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Thesis ID: CBB001561736

An Appetite for Numbers: Quality, Quantity and American Food (2004)

University of Pittsburgh
Leach, Joan

Publication Date: 2004
Edition Details: Advisor: Leach, Joan
Physical Details: 292 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Nutrition Food and foods Nutrition; dietetics Science and government 20th century United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)

Over the past century, the United States Department of Agriculture's federal food guidance has relied on the authority of science to be the founding body of knowledge for knowing what to eat. This project examines federal food guidance, as well as some alternative nutritional advice, and critiques the construction of the American diet that relies on the knowledge and language of scientific facts and food measurement. The reliance on the authority of objectivity fostered a way of talking about food based on quantities like calories, vitamins and fat grams. In turn, this organized a relationship between food and eater dependent upon numbers, measurements and data. This "discourse of quantification " underpins an epistemology of quality of food. According to the U.S. government, as well as many of their critics, knowing how and what to eat requires an enumerated understanding of what to eat, and requires an eater to recast qualitative judgments of "good " and "bad " based on quantitative measurements. Herein, I argue that this quantitative discourse needs to be supplemented with alternative discourses that highlight the importance of experience, history, geography and food traditions. By giving credence to these discourses of taste that make a place for a more subjective understanding of food we can better understand food as a source of nourishment, as well as a source of enjoyment.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65 (2005): 2508. UMI pub. no. 3139708.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001561736/

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