We again start with the theological ruptures in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which a privileged place of Man and nature was fore- grounded in the rise of ascetic Protestantism. Here we are concerned with the way this system of thought privileged an empirical view of the world.
The connection between ascetic Protestantism and the rise of science was first mooted by Weber in his work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1930). It was Weber’s belief that in order to nourish the spirit of capital- ism, ‘worldly’ ascetism of the kind practised by ascetic Protestants was necessary so as to provide, first, support for entrepreneurial individualism and, second, a ‘work ethic’ for a diligent labour force. Weber’s thesis was taken up by Merton (1973 [1936]), who concluded that ascetic Protestant traditions, especially Calvinism and Puritanism in England, and Pietism in Germany, played a large role in the development of science and technology in the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries. Merton’s thesis basically rests on the following. First, within ascetic Protestant religions there is, as we have seen, a strong belief in the source of nature itself, rather than in an authority or theological hierarchy. For Pietists, for example, God was represented in nature rather than in the form of higher church officials (for example, priests and the papacy). Second, within these tradi- tions there was a freedom from ecclesiastical or other forms of censorship. This strongly influenced their educational philosophies, which encouraged a worldly rather than a strictly theological viewpoint. The relationship between people and nature was to be understood through rationalism and empiricism, a view crys- talised in Kantian philosophy. Last, Merton observes that the foundation of scientific groups in England in the mid-seventeenth century, such as the Royal Society, was largely in the hands of men like Robert Boyle, John Ray, John Wilkins and Thomas Sprat, who all had strong ascetic Protestant beliefs. In the writings of these men Merton sees that ‘certain elements of the Protestant ethic had pervaded the realm of scientific endeavour and had left their indelible stamp upon the attitudes of scientists towards their work’ (1973: 22). Merton’s thesis has been the subject of much debate (see Turner, 1992: 196–213), and a number of
criticisms have been made. Even amongst critics who take issue with Merton’s original argument, however, there is support for the idea that ascetic Protestant thought and the rationality of science share the same heritage (see Lawless, 1974). In other words, both belong to the same system of thought (Hooykaas, 1972: 100).
Merton believes that wherever ascetic Protestantism spread its influence there was a large-scale introduction of science and technology into the educational sys- tem. In Germany the University of Halle, originally a Pietist institution (Greene, 1960: xiii), was the first university to introduce a thorough training in science (Merton, 1973: 37). The same emphasis on science was also given at Königberg, Göttingen and Altdorf. Merton tells us that the Realschule – in which study was centred on mathematics and the natural sciences – was a completely Pietist prod- uct (Merton, 1973: 38). Interestingly, Hunter locates in the same geographical area the prototype of the modern elementary school – the Volksschule – which was established in opposition to the Gymnasium or classic school (Hunter, 1994: xvi). The practical, utilitarian education that was provided in these institutions exemplified a worldly rather than a classical theological education.
In terms of the science of nutrition, these developments are very important since much of the early work in human physiology which formed the basis of nutritional science was undertaken at German universities in research funded by the State (Aronson, 1982). People like Voit, Rubner and Pettenkofer, who are associated with the early research in the measurement of human metabolism, worked from German laboratories. These institutions were also considered to be training grounds for others from England and America. Some of the most influ- ential work in early nutrition was undertaken by Justus von Liebig at the University of Giessen. Liebig’s department was unique in that it was the first in which students were taught to handle scientific apparatus and conduct experi- ments. Prior to this, students were only allowed to watch the professor demonstrating (Clements, 1986: 11). No doubt these new procedures in chemical analysis ‘opened up’ organic substrates, like food, to the gaze of the chemist in much the same way that new medical procedures of physical examination ‘opened up’ the body to the gaze of the doctor.
