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

在20世纪的过程中，美国对饮食和健康的关注已经从主要集中在营养不良或食物消费不足上，转变为与所谓的“富裕社会”或过度消费有关的健康问题。这篇论文由科学、技术和社会计划资助，研究了一个机构，美国食品和药物管理局如何通过实施食品标签和健康声明广告的变化来应对这种营养转变。特别地，这个项目着眼于FDA对营养科学和食品工程专业人员的依赖，以使食品供应合理化。首先，第二次世界大战后，FDA制定了食品“身份标准”，一套标准配方，带有固定的通用名称标签（如“花生酱”或“番茄汤”），适用于所有大规模生产的食品。其次，从20世纪70年代开始，FDA转变为一种信息风格，专注于通过新的标签（例如成分和营养信息面板）向消费者披露健康“事实”。通过研究包装标签的这种监管转变，该项目探讨了一个更普遍的关于食品科学化的历史问题，因为它与现代风险概念有关：食品，特别是食品过量，是如何被视为危险的，政府是如何应对这种对食品风险的新认识的？

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?