It's served to us in many different styles - some more palatable than others - but we can’t deny the surge of historical interest in food taking place over the past few years. Drawing on various forms of expertise, food history seems to be one of the few topics to connect the world of investigative journalism to the ivory towers of academia. We would expect that historians, perhaps, would gravitate towards broad processes –– such as the spread of industrialization
that gave birth to the grocery store and the tin can, or the culinary impact of
immigration and the rise of ‘counter-cuisine.’ We might expect journalists, on
the other hand, to unmask more immediate concerns, such as the arduous journey
from farm-to-table or the politics of GMO labeling, compelling us to think
twice about what we select from our grocery store shelves.
But maybe our interests are more alike than
we think. The last two food history
books I have read have grappled with several ancient yet still exigent issues in food
history worthy of further exploration. The
first one, historian Dr. Emma Spary’s Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris 1670-1760 (University of Chicago Press, 2012) examines
the animated debates about alimentary knowledge during the 18th
century, ranging from the physiology of digestion to the chemistry of alcohol
distillation. The book is written with a
specialist audience in mind: rewarding reading provided one reads with a pen in hand. The second, Pulitzer
Prize winning journalist Michael Moss’s
Salt: Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (Random House, 2013), examines the understudied
phenomenon of modern processed food and the political machinations of the
industries that design and sell it. The
reading is as addicting as the Cheetos and Twinkies that he describes. I picked these books up for very different
reasons, but both, I think, raise important questions about our understandings
of taste preferences, addiction, and the relationship between food and
drug.
1) Matters of
Taste
Straddling self-preservation and leisure, philosophers and
physicians have long considered taste to be the most enigmatic sense. The Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius posed the
question in the first century B.C.
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Lucretius, Roman poet
and Epicurean |
“Now, how it is we see
some food for some,
Others for others …
I will unfold, or
wheretofore what to some
Is foul and bitter,
yet the same to others
Can seem delectable to
eat?”
Drawing on the works of eminent French physicians and cooks,
Spary examines the heated debates ignited by the rich, delectable flavors of fashionable
nouvelle cuisine. As culinary masterminds attempted to dazzle
the palate with seasoned ragouts and fricassees, they also marketed gustatory enjoyment
of them as a social virtue. Over the
first half of the 18th century, she argues, physicians anatomically
linked a delicate palate attuned to culinary artistry and subtle flavors to a
lucid and productive mind.
Spary’s physicians are essentially the ancestors of the food
scientists today working at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, where the manufacture
of gustatory delight is now a multi-billion dollar industry. Moss invites us into this Wonka-like behemoth in Philadelphia, where chemists tinker with smell,
taste, texture, and aesthetic appeal to design the cookie or soft-drink guaranteed
to bring in the biggest profits. I was
particularly struck by the fact that heavy loads of salt, sugar, and fat do equally great wonders for texture as much as taste, making Wonder-Bread puffy, Cheetos crispy,
and Lunchables chewy. Indeed, seems like the processed food
industry has whittled our flavor preferences down to a science. “People like a chip that snaps
with about four pounds of pressure per square inch, no more or less,” one food
scientist matter-of-factly reports, leaving me wondering whether the
subjectivity of human taste preferences celebrates the individual as we like to think.
2) Nourishing Bad
Habits
Likewise, the relationship between taste and habit formation is
hardly new. The famous 17th
century physician Thomas Willis described the pleasure of eating tasty foods as
a God-given reward for the monotonous
and laborious act of eating necessary to keeping us, and the human race, alive. (The same logic was also used to explain the
pleasure of sex.)
 |
In his theory of two souls,
Thomas Willis (1621-1675)
speculated why food tastes good |
Our understandings of
habituation and addiction are quite different today. As eating was necessary to human
survival yet was also subject to the spontaneous grumblings of the stomach,
“alimentary pleasure” Spary observes, “occupied a grey zone of permissible
indulgence.” So long as he could sublimate his appetite to his faculty of
reason, the 18th century enlightened eater was permitted to enjoy
the delights of haute cuisine. But not
everyone was capable of handling these gustatory pleasures. The aspirational parvenu and the coarse
country brute, unsurprisingly, were most at risk of getting carried away. The 18th century science of
addiction, Spary explains, therefore had little to do with the chemical
composition of tasty foods themselves, but was enmeshed in the ideas of luxury,
decadence, and indulgence that eating these foods presupposed.