Voit, Rubner and Pettenkofer were all students of Liebig at Giessen. Liebig’s interest in physiology and agricultural chemistry was part of his overall enthusi- asm for analytical organic chemistry. There is some support for the fact that his work was stimulated by population and agricultural problems (Rossiter, 1975: 27), and the resulting civil unrest (Walker, 1964: 40) that was evident in Giessen during the early nineteenth century. It was Liebig’s experiments on animals which provided him with early indications that food provided the body with the different constituents, some nitrogenous, others carboniferous, required for proper human metabolism. And it was Liebig who ascertained that only those constituents (nutrients) that entered the blood could be valuable to the organism. On another front, Liebig was one of the first to put agricultural chemistry on a rational, ana- lytical footing, opening the way for the use of modern mineral and organic
fertilisers. In fact, Liebig’s solutions to agricultural problems made his name syn- onymous with the progress and usefulness of science in nineteenth-century Europe and America (Rossiter, 1975: 26). In America, Liebig’s influence was instrumental in helping to garner federal support for the establishment of agricul- tural research stations in each State. These stations, originally established along the lines of those in Germany, were to be of practical assistance to farmers facing problems with crop yields and pest control.
We will now turn to the work of Wilbur Atwater, which usually commands a privileged position in the history of nutrition. It was Atwater who, as professor of chemistry at Wesleyan University, took responsibility for directing the first agri- cultural experimental station in America in 1875, in Connecticut. It was during this time that he began a comprehensive nutritional analysis of foods grown and processed in the United States (Aronson, 1982). Eventually some 2,600 analyses of American foods were published as the first comprehensive food composition tables in America (Widdowson, 1987). These were later used in his surveys of the dietary intakes of individuals and families. For his training in this work Atwater went to study in Germany under Rubner. He also studied with Voit and became interested in the measurement of human metabolism. Bearing in mind that, at that time, knowledge of nutritional requirements was mainly confined to energy and protein, the question that Voit, and later Atwater, addressed was: what are the min- imum daily requirements of protein and energy for humans undertaking a range of activities?
On return to the United States in 1881, Atwater resumed his position at Wesleyan University and by 1885 had secured funding to allow him to commence work on the construction of a calorimeter for measuring human energy and pro- tein requirements. The calorimeter is a chamber in which people live for various periods of time (usually amounting to a few days) while measurements are made of their inputs (food, drink, oxygen consumption) and outputs (excreta, carbon dioxide, body heat) while they undertake various activities. Atwater’s work focused on the role of food in the body especially in terms of thermodynamic principles. Atwater was attempting to illustrate that food could be measured as an energy ‘input’ and labour as an energy ‘output’: his project thus centred on the economy of food in the strict sense. Much of Atwater’s original work is still of rel- evance to nutritionists today. Indeed, the ‘Atwater factors’ are still used to calculate the amount of energy available from fat, protein and carbohydrate and are therefore an indirect assessment of the caloric value of food. Atwater is regarded as the father of modern nutrition through his work on human metabo- lism. As Elsie Widdowson, another prominent figure in nutrition, put it, ‘I think I can safely say that Atwater contributed more to our knowledge about the energy value of food than anyone who has ever lived ... he made a great contribution to other aspects of nutrition as well’ (Widdowson, 1987: 898).
The ‘other aspects’ that Widdowson refers to are the dietary surveys that Atwater directed from 1894 onwards. In these surveys details of the dietary intakes of families were calculated. This was achieved first by weighing all the
food in a household at the beginning of the study, including that brought in over a one-week period. An investigator was present at mealtimes to account for any waste. At the end of the week-long study all food left in the household was weighed and the amount consumed calculated by subtraction. In all, 500 surveys were undertaken in twenty-two states and territories, on families from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds (Shapiro, 1986: 164). The findings of each survey were published by the Department of Agriculture and circulated to the press, mag- azines, charities and other reform workers. Atwater’s work was of direct relevance to economists, statisticians and policy makers in the United States federal bureau- cracy who, at the time, were addressing issues of labour reform. His calculations gave them a rational and scientific way of calculating a ‘standard of living’ since food purchases accounted for between 50 and 60 per cent of household income of working-class families (Crotty, 1995; 19). Moreover, his work was supported by philanthropic agencies, missionaries and settlement workers who helped him undertake surveys in impoverished areas to ascertain how much people were spending on food and how nutritious their meals were (Aronson, 1983). By relat- ing nutrient intake to nutrient need, Atwater was able to estimate the wisdom of family food purchases. He related his findings to calculations of spending power in the manner presented in Table 4.1 (McCollum, 1939: 10). Using information like this, in combination with estimates of daily requirement of nutrients for indi- viduals, Atwater was able to calculate nutritious and economical menus for families. Atwater regarded fruits and ‘water rich’ green vegetables as unnecessar- ily extravagant purchases since, at the time, there was a limited understanding of the need for vitamins and minerals.
