Shifting Food Facts

Dietary Discourse in a Post-Truth Culture

Alissa Overend

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351000093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geology & Earth Sciences

This book offers a much-needed reframing of food discourse by presenting alternative ways of thinking about the changing politics of food, eating, and nutrition. It examines critical epistemological questions of how food knowledge comes to be shaped and why we see pendulum swings when it comes to the question of what to eat.

As food facts peak and peril in the face of conflicting dietary advice and nutritional evidence, this book situates shifting food truths through a critical analysis of how healthy eating is framed and contested, particularly amid fluctuating truth claims of a "post-truth" culture. It explores what a post-truth epistemological framework can offer critical food and health studies, considers the type of questions this may enable, and looks at what can be gained by relinquishing rigid empirical pursuits of singular dietary truths. In focusing too intently on the separation between food fact and food fiction, the book argues that politically dangerous and epistemically narrow ideas of one way to eat "healthy" or "right" are perpetuated. Drawing on a range of archival materials related to food and health and interviews with registered dietitians, this book offers various examples of shifting food truths, from macro-historical genealogies to contemporary case studies of dairy, wheat, and meat.

Providing a rich and innovative analysis, this book offers news ways to think about, and act upon, our increasingly complex food landscapes. It does so by loosening our empirical Western reliance on singular food facts in favour of an articulation of contextual food truths that situate the problems of health as problems of living, not as individualistic problems of eating. It will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners working in food studies, food politics, sociology, environmental geography, health, nutrition, and cultural studies.

1 Western genealogies of healthy eating

From humoural medicine to modern nutritionism

Current scientific understandings of food—measured, marketed, and consumed through the language and framework of micro- and macronutrients, calories, and vitamins—are so commonplace that many of us fail to consider that scientized approaches to nutrition are a mere two centuries old. In this chapter I trace the broad epistemological shifts in Western nutritional wisdom from ancient times to modern nutritionism. My aims in showcasing the breadth and variability of food knowledge that has existed within recorded Western histories are twofold. One, by positioning the current nutricentric model as one epistemology among others, I denaturalize the dominant scientific paradigm. Two, in moving away from scientized approaches as the singular truth in food and dietetic knowledge, I enable other (post-truth and post-positivist) food paradigms to exist and emerge. This chapter is very specifically not an exhaustive history of food or nutrition, if that were even possible or desirable. As Kamminga and Cunningham (1995) note,

The history of nutrition is an enormous subject that spreads across the history of food, its production and distribution, the history of diet and eating habits, the history of laboratory investigations of animal physiology and of foodstuffs, and the history of society not to mention the history of climate and soil.

(p. 1)

Instead, I offer a genealogy of changing Western conceptualizations of food and nutrition—one that documents the fluctuation of these definitions and the emergence of a dominant, not singular, positivist food paradigm.

Following the intellectual queries set out by Thomas Kuhn (1996) and Michel Foucault (1970, 1975, 1977, 1986), I trace the broad paradigm and epistemological shifts in Western ways of seeing, understanding, and classifying “healthy eating” in order to offer a theoretically informed understanding of what Foucault (1977) famously coined “a history of the present” (p. 31). Using his loosely defined genealogical method, Foucault (1977, 1986) used history as a means of critically understanding the present. As David Garland (2014) explains, Foucault’s historical analysis was not intended to judge historical concepts through contemporary values, nor was it meant to reimagine the past in new ways. These are also not my intentions. Foucault’s genealogy was decidedly oriented in the present moment, and, more specifically, on the terms in and through which the present moment has come to be defined. As he (1984) himself expressed, “I set out from a problem expressed in the terms current today and I try to work out its genealogy. Genealogy means that I begin my analysis from a question posed in the present” (quoted in Garland, 2014, p. 367). In this regard, Foucault’s histories differ from those written by traditional historians in that they are not concerned with the origin of a particular idea or concept but rather with the epistemic logics that shape its development. Just as Foucault’s (1975) history in The Birth of the Clinic was concerned with “determining the conditions of possibility of medical experience in modern times” (p. 35), I am interested in understanding the current terms of healthy eating discourse in contemporary culture. I open up the empirical frameworks in and through which modern constellations of healthy eating are judged.