The delicate 18th century ragout thus bore a striking resemblance to the taunting motto
emblazoned on every bag of Lay’s potato chips: Betcha Can’t Eat Just One.
Moss, however, is less interested in the social forces informing the
production of physiological knowledge, proudly standing by his oh-easy-to-hate
culprits: salt, sugar, and fat. It is the
expert manipulation of these substances that induce people to inhale a bag of
potato chips in one sitting and to (falsely) believe that their waistlines can
get away with it. I found Moss more
compelling when he discusses the disingenuous tactics by which corporations
have hooked populations on processed foods.
Virtually all of the food scientists he interviews –– the engineers of
everything from Dr. Pepper to Lunchables –– do not dare touch the food that
their employers unscrupulously market to our society’s most impoverished and
vulnerable demographics. When it comes
to our habituation and addiction to the “wrong” foods, the forces of social
distinction always seem to be at work.
 |
| Are the processed food industries mocking our lack of willpower? |
3) Food and
Medicine
Last, Spary and Moss both explore the relationship between food
and medicine. These distinctions are also
thousands of years old. In the 4th
century B.C., Hippocrates exhorted us that every doctor should also be a good cook, as pleasant tasting
food was easier to digest than nutritionally identical food that was perhaps
less pleasing to the palate. (Ayurveda
and many other forms of alternative medicine are gaining interest in the West because they operate according to a similar logic, discussed in a previous post. Spary
shows us how the medical categories assigned to food –– whether they are
“addictive” or “healthy,” “nourishing,” or even counted as food at all –– are
highly unstable and are constantly evolving.
While today’s food scientists might balk at classifying coffee and
liquor in one alimentary category, 18
th century chemists believed
the essential salts in both substances shared certain healthful medical
properties –– “spiritual gasoline” –– that affected the brain and nerves in
ways more alike than different.
Nutritional beliefs are shaped by far more
than science alone, but also incorporate political, social, and cultural
factors.
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| Tang Advertisement, c. 1960 |
But does this apply to Tang and potato chips? It might be hard to believe that processed food had ever been
touted for its medical properties, but Moss warns us not to forget that the
1950’s “Golden Age” of food processing once signified the triumph of American
progress and ingenuity. Tang, for
example, fortified with nutrients, was considered an effective and tasty
solution to the high cost and limited accessibility to regular orange juice. Today, however, the gurus of food processing
are singing a different tune, as Moss learns during his trip to Nestlé’s
research center in Switzerland. Here, food scientists keep busy testing potential state-of-the-art alimentary solutions to the obesity problem.
The nature of their research, unfortunately, suggests that it
might be too late. We hear about new products
like “Peptamen” ingested through a tube to feed the alarming numbers of men,
women, and children that have undergone gastric bypass surgery to shrink their
stomachs yet still can’t rein in
their cravings for nutritionally devoid processed food. Indeed, the new ‘science’ of medical nutrition
seems to be suggesting that maintaining health and losing weight the
old-fashioned way –– by eating –– might be a relic of a by-gone era. This might be more serious than a
capitulation to the obesity epidemic, bad as that sounds. These new products suggest that the
distinctions between food and medicine, which part ways during the 17th
century, might now, in the 21st century, be drawing back
together.
I picked up both of these books for very different reasons, and
I enjoyed both of them tremendously, albeit in different ways. Despite the differences in subject matter and
approach, both of these books illuminate the messy political, social, and
intellectual forces that inform our knowledge of food. There is nothing inevitable, both books
conclude, about the ways whereby our food decisions take shape. But both of these books open new questions
about our relationship to food –– about consumption, about agency, about the
politics of alimentary knowledge –– that show us that there is far more
research to be done.
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