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By Root 488 0

the first golden age of American food faddism, though of course its exponents spoke not in terms of fashion but of “scientific eating,” much as we do now. Back then the best nutritional science maintained that carnivory promoted the growth of toxic bacteria in the colon; to battle these evildoers Kellogg vilified meat and mounted a two-fronted assault on his patients’ alimentary canals, introducing quantities of Bulgarian yogurt at both ends. It’s easy to make fun of people who would succumb to such fads, but it’s not at all clear that we’re any less gullible. It remains to be seen whether the current Atkins school theory of ketosis—the process by which the body resorts to burning its own fat when starved of carbohydrates—will someday seem as quaintly quackish as Kellogg’s theory of colonic autointoxication.

What is striking is just how little it takes to set off one of these applecart-toppling nutritional swings in America; a scientific study, a new government guideline, a lone crackpot with a medical degree can alter this nation’s diet overnight. One article in the New York Times Magazine in 2002 almost single-handedly set off the recent spasm of carbophobia in America. But the basic pattern was fixed decades earlier, and suggests just how vulnerable the lack of stable culinary traditions leaves us to the omnivore’s anxiety, and the companies and quacks who would prey on it. So every few decades some new scientific research comes along to challenge the prevailing nutritional orthodoxy; some nutrient that Americans have been happily chomping for decades is suddenly found to be lethal; another nutrient is elevated to the status of health food; the industry throws its weight behind it; and the American way of dietary life undergoes yet another revolution.

Harvey Levenstein, a Canadian historian who has written two fascinating social histories of American foodways, neatly sums up the beliefs that have guided the American way of eating since the heyday of John Harvey Kellogg: “that taste is not a true guide to what should be eaten; that one should not simply eat what one enjoys; that the important components of food cannot be seen or tasted, but are discernible only in scientific laboratories; and that experimental science has produced rules of nutrition that will prevent illness and encourage longevity.” The power of any orthodoxy resides in its ability not to seem like one and, at least to a 1906 or 2006 genus American, these beliefs don’t seem in the least bit strange or controversial.

It’s easy, especially for Americans, to forget just how novel this nutritional orthodoxy is, or that there are still cultures that have been eating more or less the same way for generations, relying on such archaic criteria as taste and tradition to guide them in their food selection. We Americans are amazed to learn that some of the cultures that set their culinary course by the lights of habit and pleasure rather than nutritional science and marketing are actually healthier than we are—that is, suffer a lower incidence of diet-related health troubles.

The French paradox is the most famous such case, though as Paul Rozin points out, the French don’t regard the matter as paradoxical at all. We Americans resort to that term because the French experience—a population of wine-swilling cheese eaters with lower rates of heart disease and obesity—confounds our orthodoxy about food. That orthodoxy regards certain tasty foods as poisons (carbs now, fats then), failing to appreciate that how we eat, and even how we feel about eating, may in the end be just as important as what we eat. The French eat all sorts of supposedly unhealthy foods, but they do it according to a strict and stable set of rules: They eat small portions and don’t go back for seconds; they don’t snack; they seldom eat alone; and communal meals are long, leisurely affairs. In other words, the French culture of food successfully negotiates the omnivore’s dilemma, allowing the French to enjoy their meals without ruining their health.

Perhaps because we have no such culture of