One of the most cited works in the humanities and social sciences, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996) contends that scientific facts are paradigm-relative and change as dominant epistemological paradigms evolve. Rather than facts about the natural world being objectively measured, developed, and/or evaluated, “what man [sic] sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual conception experience has taught him to see” (Kuhn, 1996, p. 113). In tracing paradigm changes within the natural sciences, Kuhn’s work has been influential in moving away from positivist-based accounts of scientific knowledge. His model of shifting paradigms is helpful for understanding how existing scientific ideas are eventually replaced by different ways of thinking. He contends that paradigm changes do not grow out of a development-by-accumulation model, but rather as abrupt changes to the former ways of thinking. Understandably, Kuhn’s analysis of paradigm shifts was controversial to the natural sciences at the time because it dispelled the myth about linear, cumulative, and progression concepts of positivist knowledge. However, as Steve Fuller (2000) asserts, it remains to this day one of the few major works in the philosophy of science that has been received sympathetically by natural scientists. Kuhn’s theory of paradigm relativity has been used to explain the incommensurability of knowledge across different academic fields, articulating why multiple and sometimes competing facts can coexist. Within different paradigms there can be no common measure between disparate ways of thinking, including about what counts as good science (Friedman, 2003). Given the barrage of conflicting and contradictory food truths that exist within popular and scientific discourses, Kuhn’s theory of incommensurability is one way to conceptualize the production of plural food facts.

Like Kuhn (1996), Foucault (1970) was also interested in how knowledge frames shift based on social, historical, and intellectual contexts.¹ However, Kuhn and Foucault’s specific interests, as well as how they each went about exploring paradigmatic and epistemological divides, diverge. While Kuhn’s (1996) concern was with the natural sciences, Foucault’s (1970) application was in the social sciences. Furthermore, while Kuhn focuses on “the shared understandings that bind communities of scientists in social processes of acculturation and replication, Foucault’s analyses focus on the often unconscious operation of historically specific epistemological structures” (Garland, 2014, pp. 370–371). Using his earlier archaeological method, which sought to excavate historical ways of thinking, in The Order of Things Foucault (1970) traces the epistemic conditions that produce discourse and order thought. Utilizing the language of epistemes—a set of unconscious knowledge structures that govern the discursive formation of objects and subjects—he (1970) contends that “in any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge” (p. 168). His subsequent genealogical work both expands and refracts this earlier statement to articulate a theory of knowledge that highlights how dominant—not singular—epistemic frameworks emerge.

Foucault’s later genealogical method articulates that dominant ways of thinking are the result of historical contingencies, not progressive trends in knowledge formation (Gutting, 2014). As its name suggests, genealogy is “a search for processes of descent and emergence” (Garland, 2014, p. 372). Foucault’s (1977, 1986) genealogical approach has been widely taken up across a range of social science and humanities disciplines as a way to denaturalize dominant forms of knowledge, including but not limited to scientific, colonial, and patriarchal epistemes. As Gary Gutting (2005) writes, “Foucault’s histories aim to show the contingency—and hence surpassability—of what history has given us” (p. 10), which has allowed other (often marginalized) forms of knowledge not only to exist but also to call into question the singularity of dominant truths. Foucault (1984) writes that “the search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously thought to be immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself” (p. 82). Knowledge and truth are thus contingent.

At a time when narrowly defined, empirical questions of eating dominate discussions of health and encourage didactic, all-or-nothing approaches to food, many of us in the growing fields of critical dietetic, nutrition, and food studies are looking for new ways to reassess prevailing dietary approaches. Drawing on Kuhn’s (1996) concept of shifting paradigms and Foucault’s (1970, 1975, 1977, 1986) archaeological and genealogical contributions to changing epistemologies, I map Western genealogies of contemporary food knowledge, and the ways we have been taught to think about food and healthy eating. In her work on the history of American dietary advice, Charlotte Biltekoff (2012) asserts “that [a] historical investigation of nutrition and dietary health […] is exactly what is missing from our public discourse around food and health” (p. 173). Such a discourse would enable new public literacy around the cultural politics of dietary health. Responding to Lisa Heldke’s (2006) call for a theoretically informed understanding of food, alongside Biltekoff’s desire for a historical food literacy, I trace the macro epistemological shifts in Western nutritional wisdom, highlighting the degree to which changing paradigms (and epistemes) alter, at times vastly, throughout historical Western dietetics. Food knowledge is positioned not simply as a given truth, but as provisional and actively produced by shifting paradigms and epistemologies.

