Doctoral Dissertation Research: Accounting for Taste: Regulating Food Labeling During the Nutrition Transition, 1945-1995

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Over the course of the 20th century, concerns over diet and health in the United States have shifted from those predominantly focused on undernourishment, or under-consumption of food, to health problems associated with the so-called "affluent society," or over-consumption. This dissertation funded by the Science, Technology, and Society Program examines how one institution, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, responded to this nutrition transition by implementing changes in how foods could be labeled and health claims advertised. In particular, this project looks at the FDA's reliance upon nutrition science and food engineering professionals to rationalize the food supply. First, following WWII, the FDA developed food "standards of identity," a set of standard recipes with fixed common name labels (such as "peanut butter" or "tomato soup") for all mass produced foods. Second, beginning in the 1970s, the FDA changed to an informational style focused on disclosing health "facts" to the consumer through new labels (e.g. Ingredients and Nutrition Information panels). By studying this regulatory shift in package labeling, the project explores a more general historical question about the scientization of food as it is linked to modern notions of risk: how did food, and particularly food excess, become seen as dangerous, and how did the government respond to this new understanding of food risk?