E. Neswald u.a. (Hrsg.): Setting Nutritional Standards

Cover
Titel
Setting Nutritional Standards. Theory, Policies, Practices


Herausgeber
Neswald, Elizabeth; Smith, F. David; Thoms, Ulrike
Reihe
Rochester Studies in Medical History 38
Erschienen
Anzahl Seiten
230 S.
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€ 92,49
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
Nina Mackert, North American History, Erfurt University

In recent years, food historians have increasingly stressed the social and political impact of nutrition, food reform, diet discourse and dieting practices.1 At the same time, scholars have traced the historical roots of quantifications and asked how standardizations have shaped modern bodies and societies.2Setting Nutritional Standards combines these two perspectives. The editors present historical studies on the late 19th and early 20th century that aim to explore how efforts to standardize nutrition were shaped by and how themselves shaped Western European and US American policies and social reform. This approach is important, as the editors argue in their useful introduction, not least because it provides a historical perspective on contemporary developments. Tracing the contested history of nutritional standards allows coming to terms with current anxieties about health, fatness, food processing, and nutritional advice.

The eight chapters of the anthology fit together nicely, up to some redundancies that rather than bothering the reviewer demonstrate the density of transatlantic nutritional negotiations at the fin-de-siècle – as well as the different ways of writing such histories. Three interrelated themes run through the chapters, shedding a light on the emergence, negotiation, and application of nutritional standards.

First, the chapters focus on the instability of nutritional knowledge and standardization, time and again showing how they were negotiated and under contest by different historical actors and kinds of knowledge. In her chapter on efforts to determine protein and calorie requirements in late 19th century and early 20th century US and Germany, Elizabeth Neswald demonstrates that dietary standards and norms emerged through an interaction of laboratory experiments and field studies. She argues that both methods created complementary nutritional knowledge by providing a different form of evidence: the results of experiments on individuals in the conditions of a laboratory as well as collected data from surveys of groups in the conditions of daily life. However, Neswald also shows how the limits of both approaches as well as frictions between experimental and statistical methods challenged the stability of nutritional norms. Whereas scientists such as Russell Chittenden questioned a protein standard derived from field studies as being too observational and unreliable, laboratory experiments fell short of producing average data, focusing on individuals only over a short period of time.

Corinna Treitel, too, discusses the protein standard, with a focus on the influence of vegetarianism on nutritional research in Germany in the late 19th century. Her core argument considers the heterogeneity of actors participating in the negotiation of nutritional standards. With meat forming one central site of nutritional research as well as social reform, a wide range of scientists and lay people were considered with the question of how much protein bodies needed to function and thrive. Treitel shows how they challenged and eventually overturned the protein standard set by the German physiologist Carl Voit in the 1870s. By tracing the interactions of nutritional scientists with lay reformers and non-German researchers (in this case from Japan), Treitel seeks to show that biopolitical knowledge emerged not in a top-down manner but “sideways” (68), calling for research beyond scientific circles.

Second, the chapters time and again stress how the making of nutritional standards was shaped by cultural assumptions and social problems, such as conceptions of race and liberalism. Ina Zweininger-Bargielowska, for instance, deals with a scientific and medical debate on the nutritional benefits of white versus wholemeal bread in interwar Britain. She shows that there was an ongoing controversy among nutritional experts of various disciplines on the question of which kind of bread contained more beneficial substances, such as protein, vitamins, and fiber. Whereas Zweininger-Bargielowska considers the scientific knowledge that the proponents of different kinds of bread referred to, she emphasizes how cultural and political conflicts shaped the conclusions they reached. Advocates of white bread could dominate the controversy, she suggests, because white bread emerged “as an integral aspect of a superior British civilization” (p. 159) as well as the epitome of consumers’ choice and comfort, especially after the hardships of World War I. The proponents of brown bread, however, referred to biopolitical assumptions of increased health and efficiency, as well as to the notion of more natural, non-Western diets.

Third, some chapters attend to the productivity of dietary standards. They accentuate not only their impact on policymaking but a broader cultural and political function of nutritional standardization. Most notably, Nick Cullather demonstrates how different methods of measuring and predicting hunger created famines and shaped the global order. Zooming in on the Bihar famine of 1966, he tells the story of mainly two different modes of understanding famine. In order to minimize British government obligation, the famine codes in colonial India conceptualized famines narrowly as unavoidable, temporary, and local occurrences, with indicators such as food prices, crime, epidemics, or movement of people or flocks. In the 1960s, the famine codes were challenged, when American agricultural specialists developed a system of measuring global food supplies for the United Nations. Calculating national food supplies and demands in balance sheets (a method that had been made possible by the invention of the calorie), a negative balance was used to indicate a famine. Cullather explains how in the Bihar crisis, both methods clashed and created a local famine from national projections of food scarcity. Moreover, he shows the productivity of the new method of measurement for American domestic and foreign policies, arguing that the balance sheets created a point of intervention for nations such as the US, making famines into a site of global power struggles.

In general, this is an instructive work for readers interested in the history of food, nutrition, and standardizations alike, as well as their transnational circulations. The strength of the anthology lies in historicizing nutritional standards as political and contested. In asking for the interdependencies between science and policies, however, the book could have gone further. Joining recent works on the cultural work of science3, the emphasis could have been placed more on the question how the actual scientific research – and not mainly the application of scientific knowledge – was informed by conflicts over power and progress. Moreover, the body is conspicuously missing in most of the chapters, although it was and is the main target of nutritional norms. Finally, because many chapters remain in a history-of-science-perspective, the anthology can only partially honor Treitel’s call for research beyond scientists to grasp the power of modern biopolitics.

Notes:
1 Nick Cullather, Hungry World. America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia, Cambridge 2010 Charlotte Biltekoff, Eating Right in America. The Cultural Politics of Food and Health, Durham 2013; Alice Weinreb, Modern Hungers. Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany, Oxford 2017.
2 Dan Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered. Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual, Chicago 2015; Oliver Schlaudt / ‎Lara Huber (eds.), Standardization in Measurement. Philosophical, Historical and Sociological Issues, London 2015; Peter Cryle / Elizabeth Stephens, Normality. A Critical Genealogy, Chicago 2017.
3 Moritz von Epple / Claus Zittel (eds.), Science as Cultural Practice. Vol. I: Cultures and Politics of Research from the Early Modern Period to the Age of Extremes, Berlin 2010.

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