Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves

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.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Introduction: What’s for Dinner? Chapter 1: The Words and Ways of Traditional Dietetics Chapter 2: Medicine, Morality, and the Fabric of Everyday Life Chapter 3: How to Know about Your Food and How to Know about Yourself Chapter 4: You Are What You Eat: Types of People and Types of Food Chapter 5: Talking Back to the Doctors: Medical Expertise and Ordinary Life Chapter 6: Dietetics Modernized? Mathematics and Mechanism Chapter 7: Dietetics Revolutionized? Common Sense, Common Life, and Chemical Expertise Chapter 8: Nutrition Science: Constituents and Their Powers Conclusion: The Way We Eat Now Notes Bibliography

About the Author :
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.

Review :
“Eating and Being is a history of dietetics, and of the ideas about eating that succeeded it, all the way up to the unpoetic calorie. Shapin is an eminent historian of science whose work has taught us much about the social worlds in which scientific knowledge was created, and he argues here that thinking about food is also a way of thinking about some of the most fundamental categories of human physiology, personality, and morality. . . . Shapin traces the slow and uneven transformations in the ways people imagined their bodies to work, how food made flesh; in his telling, this isn’t a story of radical change but of ‘layered pasts, a surface through which supposedly past sentiments intermittently intrude, one in which some elements of the past were never completely submerged.’” “Eating and Being is a genuine pleasure to read and think about. The issue the book raises is profound: in our gardens, in our kitchens, and at our tables, every morsel links eating and being.” “Shapin’s ambition is greater than a retelling of dietetic principles. His purpose is to uncover the history of food as a building block of both body and mind: the history of food as a ‘self-making’ substance. Interested in continuities as much as change, he traces the history of dietetics to reveal that modern practices of self-making are deeply rooted in the silt of the past.”  “Shapin’s new book, Eating and Being, ranges from Socrates to slow food by way of Plutarch, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and the American home economics movement, as it traces significant shifts and surprising continuities in writings about diet, health, and the good life.”  “Erudite, complex, riveting . . . Shapin’s Eating and Being relates a fascinating cultural history of Western concepts about good food, moral medicine, and ideal health.” “Shapin explores the links between social posturing, morality, and diet and reveals the tight coupling between diet and culture. Despite covering many centuries worth of advice on how to eat ‘right’ and medical and cultural frameworks, the writing is sparklingly clear and accessible even when explaining technical dietary concepts.”  “Eating and Being explores the evolution of eaters’ perception of food, as priorities shifting from what is good to what is good for them. Historian Steven Shapin traces the development of traditional dietetics and its growth into the nutrition science of today, arguing that this change has fundamentally altered the way we think about food, bodies, and the mind.” Q: What book last changed your thinking?Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves by Steven Shapin. It’s a history of the idea that “we are what we eat”. For example, today we believe that people who eat lettuce, carrots or organic foods are not just healthier, but also morally superior to those who eat burgers. Modern nutrition is a lab-based equivalent to old concepts – dating back to ancient Greek and medieval medicine – where we try to eat things that correct some aspect of our body that’s “out of balance”. In an age of obesity drugs, the book really made me think about diet trends and how deep-rooted our attitudes to food are. “A timely and authoritative book. Eating and Being offers a detailed, but highly readable, historical account of how Western ideas about good food have changed, particularly over the past five hundred years.” “‘Diet’ has come to mean what we eat, how many calories, how much protein or carbohydrate. Shapin gives us a cultural and medical history of how this was not always so in western countries. From the ancient Greeks until the mid-nineteenth century, diet meant a medical regimen for management of the body, in which the language of qualities, humors, and temperaments was ubiquitous in both medical practice and common parlance. In this erudite and often entertaining book, Shapin further demonstrates the persistence of centuries-old prescriptions for balance and moderation as the virtuous aim in eating and living.” “Eating and Being is an important, timely, and beautifully written book tracing the history of western thinking about food and health from the ancient to the modern worlds. Shapin demonstrates the pervasiveness of ‘dietetic’ thinking about what we eat and drink until the eighteenth century; explains the implacable rise of the chemical and nutritional sciences thereafter; and reflects on the complicated and sometimes surprising survival of historical language and categories in contemporary culture. Along the way, and drawing on his vast historical knowledge, Shapin offers profound insights into very modern concerns: not least the relationship between eating and selfhood and the entanglements of food, politics, capitalism, and expertise. By providing an accessible and panoramic introduction to the story of food theory over the longue durée, Eating and Being emphatically shows why the past matters to the present.” “With his characteristic genius for cracking open what most of us take as given, Shapin has turned his attention to eating. His new book is a rich historical meditation on the notion that ‘you are what you eat,’ an ancient idea, although the phrase in its various forms in French, German, and English originated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shapin traces the changing meanings of this phrase over the centuries and reveals an element of continuity: we think about what to eat by thinking about who we are, and we think about who we are by thinking about what’s for dinner. Eating and Being will make you want to have dinner with the author, preferably at his place. It spans, as good dinner conversations do, introspection, narrative, science, analysis, and popular culture. If you are hungry for a unifying exploration of food, personhood, culture, and history, get ready for a feast.” “Even as a resolute non-foodie, ever indifferent to my peers’ endless discussions of their favorite restaurants and recipes, Eating and Being was for me a great revelation. I am almost prepared to say it is the only book about food, perhaps alongside Athenaeus’s The Deipnosophists and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s La physiologie du goût, that makes clear the fundamental importance of eating not only for our bare physiological survival, but also for the constitution of our identities, our self-understanding, and our place in the world. Eating is always politically and metaphysically charged, and food, to paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss, is powerfully good to think with—especially when Shapin is our guide.”