter for debate and discussion. Some, like Ellen Richards, who was an early pioneer of home economics in America, stress that while flavour was obviously important to the enjoyment of food, too much overtaxed the appetite and the digestive system ‘like the too frequent and violent application of the whip to the willing steed’; what was needed was ‘just enough to accomplish the purpose that is nature’s economy’ (Richards and Elliott 1910: 59). Atwater, on the other hand, could see little place for the role of flavour or indeed pleasure in the diet since he had proved scientifically that tasteless, even repugnant, food was ‘healthy and digestible’ (Shapiro, 1986: 81). These modern solutions to a moral problematisation of pleasure are very Kantian in their form and their expression: the sensuous (impure) nature of the body has to struggle with the higher, rational principles of moral judgement, established in this case through science. Thus nutrition also provided a spiritual discipline, through technologies of the self: it encouraged a moral choice for an ‘economy of nature’, and for action against waste and barriers to productivity. By producing ‘ideal diets’ based on sound science, nutrition problematised the relationship people had with food. We have seen in earlier chapters that food had been problematised in ancient Greece and early Christian times. The arrival of nutrition provided another aspect to food problematisation which mapped onto these earlier concerns, especially those of an ascetic Christianity. The need to be frugal, thrifty and economical with nature was all part of the application of nutrition. The justification for these habits was now based on


science, supported by both rationalism and empiricism. Eating unwisely was at one and the same time irrational and morally questionable. Indulgence becomes hedonism which was itself morally indefensible, especially when the costs were prohibitive. Thus Atwater’s contribution to the field can be seen as a government of nutrition – in the development of food classifications, registers, and techniques of inquiry into what people ate – and it was an ethics of nutrition by virtue of the moral problems it posed for subjects. Crotty (1995: 19) and Aronson (1982: 481) are highly critical of Atwater and his workers for this moralism. They point out that Atwater displayed double standards in that his dietary recommendations were made only to the poor while the excesses of the prosperous went uncriticised. This is, in fact, untrue. Atwater’s recommendations and exhortations were published in magazines aimed at the middle class (Atwater, 1888). Also we have already seen how the eating habits of the well-off were problematised on another front: in the spas, sanatoria and clinics of nutritionists like Kellogg. However, as far as Atwater was concerned it was only the poor who were a ‘social problem’. They were the ones living in squalor; they were the ones with the highest morbidity and mortality rates; they were the ones with the most to gain from his programmes of ‘scientific cooking’. Atwater’s approach was entirely consistent with his own temperance morals and those of his era. His project was one of assisting less affluent groups to improve their lives. As one of Atwater’s colleagues put it, ‘If the . . . present waste of food material could be spent for more adequate shelter . . . the bad tenements in the slums would be renovated’ (Atkinson cited in Aronson, 1982: 480). Of course, the rationality of nutrition did not always hold sway with the people whose ‘improvement’ was of so much concern to reformers. There was often resistance to these reformist efforts by those who saw them as ways to justify a reduction in standards of living. One participant in an Atwater survey withdrew because ‘the neighbors were convinced that it was a scheme to see how much it actually cost for a man to live, in order that his wages might be reduced’ (Aronson, 1982: 481). Atwater’s critics make the assumption, first, that his principles were accepted and applied in a wholesale manner. This was not so for it is clear that the early nutrition and home economy movements were far from being allpervasive. People could, and apparently did, resist efforts to reform them. The second assumption is that the production of nutrition as a ‘social problem’ was unhelpful. Its production as a social problem, however, provided for a better


understanding of the needs of certain groups. According to Guthrie (1989) the work by Atwater represented the first attempts by a nutritional scientist to influence national food and nutrition policy.

Conclusions In this chapter we have examined how Enlightenment philosophy perfected a universal form of humanity – understood as pure reason or ‘good’ – which is imposed by a person on him or herself through self-problematisation and purification of thoughts, desires and motives. As definitions of what was good, proper and normal became increasingly shaped by the human sciences, the mass pedagogies of the Church become eclipsed by the mass pedagogies of rational expertise. For nutrition in particular, knowledge of the ‘good’ diet becomes the central focus for the modern subject of food choice. As a complex form of power, nutrition became a practice of analysis, reflection, calculation and tactics on food. These practices were not solely the concern of the state which is only one particular form of government (Miller and Rose, 1990: 3). Indeed, as we have seen, a number of agencies, philanthropic and otherwise, became concerned about nutrition for both regulatory and spiritual, that is moral, reasons. Atwater’s examination and explanation of food, disease and poverty in the social space, through the use of surveys, charts, numbers and so forth, located problems in families, homes and kitchens. His work illustrates two of the major preoccupations of the Modern era: life and labour. Embedded in the science of nutrition has been a spirituality of the Enlightenment which has always been mortgaged to ethical (ascetic) principles of living. In the next chapter we shall see how nutrition continued to be developed as a science through the moral practices of the rations of prisons and the rationalisation of paupers.

Chapter 5

Paupers, prisoners and moral panics Refining the meaning of nutrition

In the last chapter we ended by illustrated the emergence of nutritional discourse by way of the work of scientists, like Wilbur Atwater and others. In a normal history of nutrition the next logical step would be to proceed to the discovery of the other nutrients, for example, vitamins in the early twentieth century. In this book, however, we are more interested in the history of the systems of thought than the history of ideas. For this reason we will return to the eighteenth century to illustrate the following points: first, that Atwater’s scientific interests in the rationalisation of the diet were part of a growing involvement in nutrition taking place at different times and in different spaces; second, that the moral concerns which are explicit in Atwater’s work were not unique to America. Indeed, as we will see, the problem of morality and its expression through food discipline were entrenched in eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought in which empirical problems of health and economy accompanied transcendental problems of the morals of rationality. Rationality was not just an efficient means of achieving the desired outcomes; it was a moral imperative through which subjects were required to problematise themselves for their own ‘good’. We will therefore examine how a rationalisation of food has been important in setting conditions of possibility which were crucial for the further development of nutrition.

The rationalisation of deservedness: paupers and prisoners According to Foucault a major phenomenon of the eighteenth century was an analysis of idleness in which a ‘utilitarian decomposition of poverty is marked out’ (Foucault, 1980d: 169). Basically this required the progressive and

80 Paupers, prisoners and moral panic

systematic re-examination of the pauper in which a number of functional discriminations were made possible, namely, the good poor, the bad poor, the wilfully idle and the involuntarily unemployed. In short, economists and administrators were concerned about the amount of state revenue spent on the ‘idle’. In England and Wales in the early nineteenth century this was addressed through a restructuring of the Poor Laws. According to Finer (1952) the Poor Laws affected the entire administrative and economic underpinnings of the state. The Poor Laws were intended to take care of the destitute, orphans, the aged and infirm. They were also designed, however, to provide work for the unemployed and they regulated the migration of labour (Finer, 1952: 42). In England from 1760 onwards, stagnant pools of landless labourers emerged as common land (‘commons’) and small farms became enclosed. The Poor Laws were expected to take care of the landless by subsidising their employment or by paying them direct ‘out-relief’. But by the early nineteenth century these Poor Laws became an administrative nightmare. They were administered by over 15,000 parishes throughout England and Wales; they were costly, amounting to seven million pounds in 1832; and they created a dependence on the state. Moreover, subsidised pauper labour competed with independent labour which was anathema to the free market spirit of the times. The New Poor Laws (1834) were drafted to overcome these problems. One salient feature of the New Poor Laws was that they were organised without a labour subsidy so the poor but able-bodied were expected to compete for work. To ensure this the conditions available under the New Laws were such that they created a large margin between independent labour and pauper labour so that only those who had no other means of support would be assisted. In other words, only the deserving poor would be likely to take up assistance. The relief offered to the poor was to be paid for by ‘adequate labour‘ in ‘well-regulated’ workhouses (Finer, 1952: 44). Workhouses were in existence under the old Poor Laws, but were inadequately regulated by parishes. Under the New Poor Laws, however, paid officials and Poor Law Unions (which replaced parishes) were under the central control of a Poor Law Commission. The conditions in the workhouse were to be harsh. According to one commentator of the day, the Reverend Milman, ‘The workhouse should be a place of hardship, of coarse fare, of degradation and humility; it should be administered with strictness – with severity; it should be as repulsive as is consistent with humanity’ (Anstruther, 1973: 16). Most workhouses, it seems, were organised along the lines recommended by the Reverend. The Poor Law Act consisted of a set of recommendations with

Paupers, prisoners and moral panic 81

very little mention of the practical organisation of the workhouse, the day-to-day running of which was left mainly to a governor or a matron. Diet, however, was one of the few areas where specific guidelines were drawn up by the Poor Law Commission (Johnston, 1985: 15). The first Commission reports dealt directly with food, The diet of the paupers shall be so regulated as in no case to exceed, in quantity and quality of food, the ordinary diet of any class of able-bodied labourers living within the same district . . . on no account must the dietary of the workhouse be superior or equal to the ordinary mode of subsistence of the labouring class of the neighbourhood.

(1835 Commission Reports cited in Johnson, 1985: 16) Indeed, this proved to be the case as the rations of the workhouse have been shown to compare poorly, qualitatively and quantitatively, with the diets of working-class families of the day based on information collected by Neild in 1841 (Johnston, 1985: 233). The justification for regulating the pauper diet was part of the policy of ‘less eligibility’ – or unfavourability – and was an attempt to make the conditions of the workhouse unattractive to all but the truly indigent. The Commission issued six dietaries which would provide the basis of the three meals for the workhouse. The dietaries specified the amounts of food given; for example, men were provided with more food than women or children. The foods specified were bread, gruel, meat, broth, cheese, potatoes and rice or suet pudding. Some regional differences were allowed for so that on the coast, for example, fish was often used in place of meat. Further specifications concerned mealtimes: breakfast (6 a.m. in summer, 7.30 in winter), dinner (noon), and supper (6 p.m.). Meals were to be eaten in a dining-hall or day-room under strict supervision. Although workhouses were ‘mixed’, men, women and children ate separately for easy administration. No food was to be taken away from the table uneaten (Johnston, 1985: 109). Provisions were made for dietary punishment (usually bread and water) for malingerers or inmates who refused to work. A medical officer was authorised to adjust the ration for the sick if this were considered necessary. Whether or not the inmates received their rations is, of course, another matter. Stories of under-rationing by governors and supervisors were fairly common. One case, the Andover Scandal of 1840 (Anstruther, 1973), revealed the most shocking conditions. The labourers at Andover revolted after


making several complaints about, inter alia, the state of the workhouse diet. During an inquiry later it was heard the diets were so poor that some inmates assuaged their hunger by gnawing candles (Anstruther, 1973: 133). One report in The Times stated that inmates were so hungry that they ate meat off putrid bones which were sent to the workhouse to be ground for fertiliser (Johnston, 1985: 19). In 1846 the Poor Law Commission was replaced by a Poor Law Board, and, shortly after, diets were placed on a scientific footing when Dr Lyon Playfair was hired to devise a scientific scale listing the weights of food provided in the workhouse rations, in terms of nitrogen and carbon, as an attempt to more accurately meet the food needs of inmates. According to Johnston from about 1850 onwards there was increasing recognition that the able-bodied were, in fact, only a small part of the workhouse population. In other words, it became recognised that workhouses mainly comprised the old, the sick and orphans. According to Webb and Webb (1910: 88) from this time on there was a gradual movement towards a policy based on the principle of the minimum relief necessary for training or treatment. Workhouses took on a more reformatory attitude, especially for children who were hopefully to be rehabilitated and returned to society. Gradually new rations emphasising the importance of growth and health were introduced for children under nine years and for those between nine and sixteen years of age (Johnston, 1985: 29). Later still, two sample diets for children aged two to five years, and five to nine years of age were published. By 1860 a chief medical inspector was appointed to the Poor Law Board, and in 1865 Dr Edward Smith was appointed to this position. Smith’s earlier work on diets in prisons and the ‘labouring classes’ had provided a better understanding of nutritional requirements for adults. He had also analysed a variety of foods for their nutritional properties. Smith undertook surveys of the diets in workhouses in a number of regions, the last of which was published in the Lancet. His recommendations were that two main considerations should be borne in mind when workhouse rations were calculated: health and economy. For Smith, economy did not mean providing the cheapest food, but finding the most nutritious foods at least cost. From that time onwards workhouses were expected to submit, and have ratified, dietaries based on Smith’s recommendations. According to Johnston (1985) who has analysed over a thousand workhouse dietaries from 1834 to 1894, an improvement in the size and


quality of the workhouse rations can be seen from 1866 onwards. Johnston believes there were three main reasons for these changes. First, the price of food, especially bread made from imported American wheat, was reduced and this may have increased the size of the bread ration. Since bread made up the major portion of the ration, its increase had a considerable effect on the quantity and the quality of the diets. Second, there was, as has been discussed, a recognition that the inmates of the workhouse were indeed the deserving poor for whom there was no further resort. Thus the policy of ‘less eligibility’ was gradually replaced by one in which ‘need’ was addressed. Last, the definition of ‘need’ became more scientific after Smith’s intervention, and dietaries were expected to conform to tables of nutrients specifying the nutritional requirements of different groups. This responsibility fell to the medical inspectors whose influence was increasingly felt in the workhouse, especially through medical societies such as the Poor Laws Medical Officers Association (Johnston, 1985: 149). There was also an increase in the uniformity of the diet which facilitated inspection and administration. Questions remain, of course, over whether the populations of the workhouse ate according to the official recommendations. Instances of management dishonesty have already been mentioned, such as the case in Andover. But there was also a problem with poorly prepared food. According to one inspector’s report, They had two coppers so set that their tops were separated only by a space of three inches. When I was there, they were boiling clothes in one and soup in the other: and there were no lids on them. When the soup boiled over into the clothes, I raised no objection, but when the clothes boiled over into the soup, I said I would not stay to dinner.

(Thomas, 1909: 293) Thus while there may have been some improvement in the dietaries, in terms of nutritional quality, it was very likely that the food itself provided in the workhouse remained very poor even by working-class standards of the day. By all accounts, though, workhouse food was considerably better than that provided in prisons. After the Prisons Act of 1835, institutions of correction became subject to certification and inspection from the Home Secretary. There were generally two types of prisons in England and Wales in the nineteenth


century: the local prison and the convict gaol. The former was for petty crimes and accommodated prisoners with sentences ranging from a few days to a few months, normally without hard labour (Drummond and Wilbraham, 1958: 370). Convict gaols, on the other hand, were for those crimes where the penalty was transportation to the colonies – initially to some American states, but later to New South Wales, Van Dieman’s Land, and Western Australia – or, when these opportunities ceased, hard labour on the treadmill. Like the workhouse, prisons had an explicit policy of deterrence. It was agreed that deterrence could be achieved if the conditions of prisoners were as harsh as possible. Rations were therefore small and unpleasant (Johnston, 1985: 46). The role of prison as punishment was also widely debated. It was generally accepted that the harsh conditions were indeed there to punish prisoners. Prison diets were generally limited to bread, potatoes, meat and gruel. Sometimes porridge was provided as an extra item. The gruel was to be made ‘from oxheads in the proportion of one ox-head for about 100 male prisoners, and the same for about 120 female prisoners. . . . [I]t could be thickened with barley or pease, or vegetables if convenient’ (Drummond and Wilbraham, 1958: 367). The prison dietaries were divided into nine classes depending on the prisoners’ sentence and gender. In terms of the deterring and punishing effects of the diet, short-term prisoners apparently fared worse. Dr Guy, the medical officer of Millbank Prison, was in favour of short-term prisoners having rations which were ‘so scanty and uninviting as to be itself a punishment’ (Guy cited in Johnston, 1985: 53). Nevertheless it was long-term prisoners, especially those undergoing hard labour, who were the subject of a number of inquiries since there had been some reports of the long-term health effects of poor prison diets. The most common problems were thought to be scurvy and tuberculosis. At an 1863 Select Committee hearing on the state of gaols and houses of correction, evidence about the diet was provided by Edward Smith whose efforts in workhouse reform have already been discussed. Smith criticised the dietaries of long-term prisoners which he considered to contain too much meat. He believed that a study should be commissioned in which the actual nutritional requirements of prisoners should be established on scientific grounds. Dr Guy, the medical officer of Millbank Prison, also gave evidence and was critical of the dietaries because he believed they were insufficiently penal. Guy saw nothing wrong in setting the diet so low as to be injurious to health. He argued that it was unreasonable to expect the diet to keep a prisoner in the ‘highest possible state of health and vigour’ (Johnston, 1985: 53). Thus, while conditions


in English and Welsh prisons did become better on the basis of the 1863 review, the quality of prison food hardly ever improved. According to the analysis by Johnston (1985) from 1850 onwards the dietaries of prisons were almost always poorer in quality and quantity than those of the workhouse which, in turn, were unfavourable when compared to those eaten by almost all classes outside these institutions. By way of summarising this section we can ask how a review of the place of food in social institutions like workhouses and prisons are of use to us. Do these problems merely parallel the emergence of nutritional science? Or are they interesting asides to the unfolding of the real story? In other words, are these descriptions of food in institutions coincidental to, or part of, a nineteenthcentury interest in the rationalisation of food. The fact is that the rationalisation of food in the workhouse and the prison (and indeed, other confined institutions) provided specific conditions of possibility for the emergence of the science of nutrition. Let us look at this proposition more carefully. First, the rationing of food in the prison and the workhouse had a direct impact on the growth of knowledge about food and the body, especially through the development and application of nutrition principles. The early research in England undertaken by Edward Smith, initially in prisons and later in workhouses, paved the way for an increased understanding of food in a wider social space. Smith’s interest in the health of the ‘confined’ provided him with the opportunity to undertake estimates of human metabolic costs. His work initially centred on the energy expenditure of prisoners doing hard labour, especially on the treadmill at Coldbath Fields Prison in 1856 (Chapman, 1967: 10). Smith calculated the energy cost of labour and food in a fashion similar to, but more crude than, Wilbur Atwater. He corresponded regularly with Liebig and others in Germany about his results and he presented his work to the Royal Society in 1857 and again in 1859. Smith’s reputation in this area led to his appointment as director of a survey of cotton workers in Lancashire in which his brief was to estimate ‘the least outlay of money which [will] procure food enough for life’ (Chapman, 1967: 15). Using his earlier estimates of nutritional requirements and food nutrients, Smith expressed the weekly income spent on food in families in terms of nitrogen and carbon per household. He claimed that the diets of the 21 per cent of families under surveillance were unable to meet their nutritional needs. In a later report to the Privy Council on The Food of The Poorer Labouring Classes published in 1863, Smith provided further evidence on the poor diets of families living in rural as well as urban areas of England.


‘The average quantity of food supplied’, concluded Smith, ‘is too little for health and strength’ (Burnett, 1979: 129). Smith’s work was cited in Capital by Marx (1977 [1894]) and his methods for estimating food adequacy were used by social reformers such as William Booth in his study of diet in working-class London (1970 [1902]) and Seebohm Rowntree in his study of York (1980 [1901]). Thus we start to see a nutritional ‘truth’ of the body emerging where the limits to life and labour are defined as part of a knowable, calculable and administrative object: that of nutrition science. Second, the regulation of places like workhouses and prisons (and indeed factories, houses and so forth) brought with it an army of inspectors who became part of local intelligence and local surveillance. According to Driver (1993: 28) this central corps (planners, medical officers, petty officials) collected information and enforced official standards or laws. Thus a panoptic surveillance mechanism radiated from a central agency across a number of institutions. In the areas of institutionalised diets this process created, and in turn was created by, a rational, scientific understanding of food and food needs. Populations which required management could now be problematised in a different way within a new knowledge of nutrition. They could be stratified, classified and registered according to their biological and social traits. Rations could not only target the sick, for whom knowledge of special food needs in relation to pathological problems had been known since antiquity, but also infants, children and women whose physiological requirements were part of new knowledge of the body. Thus emerged a government of the food choice of populations who were ‘confined’. In this case the ‘walls of confinement’ were ‘physical’, as in the prison and the workhouse. But in other cases they were ‘social’, as in the limits on living set by class and privilege studied by Smith and Atwater. We can say that this government of food choice, understood as nutrition, informed, and was informed by, the larger questions of life and labour. It involved the practices of the art of governing, governmentality, through the deployment of a range of calculations, procedures and strategies for both knowing about and caring for individuals. An important feature of this governmentality was the way that shared models of vocabulary and perception became available to a wide range of individuals and groups. The language of nutrition was not only used by those who sought to know and regulate food choice, like Playfair and Smith. As we have seen, it was used by others such as Booth, Rowntree and Marx, who developed their own demographic details


in order to deploy nutrition understandings, calculations, and classifications in order to illustrate the plight of the poorer classes. The institutional regime in workhouses and prisons also carried with it a familiar tradition in dietary asceticism for it not only targeted the bodies of the ‘confined’ but also their habits and their conduct. Rations were to be eaten in public according to strict timetables and conditions. And meals were rationalised not only according to nutritional content but also according to taste. For example, a circular from the Poor Laws Board in 1867 reminded supervisors that all food should be kept as ‘plain as possible’, and the ingredients allowed ensured that the food was monotonous. With few exceptions all food in prisons and workhouses was boiled with only salt as the main added flavouring. Food was likely to have been served cold (Johnson, 1985: 230), and indeed there appeared to be a need to keep sapid foods out of dietaries as much as possible in order to keep meals unattractive. The full horror of workhouse meals was put to good effect in 1838 in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. But Dickens’ story not only reveals the nature of the physical conditions of the workhouse. It also reveals its moral purpose. Oliver’s request for ‘more’ displayed an attitude that was totally out of keeping with his position as a pauper for whom food, any food, was a privilege. Oliver’s crime was that he had transgressed an understanding that, for paupers, workhouse food was to be strictly rationed, and his presumption of getting a second helping was a moral outrage. In short, the dietary of the workhouse and of the prison was a way of disciplining bodies and souls. As such, it functioned in much the same way as the regime in the monastery where it encouraged the formation of the selfreflecting and self-regulating individual. By way of summarising our discussion so far we can say that, by the latter half of the nineteenth century, a particular scientific knowledge of food became formalised under the growing discipline of ‘nutrition’. This knowledge problematised the food choices of the ‘choosing’ subject according to a rational, scientific understanding of food. We can see this problematisation manifested in a number of ways and forms. Discourses on health -which, as we have seen, almost always included diet – now spoke about food in a calculable and rational manner. For example, in his lectures to the Australian Health Society in 1884, Dr Sidney Gibbons drew specifically on nutrition in terms of two food groups: one containing heat-giving foods which mainly contained carbon, the other containing nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur. Gibbons itemises the roles and functions, as they were then understood, of these different components of food


(Gibbons, 1884). At around the same time in America, Atwater was regularly publishing information on diet in professional and lay journals. As we saw earlier, Atwater was mostly concerned with the economy of nutrition, and ways in which it could be deployed to improve household management. In an article titled the ‘Pecuniary economy of food’ (Atwater, 1888) published in the Century Illustrated (which, according to Aronson (1982: 474), was ‘a magazine widely read in educated, civil minded, middle-class households in America’), Atwater includes numerous charts and tables illustrating the costs and amounts of fat, protein and carbohydrate in a variety of foods. A number of books published in America, Europe and Australia combined the importance of nutrition for the management of ‘health’ and for the management of the ‘hearth’. Dr Phillip Muskett’s popular book The Art of Living in Australia (1893), which was basically a manual for a proper European lifestyle in the Antipodes, contained much about the correct choice of diet. Muskett drew extensively on F. W. Pavy’s The Treatise on Food and Dietetics and Food and Feeding by Sir Henry Thompson. Commenting on a mounting interest in nutrition and dietetics, Muskett said that ‘There are a number of works on diet and on food written by well-known authorities in the medical world so that the science of dietetics must eventually attain an unassailable position’ (Muskett, 1893: 106). The first edition of The Book of Home Management (1861) by Isabella Beeton makes only passing reference to nutrition, mainly in sections on ‘Invalid cookery’ and ‘The doctor’. A later publication, Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book (1902 [1890]), however, contains a firm commitment to nutrition saying, Till lately, chemistry has not been in active growth, but day by day it is now adding to our physiological knowledge and is fast becoming a more popular science. With it, and by its aid, advances the science of cookery. A dietary cure is now as common, if not more so, than a medicinal one for even the greatest of disorders, particularly in the case of mental aberration; and to this reason may be partly owing the giant strides that cookery has taken during the past few years. It is argued by some who object to the term ‘science of cookery’ that people lived as long before such a thing was heard of. So they did, just as they lived before they knew the laws of gravitation or elemental mathematics, before the days of wonderful machinery or steam. But as we are ready to acknowledge the fact that these discoveries have done much good . . . why should we not be ready to


say whether science in cookery will not aid us in the feeding of our starving millions.

(Beeton, 1902: 44) Beeton’s books typified a growing domestic economy movement in Britain, America and Australia that focused on efficiency and thrift. On the question of feeding large populations we have seen how the nutrition calculations of Smith were developed from a rationalisation of diets of the ‘confined’, and we have spoken about the way these were used by a number of others for the social reform of the poor. In all of these manifestations of nutrition we can, of course, identify individuals whose beliefs and practices represented ideas which have been important to the development of nutritional science, for example, Tryon, Cheyne, Kellogg, Liebig, Smith, Atwater, Rowntree and so on. We have, however, looked beyond these ‘creative minds’ at a much larger system of organisation: that of the will to govern, or governmentality, in which there was a recognition of the need to be concerned with ‘men and things’. This development, which flourished after the Enlightenment, saw the expansion of a complex set of discourses and practices in the human sciences around ‘what it means to be human’ (van Krieken, 1996). In the case of nutrition, much of the early development was based on questions related to ‘human cost and efficiency’, especially in health, metabolic and economic terms. And although many of the answers to these questions came from experiments on ‘confined’ populations, as a discourse on ‘proper eating’, nutrition did not impose itself as a ‘sovereign’ power with the aim of oppressing and dominating subjects. On the contrary, as a government of food choice, nutrition constructed a ‘co-ordinated, mediated autonomy’ for subjects where their personal problems were at one and the same time ‘distanced’, but emanating from, the public concerns of various organisations: state agencies, economic enterprises, philanthropic movements. This government ‘at a distance’ – which preserved the autonomy of individuals – was facilitated by, first, the establishment of rules, be they religious, legislative, medical, or economic. And, second, it was facilitated by shared expert language and shared conceptual frameworks which made nutrition available to a whole range of agents and settings. The autonomy of the ‘choosing’ subject was important because, as we shall see later, it preserved the idea of ‘private’ and ‘personal’ choice. This autonomy is the Kantian moral autonomy, where moral conduct arises out of


a rational knowledge of moral principles. For nutrition, moral principles were those set by expert knowledges about the ‘right’ and ‘proper’ way to choose food with a special concern for health, economy and efficiency. What we see then is the ‘forging of alignments between the personal projects of citizens and images of the social order’ (Miller and Rose, 1988: 172), in which individuals actively and productively seek out the ‘correct’ course of action which will positively fulfil their ethical concerns. This government and ethics of nutrition constructs, and is constructed by, the ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’, whose actions are regulated by, on the one hand, the expert knowledges on rational science and, on the other, spiritual practices of selfproblematisation and self-reflection. As we saw in the last chapter, we can trace these spiritual practices back to those in early Christianity which, in turn, developed them from the moral concerns about food in antiquity. In short, nutrition emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century as a government of food choice through a panoply of disciplinary practices which sought to know, calculate and regulate the food choices of individuals and populations. But, just as importantly, it also functioned as a moral discipline: as an austere regime which disciplined the soul.

