{"title":"World War II and the Quest for Time-Insensitive Foods","authors":"D. Fitzgerald","doi":"10.1086/709509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/709509","url":null,"abstract":"When one walks around the local supermarket, one is often struck by the proportion of highly processed foods, or what some refer to as “the middle of the store.” Yet to the military in the 1940s and 1950s, these same foods represented the apogee of scientific progress—the creation of time-insensitive foods suitable for the rigors of military combat. This article explores the social and technical development of a system for producing such things for the military in World War II, including the collaborations between the military, American food firms, and university scientists. While at the beginning of the war, military and civilian food systems were quite different, by the early 1950s the two systems had effectively merged. Thanks to the supercharged food research agenda of this period, focused on achieving maximum time insensitivity in military foods, Americans can now quite easily avoid eating time-sensitive foods entirely. Here I will explore the professional networks that made this possible in the mid-1940s, as well as the challenges of standardizing something as alive as fresh food.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"291 - 309"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/709509","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45620117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Digesting Faith","authors":"B. Bouley","doi":"10.1086/709424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/709424","url":null,"abstract":"In seventeenth-century Rome, the consumption of meat was on the rise. By the 1630s, Romans were eating double the amount of meat they had consumed fifty years previously, even accounting for growth in population. At the same time that all this meat was being consumed, the papacy came to fiercely defend another comestible: the wafer eaten in the Eucharist. These two products came to be at the center of papal reform in Rome. Eating meat, especially at Easter, and regularly partaking in the body of Christ signaled one's adherence to Catholicism and obedience to the Pope. But the matter was not that simple; accusations of cannibalism in Rome—both real and imagined—led to lengthy medical and theological discussion over how the body digests food. Furthermore, most contemporary medical advice did not recommend heavy consumption of meat. This article thus explores how an alliance between the medical community and the papacy sought to remake alimentary and anatomical ideas related to digestion and healthy eating in early modern Rome. Various sections will detail evolving theories of digestion in the papal capital; how such theories were applied to theological and practical issues such as giving the Eucharist to the sick; whether cannibals could gain sustenance from human flesh; and physician commentary on rising meat consumption in the city. In the end, medical expertise allied with Church authority to defend the aims of the Counter-Reformation papacy.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"42 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/709424","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47012239","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Technopolitics of Food","authors":"U. Thoms","doi":"10.1086/709895","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/709895","url":null,"abstract":"Since the Annales School started to investigate the history of food in the 1960s, institutional diets have been an important field of research. The history of food encountered the general source problem of the history of everyday life of the lower, often illiterate, classes, as they have left hardly any written sources. Even more, food is highly perishable, so that it leaves nothing as a source itself. In contrast to this, institutions kept books registering the expenses and consumption of food, and can be used to access the history of food. This article presents a different view of institutional food. It shows that prison food does not just mirror the general developments of the food of the people, as the Annalistes had hoped for. Instead, it shows that the dietetic order in prison described and expressed the social, political, and judicial concepts of the day, as well as concepts of the body. In addition, it shows that the dietetic order resulted from multiple negotiations of the various actors involved, including those in law, administration, science, and medicine, and last but not least, the public. Using the example of Prussia, this article investigates changes in prison food standards and cross-checks this with quantitative developments as well as with the personal experiences of prisoners from 1700 to 1914.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"162 - 182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/709895","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46752879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Meat Mimesis","authors":"B. Wurgaft","doi":"10.1086/709259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/709259","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines an emerging form of contemporary food biotechnology, laboratory-grown or “cultured” meat, that often seeks to copy conventional “in vivo” animal flesh by using in vitro techniques. The ultimate goal of cultured meat research is to devise an alternative to the environmentally damaging and ethically undesirable infrastructure that makes “cheap” industrial-scale meat possible. Formal research into cultured meat has been underway since the early 2000s. However, after almost two decades of experiments, it is still unclear if this avenue of research will produce a viable meat product at scale, or if it is even possible to perfectly copy the physical characteristics of in vivo meat. There are technical limitations on scientists’ ability to reproduce the precise textures, tastes, and overall “mouthfeel” of familiar types of meat gleaned through butchery. Cultured meat proceeds from a premise we might call “biological equivalency,” the view that animal cells grown in a bioreactor will have the same characteristics as their in vivo counterparts, and it breaks from a standing approach in food science that we might call “sensorial equivalency,” which seeks to reproduce not meat itself but rather the sensory experience of eating meat, usually starting with a substrate of plant cells. This article, which draws from five years of ethnographic fieldwork in the cultured meat movement, seeks to illuminate not only the historical but also the philosophical questions raised by efforts to copy meat. Drawing on the work of the intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg, this article concludes with an exploration of mimesis itself, understood as the imitation of nature.