Thought for Food

THOUGHT FOR FOOD M. V. TRACEY* THOUGHT FOR FOOD A PARTIAL HISTORY OF HUMAN NUTRITION THREE PERIODS OF THAT STUDY ARE OUTLINED THE PRESCIENTIFIC FROM EPICURUS TO LAVOISIER THE SCIENTIFIC fromlavoìsiertofao/who THE PRESENT POST-SCIENTIFIC PERIOD BY EXAMINING BRIEFLY THREE THEMES WHICH HAVE ALWAYS PRBXCUPIED ITS STVTOENTS THE CONTENTS OF THE LOWER BOWEL MAN'S INCONSTANCY OF NEEDS HIS ENDURING IMPULSION TO FOIST HIS BELIEFS ON OTHERS FOR THEIR OWN GOOD *y M.V. TRACEY ?.?., M.A., F.T.S.¡onutiitu of CLAJlE CX)LLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ROTHAMSTED EXPERIMENTAL STATION The area of knowledge and belief that we label human nutrition has an accessible history that, in the West, begins some centuries before the birth of Christ. It can be divided into three periods: the prescientific, which ran until the late eighteenth century; the scientific, which lasted until the early 1950s of this century; and the postscientific, which is now taking shape in the more advanced countries of the world. It is my Adaptation of a talk delivered to the Dining Club of the Canberra Fellows of the Academies (Science, Technology and Engineering, Social Sciences, and Humanities), May 1988. The announcement of the event is reproduced above. ?Address: 51 Glasgow Street, Hughes ACT 2605, Australia.© 1989 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 0031-5982/9073301-0067$01.00 50 I M. V. Tracey ¦ Thoughtfor Food intention to follow in outline the fortunes of only three themes during these three periods. They are: man's enduring suspicion of, and fascination with, the nature of the contents of his lower bowel; his belief that a diet can be good for one group of individuals but bad for another; and finally, his conviction that his individual beliefs on nutrition should be adopted by everyone else for their own good and, in some extreme cases, the belief that this adoption would change society for the better by eliminating war and conflict of all kinds, thus resulting, quite rapidly, in the return of the Golden Age. Early in the prescientific period, Homer is of little help with dietary information, though he gives one regimen in the Odyssey. The orphans Merope and Cleothera were raised by a group of four goddesses, of whom Aphrodite was responsible for the orphans' diet. She chose curds, honey, and sweet wine—not a bad diet, but a little low in vitamin C[I, 20:68]. Elsewhere in the Odyssey, Pallas Athene, goddess ofwar, wisdom, and the arts, comments on the value of "the barley meal that makes men's marrow" [1, 20: 107], Qui; first substantial record ofspeculation on a relation of diet to health lies in the remains of a library accumulated by the school of medicine founded by Hippocrates about 430 b.c. It is believed to have been formed over a period of 1-3 centuries, and its surviving 72 works were known as those of Hippocrates, although perhaps no more than half a dozen can be regarded as written by him [2]. The basic assumptions ofGreek dietetics—I say "dietetics" because for many Greeks medicine was but a branch of dietetics—were that all foods were in essence equally nutritious; that health depended on the maintenance of a benign balance in the qualities of the undigested residues; and that the efficacy of the digestive process in avoiding deleterious residues varied with climate, the constitution of the eater, and the nature of the diet, all of which could interact on the digestive and assimilative processes. Foods could be classified as wet or dry, or hot or cold, not on objective physical grounds but as tending to affect the balance of these qualities in the consumer, whose needs varied according to his own inborn balance of these qualities. Males, for example, flourished when the balance tended towards the warm and dry; females did better with a preponderance of cold and moist. The desirable balance for an individual varied to some degree with the season of the year and was dependent on his temperament, which was determined by the balance between his four humours. Thus those ofa sanguine temperament were at their best with a dietary preponderance of moist and warm qualities abetted by spring; the...