Fra kvantitet til kvalitet. Kokeboken som opplysningsskrift og styringsteknologi

Abstract

Nutrition information must be disseminated and integrated into everyday practice to be of any use. This chapter shows how cookbooks have not only been a channel for communicating practical recipes and traditions but have also served as a voice to promote new nutritional understandings. The chapter shows how cookbooks became important media to promote a new nutritional paradigm. The so-called “porridge feud” in the mid-1860s helped lift nutrition and housing issues into the public debate. In short, the porridge feud was about the knowledge base for nutrition, and how a new science-based understanding of nutrition should be made effective. The battle became a mediation arena where different nutritional paradigms were set against each other. The chapter shows how a new scientific approach to nutrition gradually made its way into cookbooks and led to a nutritional paradigm shift where the focus was no longer just on amounts of food, but also on what constitutes proper food. Cookbooks came to play an important role in translating new scientific research results into practical knowledge and making it accessible to the general population. In this way, cookbooks have come to act as mediators between science and the public, thus helping to make new nutritional knowledge effective.