The Bleak Ideology of Food Crazes

It seems like you can't swing a spatula without hitting a claim that eating "this way" will make you happier, stronger, and more productive. As it turns out, diet trends are neither new nor politically innocuous. This week on This is Critical, Lisa Haushofer, author of the upcoming “Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition,” joins Virginia to dig into the outsized promises of idealized foods — and their roots in imperialism and racism.

Listen here, and read an excerpt of the transcript below.

Virginia: My guest today gives us lots to think about — and it led my brain in a whole other direction. Lisa Haushofer is a historian with a Ph.D. in the history of science, and an MD, and she’s a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Culinaria Research Centre where she researches food history.

In her book, “Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition,” Lisa reviews the history of what she calls “wonder foods” - these are foods that promise to give so much more than just sustenance. You might be thinking of quinoa and soylent. But did you know Fleischmann's yeast once claimed that it would not only make bread rise but would also cure pimples, boils, and constipation? Or that Kellogg believed flaked breakfast cereal would aid digestion, and also result in "race betterment”? Truly horrifying. Let’s start there.

Lisa, welcome to this is critical.

Lisa Haushofer: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Virginia: So you write quite a bit about one of the most controversial purveyors of a wonder food - John Harvey Kellogg. Tell us a little bit about Kellogg.

Lisa: Yeah. So I imagine that Kellogg's name is actually familiar to a lot of listeners, from the cereal boxes that we have on our breakfast table. So Kellogg is the originator you might say, of our modern breakfast cereal and the modern Kellogg company actually goes back to a company that Kellogg founded with his brother.

So Kellogg was a religious health reformer and a physician. He was a Seventh Day Adventist and he grew up very much influenced by the ideas of Seventh Day Adventism. Most importantly, this idea of what's called Christian physiology. So the idea that a healthy body, including healthy nutrition, is important for a healthy spiritual life.

And Kellogg was sponsored by Ellen White, who was one of the co-founders of Seventh Day Adventism, to get a medical education. And so he got, actually two kinds of medical education. One was in Christian physiology, more strictly, and the other was in sort of more orthodox medicine. And these two educations really influenced Kellogg throughout his life.

And he started his own religious health institution, the so-called Sanitarium in Battle Creek, which he imagined as a very religious, but also sort of very forward-looking medical institution. And the sanitarium was an institution where basically mostly white middle-class patients would come for a period of time, for particular diseases and for their general health.

And they'd be given a particular diet, particular exercise regime, and the foods that patients were served in the sanitarium were also sold more broadly as health foods. And flaked cereal was one of the first successful health foods. So he was a big health food producer as well.

He was also a fervent eugenicist. So he believed in the supremacy of the white race. He was very concerned that the white race had degenerated through too much civilization. And he also at the same time believed that things like diet and lifestyle choices can actually improve the hereditary material that humans had been equipped with, which was a view known as euthenics at the time.

So he kind of combined eugenics and euthenics in what he called race betterment. So essentially the idea that, you know, that the white race can be improved through diet and exercise.

Virginia: Wow. So this idea that civilization - or the comforts of civilization - is making white people weak is kind of related to things we’ve talked about on the show before, like Tucker Carlson's initiative in kind of hyper masculinity. And the sort of fear, I think, that other people, in particular people of color and immigrants are healthier and that white people have grown emasculated and flabby and they need to do farm work or they need to eat better. You also go to this idea that the exoticization of eating habits from quote unquote primitive groups. So this again is people of color and in particular indigenous people. What about that kind of appropriation?

Lisa: Yeah, and there's really a particular episode that's also related to Kellogg that very much has to do with the appropriation of indigenous food knowledge. So the, you know, in general, around this period, sort of end of the 19th and early 20th century, this idea that the white race had degenerated resulted in a lot of interest in what were called primitive diets on the one hand. So a search for, you know, the original way of eating and Kellogg, was one of the people who was really, really interested in that.

So he actually went and did—well, you can call it research, but it's really exploitation of indigenous people. And in particular he was interested in the Quechan people, which is a native group in Southern Arizona, because he thought they were the only unspoiled tribe that was still left.

So he thought that most indigenous groups had been sort of spoiled by civilization. So he went there and studied their eating habits and their food customs and appropriated some of that knowledge in order to make his products. So for example, the idea for the flaked cereal very likely also came from the tortillas that he saw being produced by Quechan women, because he had this idea about digestion that, you know, essentially the modern bread—that the modern civilized bread was actually bad for the digestive system, because the big modern loaves didn't allow for the heat to really go through all the grain and sort of produce this, what he thought of as a process of starch digestion that was occurring through heat.

So he thought that modern American people were constantly eating some somewhat undigested bread. So this idea of the flaked cereal, a much more flat version of a cereal product allowed for essentially the heat to supposedly convert the starch of the flake into more readily digestible sugar. So this is his mix of these sort of scientific ideas that he takes from the the research on digestion at the time that was going on, but then also his eugenic leanings and his scientific racism, where he appropriated these, these insights from indigenous people.

Virginia: Yeah, and we're still left with so many artifacts of this period, including the fetishization of diets that we see as primordial or as essential to humans, you know, obviously paleo, for one

Lisa: Yeah. And this thread that goes through these narratives of progress, but then also fear of progress and sort of this wanting to go back to an original way of eating, that’s sort of inherent in diets like paleo and and Atkins. That's still super, super powerful. That really is a constant. So that was also one of the questions, you know, why are these ideas so tenacious and keep returning in different forms?

Virginia: So there’s an interesting contradiction in what Kellogg was doing. On the one hand, he was concerned with gluttony and overconsumption. On the other hand, he was peddling a consumer product. And you still see that with diet culture today. Like dieting is in theory about consuming less but then you have to buy all these diet products.

You know, it sort of feels like you when you're supposed to declutter your house and that comes with buying a lot of equipment to declutter it that then turns into clutter itself.

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the mental gymnastics that went into that were just so fascinating to read about. I have to say - you know, this is the moment when like this fear of degeneration turns into exactly, as you say, a critique of consumption, a critique of gluttony, you know, that modernity has perverted our tastes. And then at the same time he had this health foods emporium, essentially, where he, you know, he’s still very interested in getting people to consume the right foods, so he had this really elaborate theory of the appetite—that the appetite could basically be rebooted, that you could kind of restore the natural impulses of the body and that required training.

Listen to the full episode here.