Tagung vom 26. – 28. Februar 2004 Universität Bielefeld

“Knowing Consumers: Actors, Images, Identities in Modern History”

Incorporated knowledge and the making of the consumer: Nutritional science and food habits in the USA, Germany and Switzerland (1930s to 50s)

Jakob Tanner (University of Zurich, Switzerland)

[Draft version. Do not quote without permission of the author]

1. Introduction

1. My paper starts with the assumption that the notion of a ‘consumer-revolution’ is problematic, because it stipulates a dichotomy between an inert and relatively stable period before and a dynamic phase after a supposed threshold into the modern area has been crossed. In accordance with Giovanni Levi, one of the main protagonists of micro-storia, I think it is much more appropriate to focus on a century-long and still unaccomplished process of accumulation – not only of consumer goods, but also of the social practices and the cultural competences that are needed to be a ‘good consumer’, able to navigate in an appropriate manner in a huge and agitated ocean of goods and services.[1] This way, a number of important frictions and non-simultaneous developments will come to the foreground. A micro-analytical perspective is not a pleading for “small is beautiful”, not a self-limitation on tiny contexts, but such an approach permits to reconstruct social change in a much more differentiated way than the macro-view. When historians go beyond the household-statistics, when they look at food entitlements in families, when they include informal procurements of foodstuffs, then they are able to reveal a more complex picture of class-divisions, of asymmetries in gender and family relations, of differentiations between generations and variations of regional patterns. Empirical data normally covers households as the central consumer unit, which means that many dimensions of inequalities tend to be camouflaged.[2] Nonetheless the family and the household are important factors in the process of the social shaping of the modern consumer. In most cases, consumer-acts make an important part of gender-relations and concern a series peoples (parents, children, relatives) which are bound together in a household. In this regard, two points are important:

Firstly, the rise of the modern consumer is tantamount with new abilities and techniques of information processing in the society.[3] It is Karl Marx, who wrote in “Das Kapital”, that the consumer must have an almost “encyclopaedic knowledge” in order to be able to do his or – more and more important – her job without being paralyzed by the overwhelming complex arrangements of goods and services available and not being swept away by a steady flow of information. One important strategy to reduce this complexity was to transform the product in a medium which conveys a clearly arranged, trust-enforcing message. Another is to stabilize everyday-routines and heuristics in order to simplify an otherwise too difficult a task to be solved every single day. Both processes are strongly influenced by the growing role of scientific knowledge and its impacts on the perception of food and the rationalization of production and distribution systems. Neither body-pictures nor health-concepts or consumer desires are understandable without an analytical sensibility of the multifaceted ‘scientification’-process that underlies the breakthrough of modern capitalism and – with a time-lag, but as a correlate in the long-run - consumerism. This aspect will be at the core of my contribution.

Secondly, the emergence of the consumer as a now role and performative capacity must be understood and conceptualized as a relational phenomenon. The ‘consumer’ is a figure which structures social relations and gender interactions.[4] For this reason, the idea that the unfolding consumerism was a genuine leveller of social disparities and the strongest consensus-builder in modern societies is a misleading assumption. As Levi points out, the uniformization of cultural habits is, when it exists at all, not the automatic result of income increases. Up to the beginning of the 20th century, there was an alternative vision how to organize consumption, how to shape every-day life. In the labour movement, there was an intense discussion about socialist forms of life and consumption and the more these perspective of a collectively organized ‘horn of plenty’-socialism found resonance in the working classes, the more consumption became an antagonizing force on the level of industrial class-societies. Without overestimating the persuasive power of such an alternative to the nuclear-family-based consumerism, it can be stated that it was only after the breakdown of a proletarian model of consumer-model that rising incomes gained an integrative momentum and turned out to be a factor of social cohesion and societal consensus. This important transformation from conflict to compromise can be located between the First World War and the defeat respectively the repression of the strike movements around the mid-20s (the British General Strike of 1926 was important in this regard). With the advent of the Fordist mode of (re-)production (as described e.g. by Antonio Gramsci in “Americanismo e Fordismo”), mass-production and mass-consumption were put in a new, family-centred relationship and the collectivist drive of ‘old labour’ evaporated in private desires and personal aspirations of the mentally new-forged breadwinning family-father and his loyal ‘Mrs. Consumer’.[5] On this constellation, consumption was open for scientific rationalization, for generalized marketing research, for a new dynamic of process and product innovation. And these were primary prerequisites for the rise of an “knowledgeable society” (as it was called since the 1960s).[6] It is the main hypothesis of this paper, that the making of the consumer is intricately interwoven with the incorporation of goods – physically as in the case of nutrition, neuro-motorially as in the case of many things which can only be used in an appropriate way after a learning process (including body and mind), mentally as in the case of the internalization of categorical classifications and nomenclatures.[7] The underlying perspective is that of a historical anthropology of consumption.[8]

