In a 2011 public lecture on the long history of dietetics (available on YouTube), historian of science Steven Shapin spoke about the shift from dietetics to nutritional science as the primary way of knowing food in relation to attaining dietary health. Among other things, this shift, much of it taking place in the nineteenth century, transferred knowledge of “what to eat” from one's own sensory experience to the purview of experts and brought forth a focus on food constituents at the expense of its qualities. Two new books, Charlotte Biltekoff's Eating Right in America and Helen Zoe Veit's Modern Food, Moral Food, detail the significance of that shift, as it took place in the United States. Yet their interests are not only in the emergence of new nutritional knowledge and how it lent itself to expert-led dietary reform efforts, but also, crucially, how dietary reform was simultaneously a pedagogy of moral reform and citizenship. To make their respective cases, both begin with the American Progressive Era of 1890–1920, in their eyes the watershed moment for modern nutrition, since it was in this era that scientific reasoning became the basis of moral reasoning. Both end with the contemporary war on obesity, which in its calls for self-discipline for the sake of the body politic is the apex of this convergence of morality and dietary advice. Along the way, both also discuss how dietary reform has tended to reify and naturalize race and class differences, by valorizing the diets of the white, middle classes (and later upper middle classes), and associating what Biltekoff calls “an unhealthy other” with their nonnormative foodways. Even with these similarities, their emphases and arguments are decidedly different, and the way these books differ attests to the value of each book on its own.

The primary focus of Veit's book is the Progressive Era, since it was in this era, as she demonstrates, that a confluence of ideas and events changed not only the character of nutritional advice but also the willingness of at least white, middle-class Americans to listen to it. These included new discoveries in nutrition science, the valorization of expertise and professionalization, the war effort, changing ideas about domestic servants and women’s work, and new waves of European immigration. The key impulse of the time was to make rationality the governing trope of dietary choice. This meant letting science be the guide to good eating and downplaying or even renouncing pleasure. Such an approach to eating was aided and abetted by the quantification discourses that emanated from nutrition science. Seeing food through the lens of calories and the key macronutrients of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins made equivalent foods that otherwise appeared different, and Americans came to understand food through these measures. When the war effort demand that Americans’ most favored foods of wheat and beef be sent to allies in Europe, patriots then understood that diets centered on pork and corn could fulfill the same nutritional requirements. Making such patriotic sacrifices in food choice also instilled norms of self-restraint, and the white middle class was particularly eager to differentiate itself from both the poor and the wealthy by performing self-discipline.

Despite this thematic framing, Veit's chapters are actually fairly wide-ranging. For example, a chapter on “A School for Wives” explores the rise of home economics as a professionalized field for American women. Noting how this reinvented housework as a prestigious and intellectually challenging profession for women, she shows how it also reinscribed women's place as unpaid laborers in their home, ironically so. A particularly strong chapter on “A Corn-Fed Nation” discusses how patriotic exigencies forced white Americans to shift their diets to foods closely allied with southern black diets. This same chapter also explores how diet was put in the service of racial betterment and distinction through the field of euthenics, which held that environmental factors affect race. It is in her final chapter, “The Triumph of Will,” that she returns to themes of self-discipline and asceticism laid out earlier in the book to presage today's obesity panic. She shows how, by the end of World War I, thinness had already become equated with self-control, willpower, intelligence, patriotism, beauty, and moral righteousness – ideas that carry through to the present.

Biltekoff, in contrast, treats the Progressive Era as one of several moments when what she calls the ethical and empirical (science-based) aspects of eating were conjoined, even when one tended to mask the other. Eating Right in America focusses on four seemingly distinct dietary reform moments, each one underpinned by different ideas of good food, reflecting to some extent the nutritional science of the day, but more so the social ideals of the day. Chapter 2, which covers much of the same ground as Veit with its focus on the Progressive Era, emphasizes how the system of equivalencies made possible by the quantification of calories and other nutrients allowed cost to be the key factor in dietary choice, making a good eater one who maximizes nutrition (calories) for the cost – and who eats within the means of his or her economic class. The World War II era, covered in a chapter on “Anxiety and Aspiration on the Nutrition Front,” was undergirded by new discoveries of the role of vitamins in deficiency diseases. Having a bad diet was seen as a threat to the war effort, and wartime propaganda became the vehicle to promote optimal health.

Following these two chapters, Biltekoff then jumps nearly a half a century to look at two contemporary dietary reform movements, both somewhat guided by the negative nutrition of the 1970s, with its focus on foods that are to be avoided. Breaking considerably from the other movements she discusses, the social ideal that underpins the alternative food movement is responsibility for the food system based on knowledge of the provenance of food and the pleasure of eating it. While proponents of alternative food purport to judge food not by its quantities and its constituents but by its quality and production processes, in their appeal to food with clear provenance and minimal processing they obscure the empirical in the ethical, as Biltekoff argues. In contrast, the antiobesity movement, the focus of another chapter, obscures the ethical in the empirical. Armed with concern about chronic disease, and thus returning to biomedical understandings of good food, and good bodies, reformers move into the ethical by emphasizing that a thin body is one that is fully in control and responsible, militarily ready, or not a burden to the health-care system. In these last two chapters Biltekoff attempts to connect these two different dietary impulses to processes of neoliberalism – an effort that, unfortunately, is not fully realized.

One subtle distinction between the two books stems from the difference in historical foci. Veit puts all of her eggs in the Progressive Era basket, and in her final chapter traces today's obsession with thinness and self-control directly to that era. Biltekoff's argument is different. She argues that dietary advice has intensified and extended over the four periods she discusses: it has spread to broader swathes of the population than the middle class; it has extended to more behaviors and realms of concern, including the body; it has come to emanate from a much broader set of actors than nutritionists, reformers, or state food agencies.

Because these two books draw on some of same archival material and have considerable substantive overlap, further methodological comparison is in order. Veit is a historian who specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history. She landed on a wealth of archives from that era, including 380,000 letters to the FDA. It seems she then set out to write a book that used as much of this material as she could, as it relates to food. Biltekoff is a scholar of American studies but is jointly appointed in a food science and technology department. Biltekoff settled on an argument early in the process and looked for data to support it. The strengths and weaknesses of each book stem from these institutional loci and methodological choices. Veit's book is impressive for the richness of its empirical material. The use of consumers’ letters to address questions of how this dietary advice was received is especially novel, and provides a unique angle for the book. Suffused with all of these data, however, the chapters veer from the main argument at times. Conversely, Biltekoff's book is admirable for its carefully worded prose, refined arguments, and attentiveness to changes in the field of nutritional science. It is evident that she made great efforts to cohere her arguments and data, and the result is a book with memorable takeaway concepts. The trade-off for this coherence is a significant historical gap that left me wondering how both the postwar period and the 1970s counterculture's “brown food” fit with the argument.

Despite what are truly minor weaknesses, both Modern Food, Moral Food and Eating Right in America make important – and distinct – contributions to both American studies and food studies. Through the prism of American history, both show how today's dietary obsessions are not particularly novel, and even though the Progressive Era diets might be distasteful for today's discerning eaters, their reasons for desiring particular foods may not be all that different than they were a century ago.