Conclusions An understanding of the ‘choosing’ subject of nutrition as a historical object makes clear the moral conditions under which it emerged. These conditions were typical of the mid-nineteenth century, dubbed the ‘era of enthusiasm’, where there was a fetish for collecting statistical data with the motto ‘information and control’ (Hacking, 1982: 280–1). Statistics was known as the ‘moral science’ and it was interested not only in the habits of people and their conduct, but also in the level of morality of their actions. This was why information on delinquency, deviance, pauperism, prostitution, drunkenness, insanity and so on, was so important. This moral concern about the population produced institutions like the workhouse which was symbolic of both an ethos of laissez-faire administration and a growing welfare state (Driver, 1993: 4). It reflected a kind of ‘hands off/hands on’ political philosophy where the free spirit of individualism was accompanied by increasing administration by the state. The apparent paradox of this philosophy is solved, however, by an understanding of governmentality in which the freedom of individuals and defence of private property can only flourish if a variety of policies and administrative


practices are diffused throughout the population for the safe and happy conduct of everyday life. This was, of course, the rational and fundamental principle of Bentham’s panopticon as an instrument of law and order. For, while Bentham was totally opposed to notions of natural rights and natural justice (what he called ‘nonsense on stilts’), he was committed to a moral regulation through the self-discipline of the individual in order that self interests coincided with the general interests of society. And since, for Bentham, there was no natural spontaneous identity of interests, the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ could only be achieved through the application of rules and laws regulating human affairs (Driver, 1993: 21). Bentham’s writings are full of ideas of how this may be realised through police and security, not in the form of arbitrary concentrated power, but rather a diffused, localised power (Driver, 1993: 19). What we see developing is thus a new political technology of the individual, both as ruled and as ruler. These were the aspects of governmentality that Foucault found so interesting: ‘What I am looking for . . . are the techniques, the practices, which give a concrete form to this new political rationality and to this new kind of relationship between the social entity and the individual (Foucault, 1988b: 153). Foucault finds these techniques and practices in the ‘police’. In this sense ‘police’ is taken to mean the regulative apparatus of the state through which it acts in all aspects of life: property, economy, health and so on. Words like ‘police’, ‘policy’ and ‘politics’ derive from the Greek ‘polis’, and thus policing the population is carried out through the development of policy so as to act on ‘the conduct of individuals, their morals, their occupational capacities, their honesty and how they are to respect the law’ (Foucault, 1988b: 153). As we have seen the administration of daily life was facilitated by the collection of technical knowledge gained through the collection of information: moral statistics. Hacking argues that the numbers resulting from the counting of bodies returned to the population in the form of categories of people. For example, social class is not something into which a society is intrinsically sorted. It is, instead, a product of the nineteenthcentury counting-bureaucracy (Hacking, 1982: 280). We have then a society in which moral reforms are made very evident. The resulting ‘disciplinary society’ is one where programmes for moral and social control proliferate and this, according to Foucault, is quite different from a ‘disciplined society’ in which such programmes are, in fact, unnecessary (Driver, 1993: 13). In the next chapter we will see how the disciplinary nature of a programme on nutrition was carried out at the level of the family and how this was crucial to an ongoing development of a nutrition discourse. We will start by looking


generally at this relationship, but we will come to focus especially on the insertion of nutrition into Australian family life during the early part of this century. The reason for focusing on Australia is threefold. First, it provides an understanding of the way the medicalisation of the family was indeed part of a common global strategy (Foucault, 1980d: 167). Second, during the early part of this century Australia was remote from Europe and America in terms of its geography, culture and science. Yet we will see that even in a country so far removed from the centre of nutritional research, nutrition quickly became part of professional and public discourse. Last, focusing on the Australian situation paves the way for subsequent chapters which will examine nutrition in the lives of contemporary Australian families.

Chapter 6

The nutritional policing of families

Let us begin this chapter by looking at the changing nature of medicine in eighteenth-century Europe. In his essay ‘The politics of health in the eighteenth century’, Foucault (1980d) alerts us to two characteristics of eighteenth-century medicine: first, the privileging of the child and the medicalisation of the family; and, second, the promotion of hygiene as a bona fide role of the doctor which opened a new field of noso-politics in the community. Up to the eighteenth century the general hospital was a repository for not only the sick but also the poor, the mad and the destitute. According to Foucault, three things happened to change the nature of hospitals and the course of medicine from that time onwards. In the first place there was hospitalisation at home in which domestic labour reduced the costs of treating the patient and, indeed, reduced the risk of cross-infection. In the second place there was a development of a medical corps dispersed throughout the social body offering treatment free of charge or as cheaply as possible. Last, community dispensaries were established through which a supply of medication could be channelled. These factors meant that the technical advantages of hospitals could be maintained without medical and economic disadvantages (Foucault, 1980d: 180).

The morality of families and the visibility of children Armstrong (1983: 14) explains that the organised movement of medicine out into the social space of the community increased its reach directly into the home. This process was facilitated by a greater visibility of children constructed through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on childhood. As we saw in the writings of Tryon earlier, children in the seventeenth century were

94 The nutritional policing of families

considered to be highly impressionable both physically and morally. Aries (1973) tells us that this notion of innocence was entirely missing in earlier understandings of childhood. The acceptance by the eighteenth century that children were easily corruptible provided an opportunity for greater scrutiny of their habits. For example, children often appeared in moral and other statistics which showed how they were represented in life and labour. A problematisation of child labour began in 1773 and McCleary (1933: 10–12) uses the example of the child chimneysweep to illustrate how, throughout the nineteenth century, increasing concerns about child labour were brought before the English parliament. By 1890 a number of Acts of Parliament had been passed relating to child labour and child cruelty. The moral problems of childhood were also much discussed, especially in relation to sexuality. According to Foucault childhood masturbation was considered by educators and doctors to be an epidemic that needed eradicating, and ‘an entire medico-sexual regime took hold of the family milieu’ (Foucault, 1990a: 42). Mothers had a special role to play in assisting in this surveillance (Finch, 1993: 85). A social space for policing families thus opened up. The work of Donzelot (1980) and Finch (1993) illustrates how a modern understanding of the family was shaped by the growth of organisations which were charged with the responsibility of overseeing family life. With regard to medicine, from the eighteenth century onwards we can see child health becoming an increasing focus of material written for parents (Foucault, 1980d: 173–4). In England the beginning of foundling hospitals can be seen from 1739 (McCleary, 1933: 14), and in 1769 the Red Lion Dispensary in London opened as one of the first community infant welfare dispensaries. We do, however, have to come to the beginning of the twentieth century to see an organised administration of community health care for children and families. In England the first infant welfare centre, the St Pancras School for Mothers, opened in London in 1907 and was run by volunteers. Within fourteen years more than one hundred centres had opened in England, all subsidised by local government (McCleary, 1933: 139).

The philanthropy of health The importance of philanthropy in the establishment of ‘proto-services’ which are later developed by the state should not be underestimated. As Rose (1990: 127–8) points out, philanthropic activity was instrumental in promoting a prophylactic mode of action against many of the moral problems of family

The nutritional policing of families 95

life in the nineteenth century such as inebriety, illegality, promiscuity and so on. When allied with medicine, as it often was, philanthropy became a powerful force in laying the groundwork for the later development of state-funded services for the normalisation of families. For example the first child welfare movements in Australia began as philanthropic ventures (Reiger, 1986: 130). In 1904 William Armstrong, the first graduate of the new medical course at Sydney University, returned from a visit to France where he had seen the work of Pierre Budin and the Consultation de Nourrissons at Charité (Clements, 1986: 67). He established the first Sydney clinic for mothers and babies in 1914, mainly through philanthropic support. Infant welfare centres were established earlier in Adelaide in 1909 when Helen Mayo returned to Australia after working at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London. Again, this service was for many years funded by public donations. But by 1923 all Australian states had infant welfare movements which were, in fact, partially or fully state-funded. While these services were essentially medical in nature, they were promoted as general health services and were mostly staffed by nurses who were supervised, and sometimes trained, by doctors. The focus on family health, especially that of children, was of crucial importance for the further development of nutrition. This was because, as Foucault points out, The family is assigned a linking role between general objectives regarding the good health of the social body and individuals’ desire or need for care. This enables a ‘private’ ethic of good health as the reciprocal duty of parents and children to be articulated onto a collective system of hygiene and the scientific technique of cure made available to individual and family demand by a professional corps of doctors qualified and, as it were, recommended by the State.

(Foucault, 1980d: 174) Community medicine, as it came to be known, was of particular importance for the emergence of the science of nutrition for a number of reasons. Through a focus on the health of children, community medicine had direct access to information about the family which, as we have already seen, was the site for earlier nutrition work by Atwater, Smith, Rowntree and Booth. Moreover, the family was not only a site for collecting information, it was, as we saw in the work of Atwater, a site for reform. The need for reform at the level of the


family was made clear by a number of English surveys. A major one was the 1904 Report on the Physical Deterioration instigated in light of a report from the Director General of the Army Medical Services, in which it was stated that the Inspector of Recruiting was having trouble enlisting enough men with satisfactory physical stature for the Boer War (Drummond and Wilbraham, 1958: 405). A major part of the 1904 report was given over to the health problems of children, one-third of whom were considered to be malnourished. An earlier study in Leeds had shown that half of all children surveyed had marked rickets and 60 per cent had poor dentition (Burnett, 1979: 272). On the basis of the report free school meals were provided to the needy. Also the routine examination of health, height and weight of schoolchildren began in 1907 (Floud et al., 1990: 178). News of this work in England spread to Australia. For example, the report on ‘The physical condition of children attending public schools in New South Wales’ (1908) points to studies on children in Europe and England: Though for six years past, [medical examinations of schoolchildren] have been taken in Great Britain and for a number of years in France, Germany and America, it has only been in the latter part of 1906 that such work was undertaken for the first time in Australia. . . . In Great Britain and on the Continent, school administrators have to face problems arising out of crowded populations, sordid poverty, and the consequent neglect of physical condition to which many children are subject at the hands of parents who are either helpless victims of their surroundings, or are wilfully evading their responsibilities. In Australia, fortunately these conditions do not prevail to such an extent as to create a problem of the same magnitude.

(New South Wales Department of Public Instruction, 1908: 1) We should note here that in the early part of this century, Australian medicine was still strongly attached to and associated with Britain. There were a number of direct connections through, for example, education and research activities. As Fenner puts it ‘When I graduated [from medicine] in 1938 it was still thought necessary to obtain the English fellowship or membership if one had ambitions in surgery or medicine, and it was the natural wish of every ambitious young medical graduate to work for a time in the United Kingdom’ (Fenner, 1988: 22).


It should not surprise us then that the health concerns of Britain were fully echoed in Australia. For example, Australian interest in child health was promoted by the English surveys mentioned earlier and, as we have seen, by Australians returning after working in Britain. By 1911 Australian paediatrics started to figure more prominently in medicine as judged by the number of papers presented at the Australian Medical Congress and articles in medical journals (Reiger, 1986: 166). As well as concerns about ill health of children, Smith (1978) argues that anxiety about the falling birth rate in Australia, which bordered on alarm after the First World War, was instrumental in promoting child health. In Adelaide, the motto for the infant welfare movement was ‘Babies make the best immigrants’, highlighting the fact that one solution to the problem of the declining population was to reduce infant mortality.

New discoveries on food and ‘goodness’ Australian movements to medicalise the family came at a time when there was an increasing interest in nutrition which, after the 1920s, was particularly buoyed along by a discourse on dietary ‘goodness’ based on the importance of vitamins and minerals. The medicinal properties of food had been accepted since early times, and the effects of citrus fruits had for centuries shown impressive results in the prevention of scurvy. Research early in the century on the poor outcome of animals reared exclusively on purified diets culminated in ideas about ‘accessory food factors’. A paper written in 1912 by Casimir Funk from the Lister Institute in London was the first recorded use of the term ‘vitamine’ (from ‘vital amine’) later to become ‘vitamin’ (Drummond and Wilbraham, 1958: 424). Much of this work was brought to Australia by Henry Priestley who, after having been a researcher at the Lister Institute in the 1920s, became the Foundation Professor of Biochemistry at Sydney University (Walker and Roberts, 1988: 154). Despite the early evidence for the existence of ‘vitamines’ going back at least to 1890 (Aronson, 1986) there was much scepticism about their existence from within the medical establishment. The elucidation of vitamin D serves as a good example of this resistance. A centre for medical research into rickets was established in Glasgow in 1914. The centre was run by a group who were opposed to the notion that rickets was the product of a vitamin deficiency. They believed instead that the problem, like so many others at the time, was due to unhygienic domestic conditions, a dilemma that could be solved by education rather than by supplementation.


On the other side of the debate were the views of people like Frederick Hopkins, professor of the newly-appointed chair of biochemistry at Cambridge, who held that rickets was the result of a vitamin deficiency. Smith and Nicholson (1989) believe that the controversy turned on the fact that, at the time, medical practice was based on clinical experience and not on scientific experimentation by biochemists, who were viewed by the medical establishment with deep suspicion when they presumed to be arbiters of clinical knowledge. According to Aronson (1986), there is a general belief that there was resistance from the field of medicine to almost all the early vitamin discoveries because most of them were made by chemists. There may have been a further reason, however, for the resistance in medicine to early nutrition discoveries. The increasing circulation of a discourse around vitamins in food and their effects on health in many ways vindicated the ideas and beliefs held earlier by the natural food movement, which itself had often been very anti-medicine (Harvey-Young, 1967: 333–56). Food now did indeed possess what some described as ‘natural tonics’, later known as ‘protective factors’ (Santich, 1995: 68). The value of fresh fruit, vegetables, wholemeal cereals and even sunshine – all of which had been promoted by health enthusiasts (such as Graham and Kellogg) for much of the nineteenth century – could now be confirmed in scientific terms. However, findings about the newly discovered properties of food, the structures and modes of action of which remained undefined, were too easily over-extended and applied without sufficient medical or scientific rigour. In the second Annie Cunning Lecture on Nutrition to the Royal Australian College of Physicians in 1942, Dr McDonald reflected on the interest in vitamins earlier this century, saying that, Enthusiasm for the newer knowledge of nutrition led to the appearance in medical and lay literature of many articles which betray the uncritical attitude of the writers towards the part played by vitamins in disease. Vitamins may become an obsession and either a physician or a layman may degenerate into a vitamineer. The unashamed zeal is fostered by advertisements of certain proprietary drug firms which make unwarranted claims for their wares.

(McDonald, 1942: 6) In the 1920s a number of popular Australian nutrition practitioners were effectively marginalised by medical groups who had decided, after all, to claim


nutrition as their own (Santich, 1995: 85–6). The tensions between a health movement founded on natural therapies (naturopathy, for example) and the medical establishment took on new proportions. These examples serve to show that at the beginning of the century nutrition was not a monolithic movement. It was received and applied with different amounts of enthusiasm by a variety of health groups within and outside the medical profession. The suspicion medicine had for nutrition is sometimes still evident. For example, nutrition has rarely established itself in medical schools like other biomedical sciences, for example, pharmacology and microbiology. Moreover, nutrition is hardly ever taught to medical students other than as part of biochemistry or physiology. There is an increasing debate about the lack of nutritional training in medicine (Fidanza et al., 1981; Robertson and James, 1991; Warden, 1992; Zimmerman and Kretchmer, 1993).

Child health and hygiene In Australia community medicine, especially that concerning children, took to nutrition early. Concern about the impact of infant feeding on health can be traced to writers in the eighteenth century. In Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these concerns were the focus of a number of studies of infant feeding, especially in poorer communities (Lewis, 1980). By the 1920s and 1930s the field of child health had become a focal point for nutrition. As the English surveys had shown, children were particularly vulnerable to health problems created by poor diet. This was for two reasons. First, because of their growth and development, children were shown to have higher nutritional needs than adults per kilogram body-weight; and second, children, especially infants, were dependent on others (parents, guardians, or siblings) for the kinds of food they were given and the feeding methods used. The vulnerability of children made them strong candidates for what Armstrong calls ‘surveillance medicine’. According to Armstrong (1995), surveillance medicine is quite different from hospital medicine. The latter is practised in the ‘neutral’ space of the hospital where a physician gains knowledge about underlying lesions in a patient’s body through the presence of signs and symptoms, and the process of examination. Hospital medicine is often aided by laboratory medicine in which clinical investigations assist in the location and diagnosis of disease. Surveillance medicine, on the other hand, reconstructs the nature of illness altogether by focusing on normal


rather than diseased populations. Moreover, the medical or nutritional surveillance of normal populations, such as infants and children, is not only interested in identifying existing disease or malnutrition; it is equally interested in pre-clinical manifestations of illness which may show up as early signs or ‘risk factors’ which predispose to poor nutrition. Thus a child’s appearance is not a sufficiently reliable indicator of good health since it may be hiding subtle signs of pre-clinical disease due to a sub-deficiency of vitamins and minerals. A number of clinical ‘tools’ were required in order to judge whether a child was ‘at risk’. One was the food group model in which foods were grouped together according to their nutrient content, for example, fruits and vegetables, meat and meat alternatives, milk and dairy products, breads and cereals, and fats. Thus details of the child’s diet, obtained from the carer, were categorised in terms of the food groups. In this way a child’s food intake could be qualitatively and quantitatively measured against recommendations which, themselves, were based on calculated dietary allowances or requirements. The presence or absence of particular foods in a child’s diet gave important clues about the likelihood of possible nutritional deficiencies. Moreover, foods or feeding habits deemed inappropriate for the child’s age, old-fashioned or even harmful to health could be discouraged. Another clinical ‘tool’ was the growth chart, a device for detecting underlying health problems in children. Armstrong describes it as consisting of a series of gently curving lines, each one representing the growth trajectory of a population of children. Each line marked the ‘normal’ experience of a child who started his or her development at the beginning of the line. Thus every child could be assigned a place on the chart and, with successive plots, given a personal trajectory.

(Armstrong, 1995: 396) A particular child’s growth was judged, therefore, against a pattern of growth of a population which is assumed to be healthy. Thus the growth chart distributes the body of a child ‘in a field delineated not by absolute categories of physiology and pathology but by the characteristic of the normal population’ (Armstrong, 1995: 397). If a child’s diet or growth was seen to be outside the ‘normal’ population, intervention was required. In this way nutrition ‘normalised’ children.


Sometimes, though, the pressure to normalise overshadowed the need to consider health issues of children. For example, the benefits of breastfeeding over bottle-feeding were generally supported by infant welfare staff. However, when the heights and weights of breast-fed infants did not conform to the trajectories of standard growth charts, they were readily diagnosed as ‘failing to thrive’ due to milk insufficiency (Hitchcock, 1989), a situation remedied by supplementing with infant formula provided free of charge at the clinic (Minchin, 1985: 213). But bottle-feeding itself was known to be associated with health problems through poor hygiene caused by polluted water and contaminated bottles. Thus the reinforcement of personal and domestic hygiene provided another important occasion for an interaction between community health professionals and their clientele. The infant welfare clinic created the opportunity for education about child feeding, hygiene, child development and family interaction. As the movement grew during the 1920s and 1930s and became formalised, manuals and textbooks were published by Australian authors for Australian conditions. In them, concepts such as ‘dietary balance’ (which, itself, expressed a need to scientifically account for the increasing variety of nutrients now considered to be essential for health) were laid out for parents, especially mothers. Special care was taken to discuss the need for proper preparation of food, especially measures to preserve the vitamin content. Instructions were given on how best to retain the nourishment of the diet, particularly since vitamins were found to be labile and easily destroyed through cooking. Charts, feeding timetables, recipes and menus were distributed. Lists of nutrient values of food (cooked and uncooked) were provided to make it easy to prepare nourishing meals. Food was thus categorised and rationalised along nutritional lines. In the process the feeding of children and, indeed, families, became normalised. It also became problematised. For example, this new understanding of diet often required more time to be devoted to food preparation; moreover, the new knowledge about what families ought to eat did not always comport with what family members wanted to eat. Children’s eating habits were also problematised by ‘feeding by the clock’, a method designed to prevent overfeeding, which sometimes meant that parents had to learn to ignore children’s demands for food. Selby (1993) interviewed women who had used Australian infant health clinics during the 1930s. One women remembered being questioned by the nurse to see if she was giving her baby night-feeds,


‘No, no, no’ I said. Liar, I was. Oh, living in a flat, I couldn’t have the baby screaming at two o’clock in the morning. Every four hour feeding? That’s a bloody long time to go without anything to eat.

(Selby, 1993: 69) Other problems arose with comforters or ‘dummies’, the use of which was particularly discouraged. Truby King, whose manual on feeding and caring for babies was a popular textbook for child health nurses in Australia, was especially against the dummy. He even tried to get it made illegal in New Zealand stating that, The Society for the Health of Women and Children has been making strong efforts to bring about the abolition of the ‘Dummy’ and has drawn to the attention of the Legislature the extent and gravity of the evils resulting from its use. . . . Of course the comforter must be abolished and forbidden, its use is injurious, and if resorted to after warning, should be deemed an indictable offence.

(King, 1933: 134) The proper behaviour of children in regard to eating became part of the management of family life. This itself was informed by developments in psychology which, according to Rose, has played a key role in establishing norms of desirable childhood development and behaviour (Rose, 1990: xii). The infant health centre was not only a place where information was given out, it also became a point from which information about the family could be collected since records were kept for each child on growth, feeding patterns and stage of development. Information was also collected on family habits and facilities. How was food cooked? Did the family eat together? At what times were children fed? Through a process of collection and consolidation of this information, the lives of families were constructed around food and nutrition. We have, then, a way of ‘making people up’, as Hacking calls it, in which we can consider a partial framework with two vectors: One is a vector of labelling from above, from the community of experts who create a ‘reality’ that some people make their own. Different from this is the vector of the autonomous behavior of the person so labelled, which presses from below, creating a reality which every expert must face.

(Hacking, 1986: 234)


In this way nutrition produced a ‘regime of truth’. It provided rules and guidelines about eating which informed, and were informed by, the data collected from individuals and populations.

Sites and techniques of the surveillance of food choice Community health centres were not the only places from which a nutrition discourse radiated. As we have seen schools were also important places in which nutrition was deployed especially through the establishment of school medical services. The first medical survey of schoolchildren in Australia was undertaken in Tasmania in 1906 promoted by the results of the English inquiry into physical degeneration. Subsequently, a scheme of routine medical examination of children at school was introduced in New South Wales (The New South Wales Department of Public Instruction, 1908). Eventually children at school underwent medical examinations about every three years and, where considered necessary, treatment by a nurse was often undertaken during a home visit (Reiger, 1986: 166). Schoolchildren were also weighed and measured as a way of tracking normal growth. The English surveys on physical degeneration also spelt out the need for physical education which became a formal part of the curriculum of schools in all Australian states. Schools also became the site for education about the domestic economy movement, developed earlier in America by Wilbur Atwater and co-workers. State elementary schools in Victoria began teaching domestic economy, also known as domestic science, in the late nineteenth century as a preparation for an ‘ordinary calling of life’ (Reiger, 1986: 59). In 1904, however, the Australian Institute of Domestic Economy established a national movement by successfully lobbying state governments to fund training centres for domestic science teachers. The domestic economy movement applied scientific principles to the efficient running of the home. Scientific cookery, including the theory and practice of nutrition, stressed the importance of avoiding unnecessary, waste. As Reiger points out, this ethos resonated well with the ascetic Protestant movements whose concern for thrift and hard work permeated the thinking behind domestic manuals of the nineteenth century (Reiger, 1986: 64). The education of schoolchildren in scientific principles of food preparation was not only considered to be an investment in the health and efficiency of future generations, but also to be a strategy for the immediate introduction of nutritious


food into the children’s families. As Shapiro tells us of the cookery classes in United States schools, some decisions had to be made about the best ways of dealing with the food that had been prepared in class by the students. Although the students were allowed to taste a little, mainly to see if meals conformed to the correct standards, a major objective was for them to buy the food at cost: In this way the stews and custards prepared at school would find their way to the girls’ homes, which was one of the a major goals of the experiment. In addition, the pupils were supposed to take the recipe home with them and cook the same meals for the families. . . . After six years the principal estimated that 1,600 girls had cooked 152,621 dishes at home.

(Shapiro, 1986: 141) With the classroom as a focus for action about, and contemplation of, food, nutritional discourses were extended out into the community and into homes themselves. The domestic science movement, in which nutrition was firmly embedded, gained particular prominence during the early part of the century because the First World War, and, later, the depression years required that home management be carried out as economically as possible. These conditions provided increased possibilities for a greater penetration of nutrition discourses into the home. During the inter-war years, nutrition became part of a much larger network in which newspaper columns and magazines, especially those directed at women, reported widely on ideas about scientific ways of preparing food. For example, ‘Rita’, a writer of a home page in the Melbourne Herald during the 1920s and 1930s, and ‘Vesta’, who had a similar role with the Argus, regularly included the subject of scientific cookery and nutrition in their columns. Reiger (1986: 75) believes that the amount of technical detail included on the chemical and nutritional properties of food was striking, even compared to contemporary standards. Much of the advice on nutrition in the print media was accompanied by advertising which amplified the themes of the columnists, reflecting an interest in nutrition by Australian food manufacturers which actually goes back much further. In 1882 Arnotts, for example, launched what Santich believes to be the first ‘health food’ in Australia, milk arrowroot biscuits which were promoted as ‘Best for children . . . noted for their purity and excellence’ (Santich, 1995: 19). The advertising of sweetened condensed milk, as a feed for infants, was also an example of nutritional advertising of food products.


