Diet and the Disease of Civilization

DIET AND THE DISEASE

OF CIVILIZATION

DIET AND THE

DISEASE OF

CIVILIZATION

ADRIENNE ROSE BITAR

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bitar, Adrienne Rose, 1986– author.

Title: Diet and the disease of civilization / Adrienne Rose Bitar.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017014959 (print) | LCCN 2017019969 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813589664 (E-pub) | ISBN 9780813589688 (Web PDF) | ISBN 9780813589657 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813589640 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Diet. | Nutrition—Social aspects.

Classification: LCC RA784 (ebook) | LCC RA784 .B546 2017 (print) | DDC 613.2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014959

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2018 by Adrienne Rose Bitar

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my father and editor, Michael McIntyre Johnson

CONTENTS

DIET AND THE DISEASE

OF CIVILIZATION

INTRODUCTION

DIET BOOKS ARE some of the bestselling books of the twentieth century. By some accounts, the Atkins series has sold more than twenty million copies. The South Beach Diet sold about ten million and Eat Right 4 Your Type adds in another seven million. Combined, just these three diet books could fill every shelf in the Library of Congress and still have a copy left over to circulate at every American public library.

Obesity rates and the long, complicated history of food and diet explain a lot about why forty-five million Americans diet every year and weight loss is an estimated $60-billion industry.¹ As oft-cited statistics indicate, obesity rates have more than doubled in the last generation, growing from just under 15 percent in the 1960s to 35 percent today.² Morbid obesity rates quadrupled between 1986 and 2000.³ Today, two out of every three Americans are overweight or obese. In 1997, the surgeon general declared a war on obesity, calling it an epidemic which endangered the very future of the nation. By 2002, another surgeon general called obesity the ‘terror within’, a threat that is every bit as real to America as weapons of mass destruction.⁴

Diet books do more than offer insight into statistics like these. With the onset of the obesity epidemic about thirty years ago, the books became myths and manifestos, with broader concerns and higher stakes. They now look more like manuals to make the world a better place. Like other powerful narratives, diet books offer insight into how America sees itself, blames itself, and what kind of civilization it promises to make for itself.

The scholar R.W.B. Lewis once explained that the history of a culture is a dialogue, a sometimes bruising contact of opposites that uses specifics to stand in for larger, more powerful ideas. Diets, like all good cultural touchstones, stand in for the bigger debate about history, salvation, nature, money, power, sin, hope, innocence, experience, time, and all the other ideas that make the world worth thinking about. And Lewis writes that a scholar’s work is not to settle the terms of the discussion—to judge right and wrong, declare a victor—but to divine the images and ‘story’ that animate the ideas and are their imaginative and usually more compelling equivalent.⁵ Diet books enclose these big ideas to reveal, in Lewis’s words, a certain habitual story that gets repeated endlessly, from one decade to the next, from one generation to the next, a story about a fallen civilization that might just still do right.

Diets retell the narrative backbone for our national consciousness: a tragedy of the jeremiad lamenting a lost Eden, simmering with potential, and always grasping for a better world. It is unsurprising that diets narrate what is, arguably, the most familiar literary narrative in the Western world. More important for a deeper understanding, however, is how these diets use the banal, often boring material of breakfast-lunch-dinner and the quest for self-improvement to channel larger concerns about the success or failure of America.

It is easy to confuse American dieting and diet books. The diet itself—the breakfast-lunch-dinner plan—is often the least interesting part of the diet book. Of the four hundred diet books surveyed for this study, the practical details of the diet take up on average less than 20 percent of the total content. Recipes and nutrition tables are minor compared to the pages devoted to dieter testimonials, autobiographical reflection, and food philosophies. Usually the actual advice can be summarized in a few words: either eat grains and cut meat or eat meat and cut grains. Exercise. Don’t overdo it on sweets. Some mono-diets promote a single food or dish: juice, bananas, or cabbage soup. Others promote whole cuisines, like the Mediterranean diet. Still others couch themselves as medical or spiritual or religious. But these are mere details when compared with the stories told by diet books—stories that have captivated tens of millions of readers over the last hundred years.

By a rough count, Diet and the Disease of Civilization draws from four hundred diet books published over the last hundred years. An original archive was composed from hundreds of these books—ebooks and pamphlets and promotional materials, every diet book at dozens of Goodwills, and ephemera such as grocery receipts, recipes, and food diaries. A Craigslist want ad led to the acquisition of a private collection: hundreds of food diaries, inspiration cards, carbohydrate counters, and diet books collected by one woman over the course of her lifetime. She bookmarked in a half dozen before photos in the diaries and never an after; often these personal things offer the greatest insight into the tender project of reading a diet book.

