Philosophy of Food Class Notes

Reutrn to Philosophy of Food

JAN 19

• Course Content: A brief look at the major course research questions.

• Course mechanics:

• Websites in this course. alfino.org --> wiki and courses.alfino.org
• Roster information -- fill in google form
• Main Assignments and "Grading Schemes"

• To Do list:

• Send me a brief introduction through the "Tell Me" form on the wiki. (Soon, please.)
• Login to wiki for the first time and make a brief introduction on the practice page. (3 points if both are done by Friday.)
• After rosters are posted, login to courses.alfino and look around. Note "Links" for pdfs. Retrieve reading for Monday (and read it).
• Browse wiki pages.
• Get the book. Pollan, In Defense of Food
• Start printing pdfs. Highly recommended.

• The Prep Cycle -- recommendations for success in the course!

1. Read - Follow "Focus" notes on Reading schedule. Be ready for quizes.
2. Track study questions during and after class - use your note taking to express main ideas in your terms, link in-class notes to your reading notes. Remember, almost all assessments in the course are open book & open note.
3. Class -- Our pattern is to consolidate our understanding of the reading and then engage in philosophy on the basis of it.

This is the basic pattern for our coursework. From this cycle we then develop short philosophical writing and position papers using instructor and peer review.

JAN 24

Review of Three Food Documentaries

Philosophical Method

• We'll use Cowspiracy today to illustrate this point about philosophical method:

Philosophers worry alot about the way a claim is stated. The strength of a claim is related to the sorts and amounts of evidence needed to support it. So if you state your claim (the conclusion of your "argument" broadly) too strongly you can have a bad argument even though a slightly weaker or more qualified version of the claim may be the best supported view.

Food Inc Notes

Fed Up!

Cowspiracy

Nestle, "Introduction: The Food Industry and 'Eat More,' from Food Politics"

Intro: "This book exposes the ways in which food companies use political ernment and professional support for the sale of their products."

• we aren't critical of food industry -- assume they are interested in health.
• mentions tobacco analogy
• historic note: early 20th century still battled nutritional disease from inadequate calorie intake.
• her professional experience (3) with editing Surgeon General's report: no "eat less meat" - Government gave up producing the report in 2000. Authoritative advice would have required some "eat less" messaging.

• Side note: "New Dietary Guidelines Crack down on Sugar but red meat gets a pass," NPR Jan 7, 2016 [1]

• her thesis: "that many of the nutritional problems of Americans—not least of them obesity—can be traced to the food industry's imperative to encourage people to eat more in order to generate sales and increase income in a highly competitive marketplace."

• note her concise nutrition advice on p. 5ff.

• 7ff: stats on diet and mortality, childhood obesity. Note that she does endorse "energy balance" as legitimate (more so than in Fed Up, but she would agree with their point)

• 8ff: food production and consumption trends. more total daily calories, increased consumption of low fat foods, more restaurant food, where we are in relation to USDA advice. see p. 10. low variety of food in actual diets.

• 11: dimensions and trends in food industry and international - European diets are approximating US diet in calories from fat. "nutrition transition" idea that as cultures move from primary healthy diets to industrial diets they ironically seek more calories and want cheap calories. US less than 10% of income on food (see wiki links for more)

• Some food economics: percent of food value from farming across food types. Advertising spending on industrial food, using philanthropy for branding, new food products (25)

JAN 26

Pollan, In Defense of Food, first 4 chapters of Part 1

• background on previous work and personal food history.
• 5: example of failure of advice on fat and cancer, coronary heart disease. Failure of claims about fiber not reducing cancer risk., also on value of fish.
• best to understand confusion on nutrition as result of interaction of food industry, gov't and journalism.
• claim for Part One: most of the nutritional advice of the last 50 years has made us less healthy.
• surprising claim: It's a dangerous idea to think that food is just about health. orthorexics.
• 10: at. Four of the top ten causes of death today are chronic diseases with well-estabUshed links to diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer. Even after adjusting for longevity.
• goal: advice for enjoying food.