From the 1920s onwards an increasing number of new food products were launched on the basis of their convenience and nourishment. Common examples were tinned soups and stews. In women’s magazines other foods like fruits, vegetables and milk were also widely promoted on the strength of their nutritional properties and their ability to ‘provide vigour’, ‘vitality’, ‘nourishment’ and also to ‘prevent fatigue’ because of their ‘vitamin’, ‘mineral’, ‘nutriment’ and ‘energy content’ (Santich, 1995: 68–87). Notions of ‘food goodness’ struck a strong nutritional chord, as did terms like ‘wholesome’ and ‘pure’. Of course, the alternative to good food was ‘unwholesome’ food which could be damaging to health. These foods acquired very familiar characteristics which would have been recognisable a hundred years earlier since unwise foods, often processed, generally had their ‘natural’ properties stripped away. The following information from a 1931 booklet published by the Western Australian Health Department reinforces this:

A Food Dialogue ‘Assail not Nature. She has done her part. Do thou but thine.’ What is meant by wrong kinds of food? White bread, white flour, polished rice, cornflour, sugar, syrups, sweets, tinned goods, preserved foods, lard, margarine, and then some – as the Americans say. . . Well, Are Not those Foods Pure Enough? Pure! Yes, too pure. If you try to feed animals . . . on those foods they will be dead within a few weeks. They are not natural foods,they have been robbed of, or they do not contain certain things that animals must get. Yes, But . . . Yes, you are ‘all right’ more or less – chiefly less – but you get other things that have kept you going – fresh meat, milk, butter, eggs, fresh and green vegetables and fruits. But often you and your children live chiefly on the wrong foods. Those other Things keep you Right? Yes. Some of them are called by doctors ‘protective foods’ – particularly milk and fresh green vegetables. (quoted in Santich, 1995: 95)


Sweets, biscuits and cakes were also highly discouraged, particularly for children. As one manual of child feeding put it ‘The sin of giving sweets [etc.] to infants is one concerning which it is difficult to speak too strongly’ (King, 1933: 53). During the inter-war years then we are able to identify a number of nutrition movements which focused on family nutrition. These were government-funded infant and child health services in community centres and schools, domestic science education in schools, home economics discourses in the media, and the food industry. Moreover, clinical nutrition was moving into Australian hospitals when the profession of dietetics became established in 1934 (Nash, 1989). The spiralling interest in nutrition in Australia gained almost all news of ‘fresh evidence’ and ‘breakthroughs’ from overseas since little original nutrition research was carried out here. Things changed in 1936, however, when the Commonwealth Advisory Council on Nutrition was formed. Fred Clements, an important figure in a nutrition bureaucracy that developed later from the Council, hailed this development as a ‘Watershed . . . a major milestone in the history of nutrition in Australia’ (Clements, 1986: 86) because government funds could be used to employ trained people on a full-time basis to undertake scientific investigations into nutrition. The functions of the Council were to advise the government on, firstly, the present state of nutrition of the Australian people and, secondly, the nature of any evidence that the Australian people are in any degree undernourished, or that their diet is improperly balanced or improperly prepared.

(Clements, 1986: 88) The major focus of inquiry for the Council was the family, and one of the first research activities undertaken was to document domestic food consumption. Families in selected cities were issued with booklets designed to collect information about family composition, gender, age, occupation of members, foods purchased, received as gifts or grown in gardens. These were to be expressed as weights or volumes and the price (where applicable) was to be given. Space was provided in the booklets to record daily menus, meals eaten away from home and meals provided to visitors (Clements, 1986: 90). These details were to be kept by families over a twenty-eight day period. The main collector of information in the family was to be the mother. Several other surveys were organised by the Council to gather information on, for example, the growth of children living in rural areas, oral hygiene in


children and nutritional deficiency diseases. Nutrition surveillance – using scientific methods of investigation – became an important function of the Council. In late 1938, under the Council’s recommendation, a Nutrition Section was established as part of the Commonwealth Department of Health with Clements as director. The Section staff included physicians, biochemists, nutritionists and dietitians, whose main activities were research into and education of ‘professional persons and the public’ (Clements, 1986: 122). The work of the Council received much publicity through health and domestic science networks. The press published the findings of the surveys, and ‘Vesta’ of the Argus urged readers, especially women’s organisations, to learn about ‘nutritive principles’ (Reiger, 1986: 76). While nutrition discourses were being circulated during the interwar years to families in Australia through infant welfare centres, schools and the press, the nutrition problems facing poor families had, in fact, been aired much earlier on another front. In 1907 the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration proclaimed the ‘Harvester Case’ which specified that every unskilled adult male should be ‘paid a wage sufficient to live like a human being’ (McCarthy, 1969). The judge who brought down the decision, Justice Henry Higgins, stipulated that nothing less than seven shillings a day would do. The judgement was hailed as a landmark decision in Australian industrial history since, from its implementation, basic wages were no longer to be established by economic criteria such as supply and demand of labour. The figure of seven shillings was arrived at after Higgins had considered the work in England by Booth and Rowntree (McCarthy, 1969: 29). Higgins had included in his reckonings nutritional calculations of the dietary requirements of a family of five. Nutrition issues were made much more explicit thirteen years later in the 1920 Royal Commission into the Basic Wage. The Commission had been called to inquire into the cost of living which had escalated during the war. Again nutritional information was used to estimate basic living costs and a reasonable standard of living (Santich, 1995: 71). During the hearing a number of witnesses were called by the trade union movement. One was Mrs Burley, from a family of seven, who was questioned by the employers’ representative who asked: I suppose you do not know anything about calories? No. And when you order a thing [grocery] you do not estimate its calorie value? No I do not go in for calories, but if I hear a thing is going up [in price] I generally get a supply in.

(Reiger, 1986: 77)


Let us use this brief exchange to summarise the issues presented in this the final section of this chapter. Nutrition discourses were circulated with increasing influence in Australia during the first part of this century. Understandings about the nature of food in the form of nutrition took place through a government of the diet in terms of an administration of rational and scientific ways of eating. As a new discourse, nutrition did not necessarily provide entirely new meanings about food for, as we have seen, many of the injunctions were often part of advice given in earlier centuries. Indeed, it was the congruence with earlier understandings of food and health that allowed nutrition to map directly onto concerns about disease, morality and the need to undergo certain privations for the sake of health and for the sake of ‘nature’s economy’. Nutrition provided a moral discourse alongside a scientific discourse on food where it found a place as part of public health and hygiene campaigns. As a scientific discourse on food, nutrition allowed for a surveillance of the population’s eating habits which produced a number of categories of nutrition subjects. These were the well-nourished, the malnourished and the pre-clinical or ‘at risk’ groups. The latter category was defined according to blood-tests, X-rays and dietary intake information in which sub-deficiency criteria had been defined. However, personal and social characteristics were also factored into nutritional assessments. Thus in describing the results of the survey of rural children in 1937, the chief investigator notes that ‘[a] personal quality [of the mother], designated as “mothercraft” seemed important in determining whether the children in a household fared well or not’ (Clements, 1986: 106). In this way nutrition produced not only new knowledge about food and new understandings about the health consequences of poor diet; along with other demographic techniques, it produced a new category of subjects on the basis of age, class and nutritional status. Parents, especially mothers, could be classified with other factors which contributed to the risk of poor nutrition in children. Consequently socio-nutritional surveys went beyond the usual binary separation of health and disease. Sub-clinical manifestations required that health be best represented as a continuum. This ‘nutritional spectrum’ meant that the classes of health could not be fixed at one end of the spectrum or the other, but instead in the spaces between them in which different standards of nutritional health were defined by the degree of


sub-clinical manifestation (Armstrong, 1995: 397). Thus nutrition discourses produce subjects by objectifying them in terms of physiological, nutritional and social categories. There is little doubt that health improvements through the availability of better food, and a better understanding of food, did indeed make populations healthier. An example which stands for many concerns infant mortality. In New South Wales, mortality rates for infants aged six to twelve months fell from thirty-two per 1,000 live births in 1895 to six per 1,000 live births in 1935. This was due mainly to a reduction of infantile gastro-enteritis, known as the colonial killer, through better domestic hygiene and improved handling of infant food, especially cow’s milk (Walker and Roberts, 1988: 73). New knowledge of families’ eating habits, through routine checks at infant welfare centres and schools, provided a breadth and depth of understanding about family diets on a scale never before known. The Mothers and Babies Association of South Australia, for example, included in its annual report the frequency of, and reasons for, ‘dietary adjustment’ in infants and children. Also reported was the percentage of infants at various ages given breast, bottle or ‘mixed’ feeds. Nutrition surveys of populations systematically collected, coded and reported what people were eating. This scientific information was relayed back to the public by way of professionals, government agencies, the media and food manufacturers. These ‘regimes of truth’ produced subjects as objects of nutrition. But nutrition also produced technologies of the self through which subjects of nutrition problematised their relationship with food in terms of an understanding of what was considered to be ‘good’. By grounding food in a rational and biomedical discourse, nutrition redefined ‘goodness’ for modern subjects for whom food had already been problematised by ascetic Christian beliefs and practices. But now, instead of effacing pleasure of food, modern subjects were able to rationalise it through moral judgement based on science. This reminds us that nutritional thought is thus a product of Kantian thought, in which sensuous experiences of food should always be problematised against a higher order of reason and knowledge. In this way nutrition continued a moral problematisation which has been part of Western culture since antiquity in which eating cannot be justified by pleasure alone. Pleasure around food is either to be mastered and moderated as it was for the ancient Greeks, or effaced as it was for the early Christians, or rationalised in relation to scientific principles and moral reason as it is for modern subjects of nutrition.


Conclusions This chapter has examined a range of factors which were important for the emergence of a discourse on nutrition. Perhaps we can conclude by considering the problematisation of food in terms of Foucault’s typology and analysis of ethics (Foucault, 1992b). Using this typology we can say that, since the time of the early Greeks, there has been a moral problematisation of food and pleasure. What has changed, however, has been the particular ethics employed to deal with this problem. Let us look at this in more detail. If the pleasure of food is considered to be the immediate ethical concern governing individual conduct we can say that in antiquity the major concerns were about timeliness and need. The practices required to promote ethical conduct were moderation and self-mastery. The purpose of all of this was to have a good reputation and to be fit to rule others in order to have access to the ‘truth’. For the early Christians, the major concerns with food were understood in terms of carnality and sensuality of the flesh. The practices required to develop a pure Christian self were denial of pleasure and fasting, with the specific aim of spiritual purity and immortality. For modern subjects of nutrition the major concern is (ir)rational eating habits in relation to scientific and medical norms. The practices for the development of the ‘good’ eater is adherence to food choice based on nutritional principles with the purpose of recognising oneself as a moral and ‘good’ citizen. Thus nutrition produces modern subjectivities through a process whereby food choices are problematised in relation to scientific principles. This moral duty is, as we saw earlier, developed through a Kantian ethic based on Christian practices of self-reflection and problematisation. It becomes easy to see how modern subjects express feelings of ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ when they have committed a dietary transgression by engaging in so-called ‘indulgences’. Food choice along nutritional lines therefore becomes a practice for the body, through health and longevity and so on, as well as a reflection of the soul: an ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’. The brief exchange between Mrs Burley and her questioner, described earlier in which she ‘confesses’ that she did not ‘go in for calories’ tells scientists not only about the questionable nature of her economical skills but also her moral judgement in feeding her family. And this brings us to an important point about nutrition discourses. We have noted that they have mapped onto discourses on the family, especially in terms of the well-being of the children. It was, however,


the mother, through a discourse on motherhood, who interacted mostly with nutrition. As Nettleton (1991) has shown with discourses in dentistry, the mother is the prime mover in regard to family health. For nutrition, also, we can say that the mother was the prime mover in the health of the family since she was often solely responsible for the provision of family meals. Nutrition discourses then become amplified through the government of the family and the ethics of motherhood. By way of bringing this chapter to a close, we should note the government and ethics of nutrition reached something of an apogee in Australia (and, indeed, in Britain and the United States) during the Second World War. The dietary rationing that took place at that time was based on nutritional knowledge of the physiological food needs of individual groups in the population such as infants, children, pregnant and lactating women and labouring men. During this period nutrition discourses were relayed by professionals, the media, food manufacturers, trade unions and others to families, especially women, with an explicit message about the need to make the most of what was available and to reduce waste. Food and nutrition messages provided information and, at the same time, bolstered patriotism: ‘cooking and eating for victory’. Thus the government of the food supply was never stronger. However, as Burnett (1979: 331) remarks, the success of rationing schemes (in Britain) depended on the ‘goodwill of thousands of traders and millions of housewives’. Australia, too, had millions of ‘good-willed’ housewives prepared to do the ‘right and proper thing’ with a food rationing scheme which, though not as austere as that in Britain, was still very restrictive. The war years made food austerity both a private and public virtue. And, in doing so, provided another condition of possibility for the insertion of nutrition discourse into public discourse. In the next chapter we will see how, in the postwar years, nutrition further developed in another ‘war’: that waged against common health problems like heart disease and cancer.

Chapter 7

Nutrition landscapes in the late twentieth century

This chapter looks at the way nutrition discourse circulates in contemporary Western culture. Our purpose here is to map the changing nature of the government of food choice, especially as it has been constructed by nutrition, since the Second World War to the present. We will see how new rationalities, new calculations and tactics have developed over the past fifty years with an expressed concern for the nutritional health and happiness of individuals. We will also look at the effects of these concerns on the way individuals govern themselves through the ethics of nutrition, particularly the way this ethical comportment fits into other forms of regime. The material presented in this chapter focuses particularly on the Australian reception of nutrition. This experience, to a large extent, mirrors that of other communities in Western culture – especially in the United States and the United Kingdom – where nutrition has become an important health-related concern since the Second World War. More recently, a number of other European and Asian countries have developed an interest in nutrition so that dietary guidelines or goals have now been established for nearly all countries in the industrialised world (Trichopoulou and Vassilakou, 1990). We should note, too, that these concerns have been ‘exported’, as it were; they have been applied to, and, indeed, taken up by, some cultures in the developing world where changing political, economic and social structures have ushered in Western eating habits and Western disease patterns. Of particular interest to us in this chapter are modern dietary concerns and the specific health issues which they address. As we shall see, in the post-war era, nutrition is not so much regarded as the social problem it was considered to be in the early part of the century; instead, it came to be seen

Nutrition landscapes 113

much more as a ‘bio-problem’, a problem of life and living. This transformation required new considerations and problematisations.

Choice, autonomy and modernity In his painting The Potato Eaters, van Gogh depicts a nineteenth-century peasant family meal. The only food on the table is a plate of boiled potatoes. While one figure is pouring tea the others are helping themselves to a meal of this solitary food. We can readily see how the notion of food choice – and the ‘choosing’ subject – makes problematic the experiences of van Gogh’s Potato Eaters. Because choice and the freedom to choose have become part of the normative category of food, not having choice is regarded as a situation in need of correction. Choice becomes a central feature of discourses of the human sciences, especially biology, anthropology, sociology and psychology, which have made food choice both the target and the effect of their discourses. Food choice thus becomes integral to health, satisfaction and cultural diversity, while the lack of choice becomes biologically precarious and culturally impoverishing. Within discourses on nutrition, moreover, choice is not only essential but is highly particularised. As we have pointed out choice is not based on pleasure but on rational considerations. As we saw in the last chapter, in the Enlightenment pure reason was expected to rationalise human sensuality. We also saw how a special kind of autonomy – one which, according to Veyne, ‘modernity cannot do without’ (Veyne, 1993) – was central to Kantian philosophy in which we act out of moral law we ourselves make (Schneewind, 1986: 64). According to Veyne, Foucault’s last works were also concerned with autonomy, but this was a version of autonomy that was not supported by tradition or reason. Foucault was interested, instead, in a style of existence. Style here does not mean distinction but rather the idea of a work of the self on the self; an aesthetics of the self (Veyne, 1993: 7). The important point to make is that Foucault’s work on the historical specificity of the modern subject forces us to consider autonomy and choice in ways that are almost counterintuitive since we take them for granted in everyday life. Indeed, political structures that provide autonomy and choice in the form of democracy are especially valued in Western cultures. Like Foucault, however, we can see that having choices, making choices and not being able to make the right choice – always against an index of morality – are things which emanate from a particular understanding of freedom which, itself, was central to the arrival of a particular

114 Nutrition landscapes

figure of Modern Man. It should not surprise us then that the problem of choice has been important to the human sciences and we can especially see this in the area of food and nutrition. In the last two chapters we saw how, in the nineteenth century, a discourse of nutrition crystallized around a particular kind of food choice based on expertise and the self-regulation of diet. This came, on the one hand, from a need to know and manage populations and, on the other, from discourses where pleasures evoked by so-called extravagant eating were constructed as dangerous to health. In this chapter we shall see how similar concerns were brought to bear on more contemporary populations.

Contemporary nutrition discourse: its sites and modes of action Activities in nutrition in Australia increased during the post-war period, especially from the 1960s. As knowledge about nutrition developed, research into the eating habits of the population served as a constant reminder of the need for more work, not only on the relationship between diet and health, but also into ways of deploying nutrition knowledge in the community. The results of nutrition activities in the post-war period in Australia have been impressive. Individuals today spend more time than ever before considering food purchases on the basis of nutritional values. People’s knowledge of food and health has increased as has their understanding of what may now be considered to be a ‘nutritious’ diet. Nutrition is a highly active and highly researched area. A range of nutritional studies are available on matters such as the nutritional merits of the Australian diet, where people get information on nutrition, how they use it, whether or not people believe they are meeting nutrition recommendations, and the barriers to putting nutrition recommendations into practices (see Worsley, 1989; Lester, 1994: 126–35; Stickney et al., 1994; Hughes et al., 1996). A major issue in nutrition concerns the ‘truth’, or, more correctly, misinformation on matters of the diet. Sources of nutrition knowledge are constantly called into question. Professionals known to advise the public about food and health are, for example, examined to see if their nutritional knowledge corresponds with that of nutrition experts. Thus the nutrition knowledge, opinions and beliefs of general practitioners (Worsley and Worsley, 1991) and community nurses (Coveney and Miller, 1991) take on a special significance. As with earlier discourses on nutrition, the media continues to play an important role in distributing


knowledge about food and health (Santich, 1995: 127–57), and the extent to which media information accurately reflects the ideas of nutrition experts has itself become an area of research. Cardwell and Begley (1996), for example, looked at over 400 articles on nutrition appearing between 1992 and 1994 in a range of popular Australia magazines. Over 90 per cent of the articles were considered to accurately represent current recommendations. The content of Australian television shows has also been scrutinised for the accuracy of the food and nutrition information they contain. Thus Morton (1991) has examined discussions around food and health in three popular Australian ‘soap operas’, finding that nutrition messages were generally portrayed with a high degree of ‘truth’ in relation to the Australian dietary guidelines. As with earlier concerns about food and health, schools are a continuing focus for nutrition intervention. Nutrition is taught in primary and secondary schools in all states. It is also actively integrated into other aspects of school life because it was considered that ‘too often the school environment contradicts rather than supports classroom nutrition education messages’ (National Health and Medical Research Council, 1989). Thus school canteens, or ‘tuck-shops’, school sporting events and other activities have been pulled into line in order to present a united front to children about nutritious foods. In Australia a number of agencies have been established to ensure that the public receive accurate information about food and health. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Division on Human Nutrition was established in 1975 as the nation’s premier nutrition research body. CSIRO produces findings on the relationships between food and health which are then dispersed as recommended practices by a number of other agencies involved in maintaining the ‘regimes of truth’ about nutrition. These include the Australian Nutrition Foundation, Anti-Cancer Council and the National Heart Foundation. A National Food Authority (later called the Australian and New Zealand Food Authority) has also been established with a concern, first, for food safety issues and, second, for the portrayal of accurate nutrition information. Nutritional surveillance, then, sweeps across the community, examining people’s food habits, their values and beliefs, and auditing not only sources of advice about food but also advertising that promotes nutrition and any media or entertainment forms that may include it. A constant vigilance is kept to ensure that sources of misinformation about nutrition are identified and, where possible, rectified. Of particular concern are nutrition and health claims by food manufacturers. As we shall see later,


the food supply has come under scrutiny in terms of the nutritional quality of foods available. It has therefore become a site of active nutrition reform. However, this reform has raised two problems. First, the food industry sponsors a large amount of nutrition research in Australia. The independence of nutrition knowledge and the public advice which flows from it may therefore be called into question. Second, there is often debate among nutrition experts about what priorities should be adopted in the formulation of a ‘healthy’ diet and the ways nutrition research findings should be interpreted in relation to the food supply. The large amount of publicity given to these debates is often believed to undermine the credibility of nutrition experts. The concern here is, therefore, with ‘mixed’ information rather than misinformation. The formal response by the Australian Commonwealth government to a growing concern about nutrition has culminated in The National Food and Nutrition Policy. This was launched in 1992 (Commonwealth Department of Health, Housing and Community Services, 1992). The policy enshrines the Australian dietary guidelines as the target or benchmark measurements against which people’s diets should be compared. These guidelines were first established in 1979 but have been reviewed, modified and quantified as new knowledge about food and health has become available. Australia is unique in also formulating a separate set of guidelines for children (Commonwealth Department of Health, Housing, Local Government and Community Services, 1994). All states have now been urged to develop their own nutrition policies based on the national ones and a number of states have moved a long way in this process. How has nutrition managed to position itself so well in the political, social and biological spaces of Australian life? What concerns, opportunities and problems have enabled discourses in nutrition to increase their influence in what appear to be ever-widening circles in the post-war period? These are the issues that we shall now examine. Taking the period of the Second World War to the present, major developments and transformations in nutrition will be tracked on two fronts. In this chapter we will consider the ‘landscape of nutrition’: the growing expanse of nutrition knowledge, rationales and understandings about food in terms of scientific and medical concerns. In the next chapter we will look at the ‘homescape of nutrition’: the incorporation of nutrition discourse into the lives of individuals, especially at the level of the family. The purpose of dividing the development


of nutrition in this way is to identify the considerations that have been germane to each area and, importantly, to look at how these areas have interacted with each other.

Modern nutrition landscapes In Australia, The National Food and Nutrition Policy represents a number of concerns which have been part of biomedical discourses for many years. Foremost among these has been a recognition that many common health problems in Australia are believed to be diet-related and, ipso facto, preventable. Diet-related diseases raise not only so-called quality-of-life problems (for example, premature illness and debilitation) but also economic ones. According to one Commonwealth Government report, As well as affecting the quality of our lives and causing the loss of both productive and expected years of life, these [diet-related] diseases make a significant contribution to rising health care costs for hospitalisation, medical and other health services and long-term institutional care. There are also costs associated with payment of sickness and invalid benefits and reduction of earnings.

(Report of Nutrition Taskforce of the Better Health Commission, 1987) In 1988 the cost of treating heart disease, a leading cause of death in Australia, was put at two billion dollars (Australian Health Ministers’ Advisory Council, 1988). Heart disease is but one of a number of health problems which are believe to be diet-related. Others include diabetes, liver and gall-bladder disease, dental caries, some cancers, and problems with the digestive tract and large bowel. In fact, in 1983 just under 60 per cent of the ‘burden of deaths’ in Australia were believed to be due to diet-related illness (Report of Nutrition Taskforce of the Better Health Commission, 1987: 40). The perceived poor quality of the Australian diet was highlighted in 1988 when nutrition was identified as one of the top four health priorities for Australia. It was recommended that thirteen million dollars be allocated for a national nutrition project to be spent on research, planning and developing strategies for intervention, data collecting, monitoring and evaluation (Australian Health Ministers’ Advisory Council, 1988: 141).


Modern nutrition and the discourse of ‘lifestyle’ The concern about diet in relation to post-war mortality and morbidity was first raised in the 1950s. In post-war Australia, as in many developed countries, health problems that had once been common – for example, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis – were believed to be under control. The control was due to a number of public health improvements (better housing, sanitation, quality of food and so on), as well as more effective treatments and immunisation programmes. Diseases that began to take prominence were those termed ‘chronic diseases’. At one time these were believed to be an inevitable consequence of aging. By the 1950s, however, many were considered to be preventable and reversible (Whyte, 1959). Much greater emphasis was now put on an individual’s behaviour as a cause of disease. A sharper focus on the everyday habits of the individual had, in fact, been part of earlier considerations in medicine and public health. Cumpston, the first Director General of the Commonwealth Department of Health, for example, believes that during the inter-war years there was a growing realisation that [the] prevention of disease and the preservation of health as a government activity, and the relation of the medical profession to that activity, [had] passed away from being mainly concerned with the physical environment of man – the external influences which might adversely affect health – to the physical conditions of the human individual, and to the use of medicinal agents which can be directly applied to the individual.

(Cumpston, 1978: 47) Central to a greater scrutiny of individuals’ habits was the socio-medical survey (Armstrong, 1983: 48). In the previous chapter we saw how this survey was developed as a surveillance ‘tool’ for nutrition during the inter-war years. The benefits of nutritional surveillance did not go unnoticed in the field of medicine. A 1939 editorial of the Medical Journal of Australia, for example, stated Pre-eminent amongst the recent advances in constructive medicine is the discovery of the role which proper nutrition must play to the development and maintenance of health. Coincident with this discovery we have the somewhat bald but arresting statement of the League of Nations Nutrition


Committee that the average civilised diet is inadequate; and the recent inquiry of the Commonwealth Advisory Council on Nutrition has confirmed that statement as far as the diet of the Australian people is concerned. . . . The next great advance in public health will surely come as a result of a concerted effort to apply to the mass of the population the results of scientific research into nutrition.