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"310 - 323"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/709259","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42847152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Local Food and Transnational Science","authors":"D. Lu","doi":"10.1086/709183","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/709183","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on new boundary issues that have emerged from the encounter of modern science from abroad and local foodstuffs exemplified by the caterpillar fungus in Republican China (1912–49). The caterpillar fungus was believed in premodern Chinese society to be able to reversibly transform from a blade of grass to a worm, thereby crossing boundaries between two species. It had different uses, ranging from a culinary ingredient to a medicinal substance, and in this way also crossed boundaries of identity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientific scholarship from Japan began to bring new perceptions of the fungus to Chinese society through translation. Modern science expanded human vision into the microscopic structure of the caterpillar fungus, and deconstructed it into two nontransformable species grouped with other similar species. The Chinese term for it also entered the Japanese language. However, the category of the term was broadened, crossing the boundary between the caterpillar fungus and other similar species, thereby indicating semantic boundaries of shared vocabulary. As local food or material culture in Republican China engaged scientific attention, the caterpillar fungus as a disenchanted wonder of nature sometimes transformed into a scientific wonder, eliciting new explorations within different scientific boundaries. The new scholarship led to tensions and negotiations between domains of knowledge about this organism but would not necessarily drive out the vernacular culinary or medical expertise. The emergent boundary issues overall depict both rupture and continuity in modern Chinese food knowledge.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"249 - 267"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/709183","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49294712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Natural History of the Kitchen","authors":"A. Guerrini","doi":"10.1086/708746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708746","url":null,"abstract":"On the evidence of early modern European cookbooks, the wild birds deemed edible around 1600 included cranes, herons, swans, and cormorants. By 1750, none of these were considered palatable. While culinary historians have explored the transition from medieval to modern food marked by François Pierre de La Varenne’s Le cuisinier françois (1651), less attention has been afforded to another major transition in the European diet—that of eating a large variety of wild and domesticated animals to eating only a few. Historians of science in particular have largely ignored this transition, yet this shift in the definition of what was edible held profound implications for the changing roles of animals in both diets and scientific study. Two kinds of printed sources that are not commonly consulted together—cookery books and works on natural history—afford a new comparative glimpse of early modern animals and their varied meanings. In 1600, cookbooks and natural histories included many of the same animals and talked about some of the same things, since the category of “use” applied to both. By the time Vincent La Chapelle’s The Modern Cook appeared in 1733, these works had entirely diverged in content. Animals in cookbooks became a means to an end rather than a topic of study, while natural histories ceased to talk about uses and considered instead comparative anatomy and classification. Looking particularly at birds, this article tracks changing meanings surrounding both animals and diets in early modern Europe. The turkey emerges as the critical indicator of these changes in its naturalization from a wild exotic species to a familiar farmyard animal.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"20 - 41"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708746","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44338179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hungry, Thinking with Animals","authors":"Dana Simmons","doi":"10.1086/709851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/709851","url":null,"abstract":"Edward L. Thorndike (1874–1949), at the turn of the twentieth century, set up animal hunger as a model system for understanding human motivation and learning. Hungry animals participated in over a hundred years’ worth of experiments designed to characterize human emotions and behavior. Hunger, along with electric shocks, became standard tools for producing psychological effects, such as motivation, excitement, fear, learning. Scientists deprived kittens, monkeys, chicks, turtles, children, and soldiers of food for four, eight, twenty-four, or forty-eight hours to observe the variable effects. I want to think through the meaning and context of this choice. What is the nature of hunger as an epistemic tool and as a model system? Why did hunger appeal to Thorndike and his colleagues at the turn of the twentieth century as a reasonable and productive relation with their animal subjects? What preexisting relations made hunger an obvious choice? What relations, in the end, did hunger experiments produce? I am interested in how hunger, as a model system, helped to establish a field of behavioral-physiological-neuroscientific knowledge. I am even more interested in what the traces of these model systems, and the animals within them, can tell us about the history of hunger. In the global nineteenth century, hunger was a tool for social violence.