Flannery, Ezekiel J. (Author)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Nederveen Pieterse, Jan
Edition Details: Advisor: Nederveen-Pieterse, Jan
Physical Details: 319 pp.
Language: English
My dissertation explores the socio-historical emergence and contemporary significance of a modern cosmology of food. A cosmology, in this sense, includes the production and consumption of food, as well as the knowledge and discourse surrounding it. Modern nutritional categories like protein or the calorie, which emerged from research deemed modern and scientific, were imbricated in particular epistemological, institutional, cultural and ontological constellations. By contextualizing and analyzing the development of food science and the rise of chemistry, the key modern science to impact food, this dissertation shows the inseparability of the nation state, industrial capitalism and modern science through the emergence of a culture of food. The applications of chemistry have impacted the way food is known and spoken about, the methods used to produce it, as well as what people consume and how they behave around food. It is in this sense that we can say there has been a cosmological shift, a change in worldview. My dissertation demonstrates that this cosmological shift has been profoundly reductionist. In modern chemical research on nutrition, the scientific methods have been reductionistic in that a nutritional scientist can only break a given food down into its component parts, measured in chemicals, and study them one by one, even if complex interactions and contexts might be ignored. Such scientific analysis and through it, ways of conceptualizing food, ignores the possibility that the whole food might be more than or different than the sum of its parts. And the particulars of what the scientific analysis looks at is further constrained by the fact that such work has been conducted under the ageis of agencies of the state or for-profit corporations. In modern scientific theories, as foods consist of invisible chemical components, a powerful expert is required who can inform or withhold information from the majority. My dissertation argues that these processes have led to an epistemological crisis surrounding food and nutrition, even though knowledge about the elemental components of food may seem to have improved.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/11 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3290234.
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