On Sun, 25 May 1997 19:12:07 -0400 Nalo Hopkinson wrote:
. (I once read that in North
> America, it used to be that most people did enough physical labour
in the
> course of each day to maintain a basic level of fitness. Now,
almost
> no-one does. So it's not just food, it's that we now do far less
labour.)
> In America, it's possible to be quite poor and still be fat. So having
> the time and the resources to work at being thin has become the
ideal of
> beauty.
>
> -nalo
Two superb books on the history of eating in America are Harvey
Levenstein's Revolution at the Table and The Making of the American
Diet. Put simply he points to a general culture of fat is beautiful up to
the end of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century this got
caught up with the discovery of vitamins but, and this is crucial, no
way was yet invented to count vitamins. The consequence was a
tendency to overestimate the amount of food people needed to be
well-nourished. Instead of concentrating on real poverty American
nutritionists started diagnosing large numbers of children as
undernourished. Furthermore, the recommended calorific intake was
set so high that American soldiers in the second world war actually
put on weight during basic training. When at the end of the war these
soldiers went home, they went home with expectations of
overly-large meals which they passed on to their families.
As a side issue, Levenstein talks about the dumbing down of the
American diet -- the tendency at the turn of the century to advocated
"unmixed" and non-spicy foods as easier to digest. In 1950 you
could travel from coast to coast and be served nothing but chicken or
steak with potato salad and coleslaw. Suddenly, MacDonalds starts
to look attractive.
Sorry, all off the point, but excellent books for anyone interested in
the culture of the body.
Farah
>
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