Proteins, Pathologies, and Politics: Dietary Innovation and Disease from the Nineteenth Century ed. by David Gentilcore and Matthew Smith (review)

[Erratum]

In a legislative attempt to curb what many nutritionists and food reformers see as alarming rates of childhood obesity, the United Kingdom last year rolled out the so-called "Sugar Tax," which puts a charge on excessively sugar-sweetened drinks. It was a move ushered in by antisugar campaigns by celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver and backed by leading public health experts. But Britain is late to the antisugar party. In the past decade Hungary, Mexico, South Africa, and a host of other countries have introduced tax schemes on sugar-sweetened products.

We are in a cultural moment today, it seems, where sugar is anathema to good health. But as Rachel Meach points out in this volume, the antisugar campaign is hardly new, even if it is newly relevant. Take, for example, the recent republishing—and rebranding—of mid-twentieth century British nutritionist John Yudkin's seminal Pure, White and Deadly.¹ Yudkin, a self-styled and controversial "slimming expert," was clamoring about the harmful effects of excess sugar consumption from the 1950s, particularly to middle class women. But as Meach cleverly shows, in a post-World War II milieu that prioritized reductionist explanations for the relationship between diet and cardiovascular disease, Yudkin's antisugar claims were dwarfed by American nutritionist Ancel Keys' assertion that fat was the root—and sole cause of cardiovascular disease.

Meach's chapter is a shining example of the kind of cutting edge, integrative, and historicist work on the intersections of food history and the history of disease at the heart of this edited volume. Much of the context here is familiar enough. The volume centers on the hundred years from 1850 to 1950, particularly the explosion of the manufactured food industry and the epidemiological transition, the decline of major infectious diseases and the rise of chronic conditions, particularly cancer and cardiovascular disease. Well known to historians of medicine is the emergence of risk-factor epidemiology, and so too are the classic examples of studies on beriberi and pellagra, and the Framingham Heart Study and Keys' Seven Countries Study.

Proteins, Pathologies and Politics is organized into three sections, twelve chapters total. Part 1, "Responding to Chronic Disease," features work on three specific diseases, cancer (Agnes Arnold-Forster), diabetes (Kirsten Gardner), and allergies (Matthew Smith). Part 2, "Scientific Discourses" has two chapters on pellagra (Gentilcore and Mircea Scrob), one on the Framingham Study (Maiko Rafael Spiess), and Meach's work on the antisugar movement. The final section, "The Politics of Dietary Change," is more loosely organized, with chapters on the popularization of the calorie in World War I Belgium (Peter Scholliers), public feeding schemes in post-World War I Britain (Bryce Evans), vegetarianism in Italy and Germany (Francesco Buscemi), milk and child welfare in post-war Italy (Inaudi), and food additives in twentieth century America (Claire Gorden Bettencourt).

The central intervention of the volume is self-evident but deeply important, that "the emerging nutritional science of the early twentieth century came wrapped in a moralizing packaging" (p. 4). Where the volume shines is in chapters like Meach's, Arnold-Forster's, and Smith's, where the cultural history of food consumption is situated in changing debates in food science and research on disease. The opening chapter, for example, by Arnold-Forster, is a neat intervention about the largely ignored discourse on cancer in fin-de-siècle Britain, where the debate over cancer's incidence was intimately tied to broader theories of imperial decline. Smith's chapter is a fine addition as well, unpacking colorful and electric twentieth century debates over the relationship between food allergies and mental health. In total many of the chapters go a long way in historicizing Gyorgy Scrinis' concept of "nutritionism," the post–World War II reductive thinking about diet and disease that provides useful context for the explosion of...