Eating and being : a history of ideas about our food and ourselves / Steven Shapin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shapin, Steven, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Food habits--History.

Food habits.

Diet--History.

Diet.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (568 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Summary:

"Eating and Being is a book about what we eat and who we are, and how the two are intertwined. Why do we eat what we do, and what do we think about what we eat? A genealogy of thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves, it draws attention to how people in the West have thought and felt about food and eating over the centuries. How has food been represented and what have been the consequences? The book begins by taking up what Steven Shapin calls traditional dietetics, which was intended to counsel people about how to live to maintain their health. Traditional dietetics-from Antiquity through the early modern period-occupied much the same terrain as moral culture and it took some of its authority from the way in which advice on health and advice on a virtuous life coincided. Its ideas were challenged throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as nutrition scientists, chemists, and physiologists attempted to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the concepts coming out of their labs-namely, a language of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Shapin's tour then takes us through the twentieth century to show how a new vernacular for thinking about food came to shape our present-day relationship to it. Eating and Being is a sympathetic story about the relationship between the objective and the subjective, about human beings as natural objects and sensing subjects, and about what is good for you and what is good"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: What's for Dinner?

The Words and Ways of Traditional Dietetics

Medicine, Morality, and the Fabric of Everyday Life

How to Know about Your Food and How to Know about Yourself

You Are What You Eat: Types of People and Types of Food

Talking Back to the Doctors: Medical Expertise and Ordinary Life

Dietetics Modernized? Mathematics and Mechanism

Dietetics Revolutionized? Common Sense, Common Life, and Chemical Expertise

Nutrition Science: Constituents and Their Powers

Conclusion: The Way We Eat Now.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Other Format:

Erscheint auch als

ISBN:

9780226832227

0226832228

OCLC:

1467879422