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"268 - 290"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/709851","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45064006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Introduction of Chemical Dyes into Food in the Nineteenth Century","authors":"C. Cobbold","doi":"10.1086/708969","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708969","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the introduction of chemical dyes into food in the nineteenth century in four different countries: the United States, Britain, Germany, and France. From the early 1860s, chemists produced aniline and azo dyes from coal tar on an industrial scale for the burgeoning European textile industry. However, by the end of the century, hundreds of the new dyes were also being added to food, a use for which they were not designed. This article examines the disagreements among chemists over whether these new chemical substances should be seen as legitimate food ingredients or as food adulterants. This was a period when chemists were establishing themselves as professionals, with chemistry being promoted as a science capable of transforming everyday commodities and solving public health issues. However, chemists’ attempts to mediate the use of chemical dyes as food coloring were complicated by a lack of consensus within the chemical community about how to detect the use of such dyes in food and how to test their toxicity. Chemists also were conflicted in their response to the debate depending on whether they were employed by food or dye manufacturers, or working as food inspectors for the state and local authorities. In their efforts to gain authority as food experts, chemists found themselves in a crowded market of interested parties, including food manufacturers, consumers, and politicians. The article describes the diverse opinions of chemists, manufacturers, consumers, and regulators in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, and the varied regulatory responses in these countries to the use of new chemical dyes in food.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"142 - 161"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708969","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47903039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the Virtues of Historical Entomophagy","authors":"E. Spary, A. Zilberstein","doi":"10.1086/709706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/709706","url":null,"abstract":"“Why Not Eat Insects?” inquires a short book, really a pamphlet, first published in London in 1885. Working against the common perception of bugs as pests—at best, an absurdly obvious nonfood, and at worst, a toxin—the author, Vincent M. Holt (who provided no autobiographical details that might establish his credentials) aimed at reversing his readers’ general disdain for insects as low and troublesome forms of being, as well as the specificWestern objection to entomophagy. Cockchafers, caterpillars, and grubs, he asserted in his opening pages, were “clean, palatable, and wholesome” foods. Indeed, as eaters, these insects were more discerning “than ourselves.” It followed, therefore, that eating insects was not a form of pica (themental and physiological disorder of consuming nonfood items); rather, refusing to eat them was merely a provincial prejudice of Europeans, born of ignorance about the consumption of insects, a practice Holt assured his readers was common around the world. We pose a variant of Holt’s deceptively simple question by bringing to the fore the underlying provocation in his manifesto and critique: why not study food? Why hasn’t food, or the knowledge and practices that surround its production, preparation, distribution, and ingestion, mattered much to historians of science, medicine, and technology? Arguably, the only universal historical constant of human existence (besides death and taxes) is the need to eat and drink. Yet, claims and practices surrounding food and beverages varywidely across time and space. The historicity of food embraces notmerely geographic, economic, and political pressures, but also a wide range of claims—theological, legal, medical, traditional—that shapewhat can, should, orwill be consumed by any person or society. Food has long been an object of serious study across the humanities and social","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"1 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/709706","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48383241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Perceptions of Provenance","authors":"Alissa Aron","doi":"10.1086/708824","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708824","url":null,"abstract":"During the reign of Louis XIV, influences arising from the Galenic and iatrochemical medical traditions collided with changing notions of Frenchness to shape understandings of the healthfulness and quality of a wine in relation to its provenance. Specific locations were believed to impart particular qualities to the people, plants, animals, and waters that originated there. Thus, wines from a particular locale would be marked by the properties of that place, and were thought capable of transmitting their characteristics to a drinker. Some land was seen as inherently suited for producing superior wines, and proponents of wines from particular regions often grounded their arguments on the basis of the proclaimed health benefits. However, this was a period of tension between French and regional identities, and the promotion of prestigious wines from specific regions, like Champagne or Burgundy, can be interpreted as an impediment to the goal of Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert to equate Frenchness with quality and distinction.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"84 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708824","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45173891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}