• Chapter 1 - From Foods to Nutrients

• food disappearing in favor of "nutrients" - a kind of reductionism.
• William Prout, early 19th division of macronutrients into Protein, Carb, and Fat. Justus von Leibig, also studied soil, imp. or minerals.
• 1912: Casimir Funk, "vitamines" - goes back to "vitalism", also "amines" because nitrogen based.
• part of the story starts in 1977, with the first Fed comm on nutrition. blow back on recommendations 23. This led to a strategy of not referring to foods directly in terms of "more or less" but nutrients.
• also from 1950's "lipid hypothesis" - that fats from meat and dairy were responsible for much dietary disease.

• Chapter 2 - Nutritionism Defined

• Gyorgy Scrinis -- 2002 claim.
• Nutritionism puts the scientists in charge. leads to thinking about foods as "good" or "bad" based on their nutrients. you find this in the history of nutrition. 29ff. Liebig made "protein" a master nutrient. Others, like Kellog and Fletcher, would promote carbs. Good place to see limits of nutritionism is in baby formula. Still no match for the real thing.

• Chapter 3 - Nutritionism comes to Market

• nutritionism works well with marketing of food. margarine, for example. starts as cheap fat, but then marketed as healthier. industrial foods can be redesigned as nutrition fads change.
• early history of food adulteration. Sinclair's The Jungle, 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Objections to "imitation" rule. (note other controversies: milk, real). Thrown out in 1973. If an imitation food is nutritionally similar to the food it imitates, it doesn't need to be called imitation. Opened the door to lots of chemical substitutes.

• Chapter 4 - Food Science's Golden Age

• diet fads tend to favor foods that can be reengineered. Some of that can be done with animals by feeding them differently, but mostly this favors industrial food over whole foods.

Montanari, "Food is Culture"

• Creating One's Own Food

• q. 3: roughly, now that we're in a postindustrial age, we look at agriculture as "natural" and traditional, but from the perspective of those adopting, it wasn't. - but they experienced ag as a break from nature. against nature, but also a breakthrough and innovation. ...gave us power to rule nature (later ideas about space and time).

• demography of agriculture is amazing.dates for ag in diff regions (5), "invention of agriculture...matter of necessity tied to population growth"

• cites Franz Braudel, who made a version of this thesis. Agriculture organized everything (roughly). see list. economy, religion (make side point about warrior / ag gods). Civitas and civilitas depend upon agriculutre!

• Bread, breadeaters, marks break from nature. Bread is an invention from nature (sidepoint: can sustain life, man can live on bread alone, it just isn't pretty.). Interesting reference to mythology of bread and woman in Epic of Gilgamesh (short term research oppportunity).

• Fermented drinks - like bread, break from nature.

• germ idea about culture: culture is produced where tradition and innovation intersect

• Even Nature is Culture -

• two oppositions: 1. ag and hunt/gather goes through plant and animal kingdom. but 2. sedentary/nomad favors plant over animal (in fields vs. forest opposition, plants are identified with culture, hunting with nature)

• gods/myths of agricultural societies: stories of Persephone, rice in asian narratives, corn in Mayan legend. hunting practices treating bones of animal as sacred, basis for rebirth. Germans have their grand Miale!

• thesis: opposition between nature and culture somewhat fictitious. something like: civilized man uses nature (food structured) in the primary myths to separate him/herself from nature.

• p. 11: difference btween Greco-Roman and German food systems. Germ of European food system in the clash between these cultures (note that Romans saw German meat culture as barbaric. Romans would have eaten meat, but not as primary food (note, later, Christian calendars with meatless and fasting days). Christianity coming from Med culture, has bread and wine as liturgical symbols. Unification of these cultures produces European food culture, balancing bread and meat. Implications for gastronomy.

• Playing with Time

• no seasons in Eden or Land of Cockainge.
• Food culture developed by prolonging and stopping time, through species variation and food storage. examples 14-15. "man made putrefaction a means to a useful end" cheese, cured meats.

• Playing with Space

• goal of transcending spatial limits to food, transpo. Nice story from the Mantuan court of Gonzaga. "good horse and a full purse". involves concept of "terroir".

• Conflicts

• food systems are not nec. harmonious (esp. given what is at stake in a food insecure world). Medieval system was a class based system of control of food production. Peasant rebellions over restricing forest access. Robin Hood. famine image: scene of farmers at the city gate starving. conflicts between lords also about food, cities taxed area villages in food. Irish food famine of 1846 due to English control of food. (can't live on potatoes).