Before the 1990s, weight loss diets were usually categorized into two groups: faddish feminine diets and more serious medical advice. With the onset of the obesity epidemic, however, diet books began to look more like clarion calls for serious political and cultural reform. Weight loss suddenly became an American concern, with the health of the nation at risk. And diet books published in the last twenty years represent the first time the efforts of countercultural food activism, government health-promotion policy, federal food guidelines, and faddish weight loss diets have come together to truly create a unifying narrative of American health and disease.

This distinction, though arbitrary, may have distracted scholars from the significant shift in diet literature published since the onset of the obesity epidemic, roughly in the early 1990s. Scholarship has lagged on the topic. By taking a top-down approach, American perspectives on food often consider diet as a project of nation-building promoted by the federal government through initiatives like Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move program. A host of geopolitical, environmental, labor, human rights, and economic concerns also stress the global food system and occupy scholars working on these urgent issues. In terms of diet for weight loss, many discussions today still see diet as an individual concern, usually particular to overweight women. Though these themes are no doubt important, they have misled scholars into upholding that same arbitrary dichotomy between the serious and the silly in diet advice. The arbitrariness of this distinction explains volumes about how scholars and cultural critics have overlooked some of the bestselling books of the twentieth century.

A study of the American diet would raise these important and timely concerns. Yet this book is not that study because diet books are books of their own breed—they are stories that read a lot like scripts, laid out in text and fleshed out in the daily life of the dieter. They are useful fictions that function in the real world. Few academics have looked at diet books and no literary scholar has analyzed the role of these texts in shaping the stories American culture tells about its past and its future. Diet books, to borrow from Clifford Geertz, are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. And this book is a study of a people and their stories.

Diet and the Disease of Civilization follows a chronology of imaginary human origins. Four chapters analyze four diets—the Paleo diet, the Eden diet, the precolonial diet, and the detox diet—all of which follow the same familiar narrative. Along the arc of the Fall of Man, these diets remember an original, innocent world and mourn the descent of the human race into modern disease. This survey of just over four hundred diet books published since the 1910s reveals four locations of human origins and health: in the cave (the Paleo diet), the Garden of Eden (the Eden, or biblical, diet), the precolonial paradise (Pacific Island, or primitive, diet), and the preindustrial world (detox diet).

Chapter 1 maps out the Paleolithic diet. Paleo dieters today number into the millions and the diet—modeled loosely after ideas of Paleolithic nutrition and ways of life—has been called the defining diet of the early 2010s. Paleolithic diets belong to the long Western tradition of venerating preagricultural diets. Dieters believe that civilization has outpaced evolution and created a world hostile to human biology. Usually, utopian myths about food celebrate cornucopias of lavish, never-ending feasts but the Paleo myth redefines a new type of refined, slow pleasure. A peaceful vision of gender relations between cavemen and cavewomen—cavepeople, maybe—who hunted, gathered, and lived in sexual harmony also overturns scholarly thinking about brutish cavemen masculinity.

Chapter 2 shifts away from evolutionary accounts of human history to a biblical understanding of genesis with Eden diets. Most historians today agree that contemporary weight loss diets are heirs of Puritan asceticism and long traditions of female fasting. Beauty ideals, they believe, have also grown out of the secularization of Christian suffering. However, Eden diets disavow suffering and redefine a special kind of pleasure, nuancing the relationship between the body and divine instincts. Eden diets promise a beautiful, blessed deliciousness that uses holy food to revive God-given instinct in a still-sacred human body created by God and handed down to Adam and all of humankind.

Chapter 3 moves from the Garden of Eden to an Edenic garden in a precolonial paradise. Precontact or primitive diets are based on the moment of colonial encounter in which a previously healthy race is brought into the modern world, introduced to contemporary foods, and subjected to the diseases of civilization. Unlike Paleo and Eden diets, primitive diets revive the old and sometimes ugly debate about race and human origins. These diets question whether human beings share a common ancestor or have such different origins as to require evolutionarily-specific diets. The diets refine the nostalgic noble savage theme by citing primitive disease as proof of a failed experiment. A foreboding darkens the dying savage story, suggesting the first to fall will not be the last and Westerners might soon follow in their fatal wake.