Humoural medicine: ancient and Renaissance food knowledge

For more than 15 centuries in much of Europe and its colonies, and currently in some non-nutricentric accounts of food, the dominant discourse of food and nutrition stemmed from theories of humoural medicine.² Within these models, food and diet were considered part of a broader, dietetic, and holistic regimen of the self. Food rules were commonly set in the context of the broader topic of “hygiene”, which indicated methods for maintaining health by means of diet, exercise, and regulation of all external factors that affect the individual (Albala, 2002). As central as diet may be by contemporary standards, proper dietetic care in ancient and Renaissance periods was considered the single best practice a person could undertake, both for corporeal and intellectual well-being (Skiadas & Lascaratos, 2001). In Plato’s words, “There ought to be no other secondary task to hinder the work of supplying the body with its proper exercise and nourishment” (quoted in Skiadas & Lascaratos, 2001, p. 533). Similarly, for Avicenna, a Persian physician and writer, digestion was “the root of life” (quoted in Albala, 2002, p. 54). Pictorius, a Renaissance physician, called the stomach “the padre di famiglia [the father of the family]—the supplier of the household, without whom the whole would parish” (quoted in Albala, 2002, p. 54). Patriarchal frames notwithstanding and in contrast to today’s largely mechanical understanding of digestion, to ancient and Renaissance thinkers, food affected every aspect of the individual, including, most strongly, the links between diet and health (Anderson, 1997).

According to ancient and Renaissance dietetics, food and health were inextricably linked. Diet was both the cause of disease imbalance and the means of treating ailments of the time. Plato urged that human illnesses should be treated through the regulation of diet before the use of medication: “Wherefore one ought to control all such disease, so far as one has the time to spare, by means of dieting rather than irritate a fractious evil by drugging” (quoted in Skiadas & Lascaratos, 2001, p. 536). In more extreme humoural and pathological imbalances, physical therapies such as hydrotherapies, bloodletting, and cauterizations, as well as drug treatments, were attempted, but only after dietary therapies were exhausted. Diet was the preferred method of treatment because food was considered more similar to human substance and could therefore “be assimilated after digestion and converted into the body” (Cardenas, 2013, p. 261). By contrast, medicine was seen as too distinct from human flesh and while it was able to change the “body’s own nature, it could not be converted into the body’s own substance” (Cardenas, 2013, p. 261). Diet therapies were used extensively for many generations—and continue to be in some cultural contexts—to maintain and rebalance humours.

Although Hippocrates did not put forth a complete theory of humoural medicine, he is often credited for attributing foods with heating, cooling, moistening, and drying properties, though, as E. N. Anderson (2005) notes, he claims to have inherited the classification method from earlier sources. It was Galen, a Greek physician and disciple of Hippocrates, who advanced and popularized the idea that disease states were the result of an imbalance of the bodily humours necessary for its regulation, maintenance, and function. According to humoural theory, blood was classified as hot and moist, yellow bile as hot and dry, phlegm as cold and moist, and black bile as cold and dry (Estes, 2000). An excess in any of these humours would lead to sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic diseases, respectively (Crowther, 2013). Fluctuations of humours could be the result of temperament, disposition, age, activity level, season, or dietary unevenness. Humoural imbalances could also determine a person’s physical characteristics (such as a rosy or pale complexion), mental characteristics (such as a melancholic or bilious personalities), as well as their susceptibility to particular illness (cholera, for example, was presumed to be the result of an excess of yellow bile). The principle behind humoural medicine was to rebalance humours by consuming foods with the opposite properties to the symptoms described by the patient (Crowther, 2013). For example, a physician would attempt to correct phlegmatic conditions or symptoms (i.e., those that were considered a result...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Western genealogies of healthy eating: from humoural medicine to modern nutritionism
• 2 Shifting food facts of Canada’s Food Guides, 1942–2019
• 3 Dairy: beyond “got” and “not” milk
• 4 Wheat: global staple, modern health scourge
• 5 Meat: false divides between veganism and carnism
• Conclusions: the trouble with singular food truths
• Index