2. The production of scientific knowledge and the popularization of science

Since the “hungry forties” of the 19th century, both the cognitive innovations and the laboratory and clinic-based research practices came mostly from Europe. In the 1850s and 60s, especially German physiologists suggested so-called “Kostmasse”, i.e. dietary standards, which should allow factory workers, peasants or soldiers to stabilize a normal energy household and to optimise his capabilities. Very famous became the “Voit-Kostmass” of the mid-1860s, which promoted protein-consumption. Round 1900, the so-called “New Nutrition” gained momentum, thereby developing and diffusing in the population of the industrialized countries a revised view and evaluation of foodstuffs.[9] The discovery of hitherto inconceivable, although partly empirically already known micronutrients (later named vitamins and trace elements) and new assumptions about the interrelationship between bodily performance, life expectancy and food habits reshaped the picture of what eating is about and whether the way people eat and drink is right or wrong. In the course of the 20th century however, the innovative dynamic in nutritional science and the capacity to transform scientific knowledge in technical solutions and commercial products shifted from the Old in the New World. Today, food policy is based on the concept of “Recommended Dietary Allowances” (which is presently undergoing a major revision: the RDA’s will be replaced by the broader category called DRI, Dietary Reference Intakes). The RDA’s were created in the USA in 1941, from where the concepts spreads all over the world to became the most accepted reference yardstick for the evaluation of food and nutrition.

In this transatlantic shift, the Second World War played a catalytic role. A historical analysis has to focus on living conditions, agricultural production, food supply, rationing systems, and scientific efforts made to measure and model both foodstuff and bodily needs in an appropriate way.[10] The interactions between bodily self-perception, food habits and scientific concepts of nutrition are of outstanding importance for the understanding of these relationships. The first chapter is based on two theoretical assumptions: Firstly, science and everyday-life are not separated, as the scientific self representation often assumes, but in an osmotic and reciprocal interrelationship. Secondly, eating is a cultural practice, which cannot be separated from complex classificatory systems which constitute a normative order and which are linked with a “moral physiology”.[11] As to the first point, it is important to see that nutritional science conceives itself as standing largely in opposition to “common sense“. For this reason experts in this field tend to decry popular food habits as being wrong, thereby looking for possibilities to educate the “’unreasonable’ community of consumers”[12]. From this point of view, the dissemination of scientific knowledge looks like a one-way street, i.e. a flow in reliable information form experts to the broader public. History of Science-Studies has developed an alternative interpretation. It was shown, that there is not a mere diffusion of scientific knowledge. On the contrary, widely spread scientific metaphors and images are also present in the highly trained minds of scientists and play a significant role in the way experiments are carried out and new trajectories of research are found. In his study Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache [Origin and Development of a Scientific Fact] – having its first impact on the field in the 1960s though published in Basle already in 1935 – the bacteriologist, biochemist and philosopher Ludwik Fleck wrote of the “general repercussions of popular science“ on scientific research,“ and asserted that “certainty, simplicity and clarity first originate in popular knowledge; the scientist’s belief in such as the ideal criteria for knowledge is derived from the popular sphere, and herein lies the general epistemological significance of popular science.“[13]

Taken this for granted, the juxtaposition of “scientific knowledge” and „unscientific simplifications“, as well as the dichotomy between scientific enlightenment and public superstition would be a misleading assumption. It is much more productive to question the way in which the field of food and culinary regimes are symbolically and linguistically organized. Again, history of science-studies propose an appropriate approach for the understanding of the mutual influence in both directions. The key-idea is that we have to look at the way “classification works” (to quote the title of a reader of Mary Douglas and David Hull).[14] The two editors also stated, that “the theory of knowledge needs an account of agency. It needs an account of community interest in stable categories as well as in precise categories.” In the same reader, Gary L. Downey starts with the assumption “agency-based approaches typically treat change and continuity asymmetrically as qualitatively distinct and separate mechanism”: Agency has a privileged perception of change and deemphasise the mechanism of continuity.[15] In times of war, when scientific experts try to cope with food shortages and to implement new nutritional knowledge, the attention was drawn towards the complex change of food habits. Continuity is then considered as a mere hindrance, an irrational obstacle opposed to rational adjustments.

