El juego en la enseñanza de una lengua extranjera

‘Assail not Nature. She has done her part. Do thou but thine.’

What is meant by wrong kinds of food?

White bread, white flour, polished rice, cornflour, sugar, syrups, sweets, tinned goods, preserved foods, lard, margarine, and then some – as the Americans say...

Well, are not those foods pure enough?

Pure! Yes, too pure. If you try to feed animals ... on those foods they will be dead within a few weeks. They are not natural foods, they have been robbed of, or they do not contain certain things that animals must get. Yes, but ...

Yes, you are ‘all right’ more or less – chiefly less – but you get other things that have kept you going – fresh meat, milk, butter, eggs, fresh and green vegetables and fruits. But often you and your children live chiefly on the wrong foods.

Those other things keep you right?

Yes. Some of them are called by doctors ‘protective foods’ – particularly milk and fresh green vegetables.

(quoted in Santich, 1995a: 95)

Sweets, biscuits and cakes were also highly discouraged, particularly for children. As one manual of child feeding put it, ‘The sin of giving sweets [etc.] to infants is one concerning which it is difficult to speak too strongly’ (King, 1933: 53).

During the inter-war years we are then able to identify a number of nutrition movements which focused on family nutrition. These were government-funded infant and child health services in community centres and schools, domestic sci- ence education in schools, home economics discourses in the media, and the food industry. Moreover, clinical nutrition was moving into Australian hospitals when the profession of dietetics became established in 1934 (Nash, 1989). The spi- ralling interest in nutrition in Australia gained almost all news of ‘fresh evidence’ and ‘breakthroughs’ from overseas since little original nutrition research was car- ried out here. Things changed in 1936, however, when the Commonwealth Advisory Council on Nutrition was formed. Fred Clements, an important figure in a nutrition bureaucracy that developed later from the Council, hailed this devel- opment as a ‘Watershed ... a major milestone in the history of nutrition in Australia’ (Clements, 1986: 86) because government funds could be used to employ trained people on a full-time basis to undertake scientific investigations into nutrition. The functions of the Council were to

advise the government on, firstly, the present state of nutrition of the Australian people and, secondly, the nature of any evidence that the Australian people are in any degree undernourished, or that their diet is improperly balanced or improperly prepared.

(Clements, 1986: 88)

The major focus of inquiry for the Council was the family, and one of the first research activities undertaken was to document domestic food consumption. Families in selected cities were issued with booklets designed to collect informa- tion about family composition, gender, age, occupation of members, foods purchased, received as gifts or grown in gardens. These were to be expressed as weights or volumes and the price (where applicable) was to be given. Space was provided in the booklets to record daily menus, meals eaten away from home and meals provided to visitors (Clements, 1986: 90). These details were to be kept by families over a 28-day period. The main collector of information in the family was to be the mother.

Several other surveys were organised by the Council to gather information on, for example, the growth of children living in rural areas, oral hygiene in children and nutritional deficiency diseases. Nutrition surveillance – using scientific methods of investigation – became an important function of the Council. In late 1938, under the Council’s recommendation, a Nutrition Section was established as part of the Commonwealth Department of Health, with Clements as director. The Section staff included physicians, biochemists, nutritionists and dietitians, whose main activities were research into and education of ‘professional persons and the public’ (Clements, 1986: 122). The work of the Council received much publicity through health and domestic science networks. The press published the findings of the surveys, and ‘Vesta’ of the Argus urged readers, especially women’s organisations, to learn about ‘nutritive principles’ (Reiger, 1986: 76).

While nutrition discourses were being circulated during the inter-war years to families in Australia through infant welfare centres, schools and the press, the nutrition problems facing poor families had, in fact, been aired much earlier on another front. In 1907 the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration proclaimed the ‘Harvester Case’ which specified that every unskilled adult male should be ‘paid a wage sufficient to live like a human being’ (McCarthy, 1969). The judge who brought down the decision, Justice Henry Higgins, stipulated that nothing less than seven shillings a day would do. The judgement was hailed as a landmark decision in Australian industrial history since, from its implementation, basic wages were no longer to be established by economic criteria such as supply and demand of labour. The figure of seven shillings was arrived at after Higgins had considered the work in England by Booth and Rowntree (McCarthy, 1969: 29). Higgins had included in his reckonings nutritional calculations of the dietary requirements of a family of five. Nutrition issues were made much more explicit thirteen years later in the 1920 Royal Commission into the Basic Wage. The Commission had been called to inquire into the cost of living, which had esca- lated during the war. Again nutritional information was used to estimate basic living costs and a reasonable standard of living (Santich, 1995a: 71). During the hearing a number of witnesses were called by the trade union movement. One was Mrs Burley, from a family of seven, who was questioned by the employers’ repre- sentative who asked:

I suppose you do not know anything about calories? No.

