Controlling consumption: The origins of modern American ideas about food, eating, and fat, 1886-1930

It's a familiar tale. Nutrition experts concerned about obesity, processed and convenience foods, and excessive consumption of sugar and meat. Young women dissatisfied with their weight and counting calories to slim down. But these preoccupations with diet, health, and fat are not just contemporary American concerns. They were manifest nearly a century ago.;This thesis is concerned with that historical period (roughly 1890 to 1930), when food choices began to come under systematic scrutiny. Using an array of sources, particularly nutrition experts' monographs and articles, it interrogates how modern ideas about food, eating, and fat developed. To illuminate that question, the thesis examines: (1) the emergence of expert nutrition authority, (2) the establishment of nutrition principles and dietary critiques, (3) the normalization of weight and the medicalization of obesity by physicians and actuaries, and (4) the proliferation of calorie-counting among middle-class dieters.;In considering these developments, this thesis emphasizes that nutrition authorities (physiologists, chemists, home economists, physicians, and social reformers) promoted a chemical and physiological understanding of food while discounting its social significance. They re-imagined food as a combination of previously invisible nutrients, calories, and vitamins, and instructed Americans to eat in accordance with their energy expenditure and bodily requirements. In this vein, this work argues that starting in the late-1880s, a central principle in nutrition advice was discipline---discipline in terms of what and how much to consume, as well as in food budgeting.;The notion of control in food and eating was especially salient to experts during this period and into the early twentieth century because changes in the production, manufacture, and distribution of food resulted in a more accessible and abundant food supply for middle-class Americans. Experts, then, advocated self-regulation as the requisite response to unprecedented food choices, and their principles of nutrition sought to lend a scientific credence to the necessity of dietary discipline.;This thesis intersects with a number of historiographies, including those on the history of fat and dieting. It shares with the two literatures the premise that fat was starting to become pathologized en masse in both expert and public opinion in the late-nineteenth century. But while histories of fat and dieting tend toward chronicling the ways in which fat fell out of favor, this thesis is principally concerned with illuminating topics that have been subject to considerably less scholarly treatment---the ideas that informed that shift and the forces that facilitated it.