Tables turned, palates curbed: Elements of energy, economy, and equilibrium in American nutrition science, 1880--1930

From Reconstruction to Great Depression in the United States, major changes in food production techniques altered traditional dietary habits. Transformation of common staples into mass-market goods raised concerns about food quality in an urban, industrial society. Government-supported inquiry at land-grant universities, experiment stations, and official bureaus offered nutrition scientists institutional and instrumental means to pursue laboratory or field studies of food. University departments, foundation institutes, endowed schools, research wards in teaching hospitals, and commercial product-testing facilities afforded other sites for physiological-chemical inquiries.;Despite this wide range of institutional-disciplinary communities oriented to specific colleagues, clients, or constituencies, nutritionists had by the turn of the century achieved more stable identities. They submerged some differences by participating in public-service communities committed to practical advice or policy recommendation regarding food regulation, environmental hygiene, consumer education, and scientific accountability. Much of this public-service effort eventually modified customary habits, consumer preferences, and common beliefs about food's place in daily life. Attempts to refashion dietary expertise into accessible genres and media encouraged nutritionists to participate in diffuse intellectual-cultural communities associating specialty terminology with comparable, but figurative, lay idiom in order to popularize their authority. Terms such as elements of nutrition pedagogy; energy conservation or efficiency in evaluating environmental conditions; economy of metabolic, dietary, or fiscal balance in 'dynamic' diet factors; and equilibrium mechanisms in the regulation of the 'internal environment' figured prominently in popular nutrition literature.;Four main technical-instrumental communities emerged from this diverse array of research locations, public missions, and popular forums, each making use of comparable apparatus, materials, practices, and metrics. They included: chemical analysis of food composition; respiration calorimetry of material and thermal conversion in metabolism; standardized animal-feeding trials with large-scale colonies fed purified rations to isolate trace nutrients; and sectional aperture or mechanical registration of alimentary processes in physiology. Each attempted to balance autonomous inquiry with applicable service by establishing the optimal place and time, scale and scope of their research programs and practices, using suitable experimental subordinates and subjects.