And when you order a thing [grocery] you do not estimate its calorie value? No I do not go in for calories, but if I hear a thing is going up [in price] I gen- erally get a supply in.

(Reiger, 1986: 77)

Let us use this brief exchange to summarise the issues presented in this, the final section of this chapter. Nutrition discourses were circulated with increasing influ- ence in Australia during the first part of the twentieth century. Understandings about the nature of food in the form of nutrition took place through a government of the diet in terms of an administration of rational and scientific ways of eating. As a new discourse, nutrition did not necessarily provide entirely new meanings about food for, as we have seen, many of the injunctions were often part of advice given in earlier centuries. Indeed, it was the congruence with earlier understand- ings of food and health that allowed nutrition to map directly onto concerns about disease, morality and the need to undergo certain privations for the sake of health and for the sake of ‘nature’s economy’. Nutrition provided a moral discourse alongside a scientific discourse on food, where it found a place as part of public health and hygiene campaigns.

As a scientific discourse on food, nutrition allowed for a surveillance of the population’s eating habits which produced a number of categories of nutrition

subjects. These were the well-nourished, the malnourished and the pre-clinical or ‘at risk’ groups. The latter category was defined according to blood-tests, x-rays and dietary intake information in which sub-deficiency criteria had been defined. However, personal and social characteristics were also factored into nutritional assessments. Thus in describing the results of the survey of rural children in 1937, the chief investigator notes that ‘[a] personal quality [of the mother], designated as “mothercraft” seemed important in determining whether the children in a household faired well or not’ (Clements, 1986: 106). In this way nutrition pro- duced not only new knowledge about food and new understandings about the health consequences of poor diet; along with other demographic techniques, it produced a new category of subjects on the basis of age, class and nutritional sta- tus. Parents, especially mothers, could be classified with other factors which contributed to the risk of poor nutrition in children. Consequently socio-nutri- tional surveys went beyond the usual binary separation of health and disease. Sub-clinical manifestations required that health be best represented as a contin- uum. This ‘nutritional spectrum’ meant that the classes of health could not be fixed at one end of the spectrum or the other, but instead in the spaces between them in which different standards of nutritional health were defined by the degree of sub-clinical manifestation (Armstrong, 1995: 397). Thus nutrition discourses produce subjects by objectifying them in terms of physiological, nutritional and social categories. There is little doubt that health improvements through the avail- ability of better food, and a better understanding of food, did indeed make populations healthier. An example which stands for many concerns infant mortal- ity. In New South Wales, mortality rates for infants aged six to twelve months fell from thirty-two per 1,000 live births in 1895 to six per 1,000 live births in 1935. This was due mainly to a reduction of infantile gastroenteritis, known as the colo- nial killer, through better domestic hygiene and improved handling of infant food, especially cow’s milk (Walker and Roberts, 1988: 73). New knowledge of fami- lies’ eating habits, through routine checks at infant welfare centres and schools, provided a breadth and depth of understanding about family diets on a scale never before known. The Mothers and Babies Association of South Australia, for exam- ple, included in its annual report the frequency of, and reasons for, ‘dietary adjustment’ in infants and children. Also reported was the percentage of infants at various ages given breast, bottle or ‘mixed’ feeds. Nutrition surveys of popula- tions systematically collected, coded and reported what people were eating. This scientific information was relayed back to the public by way of professionals, government agencies, the media and food manufacturers. These ‘regimes of truth’ produced subjects as objects of nutrition. But nutrition also produced technolo- gies of the self through which subjects of nutrition problematised their relationship with food in terms of an understanding of what was considered to be ‘good’. By grounding food in a rational and biomedical discourse, nutrition rede- fined ‘goodness’ for modern subjects for whom food had already been problematised by ascetic Christian beliefs and practices. But now, instead of effacing pleasure of food, modern subjects were able to rationalise it through

moral judgement based on science. This reminds us that nutritional thought is thus a product of Kantian thought, in which sensuous experiences of food should always be problematised against a higher order of reason and knowledge. In this way nutrition continued a moral problematisation, which has been part of Western culture since antiquity, in which eating cannot be justified by pleasure alone. Pleasure around food is either to be mastered and moderated as it was for the ancient Greeks, or effaced as it was for the early Christians, or rationalised in rela- tion to scientific principles and moral reason as it is for modern subjects of nutrition.