(Medical Journal of Australia, 1939: 253) A second nutrition survey, focusing on household consumption of food, was launched in 1944 and another in 1974. While nutrition concerns during the prewar and war years were constructed by discourses of ‘enoughness’ and ‘adequacy’, post-war interests were focused by discourses on ‘abundance’ and ‘excess’. During the immediate post-war period small studies on Australian eating habits were undertaken, often under the supervision of the Nutrition Committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council (Clements, 1986: 115). But unlike Britain or the United States, where national surveillance of domestic food consumption had been ongoing since before the Second World War, nutritional epidemiology in Australia did not become firmly established until the early 1970s. None of this is to say that prior to this time the eating habits of Australians were considered to be unimportant. Far from it. From the end of the Second World War to the 1970s nutrition was of growing interest and concern, and Australian health experts took their lead from research in the United States and Britain (Hetzel and McMichael, 1987: 42). As a component of what were believed to be significant changes in the way Australians now lived – and the supposed health problems arising from these – food habits were of major interest along with other behaviours such as smoking, use of alcohol and physical activity or ‘exercise’. The term ‘lifestyle’ emerged during the 1960s to describe the way an individual chose certain behaviours which predisposed them to illness. ‘Lifestyle’ also implied that personal habits were discrete and independently modifiable, that individuals could voluntarily choose to alter certain behaviours and that each person had a responsibility for living well through self-discipline and behaviour modification (Coreil and Levin, 1984: 105). The role of food choice in ‘lifestyle’, especially in making incorrect or unwise choices, extended the influence of nutrition much further than had previously been the case. In the previous chapter we saw how, by focusing mainly on children’s health, nutritional discourses were introduced into the home. Within the concept of ‘lifestyle’, diet was regarded as a factor in the development of illnesses affecting larger sections of the population. For


example, cardiovascular disease was of increasing concern. Between 1950 and 1962 heart disease in Australian men aged thirty-five to thirty-nine years, forty to forty-nine years and fifty to fifty-nine years was believed to have increased by 78, 34 and 34 per cent respectively (Reader and Wynn, 1966). In response to this ‘epidemic’, the National Heart Foundation was established in 1958 with a primary aim of reducing premature death and debilitation arising from all forms of heart disease (Reader, 1988). The ‘war’ against heart disease was mounted in a way similar to disease control programmes in earlier eras; of key importance was the identification of causative factors. Now, however, a concern with ‘lifestyle’ meant that it was no longer appropriate to examine the environment for causes of disease. As a consequence, these diseases were considered to be self-inflicted; they became regarded as the degenerative diseases of affluence. This point was made especially evident when epidemiological studies showed that diseases of affluence, especially heart disease, were reduced in some countries during the Second World War when lifestyles were austere (Whyte, 1959: 8).

Modern nutrition and the discourse of affluence and ‘excess’ living The early days of the prevention of heart disease focused on obesity. Being too fat was considered to be the major risk for heart disease as spelt out by Garfield Duncan in his public lecture in 1953. Duncan stated that overweight people were more likely to suffer from cardiovascular and other circulatory problems (Duncan, 1954: 9). The emphasis on fatness as a cause of mortality, however, was not new. Walden (1985) shows how medical advice on fatness was part of health discourses in the nineteenth century. Then, however, obesity was not considered to be a major health problem since most concern was with people not getting enough food. In the so-called ‘booming’ period after the Second World War, the situation was different. A rise in affluence was supposedly accompanied by ‘excess living’. In his lecture, Duncan specifically cited fat in the diet as the primary cause of obesity. The reference to fat – especially animal fat – was part of a growing belief that heart disease was seen in communities where animal fat intake (and meat consumption) was high (Keys, 1952) and where physical activity was low. The links between ‘lifestyle’ and diseases of affluence were thus strengthened by epidemiological data showing that communities believed to be less technologically developed –


for example, the African Bantu and New Guinea Highlanders – were healthier than Western communities. Concluding his lecture to the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, the Director of the Kanematsu Institute of Pathology at Sydney Hospital remarked: If by this rather crude, unpolished lecture you have been persuaded that fats raise the serum cholesterol levels, induce atheroma and blood clotting, and lead to ischæmic heart disease; that excess food produces obesity and through raised high blood pressure, atheroma and more heart disease; that physical activity is an antidote to these poisonous effects; and that New Guinea natives are vigorously healthy individuals with sensible eating habits, while Australians are flabby, degenerate and diseased; then you must be reminded of St. Augustine’s confession.

(Whyte, 1959: 19) Interestingly, St Augustine’s Confession ends by saying ‘Wisdom and foolishness are like food that is served wholesome and unwholesome, which may be served in plain or costly dishes, as the other in words that are choice or homely’. There emerged, then, a view that major health problems in countries like Australia were due to rising affluence, physical idleness and even social gluttony in the machine epoch of prosperity (Santich, 1995: 160). It was the age of Homo Sedentarius, as one commentator put it (Yudkin, 1967). The same links between pathology, gluttony, indolence and prosperity, as we have seen in earlier chapters, were written about by Cheyne and Wesley, and even earlier by Lessius and Cornaro. At the centre of these discourses on health was an anxiety about the moral consequences of gluttony and indolence, and a spiritual salvation through ascetics. We can see similar concerns in the lectures by Sylvester Graham and Adventists like Kellogg in the nineteenth century, and in the writings of the Australian Health Society. While modern discourses on ‘lifestyle’ were less religious in their tone – being based, instead, on scientific reason and rationality – they were equally ‘pastoral’ in their aims and objectives. In other words, they were salvation oriented, they were ascetic by nature, and they were individualised (Foucault, 1982a: 214). Over the next three decades research in medical science and epidemiology revealed an increasing involvement of diet in the causation of ‘lifestyle’ diseases. For example, salt was connected with high blood pressure (itself a


contributor of heart disease); a deficiency of dietary fibre was believed to be a factor in the development of bowel cancer and other diseases of the gastrointestinal tract; fat was also connected with the development of breast cancer; lack of fruits and vegetables was related to cancers of the lung, prostate and bladder; and poor intake of ‘calcium-rich’ dairy food became a cause of osteoporosis. Our aim here is not to discuss each of these so-called ‘breakthroughs’; it is, instead, to see how they produced new discourses on food and health and ‘regimes of truth’ about food choice.

Modern nutrition and the ‘sick’ population In the post-war era the conceptualisation of diseases in relation to food fundamentally changed. Unlike the earlier discoveries of nutrition where certain disease states, for example rickets in children, could be said to be eradicated by the provision of vitamins or minerals, later discourses in nutritional science were never able to make such outright claims. This was because food was now part of ‘lifestyle’, and nutrition was not a sole factor in ‘lifestyle’ diseases. To facilitate an understanding of the multifactorial nature of diseases of ‘lifestyle’, notions of susceptibility or ‘risk’ were widely circulated. In the last chapter we saw how this concept operated for child health in the early part of the century. But in the post-war era the new possibilities opened up by a discourse on ‘lifestyle’ cast a much wider mortality and morbidity net over the community. Now that an individual’s behaviours could be categorised through ‘lifestyle’ risk factors, one was never truly healthy. There would inevitably be a behaviour in one’s ‘lifestyle’ which, however trivial, carried a certain degree of ‘risk’. Indeed, the lifestyles of individuals could now be represented as a collection of ‘risk factors’. The range of eating behaviours deemed to be ‘unhealthy’, and their commonplace nature in everyday life, meant that almost the whole population was ‘at risk’. Expanding on Armstrong (1995), we can say that, for Australia in the second half of the twentieth century, illness and health can no longer be considered as discrete entities. Health, as we have seen, is only ‘potential’ health. Predisposition, preillness and ‘at risk’ states complicate a person’s health profile. The situation is made more difficult because hereditary factors are believed to play an important role in the development of diseases of ‘lifestyle’ (Simpoulos et al., 1991). Thus genetic predisposition to illness means that one’s parents become a ‘risk’ that has to be factored into one’s ‘lifestyle’ equations. The estimate of an individual’s


health status thus depends on a tally of the past, by way of their genetic inheritance, and the present, by way of their current ‘lifestyle’, in order to make predictions about the future. As Armstrong (1995: 401) points out, each risk factor does not necessarily produce an illness, it simply opens up a space of future possibilities. Whereas hospital medicine examines the three-dimensional body for pathologies in the form of concrete lesions, surveillance medicine ‘analyses a four-dimensional space in which a temporal axis is joined to the living density of corporal volume [and in which] illness becomes a point of perpetual becoming’ (Armstrong, 1995: 402). We may even add a fifth dimension to this model. Barker’s ‘fetal origins’ hypothesis (1995) proposes that the nutritional environment in utero is crucial to the developments of chronic disease in later life. An individual’s ‘pre-birth’ experience therefore becomes an important risk factor too. Health, in terms of an outward display of a fit and healthy body, now becomes meaningless since subtle signs of illness may be hidden. No longer can individuals rely on how they feel as a prediction of their health. Just as in the early part of this century clinical ‘tools’ were required to test for pre-existing nutrition diseases in childhood, so, too, in the latter half of the century more ‘tools’ and tests are needed to detect ‘risk factors’ which potentially affect the whole population. A whole ‘nutrition landscape’ now opens up; a new expanse that requires new vantage points from which the precarious nature of eating can be surveyed according to, first, a set of dietary criteria (normalised as dietary targets, goals or guidelines against which eating practices can be judged) and, second, a normal range of biochemical indices and anthropometrics, or body measurements. Because the whole population is now potentially sick and therefore under surveillance, it makes little sense to confine the assessment and diagnosis of disease to clinics, hospitals or surgeries. In Australia, health promotion and disease surveillance campaigns have moved into the community to provide spot checks on ‘lifestyle’ in a variety of social spaces such as shopping malls, sporting clubs, worksites and community entertainment events (James et al., 1991; Fardon et al., 1992). Here lifestyles and risk factors can be rapidly checked: a serum cholesterol estimate takes three minutes; a blood pressure reading takes two minutes; a scan of an individual’s diet for ‘risky’ foods only sixty seconds. In this way the population is rapidly divided into ‘high’ and ‘low’ risk categories. This categorisation of individuals does not stop at ‘biodata’: other factors also have to be considered. Since socio-economic and psychological factors are now considered to influence food choice, an individual’s social status also becomes a ‘risk’ factor (Turrell and Najman


1995) as do their psychological traits (Falconer et al., 1993). Categories of ‘high-risk’ lifestyles, therefore, have to account for the psycho-social background of the individual inasmuch as this is believed to affect food choice and compliance with dietary regimes (Smith et al., 1995; Glanz et al., 1990). These psycho-social discourses are also included in the promotion of nutrition. For example, social marketing techniques, defined as problem-solving processes which are based on ‘understanding the consumer’s reality and [fashioning] programmes that are relevant to this reality’ (Lefebvre et al., 1995) are widespread in the promotion of nutrition discourse. In-depth interviews and focus groups uncover consumer values and beliefs, pleasures and desires about food, which then become incorporated into nutrition intervention programmes (Droulez and Mortensen, 1996). In this way nutrition discourse on food choice conflates with the concerns of other human sciences. The ‘nutrition landscape’, like any other, shifts and changes form in response to certain influences. For nutrition, these influences have usually come in the form of ‘new’ findings about, on the one hand, food and its effects on the body resulting from biomedical science and epidemiology and, on the other, social and moral concerns about certain lifestyles amplified by discourses on affluence. As we have said, because the whole population is ‘at risk’, everyone becomes the target of nutrition surveillance. So as well as large surveys on the population’s eating habits (see, for example, Commonwealth Department of Health, 1986), the population is broken down for closer examination and specific terrains are identified within the landscape of nutrition. Thus the eating habits of infants (Hitchcock et al., 1986), teenagers (Magarey and Boulton, 1995), women (Harvey et al., 1993), men (Australian Dairy Council, 1993) and the elderly (Magarey et al., 1993) have had individual attention. Groups defined as having ‘special needs’ – breast-feeding women (Hartmann et al., 1995), vegetarians (Rouse et al., 1982) and athletes (Harrison, et al., 1991) – have also been singled out for examination. As the population is traversed, categorised and classified in relation to eating habits and dietrelated diseases, new ‘regimes of truth’ emerge. It has been accepted, for example, that ‘diseases of affluence’ are, in fact, much more common in less affluent groups. Economically underprivileged groups have a greater incidence of almost all diet-related disease categories. For underprivileged populations, such as Australian Aborigines, death rates due to cardiovascular disease are up to twenty times greater than ‘standard’ population death rates (Report of


Nutrition Taskforce of the Better Health Commission, 1987: 44). Thus a little more than one hundred years after it was mobilised as a community concern, nutrition again focuses on the underprivileged for dietary reform. This situation has been complicated by the recognition that many foods once promoted as ‘healthy’ are actually more expensive than those which are considered to be nutritionally undesirable (Santich, 1992). Discourses on affluence have had to be reformulated to accommodate different socio-economic circumstances and nutrition has now become incorporated into a humanist discourse on equality and social justice (Duff, 1994). Because of the multiple opportunities that now exist for intervention and surveillance of nutrition, these are no longer the sole domain of the custodians of nutritional knowledge such as nutritionists and dietitians. Nutrition advice is now propagated through a multitude of professions and groups. The Royal Australasian College of Physicians (1989: 10), for example, recommends that ‘nutrition knowledge be widely disseminated by family and community leaders . . . the formal education system . . . the primary health care system’. Furthermore, the College believes that nutritional surveillance should be undertaken by a panoply of health and other professionals (for example, pharmacists, dentists, psychologists and physical educators) who are ‘uniquely placed to undertake nutritional assessments related to their area of research’ (Royal Australasian College of Physicians, 1989: 10). In this way the dietary habits of the population are judged in relation to indices of nutrient needs or ‘recommended dietary intakes’, which themselves are subject to change on the basis of ‘new’ findings (see National Health and Medical Research Council, 1990). For example, a review of the Australian recommended daily intakes in the early 1980s saw a readjustment of the recommendations for a variety of nutrients based on new findings of ‘adequacy’ (Truswell, 1990). Of course, understandings of ‘adequacy’ are themselves highly problematic, since they are not defined solely according to an absence of deficiency symptoms. They are, instead, informed by a variety of other discourses concerning what might be ‘good’, ‘optimal’ or ‘healthy’ for individuals or populations. But as Dye Gussow and Thomas put it [this] is something like the difference between defining health on the one hand as the avoidance of disease, and on the other – as the World Health Organisation has proposed – as ‘a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing, not merely an absence of disease’.

(Dye Gussow and Thomas, 1986: 57)


In the end, what is considered to be nutritionally adequate is a judgement based on what is considered to be ‘optimal’ or ‘proper functioning’. And, since there are no a priori conditions on which to judge what is ‘proper’, this has to be socially defined; it is based on a society’s expectations of its individuals (Armstrong, 1987). It is because of this fact that recommended nutrient intakes differ over time and often from country to country (Dye Gussow and Thomas, 1986: 59). The moral urgency of nutrition is such that ‘new’ findings sweep across the nutrition landscape, often with surprising speed, sometimes displacing and transforming, but often adding another layer to what was already present by way of knowledges and practices. A good example concerns recent knowledge of the decreased incidence of neural tube defect in infants whose mother’s diets were supplemented with folic acid (Bower and Stanley, 1992). Shortly after these findings were mooted, dietary advice about folate in food was being distributed to women and foods fortified with folate appeared in the Australian marketplace. Nutrition thus rapidly instils itself into professional and public discourse. And the incorporation of nutrition into the food supply itself ensures that nutritional science takes up residence in a variety of locations but none so important as the home which we will be looking at shortly. Food products now carry an abundance of information relating to their nutritional content, some of which symbolises expert nutrition approval (Shrapnel, 1994). Modern nutrition, then, is a technology of power which objectifies bodies in relation to specific outcomes. Nutrition constructs subjects as objects through knowledges about the size and shape of their bodies (in relation to recommended values); their internal body systems, for example, blood lipids such as high/low density lipoproteins (in relation to recommended values); the quality and quantity of foods they consume (again in relation to recommended values), and their thoughts and feelings about food and health. As a technology of power, nutrition brings Foucault’s five disciplinary operations into play: it refers individual actions to a whole that is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation and the principle of rule to be followed. [Second] it differentiates individuals from one another, in terms of the following overall rule: that the rule be made to function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected or as an optimum towards which one must move. [Third] it measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the level, the nature of individuals. [Fourth] it introduces through this ‘value-


giving’ measure, the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved. Lastly, it traces the limit that will define difference in relation to all other differences, the external frontier of the abnormal.

(Foucault, 1979: 182–3) As always, we would need to remember that, as a technology of power, nutrition should not be considered oppressive and restrictive but, rather, productive. Indeed, as a ‘regime of truth’, nutrition produces new and ever more specific subjectivities for individuals and populations. As Foucault says about power: ‘It invests [individuals], is transmitted by them and through them’ (Foucault, 1979: 27). In terms of its role in the reduction of disease, some would argue that nutrition has also been productive in promoting health. Truswell (1995), for example, highlights the decreasing incidence over the past two decades of a number of diet-related diseases which he relates to the promotion of nutrition. This is not to say that conventional nutritional strategies have gone uncriticised and in the next section we will examine some of these criticisms.

Nutrition discourse and its resistances In chapter two we looked at a number of criticisms of current approaches to nutrition intervention. We noted that these criticisms are almost always related to what is seen as ‘top-down’ approaches (Crotty, 1995). In particular, nutrition promotion based on the medical model is considered to be narrowly focused and lacking in a socio-cultural perspective. Indeed, criticisms of The National Food and Nutrition Policy have been made along these lines (McGuckin and Mansfield, 1992). The alternative to the medical model is, as we saw in chapter two, a social model of health which sees health problems as primarily due to an unequal distribution of resources in the community (Macklin, 1992). The strategies for mobilising the social model of health are invariably linked with notions of ‘community participation’ as opposed to the so-called ‘individualistic’ approaches of the medical model. Community participation is believed to redress the balance of power in favour of the community. However, Petersen (1994a) suggests that this assumption requires careful consideration for a number of reasons. First, within discourses on community participation, the notion of power is under-theorised and simplistic. Power is usually understood as a means by which people are


controlled and dominated. On this understanding, community development has rarely been successful in Australia (Petersen, 1994b: 112). Second, the notion of ‘grassroots’ control is problematic because of inherent assumptions of unitary concepts like ‘community’, and ‘common interests’ which are expected to work towards the common good of all (Petersen, 1994b: 121). This is hardly ever the case and the dream of an equitable distribution of resources once control is handed to ‘grassroots’ is not necessarily realised. None of this is to say that the community should not be involved in matters of nutrition or the deployment of nutrition programmes. It is to say, instead, that assumptions about community development as a better alternative to other approaches are problematic. Criticisms of nutrition also come from groups who believe that nutrition intervention often disadvantages women. This dissent has been raised at three levels. First, because women bear most of the responsibilities for domestic food provision, they are expected to be the key to the successful implementation of nutritional strategies and are therefore targeted in most nutrition promotion campaigns. The positioning of women in this way, however, takes no account of the influences that other family members, especially men, have over the family menu (Charles and Kerr, 1988). Current nutrition promotion programmes have therefore been criticised for creating guilt in women who, on the one hand, are expected to make the changes necessary for the family’s health, but on the other hand, are often unable to make any real difference in the family’s eating habits (McKie et al., 1993). A second criticism from this sector has been based on the role nutrition plays in the production of discourses on the body, especially in the construction of women’s bodies which has been most notable in Australia since the Second World War (Koval, 1986). Certainly the ‘slimming industry’ in Australia, which is believed to have an overall worth of between 200 and 600 million dollars a year (Cardwell, 1994), makes full use of discourses on nutrition. Furthermore, alarm has arisen from findings that the importance of slimming has become part of the concerns of young children, especially girls, in whom a desire for slimness occasionally goes beyond the attainment of ‘healthy’ weights (O’Dea, 1995). A third criticism from this sector is based on nutrition’s supposed lack of specificity. Crotty, for example, raises questions about the way research findings on the relationship between diet and heart disease in men are extended to the community as a whole without considering the consequences of, for


example, low fat-diets for women (Crotty, 1995: 77–8). Nutrition has also come under attack from those who believe it has encouraged a ‘nutri-centred’ food supply and a medicalisation of the nation’s diet (Symons, 1993: 177). The belief here is that food has been devalued now that consumers and food manufacturers are more interested in the health consequences of food rather than the pleasure of eating. It is not the purpose of this chapter to deal with these criticisms as they stand, but rather to view them as part of the ‘nutrition landscape’. They are voices of dissent against nutrition as a discourse of social control. We should also mention, however, the support and endorsement for nutrition knowledges and practices in the community, much of which comes from consumers or groups representing them. The Australian Consumers’ Association, for example, strongly advocates more nutritional labelling of food, better nutrition information available to consumers and higher standards of nutritional practices on the part of retailers and food manufacturers (Australian Consumers Association, 1991a). At stake here is what is considered to be the consumers’ right to make ‘informed’ choices about the food they eat. Thus nutrition as a technology of power is able to generate its own counter-demands in what Foucault calls ‘strategic reversibility’. Gordon (1991: 5) describes ‘strategic reversibility’ as ways in which practices of governmentality can be turned around into forms of resistance. This ‘reversal’ emphasises Foucault’s point that at the heart of any power relationship there is not absolute control that annuls an individual or a social group’s capacity as an agent. There is, instead, an ‘agonism’ – a permanent provocation – which always opens up new practices and new ethical possibilities (Foucault, 1982a: 221–2). Positions of dissent around nutrition serve as reminders that discourses always intersect with, amplify and resist other discourses. As such, discourses open up ethical positions for subjects that may be both complementary and conflictual.

Conclusions Overall we can see that the rise in popularity of nutrition in the post-war era occurred just as discourses in affluence and choice were beginning to herald new possibilities for countries like Australia. In the post-war era, the lifestyle of the population was increasingly characterised by convenience, leisure, and enjoyment. Post-war food pleasures, made available by more affordable, more


convenient foods, were being enthusiastically enjoyed. The pleasures of eating accorded by post-war affluence were, however, to provoke a growing anxiety. The term ‘lifestyle’ itself became problematised as a rising disquiet about the effects of prosperity on health was being voiced. Claims about the folly of physical inactivity, the ‘unnaturalness’ of processed foods and the importance of adopting parsimonious habits reminiscent of bygone days or even exotic populations were all part of growing concerns about excess living. The physiological basis of nutrition, founded as it is on reason, economy and efficiency, justified its role as a moral pursuit. In the next chapter we will examine how these were played out in the institutional setting in which nutrition had already gained a stronghold: the home.

Chapter 8

Nutrition homescapes in the twentieth century

As we saw in chapter five, in the early part of this century the family was the focus of nutrition intervention, mainly through discourses on childhood via child health surveillance in the welfare clinic and in the school. This greatly expanded the focus of nutrition so that all family members were subject to its invitations and incitements to more closely inspect the food they ate. With the recognition that post-war food choices were still mostly made in the context of the household, and that most food was consumed in the home (Taylor, 1992), nutrition discourses in Australia focused the supply and demand of food within the domestic setting. In this chapter we will focus on three main developments in what we are calling here the ‘nutrition homescape’, namely: the effects of a discourse on choice on family food habits; the notion of children’s rights and the child as citizen; and the influence of a so-called counterculture on nutrition. We will view these developments as part of a discursive framework in which the ‘social’, especially the family, was opened up to further scrutiny by ‘regimes of truth’ in nutrition.

Discourses of choice and the family diet We have already discussed the way that, as a reflective move, choice has been an integral part of modernity, reinforced by moral principles of freedom. And we have seen how, pace Kant, these principles have to be inculcated by the cultivation of the perfect self-will developed through the practice of spiritual self-purification and self-clarification (Hunter, 1995: 13). It should not surprise us that a problematisation of self-will has been an important aspect in the moral training of

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children since the Enlightenment, or as one commentator puts it ‘from Locke to Spock’ (Hardyment, 1983). In seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, for example, the self-will of the child was explicitly recognised as a major problem which had to be controlled. In a letter from his mother outlining the ‘correct’ methods of child-rearing, John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, was reminded that self-will had led Adam astray and was at the heart of sin and misery in the world. Wesley’s mother’s advice on child-rearing was to ‘break their [children’s] wills . . . begin this work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, perhaps before they can speak at all’ (Cleverley and Phillips 1976: 22). The problematisation of children’s self-will in relation to food and feeding has acquired a special significance in discourses on the management of childhood. As we shall see shortly, in expert advice on feeding earlier this century, children were expected to eat what was given to them. In the post-war period, however, the management of feeding came to be regarded as an inevitable aspect of parental anxiety, especially for mothers. There were two reasons for this change: the first relates to a widening variety of foods generally, and the second concerns a reconceptualisation of the notion of choice for children. Let us look at each of these factors in turn. In comparison to the earlier years of austerity and depression, the postSecond World War boom in Australia was rife with discourses of affluence. This was usually articulated and estimated in terms of the material wealth in families: for example, home and car ownership and the number of white goods in the household. As Whitwell puts it ‘The need to buy a house . . . to fill the house with a range of appliances and to acquire a car lay at the heart of the post-war consumer society’ (Whitwell, 1989: 44). The additional spending power in Australian homes came from better wages (unemployment was low) and, for many families, from the move by women into the paid workforce outside the home. In 1947, for example, 22 per cent of women worked outside the home in paid work and by 1971 this had increased to 32 per cent. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (1986), fifteen years later, 48 per cent of women were participating in the workforce. Discourses on affluence carried with them notions of better food lifestyles through the use of terms like ‘convenience’, ‘modern’ and ‘variety and choice’. Goodman and Redclift describe how the changing nature of women’s work-patterns outside the home was matched by major changes in the food supply in which the number of manufactured or socalled ‘convenience’ foods increased substantially. Thus ‘it was not an accident

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that the labour market for women, and food consumption habits both inside and outside the home changed the way they did’ (Goodman and Redclift, 1991: 11). Indeed, a greater reliance on manufactured foods was believed to be inevitable if women were to both continue to meet their domestic obligations as food providers and participate in the paid workforce. As an indication of the changing nature of the food supply in Australia, we might note that at the end of the 1930s just over 1,000 different food items were used by families (Clements, 1986: 110). By comparison, the average supermarket in the 1980s contained over 15,000 different foods most of which could be classified as ‘convenience’ (Smith, 1991). The popularity of ‘convenience’ foods was not, of course, confined to families in which both parents were working outside the home. During the 1950s and 1960s ‘convenience’ foods were increasingly promoted as cooking in the ‘modern’ way. Women’s magazines in particular promoted manufactured foods through recipes, features and stories by emphasising how cooking could now include ‘speed’, ‘convenience’ and ‘choice’ (Santich, 1995: 132). Other indications of affluence were made available through details about the Australian food supply as the surveillance of the food of the nation was subjected to larger and wider comparisons and inspections. For example, by the mid-1950s it was possible to position Australia on a global scale showing Australians to be among the highest consumers of meat in the world (Hutchinson, 1958: 28). The Second World Food Survey undertaken by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO, 1952) placed Australia fourth in a table of available calories per person. Much of the information about the foods eaten by Australians was estimated from ‘Apparent Consumption of Food’ data. Apparent Consumption data represents a national inventory of food production and contains details of imports, exports, wastage, non-food use and stock carry-overs (Lester, 1994: 58). This had been compiled annually by the Commonwealth government since 1938 as a way of tracking per capita food and nutrient intake (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1995). Thus trends in food consumption were mapped, analysed and compared on a national and international level. In summarising the changing nature of the Australian diet in the post-war period up to the 1950s, Hutchinson estimated that increases in calorie consumption were a result of an expanded intake of practically all food categories, especially fats and sugars (Hutchinson, 1958: 49). In the post-war period such revelations were directly incorporated into discourses on affluence especially since these foods had been heavily rationed during the austere war years. News about increased food consumption provided grounds for alarm by health authorities who, as we saw in the previous chapter, had been linking diets


of modern ‘lifestyle’ with degenerative diseases of affluence. Of particular concern was the level of refined sugar that Australians were eating. The FAO study mentioned above showed that in 1952 Australia had the highest sugar consumption per head of any country in the world, at 120 pounds (about 55 kg) per head per annum. The role of sugar in the development of dental caries had been known for some time (Nettleton, 1992: 79–81). However, sugar was now being implicated in diseases of affluence, especially cardiovascular disease, through its putative role in the development of obesity (Yudkin, 1967). As the food supply came under closer examination, so did the composition of manufactured foods. One revelation was that sugar entered the diet not only as a discretionary addition in the form of table sugar; it was also ‘hidden’, added to many foodstuffs as part of manufacturing, as, indeed, was fat. Since both sugar and fat had been directly linked to ‘lifestyle’ diseases, the problematisation of food choice, qua nutrition, created a number of dilemmas for post-war individuals. At the very time when it should have been possible for individuals to celebrate the end of food shortages and avail themselves of an increased variety of foods – and ‘modern’ foods at that – the news from health and nutrition experts was not good. Now ‘good’ nutrition was not merely a question of getting enough food to eat, nor even a question of greater food group variety, as had been the case in an earlier period. In the postwar boom period ‘good’ nutrition was more a question of cutting back; it was, as one author put it, ‘a paradox of plenty’ (Levenstein, 1993). Moreover, the categories against which food could be judged as ‘good’ had changed. For example, the importance of having fat in the diet was stressed in the oral histories collected by Jamrozik et al. (1992), where memories of Australian food during the interwar years were recalled. One informant says ‘[Fat] was considered to be part of the flavour in a stew’ (Jamrozik et al., 1992: 760). And many informants could remember the ‘dripping bowl’ which was a permanent feature in the kitchen. Thus while the role of the diet in the development of diseases of ‘lifestyle’ became more widely understood, nutrition challenged a number of established views about food. During the post-war period, then, discourses on ‘affluence’, ‘choice’, ‘convenience’ and so forth, provided an opportunity for an expansion of nutrition for a number of reasons. First, a modern ‘lifestyle’ was believed to create indolence and excessive eating which, in turn, caused degenerative diseases of affluence. Second, an increase in those foods believed to be directly related to common causes of mortality and morbidity produced a specific discourse on moderation and regulation. Last, a radical change in the nature of the food supply – especially


the increase of ‘convenience’ foods – ushered in a discourse on a new nutrition pedagogy. Spoilt for choice, consumers were now believed to be in need of the basic ideas on food and health. The will to govern food choice, through nutrition, was believed to be justified through medical science and epidemiology. Food choice was made problematic in new and different ways in the homescape of nutrition. On another front, too, choice was an issue as the next section explains.

