Eating and Being

What we eat, who we are, and the relationship between the two.Eating and Being is a history of Western thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves. In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not always been the case. For a great span of the past-from antiquity through about the middle of the eighteenth century-one of the most pervasive branches of medicine was known as dietetics, prescribing not only what people should eat but also how they should order many aspects of their lives, including sleep, exercise, and emotional management. Dietetics did not distinguish between the medical and the moral, nor did it acknowledge the difference between what was good for you and what was good. Dietetics counseled moderation in all things, where moderation was counted as a virtue as well as the way to health. But during the nineteenth century, nutrition science began to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the vocabulary of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and calories, and the medical and the moral went their separate ways. Steven Shapin shows how much depended upon that shift, and he also explores the extent to which the sensibilities of dietetics have been lost.Throughout this rich history, he evokes what it felt like to eat during another historical period and invites us to reflect on what it means to feel about food as we now do. Shapin shows how the change from dietetics to nutrition science fundamentally altered how we think about our food and its powers, our bodies, and our minds.

Autorentext

Steven Shapin is professor emeritus of the history of science at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (with Simon Schaffer); The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation; The Scientific Revolution; A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England; and Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority.

Klappentext

"Eating and Being is a book about what we eat and who we are, and how the two are intertwined. Why do we eat what we do, and what do we think about what we eat? A genealogy of thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves, it draws attention to how people in the West have thought and felt about food and eating over the centuries. How has food been represented and what have been the consequences? The book begins by taking up what Steven Shapin calls traditional dietetics, which was intended to counsel people about how to live to maintain their health. Traditional dietetics-from Antiquity through the early modern period-occupied much the same terrain as moral culture and it took some of its authority from the way in which advice on health and advice on a virtuous life coincided. Its ideas were challenged throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as nutrition scientists, chemists, and physiologists attempted to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the concepts coming out of their labs-namely, a language of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Shapin's tour then takes us through the twentieth century to show how a new vernacular for thinking about food came to shape our present-day relationship to it. Eating and Being is a sympathetic story about the relationship between the objective and the subjective, about human beings as natural objects and sensing subjects, and about what is good for you and what is good"--