Conclusions

This chapter has examined a range of factors which were important for the emer- gence of a discourse on nutrition. Perhaps we can conclude by considering the problematisation of food in terms of Foucault’s typology and analysis of ethics (Foucault, 1992b). Using this typology we can say that, since the time of the early Greeks, there has been a moral problematisation of food and pleasure. What has changed, however, has been the particular ethics employed to deal with this prob- lem. Let us look at this in more detail.

If the pleasure of food is considered to be the immediate ethical concern gov- erning individual conduct we can say that in antiquity the major concerns were about timeliness and need. The practices required to promote ethical conduct were moderation and self-mastery. The purpose of all of this was to have a good reputation and to be fit to rule others in order to have access to the ‘truth’. For the early Christians, the major concerns with food were understood in terms of car- nality and sensuality of the flesh. The practices required to develop a pure Christian self were denial of pleasure and fasting, with the specific aim of spiri- tual purity and immortality. For modern subjects of nutrition the major concern is (ir)rational eating habits in relation to scientific and medical norms. The practice for the development of the ‘good’ eater is adherence to food choice based on nutritional principles with the purpose of recognising oneself as a moral and ‘good’ citizen.

Thus nutrition produces modern subjectivities through a process whereby food choices are problematised in relation to scientific principles. This moral duty is, as we saw earlier, developed through a Kantian ethic based on Christian practices of self-reflection and problematisation. It becomes easy to see how modern sub- jects express feelings of ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ when they have committed a dietary transgression by engaging in so-called ‘indulgences’. Food choice along nutri- tional lines therefore becomes a practice for the body, through health and longevity and so on, as well as a reflection of the soul: an ‘empirico-transcenden- tal doublet’.

The brief exchange described earlier between Mrs Burley and her questioner, in which she ‘confesses’ that she did not ‘go in for calories’, tells scientists not only about the questionable nature of her economical skills but also her moral

judgement in feeding her family. And this brings us to an important point about nutrition discourses. We have noted that they have mapped onto discourses on the family, especially in terms of the well-being of the children. It was, however, the mother, through a discourse on motherhood, who interacted mostly with nutrition. As Nettleton (1991) has shown with discourses in dentistry, the mother is the prime mover in regard to family health. For nutrition, also, we can say that the mother was the prime mover in the health of the family since she was often solely responsible for the provision of family meals. Nutrition discourses then become amplified through the government of the family and the ethics of motherhood. We will look more closely at this in the next chapter.

By way of bringing this chapter to a close, we should note that government and ethics of nutrition reached something of an apogee in Australia (and, indeed, in Britain and the United States) during the Second World War. The dietary rationing that took place at that time was based on nutritional knowledge of the physiologi- cal food needs of individual groups in the population such as infants, children, pregnant and lactating women and labouring men. During this period nutrition discourses were relayed by professionals, the media, food manufacturers, trade unions and others to families, especially women, with an explicit message about the need to make the most of what was available and to reduce waste. Food and nutrition messages provided information and, at the same time, bolstered patrio- tism: ‘cooking and eating for victory’. Thus the government of the food supply was never stronger. However, as Burnett (1979: 331) remarks, the success of rationing schemes (in Britain) depended on the ‘goodwill of thousands of traders and millions of housewives’. Australia, too, had millions of ‘good-willed’ house- wives prepared to do the ‘right and proper thing’ with a food rationing scheme which, though not as austere as that in Britain, was still very restrictive. The war years made food austerity both a private and a public virtue, and, in doing so, pro- vided another condition of possibility for the insertion of nutrition discourse into public discourse. In the next chapter we will see how, in the post-war years, nutri- tion further developed in another ‘war’: that waged against common health problems like heart disease and cancer.

Nutrition landscapes in late