The child as citizen The structure of Australian family life was changing during the post-war period. In a study by Fallding in the mid-1950s, parents saw themselves in what they considered to be a new era of child-rearing. This was a time when so-called traditional knowledge was challenged by new expert advice: There were four main elements to the new approach to children: a belief that one had to be equipped with knowledge in order to deal with children effectively, not simply repeat the methods used by one’s own parents; a belief that one should be affectionate and companionable towards one’s children, and not the remote authorities that parents had been in previous generations; a desire to produce a self-regulated rather than an obedient child; and an aim to ensure the full development of the child’s capacities rather than prepare him to be devoted to duty.

(Fallding, 1957: 71) The growing importance of children in post-war families dramatically influenced their visibility. In 1959, the United Nations unveiled a Declaration of Children’s Rights (United Nations General Assembly, 1960) which was reformulated and re-released in 1989 as the United Nations International Convention for the Rights of the Child (Greenwood, 1993). Under this new Convention, the Australian government has to report to the United Nations every two years on how it is complying with the Convention’s principles. The emergence of children’s rights in the post-war period required that family life be opened up to closer scrutiny to ensure these rights were being addressed. The granting of rights to children amounted to extending to them a form of citizenship, not in the sense that they could participate in the execution of political options, but in the sense that they now had social rights and the right to liberty (Rose, 1990: 122). These rights provided for the exercise of choice by


children. Indeed, the recognition of children’s choice was almost a hallmark of a new ethics of parenting which went hand in hand with greater material possibilities of providing choices to children, something that may not necessarily have been feasible in an earlier era (Reiger, 1986: 173). Children also had the right to be heard and they had opinions which were to be taken seriously. The idea of choice and freedom for children in family life was played out in a number of regimes of new parenthood. The eating habits of children were an important site for the development of choice, autonomy and eventual independence by children. In this way the notion of food choice for children became an important part of family food events. In the early part of this century, parental advice about feeding children focused mainly on achieving a correct balance of foods. The Australian Mothercraft Book (1938) for example, lists the sequence in which foods should be introduced into a child’s diet on weaning, with special instructions for correctly cooking the food and achieving the right consistency. Specimen diets for older children are also provided, listing those foods to be given and the times at which they should be offered. But, while a good deal of advice is given about the management of breastfeeding, very little is written concerning the administration of food to children. In fact, the section on feeding the older child concludes rather matter-of-factly: ‘A well arranged diet containing milk, meat (including fish and chicken), eggs, butter, cream, fresh fruit and vegetables, bread and sugar, properly prepared and attractively served will meet the child’s needs’ (The Australian Mothercraft Book, 1938: 82). The nature of this advice is supported elsewhere. For example, another popular book of the time, Health and Education in the Nursery, states As a rule it is wise not to coax an unwilling child to take its food. . . . Faddiness about food should in no case be encouraged. . . . The food provided should always be suitable and it should be assumed that it will be eaten.

(Bennett and Issacs, 1931) Truby King’s Feeding and Care of Baby (1933), which was used extensively by infant welfare nurses in Australia, advises about the categories of food to give to children, but it offers no guidance on the actual management of feeding children.


In the post-war period, however, manuals on child care focus specifically on the management of feeding children as a potential difficulty. In his book Baby and Child Care, Spock (1955) devotes almost a whole chapter to the problems that can be expected in this area. Spock starts by noting that ‘You don’t see feeding problems in puppies or among young humans in places where mothers don’t know enough about diet to worry’ (Spock, 1955: 448). He continues by stressing the importance of patience, offering choices and encouraging independence in eating. Spock cites the scientific experiment conducted by Clara Davis earlier in the century as proof that, left to themselves, children will eat properly (Davis, 1928). As a post-war text on child management, Spock’s book stands in contrast to those written earlier in so far as it recognises feeding children as a problem. The topic of fatness in children, not mentioned in earlier texts, is given special treatment by Spock. Advice is provided on how to cope with fat children who ‘crave large amounts of rich foods [cakes, biscuits and pastry]’ (Spock, 1955: 457). Obesity in children is now seen as a health problem requiring intervention by parents and a doctor. Stressing the difficulties that beset the management of children’s overweight problems, Spock points out that: A child has less will-power than an adult. If the mother serves the child less fattening foods it means either that the whole family must go without the richer dishes or that the fat child must be kept from eating the very things his heart craves while the rest of the family enjoy them. There are few fat children reasonable enough to think that’s fair.

(Spock, 1955: 459) Spock thus recognises the importance of fairness when managing children’s eating habits; he stresses children’s ability to reason and that their views should be respected. Spock also believes that a tactful parent can remedy the problem of fatness in a child by serving more of the less fattening foods that are the child’s favourites. If a child shows willingness to co-operate in dieting, then it ‘should be encouraged to visit the doctor, preferably alone. Talking to the doctor, man to man, may give him a feeling of running his own life like a grown-up’ (Spock, 1955: 459). Again Spock emphasises the importance of encouraging independence and self-regulation in children. The need to offer choices to children in the area of food is a continuing theme in present advice to parents. For example, in her book Feeding your Child, Turner (1986) points out that children should be given a choice of nutritious foods to


encourage independence in eating. When feeding difficulties present themselves, Turner advises that a good knowledge of food values makes it easy to substitute nutritious foods for those not eaten. She likens children’s capricious attitudes to food with the food preferences of parents: ‘remember that there are some foods [parents] like to eat more than others or feel like at certain times and not other times!’ (Turner, 1986: 67). Stressing that each child is an individual, Turner warns parents not to compare their child’s eating habits with those of others. But if they are worried about the amount of food their children are eating, Turner advises parents to ‘write down everything he eats or drinks and check it with the recommended amounts of food given on the next page [of the book]’ (Turner, 1986: 70). So the advice to parents is to treat children as individuals and to foster independence, but also to ensure that their diets are nutritious and to see that foods are eaten in the amounts recommended. Another example is A Parents’ Guide to Nutrition: Healthy Eating from Birth through Adolescence, (Baker and Henry, 1987). This book also points out that many children are ‘picky’ eaters and, in dealing with this problem, parents should show encouragement rather than force. According to the authors, nutritious foods can be ‘hidden’ in other foods or blended in drinks. Negative encounters with food should always be avoided and ‘parents should respect children’s food preferences and not try to dictate them’ (Baker and Henry, 1987: 135). The feeding of children which, in earlier times, may have been taken for granted, now becomes a process fraught with difficulties; children are now likely to be ‘fussy’ and ‘picky’. On the one hand, parents are reminded that children should be treated as individuals, encouraged to be independent and have their food choices respected. On the other hand, parents should, above all, make sure that children are given healthy diets. In other words, the new ethics of parenting requires that children be given choices and that they eat nutritious foods. Parents are also reminded that the child’s happiness around food and eating should be preserved because unpleasant experiences around food in childhood can lead to eating problems in later life. In arguing for a more child-centred approach to the management of eating some authors believe that by allowing the child to decide when to eat, what to eat, and how much to eat, we can strengthen her self-confidence, self-esteem and sense of dignity and also avoid the kinds of eating difficulties that have plagued many of us for life.

(Hirschmann and Zaphiropoulos, 1985: 13)


In the post-war era, then, the new responsibilities around food in the family valorise an emotional investment in eating. Managing this problematic process requires judgement and skill, the acquisition of which turns an inexperienced parent into a competent one. This skill is a part of the process of parenthood, which itself becomes ‘in theory intellectually exciting, a test of personal capacities, virtually a profession in its own right; in practice [parenthood] is the site of a constant self-scrutiny and self-evaluation in relation to the norms of responsibility to one’s child’ (Rose, 1990: 198). In short, feeding the family becomes an important aspect of the ethics of parenthood. While the responsibilities for this have fallen mainly to mothers, in the latter part of this century fathers, too, are expected to play their role by reinforcing and encouraging the mother’s assertiveness and management tactics, by preparing food, feeding children and setting a good eating example. In summing up the ‘paedo-centricity’ of family life around food we can say that motherhood, fatherhood, and parent conduct generated by expertise ‘were to infuse and shape the personal investments of individuals, the ways they formed and regulated, evaluated their lives, their actions and their goals’ (Rose, 1990: 129). Feeding children, then, becomes a problematic concern, full of pitfalls. It becomes a potential battleground in which the major stakes are love and pleasure. The love of the parent – especially the mother – is at stake through an emotional investment now thought to be implicit in nourishing children. Food rejection by the child is constructed as a rejection of a mother’s love. With the growing importance of nutrition, this emotional investment is given an added dimension. Now children’s physiological and psychological needs for food have to be addressed. Food choices in families can no longer be taken for granted. They have to be considered and appropriate strategic actions formulated. Nutrition discourses therefore intersected with and amplified others of the human sciences. For example, psychological issues around family eating, children’s feelings and emotions about food are debated and discussed in professional and public forums. And because of the gendered nature of family food provision, coupled with the increased responsibility of maintaining a healthy family diet, sociological discourses mapped directly onto nutrition by way of women’s roles in feeding the family (Murcott, 1983b), the role of women as proselytisers of health (Crotty, 1991) and the gendered nature of divisions of labour around food in the home (Baxter, 1993). It was, however, biomedical discourses on nutrition which took priority in the problematisation of food in family life. The problems of ‘lifestyle’ disease, the positive


consequences of health and the responsibility one has for one’s own health – and, indeed, that of other family members – became part of an attitude described by some as ‘healthism’ in which one has a ‘duty to be well’ (Greco, 1993). Eating healthily becomes part of that duty. Food and nutrition discourses emphasise family health in programmes that target family eating by way of mass media techniques, and support material such as cookbooks, recipe cards and eating hints. These programmes are deployed at a variety of sites including supermarkets, schools, and workplaces. Evaluations of this government of nutrition, however, constantly reveal the limits of normalisation and self-efficacy. Indeed, governing always carries with it a necessary possibility of failure, or as Rose puts it, ‘the inevitable discrepancy between rational schemes for the government of the family [and, indeed, the diet] and the messy realities of existence’ (Rose, 1990: 195). Recent research, for example, shows that ‘less than 1 per cent of the population had diets totally in line with recommendations’ (Baghurst, 1994). Thus the will to govern is fulfilled by the constant registration of failure and, with it, the constant injunction to do better next time (Rose and Miller, 1992: 191). Nutrition becomes self-reinforcing; it is a constant reminder of the need for further work to reform strategies, improve interventions and reformulate expertise.

Nutrition and the counter-culture In the post-war era in Australia, and many other industrialised countries, a number of changes took place in social life. Within the family, one major development was the emergence of the category ‘teenager’. In his book The Making and Breaking of the Australian Family, Gilding (1991) points out that ‘[in post-war Australia] there was a tension between the growing material dependence of the teenager on the one hand, and the consumer-supported demand for adult status on the other’ (Gilding, 1991: 116). In the 1950s and 1960s there was a rise in a certain set of values, especially in young people, which openly contradicted those of the dominant culture. This trend culminated in the so-called ‘generation gap’ of the 1960s where the traditions of older generations were openly rejected. The period is usually believed to be characterised by ‘permissiveness’, mainly considered in terms of attitudes to sexuality, drug taking and alternative lifestyles. However, while there may have been a slackening of the morals of earlier generations on some matters, highly ethical attitudes were adopted towards food, the body and the


environment. An overarching concern within these new morals was the way ‘nature’ had been overshadowed and undermined by ‘science’ and ‘technology’. These ethics challenged the ‘modern’ food supply which, as we have seen already, had become increasingly dominated by foods produced by advances in science and technology. In short, what emerged was a movement we will describe here as the ‘Wholefood’ movement. It emphasised nature, ecology and humanism (Belasco, 1990). The ‘Wholefood’ movement was critical of many manufactured foods – especially ‘convenience’ foods – for being highly processed, over-refined and containing artificial colours, artificial flavours, and preservatives. These complaints came at a time when the Australian food industry felt it could boast high standards of purity and safety, all of which, of course, were only possible through modern food technology. But, according to the ‘Wholefood’ movement, these modern food processes took from food its ‘natural’ properties. The ‘Wholefood’ movement’s emphasis on ‘nature’ also problematised the primary production of food and conventional farming methods. First, these were considered to be detrimental to the environment, especially through the application of pesticides, fertilisers and other growth promoters. Second, the mass production of meat, poultry and other livestock was condemned as being morally unjust and inhumane. Indeed, meat eating itself was considered ecologically wasteful and morally questionable at a time when food shortage in many countries had been highly publicised (Moore Lappé, 1971). The ‘Wholefood’ movement provided new discourses, especially for young people, about what was ‘good’ to eat. In theory and practice this movement was entirely reminiscent of the one promoted a hundred years earlier by people like Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg in the United States, and Phillip Muskett in Australia. Foods that were ‘natural’ or ‘whole’ were favoured over those that were processed or refined, and meat eating was regarded with suspicion. The new term ‘junk food’ became part of popular discourse. ‘Junk food’ was, on the one hand, food with no nutritional properties and, on the other, it was food with no ‘spiritual’ properties or ‘goodness’. In Australia, the factors responsible for this period of social ferment have been, and no doubt will continue to be, debated (see Neville, 1995; Gerster and Bassett, 1991). Most might agree, however, that the so-called ‘hippy’ generation was characterised by ‘the celebration of the individual over the mass, the choice of natural and transcendental routes towards “freedom” (through travel, mysticism or drugs), the currency of notions of Dionysian release and self-


assertion’ (Gerster and Bassett, 1991: 4). In terms of nutrition, some authors have suggested that the ‘Wholefood’ movement, which gained momentum at the time, had a marked effect on the direction of the food supply from the 1960s onwards. Belasco (1990) and Levenstein (1993), for example, argue that the so-called 1960s ‘counter-culture’ directly influenced not only consumer attitudes to food but also food industry attitudes in favour of ‘natural’, ‘unprocessed’ food products. We should, however, consider these claims in light of the following issues. First, the term ‘counter-culture’, as a description of social alternatives, should be used with caution for it is highly questionable whether the new values truly ‘counter’ existing ones (Yinger, 1982: 3). We might instead see the ‘counter-culture’ as a development within the discourses we have already discussed; those of affluence in general, and of freedom and choice for the young in particular. Second, instead of arguing for an ‘elective affinity’ between a counter-culture and a ‘counter cuisine’ (‘natural’, ‘unprocessed’ and so on), we should view the ‘Wholefood’ movement as part of a larger discourse of the moral problematisation of the conduct of subjects. We have, after all, already seen how health questions and concerns were raised about ‘modern’, ‘convenient’ and ‘technically advanced’ ‘lifestyles’, including eating habits, from the 1950s onwards. And we have heard from those who unfavourably compared ‘flabby’, ‘degenerate’, ‘diseased’ Australians with ‘vigorously healthy’ New Guinea Highlanders. Thus, in much the same way that van Krieken (1996) urges us to reconsider Weber’s ‘elective affinity’ between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism as two sides of the same ‘will to govern’, we should perhaps view the ‘elective affinity’ between the 1960s ‘counter-culture’ and changes in food attitudes as being organised by a government of the ‘modern’ lifestyle. That is, a moral concern about, and a will to govern, the affluence and excesses of homo sedentarius. There is no doubt that a new ethics of the diet in the 1960s provided important conditions of possibility for nutrition in a number of ways. First, a closer public scrutiny of the food supply raised a number of issues that had already been taken up by consumer advocates. In the United States, for example, activist Ralph Nader had for sometime been campaigning for a reexamination of the safety of the American food supply (Turner, 1970). And the environmental concerns raised earlier in the decade by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) were to find new expressions and interests within the new ethics of food choice characterised by the ‘Wholefood’ movement. Moreover, as a public discourse on food safety grew in the 1960s and 1970s


action was taken by the US Food and Drug Administration. Some food additives – for example, the artificial sweetener, sodium cyclamate – were confirmed to be carcinogenic and were removed from the food supply in the United States amid much publicity (Levenstein, 1993: 201). Food regulators in Britain followed suit with this ban. But instead of calming public anxiety about the safety of the food supply, these bans raised further suspicions. In America, a Harris poll in 1977 found that food manufacturers ranked the highest among the industries the public would like to see most investigated by the government (Levenstein, 1993: 200). In Britain, food additives caused similar concern (Cannon, 1987: 152). In Australia, too, anxiety over the food supply was expressed by consumers. In one survey, over 70 per cent of respondents wanted the government to ban certain additives, for example, artificial flavourings, in foods (Crawford et al., 1987). A later survey showed that ‘residues’, ‘chemicals’, ‘additives’ and ‘preservatives’ in food continued to be of major concern for consumers (Lester, 1994: 128). A closer inspection of the food supply, especially its effects on the environment through intense farming practices, also highlighted the involvement of multinational and transnational companies in the food business. This revelation caused disquiet amongst consumers because of the perceived concentration of the food supply in the hand of a few monopolies which had ‘vertical control’ of lines of food from ‘paddock to plate’ (Sargent, 1985). The term ‘agribusiness’ became part of a popular discourse against large food companies. A second development at this time, important for nutrition, relates to the ethics and feeding of infants. Because of an increasing faith in ‘nature’ and what was considered ‘natural’, breastfeeding began to gain popularity in many Western cultures. In Australia, for example, breastfeeding had been slowly declining from the beginning of the century until the Second World War, despite the fact that it was specifically recommended and promoted by medical and nursing professions. Breastfeeding rates in Australia reached a nadir during the late 1960s. In Victoria, for example, the number of mothers fully breastfeeding at three months postpartum dropped from 48 to 25 per cent between 1950 and 1965 (Hitchcock, 1989: 105). During the 1970s, however, rates of breastfeeding began to increase so that by 1984, 50 per cent of mothers in Victoria were breastfeeding at three months. In Western Australia during the same period these rates reached 80 per cent (Scott et al., 1996). Interestingly, this return to breastfeeding came at a time when artificial feeds for infant were microbiologically safer, easier to prepare and were ‘closer to breast milk’ than had previously been the case (Hitchcock, 1989).


Thus at a time when it was easier than ever before to feed babies artificially, more women turned to breastfeeding. Another development important for nutrition relates to the questioning of the values of conventional medicine and a move towards more so-called natural and holistic alternatives. Natural methods of healing were becoming increasingly popular. In Australia, the Webb Report was commissioned to inquire into ‘alternative methods’ of health care, such as chiropractic, osteopathy, homeopathy and naturopathy (Webb, 1977). It had been estimated that a quarter of a million Australians annually sought help from alternative practitioners, mostly because they had lost faith in conventional medicine (Drury, 1983: 18). New treatments and cures entered the discourse on health care: ‘iridology’, ‘acupuncture’, ‘hypnotherapy’, ‘aromatherapy’ and ‘re-birthing’ (Drury, 1981). These challenges provided important opportunities for nutrition. For within the alternative health movement, the basis of nutritional science was hardly ever challenged. On the contrary, the promotion and justification of wholefoods and organic diets were often based on them being ‘better’ nutritionally. And ‘nutrition’ here was always expressed in terms of orthodox nutrition. The Zen macrobiotic diet is, perhaps, the closest we get to an alternative way of theorising about the science of the diet. For a good discussion of macrobiotics, albeit in a fictional context, see Camilla’s Bread (Lohrey, 1995). As an example of an endorsement of the orthodoxy of nutrition, The Whole Earth Catalog, a popular resource of the day, promoted an authoritative manual on the nutritional composition of foods saying: ‘Since natural food does not come with a list of ingredients on the label, the [US] Department of Agriculture has kindly prepared this authoritative analysis of everything edible. If you’re serious about nutrition, it’s a buy’ (The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1974: 188). In Australia, Grass Roots magazine was launched in 1969 to cater for a growing population seeking an ‘alternative’ lifestyle. The magazine regularly featured ‘Wholefood’ and nutrition topics. For example, the Grass Roots annual edition included articles about food and nutrition (‘Cabbage contains calcium, sugar, vitamin K and many minerals which help to eliminate uric acid from the body (arthritis and gout)’), tips on growing organic food, and recipes for making nutritious meals (Miller and Miller, 1981). Another important book of the period was Diet for a Small Planet (Moore Lappé, 1971), which emphasised the ecological importance of ‘eating low on the food chain’. In its explanations this book drew explicitly on fundamental terms in orthodox nutrition such as ‘net protein utilisation’, ‘protein scores’


and ‘amino acid complementation’ in order to prove that meatless meals could meet nutritional requirements. Nutrition discourse was, then, widely promoted within the new ethics of the ‘Wholefood’ movement. None of this is to say, however, that the views of orthodox nutritionists went unquestioned. On the contrary, many nutrition opinions were challenged, especially those regarding the safety and integrity of the food supply. Many followers of the ‘Wholefood’ movement became suspicious of conventional nutritional requirements, believing that supplementation of the diet was needed in order to achieve adequate doses of nutrients. Consequently wholefood or health-food shops, which proliferated at the time, not only stocked wholegrain breads, organic cereals and seeds but also a range of vitamins, minerals and other supplements. The ethics of the ‘Wholefood’ movement stressed that both body and soul were renewed by the new diet. The purpose of diet was, according to one nutritionist, to ‘empty ourselves of the garbage so that nature can function unimpeded. . . . The debris that has to be eliminated is both mental and physical for the two are inseparable’ (Levenstein, 1993: 184). In terms of the nutrition homescape, these developments in nutrition were to create a number of effects. First, concerns about the ‘modern’ food supply, especially its effects on health, became incorporated in nutritional sciences. Most important here was the issue of processed foods and the lack of fibre in the diet. During the 1970s a variety of health problems were attributed to fibre deficiency. Thus dietary requirements were reformulated and translated into new recommendations about what was good to eat. A new discourse on family food opened up with a greater emphasis on wholegrains, ‘complex carbohydrates’ and fresh foods. Second, the food industry in Australia embarked upon the production of a range of foods with high fibre content. There was a rapid proliferation of manufactured foods promoted on the basis of their ‘naturalness’. Third, after suspicions had been raised about artificial ingredients in food, a range of health problems were identified which were believed to be due to food additives. One example concerned the relationship between hyperactivity in children and artificial colourings and flavourings in food (Feingold, 1974). More generally, however, a concern about food additives led to the introduction in 1987 of laws about food labelling whereby additives had to be declared using a coding or numbering system (Australian Consumers’ Association, 1991b).


Thus new rationalisations of nutrition meant, for the family, new recommendations, new food products, new advice about how to compile healthy diets and new concerns about food choice. These nutrition recommendations were to be transformed later still by others in which a ‘Mediterranean diet’, ‘Asian diet’ or even ‘peasant diet’ was promoted. The exact details of these transformations in Australia, especially the way that nutrition mapped onto socalled ethnic cuisines, have been discussed by Ripe (1994). What concerns us here, however, is the way that nutrition discourses about food and health have been part of an ongoing government of everyday life via the food available across the homescape. Again we should stress that governing in this sense should not be seen as a direct involvement in nutrition by the ‘state’ alone. In fact, many of the organisations involved in promoting nutrition discourses are non-governmental organisations who receive no ‘state’ funding. Nor, of course, is the food industry, and its associated advertising and media arms which heavily promote nutrition, funded by the ‘state’. Government here, as we have stressed elsewhere, should be seen as a range of practices: ‘tactics, strategies, techniques, programmes, dreams and aspirations of those authorities who shape beliefs and the conduct of the population’ (Nettleton, 1991: 99). At the level of the family, nutrition provided new desires and fulfilments through what Rose calls the intense subjectivisation, emotionalisation and eroticisation of domestic affairs (Rose, 1990: 201). These processes around food had little to do with direct intervention into family life by the state bureaucrats. On the contrary, as health becomes a family responsibility through the ‘duty to be well’, individuals watch over their own, and each other’s, eating habits. As Foucault puts it, this is a superb formula since ‘power is exercised continuously and for what turns out to be a minimal cost’ (Foucault, 1980c: 155). In this way the autonomous family is left to assume full responsibility for its health and its eating habits. Discourses on nutrition govern at a distance by ensuring that subjects are ‘bound into the language and evaluation of expertise at the very moment they are assured of their freedom and autonomy’ (Rose, 1990: 203). Moral obligations in family life are, though, diverse and contradictory. In them we can easily see what Miller (1994: xii) means by ‘ethical incompleteness’: the way subjects are required to find ethical ambiguity in themselves which has to be remedied. But as Miller puts it, this is a ‘world without end’ because one’s putative completion always needs reinventing with each new dilemma. For example, while satisfying the ethics of parenthood in which children’s choices and preferences are to be respected, and children’s rights and views are to be


preserved, it is likely that parents will have to abrogate their responsibilities in meeting the ethics of nutrition where they are expected to provide healthy and nourishing food that children will eat and enjoy. We see, then, an indeterminacy of ethics in which cultural policies require of subjects a pedagogic dependence (by way of technologies of power) that never allows totality. In other words, subjects can never do the ‘right thing’ all the time. For subjects of modernity, a determinate incompleteness means that they are always calling into question and problematising their ethical considerations. They are always the ‘empiricotranscendental doublets’ that Foucault mapped out in his earlier work (Foucault, 1982b), since they are constantly matching their experiences in the world with the moral choices or categories made available through expert discourses. In postwar Australia, and other developed countries, expert opinion around food choice was informed by a discourse raising concerns about affluence and modern ‘lifestyle’. While this was mainly voiced in terms of health and disease, it represented a modern moral problematisation around food and conduct, the counterparts of which can be seen in early antiquity. This moral problematisation is: a process in which the individual delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice, defines his position relative to the precepts he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of being that will serve as his moral goal. And this requires him to act upon himself, to monitor, test, improve, and transform himself.