Atwater was convinced that his work could remove the unnecessary waste in the food supply. By relating a ‘physiological economy’ to a ‘food economy’, Atwater believed that he had provided a nutritional accounting system in which
Table 4.1 An example of the amount of food and nutrients that could be bought for 25
cents in 1895
Total/ Protein/ Fat/ Carbo- Calories
lb lb lb hydrate/
lb
Milk @ 8 cents per quart 0.81 0.23 0.25 0.29 2,020 Cheese @ 18 cents per lb 1.32 0.96 0.40 0.49 2,850 Potatoes @ $1.00 per bucket 2.69 0.27 0.01 2.29 4,785 Sugar @ 5 cents per lb 4.90 0 0 4.89 9,095 Dried beans @ 5 cents per lb 4.37 1.15 0.10 2.96 8,065 Cornmeal @ 3 cents per lb 7.08 0.77 0.32 5.88 13,720 Wheatflour @ 3.5 cents per lb 6.25 0.79 0.07 4.68 10,285 Eggs @ 5 cents per lb 0.23 0.12 0.10 0 645
each meal would meet nutritional requirements with minimum costs. The savings made by removing the unnecessary waste on food could be used to counter poverty. According to Atwater,
The true Anti-poverty Society is the Society of ‘Toil, Thrift and Temperance’. One of the articles of its constitution demands that the principles of intelli- gent economy shall be learned by patient study and followed in daily life. Of the many worthy ways in which the charity we shall call Christian is being exercised, none seems to me more worthy of appellation than the movement in industrial education of which teaching the daughters of working-people how to do housework and how to select food and cook it forms a part.
(Atwater, 1888: 445)
An important spin-off from Atwater’s work was the development of the field of domestic science or home economics. According to Rossiter (1980), American cities at the end of the nineteenth century, like many in Europe, had major public health problems which accounted for a large percentage of mortality and morbid- ity. Half of all deaths were children. The need for families to be taught better hygiene and nutrition appeared to be utterly self-evident. Thus began a training in science for women who, up to that time, had been prevented from doing scientific research; domestic science began as a tertiary degree. Training programmes taught topics such as cookery, nutrition, hygiene and mothercraft, the prerequi- sites for which were often sciences like chemistry, bacteriology and psychology. This scientific approach to home-management will be discussed later in Chapter 6, especially in an Australian context.
So far in this section of the chapter we have looked at the beginnings of mod- ern nutrition as a scientific discipline. We should, however, examine carefully the work of Atwater since it is a good example of modern nutrition functioning as an empirical science and a spiritual discipline. Let us look at this more closely. As an empirical science, nutrition produced subjects who were both the targets and the effects of its discourse. By developing criteria for judging the adequacy of the diet, nutritional knowledge was able to establish for itself rational and calculative strategies for ‘knowing’ food. This knowledge about food was dispersed through- out the community by home economists, nutritionists and others. As a technology of power/knowledge, therefore, nutrition was productive in that it provided a new understanding of food with the potential to improve health. It was also productive in that it helped to define, and to some extent create, the social problems it sought to solve.
Within this rational view of eating, the sensuous properties of food – taste, flavour and pleasure – became a matter for debate and discussion. Some, like Ellen Richards, who was an early pioneer of home economics in America, stress that while flavour was obviously important to the enjoyment of food, too much overtaxed the appetite and the digestive system ‘like the too frequent and violent application of the whip to the willing steed’; what was needed was ‘just enough to
accomplish the purpose that is nature’s economy’ (Richards and Elliot, 1910: 59). Atwater, on the other hand, could see little place for the role of flavour or indeed pleasure in the diet since he had proved scientifically that tasteless, even repug- nant, food was ‘healthy and digestible’ (Shapiro, 1986: 81). These modern solutions to a moral problematisation of pleasure are very Kantian in their form and their expression: the sensuous (impure) nature of the body has to struggle with the higher, rational principles of moral judgement, established in this case through science. Thus nutrition also provided a spiritual discipline, through tech- nologies of the self: it encouraged a moral choice for an ‘economy of nature’, and for action against waste and barriers to productivity.
