Food, Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating

222 Pages·1999·0.88 MB·English

by  John Coveney

Food, Morals and Meaning
By using current fascination with the science of nutrition in many Western cultures,
Food, Morals and Meaning will examine our need to discipline our desires, our
appetites and our pleasures at the table. It will be argued that, as well as providing
a scientific rationale for eating, nutrition forms the moral basis of modern food
choice, requiring us to rationalise our food pleasures.
Food, Morals and Meaning first explores the way that concerns about food,
the body and pleasure were prefigured in antiquity and then how these concerns
were recast in early Christianity as problems of ‘natural’ appetite which had to
be curbed. The following chapters discuss how scientific knowledge about food
was constructed out of philosophical and religious concerns about indulgence and
excess in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. By analysing current
strategies to promote healthy diets, the book provides an original insight into the
construction of social categories like ‘good eaters’, ‘responsible parents’ and
‘healthy children’. Finally, by using research collected from in-depth interviews
with families, the last section focuses on the social organisation of food in the
modern home to illustrate the ways that the meal table now incorporates the
principles of nutrition as a form of moral training, especially for children.
Food, Morals and Meaning will be essential reading for those studying
nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body.
John Coveney is a Senior Lecturer in nutrition and public health at Flinders
University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia.

Food, Morals and
Meaning
The pleasure and anxiety
of eating
John Coveney
London and New York
First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.
© 2000 John Coveney
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-415-20748-7 (Print Edition)
ISBN 0-203-02594-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-17317-1 (Glassbook Format)
Contents
List of tables vi
Preface vii
1 Foucault, discourse, power and the subject 1
2 Governmentality of modern nutrition 18
3 Greeks to the Christians: from ethics to guilt 30
4 Religion and reason: the emergence of a
discourse on nutrition 56
5 Paupers, prisoners and moral panics: refining the
meaning of nutrition 79
6 The nutritional policing of families 93
7 Nutrition landscapes in the late twentieth century 112
8 Nutrition homescapes in the twentieth century 131
9 An ethnography of family food: subjects of food choice 149
10 Conclusions 172
Appendix 178
Notes 181
References 182
Index 198
Tables
4.1 An example of the amount of food and nutrients that
could be bought for 25 cents in 1895 75
A.2 Family members (including income and
self-described employment) 179
Preface
This book will examine the development of our current attitudes to food, pleasure
and the body. Our aim is to explore the way that the pleasures we derive from
food are also the sources of anxieties around eating. We will see how eating
became a problem for the individual body, and, importantly, how it became a
problem for the social body. We will show that anxieties about our appetite for
food have given and continue to give rise to concerns about the very moral fabric
of society. We will see that they have a long-standing place in Western history.
The heart of the problem it seems is that food pleasure challenges self-control.
There is only one other pleasure that matches food in this way. That is sex.
Indeed, it is no coincidence that for the ancient Greeks, pleasure from food and
pleasure from sex were considered in much the same terms. Both were natural
appetites and both required the exercise of moderation in order to demonstrate
that one was truly civilised. Nor was it any coincidence that the early Christian
fathers considered the appetite for food to be more harmful and distracting than
an appetite for sex in the quest for spirituality. Satisfying the appetite for food,
and any pleasures derived from that satisfaction, was a source of great anxiety for
the early monks.
It could be said that these things may have been true for superstitious ancients,
but today don’t we live more rational, more sophisticated, more informed lives?
This is indeed far from the case. Look at the following example: we live at a time
when food choices seem endless. Modern food production systems churn out a
wide range of foodstuff at a breathless pace, with thousands of new food items
launched each year onto the Australian market. But has there ever been a time
when we have been required to demonstrate so much concern about our eating
habits? Warnings and admonitions constantly alert us to the fact that we could be
viii Preface
digging our own graves with our knives and forks. These concerns are usually
couched in terms of our health, especially in terms of the scientific, calculated
understanding of food that we recognise as the field of nutrition. However,
nutritional knowledge does not merely consist of facts, figures and
