Posted by Jim at October 9th, 2005

Here’s a book I’d like to read if something like it exists:

A book that traces eating and not eating through history and pays attention to the cultural and resource related reasons that people eat or don’t eat. In an ideal world, it would attempt to relate food taboos (for example: keeping kosher), vegetarianism, diets, anorexia/bulimia and fasting. It might also consider the Temperance movement.

What’s interesting about the topic:
1. For example: In the past, when people were often only just barely above starvation, fasting was a common religious discipline. Today, in an age of excess food (at least in the US), fasting is uncommon.
2. Is anorexia/bulimia a modern problem or did it happen throughout history and only now has become recognized? Also, are the people most likely to diet a different demographic group than the people most likely to have anorexia or bulimia? Is the process of a person becoming convinced to go on a diet similar or different from the process of developing an eating disorder?
3. In the past, food taboos came about for various reasons, some of them cultural/religious, some of them related to available resources. For example, people refusing to eat meat dedicated to a god not their own would be a cultural/religious reason. Refusing to eat snake because catching a snake uses more calories than the actual snake provides would be a resource related reason.

By contrast, today’s food taboos are totally individual. These range from losing weight (by avoiding carbohydrates/fat/only eating special soups/only eating cabbage and beans…) to attempting to change the world via your change in diet. Examples of the latter can include vegetarians of all stripes (vegans, raw foods, macrobiotic diets…), but can also include people who don’t eat processed sugar or other foods with labor practices they disapprove of.

Similarly, in the relatively recent past, the Temperance movement pushed people not to drink alchohol. Part of the reason for this was reasonable: in an industrial society (one with factories) drinking causes accidents with heavy machinery. Also, alchoholism can cause people to waste money that could be spent on rent or food. Of course, that’s not the only reason people were into the Temperance movement. There’s a lot of evidence out there that the push to stop drinking was also an effort to control immigrants (Irish, Swedes, Norwegians, Polish…) of the period as they were percieved to be likely to drink a lot.

There’s got to be a way to pull this together into an interesting, popularly accessible narrative.