This leads us to the second afore mentioned point. In “deciphering a meal”, anthropologist Mary Douglas demonstrated a way of “reading” the structure of foodstuffs and the time and spatial organisation of eating in the basic unit of a culinary system, a meal.[16] Anthropologists were generally against an biological and physiological approach form the very beginning. The explanatory capacity of anthropological theories was based in a holistic concept of culture, which aimed at analysing foodstuffs neither as calorie-container nor as supplier of nutrients, but as both symbolic values and cultural artefacts which has a great significance for social interaction and communication. From this point of view, nutritional science might be helpful, but is never capable to comprehend the complex effects of changes in the culinary regime (not only in the composition of the meals, but also in the preparation techniques) on food habits and social relationships. This kind of research was carried out especially in the United States during the Second World War.

This opposition between sciences and social anthropology brings afore another interesting question, which refers to the dichotomy between “universalistic versus relativist” positions: Nutritional scientists are basically committed to a universalistic concept of the human being, which is rooted in biology and physiology. Aware of individual differences, they nonetheless try to formulate criteria for an adequate diet based on knowledge in properties and effects of different nutrients. Their aim was to match the bodily requirement of human beings and the nutritional value of foodstuffs in order to provide health and efficiency on an aggregated, collective level. Instead of looking for concrete foodstuffs and specific meals, they developed a calculus, based in nutrients (quality) and energy (quantity). Food systems could be changed voluntarily along scientific criteria and as long as the total amount of caloric intake and the composition of nutrients is appropriate. Resistance against such a change is perceived as an expression of irrational attitudes or burdensome tradition. Nutritional science concentrated on biological conditions and anthropological constants; it didn’t care for cultural factors. This view was challenged through a cultural perspective on food and eating. This approach was interested in discovering interrelationships between food habits, community structures and social interaction. As food patterns are closely intertwined with culture, they cannot be changed without far-reaching impacts on the whole web of societal relations. Therefore it is not appropriate to look at meals and diets form an exclusively physiological viewpoint. Although traditional dietary regimes may have incorporated sort of physiological wisdom and although customs might be guided by some hidden rationality, which fosters health and longevity, they are bound to the self-understanding of individuals and social groups as well to the cosmos of values stretched over a cultural community. When food habits are interpreted as symptomatic for cultural structures, they cannot be altered without a deeper understanding of the whole society. From such a point of view, the science-approach is an expression of a technocratic understanding of societies.

Under the political conditions of the 1930s and 40s, this juxtaposition between a universalistic-physiological and a relativistic-cultural approach was intermediated by the strong national bias: Although there was an international exchange of research results and underlying hypothesis in the field of nutritional science, a national homogeneity-assumption prevailed. To be sure, “nation” was not “nation”; there was on the contrary a great variety of national self-understandings and collective behaviours. In the German case the nation was considered to be homologous with race: the “Third Reich” and the “Germanic Race” should fit together, because in this social-darwinian and racist world-view the basic for politics was biology and races were considered to be biological entities, rooted in common blood. On the other side of the spectrum, there were nations based on constitutional law, defining themselves in terms of political citizenship. But whatever the ideological principles and institutional structures, the nation was the reference-frame for all “big” decisions to be made regarding the war. The nation produces a strong integrative power inside its boundaries. This inclusion is accompanied by exclusion: Every nation works as a discriminatory concept against other nations, drawing a clear demarcation line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in terms of territory and membership.

In the field of nutrition, the science-based universalistic concept was hence transformed and limited in a national one: the population that constitutes a nation (or, as in the German case, a race), should be treated in the same way or according the same criteria and be integrated in an administrative-bureaucratic system of food entitlements. Rationing, the rise of domestic production and price controls are the main measures to guarantee the provisioning of an adequate food or to implement a “just” distribution of scarce nutritional resources on a national scale. Given the distinction between inside and outside the nation or the race, culture should not play any role for rationing techniques, because nutrition was perceived as a biological and physiological process and the distribution of scarce food can be organized along the calculation of the experts in nutritional science. This “technocratic” approach laid the basis for trans-national comparisons of wartime food provision since the late 1940s, when nutritional scientists form all over the world and form both camps of the former world war started a new international collaboration in their discipline. This cooperation also included the results of studies which were conducted in Nazi-Germany in forced labour camps and which were deeply rooted in the racist ideology of that regime. Now, in the new world order of the post-war Pax Americana, these findings could be valorized in the framework of a universalistic physiological framework. Physiologists, who advocated a decade before for a racist society were now anew adopted in the international scientific community of the experts in nutrition and their accounts of the interrelationship between lack of foodstuffs and work performance were considered to be instructive experiments in human physiology. These recognition and appreciation of former German scientists who fully cooperated with the institutions of the NS-state was only possible, because the Allies – and especially the United States – were willing to consider this problem finished and to go forward in a future which was shaped by the Cold War.