recommendations from scientific experts. As a knowledge about what, when, and
how much to eat, nutrition provides a guide for individuals to assess their eating
habits in terms of what is ‘good’. Indeed, the term ‘good food’, once reserved for
notions of tables laden with tasty dishes of food, now suggests something entirely
different. Today good food requires one to show less concern with the physical
pleasure of eating, and more interest in the good health that results from our
dietary habits. Think about the number of times people describe themselves as
‘good’ or ‘bad’ in relation to the nutritional quality of the food they have eaten
(‘I’ve been very bad today, far too much fat and sugar in that chocolate bar’ or,
‘Actually, I deserve this gooey, sugary treat because I’ve been very good so far
this week’).
These comments signal the way in which scientific and technical knowledge
forms the basis for the moral judgements we make about ourselves and others. It
is this moral imperative which is encoded in nutrition that makes it so compelling,
so engaging, so judgemental, and so strangely popular. Much of this interest
stems from the fact that many of the foods that give us pleasure are the very
foods that – in a nutritional context – cause us anxiety, and often guilt. And yet
instead of shrugging off recommendations and proscriptions as gratuitous preaching
from a bunch of scientific do-gooders, we have allowed – indeed, welcomed –
nutrition into our lives and into our minds. For even the most ardent hedonist (‘I
just eat anything I like and enjoy’) knows about good nutrition principles, even if
he or she chooses not to practise them. If the popularity of nutrition is gauged by
the media coverage it commands, it would seem that we are fascinated by the
moral dimensions of food choice: what we should and should not be eating.
It is the emergence of nutrition, as a science and a morality, that is the subject
of this book. As we shall see, concerns about the pleasure and anxiety of eating
have been variously structured at different times in different Western systems of
thought. We need to acknowledge that nutrition did not invent a morality about
eating, even if it rehearses it. Nutrition merely mapped onto existing concerns
about food and pleasure that have been part of Western culture since antiquity.
Nutrition, that is to say, is the most recent manifestation of this concern. It is the
Preface ix
purpose of this overview to introduce the general themes, key concepts and
broad issues of this book which will be developed in subsequent chapters.
Histories of nutrition and their problems
Some commentators have taken an interest in the emergence of nutrition, and
attempts have been made to study how it developed, and where and why it
currently circulates in contemporary discourse on health. These studies may be
broadly described under three headings. First, there are histories of the scientific
discoveries of nutrition; second, there are sociological interpretations of the
development of nutrition; and, last, there are histories which have examined
changes in medical opinion about diet since the nineteenth century. In Australia,
recent examples of these three approaches are, respectively, The History of Human
Nutrition in Australia (Clements, 1986), Good Nutrition? Fact and Fashion in
Dietary Advice (Crotty, 1995), and What the Doctors Ordered: 150 Years of
Dietary Advice in Australia (Santich, 1995). Typically, these accounts of nutrition
take as their starting points people and events in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Thus, Clements has explained the development of nutrition through
the scientific discoveries of Lavoisier (1743–1794), Liebig (1803–1873) and Voit
(1841–1908). With a more sociological orientation, Crotty has examined the role
of so-called nineteenth-century middle-class social reformers, such as Wilbur
Atwater in the United States, in the application of nutritional science to the social
problems of poorer classes, while Santich has looked at the changing nature of
medical advice on diet, especially as this has reflected social concerns.
The problem with these approaches to the development of nutrition will be
fully discussed later. At this point, we will propose that histories of nutrition
which begin with the ‘bright and creative minds’ of scientists or social reformers
(or, indeed, the populations for whom nutrition was expected to be of benefit)
impose unnecessary limits on a fuller conceptualisation of nutrition. For one
thing, they require us to explain the increasing interest and spread of nutrition
discourses either in terms of humanistic, progressive, scientific rationality or
through a political economy of food choice aimed at manipulating the poorer
classes. Left totally unproblematised in these accounts, however, is the nature of
the knowing individual, or subject, who has the capacity for making food choices
or recommending them. This subject is easily recognisable in the aforementioned
histories as the scientist who makes discoveries about food and nutrients, as the
social reformer whose knowledge about food choice allows them to inform the