• examples of movements of food in global trades cultures. For Columbus ( int. term "Columbian exchange") and age of conquest, exploitation was avowed purpose.

JAN 31

Montanari, "Food is Culture" "Fire > Cooking > Kitchen > Cusine > Civilization

Fire > Cooking > Kitchen > Cuisine > Civilization

• cooking essential to human being. (note other resources) . Western story of Prometheus (30), the hearth identifies human being (abode).

• Not true that cuisine is only about cooking. raw food methods. Chinese critic of western gastronomy as based too much on cooking. meanings of "Cucina". transition from womens' domain to men's.

Pollan, In Defense of Food, part two of section one

• Chapter 5 - The Melting of the Lipid Hypothesis

• 30 years of bad advice about fats. cites an example of a scientific "retraction" of the lipid hypothesis. 43. transfats are apparently dangerous, but they had been encouraged early by advocates of lipophobia. ratio between types of fats matters. (mention "The Queen of Fats" O3/O6 fats) low fat diets are not associated with weight loss either. replacing fats with carbs might lead to weight gain.
• science journalist Gary Taubes credited with exposing lipid hypothesis, especially in Good Calories, Bad Calorie.
• scientist sought to confirm the lipid hypthesis in the 50s by looking at diets that are low in fat among people who do not suffer CHD. But that's pretty selective. Such diets may also be moderate in calories or combine other foods that offer protections.

• there are correlations between high cholesterol and CHD and between diet and chol levels, but not clear that's a complete causal relationship.

• Chapter 6 - Eat Right, Get Fatter

• so we did eat more low fat foods, but we got fatter. we reduce the % of fat by eating more non-fat calories. (hence the importance of the "eat more / eat less" impass in food politics)
• Pollan argues that nutritionism is partly to blame. Fat became a "bad" nutrient and since the dietary guidelines couldn't tell people to eat "less" of anything, it told people to eat more "low-fat" and non-saturated fats.
• Nutritionism solves the problem of the "fixed stomach" only so much food is needed.

• Chapter 7 - Beyond the Pleasure Principle

• cites research on American food culture suggesting that we are more focused on abundance of calories that savoring.. haute cuisine is often looked upon as effete. Food Puritanism. (linking nutritionism to our susceptibility to follow nutritional and to our culture).

• story of Kellog and Fletcher -- protein was the bad nutrient.

• yogurt enemas, chewing songs,

• Kellogg: "The decline of a nation commences when gourmandizing begins."

• scientific food culture in the US might also have been appealing as part of the process of assimilation. Nutrient based diets are culture neutral.

• See below for group discussion exercise we'll do about here.

• Chapter 8 - The Proof is in the low-fat pudding

• carbs may have made us fat by distorting our insulin responses and leaving us hungrier. (Note the importance of "satisfaction" here.)

• we have reduced mortality from heart disease, but it's not clear that underlying rates of CHD have dropped. smoking reduction also contributes.

• Chapter 9 - Bad Science.

• claims that nutrition science is hard because nutrient by nutrient analysis is practical, but simplifies the interactions of actual metabolism. Different individuals and populations metabolize differently. Your microbiome affect nutrient absorbtion and production as well.

• example: some whole foods diets have been correlated with cancer avoidance, but it doesn't follow that there is a single nutrient or class of nutrients that does that. Speculation about anti-oxidants, vit E beta-caroteme, ...etc. But then some evidence that beta-carotene alone can increase cancer risk.

• example of chemicals in thyme.

• sometimes science is limited by only being able to study chemicals it has the tools to measure. This was true of cholesterol at one point. 66

• examples of effects from combinations of foods: carbohydrates in a bagel will be absorbed more slowly if the bagel is spread with peanut butter; Drink coffee with your steak and your body won't be able to fully absorb the iron in the meat. The olive oil with which I eat tomatoes makes the lycopene they contain more available to my body.

• hard to know if disease is caused by too much of a bad thing or too little of a good thing. a meat diet may be harmful intrinsically (as in the China Study hypothesis) or because it crowds out fruits and veg, which might have offset the risk factors of the animal protein.

• problem of context - lifestyles connected to food may be relevant -- Med diet based on mid-20th Crete islanders. Veganism studied among 7th day adventists. "confounding effects"

• long term observational study in "Nurses' Health Study -- problem -- everyone's eating roughly the Western diet, so hard to detect improvements.

