Food, Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating

208 Pages·2006·1.06 MB·English

by  John Coveney

Food, Morals and Meaning
Food, Morals and Meaning traces our complex relationship with food and eating
and our preoccupation with diet, self-discipline and food guilt. Using our current
fascination with health and nutrition, it explores why our appetite for food pleasures
makes us feel anxious. This second edition includes an examination of how our
current obsession with body size, especially fatness, drives a national and inter-
national panic about the obesity ‘epidemic’.
Focusing on how our food anxieties have stemmed from social, political and
religious problems in Western history, Food, Morals and Meaning looks at:
● the ancient Greeks’preoccupation with eating;
● early Christianity and the conflict between the pleasures of the flesh and
spirituality;
● scientific developments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and
our current knowledge of food;
● the social organisation of food in the modern home, based on interviews;
● the obesity ‘epidemic’ and its association with concerns about moral
degeneration.
Based on the work of Michel Foucault, this original book explains how a rational-
isation of food choice – so apparent in current programmes on nutrition and
health – can be traced through a genealogy of historical social imperatives and
moral panics. Food, Morals and Meaningis essential reading for those studying
nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness, and sociology of the body.
John Coveney is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health,
Flinders University, Australia. He has broad professional experience and aca-
demic interests related to food and health. He is a well-known author and
commentator on social nutrition, and is frequently invited to speak on this topic.
He is recognised for his expertise in public health and food policy.

Food, Morals and Meaning
The pleasure and anxiety of eating
Second edition
John Coveney
First published 2000
by Routledge
This edition published 2006 by Routledge
2 Park Square,Milton Park,Abingdon,Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave,New York,NY 10016
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,an informa business
© 2006 John Coveney
All rights reserved.No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic,mechanical,or other means,
now known or hereafter invented,including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system,without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Coveney,John.
Food,morals,and meaning :the pleasure and anxiety of eating / John
Coveney.– 2nd ed.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Nutrition–Moral and ethical aspects.2.Food–Moral and ethical
aspects.3.Nutrition–Social aspects.4.Food–Social aspects.5.Gastronomy.
6.Food habits–Moral and ethical aspects.7.Food preferences.
[DNLM:1.Food Preferences.2.Diet.3.Food Habits.4.Morals.
5.Nutrition.6.Obesity.QT 235 C873f 2006] I.Title.
TX357.C59 2006
178–dc22
2005031285
ISBN10:0-415-37620-3 (hbk) ISBN13:978-0-415-37620-4 (hbk)
ISBN10:0-415-37621-1 (pbk) ISBN13:978-0-415-37621-1 (pbk)
ISBN10:0-203-02594-6 (ebk) ISBN13:978-0-203-02594-9 (ebk)
For Melanie,Max and Claudia

Contents
List of tables viii
Preface ix
Introduction xii
1 Foucault, discourse, power and the subject 1
2 The governmentality of modern nutrition 15
3 The Greeks to the Christians: from ethics to guilt 25
4 Religion and reason: the emergence of a discourse
on nutrition 46
5 Paupers, prisoners and moral panics: refining the
meaning of nutrition 65
6 The nutritional policing of families 76
7 Nutrition landscapes in late modernity 92
8 Nutrition homescapes in late modernity 107
9 An ethnography of family food: subjects of food choice 122
10 The governmentality of girth 141
11 Conclusions 157
Appendix 162
Notes 164
References 165
Index 181
Tables
4.1 An example of the amount of food and nutrients that 61
could be bought for 25 cents in 1895
A.1 Family members (including income and self-described 163
employment)
Preface
The decision to publish a second edition of this book, originally published in
2000, was, in fact, a relatively easy one. In the time since the first edition a num-
ber of important developments have taken place in the area of food and health
which prioritise the arguments on which this book was based. These are that our
relationship with food and eating is highly complex, even problematic, especially
in terms of the pleasures we derive from our appetite. Our preoccupation about
what is good to eat demonstrates not only an interest in our desire to better under-
stand what is in the food we eat, from a nutritional sense, but also a deep and
abiding interest in how we understand ourselves as social and individual moral
agents of food choice. In other words, making the ‘right’food choice is both a sci-
entific judgement and a moral decision.
The notion of the ‘good’eater, however, is far from new. The science of nutri-
tion is but a modern development in a moral history of food and eating that can be
traced to earlier systems of thought in Western culture. Starting with ancient
Greece and Rome, where codes of proper conduct of citizens were dependent on
a concern for the appropriate daily management of natural pleasures of many
kinds, including food and eating, we can see the beginnings of regimes of
lifestyle. Moderation of one’s pleasures was the key principle. And from this
developed a natural reason based on an understanding of one’s capacities as an
ethical, that is morally responsible, person. The recognition, or knowledge, of
one’s self as a fit and proper subject was transformed in the later Christian period
where austerity replaced moderation. The desire for food, like the desire for sex,
was a reminder of the ‘natural’bodily appetite which had to be tamed in order to
maximise spiritual pursuits. And while European monastic practices of self-
denial, even chastisement, may not have been fully embraced by audiences
beyond the monastery walls, the practice of ‘fasting’and deprivation was widely
followed, even if as a necessity for the poor of the time. The later integration in the
Enlightenment period of Christian thinking, especially Protestantism, with scien-
tific views of the world provided grounds for a rationing of food, in terms of the
correct amounts the body needed for healthy functioning, and a rationing of plea-
sure. It is no coincidence that deep Christian beliefs were held by some of the
most influential early thinkers and writers about the science of food and the body,