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Melons and Melancholy: Review of Steven Shapin's "Eating and Being"

Ben Wurgaft demonstrates how Steven Shapin’s “Eating and Being” illuminates the intellectual and cultural dynamics of “dietetics”—the relationship between diet, health, and identity—like no prior work on the subject.

Practitioners of dietetics sought to “prevent disease, maintain health, and prolong life,” not only by eating the foods that were correct for a given person, relative to their characteristics, but also by resting, sleeping, and working (and engaging in myriad other bodily functions) at the right times and in the right ways. We may no longer believe that so-called “hard” or serious students have sallow complexions and weak or empty bellies, nor may we think we can know the results of eating a peach by observing its gross physical qualities, but many of us still implicitly believe in a larger natural order of which we are one small part. When the book addresses such 19th- and 20th-century scientists as Justus von Liebig and Wilbur Olin Atwater, Shapin demonstrates that even a modernizing nutritional science equipped with protein, calories, and vitamins has never moved past the idea that we somehow are what we eat.

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