Eating and Being

“Eating and Being is a history of dietetics, and of the ideas about eating that succeeded it, all the way up to the unpoetic calorie. Shapin is an eminent historian of science whose work has taught us much about the social worlds in which scientific knowledge was created, and he argues here that thinking about food is also a way of thinking about some of the most fundamental categories of human physiology, personality, and morality. . . . Shapin traces the slow and uneven transformations in the ways people imagined their bodies to work, how food made flesh; in his telling, this isn’t a story of radical change but of ‘layered pasts, a surface through which supposedly past sentiments intermittently intrude, one in which some elements of the past were never completely submerged.’” * London Review of Books *
“A timely and authoritative book. Eating and Being offers a detailed, but highly readable, historical account of how Western ideas about good food have changed, particularly over the past five hundred years.” -- Rebecca Earle, author of Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato
“‘Diet’ has come to mean what we eat, how many calories, how much protein or carbohydrate. Shapin gives us a cultural and medical history of how this was not always so in western countries. From the ancient Greeks until the mid-nineteenth century, diet meant a medical regimen for management of the body, in which the language of qualities, humors, and temperaments was ubiquitous in both medical practice and common parlance. In this erudite and often entertaining book, Shapin further demonstrates the persistence of centuries-old prescriptions for balance and moderation as the virtuous aim in eating and living.” -- Mary Jo Nye, author of Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science
“Eating and Being is an important, timely, and beautifully written book tracing the history of western thinking about food and health from the ancient to the modern worlds. Shapin demonstrates the pervasiveness of ‘dietetic’ thinking about what we eat and drink until the eighteenth century; explains the implacable rise of the chemical and nutritional sciences thereafter; and reflects on the complicated and sometimes surprising survival of historical language and categories in contemporary culture. Along the way, and drawing on his vast historical knowledge, Shapin offers profound insights into very modern concerns: not least the relationship between eating and selfhood and the entanglements of food, politics, capitalism, and expertise. By providing an accessible and panoramic introduction to the story of food theory over the longue durée, Eating and Being emphatically shows why the past matters to the present.” -- Phil Withington, author of Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas
“With his characteristic genius for cracking open what most of us take as given, Shapin has turned his attention to eating. His new book is a rich historical meditation on the notion that ‘you are what you eat,’ an ancient idea, although the phrase in its various forms in French, German, and English originated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shapin traces the changing meanings of this phrase over the centuries and reveals an element of continuity: we think about what to eat by thinking about who we are, and we think about who we are by thinking about what’s for dinner. Eating and Being will make you want to have dinner with the author, preferably at his place. It spans, as good dinner conversations do, introspection, narrative, science, analysis, and popular culture. If you are hungry for a unifying exploration of food, personhood, culture, and history, get ready for a feast.” -- Jessica Riskin, author of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick
“Even as a resolute non-foodie, ever indifferent to my peers’ endless discussions of their favorite restaurants and recipes, Eating and Being was for me a great revelation. I am almost prepared to say it is the only book about food, perhaps alongside Athenaeus’s The Deipnosophists and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s La physiologie du goût, that makes clear the fundamental importance of eating not only for our bare physiological survival, but also for the constitution of our identities, our self-understanding, and our place in the world. Eating is always politically and metaphysically charged, and food, to paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss, is powerfully good to think with—especially when Shapin is our guide.” -- Justin Smith-Ruiu, author of The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning