Counting on Dinner: Discourses of Science and the Refiguration of Food in USDA Nutrition Guides

摘要

My goal in this paper is to demonstrate how discourses of science, in particular a discourse of quantification, change food, and what we know about it. Herein, I use United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) food and nutrition guides as sites for the development of an enumerated discourse of food. Since the USDA published its first food guide in 1917 it encouraged the eater to understand food in scientific and numeric terms. As the twentieth century progressed, the USDA continued to figure food using reductive, quantitative language until the food guide pyramid codified the syntax into a visual symbol. I argue that an enumerated discourse fundamentally changes our understanding of food by categorizing food according to scientific principles and properties instead of by season, taste, or cultural experience.