‘Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food’ (p. 30) is the sort of maxim that now circulates as a wellness slogan, stripped of the world that once gave it force. Steven Shapin’s Eating and Being recovers that world. The book is, in his words, ‘a genealogy of thinking about food, eating, and our conceptions of what it is to be a person’ (p. 20). Shapin is well placed to write it: a major historian of early modern science who has also spent more than two decades writing on food studies, the history of dietetics, the ‘sciences of subjectivity,’ wine judgement and modern diet cultures. The result is a historical account of how modern talk about food grew to be so precise about eating and bodies, and yet so silent about the kind of people eating makes us.
A central theme of the book is the nature of expertise. Specifically, it focuses on diet experts and how they talked about food, and how they talked amongst each other and with lay audiences. The lost world Shapin reconstructs was governed by qualities rather than quantities. Traditional dietetics, from antiquity to the eighteenth century, worked through the humours and temperaments of the Hippocratic corpus, categories grounded in sensory experience and shared by learned and unlearned alike; dietetic culture, Shapin insists, ‘belonged to everyone’, not just medical experts (p. 32). Diet meant diaita, not a weight loss regime but a whole way of life; the medical and moral were one, and gluttony ‘was a vice long before obesity was a disease’ (p. 93). Under the principle of ‘agreement’ (pp. 200–1), quod sapit nutrit (‘what tastes good is good for you’), taste was a reliable index of what nourished, ‘the capacity that enabled us to observe divinely ordained natural law’ (p. 204).
The book moves, chapter by chapter, from the ideas of traditional dietetics, through the ‘temperaments’ it assigned to people and foods – the bodily and psychological dispositions associated with the balance of blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile – to the ‘modernizing’ challenges of mechanism and mathematics, and at last to nutrition science. The question marks in Shapin’s section titles signal his scepticism about clean ruptures. Dietetic reasoning, he shows, saturated past culture. It is striking how it appears not only in the natural philosophy of Hobbes and Boyle, but also in Shakespeare, where jokes about the matched temperaments of Petruchio and Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew only work because popular audiences could recognize the language of humours (p. 129). Dietetics, Shapin argues, mattered to system builders like Descartes because it was ‘philosophy put into action, put to the test’ (p. 217). Dietetic authority was also contested. Expert dissensus was the rule; patients shopped around in a ‘medical marketplace’ for a second opinion (p. 209), while lay scepticism ‘talked back’ (pp. 198–207).
The change from this old system to the new, when it came beginning in the seventeenth century, was more complicated than simple replacement. Often the words remained while what they named was reconfigured. Albumen, once known by perceptible qualities, was redefined as a chemical compound, the protein (p. 284). Across the nineteenth century, sensible qualities gave way to chemical constituents and the body became an engine. Justus von Liebig, ‘the high priest of the church of protein’ (p. 289), made food into fuel or building material, and Atwater’s ‘calorie’ helped make foods ‘energetically fungible’ (p. 307). Once a food’s powers lay in invisible constituents, the senses could no longer reach them, which means that ‘your sensory experience of foods is not now a reliable index of their composition’ (pp. 352–3). Knowledge migrated from eater to expert and health was secularized: the ‘risk factor’ as an instrument of intervention was separated from the moral vice it had once marked (p. 359).
What keeps Eating and Being from following the familiar plot of science routing superstition is Shapin’s refusal to describe this change as a clean break. Mechanical and mathematical reformers changed their theory more than their practice. Descartes’s own diet advice remained ‘wholly recognizable as belonging to long-standing and approved dietetic traditions’ (p. 245). The death of traditional dietetics, Shapin proposes, ‘might not be “death” at all but rather some other notion such as “submergence”’ (p. 267), its fragments still circulating in lay culture after expert culture had moved on. The book closes on this paradox of ‘continuity through change’ with our modern thinking as ‘a pastiche, a palimpsest, a potpourri’ (p. 395) of both older and newer ideas about food and diet.
The method that yields these insights also marks the book’s limits. Shapin recognizes that he attends less to specific ‘idiosyncratic’ authors and texts than to the ‘stability and homogeneity’ of dietetic thought as gleaned from a wide range of sources (pp. 21–2). This gives the book a remarkable reach across two millennia, but it also means he spends more time painting an overall picture than tracing local contexts or specific moments of change. He also acknowledges a ‘bias towards texts known in the English-speaking world’ (p. 22), which makes the book’s focus decidedly Western. There are smaller omissions: Shapin treats the early twentieth-century craze for efficiency in the kitchen without once naming Frederick W. Taylor, whose scientific management is the obvious companion to the body-as-engine.
None of this diminishes his considerable achievement. Eating and Being denaturalizes the everyday familiarity of food and diet advice, revealing it as an enduring cultural space in which trust, expertise, moral conduct, and the good life have long been negotiated. Its closing parade of present-day authorities, from Michael Pollan and Carlo Petrini to Alice Waters and various diet entrepreneurs, shows how little the contest has changed: edible expertise still turns on competing claims and a sceptical public. That the calorie is so recent an arrival, and that older convictions about moderation or variety continue to resurface, gives Shapin’s history a contemporary salience. For those interested in the history of diet advice, and for historians of science and medicine concerned more broadly with contested expertise and the translation of scientific ideas into everyday practice, this is a deeply thoughtful and quietly provocative book.
