Season 2, Bonus Episode: Dieting: What’s Old is New Again
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
On Today’s Episode:
An excerpt from my interview with Michael Lansing - a very truncated history of dieting, and the way that industrialization impacted our understanding of how we should eat.
With Special Guests:
Michael J. Lansing is Associate Professor of History at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN. A historian of the modern United States, his current book project is Enriched: Industrial Carbohydrates and the Rise of Nutrition Capitalism—a history of factory-processed grains and the hidden logic that drives contemporary food systems. He is the author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as well as commentaries in MinnPost, BillMoyers.com, and Zócalo Public Square.
The Was Is Could Be podcast is produced by Liz Russell at To Eat and To Love, LLC. Each episode is carefully edited by Joshua Rivers of Podcast Guy Media, LLC. Our theme music is made by Neil Cross and published by ImageCollect Publishing.
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Liz Russell Narration:
In the last episode, Michael Lansing and I talk about how marketing and nutrition science really came into their own during the industrialization of food. This led me to a new question: What about diet foods and marketing that's based on diets? Here's what Michael Lansing had to say.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
Yeah, that's a great question. There are historians who have done some work on the history of dieting, there’s a couple of really, really good books on it. What they suggest, when you look at that more recent historical research on the history of diets in America since the second half of the 19th century, essentially what you see is that there has been a critique of industrially processed food for as long as we have had industrially processed food. And what's really interesting once you dig into the details of that long standing critique is that, for instance, we're really interested in fiber in our diets. And right now a number of scientists are telling us that fiber affects the ways in which the bacteria in your gut work and can have all these potential health effects, positive or negative, depending on what you're doing with fiber in your diet.
There's a fiber craze in the United States in the 1920s. And there are concerns raised about the lack of fiber in an industrially processed diet as early as the early 1900s. Indeed, Kellogg himself is writing about the lack of fiber in a diet and how that's a problem. There are consumer advocates writing in the 1930s about how white bread flour is one of the worst things you can put in your body. And they say, in fact, you should cook like your grandma cooked, which of course is exactly what Michael Pollan says in the early 2000s, almost word for word. And I know that Pollan, I'm pretty sure he didn't know about this consumer advocate writing in the 1930s. And by the way, this consumer advocate wrote a book called Eat, Drink, and Be Wary by Frederick John Schlink and it was reviewed in the New York times, like this was widespread knowledge. So this critique of industrial food is as old as industrial food itself and the question of how should I eat and what things should I consider about the food that goes in my mouth, these are also longstanding questions with their own histories. And even fad diets of various sorts, the raw food diet or the diet eating like people did in a pre-industrial time, or there are all these examples of those types of diets happening long before the 1990s or 2000s.
In some ways in the world of dieting, everything old is new again, that's what these more recent histories of dieting in America have suggested. And then of course there are different types of choices about food that people make, for instance, vegetarianism and the historians of vegetarianism that have done great work have often focused on the religious roots in the United States, at least of vegetarianism in the 19th century and how a broader vegetarian culture emerges in the middle of the 20th century and how that's related to changing ideas about the body and health and how these kind of religious origins are left behind in some cases.
But there's a chain of vegetarian restaurants in the early 1900s as it turns out. There's canned vegetarian products in the early 1900s. And then the question of diet can also really turn on questions of actual whether or not a person will live. Think about people who struggle with diabetes. And we think we know now, of course, that high carbohydrate diets can be very problematic for people with diabetes because that's what bounces one's blood sugar around. And there are these profound effects and all these other systems in the body based on what your insulin is like chemically at any given time. And so of course, many diabetics are working hard to stay away from things with added sugars or what we think of today as simple carbohydrates or empty carbohydrates. Well, that's also a market for the food industry.
I've found examples from the late 1890s of Pillsbury making a diabetic flour and that was a flour that had more fiber in it. So the people who were even then critiquing white bread flour, and there were some in the 1890s who were saying, oh, this stuff is bad for you, you shouldn't use that stuff. Even diabetics were being marketed to. And I think that's some of what this food system that we live in is about that even the alternatives captured ultimately by the large food companies. That's what I refer to in my book project as nutrition capitalism, this kind of ever-changing way in which the critique is swallowed up by the thing that's being critiqued. A great modern example is the second largest maker of organic foods in the United States today is General Mills. And once again, it's not a conspiracy, it's not some kind of evil people in a back room plotting to ruin things. It's the acquisition of smaller companies like Annie's or Cascadian Farms, and ensuring that there's separation between those brands and your long standing brands like Wheaties or Cheerios, and then investing a lot of money into those and expanding the access for, in this case, organic processed grain products. Nutrition capitalism is a really important way to think about, I would argue, our current food system because all the alternatives, all the critiques seem to slowly get enveloped by and incorporated into the current food.
Liz Russell Narration:
There you have it. Thanks so much for listening to this season and to the bonus episodes if you’ve made it this far. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please let me know on Instagram at @itslizrussell. See you there!
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