From precolonial paradises, the diets move to a world before industrialization. Chapter 4 considers detoxification diets. Detox diets, as they are more often called, maintain that environmental toxins have caused a host of modern diseases, everything from obesity to epilepsy and Alzheimer’s. Detox diets look back to a preindustrial world, viewing toxins as a symbol for the hazards of modernity. Beginning in the late 1980s, detoxification diets helped introduce the metaphor of toxicity into food politics and politicized food and diet in a way that laid the foundation for today’s alternative food movement. Detox’s concept of the toxic food environment was later picked up by obesity prevention researchers and activists to explain food addiction. These diets demonstrate the porousness of the boundary between body and environment, revealing new ways that Americans have conceptualized the health effects of modern living and the postindustrial environment. And these diets reveal how Americans have interpreted the biological dangers of modernity in late twentieth-century medicine and culture.

Scholars have called the United States the most diet-conscious society on the planet.⁶ Agricultural abundance, cultural diversity, the rapid pace of technological change, and an emphasis on free will all combined to create a nation which has constantly questioned the rights and wrongs of a national cuisine. Food creates categories of political and social identity—inside and out, us and them—that has particular relevance in a society that invests so much power in an individual’s self-determination. If every forkful is a choice, then perhaps food is the best everyday expression of free will which, as sociologist E. Melanie DuPuis recently put it, speaks to basic tenets of the Western idea of democracy and freedom.⁷

Choosing what to eat is difficult in a society characterized by constant innovation: new foods, new crops, new dishes, new restaurants, and new methods of preservation and food processing have created a dizzying glut of choices available to the American consumer. The average 2017 American supermarket carries about 40,000 unique items.⁸ When Andy Warhol first painted Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1962, he accurately represented Campbell’s 32 varieties of soup. Today, Campbell’s sells 272 different soup varieties: Cream of Bacon was the most recent addition to their condensed soup line.

New World abundance also changed culinary history forever. Called the Columbian Exchange, the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century transfer of plants and animals between the New World and the Old revolutionized global agriculture, diet, and cuisine. Tomatoes, peanuts, potatoes, cacao, chili peppers, and vanilla were all new to Europeans. Observers marveled at the array and availability of so many current staples of the global diet. As historian Hasia Diner notes, dreams of New World abundance were powerful currency in attracting hungry immigrants to a country full of all sorts of excellent viands, as a 1605 play described the young British colony of Virginia.⁹

With so many excellent viands to choose from and the freedom to choose heavily freighted with ideas of freedom, it is no wonder that diet advice has been such a rich arena for larger debates about the American character. Most visibly, through regulations and guidelines, government officials have long issued top-down guidance about a healthy diet. Religious reformers, food activists, and medical experts have contributed competing narratives. More stealthily, diet book authors have written stories explaining what and how and why to eat in the United States. Taken as a whole, diet books provide the narrative key to understanding how all these sources combine to change definitions of proper diet and create a contested and complex system of moral evaluation and national identity.

Scholars generally cite William Banting’s 1863 bestselling Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public as the first diet plan.¹⁰ Autobiographical and compassionate, the British undertaker chronicled his obnoxious boils and other physical ailments alongside the emotional pain of being a fat man in London, subject to cruel sneers and taunts. In consultation with his doctor, William Harvey, Banting lost over thirty-five pounds on a high-protein diet of meats, stale toast, and cooked fruits. His sixteen-page pamphlet quickly became a bestseller in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Letter on Corpulence went through twelve editions by 1900, selling between sixty and seventy thousand copies by 1878.¹¹ Banting’s plan established two principles of the modern diet: that obesity is a physiological disease and corpulence is a condition of the modern, Western age.¹² Other British diets followed suit, such as the 1883 Advice to Stout People or 1889 Foods for the Fat.¹³

Stateside, no single-authored book stands out. Respectable publications like Scientific American referred to Banting and London journals to prescribe tea, seaweed, sparkling red wine, and tight lacing, or the British practice of lacing a man into a tight women’s corset, to cure corpulence.¹⁴ In fact, American weight loss advice at the end of the nineteenth century was chaotic, an entrepreneurial mix of sanitariums, hucksters, quacks, weight reducing devices, and patent medicines. In the late 1890s, Horace Fletcher, or The Great Masticator, cultivated a wildly popular diet doctrine fixed on rigorous chewing. Even celebrities such as John D. Rockefeller and Upton Sinclair adhered to the plan to chew each bite of food thirty-two times (one chew for each tooth) for greater health and longevity.¹⁵

