Dangerous digestion
Subtitle: the politics of American dietary advice
By: E. Melanie DuPuis
Series: California studies in food and culture -- 58; California studies in food and culture -- 58.
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 213
ISBN-13: 9780520275478; 9780520287488
Subjects: Food habits; Diet; History
Description: "Throughout American history, ingestion (eating) has functioned as a metaphor for interpreting and imagining this society and its political systems. Discussions of American freedom itself are pervaded with ingestive metaphors of choice (what to put in) and control (what to keep out). From the country's founders to the abolitionists to the social activists of today, those seeking to form and reform American society have cast their social-change goals in ingestive terms of choice and control. But they have realized their metaphors in concrete terms as well, purveying specific advice to the public about what to eat or not. These conversations about 'social change as eating' reflect American ideals of freedom, purity, and virtue. Drawing on social and political history as well as the history of science and popular culture, Dangerous Digestion examines how American ideas about dietary reform mirror broader thinking about social reform. Inspired by new scientific studies of the human body as a metabiome--a collaboration of species rather than an isolated, intact, protected, and bounded individual--E. Melanie DuPuis reimagines the American body politic through a new metaphor--digestion--opening social transformations to ideas of mixing, fermentation, and collaboration. In doing so, the author explores how social activists can rethink politics as inclusive processes that involve the inherently risky mixing of cultures, standpoints, and ideas"--Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 183-197) and index.
Table of contents: title: Free and orderly bodies; title: Diet and the romance of reform; title: Gut wars : gilded age struggles against purity; title: Pure food and the progressive body; title: Good food, bad romance; title: The trouble with purity; title: Ferment : an ecology of the body; title: Toward a fermentive politics.