Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry About What We Eat. By Harvey Levenstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. vii plus 218 pp.)

Abstract

Harvey Levenstein's Fear of Food is an extension of his previous work tracing the development of the American public's relationship to the evolving industrialized food system in relation to an increasingly globalized form of capitalism. For Levenstein, Americans' understanding of what is on their plates—how it gets there, what it contains, and what it should be—is the result of the nation's history as punctuated by specific events, which, though isolated as unique moments within Levenstein's narrative, are situated along a continuum of the constantly changing social world. Through these circumstances, as manifest from the inextricable connection between the political, cultural, and economic, Americans come to have seemingly rapid shifts in their understandings of food and diet. Thus, while Levenstein emphasizes the paramount role of the ideologies of choice and personal responsibility in individuals' food consumption, his focus on the hands of government, science, and industry in the formation, continuation, and renovation of American food discourse clearly reveals the historical situatedness and societal construction of personal decision-making regarding what to eat.