(Foucault, 1992b: 28) Conclusions Using the home as a site for the production of food choice allows us to examine the further development of nutrition along two fronts. First, there was a change in the views about the management of children in the home. Pre-war expert discourses on parenting emphasised the importance of avoiding ‘mollycoddling’ or ‘spoiling’ children. Frequent parent–child interactions, through play or even just cuddling, were believed to lead to excessive over-stimulation of the nervous system, which was considered to be detrimental to proper development (Reiger, 1986: 148). However, with advances in post-war understandings, especially in child psychology, emotional and cognitive development were to be strongly encouraged through play, discovery and frequent ‘quality’ interactions between


adults and children. The home itself was believed to be the best place for these activities. The norms of good parenting were less predicated on the amount of discipline and control meted out to children, and more on the extent to which parents maximised their children’s learning and developmental potential: ‘With the aid of books, games, toys, records, and other aids now made available for purchase, the intimate environment of the home was to be transformed into a veritable laboratory of cognitive growth’ (Rose, 1990: 196). We might note that the recognition of children’s choice and freedom went hand in hand with greater economic and material possibilities of the so-called post-war ‘boom’. Choice and variety became key themes in the post-war consumerism. Second, in terms of food, a closer examination of the effects on health of affluence gave vent to an urgency about the need to return to ‘nature’ which provided a platform for a counter-culture movement heavily promoting the ethics of ‘Wholefood’. Nutrition became the terms in which these ethics were explained as food goodness and food quality, which was quickly commercialised by mainstream food industry. The effects of this are evident in the present food homescape. Discourses on nutrition construct us as modern subjects through our ethical interest in diet which requires us to be self-reflective and self-regulating. As such, we no longer need state bureaucracies to personally inspect our daily habits. In the government of food choice, individuals want to be healthy, experts instruct them on how to be so, and entrepreneurs will exploit and enhance a market for health. Health will thus be ensured through a contribution of the market, expertise and regulated autonomy (Rose, 1992: 155). In the next chapter we will see how the government of food choice, in the character of nutrition, operates to produce modern subjectivities in families. We will see how, as a discourse of power, nutrition ‘objectifies’ by situating individuals within a field of knowledge and surveillance about health and food. And we will see how the moral problems of food, which we have discussed before, are articulated in respect to nutrition.

Chapter 9

An ethnography of family food Subjects of food choice

In this chapter we examine interviews with families that were undertaken to examine family eating habits. The nature and selection of these families are given in the Appendix. Here we might briefly say that all were two-parent families with children of a variety of ages. In each family, however, there was at least one child between five and twelve years old. The interviews were conducted in the families’ homes, principally with the adults who have mainly been identified here as ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’ or ‘couples’. We should recognise, however, that these subjects occupied other positions, such as ‘wives’, ‘husbands’, ‘citizens’, ‘consumers’ and so on. Each of these positions is discursively constructed by different knowledges and practices and different ethical possibilities. So, for example, we saw in earlier chapters the way that discourses on motherhood provided a range of knowledges and practices around food choice which defined what it is to be a mother in Australia. Nettleton (1991: 103–6) also shows us that, with regard to the dental health of children, women can be discursively positioned as ‘natural’ mothers (those who are naturally endowed with intuition regarding the proper care of children’s teeth), ‘ignorant’ mothers (those with children who have carious teeth), and ‘responsible’ mothers (those who actively take charge of their children’s teeth). In the same way discourses on nutrition provide positions around food in relation not only to parental responsibilities, but also to consumer concerns and citizen obligations. If Foucault is right in asserting that subjectivities are produced by discourses then it should be easy to identify subject positions through the knowledges and practices of respondents; for example, what subjects say about themselves and their practices when discussing family food habits. An analysis of these conversations should not require an interpretation of the

150 Family food: an ethnography

subject positions. In other words, complicated and ideological analysis, directed at finding out what is ‘really’ going on, should not be necessary. Subject positions should be easily available – ‘on the surface’ as it were – of the discourses which construct them. This is because nutrition as a discourse defines and delimits what individuals can be in the context of food, health and family life. These interviews will be framed by the ‘technologies of the subject’ developed by Foucault. Technologies here are taken to mean ‘matrices of popular reason’: they provide ways for individuals to rationalise and justify their beliefs, understandings and practices. For Foucault there are four main types of technologies: 1 2 3

4

Technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform and manipulate things. Technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs,meanings, symbols, or signification. Technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivisation of the subject. Technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality.

(Foucault, 1988a: 18) Foucault believed that his own work focused mainly on technologies of power and technologies of the self. We will attempt, then, to examine these technologies as they occur in the interviews where subject positions are produced, on the one hand, through a government of nutrition (institutions, procedures, tactics, calculations, knowledges and techniques) and, on the other, through an ethics of nutrition which involves a problematisation or decipherment of the self by the self.

Family food and meal arrangements In the last chapter, we saw how family life was produced and realised in discourse. We saw how expert understandings of the roles of parents ‘infuse and shape the

Family food: an ethnography 151

personal investments of individuals, the ways they formed, regulated and evaluated their lives, their actions and their goals’ (Rose, 1990: 129). The role of food in the family provides an opportunity to further examine the construction of family life. During the interviews couples were asked to describe the way meals in the family were arranged.1 Extract 1 Cassie: I think it’s good for a family to sit down and eat together. I mean there’s ((pauses)) people are so busy these days they don’t sort of have time to sit down and chat about the day’s activities or work or whatever. And I mean you know with little kids you’re not going to get a great deal of conversation out of them, but it’s nice to be able to sit together as a family. I mean I did it as a child, if I can remember, no well, my parents had split up, so when my mum was there I do remember sitting down and having a meal together and I think it’s just something you do. It’s awfully lonely eating by yourself. Extract 2 I: Maria: I: Maria:

Is it something you value, sharing eating? Yes, at night, definitely. Why is that? Because we talk about what we’ve done during the day. We turn theTV off and we don’t have, you know, other distractions so we actually have to talk to each other. Talk about what we’re going to do on the weekend, how things are going to fit in, or what they’ve done at school, those sorts of things.

Extract 3 Jack: Oh I think ((pauses)) yeah definitely we should all ((pauses)) I like to all sit down together you know, because that’s a chance you get to talk to each other and probably see what’s happened that day, or else you don’t know what happens that day if you don’t all sit down together and talk about it. I: Was that part of your upbringing as a child? Did your family[ Jack: [Yeah, we did that, but it’s not something ((pauses)) I don’t do it because ((pauses)). I do a lot of things different to what my parents did. I don’t do it because my parents did it, but it’s just one of those things that I


think are necessary. So I don’t like turning the television on when we’re having a meal, try and keep it off. Might have a quicklook at the news, but after that, that’s it. Extract 4 Alec: The thing is I don’t think we would [eat alone as adults], even if we were millionaires and had servants and everything, we would still eat with the children and we would not eat alone. There are times when we look at each other and say ‘If only they were somewhere else or they were fed first’, but we eat together as a family. Extract 5 Stella: [Eating together is important] because that’s usually when we discuss things that have happened during the day with each other, and we’ve always made sure the kids have had their say as to what’s happened in their day ((pauses)). What’s happened in their day is just as important to us as what’s happened in my day, so the kids have been brought up with that, so that’s always been there and they just expect it now, that they get their say in what goes on in the house. Extract 6 Patrick: No we don’t normally sit around the table. It’s only if we sit down to a hot dinner or something like that, a hot tea and if we have a roast we usually sit there, but normally we’re in here [sitting room]. Now it wouldn’t have happened in my time when I was a kid because dad would have slapped the TV off and said, ‘Righto get into the kitchen, that’s it’ and I think this is ((pauses)). You know you go to a lot of family homes now, the kids can do what they want and whatever. And they’ve lost that family combination sort of thing, you know, when everyone had to sit at the table to be part of a family and it’s not the case, not now. Meals together were, for these families, regarded as an important part of family life. On these occasions they ‘sit together as a family’ (Extract 1) or ‘eat together as a family’ (Extract 4). When shared meals do not happen, families have ‘lost the family combination’ (Extract 6). Mealtimes are part


of the way a family is defined: the family itself is realised as these events. But as Alec says (Extract 4) family meals are often difficult to organise with children. One of the reasons for this difficulty is that children need to be taught and disciplined to ‘eat as a family’. Extract 7 Derek: What we’re trying to do is to train the children to eat with us and more as a discipline than anything else, but also to sort of get involved in their conversation and their conversation with us, so that we share it more as a family group. The fact that we eat at the same time is I guess coincidental. It’s more to get the family to share some of the social norms, if you will. Families should eat together. Extract 8 Hilary: Yeah, I think that’s really important. That you have one meal together and Angus and I like to, you know, we like to sort of talk over the meal and so often we find that we spend ((pauses)). The kids eat quickly, they don’t eat a lot, and we’ll all sit down and have dinner together and the kids might be finished within fifteen or twenty minutes and they’ll be allowed to go off. Whereas we would stay there for a bit longer but as long as they [children] say, ‘Can we go now please?’, then that’s fine. But there is an important ritual there, that you have a meal together and we all talk together. Thus to eat ‘properly’ as a family, children have to be disciplined; they have to be taught, not only to eat at the table but also, as Hilary indicates (Extract 8), to have good manners (‘as long as they say, “Can we go now please?”, then that’s fine’). These examples show us how family life is constructed around food. Parents have to train children and, from Alec’s comment (‘There are times when we look at each other and say, “If only they were somewhere else or they were fed first”’) parents also have to train themselves to eat as a family should. It is thus a time for parents to discipline themselves in their parental responsibilities. One of the main reasons given for families to share mealtimes was to talk together. Parents wanted to catch up on events and experiences that had happened during the day or discuss plans for the future. The meal table therefore becomes the ‘talk table’. In their detailed study of family mealtimes, Ochs and Taylor


(1992) showed how the evening meal is often the first time of the day when family members interact as a whole for a sustained period of time. In studying the mealtimes of seven American middle-class families, these authors found repeated patterns in ‘table talk’ where conversations were mainly introduced by parents – principally the mother – to question children. The questions were designed to elicit information about the day’s events by way of ‘stories’ (events that had a central problem) or ‘reports’ (accounts of an activity). Ochs and Taylor believe that ‘table talk’ can be a double bind for parents in that it can be seen as an inquisition: ‘Parents do want – and sometimes feel they need, for good reasons, to know about their children’s lives . . . and they do become frustrated when children become reticent’ (Ochs and Taylor, 1992: 332). According to these authors, parents ask questions in order to situate children in a verbal ‘field of vision’ where the lives of the protagonists [children] are laid out for the inspection of the interlocutors [parents] . . . in order [for parents] to verbally penetrate and regulate ‘even the smallest detail of everyday life’ . . . of their children as well as one another.

(Ochs and Taylor, 1992: 330) We should, however, note that as well as surveying and monitoring children in this way, parents are also inspecting themselves. They are effectively undertaking the role of the ‘good’ parent: one who is supposed to show interest and concern about children’s activities. In ‘table talk’, therefore, we can see two constructions going on: parents are constructing themselves in the ethics of parenthood and children are constructed as subjects who have to be trained, disciplined and watched over. The mealtime, as we have already said, is an activity where the modern family itself is constructed. We may note that this model of the family meal is relatively recent. Less than a hundred years ago commentators on family life recommended that children eat separately from adults, preferably in a nursery. This was so that children were not prematurely tempted by adult dietary practices and other aspects of adult life which could be corrupting for both the body and the mind (Kociumbas, 1982). Modern families, on the other hand, are encouraged to eat together and, as we have seen, expert advice is available to help make mealtimes easier and happier. Aries (1973) sees this change as part of the growing


autonomy required in order to construct the ‘private’ family; one in which servants and intruders are kept at a distance or excluded altogether from family life. Thus the ‘private’ domain which the family now occupies is one in which the task of bringing up children is left to the co-operation of parents who seek and gain satisfaction and fulfilment through the practices of expert knowledges that construct ‘proper’ parenting.

The construction of meals In all of the twelve families in this study, women were the principal food providers. They mainly planned, shopped for, prepared and cooked food. In most families, however, men helped in this process by either undertaking food preparation (most commonly weekend breakfasts and lunches), by taking care of children while food preparation was in progress or by helping with shopping. But how does the cook decide what to cook? Couples were asked to describe how food decisions were made. Extract 9 I: We’ve kind of talked about this before but I’m interested in how the cook decides what to cook. Wendy: What I feel like. Well basically I do try to keep it nutritious, but I’m trying to shift away from beginning planning the meal with meat to beginning planning with the vegetables and that’s difficult because the children don’t like vegetables. But [husband] and [eldest son] do, so that’s all right. So this has made a difference between how can I make hamburger or chicken interesting to how can I make the vegetables interesting and what can I do with this other stuff. I have lots of cookbooks and I go through and say, ‘Oh that would be neat and that would be great’ and if I remember then I get the ingredients and try it. Extract 10 Alison: I guess basically I’m just aiming to provide what I regard as a wellbalanced diet, with a reasonable amount of variety in it. So that would include foods on a daily basis from each of the five food groups. Extract 11 Maria: I mean, we like ((pauses)). Well I try to eat healthy, you know in a healthy way. But I also really like going out and having a bit of fun


and I think there’s a happy medium. I don’t think you need to be super strict on those sorts of things. I think it’s just nice to know that you’re eating reasonably healthy, or living a reasonably healthy lifestyle, but having a bit of fun at the same time, I mean, we could all be knocked over by a bus tomorrow, couldn’t we. The choice of family food was considered on the basis of what was ‘nutritious’ and ‘healthy’. This entailed a number of strategies: an emphasis on vegetables rather than meat or, in Alison’s case, an explicit recognition of a ‘technology’ of nutrition, the five food groups. The effect of nutrition in producing subject positions is very evident here in its construction of the way meals are produced in family life. Indeed, we should notice that when Alison talks of ‘variety’ she means nutritional variety: the five food groups. We should also notice that cookbooks are sometimes needed in order to provide the variety which is important to ‘healthy’ family food. As Wendy says ‘I have lots of cookbooks and I go through and say, “Oh that would be neat and that would be great”’. Maria mentions how she feels the need to balance fun with healthy foods (‘not super strict’); so, for her, healthy foods are not necessarily fun. But as Maria says it is ‘nice to know that you’re eating reasonably healthy, or living a reasonably healthy lifestyle’. Discourses on nutrition, then, construct modern subjects who can choose foods according to certain principles. These principles are, on the one hand, scientific, rational, and nutri-centric and, on the other, ethical. The ethical possibilities around the provision of nutritious foods are likely to be made more evident in women who, through discourses on motherhood, have been given the responsibility of providing food – and ‘good’ food at that – to the family. Maria’s point about ‘going out and having a bit of fun’ raises a further problem within the government of food choice. Maria is referring here to those occasions when food is purchased outside the home, often known as ‘fast’ or ‘take-away’ food. ‘Fast foods’ provide a dilemma for families because, while they are a welcome break from cooking and are popular, they carry certain problems. As Angus says here: Extract 12 Angus: I think there’s also a bit of the feeling that if you need to resort to takeaway food on a Monday night, the rest of the week’s a probably well ((pauses)). If you’ve got to show a bit of discipline and cook a healthy meal it’s more likely to be on a Monday night, whereas Friday night


you sort of say ‘Oh well I’ve been responsible [during the week], now we’ll have some take-away food’. According to Angus, having to ‘resort’ to take-away foods at the start of the week is somehow not right. It is, perhaps, an indication of poor food or family management at the beginning of the week where it is important to make an effort and ‘show a bit of discipline and cook a healthy meal’ at home. The pre-eminence of home-cooked meals in the family menu has been emphasised in other studies on family eating habits, see Santich (1994) and Charles and Kerr (1988). Two ethical dilemmas are evident here for parents. The first concerns the fact that ‘take-away’ foods are commonly regarded as nutritionally suspect; they are popularly discounted as ‘unhealthy’. The second is that home cooking should take precedence because it shows that parents care. And that care is made explicit, as Patrick says below, by the provision of wholesome (nutritious) meals. Extract 13 Patrick: Well times have changed in attitude, family attitudes, you know, like a lot of parents don’t care, they’d rather go and buy take-away than sit down and have a wholesome meal at home ‘cause it’s easier for them. For Angus (Extract 12) ‘take-away foods’ are easier to justify on Fridays, after having been ‘responsible’ (eating wholesome meals at home) during the week. This, then, is an example of an askesis of food and nutrition. It is a training that requires discipline on the self by the self – not taking the easy option of ‘unhealthy’ take-away foods – in order to be a good parent and, indeed, a good citizen.

Children and family food As indicated earlier, the presence of children may be regarded both as a positive and a negative aspect of family meals. It is positive because children make these occasions family events (‘eating like a family’). It is also positive because it is the opportunity to train and discipline children in the familiarity of the meal table and in ‘good’ manners. Lastly, it is positive because these opportunities provide occasions for parents to exercise their parental responsibilities, thereby fulfilling the ethical role of teaching children regimes of choice, manners, independence and


self-regulation. In short, it allows parents to construct themselves and children as modern subjects. Children’s presence at mealtimes is, however, problematic when, as we have seen, they are reluctant to participant in ‘table talk’. Another problem is when they lack a willingness to try different foods. Extract 14 I: I’m wondering how the cook decides what to cook. Derek: [The menu is] predictable to the extent that some evenings Alison will be home later than others, and therefore there’s a propensity to have something quick and easy, like a spaghetti bolognaise, that’s the only predictability. The other predictability, I guess, could be predetermined because of [son’s] and [daughter’s] disposition to not eating certain foods, so that’s becoming, I guess, more of a factor in determining the family’s diet. (and later) I: Do you think the family menu would change if you had more time to prepare food? Alison: It might, although not dramatically I don’t think. We’re relatively basic in what we eat, aren’t we? [to Derek] And that’s partly because of the children’s choices, they’re not terribly adventurous in terms of what they’ll eat and I’m blowed if I’m going to cook four different things. Sometimes I do two different things, something for us and something for them. If I know it’s something that they just won’t look at, it’s pointless putting it in front of them. Yes, I guess, possibly if I had more time, it might, although probably not too much at the moment purely because the kids aren’t terribly adventurous, so I’m not likely to spend hours preparing something exotic. (and later) Alison: It’s a nuisance [coping with children’s food preferences]. It’s a great nuisance but I tend to do the things, when I’m cooking two separate things, I’ll do things that I know the children will definitely eat, so at least I don’t feel I’ve gone to all this trouble to do two separate things and find that they don’t eat what I gave them anyway. So things like chicken, I’m quite sure they’ll eat, and they like the Ingham’s chicken fillets done in the oven and you can be quite sure that they’ll get eaten and so I guess, it depends a bit on what mood I’m in.


Alison and Derek’s experience are typical of the dilemmas confronting parents who, as part of the ethics of parenting, are required to allow children a fair degree of choice. Providing choice to children, however, raises the possibility that children will not eat what is offered thereby requiring extra effort to be put into meal production. For the cook, the provision of a separate meal for children is all part of the pragmatic considerations in producing a meal. As Alison says ‘at least I don’t feel I’ve gone to all this trouble to do two separate things and find that they don’t eat what I gave them anyway’. The problems of feeding children in some contemporary Australian homes has been described by Grieshaber (1993) who undertook a detailed analysis of four families. Grieshaber found that most conflict arose out of the enforcement of behaviours at mealtimes (for example, children picking up food with hands, speaking with mouths full of food, not saying ‘please’ or ‘pardon’, and so on). Conflict, however, often involved food selection. In certain instances parents attempted, unsuccessfully, to force or spoon-feed children in order to get them to eat. None of the parents in the current study spoke of resorting to these measures. Most opted for rules about how much food should be eaten or explicitly accounting for children’s food preferences. Extract 15 Diana: Sometimes like maybe I might think, ‘Oh yeah, well tomorrow we’ll have this’, but some days I have to sit down and really sort of think and I sort of ((pauses)), I’ll ask Tony [husband] and I’ll ask Carlo [son] ‘What do you want to eat tonight?’. And like last night I said to Carlo ‘What do you want to eat?’ and he said ‘Chicken’. So I said ‘Fine, all right we’ll have chicken’ and everyone will have chicken tonight, and Tony will eat it, so it’s not that I’ll say ‘Tonight I feel like this, I don’t care what you want, this is what we’re having’. I always try to cook something that I know that Tony’s going to get a good meal at and at least Carlo will have something that he will like. And that’s how I go by it. Extract 16 Wendy: If there is anything they really, really have an aversion to I don’t fix it or I’ll fix it for somebody else. Anything else the rule is they have to take one bite. Sometimes they find out they like it and they eat it; that does happen. But I don’t see turning the mealtimes into a battleground anyway.


In order to deal with difficulties arising out of the feeding of children, regimes and procedures were introduced. These were articulated as rules about how much to eat (‘take one bite’) or, in some cases, children’s preferences were openly canvassed and catered for. Diana, for example, actively sought Carlo’s opinion about his preferences which then formed the basis of the family meal. These regimes are mainly in line with the advice of experts in feeding children who warn not to force children to eat (Hirschmann and Zaphiropoulos, 1985; Turner, 1986; Baker and Henry, 1987). Management practices around food therefore position parents in regard to discourses on the ‘right’ ways of feeding children and the right ways to manage the family meal which should be efficient and enjoyable. The differences between family mealtimes today and those of earlier generations (for example, when these adults were children) were often discussed. There was a general feeling that regimes around the meal table had changed greatly over the last twenty to thirty years. Extract 17 Stella: I virtually had no say in what meals went on the table as a child, whereas my kids do have a say in what does go on the table. Extract 18 Angus: I think it might be harder [to feed children today]. I think when I was a kid I was served meat and two veg [ [The same Hilary: thing every night virtually. Angus: And I was expected to pretty much eat it and if I didn’t eat it I wouldn’t get dessert. And that would be legit, like if I didn’t eat it I wouldn’t get dessert. Whereas these days we say, you serve meat and two veg or three veg and you say ‘If you don’t eat it you won’t get dessert’ and they don’t eat it but they still get dessert. And it’s not just us [ Hilary: [But we ’re not strict like, we’re just not strict. Angus: It’s not just us that are soft, I think it’s just like everything shifts to the left, you know, society is just a bit more malleable whereas when I was a kid it was a bit more black and white. As Angus and Hilary say, mealtimes in earlier generations were ‘strict’. If children did not behave appropriately ‘dessert’, the sweetest part of the meal,


was often withheld. Their comments suggest that now society has gone ‘soft’ (or shifted to the ‘left’) and discourses on parenting require that children be treated less harshly (‘they don’t eat it but they still get dessert’). As Wendy says (Extract 18) meals should not be a battleground. Thus the management of children’s behaviour around food is now predicated on ethics which promote choice and freedom to children. These ethics are not only practised and promoted in the home, as we shall see in the next section.

Children, independence and choice The place of formal training of children, in schools for example, was discussed in relation to behaviour around food. It often arose when adults reflected on their own food experiences during childhood. Extract 19 Alison: I’ve been trying to work out why [our children are difficult to feed], and I suspect that they seem to grow up a lot more quickly these days and I think partly because school encourages them to think a lot more for themselves and they are taught that they have rights as children and so they question what we tell them far more, and that includes things like what they’re going to eat and what they’re not going to eat and how they’re going to eat it and where. Because I’m sure at the age I was, when I was the age that my two children are now, I would certainly ((pauses)) certainly wasn’t coming up with some of the things that these two are coming up with us now. My mother comments on that quite a lot. She says, it’s just, you know, they’re just sort of coming up with things now that I would have been in my early teens before I was questioning what mum and dad was saying to me, so I think it’s just a whole new approach at school. As Alison says, the child’s rights are dealt with explicitly at school, thereby providing children with notions of autonomy and choice. In the next extract, May, who arrived in Australia from Vietnam ten years ago, contrasts the position of children as subjects in Vietnam and in Australia. Extract 20 May: Maybe I [take notice of my children] because I think Vietnamese people you know, their children, when they upset about parent they don’t


I: May:

want to say about them, only keep inside. Because now the children learn Australian school they have their opinion and I think I have to hear ((pauses)) listen to them, you know, in Vietnam parents very rarely listen to the children. Is that right? Yeah, the children only [do] what the parent say [and] they have to obey, or have to do anything that the parent wants them to do, you know, and now maybe my children is better than in Vietnam.