Earlier, beginning in the 1830s, a new religious health reform movement offered diet advice as part of the unified quest for physical and spiritual perfection, not weight loss. Reformers back then linked sexual health to spiritual purity and believed a flavorless, vegetarian diet would dampen sexual desire, mute the various appetites, and improve spiritual health. Reformers also pioneered a new self-help, can-do concept that Americans didn’t need to accept disease and death as simply God’s will. Instead, Americans could follow specific diets and ways of living to improve their well-being on earth.¹⁶ Sylvester Graham (1794–1851), Presbyterian minister and Graham cracker namesake, led the crusade for strict vegetarianism in the 1830s, believing that meat excited the sexual appetite and decimated moral and bodily health.¹⁷ For Graham, bread and bland foods signified domestic order, civic health, and moral well-being. For Graham and his followers, American-grown wheat and wholesome, unseasoned bread would help ensure America’s place in the pantheon of civilized nations.¹⁸

Like Graham, John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) also prescribed a bland, vegetarian diet to reduce sexual activity and purify the spirit. An influential Seventh-Day Adventist better known today for his cereals, Kellogg was famous in his own time for his bizarre health treatments for the sickly rich: yogurt enemas, regulated sunbaths, and electric vibration treatments were administered at a posh 1,200-room sanitarium that treated celebrated patients such as Warren G. Harding, Thomas Edison, and Sojourner Truth.¹⁹ Kellogg was also one of the first to incorporate scientific evaluations of calorific value into a prescriptive diet, using U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) composition tables in his 1908 Battle Creek Sanitarium System.²⁰

At the end of the nineteenth century, chemist Wilbur Atwater served as the first director of research for the USDA. In 1894, he published the first composition table of food values. Distributed in a Farmer’s Bulletin pamphlet, the table broke down common foods such as cauliflower or cod into the now-familiar categories of calories, protein, fat, and carbohydrate matter.²¹ In analyzing foods by component, Atwater institutionalized the process by which diet attributes value to foods and organizes foods according to these evaluations. Like any system of organization, dietary evaluations invest previously mute objects with the capacity to symbolize some abstraction: a carrot, for example, stands in for vitamin A or a lamb shank represents protein. Atwater’s work established methods to analyze food values that later proved indispensable to nutritional advice domestically and food relief efforts abroad.

Despite the diversity and fervor of food reformers, the American diet was not truly an urgent topic of national importance until World War I. The USDA released its first food guidelines, Food for Young Children, in 1916, just as President Woodrow Wilson was turning his attention to food aid.²² Under Wilson, Herbert Hoover headed the U.S. Food Administration (USFA), established in 1917 to provide food relief programs to Europe.²³ Massive food conservation efforts taught Americans about the ethical and health implications of certain foodstuffs—primarily meat, wheat, and sugar. At the same time, scientists discovered vitamins and vitamania swept the land, inspiring Americans with miracle cures and building the now multibillion-dollar vitamin and supplement industry.²⁴

Between 1914 and 1924, Hoover distributed about four million tons of food to Europe through USFA and the American Relief Association. Humanitarian ideals no doubt motivated the Wilson administration to prevent starvation in Europe, but Hoover also acknowledged the considerable aid could stem the tide of Bolshevism among Europe’s hungry citizens.²⁵ The efforts earned him the nickname the Great Humanitarian; some historians now believe Hoover saved more lives than any other man in history due to his emergency relief efforts both in World War I Belgium and, later, during the devastating 1921–1923 famine in Soviet Russia.

Even with the far-reaching powers granted by the Lever Act of 1917 to requisition food, punish hoarders, ration staples, and set prices, Hoover publicly chose to invoke the spirit of patriotism to persuade Americans to voluntarily conserve food. Most obviously, the USFA instructed Americans to increase consumption of perishable fresh fruits and vegetables and reduce meat, wheat, and sugar. Nonperishable, high-calorie foods were shipped abroad. Hoover drew from Atwater’s USDA nutrient and calorie measures to calculate which foods would best feed soldiers and famished Europeans. As Helen Zoe Veit recently noted, more than fourteen million Americans ‘joined’ the Food Administration by signing membership cards pledging themselves and their families to comply with food conservation measures.²⁶ Righteous physical self-control both confirmed patriotic sacrifice and allowed Americans (particularly women) to demonstrate their mastery over their own bodies.²⁷

Perhaps because Hoover chose not to ration, the language of health was third to moral virtue and patriotism in American diet discourse during World War I. Books such as the 1917 War-Time Cook and Health Book advised Americans on the healthfulness of low-calorie choices.²⁸ The frontispiece, reprinted from the Department of Food Conservation, explains How You Can Serve Your Country by doubling the use of greenstuffs to increase health and serve the nation.