• large scale intervention study. Womens' Health Initiative. seemed to show that low fat diet didn't help, but hard to tell. manipulating a single factor isn't very precise in this case. (kind of an example of nutritionism in research design). food-frequency questionaires. issues with.

• Chapter 10 Nutritionism's children -- our general confusion about foods as a result of generation of nutritionism.

(Note: the best data on the western diet might be the epidemiological, the natural experiment that is the Western Diet)

Group Discussion: Noticing your food culture

• When did you first become aware of your food culture? Was it in a difference between your family food culture or food culture of origin and the larger society as you were growing up? Was it from travelling? Was it last week? In a small group discussion, try to use your personal experience to amplify the "food culture" notes from Pollan Chapter 7. You may also want to use Gopnik's personal story HoJos and Parisian restaurants as an example.

Gopnik, Adam, "Who Made the Restaurant?" (13-32)

• from The Table Comes First

Gopnik, "Who Made the Restaurant?"

• opening description - follow -- illusion of dining room, relation to romance, difference from previous types: table d'hote, traiteur,

• personal experiences -- HoJo to Paris - Grand Vefour -- restaurants and writers' scenes.

• 19: account of origin of restaurant starts here:

• old story - post french revolution, displaced help from nobles. But restaurant starts 20 years earlier. Restaurant not like home service.

• three factors: intellectual causes (health and simplicity), commercial causes (new site for restaurants in/around Palais Royal), moral/social cause (breakdown of caste/class leading up to Rev)

• Mathrurin Roze de Chantoiseau -- first restauranteur. note root meanings of "restaurant" - associated with bullion and restoratives. Early restaurant served healthy foods that you couldn't source (22), not esoteric or exotic. Chantoiseau introduced more of a pleasure motive to the restaurant.

• commercial scene of the Palais Royal -- first mall. 27: 1780-1830 -- period of growth of restaurants - reflected some international ethnic cusine, but points out that the southern provinces of France would seem as exotic to Parisians and North African cuisine might seem to us. "Provencal" --

• adopted Russian services (sequence of courses, dishes chosen by each diner) rather than French banquet service (piles of dishes on a sideboard from which waiters serve) (consider the individualism in this)

• compares the emergence of the restaurant to the newer cafe, which did come into being by post-revolution licensing law changes allowing coffee/alcohol in same place. 33-37, importance of.

• brings in Bourdieu and Priscilla Park Ferguson -- "social field" , like a "scene" (examples of "gastronomic scenes" -- craft beer, local roasted coffee....) features of a food scene: writing, end of famine, enjoyment of food not seen as a sin, but mark of cultivation.

• Brilla-Savarin, 1825 Physiology of Taste. introduces word "gastronomy" 42ff. defines the "gourmand" in terms of enthusiasm about one's appetite and taste for food.
• rival, Grimod La Reyniere -- real foodie, spent the revolution eating great food, somewhat abstracted. rated restaurants and gave them stickers for their windows.

• 54: Habermas' theory about "Enlightenment eating" -- creates social capital

FEB 2

• detail from NYer article, "The Illusion of Taste"

• "Over the next few weeks, Spence invited twenty research subjects to his basement lab and sat them in front of a microphone in a soundproof booth. There they were handed a pair of headphones and instructed to bite, one by one, into nearly two hundred Pringles original-flavor chips. After a single crunch, each subject spat out the chip and gave it a rating: crisper or less crisp, fresh or less fresh. The subjects could hear each crunch as it looped from the mike into the headphones. But, without letting the participants know, Spence funnelled the crunching noises through an amplifier and an equalizer, allowing him to boost or muffle particular frequencies or the over-all volume. About an hour later, released from the booth, each subject was asked whether he or she thought all the chips were the same."

• "Along the way, Spence has found that a strawberry-flavored mousse tastes ten per cent sweeter when served from a white container rather than a black one; that coffee tastes nearly twice as intense but only two-thirds as sweet when it is drunk from a white mug rather than a clear glass one; that adding two and a half ounces to the weight of a plastic yogurt container makes the yogurt seem about twenty-five per cent more filling, and that bittersweet toffee tastes ten per cent more bitter if it is eaten while you’re listening to low-pitched music. This year alone, Spence has submitted papers showing that a cookie seems harder and crunchier when served from a surface that has been sandpapered to a rough finish, and that Colombian and British shoppers are twice as willing to choose a juice whose label features a concave, smile-like line rather than a convex, frown-like one."

