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Introduction to Chapter 7 That the science of nutrition might ever be allied with conceptions of human racial characteristics at first seems a peculiar suggestion. Yet in his essay on the American science of racial nutrition, Hamilton Cravens makes precisely that point. Larger cultural notions-in this instance, ideas of racial differences and of the centrality of racial traits to human behavior-shaped and informed technical knowledge about human nutrition in both Europe and America. In that sense Cravens's essay follows from and corroborates Miller's on Du Bois, showing how pervasive were these notions of group identity for the individual. Central to the events Cravens describes was the campaign that several influential individuals, including the scientists Ellen H. Richards, Mary Hinman Abel, and Wilbur 0. Atwater, and the Boston businessman Edward Atkinson, conducted to have the u.s. Department of Agriculture's Office of Experiment Stations support a large number of scientific investigations of the typical diets of the many distinct races in the American national population so as to determine what the ideal racial diet for the nation's denizens should be. From one vantage point, each participant seemed to join hands with the others for highly particularistic, if not downright bizarre, and individuated reasons. These included driving down the cost of labor for the put-upon American capitalist (Atkinson), applying the laws of thermodynamics to the science of nutrition and boosting the status and power of analytical chemists (Atwater), advancing the cause of female scientists in their struggles to be recognized by male scientists (Richards), and quieting social unrest and assimilating immigrants through an Americanized diet (Abel). Obviously generalized and even tacit assumptions in the culture 125 126 Introduction: Chapter 7 about how society, polity, and economy did and should work had much to do with promoting certain kinds of scientific investigations at the expense of others; or, put more starkly, some kinds of scientific work were simply inconceivable, whereas others "made sense" in that age. The resulting campaign , which stretched from the early 1890S to the middle 1900s, had different outcomes for each of the interested parties. Whether some "won" and others "lost" matters less in this analysis, finally, than the more rigorously historicist point that all were comfortably nestled in the age in which they lived. Yet there is more to the story Cravens narrates than this. In fine he draws attention to four groups of would-be nutritionists, one in Germany and two in the United States who were chemists, and a fourth in the U.S. group whose leader vigorously criticized the chemists for not understanding the biological aspects of human nutrition but who nevertheless did not alter the fundamental notion of nutritionists of that age, that there was a normal or standard diet for each population or group or race of people or, put another way, that diet was a matter of one's group identity. In an era in which practitioners of the human sciences acted and spoke as if there was no such thing as an individual, but only groups whose members shared particular traits in common and varied among themselves around a particular distribution or mean of traits, this kind of "racial" or group-oriented nutritional science made all kinds of sense to all manner of people, whether they were scientists or not. Thus even though these groups of scientists seemed deeply involved in technical knowledge, that technical knowledge itself was informed by larger cultural constructs and notions, and here more specifically by constructs that were embraced in two distinct western national cultures. To be sure, there were important differences between the Wilhelmian Reich on the one hand and William McKinley's America on the other. Yet in each there were fairly rigid hierarchies of race, class, and religion, as well as particular notions that each race or class represented a bundle of traits and patterns of behavior. Furthermore, most Germans and Americans believed and acted as if centralization, vertical integration, efficiency, and standardization were the keys to a dynamic economy and nation state. Thus with only slight modifications here and there, a bundle of technical ideas could resonate in two national cultures within a common European and American civilization . That in turn suggests how the history of science-or of any specific body of knowledge or any cultural discourse-can be used to assess questions in comparative history; if different national cultures in a common larger civilization have parallel constructs of technical knowledge, then this suggests that...

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