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. 1 1 D I E T A N D A M E R I C A N I D E O L O G Y P e r h a p s t h e be s t pl ac e t o start a study of eating and sovereignty is with the discourse of diet, where food and control converge in an ideological matrix of individual responsibility, self-mastery, and population management. Studies of famines or agricultural labor can reveal some of the ways that the production, distribution, and regulation of food manifest political power at the level of the individual body. But dietary advice and particular weight loss regimens can most clearly demonstrate how the demands of political order are personalized in liberal society. In this chapter, I show how diet trends of the past century have participated in dominant political economic trends and have helped to fashion the kinds of entrepreneurial subjects required for the advancement of neoliberal capitalism.1 Dieting, it has been noted, is as American as apple pie. And though cynics tend to read the ever-proliferating number of diet fads as a series of pseudoscientific schemes marketed to the gullible, the ideal of dieting seems but one instance of a narrative of self-mastery that is the hallmark of American political ideology. Various studies have questioned dietary literature for providing an ideal of individual self-control, precisely as a retreat from domains of politics and economics in which people feel powerless. But this chapter seeks to go further, explaining dietary literature not as a displacement or an escape from politics, but as a shifted terrain of politics itself. As a brand of self-help literature that embodies a subtle and sophisticated technique of population management, dietary literature actually intensifies—rather than distracts from—politics. This chapter also demonstrates the methodological approach of this book as a whole, reading both canonical and academic texts alongside popular narratives of the individual body in order to demonstrate how 2 . D I E T A N D A M E R I C A N I D E O L O G Y the mechanisms of political power manifest in commonsense understandings and individual habits. Looking at one very specific piece of this story—diet trends through the twentieth-century United States—this chapter argues that often unstated ideas about the individual body correspond to broader and more abstract notions about politics, freedom, and the relative power of ideals, will, and matter. The point of bringing these disparate archives into contact is to show how discourses of food constitute particular types of subjects with particular desires, abilities, and expectations. This chapter thus takes an unconventional approach to a very conventional question: What diets work? Examined politically, a diet can be said to work not when it helps somebody achieve a desired biological goal, but when it provides a satisfying way of understanding the human body.2 That is, diets work when they achieve a kind of popularity approaching commonsense—as what happened when Americans generally accepted the idea that counting calories, suppressing appetite, or avoiding carbohydrates would allow them to lose weight. The chapter thus explores diets as ideology, as frameworks for understanding the operation of their own bodies, and the functioning of systems of value and mobility more generally. This chapter explores this question—What diets work?—with specific attention on three popular approaches to diet over the past century, from the earliest advice about regulating caloric energy to the commercially successful endeavors of Weight Watchers and the Atkins diet. These specific examples are illustrative not only because they prove to be the most “successful” diet discourses of the past century but because they also stand in for larger trends in dietary commonsense that can be indexed to broader cultural and political phenomena. In particular, in these three types of advice, one can see personalized and directed narratives about the political and economic requirements of specific stages in the development of the American economy, from a vibrant driver of an industrial development to a reluctant participant in a global information economy. The Structure of Dietetic Revolutions In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn debunks the notion of the history of science as a linear, progressive movement toward truth, identifying instead a series of momentous “paradigm shifts” in which radically new understandings of the world compete with more [18.117.186.92] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 22:28...

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