Children in Australia are thus constructed by discourses of freedom or choice which May sees as preferable to the subject position of children she believed prevailed in Vietnam. She makes the point that children have to be listened to. Their views have to be considered. These practices are, in fact, part of the role of today’s ‘good’ parent: the listener, the reflective adviser, the ‘sounding-board’ for children’s thoughts, desires, and beliefs. They are techniques which are part of programmes like ‘Parent Effectiveness Training’ (Gordon, 1975), later to become ‘Systematic Training For Parents’ (Dinkmeyer and McKay, 1989), which form the basis of most parenting guidance in Australia. In these regimes, parents are asked to refrain from making judgements about, and giving direct answers to, children. Instead parents should be ‘good listeners’ who can give ‘open’ responses, ask ‘open’ questions or ‘turn questions around’ thereby encouraging children to think and consider for themselves the consequences of an action or a solution to a problem. What we see here are the tactics of the ‘confessional’: the techniques through which subjects problematise themselves in the production of selfreflecting, self-regulating individuals. We can see, then, that teaching children autonomy and choice not only produces them as modern, moral subjects but also assists in the production of ‘good’, that is, ethical, parents who can show the right concern for their children’s views. The school also plays another role specifically in the area of food and health. As we mentioned earlier in this chapter, schools in Australia now include nutrition as part of the primary and secondary syllabus. Moreover, school canteens are encouraged to promote healthy foods to children. Parents were well aware of these activities. Extract 21 Jack: See, I think the kids at school, that’s what I meant to tell you too, it’s not just what’s on TV and what you read in the papers or hear


on radio, the kids get influenced a lot at school now because I think that comes in their education a lot more than what it did when we were at school. I mean you never got told what you should eat and what you shouldn’t eat at school and the canteens just had everything there, where now the canteens tend to [ [They try to keep it Bridget: healthy ((pauses)) cut all those ((indistinct)) Jack: Like selling fruit and things like that and you know muesli bars and things like that. When we went to school all they had was what you would get in the local deli. Whereas [in] a lot of schools the canteens are tending towards the healthier type of food and they get, and I think they get taught it at school, I think that’s part of the [ Bridget: [Most of the kids know. Not that they take a lot of notice though ((pauses)) I mean they still like the [ Jack: [Yes, but they still know [ Bridget: [junk stuff. Jack: That’s something that we never did. I mean it’s only just recently in the last ten years or so that people are a bit more conscientious I think. Extract 22 Mary: A lot of the teachers these days are into healthy foods. Phillip’s had a teacher for the last two years who has been into walking, a lot of walking, [and] eating certain foods. Sometimes it got annoying to the extent he’d come home and say ‘My teacher said I have to’ and I said, ‘I don’t care, your teacher is not here’. Extract 23 George: Talking about information, the children have come home and they get taught nutrition at school and by helping the children with their homework and reading the notes that they have has also been a good source of information so the children have been approached at a fairly early age to think about the food triangle and try and eat more of the ((pauses)) eat less of the fats and sugars at the top and then concentrate on the vegetables and fruits and carbohydrate foods that aren’t high in calories.


I:

Now has that been a kind of a learning experience for you, helping them with that? George: It has been. I: So the information they’ve brought into the home has been helpful? Anne: It’s been helpful. George: It’s helped me quite a lot as well. The effects of nutrition as a discourse is well illustrated in Extract 25. Here George demonstrates his familiarity with a food model (the food triangle) used at school to teach his children ‘good’ nutrition. This concept has now become part of his understanding of food. Both he and Anne agree that they are ‘helped’ and assisted to deal with problems which arise out of, and are indeed solved by, a discourse on nutrition. George is now aware of the ‘fats and sugars at the top’ and the ‘vegetables and fruits and carbohydrate foods that aren’t high in calories’. In the previous chapter we saw that a major objective in domestic science education in schools was to directly influence family food habits. This was to be facilitated by the introduction of new foods and meals into the students’ homes. Now we see the same effect with nutrition knowledge. School thus provides a nutrition pedagogy for the community.

Nutrition knowledges and practices The couples in this study were asked about their awareness of current nutrition issues and the extent to which these may have influenced family eating practices. A range of topics were raised which are relevant to modern nutrition: Extract 24 Alec: I think the thing is that there’ll be times when I’ll just say, ‘I’ll fix dinner tonight’ and go whip something up. And generally it will have meat in it. She [wife] has weaned the family away from red meat like ((pauses)) I think there at one point it was six or seven times a week, now it’s two or three. (and later) Alec: Since we’ve been married we’ve used margarine and usually polyunsaturated, less than a month ago we’ve now switched to butter [ Wendy: [But sparingly


Alec: Wendy:

[But we use butter in place of margarine. Yes, but the point was, I mean originally the choice for margarine over butter was that it was not an animal fat and therefore wouldn’t clog up your arteries and all that. And the book, in fact is called How To Be Your Own Nutritionist, said that it’s basically a choice between potential heart problems with butter or potential cancer problems with margarine. It said at this point we know more about preventing heart disease than we do about preventing cancer so he said I would recommend butter but use it sparingly. And that in a way does make sense.

Extract 25 Anne: See, that’s something we eat very little of now. George: What’s that? Anne: Sugar. I’ve always had two teaspoons full in every cup of tea or coffee that I had and it took me two years to get off it. George: Your weakness is sweets at night after a meal, and cream. Let’s face it, that’s something you’ve got to concentrate on. Anne: We were in the supermarket Saturday morning and I picked up the cream and you said, ‘You don’t need that’, and I put it down, and I picked it up again, then when I knew he [George] wasn’t looking I slipped it in the basket. That’s where I say he’s so much stronger. George: At least you’re aware. You’re aware of it now. Anne: I know, yes, but I must be like my mother. The couples here say they have made changes to their eating habits in line with recent nutrition recommendations. Continued modification of their diets, on the basis of nutrition developments, is evident in the switch back to butter by Alec and Wendy. Using the rationale provided by popular literature (How To Be Your Own Nutritionist), Wendy weighs up the potential health risks of butter and margarine. The decision to use butter is clear to Wendy, as she says ‘it makes sense’. At work here is the government of nutrition operating through, inter alia, popular literature which provides a people’s version or an ‘ethno-nutrition’ description about cardiopathology (‘clog up your arteries’). Visible, too, in Extract 25 is the ethics of nutrition in which Anne has to demonstrate moral fortitude in order to overcome her predilection for sugar (‘it took me nearly two years to get off it’) in the face of George who is ‘much stronger’. We see, then, the dilemmas which confront


subjects in the government of food choice and the ethical indeterminacy that arises. Anne is reminded by George of the ethical position required of the modern subject of food choice in respect to cream (‘you don’t need that’) but she slipped it in the shopping basket anyway. At work here is the moral problematisation of pleasure. We have seen in earlier chapters how this operated in earlier times, for example ancient Greece and early Christianity. For modern subjects of the government of food choice, pleasure needs to be rationalised against the health of the body vis-à-vis the science of nutrition. Nutrition also produces subjects as parents because children are considered to be in need of ‘nutri-pedagogy’: they have to be taught to eat ‘good’ food. Extract 26 I: How about nutrition? I mean cholesterol issues and [ Rose: [We tend to avoid those sort of things. I: But would you be aware of them? Rose: Oh, yes. Vic: Of course, yeah. Rose: Well we switched to olive oil a long time ago, didn’t we? And we cut salt out of our diet. Vic: Salt, salt, yes. (and later) I: To what extent do you think that [information on health and nutrition] influences the way you feed the children, the food you provide for the children? Vic: We try to[ Rose: [We try, I mean if you can get them to eat it. Yeah, I would like them to eat meat and three vegetables every night, but they don’t always. Extract 27 May: Yeah, [our children] don’t like steamed, they only like fried, but I know oil is very dangerous for them you know. I: You know it’s very dangerous for them? Is that right? May: Yes, because a lot oil that’s not good for children. A lot, you say, cholesterol is it?


I: May:

Cholesterol? Ah, okay [ [I know that.

Extract 28 Alison: We can’t convince the children that they shouldn’t be eating white bread, that they should be eating either a mixed grain or a wholemeal type bread, but we certainly do. That is my taste preference as well. (and later) Alison: What about the vegetables, you know, if they [children] don’t want them, they don’t want them and that is all there is to it, and you cannot force them to eat them. But intellectually they acknowledge that, yes, vegetables are supposed to be good for you, but it’s like taking a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. Here we can see that Alison’s taste preferences coincide with her ethical position on nutrition. In other words, she prefers the taste of these foods which also happen to be healthier. This is not the case for her children for whom there is a misalignment between the ethics of nutrition (‘intellectually acknowledge that, yes, vegetables are supposed to be good for you’) and their experiences by way of taste preferences (‘cannot force them to eat vegetables’). The making good of this mismatch becomes part of the moral training of children around food and, as such, it represents Kant’s sensibilityintellectual struggle in regard to moral autonomy. In respect to food in these families, this struggle is managed by the training and disciplining of family members. During the last century’, adult food was considered to be ‘bad’ for children, corrupting body and soul. Now the moral significance of food as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is justified in terms of its nutritional content, expressed most vividly in Extract 27 by May (cholesterol is ‘dangerous’ for children). The danger of cholesterol lies in its potency as a risk factor for future heart disease. And, of course, there are many other foods and nutrients which are regarded as ‘risky’, therefore ‘bad’ and therefore dangerous. The point here is that the categorisation of foods as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ did not just emerge with nutritional science. The moral problematisation of food has, as we have seen in earlier chapters, been part of Western culture since antiquity. Nutrition is the modern product of this morality which accounts for popularity. In the next section we will look at the popularity and availability of current nutrition discourses.


Sources of information Respondents were asked where, for them, information on nutrition came from. In the next extract Greg begins by listing some common nutritional ‘facts’. Extract 29 Greg: Sweets ((pauses)) I suppose eating a few sweets in moderation is all right. I don’t think there is any real dramas with that. I think everyone requires something, a bit of sweetness every now and then but still, as I said before, I think it’s mainly your fatty, real fatty foods and that sort of thing. I think that’s where the biggest killer is, high cholesterol and stuff. I: Where do you get that kind of information from? I’m very interested where people get that stuff. Cassie: Oh, you read it in the magazines ((pauses)) magazines, you see it on TV. Greg: Yeah, it’s always advertised around the place. Extract 30 Wendy: Well I read a lot about it, I mean not only magazine articles, you hear things on TV. But I’ve noticed particularly if it’s a segment on the news generally what they tell you is something that isn’t really news, I mean the information has been around for quite a while. But with most of the magazines I read, women’s magazines, they have something about nutrition and something more at a layperson’s level not chemical formulas and that. Extract 31 I: Now where do you get that information from. I mean that’s actually very current and very topical information about nutrition. Where would you get that information from? Jack: It must be on the wireless half a dozen times a day. I: Is it? Jack: Mm, it’s always on the wireless. You see it on television all the time. I: What, as part of advertisements for different foods, or as part of government campaigns, or [ Jack: [Probably a bit of both.


Extract 32 I: Can you remember where you got the information about health from? Rose: From the media I guess. Vic: Just generally the press, either written or television or radio. Those lifestyle programs on TV. Rose: Healthy, Wealthy and Wise or something. Vic: There used to be that programme on Channel 2 didn’t there? Nutrition information is freely available through a variety of media sources. In the previous chapter, the print media’s role in promoting nutrition was historically situated in Australia. We saw how, in the 1920s, newspaper columnists reported the latest findings about the effects of food on the body thereby tapping into and, indeed, (re)producing discourses on nutrition. Now nutrition is also part of the electronic media, for example, on entertainment shows about health. The reporting of nutrition in this way often re-interprets, or modifies it in order to produce a familiar, or ‘ethnonutrition’, discourse. A good example was in Extract 26 in which Wendy spoke about fat ‘clogging up the arteries’. Nutrition thus becomes popularised; it becomes a commodifiable media product. This process transforms a complex science like nutrition into a product of sheer entertainment; one which finds its place in magazines, newspapers and popular TV programmes. Thus nutrition, as a technology of power, is translated and appropriated at a ‘layperson’s level’ (Extract 30). In these interviews we have examined a number of ways in which individuals are constructed, and the way they construct themselves, as subjects of the government of food choice. We have seen how, for these couples, the modern family is realised in family mealtimes. We saw how, as ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’, subjects have ethical obligations in regard to children’s health and behaviour in relation to food. We also looked at the way children are produced as modern subjects through training and discipline and through the notion of autonomy and choice. And we saw how ‘wives’ and ‘husbands’ are produced by different domestic regimes around food where women mainly are the main producers of food and men mainly ‘help’. We have made clear in this chapter that the modern household, or oikos, is produced by the knowledges and practices derived from expert knowledges about families through discourses of motherhood, fatherhood and family life. These regimes not only objectify subjects by situating them within


fields of knowledge that determine conduct in regard to specific objectives (technologies of power), they also produce subjects as ethical individuals through technologies of the self.

Conclusions By examining the construction of parents in relation to food choice, we have in this chapter seen how nutrition opens up a number of possibilities for the discipline and training of family members. Central to this is the expert knowledge concerning what it means to be a parent today. In other words, parenting is the object of a variety of discourses, one of which is nutrition. Expert advice now infuses and shapes the personal investments of parents. Through this process, expert opinion not only informs parents but also provides them with an index of what is considered to be the ‘proper’ way of managing children. Expertise thus becomes the benchmark against which parents’ behaviour is judged by others and, importantly, by parents themselves. In other words, parents know they are doing a ‘good’ job by reference to expert opinion. As a technology of power, expertise outlines and facilitates the production of ‘normality’ – understood as that which is considered to be normal – in childhood which, in the end, is what most parents aspire to. The popularity of books, journals and articles, and electronic media coverage of parenting skills is an indication of these aspirations. In trying to understand this popularity we should not see parents as cultural or ‘judgemental dopes’ (Heritage, 1987) who are beguiled by expert advice against their will or better nature. On the contrary, we should recognise that parents . seek out this information in order to better handle the complex and often difficult process of bringing up children. It is through technologies of the self that parents actively seek to transform themselves through attempts to ‘do it right’, especially the ways in which they regulate and evaluate their actions and their goals. Let us finish this chapter by recognising that Foucault’s work shows us that the ethical relationship we have with ourselves today, in which we reflect and regulate ourselves through a problematisation of our actions and deeds in relation to expert (moral) codes are entirely historically situated. This was not, for example, the basis of ethical comportment in early Greece. Neither were the modern preoccupations in marriage relationships over what may be regarded as ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ behaviours between men and women, or parents and children, to be found in the Hellenistic period. The modern household, its


conjugal arrangements, the obligations parents have to children, and those that men and women have to each other, has a specific genealogy. The examination of this genealogy shows us that things can, and have been otherwise. Men as husbands and fathers, women as wives and mothers and children as progeny have, in times past, been ethically constructed in these roles through very different obligations, concerns and practices. In modern families, as we have seen, subjects are constructed through technologies of power via expert knowledges of family life, and via technologies of the self. And we have seen how, as a ‘tool’ of government, nutrition operates in this construction.

Chapter 10

Conclusions

This book has covered a number of historical periods and social transformations that have been important in understanding the development of a science of food choice. One of the major aims has been to theorise the modern subject of food choice. In showing how this subject has been historically situated in modernity we have provided an account of nutrition that is quite different from others. Throughout this book it has been stressed that nutrition did not arrive unannounced, as it were, 150 years ago. It was pre-figured by a number of earlier concerns and problematisations about food and body in Western culture. But neither was the emergence of nutrition an inevitable part of so-called scientific or medical progress. It was, instead, dependent upon a collection of historically fragile contingencies in which it became possible to consider food and the body in certain ways. At the beginning of this book three questions were proposed. They were 1 2 3

What considerations were made regarding diet prior to the emergence of nutrition? What conditions of possibility were important for the emergence of nutrition? How does nutrition discourse circulate today; how is it produced and reproduced, and in what ways does it produce modern subjects?

These questions will be used to organise this conclusion. In addressing the first question, we have seen how diet in antiquity constituted a problem with regard to pleasure. In early Greece, concerns about diet – especially in relation to diet for the right occasion, for the right climate, at the right time and in the right amount – became part of the art of the self. We saw how a daily concern about food and health, as part of the dietetics, was central to a philosophy

Conclusions 173

of conduct. Ethics in regard to diet was important for the Greeks because through moderation, subjects could display self-mastery in relation to natural or common pleasures. Thus a specific concern, or attitude, for the self was cultivated through which citizens showed that they could govern themselves and, ipso facto, they could govern others. This aesthetics of existence, based on self-control, led to natural reason, logos, and the ‘truth’. Moving to Imperial Rome we saw how citizens understood themselves as subjects according to new precepts and problems. The Roman self became concerned with the privatisation of life in which medicine (and, increasingly, pathology), marriage and sexuality began to add new pressures and new obligations. Compared to those in early Greece, Roman citizens were required to understand themselves in a more complex and more extensive field of power where the details of everyday life, especially pertaining to bodily practices, were opened up for scrutiny and self-problematisation. The importance of askesis, training and exercise, was central to life in general and bodily pleasures in particular. Thus fasting and austere food practices were practised by the Epicureans and the Stoics in order to prove that they could endure privations if necessary. The central features and considerations of food and health in these historical periods may be summarised as follows. First, in relation to natural pleasures (for example, eating and drinking) there had to be a balance between need, use and desire. These practices in themselves enhanced pleasure because they showed that one could be moderate and self-masterly. Pleasure arose from satisfying a natural desire and from a specific ethical comportment in relation to that desire. Second, through the dietetics, there was a need to attend to one’s health and, therefore, one’s diet on a daily basis. The relationship between what one ate and health was fundamental to one’s medical practice, itself a personal responsibility. Third, the practices concerned with the ‘art of living’ were not codified in the sense that they comprised strict moral rules. They were, instead, a general set of understandings; they were a set of variables which one had to consider. What we see in antiquity, then, is a construction of a self by the self in relation to a set of loose principles. These emanated from, amongst other things, an individual’s concern about the body and health and, ultimately, truth. As we move from the Greek to the Roman period, the importance of self-questioning and self-problematisation in relation to what one ‘ought to do’ takes on a greater significance in order that one ‘know thyself’ and in order that one has a beautiful existence.

174 Conclusions

The whole notion of diet and health in antiquity was, therefore, totally different from that which we understand today. Diet was integral to a philosophy of life. As part of the dietetics, the conduct of eating was important for the construction of the self. Moral values that surround diet today, where guilt, remorse and contrition are frequently expressed in regard to food choice, were absent. Food excesses meant that an individual was regarded as unfit to rule, but never sinful. Food and sin were, however, central to Christian belief where the innateness of natural appetites (food and sex, especially) were associated with greed, lust and gluttony. In appeasing natural appetites, eating and drinking detracted from spiritual salvation. The sinful nature of food, caused partly by its externality to the body and partly by its capacity to incite passion, put eating in a different light. Fasting and food austerity became central practices for Christians and the way of monastic life. The body was also problematic for Christians because illness was a product of evil. Suffering through illness was believed to be corrective and spiritually beneficial. Christian beliefs recast attitudes to food and health in ways different from those in antiquity. And while austerity over food was central to both belief systems, the reasons for undertaking ascetic practices were entirely different. For both the Greeks and the Romans, austerity was concerned with moderation of pleasure, the right amount at the right time for the right need, in order to ethically comport oneself properly. For the Christians, problems of concupiscence required that pleasure be effaced altogether. Christian askesis around food was conducted in relation to strict moral codes which were under the higher law of God. Food and the body were linked to human sensuality and animality. Morality and spiritual purity could only result from food practices which were austere. From the early Christian period to the Middle Ages, diet was increasingly indexed against a religious register, fasting became integral to Christian life, and rituals that included food, such as the Eucharist, became an austere acknowledgment of Christ’s broken and suffering body. What conditions of possibility were important for the emergence of nutrition? As we have seen, nutrition as a discipline of science emerged during the middle of the nineteenth century. As a concern about health, however, nutrition was preceded by seventeenth-century discourses on food conduct. These were

Conclusions 175

invariably shaped by moral anxieties about certain modes of life, especially excess living. While these concerns can be attributed to Christianity in general, we have stressed that the emergence of Modern Man, exemplified in ascetic Protestantism, was highly influential. We argued that non-conformist religions made possible understandings of human spirituality that could be separate from understandings of the world of nature. We also saw how Enlightenment philosophy privileged a humanism in which pure reason was elevated to being a universal form of humanity. These developments in modernity provided a number of conditions of possibility for nutrition. First, Protestant pedagogy cultivated certain scientific endeavours in the eighteenth and nineteenth century which addressed questions about life and labour and about food and the body. Second, Kantian philosophy continued the practices of self-problematisation of human sensuousness in the name of intellectual purification. Within Kantian, and other Enlightenment forms of reasoning, sensuality is rationalised. As Kant’s ‘Tischgesellschaft’ showed us, eating for pleasure, as a sensual experience of the body, always struggles with intellectual pursuits. Thus the Aufklärung transformed Christian ethics, in which the sensuous nature of food pleasure detracts from spirituality, into an ethics of modernity in which food pleasure detracts from reason, logic and intellectual pursuits. The examination of food as a scientific object, with little regard to any aesthetic quality or meaning, becomes possible, and even privileged. Third, as we saw in the previous chapter, the emergence of modernity brought with it a specific form of choice and autonomy – moral autonomy. The modern subject is the ‘choosing subject’, and we saw how notions of choice and the importance of choice – always set in a particular context of ‘rightness’ – have been central to social and biological discourses in nutrition. We also saw how the deprivation of food choice in the workhouse and the prison was central to a morality of deservedness. In the nineteenth century nutrition emerges as a science in which food was relieved of almost all of its aesthetic, sensual pleasures. Nutrition calculated, rationalised and allocated food for the purpose of nourishing the body on the basis of scientific reason. But, through reasoned austerity, nutrition also nourished the soul. It provided an askesis by which individuals could address moral problems which were explicit in Christian belief but have now become part of a moral reason of modernity. Morality around food for the modern subject was less an acknowledgment of God’s wish and more an autonomous, moral choice: the ‘right’ and ‘proper’ thing to do.

176 Conclusions

How does nutrition discourse circulate today; how is it produced and reproduced and in what ways does it produce modern subjects? We have seen that social and biological problems were central to the increasing amplification and dispersion of discourses on nutrition. In the early part of this century the social space opened up by surveillance medicine provided an opportunity for nutrition to be introduced into the home. The combination of discourses on nutrition with discourses about the family were facilitated by increasing anxiety about the social and moral conditions in which children were being reared. As twentieth-century discourses about the public’s health focused more specifically on the behaviours of individuals, food choice took on a new importance. The habits of the whole population now required greater scrutiny through discourses on the diseases of ‘lifestyle’ and perceived problems of affluence and increased food choice. We argued that post-war developments in nutrition were made possible by discourses stressing austerity and moderation in what was believed to be the midst of plenty. In Australia, the government of food choice, in the form of nutrition, became central to understanding and controlling common degenerative diseases of affluence. These concerns informed, and were informed by, a moral problematisation of ‘lifestyle’. In the area of food choice, we have seen how discourses on the ‘proper’ (that is, ‘natural’) way of eating were propounded by diverse groups such as the medical profession, the counter-culture, the food industry and consumers. The mundane problem of eating thus required that food habits be subject to extensive surveillance and intervention. In this book we have focused particularly on the family as the site of intervention because it is the institution in which food choices are cultivated and exercised. Individual family members now govern themselves as subjects of food choice as nutrition becomes, on the one hand, part of the duty to be well, and, on the other, part of the ‘good’ child, the ‘good’ parent and the ‘good’ citizen. Modern nutrition is, then, an ethics routed through biology, and it is a moral regulation through askesis founded on the knowledge about the ‘right’ foods to eat that are ‘good’; it is thus both a physical and spiritual discipline. The arguments presented in this book challenge a number of earlier proposals about the nature of nutrition. For example, we can question Turner’s assertion that, for modern dietary sciences, ‘The body is no longer informed by “divine

Conclusions 177

Sobriety”, but by calories and protein so that discipline and efficiency can be measured with precision and certainty’(Turner, 1982a: 29). From the arguments presented in this book, the subject of modern dietary science continues to be suffused with ethical and ‘spiritual’ problems in the form of a government of food choice. The ethics of nutrition might not be explicitly ‘divine’, but it is spiritual and it is sober. We can also call into question Turner’s proposal that current interests in dietary sciences have at their foundation an obsession with sexuality. The arguments in this book suggest that nutrition discourse is not so much concerned with the construction of a specifically sexual subject as with the construction of a more general ethical subject. Similarly, we can argue against ideas that nutrition is a restrictive, oppressive discourse which has established itself only to disempower the modern soul. On the contrary, we have consistently argued in this book that nutrition opens up new subjectivities, new desires and new horizons around food and the body to which subjects can aspire. Lastly, we should argue against any notions that nutrition is a mere tool of the ‘state’ which stifles individuals’ abilities to use scientific facts for rational decision-making about food choice. Equally we should resist other proposals that nutrition is a missed opportunity as a rallying point for the formation of ‘competent communities’. The account of nutrition undertaken in this book allows us to see nutrition for what it is: a government of food choice which situates individuals within a field of knowledge for explicit objectives, and, at the same time, provides them with a way of constituting themselves as ethical subjects through a decipherment of their pleasures and fulfilments. As we have seen, nutrition maps onto moral concerns about food and the body which have a long tradition in Western culture.

Appendix

The families The families recruited to the study reported here were randomly chosen from two different suburbs of Adelaide with different levels of material and economic privilege. These suburbs were identified from The Social Health Atlas of South Australia (Glover and Woollacott, 1990). One suburb, Burnside, has low levels of unemployment, high levels of home ownership and a large number of households with incomes over $50,000 per annum. The second area, The Parks, has a high number of households receiving state pensions and federal welfare benefits, high levels of unemployment and high levels of families living in government subsidised accommodation. Six families from each suburb were recruited. The reason for drawing families from these two area was to be able to speak to families from a range of backgrounds and with a range of experiences. A particular type of family was selected from those who volunteered to be part of this study: all were two-parent families (parents were living with the same households) and all had at least one child between five and twelve years of age. In other words, the information presented here concerns what might be called ‘average Australian families’. A description of their composition is given in Table A2. The names of all family members have been changed.

Method All families were interviewed in their homes. A pre-piloted scheme was developed to guide the interviews. The schedule consisted of openended questions about everyday routines around food preparation, shopping and other aspects of family food decision-making. All the

Appendix 179 Table A.2 Family members (including income and self-described employment) Couple

Children (age)

Annual income

Self-described employment

Wendy and Alec

Michael (15) Jack (9) Alice (6)

$70,000– $80,000

Wendy: writer Alec: publishing consultant

Maria and Harry

Peter (14) Kathy (13) Mark (11)

$50,000– $60,000

Maria: medical records administrator Harry: physical education teacher

Anne and George

Patricia (14) Lucy (11)

$50,000– $60,000

Anne: physiotherapist George: engineer

Alison and Derek

Michelle (9) Carter (7)

$50,000– $60,000

Alison: social worker Derek: unemployed

Bridget and Jack

Pauline (12) Nick (9)

$20,000– $25,000

Bridget: home manager Jack: carpenter

Patrick and Mary

Paul (16) Phillip (12) Martha (10)

$12,000– $16,000

Mary: unemployed Patrick: unemployed

Greg and Cassie

Jason (6) June (3)

$25,000– $30,000

Cassie: home manager Greg: diesel mechanic

Tony and Diana

Carlo (5)

$8,000– $12,000

Diana: unemployed Tony: unemployed

Rod and Stella

Zane (7) Christine (4)

$27,000

Stella: home manager Rod: plant operator

Hilary and Angus

Jane (9) John (4)

$80,000

Hilary: secondary school teacher Angus: university lecturer

Rose and Vic

William (6) Charlotte (3)

$50,000– $60,000

Rose: home manager Vic: sales

May and Chen

Lau (11) Min (10) Zuen (4)

$18,000

May: home manager Chen: technician

180 Appendix

interviews were aodio-taped and transcribed and the transcriptions were indexed and managed using NUD.IST (version 3.0.4, QSR Melbourne), a software package for handling qualitative data. This project was given ethics approval by the Clinical Investigation (Ethics) Committee, Flinders Medical Centre, Bedford Park, South Australia.