Gopnik, Adam, "Who Made the Restaurant?" (32-57)

• compares the emergence of the restaurant to the newer cafe, which did come into being by post-revolution licensing law changes allowing coffee/alcohol in same place. 33-37, importance of.

• brings in Bourdieu and Priscilla Park Ferguson -- "social field" , like a "scene" (examples of "gastronomic scenes" -- craft beer, local roasted coffee....) features of a food scene: writing, end of famine, enjoyment of food not seen as a sin, but mark of cultivation.

• Brillat-Savarin, 1825 Physiology of Taste. introduces word "gastronomy" 42ff. defines the "gourmand" in terms of enthusiasm about one's appetite and taste for food.
• rival, Grimod La Reyniere -- real foodie, spent the revolution eating great food, somewhat abstracted. rated restaurants and gave them stickers for their windows.

• 54: Habermas' theory about "Enlightenment eating" -- creates social capital

Small group discussion: Applying "field" and "habitus" to US Food Culture

Now that you have a sense of the social field of the origin of the modern restaurant, try to give a parallel analysis of the "scence" that characterizes "US public eating". How does the experience of the restaurant, for example, reflect the "habitus" of US culture (compare to other cultures if possible)? How did you experience public eating in your childhood and early adulthood? Or, how do we use public eating to reinforce identity and class? Try to distinguish "generations" of US restaurant culture. What are some of the new trends in US restaurant culture?

Singer & Mason, Chapter 18, "What Should We Eat?"

• Some principles: transparency, fairness (reflect costs and sustainable), Humanity (avoid unnecessary suffering), social responsibility, needs

• factory farming -- issues for chickens, turkeys, eggs, veal, pig, dairy cows, beef.

• fish -- wild catch & sustainability

• "organic" -- typical meanings related to values: health & environment. Limits to "organic" label. Two approaches: organic if x, y, z not done. organic if natural conditions maximizes: soil quality, plant nutrients and flavor, animal feed and behaviors.

• local food -- also environmental, but sometimes not the lowest carbon impact. some distant food production helps people in absolute poverty. mention urban intensive farm movements.

• fair trade

• further issues: dairy and egg layers still involved killing of male layers and male calves (though I hear there is now technology to avoid getting male layers. Does that makes it better?).

• vegans diets are more sustainable, though there are counter views to this. significant areas of the diet comes with supplement recommendations. supplements can be organic and vegan.

• (Interesting that there is no discussion of industrial processed food. Could view industrial food products generally as high carbon foot print adulterated foods.)

FEB 7

Pollan, Part II of In Defense of Food

• Part II : Western Diet and diseases of civilization

• Chapters 1 and 2

• Summer 1982 - W. Australia aborigines study -- "metabolic syndrome" -- defined, theorized as signiture disease of western diet.
• O'Dea's results p. 87. Note that she didn't look for a silver bullet, a single factor. Just the diet change.

• Major premise: Compare us to many traditional diet populations and the difference in diseases profile is stark. It might be the "whole diet pattern" rather than a single imbalance. (The imbalances are symptoms.)

• Group of early 20th c intellectuals (bot 90) noticed absence of chronic disease in populations they travelled to. Pollan chooses the story of Weston Price from this group.

• Two objections to hyp that Western diet is to blame: disease/race theory, demographic theory (live longer). In both cases, the evidence refutes the claim.

• Weston Price -- b. 1870. diseases of teeth are effects of Western diet. 1939 major work after global travels looking at teeth. Lots and lots of teeth. kind of an amateur scientists, but collected important data (and seen right by later dental research). hard to find control groups. Price found big differences in Vit A and D. (Note comment about Masai -- . Multiple successful diets for omnivores.) pl 98: note comparison of groups with wild animal flesh and agriculturalists. made comparisons of grass fed / winter forage fed animals to find vitamin differences.

• Albert Howard -- similar time period, making argument against synthetic nitrogen (more later). both pioneers in what would later be seen as an ecological approach to food production.