By producing ‘ideal diets’ based on sound science, nutrition problematised the relationship people had with food. We have seen in earlier chapters that food had been problematised in ancient Greece and early Christian times. The arrival of nutrition provided another aspect to food problematisation which mapped onto these earlier concerns, especially those of an ascetic Christianity. The need to be frugal, thrifty and economical with nature were all part of the application of nutri- tion. The justification for these habits was now based on science, supported by both rationalism and empiricism. Eating unwisely was at one and the same time irrational and morally questionable. Indulgence becomes hedonism which was itself morally indefensible, especially when the costs were prohibitive. Thus Atwater’s contribution to the field can be seen as a government of nutrition – in the development of food classifications, registers, and techniques of inquiry into what people ate – and it was an ethics of nutrition by virtue of the moral problems it posed for subjects.
Crotty (1995: 19) and Aronson (1982: 481) are highly critical of Atwater and his workers for this moralism. They point out that Atwater displayed double stan- dards in that his dietary recommendations were made only to the poor, while the excesses of the prosperous went uncriticised. This is, in fact, untrue. Atwater’s recommendations and exhortations were published in magazines aimed at the middle class (Atwater, 1888). Also, we have already seen how the eating habits of the well-off were problematised on another front: in the spas, sanatoria and clinics of nutritionists like Kellogg.
However, as far as Atwater was concerned it was only the poor who were a ‘social problem’. They were the ones living in squalor; they were the ones with the highest morbidity and mortality rates; they were the ones with the most to gain from his programmes of ‘scientific cooking’. Atwater’s approach was entirely con- sistent with his own temperance morals and those of his era. His project was one of assisting less affluent groups to improve their lives. As one of Atwater’s colleagues put it, ‘If the ... present waste of food material could be spent for more adequate shelter ... the bad tenements in the slums would be renovated’ (Atkinson cited in Aronson, 1982: 480). Of course, the rationality of nutrition did not always hold sway with the people whose ‘improvement’ was of so much concern to reformers. There was often resistance to these reformist efforts by those who saw them as ways to justify a reduction in standards of living. One participant in an Atwater
survey withdrew because ‘the neighbors were convinced that it was a scheme to see how much it actually cost for a man to live, in order that his wages might be reduced’ (Aronson, 1982: 481). Atwater’s critics make the assumption, first, that his principles were accepted and applied in a wholesale manner. This was not so, for it is clear that the early nutrition and home economy movements were far from being all-pervasive. People could, and apparently did, resist efforts to reform them. The second assumption is that the production of nutrition as a ‘social problem’ was unhelpful. Its production as a social problem, however, provided for a better under- standing of the needs of certain groups. According to Guthrie (1989) the work by Atwater represented the first attempts by a nutritional scientist to influence national food and nutrition policy.
Conclusions
In this chapter we have examined how Enlightenment philosophy perfected a uni- versal form of humanity – understood as pure reason or ‘good’ – which is imposed by a person on him- or herself through self-problematisation and purifi- cation of thoughts, desires and motives. As definitions of what was good, proper and normal became increasingly shaped by the human sciences, the mass pedago- gies of the Church become eclipsed by the mass pedagogies of rational expertise. For nutrition in particular, knowledge of the ‘good’ diet becomes the central focus for the modern subject of food choice. As a complex form of power, nutrition became a practice of analysis, reflection, calculation and tactics on food. These practices were not solely the concern of the State, which is only one particular form of government (Miller and Rose, 1990: 3). Indeed, as we have seen, a num- ber of agencies, philanthropic and otherwise, became concerned about nutrition