Notes

I


1

The term ‘Man’ has been used throughout to identify the subject of modernity as an historically constituted entity. It is also used to highlight the philosophical priority that has been given to this subject. I have used the term she/he for other expressions of gender.

9


1

The following transcript notations have been modified from the Jefferson protocol (see Atkinson and Heritage, 1984) and are used for clarification of the extracts: I: Interviewer speaks . . . material deleted [ Speakers interrupt or overlap, as in, Alec: Are you going to [ Tom: [Yes, I am. [ ] Word(s) added for clarification, for example, Sue: They [the children] eat bread. (( )) Change or interruption in flow of speech, for example ((pauses)) or ((laughs))

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Index

abstinence see asceticism, fasting Acts (of the Apostles) 41 Adam 42, 44 additives 143 Adelaide 95, 97 advertisements for food 104 affluence, influence on diet xiii, 120–2, 132, 148 agape 39–43 agriculture, develoments in 72–3, 143 Alcibiades 41 alcohol 68 Altdorf 72 Amundsen, D. 49–51 Andover Scandal 81–3 Angela of Foligno 46 Anstruther, I. 80, 82 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View 60 antiquity see Greece, Rome Appleby, A. 45 Arano, Cogliati, L. 51 Aries, P. 94, 154 Armstrong, D. 2–4, 93, 95, 99, 100, 108, 118, 122–3, 126 army, diet in 63 Arnotts 104 Aronson, N. 16, 24, 62–3, 72–4, 77, 88, 97–8 Art of Living in Australia 88 asceticism 16, 41, 44–5, 49, 56–63, 174; see also fasting Ashton, J. 21–2 Asian diet 146

askesis 12, 15, 37, 50, 54–5, 63, 157, 173–4 Atkinson, J. 77 Atwater, W. ix, 73–9, 85–6, 88, 95, 103 Augustine 38, 121 Augustine of Hippo 41 Australia 19–20, 24, 70, 75, 88–9, 92; national food and nutrition policy 116–7, 127; see also individual locations within Australia Australia and New Zealand Food Authority 115 Australians: food choice of 103–9, 149, 176; health of 95–99; meal construction of 155–7; nutrition of 114–48 Australian Anti Cancer Council 115 Australian Better Health Commission, Nutrition Taskforce of 117, 125 Australian Bureau of Statistics 132–3 Australian Consumers Association 129 Australian Dairy Council 124 Australian Health Ministers Advisory Council 115 Australian Health Society 70, 87 Australian Institute of Domestic Economy 103 Australian Institute of Public Policy 23 Australian Mothercraft Book 136 Australian National Heart Foundation 115 Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, Nutrition Committee of 119

Index 199 Australian Nutrition Foundation 115 availability of various foodstuffs 8 Baby and Child Care 137 babies: diet of 20, 99, 101–2, 108, 136, 143–4; baby health centres 20, 101–2; mortality rates 109 Baghurst, K. 140 Baker, S. 138, 160 Barkas, J. 65 Barker, D. 123 Basil of Caesarea 49–50, 66 Basileias 50 Bassett, J. 141 Battle Creek Sanitarium 68–70 Baxter, J. 139 Beeton, I. 88–9 Begley, A. 115 Belasco, W. 141–2 Benedict, St 44 Benko, S. 41, 57 Bentham, J. 91 Bennett, V. 136 Bernauer, J. 35, 42, 54 Bevis, P. 41, 50 Boer War 96 Booth, W. 86, 95, 106 Boyle, R. 71 Boston Physiologic Society 68 Boulton, J. 124 Bower, C. 126 Braaten, C. 67 bread 83, 84; ritual significance of 40, 46 Brown. P. 41, 43 Budin, P. 95 Burnett, J. 86, 96, 110 Bynum, C. W. 42, 44–6 calories 107; increase in consumption 133 calorimeter 73 Calvinism 71 Camilla’s Bread 144 Cambridge University 98 Cannon, G. 143 Cardwell, G. 115, 128 Care of the Self 12, 34–7 Carson, R. 142

Capital (Marx) 86 Cassian, J. 38–9 Catherine of Sienna 46 Catholicism 57 Century Illustrated 88 cereal 69–70, 98 Chapman, C. 85 Charité 95 Charles, N. xiv, 128, 157 Cheyne, G. 16, 62, 66–7, 89, 121 children: diet of 19, 63–5, 82, 99–109, 135–40, 155–64 (control of by parents 132, 155–64); growth of 100–1, 103 (charts for 100); health 94–7, 99–103, 135–40; research including/ omitting 18; visibility of 93–4 Chittenden, R. 69 cholesterol see fat Chresis Aphrodision 31 Christ 38–40, 44–6, 67, 174 Christianity: austerity 41, 57; beginnings of xii, 41, 67, 76; beliefs 49, 58, 66, 174–5; charity 50, 75; church 8, 15, 25, 41, 46; codes of conduct 39; communion 40; concerns 13, 45, 175; correction 49; diet 51, 54, 67, 109; doctrine 9, 29, 39–40, 57; duty 68; ethics 29, 39, 40, 48, 50, 54, 56, 175; fasting 38, 44, 46; fellowship 41; food 38–40, 42–3, 45–6, 48, 51–3, 56; food conduct 37–9; health 50; hospitals 50; ideals 51; importance of food for 39–43; morals 13, 37, 66, 90, 166; pedagogy 28; penitence 37, 39; practices 25, 27, 38, 42, 44, 48, 54, 58, 67, 110; precepts 66; principles 49; ritual 41, 57, 174; roots 57; sects 41; self 11, 27, 31, 37, 39, 41–2, 50–1, 54, 109; soul 15, 50; spiritual discipline 15, 27, 43, 61, 66; technology of living 29; theology 9, 29, 50; thought 43; unity 46; views 49 choice of food see food choice Civilising Process, The 47 Clare of Assisi 46

200 Index Clement of Alexandria 41–3 Clements, F. ix, 19–20, 72, 133 Cleverley, J. 132 Clements, F. 105–7, 119 Coldbath Fields Prison 85 Collegium Fridericianum 58 Commonwealth Advisory Council on Nutrition 105–6, 119 Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration 107 Commonwealth Department of Health 106, 116, 118, 124 Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) 115 community health care/medicine 95, 101–3; see also baby health centres, governmentality, education Conferences, The 39 confession, religious 10, 37, 51 Confessions of the Flesh 37 Consultation de Nourrisons 95 continence 43; see also moderation convenience food 132–3, 135, 141; see also fast food, takeaway Cooke, M. 60 Coreil, C. 119 Corinthians 40 Cornaro, L. 52, 66, 121 counter culture 140–8 Coveney, J. 53, 114 Cranmer, Archbishop 46, 47 Crawford, D. 143 Crotty, P. ix, 18–22, 24, 74, 77, 127–8 Cumpston, J. 118 Curran, P. 38, 39 Dartmouth College 68 Davis, S. 67 Declaration of Childrens Rights 135 Deism 57 dental health 4, 96, 134, 149 De Proprietatibus Rerum 51 Department of Agriculture 74 Descartes, R. 6 Deutsch, R. 68 DeVault, xiv Dickens, C. 87

dietetics 12, 20, 32–4, 36, 50, 53, 63, 88, 173–4 diet 1, 31, 63, 69; aestheticism 87; Asian diet 146; of children 99–109, 135–40; choice 53, 88, 113–14, 131–5, 149–70, 177; counter culture 140–8; family diet 131–5, 155–64; guidelines 112; and health 112–130, 174 (see also health); ‘ideal diet’ 76; inadequate 85; lifestyle 122–7, 139, 142, 176; medical advice on ix (see also education); Mediterranean 146; obesity 120; peasant diet 146; poor law diet 81–90; practices 63; prison diet 81–90; rationalisation 16; dietary reform 18; regimes 16, 62, 70; scietics 76; for the sick 33; slimming 54; surveys 74; vegetarian 68; wholefood 141–5, 148; see also food, nutrition Diet for a Small Planet 144 dining arrangements/dinner party 60, 91, 150–5; see also Christianity (importance of food for), meal Dinkmeyer, D. 162 Diogenes 34 Discipline and Punish 8, 27 disease, in relation to food xii, 1, 23, 32–3, 49–55, 66, 93, 96, 97, 99–100, 108, 117–28 Donzelot, J. 94 Dreyfus, H. 56 Driver, F. 86, 90–1 Droulez, V. 124 Drummond, J. 96–7 Drury, N. 144 Duncan, G. 120 Dye Gussow, J. 125–6 Eating and Drinking with Jesus 39 education: on food issues 1, 10–11, 20–5, 75, 103–9, 115–7, 123, 128, 140, 163–4, 166–70 (in Australia 101–9, 166–70, in US 103–4); modern 25; professional, on nutrition 99; see also school Einstein, A. 2 Elias, N. 47

Index 201 elderly people, diet of 18 England 24, 47, 66, 70–2, 89, 94, 96, 99, 103, 106, 110, 112, 119, 132, 143 English Malady, The 66 enkrateia 12 Enlightenment x, 3, 5, 52, 57–8, 61, 77–8, 88, 92–3, 131, 175 Epicurians 34, 36, 173 episteme 5–8 Eros 40 ethics and food 31–55; see also Christianity, Greece, problematization, Rome Eucharist 39, 41–3 Europe 45, 47–8, 50–2, 57, 73, 75 Evagrius of Pontus 41 exagorusis 37, 41, 43 exomologesis 37–8, 43–4, 66 Fabian Society 24 Falconer, H. 124 Fallding, H. 135 family: diet 24, 99–111, 131–5, 150–71 (survey of 106, 108; interviews about 149–71, 178–80); health 94–7, 146; nutritional control within xiii, 93–109, 149–57 famine 45 Fardon, K. 123 fast food 23, 63; see also convenience, takeaway fasting 8, 38, 44, 173 fat: attitudes to in diet 18, 120, 122, 164–5, 167; quantity in diet 133, 134 Feeding and Care of the Baby 136 Feeding your Child 137 Feingold, B. 145 Fenner, F. 96 Ferngren, G. 49–51 fibre, dietary 122, 145 Fidanza, F. 99 Finch, L. 94 Finer, S. 80 Floud, R. 96 folic acid 126 food: appetite for 45–48; availability

of 8, 679; composition of 73; ‘food choice’ 1–4, 16–17, 26–8, 30–1, 52–3, 55, 62, 78, 86, 89, 90, 103–48, 149–70, 172, 177; conduct 31–4, 48; cost of 75; dialogue 105; ‘good food’ viii; good/bad dichotomy 28; economy 73; faddiness 136–8, 158–61; family 150–5; healthy 20, 48–52, 155–6, 163; history of 30, 48–52; hierarchics 28; labelling 144–5; related to lifestyle 122–7, 140–8, 176; meal construction 155–7; needs 16; new products 104–5; number of items produced vii; organic 144; plain 64, 67, 121; preparation 101; problematization of x, 8, 10, 48, 76–7, 137, 166; quantity of 73–4 (see also greed, moderation); rationalisation 79; safety 142; wholefood 141–5, 148; see also diet, nutrition Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) 133–4 Food of the Poorer Labouring Classes 85 Foucault, M. x–xiii, 5–7, 8, 12, 26–9, 32–9, 41–2, 45, 47, 50, 52–4, 56, 58, 62, 66, 79, 91–5, 109, 113, 121, 126–7, 129, 146–7, 149, 150; and food choice 1–13;and governmentality 14–17 Ford, H. 69 France 95–6 Franklin, B. 65 fruit, value of 98 Funk, C. 97 Galen 36 Geissen, University of 72 genealogy x–xi, 25–6 Germany 70–2, 73, 85, 96 Gerster, R. 141 Gibbons, Dr S. 87–8 Gibney, M. 24 Gilding, M. 140 Glanz, K. 124 Glasgow 97 gluttony see greed

202 Index God 41, 44, 46, 48–51, 54, 175; law of 13, 174; will of 15, 48, 51; see also Christianity Goldstone, S. 70 good: food viii, 28–9, 60; nutrition 18, 23 good/bad food dichotomy 28 Good Nutrition? ix Goodman, D. 57, 132–3 Gordon, C. 129 Gordon, T. 162 Gottingen 71 governmentality 66, 90; Foucault’s concept of 14–15, 26–8, 47–8 Grace, W. 5, 12, 30, 32–33, 36 Graham, S. 68, 98, 121, 141 Grass Roots 144 Great Ormond St. Hospital 95 Greco, M. 140 Greece, Ancient xii, xiii, 12, 13, 42, 46, 48, 50–3, 56, 57, 76, 91, 109, 166, 172–4; culture 12; ethics 32–55; philosophy 42–3 greed 47, 66; see also pleasure Greene, T. 58, 61, 71 Greenfield, C. 6 Grieshaber, S. 159 guilt, invoked by food viii; see also ethics, problematization Guthrie, H. 77 Gutting, G. 7 Guy, Dr 84 Hacking, I. 90–1, 102 Halle, University of 71 Hansel and Gretel 45 Hardyment, C. 131 Harris Poll 143 Harrison, J. 124 Hartmann, P. 124 Harvester Judgement 24, 107 Harvey, P. 124 Harvey-Young, J. 98 health 32–3, 49, 63, 94–7, 121–7; alternative healthcare 144; of children 99–102; of foods 129; promotion 2, 68–9, 123 (see also education); see also disease Health and Education in the Nursery 136

Henry, R. 138, 160 Herbert, G. 66 Heritage, J. 170 Hetzel, B. 119 Higgins, Justice 24, 106 Hinnebusch, W. 38 Hinske, N. 60 Hirschmann, J. 138, 160 history of nutrition xiii, 1, 6–7, 15, 19–20, 24–5, 27–8, 43–52, 71–7, 93–102, 172–7; see also Greece, Rome, Enlightenment, Middle Ages History of Human Nutrition in Australia ix History of Sexuality 11, 12, 31, 34–7 Hitchcock, N. 101, 124, 143 Hobbes, T. 61 home economics 75, 103 Home Management, Book of 88 Hooykaas, R. 57–8, 71 Hopkins, F. 98 hospitals 50, 93; foundling 94; Great Ormond St. 95; Sydney 121 How To Be Your Own Nutritionist 165 Hughes, R. 114 hunger 46; see also famine Hunter, I. xi–xii, xiv, 15, 25–7, 48, 59, 61–2, 71, 131 Hutchinson, R. 133 hygiene 75, 97, 101 Instruments of Good Works 44 Iggers, J. 28 illness see disease infant see babies, children James, R. 99, 123 Jews 41 Johnston, V. 81–5, 87 Johnstone, E. 24 Kant, I. 6, 57–62, 71, 76, 89, 110, 113, 131, 167, 175 Kellog, J. H. 69–70, 89, 98, 121, 141 Kerr, M. xiv, 128, 157 Keys, A. 120 King, T. 102, 105, 136 Kociumbas, J. 154

Index 203 Koenig, J. 40 Konigsberg 72 Koselleck, R. 61 Kretchmer, N. 99 Lancet, The 82 Lavoisier, A. ix Lawless, C. 71 League of Nations Nutrition Committee 119 Leeds 96 Lefebvre, R. 124 Leibig, J. ix, 16, 72–3, 85, 89 Lessius, L. 52, 66 Lester, I. 114, 133, 143 Levenstein, H. 68–70, 134, 142–3, 145 Levin, J. 119 Lewis, M. 99 Lister Institute 97 Lohrey, A. 144 Luther, M. 67 McCarthy, P. 24 McCleary, G. 94 McDonald, C. 98 McFague, S. 39 McGuckin, L. 127 McHoul, A. 5, 12, 30, 32–3, 36 McKay, G. 162 McKie, L. 18 McMichael, T. 119 Macklin, J. 127 macrobiotic food 144 Maddocks, M. 67 Making and Breaking of the Australian Family 140 malnutrition 19, 82 Mansfield, A. 127 mariology 41, 57 Margaret of Cortona 46 Margary, A. 124 Marx, K. xiv, 26, 86 Matthew, St 41 Mauss, M. 53 Maximus of Turin 42 Maxwell, C. 68–9 Mayo, H. 95 meal: arrangements 151–5 (see also

dining); construction 155–7 meat: attitudes to 68, 84; consumption of 133 media coverage of nutrition issues 10, 88, 104, 107, 114–15, 133, 140, 168–70 medical examinations 103 Medical Journal of Australia 118–19 medicine: and food ix, 3–4, 19, 34–5, 93, 114–5; Roman 36 Mediterranean diet 146 Melbourne Herald 104 Melbourne, University of 20 Mennell, S. 24, 44, 46, 48 Merton, R. 71–2 Metchnikoff, E. 69 Methodism 16, 62, 67, 132 Middle Ages, food in xiii, 43–8, 50–1, 66 Millbank Prison 84 Miller, D. 144 Miller, M. 114, 144 Miller, P. 90, 140 Miller, T. 146 Miller, W. 68 Milman, Reverend 80 Minchin, M. 101 Minkler, M. 22 Mitchell, D. 13 moderation: philosophy of 32–3, 36, 39; value of 50–1 monks/monastic practices 37–8, 43–6, 174 Montaigne 46 Moore Lappe, F. 141, 144 Mortensen, A. 124 Morton, H. 115 Mothers and Babies Association of South Australia 109 Mrs Beetons Cookery Book 88 Murcott, A. xiv, 2, 139 Muskett, P. 88, 141 Nader, R. 142 Najman, J. 124 Nash, H. 105 Nazianzen, G. 41 Neild 81 Nettleton, S. 4, 27, 110, 134, 146, 149

204 Index Neville, R. 141 New Method of Educating Children 63 New South Wales 84, 96, 103, 108; Department of Public Instruction 103 New Testament 40 New Testament Hospitality 39 New Zealand 70, 102 Nicholson, M. 1, 98 Nilius, Abbot 42 nutrition 10, 20, 23, 28–9, 55–6, 62–3, 73, 76; in Australia 114–30, 131–48; and affluence 120–2; and child health 99–102, 135–40; choice 112–148, 161–4, 170, 177; counter culture views of 140–8; discourse 56–78, 127–35; education 19, 21, 75, 79, 104 (see also education); elements of 19; emergence of discipline 16, 73, 79, 172, 174–5 (see also history); ethics of 63, 150; family 99–111, 131–5, 149–71; good nutrition 18–19, 23, 134; governmentality 18–29; and health 88, 94–130; information 21, 24, 168–71 (see also education, media); knowledge 10, 86, 164–71; lifestyle 118–20; malnutrition 19; and meal construction 155–7; meaning, refined 79–92; modern 17, 74, 75, 176; and moral panics 79–92; morality of 28–9; needs 74; policy/programmes 77, 85; reforms 19, 95–6; requirements 74; nutritional science 1, 10, 24–5, 28, 62–78, 85–8, 144–5, 174–5; and a sick population 122–7; as a spiritual discipline xii–xiii, 63–70; strategies 18, 24; surveys 105–6, 115–19, 124; training in 1, 99; understanding of 87; see also diet, food obesity 120, 137 O’Dea, J. 128 Ochs, E. 154 Oribasius 36 Oliver Twist 87

Origen 41 Osborne, W. A. 20 Order of Things, The 5–7, 56 Paedagogus 42 pagan philosophies 13; see also Greece, Rome Palissy 58 Parent Effectiveness Training 162 Parents’ Guide to Nutrition 138 pastoral: care 15, 27; power 9–10 Paul, Saint 40, 67 Paulsen, F. 59 Pavy, F. W. 88 peasant diet 45, 113, 146; see also poverty penance 37–8 Peter, St 41 Petersen, A, 22, 127–8 Pettenkofer 72 Philadelphia 67 philanthropy and health 94–7 Phillips, D. 132 Pietism 58–9, 61, 71–2 Pius V, Pope 51 Plato 33, 40–1 Playfair, Dr L. 82, 86 pleasure: and food xii–xiv, 31–2, 40–1, 52, 60–1, 76, 109, 129, 147, 155–6 (as a sin 46); derived from power 10; see also good food Plotinus 41 Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century 93 Poor Laws 80–90; Poor Law Board 82, 87; Poor Law Commision 80–2; Poor Law Unions 80; Poor Law Medical Officers Association 83 porridge 24 Poster, M. 12 Potato Eaters 113 poverty and diet ix, 19, 24–5, 76, 79–87, 96, 106, 113; see also workhouse Powell, H. 69 power: and food in Foucault 8–9; in the nutrition discourse 127–9,

Index 205 150; pastoral 8–10 Presbyterianism 68 Priestley, H. 97 primary health care 21 Primitive Physick 67 prison diet xiii, 63, 81–90; Coldbath Fields Prison 85; Millbank Prison 84 Prisons Act 83 Privy Council 85 problematization: Foucault’s concept of 14–15, 45; of food issues x, 8, 10, 48, 76–7, 137, 166 protein requirements 69, 73 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The 16, 71 Protestantism 57–9, 62, 67, 70–1, 103, 142, 175 Puritanism 71 Rabinow, P. 56 rationing 110, 133 Ray, J. 71 Reader, R. 120 Realschule 72 recommended daily intakes 125 Redclift, M. 132–3 Red Lion Dispensary 94 Reeves, P. M. 24 Reiger, K. 95, 103–7, 136, 147 regimen sanitatis salernitanum 51 religion see Christianity, pagan Report on the Physical Deterioration 96 Rethinking the School 25 Richards, E. 76 Ripe, C. 146 Roberts, D. 97, 108 Rockefeller, J. D. 69 Rome, Ancient xiii, 12–13, 30–1, 34–5, 37, 41–2, 49–50, 53, 56, 57, 173–4 Rose, N. 47, 62, 78, 90, 94, 102, 136, 139–40, 146, 148 Rossiter, M. 72–3, 75 Rowntree, B. S. 86, 89, 95, 106 Royal Australian College of Physicians 98, 121, 125 Royal Commission into the Basic Wage 107

Royal Society 71, 85 Rubner 72–3 Rufus 36 Rule of St Benedict 44 St Pancras School For Mothers 94 Santich, B. ix, 51–2, 70, 98, 104–5, 107, 115, 121, 125, 133, 157 Sargeant, S. 143 Satan 49 Schofield, F. 45 Schneewind, J. 113 school 25–6, 72, 103–4, 115 (food at 115); see also education Scott, J. 143 seasoning 67–8 Secretum Secretorum 51 Selby, W. 101–2 Seventh Day Adventists 68–70 sex: and children 94; compared with food as source of pleasure vii, 11–12, 38, 54; desire increased by spicy food 68; Diogenes and 34; history of practices 11–13, 30–2 Seymour, H. 21–2 Shapiro, L. 74, 76, 103–4 Shrapnel, B. 125 Silent Spring 142 Simpoulous, A. 122 slimming/slimness 54 Smith, A. 124 Smith, B. 133 Smith, D. 1, 98 Smith, Dr E. 82–6, 89, 95 Society for the Health of Women and Children 102 Sokolov xiv sophrosyne 12 Sprat, T. 71 Spock, B. 131, 137 Stanley, F. 125 Stickney, B. 114 Stoics 34, 36, 173 sugar 133–4, 165 Summae Confessorum 51 sumptuary laws 48 Supper of the Lamb, The 39 sweets 105, 168 Sydney Hospital 121

206 Index

Sydney University 95, 97 Symons, M. 39–40, 42–3, 129 Symposium 40 Systematic Training For Parents 162 Tacuinum Sanitatis 50 Tait, G. 46, 53 takeaway food 156–7 ; see also convenience, fast food Tasmania 103 Taylor, V. 131, 154 Technologies of the Self 37 Tesh, S. 21, 68 Thomas, H. 83, 125–6 Thompson, Sir H. 88 Times, The 82 Todd, J. 24 Treatise on Food and Dietics and Food and Feeding 88 Trichopoulou, A. 112 Truswell, S. 125, 127 Tryon, T. 63–6, 89, 93 Turner, B. 16, 52, 54, 62–3, 66–7, 71, 137–8, 142, 160, 177 Turrell, G. 124 Turquet de Mayenne 66 Ulyatt, C. 24 UK Social Affairs Unit 23 United Nations 135; International Convention For The Rights Of The Child 135 United States 69–70, 72–6, 79, 83, 88–9, 92, 103, 110, 112, 119; US Department of Agriculture 144; US Food and Drug Administration 142 Use of Pleasure 11, 31 Van Dieman’s Land 84 Van Gogh, V. 112 van Krikken, R. 89, 142 Vassilakou, T. 112 vegetarianism 68, 124 Veyne, P. 113 Victoria 103, 143 Victorian Ladies Sanitary Reform Movement 70 vitamins 97–9, 101, 144

Voit, ix, 72–3 Volksschule 72 Walden, K. 120 Walker, R. 72, 97, 108 Walter, J. 45 Warden, R. 99 Wass, A. 22 Ways to Health 65 wealth see affluence Webb, B. 82 Webb, E. 144 Webb, S. 82 Webb Report 144 Weber, M. 16, 62, 71, 142 Weindling, P. 70 Wilkins, J. 71 Wesley, J. 62, 67, 121, 132 Wesleyan University 73 Western Australia 84; Health Department 105 Western Health Reform Institute 69 What the Doctors Ordered ix White, E. 68–9 Whitwell, G 132 Whole Earth Catalogue 144 wholefoods 141–5, 148 Whyte, H. 118, 121 Widdowson, E. 73–4 Wilbraham, A. 84, 96–7 Wolff, C. 59 women, diet of 18, 64–5, 124, 126 workhouse, diet in xiii, 63, 80–7 working class 74, 86; see also poverty World Health Organisation 125 Worsley, A. 114 Worsley, T. 114 Wynn, A. 120 Yale University 69 Yinger, J. 142 Yudkin, J. 121, 134 Zaphiropoulos, L. 138, 160 Zimmerman, M. 99

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