• Chapter 3

• thesis: Calling for a more ecological way of thinking about food. think of food as mutual adaptation of plants and animals to humans. propagation/place in ecology of food chain. example of fruit: ripeness, transportation, high nutrient state. Corn vs. corn syrup. (Note point about possible future humans who could use HFCS. also true of milk in history of agriculture. Pollan doesn't quite give the details on milk. not like a light switching on. Textbook example of gene-culture co-evolution. Selective advantage for those who keep lactase expression going past breast feeding. You can always leave it to natural selection to favor those who can get on with the new diet.)

• Types of Changes that mark the Western Industrial Diet

• 1. From Whole Foods to Refined

• prestige of refined products: prior to roller technology, white rice and flour would be labor added, story of grain rollers 107, Refined flour is the first industrial fast food. Fresh flour lasts days. 108: specific details germ/endosperm, but also local mills, water power, (again, conquering space and time, as Montanari would say). Fortified bread.
• Jacobs and Stefffen study: epidemiological study showing effects of whole grains, but also that groups not eating whole grains, but getting equivalent nutrients did not enjoy benefits. alludes to possible wholism in effects. Sugar intake since 1870's.

• 2. From Complexity to Simplicity

• The flip side of food degradation is soil degradation. nitrogen fertilizers. simplification through chemical processing. control. simplification of species diversity and monoculture of ag. corn and soy are very efficient producers of carb calories. but then we draw less food diversity by focusing on these two.

• 3. Quality to Quantity

• decline in nutrient content (needs more research), interest in "phytochemicals" -- seem related to anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory effects.

• decline in food nutrient content from food grown in impoverished soil. Calls the result "nutritional inflation" because you have to get greater volumes of food to get your nutrition. some details on how soils matter: growing time affects mineral and vitamin levels. some evidence that organic plants have chemicals related to immune responses.

• cites Bruce Ames, serious researcher interest in micronutrition and cancer.

• 4. Leaves to Seeds

• shift from leaves to seeds decreases anti-oxidants and phytonutrients in our diet. seeds tilt in their fat profile toward O6. less healthy fat. O3 fats spoil faster, so tend to be removed from industrial food. nutritional advice to move toward seed oils didn't originally distinguish O3 from O6. Claims that the shift to seed oils helps example the change in ratio of O6/O3 from 3:1 to 10:1. note the connection p. 129 between fat profile and sense of "food security" -- interesting digression here. Could we have a deep fear of hunger that still leads us to choose overeating, especially of caloric foods?

• O3 decline also related to mental health. 130

• 5. From Food Culture to Food Science

• shift from reliance on national / ethnic food cultures to science. (digress on how national food cultures are often defined by major cookbooks).

Nestle, Chapter 1, "From Eat More to Eat Less"

• this reading gives more detail to the argument as summarized in the Intro.

• early history of USDA survey of food supply and consumption, 1909. (interesting to note that early studies in the 1890s predate knowledge of vitamins and dietary causes of onditions like beriberi, pellagra, and scurvy.

• "food groups" approach since early 20th century. War food policy, post-war "food for freedom" promotes sugar and candy. "eat more". Even in 1950's people weren't hitting RDAs in some areas. response of US gov't "eat more". 1960s war on poverty also reinforced "eat more" (recall %33 poverty rate).

• McGovern committe is the pivot point on "eat more" "eat less". Ancel Keys, explaining increase in heart disease since war, uses comparative data on food cultures with plant based diets. Hits on lipid hypothesis. reduce calories from fat. go low fat.

• details from the infamous 1977 hearings, p. 40-41. replaced "reduce consumption of meat" with "choose meats, ....which will reduce saturate fat intake."

• 43: Surgeon General's contribution -- 1979 first attention to processed foods nutritional value, publication Healthy Peoplerecommended less red meat (last time Fed Gov't would do that). Instead, switch to lean meats.

• back to USDA guidelines: 1985, first mention of maintaining ideal weight. "avoid too much" instead of "eat less". 49: consensus among nutrtitionists in late 1980s. Series of authoritative reports against high fat meat. consensus on limits of calories from fats, salt. consensus on need to restrict overall calorie intake as well.

• note last page summary: transition in 1980s of not resisting the consensus from the nutritional community, but using it to market nutrients. This coincides with the thesis of "nutritionism".

MAR 14

Spring Break

MAR 16

Spring Break