Dangerous Digestion - The Politics of American Dietary Advice

“DuPuis challenges people to think differently about dietary reform and politics, and she does so with obvious creativity and historical knowledge.”—Julie Guthman, author of Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism

“Melanie DuPuis reveals in her important new book that moral and dietary reform appear to go hand in hand—and that that’s a problem. Until we stop equating a pure personal diet with a good collective polity, we cannot construct a just food system. There is much to learn from the historical and contemporary tales DuPuis tells about struggles over dietary reform in America.”—Don Mitchell, author of They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Making of Industrial Agriculture in Bracero-Era California

“DuPuis shows how our adherence to ‘food rules’ and other nutritional advice has been driven by our national obsession with purity, which has stymied our ability to become a healthy society and made us dangerous to ourselves and to the world. Dangerous Digestion points the way beyond the dietary and political boundaries that bind us.”—Matt Garcia, author of From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers Movement

About the author

E. Melanie DuPuis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Environmental Studies and Science at Pace University. She is author of Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink, among other books.

Summary

Drawing on social and political history as well as the history of science and popular culture, this book examines how American ideas about dietary reform mirror broader thinking about social reform.

Additional text

"Dangerous Digestion is provocative and frequently fascinating, and its expansive consideration of dietary reform contributes in important ways to recent scholarship on food advice."

Product details

• Authors: E. Melanie DuPuis, DuPuis E. Melanie
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.10.2015
• EAN: 9780520287488
• ISBN: 978-0-520-28748-8
• No. of pages: 232
• Series: California Studies in Food & Culture; California Studies in Food and; California Studies in Food and Culture
• Subjects: Guides > Food & drink > International cuisine; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > General, dictionaries; USA, Cultural Studies, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Disease & Health Issues, MEDICAL / Nutrition, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, Dietetics & nutrition, United States of America, USA, Dietetics and nutrition, Medical Sociology