“Vagaries of Variability and Practices of Precision: Developing Methods in mid-Nineteenth-Century Nutritional Physiology”

Elizabeth Neswald (Brock University)

This paper traces the methodological development and tensions of early nutritional physiology. Scattered studies of nutritional physiology and nutrition can be found in the first half of the 19th century, but the methodological foundations for the field were not laid until the 1850s and 60s, primarily through the work of Carl Voit. While Voit's early experiments refined the "input-outgo" methods of his predecessors without introducing substantial new elements, his pursuit of experimental precision enabled him to demonstrate that this approach was productive for the study of basic metabolism. Paradoxically, the continuing pursuit of precision became itself a stumbling block for generating knowledge about the variable objects and materials of nutrition experimentation - foods and bodies -, creating a fog of highly specific data out of stifling experimental redundancy. Voit's experiment reports, composed in part in collaboration with Theodor Bischoff and Max Pettenkoffer, show how he struggled to reconcile the demands of precision in laboratory science with the treacherous variability of his experimental material and the overwhelming amounts of data it produced. This paper will look at how Voit's position evolved over the course of a decade (1857-1867) from emphasizing the need for precision to explicitly addressing its epistemological and practical limits for the study of variable objects and, finally, to nutritional physiology becoming one of the first life-sciences to introduce statistical methods to its experimental arsenal.

“Taste, Nutrition Science, and Consumer Culture in the Development of Kellogg’s Health Foods, 1890 - 1909”

Lisa Haushofer (Harvard University)

Intensifying scholarly interest in the histories of food and capitalism has recently prompted historians of science and medicine to reexamine the relationship between nutritional scientific knowledge and the emergence of a consumer culture around food. In these works, the role of taste has largely been regarded as gradually diminishing in the context of nutrition science, while its importance grew in the realm of marketing consumer products. Overall, however, these two processes are largely described as separate. This paper seeks to bring together the processes of creating nutritional knowledge and of developing products for a consumer market with the emergence of new ideas about taste. Focusing on some of the most successful health foods of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, those produced by the Kellogg brothers and their health food enterprise, the paper examines the role of taste in the creation of two particular groups of products, so-called peptonized and peptogenic foods. Using in-house correspondence of food experiments conducted at the Battle Creek laboratory, as well as scientific and promotional literature, I show how Kellogg and his collaborators sought to reconcile their nutritional and promotional goals by simultaneously invoking elaborate scientific and consumerist notions of taste. Appealing to scientific authority and consumer demand, I argue, allowed them to cast taste as both, antagonistic to pleasure, and conducive to it. Understanding this interplay of scientific and consumerist notions of taste is crucial to appreciating the interdependent relationship between nutritional scientific knowledge and the development of market capitalism more broadly.

“Crafting “a Yardstick for Good Nutrition”: Social Values and Scientific Decision-Making in Wartime Nutrition”

Hannah LeBlanc (Stanford University)

In 1941, the National Research Council announced the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs), the government’s first quantified dietary standard. The RDAs would have implications for everything from school lunches to the poverty line to military rations. How did the RDA committee decide on this all-important standard?

In this paper, I examine the production of nutrition knowledge during World War II by reconstructing the experimental and decision-making processes that enabled the creation of the RDAs. I show that discoveries about vitamins over the previous twenty years created uncertainty about nutrition knowledge and optimism about nutrition’s possibilities, feelings heightened by the crisis of war. Determining the RDAs raised questions both philosophical and practical: was the goal of nutrition the absence of diseases like rickets, or some yet-unknown possibility for vigor? What was the best way to account for the country’s diversity? How could you tell if a horse suffered from night-blindness? Historians of food during World War II have considered the RDAs primarily for their role in scientific communication to the public; few have appreciated how fraught their creation was. The results were determined as much by nutritionists’ vision for a vigorous nation as they were by experimental outcomes. The RDAs, in turn, affected how national leaders perceived the home front and the policies they crafted to address its short-comings. Far from an isolated scientific process with social outcomes, the RDAs demonstrate the mutual constitution of politics and science, and the constant cross-talk between nutrition research and the social exigencies of wartime America.