Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century by Helen Zoe Veit

Abstract

162 BOOK REVIEWS to compensation from injuries caused by wounds. The discussion on each set of laws is robust, but unfortunately little explanation is given as to why these two sets of laws are discussed together, beyond the fact of their Germanic origins. The Aristotelian maxim that the sum is greater than its parts is one that can certainly be applied to this collection. Taken alone, the relevance of wounds to enhancing our understanding of the middle ages may not be fully appreciated. The collection proves, however, how closely aligned the link between the health of the body and the health of the soul was in the medieval mind. Louise Elizabeth Wilson encapsulates this when she states: ‘What appears to be at stake is the location of the earthly boundary between competing views of the primacy of either heavenly or earthly care’ (p. 81). In this sense, the collection delivers, showing how the conception of wounds during the middle ages, in every sense, can be a revealing entry point into the complexity of the medieval world. IRENA LARKING UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND Helen Zoe Veit, Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). ISBN 978-1-4696-0770-2 (HC). B&W photos and illustrations, xiii + 300 pp. This is one of those books that should probably have appeared in a completely different format, stripped back to its more sensationalist content and released with many illustrations and an exciting paperback cover for the popular science market. It has moments that are rattlingly interesting and page-turning, but these are buried in otherwise worthy paragraphs of social-critical theory. I would have kept the title, but perhaps jazzed it up a bit by calling it Modern Food, Moral Food: How We Learned to Eat Right. Modern Food, Moral Food is Veit’s edited PhD thesis, which examines Americans’ relationship with food from the turn of the twentieth century to the early 1920s. Unfortunately this means that the book stops just when it’s getting really interesting—the 1920s was the decade that sold thinness to the masses on an unprecedented Health & History ● 16/2 ● 2014 163 level—but at least this study shows where that idea came from. And it’s not where I thought it came from, namely the advertising industry. Instead, Veit draws together a multiplicity of ideas about wartime austerities, the servant problem and food morality during World War I. She links the development of home economics as a school and college subject with this progressive quest for better, more rational ways of being American, and also charts the introduction of immigrant cuisine to the American diet. I also now understand why Herbert Hoover was elected President—he had a long history of public service and public image behind him, directly connected to the American stomach. To her credit, Veit is a solidly archives-based author who loves her subject. She has spent months reading old recipe books and magazines and letters written by ordinary people to government departments, and when you do a thing like this, it’s easy to fall in love with your material. Thankfully, every now and then she allows this to shine through. The opening of chapter 2, ‘Eating Cats and Dogs to Feed the World’, is a hoot, and Chapters 6 and 7 are fascinating in their own right. There is a section in Chapter 6 on the development of tinned spaghetti that will bring tears to your eyes, while in Chapter 7—on the birth of the collective anorexia known as the ‘thin ideal’—I sense an author who is really engaged with her work and loving her material. If this book doesn’t make you want to go and make polenta, then I don’t know what will. But alas, just when it’s getting interesting, Veit—or perhaps her thesis supervisors—feels compelled to remind us that Americans back then were a racist, sexist, homophobic lot. Instead of simply letting them be themselves—people of their time—Veit occasionally reminds us that the American nutritional imagination was dominated by the idea of the...