Patriotism was also invoked in the fight against fat. Not only did fat people hoard calories, fat men couldn’t fight. In 1914, journalist Vance Thompson introduced the diet book Eat and Grow Thin: The Mahdah Menus with the ominous story of how the mighty French empire [fell] to pieces in the hands of a fat Napoleon. After the paunchy Napoleon doomed his nation, Thompson explained that fat generation followed fat generation in a procession, at once tragic and grotesque, over the quaking earth. Fat was not only ugly but also made men weak, ridiculous, and, borrowing Thompson’s words, foolish, grotesque, elephant-footed, and tragic. Eat and Grow Thin suggests a more broadly Western understanding of food during wartime, reflecting back on Napoleon’s obese demise to raise the stakes on Western fatness to indicate the decline of Western civilization during the crisis of World War I.²⁹

Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters’s 1918 Diet and Health, with Key to the Calories most closely resembles a contemporary diet book. Unlike Thompson’s damning approach to the hideous tragedy in suet that was a fat person’s life, Peters was resolutely American in her simple menus of beefsteak and buttermilk and compassionate in her can-do attitude. Also unlike the Food Administration’s conservation propaganda, Diet and Health was undeniably an aesthetic diet, giving tips for a graceful bearing and a beautiful complexion. Today Peters is called America’s first successful weight-loss guru, most likely because she used equal parts nutritional ethos and autobiographical pathos to translate nutritional data into easy-to-understand language.³⁰ Describing her own long, long battle with the too, too solid and seventy-pound weight loss, Peters decorates her text with punny jokes (Mrs. Weyaton and Mrs. Ima Gobbler are favorite characters) and cute drawings of rotund stick figures. Diet and Health quickly became and stayed a bestseller. By 1939, the book had sold two million copies and had been published in more than fifty-five editions.³¹

Peters dedicated Diet and Health to Herbert Hoover and invoked patriotic reasons for weight loss. Fat people hoarded calories desperately needed by American soldiers and European civilians, she explained; it was unpatriotic to be fat. She also suggested creating a Watch Your Weight Anti-Kaiser program.³² After serving with the American Red Cross in the Balkans, Peters grew more serious in her 1921 addendum describing her efforts to raise funds for the starving children of Central Europe. She directly linked weight loss in the U.S. to desperate hunger abroad, asking dieters to think of hunger pangs as a double joy, that of knowing we are saving worse pangs in some little children, and that of knowing that for every pang we feel we lose a pound.³³

Books like these represent some of the earliest American diet plans, designed for everyday Americans and bundling ideas about health, diet, and food into larger political and ethical considerations. By eating less meat, wheat, and sugar, Americans would improve their health while serving their country and fulfilling a moral obligation to prevent starvation. These noble goals translated into specific recipes and methods of cooking, charging the ordinary routines of cooking and eating with greater purpose.

The work of Peters, Hoover, and Kellogg suggests the fluidity of diet and nutrition advice across disciplines and philosophies in the early twentieth century. Medical, political, and religiously motivated diet advice all drew from the knowledge created by these other fields: Kellogg used calories to advocate for purer spirits, Hoover claimed good health could be a side effect of the war effort, and Peters insisted a slim figure and patriotism went hand-in-hand. Early twentieth-century diet advice dealt in largely gender-neutral terms; however, in the years to come, diet advice split and different faddish or medical diets began to appeal to different types of health-conscious Americans.

Diet advice divided into two distinct and usually gendered camps in the twenty years from World War I through the Great Depression. In his history of fatness, Peter Stearns observes a similar shift toward feminine weight loss concerns, noting that prior entreaties targeted a more gender-neutral obesity characteristic of middle-class excess. After the Depression, discussions of overweight children also divided into underweight boys and overweight girls.³⁴ As Stearns puts it, it was only in the 1920s that the more familiar gender contours surrounding dieting fully developed, directed at women’s guilt