Harvey Levenstein’s 2003 book Paradox of Plenty is a thick book that recounts the history of food in America over the past 150 or so years.  It covers enough material that, in some ways, it functions better as a reference book than something you’d sit down and read.

However, it has a lot of good ideas, and one set of ideas I want to talk about today revolves around how Americans’ ideas about nutrition have changed over the time the book covers.  Levenstein divides the past 150 years into four different periods, and looking at each period shows how people thought (and think) about food and nutrition.

The first period is before the 1870s or so, when our ideas about what food is made up of, and what is needed to live, came either from old folk beliefs or what people had observed.  People did not know about germs and so, for example, a Civil War government commission could write that water from the Mississippi River was generally wholesome, even though it might be muddy, while water from the Ohio River was unhealthy. (1)  Most people believed that meat and bread were necessary for good health, and vegetables could be dangerous to the stomach unless boiled until soft.

The second period, which Levenstein terms The New Nutrition, started in the 1870s with the discovery that foods had calories, and calories gave people energy (the research into this is pretty amusing, and includes putting people into sealed rooms while precisely measuring everything that went into and, um, out of their bodies).  In addition, researchers determined that all foods could be divided into proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

These discoveries were revolutionary.  For the first time researchers could have a scientific understanding of what food was and why it was important to humans.  The caloric content of foods became an important factor in determining what people should eat (since calories were all-important, and obesity was not a problem for most Americans, this was an age in which high-calorie foods were considered to be good things).

Further research into what foods were made of led to the discovery of vitamins in the early 20th century, which Levenstein calls The Newer Nutrition. This was also revolutionary since scientists were able, for the first time, to tie specific diseases to the lack of a specific vitamin or mineral.  Scurvy, the bane of sailors everywhere, was due to a lack of vitamin C, while rickets, which especially affected miners, happened because people didn’t have enough vitamin D (our bodies naturally produce vitamin D when exposed to sunlight, and since miners spend most of their waking hours underground, they were lacking).

Once scientists identified vitamins and minerals, the next step was to isolate them, determine how to make large amounts of them, and add them to specific foods that were lacking in particular vitamins and minerals.  For example, pellagra is a nutritional disease (lack of niacin) that affected thousands of poorer people in the American south.  Their diet was corn-based  (mostly cornmeal, which was cheap and could be prepared in a number of different ways), and since corn does not contain niacin, those people suffered from pellagra.  Once researchers figured out how to add niacin to foods the government simply mandated that all cornmeal needed to have niacin added to it, and the pellagra problem disappeared (by the way, Native American groups that relied on corn-based diets for thousands of years dodged the pellagra bullet by hulling their corn with ashes, which added niacin into the food).

Both the New Nutrition and the Newer Nutrition saw foods as a tool to help make people healthier.  If there was a problem, people just had to eat more food  An example of this comes from a World War II-era poster showing the Basic 7 food groups, a forerunner to today’s food pyramid, which only identified the different groups without suggesting how much of each to eat.  At the bottom of the poster is the advice “In addition to the Basic 7…eat any other foods you want.” (2)  In the context of the thinking at that time, any foods could be helpful, including processed foods like TV Dinners or even candy.

This belief about the positive power of food began to change in the 1960s and led to the Negative Nutrition.  In the Negative Nutrition, foods shifted from being positive things to being somewhere between helpful and dangerous.  Foods could provide valuable vitamins and minerals, but they could also have too many calories, too much fat, and be too highly processed.

I shouldn’t need to say too much about the Negative Nutrition since it’s the set of beliefs about food we still operate under today.  What is interesting is to compare our approach to foods today with the older belief that food is a useful tool, with few, if any, downsides.  Things have changed a lot over the years; our distrust and fear of certain aspects of food is just one example.

(1) Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1951), 126.

(2) Barbara McLean Ward, ed., Produce and Conserve, Share and Play Square: The Grocer and the Consumer on the Home-Front Battlefield During World War II (Portsmouth, NH: Strawbery Banke Museum, 1994), 115.