Introduction: Food as Medicine, Medicine as Food

The history of food is "well and truly out of the academic wilderness."¹ Long a marginalized area of inquiry in both food studies programs and history departments, food history has moved into the historical mainstream since the early 2000s, and found institutionalization in conferences, journals, anthologies, and programs of study.² The publication of companion guides to food history perhaps signaled this move most of all.³ In addition to being at the center of an increasingly well-demarcated field, food has also become a useful category of analysis in political, social, and environmental histories. Food has been recognized, for example, as a particularly illuminating way of examining empire and globalization.⁴ At the opposite end of the scale, food forms part of local and national history.⁵ Changing technologies of food production in the home have been linked to shifts in gender roles and particularly to increasingly housebound women.⁶ Environmental historians have used food to raise issues around resource management, economic development, and the configurations of notions such as purity and the natural.⁷

Many of the problems examined in food histories intersect with the commitments of the histories of science and medicine. Science and medicine are crucial influences on past and modern conceptions of food, and historians of those fields have worked towards unraveling these influences with increasing intensity. They have examined how nutrition scientists asked their questions, arranged their experiments, and interpreted their results, often in dialogue with prevailing social and political problems.⁸ They have investigated the increasing prominence of "nutritionism" and a reductive conception of food and the eating body.⁹ They have also explored what is usually described as a growing "medicalization" of eating and food, for example in the case of anorexia or obesity, or in the contested construction of discourses of risk around specific nutritional components.¹⁰ And they have examined the attempts of different professional and non-professional groups to assert authority over questions of healthy eating.¹¹ While many of these works were sensitive to the historical contingency of scientific and medical ideas, some tended to assume a more historically stable character for food. Some accounts that can be located broadly within the theme of food as medicine, then, understood the task to be an investigation of moments when food became a scientific concern or a medically approached problem. Yuriko Akiyama's study of national training schools of cookery in Britain, for example, charted how cookery and diet became central issues of medicine in the nineteenth century.¹² More recently, Matthew Smith has examined the history of food allergies as a history of changing medical knowledge and contests over expertise.¹³

On the other end of the spectrum are histories that seek to explore the impact of a relatively fixed science on food. The mental image evoked is often a process of diffusion or popularization of scientific and medical ideas into the cultural realm of food and eating. Trudy Eden, for instance, has demonstrated how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Galenic ideas shaped American colonists' conceptions of themselves and their place in the world. Analyses of popular uses of nutritional scientific language were provided by, for example, Jessica Mudry in her study of USDA and federal food guidelines, and Helen Zoe Veit in her investigation of nutritional recommendations during the Progressive Era. Mudry and Veit showed how scientific concepts of nutrition based on a quantitative, energy-based approach to food gradually found application in everyday language.¹⁴

The essays in this special issue explore the relationship between food and medicine through time. The authors begin with the notion that food, medicine and science are not fixed or self-evident historical categories. Instead, we seek to understand how food and medicine have been considered separate or overlapping spheres in the past. We further ask how and why the relationship between food and medicine has assumed different configurations. As Lisa Haushofer writes in her essay the "intersection between food and medicine is not an unchanging and self-evident spillover of one realm into another, but the result of a historically specific process of...