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OverviewWhat 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 indeed been lost. Throughout this rich history, he evokes what it felt like to eat during another historical period and he 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 changed how we think about our food and its powers, our bodies, and our minds. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Steven ShapinPublisher: The University of Chicago Press Imprint: University of Chicago Press Dimensions: Width: 15.20cm , Height: 4.10cm , Length: 22.90cm Weight: 0.907kg ISBN: 9780226832210ISBN 10: 022683221 Pages: 560 Publication Date: 20 November 2024 Audience: General/trade , General Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Awaiting stock  The supplier is currently out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out for you. Table of ContentsList 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 BibliographyReviews“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.” -- Rebecca Earle, author of Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato “‘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.” -- Mary Jo Nye, author of Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science “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.” -- Phil Withington, author of Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas “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.” -- Jessica Riskin, author of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick “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.” -- Justin Smith-Ruiu, author of The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning “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.” -- Rebecca Earle, author of Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato Author InformationSteven 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. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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