Helen Zoe Veit. Modern Food, Moral Food

In Modern Food, Moral Food, Helen Zoe Veit examines Americans’ shifting relationships to food in the early twentieth century. She compellingly argues that a network of forces in the 1910s and 1920s, many of them tied to the rationalization of food during World War I, fundamentally reshaped American foodways. During this period, home economics, nutrition science, an increasing emphasis on willpower and self-control, a new racialized discourse, the Americanization of immigrant foods, and the demonization of fat all came together to imbue food with a new moral significance. During World War I, the American government created the U. S. Food Administration to oversee food aid abroad and food conservation domestically. The Administration’s slogan, “victory over ourselves,” captures the strain of self-deprivation and suppression of pleasure that dominated this period. On the whole, as food became more scientific and more regulated, it became less about taste and memory and desire. As Veit writes, food was stripped of its “messy cultural contexts” (8). This allowed characters like Herbert Popenoe to introduce his notorious “cat feasts in 1918,” in which he served cat meat to his friends in an effort to save more valuable meats for the war effort. The idea of substitution was supported by the rise of nutrition science in the 1910s, which encouraged people to see foods as no more than the sum of their component nutrients. This led nutritionists to a “kind of cultural algebra” in which immigrant food like lentil curry could become nutritionally equivalent to the American meat and potatoes—what home economist Ellen Richards referred to as “food synonyms” (46, 137).

Americanization · Economic history · Foodways · Modernity · Political science · Sociology · Taste · Anthropology · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Food Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law