Nutritional Modernity

Abstract

Germans were instrumental in shaping “nutritional modernity,” an era stretching from the 1840s to the present, in which nutrition became a vibrant field of scientific study as well as a preeminent tool of social control. Nutrition emerged as a scientific discipline in German laboratories and statistical studies in the nineteenth century. Responding to recurrent bouts of food insecurity associated with key moments of national crisis, moreover, German scientists turned hunger into a major social problem whose best solution lay in their hands. The article begins by considering major nineteenth-century contributions to nutrition science, from Carl Voit’s intake-output method to Max Rubner’s caloric vision of the human body. Second, the article investigates the development of nutrition as a scientific discipline against the backdrop of recurrent cycles of nutritional insecurity. Fear over the political threat posed by a hungry proletariat at the fin-de-siècle turned nutrition into a labor problem and stimulated the emergence of Volksernährung, an applied branch of nutrition science that was nationalized when the country faced severe food shortages during the First World War. Finally, the article turns to scientists’ social action in important fields such as nutritional prescription and popularization, from their frequent appearance as endorsers of reformist cookbooks in the nineteenth century to their role in developing didactic visual materials and mass scientific spectacles for the state in the twentieth. German nutritional modernity in its scientific aspects emerged from the confluence of these three trends: the scientization of nutrition in the nineteenth century, the medicalization and nationalization of hunger at the fin-de-siècle, and a vibrant tradition of scientific popularization that began in the nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth. The German case provides a particularly useful venue for exploring how the social and scientific aspects of nutrition became entangled with the project of national governance.

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