Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating (Religion and Science as a Critical Discourse) 1793620067, 9781793620064

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Food Faiths

RELIGION AND SCIENCE AS A CRITICAL DISCOURSE Series Editors

Lisa Stenmark, San Jose State University Whitney Bauman, Florida International University  

Understanding religion and science as a critical discourse means building on theoretical issues and concerns in order to address social transformation, issues of justice, and global concerns. It also means questioning the modern and western understandings of both “religion” and “science”—as well as the current disciplinary structure that developed in the nineteenth century—from multiple contexts and perspectives. Contributions to this series may employ multiple standpoints and trajectories with the aim of decolonizing “science” and “religion,” as well as the Science and Religion Discourse, in order to open up other ways of thinking. This might mean explorations of non-dominant discourses within the modern western framework that challenge the anthropocentric and reductive understandings of humans and nature. It may also mean finding new concepts, common grounds, and ways of thinking about the world from indigenous perspectives and those perspectives that fall outside of what we commonly call the modern west. It may mean asking questions about how we translate between different knowledge systems in a way that does not privilege one over the other, in search of new common grounds. Finally, it may also mean challenging notions of objectivity, and revealing that all knowledge-making systems are contextual and political. In other words, scholarship and activism are not as divided as we modern western types like to think. Our overriding assumption is that transforming the modern western disciplinary framework will require decolonizing that framework from within, in order to shake up assumptions, challenge givens, and open up space for new questions and new perspectives. This will make it possible to engage with voices outside this framework, enabling us to address pressing planetary problems in a more productive and inclusive way. Recent Titles in Series Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating, by Catherine L. Newell Marveling Religion: Critical Discourses, Religion, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, edited by Jennifer Baldwin and Daniel White Hodge Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics, edited by Arwin M. Gouw, Brian Patrick Green, and Ted Peters Amor Mundi and Overcoming Modern World Alienation, by Justin Pack Navigating Post-Truth and Alternative Facts: Religion and Science as Political Theology, edited by Jennifer Baldwin Unsettling Science and Religion: Contributions and Questions from Queer Studies, edited by Lisa Stenmark and Whitney Bauman

Food Faiths Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating Catherine L. Newell

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-7936-2006-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-7936-2007-1 (ebook) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Series Introduction: Science and Religion as a Critical Discourse

vii

Introduction: “Nothing New under the Sun” ‌‌‌

1

1: The Theory and the Theology of Diet, Science, and Religion



13

2‌: Health Reformers, Vegan Farmers, and the Nineteenth-Century Religious Roots of Scientific Diet Culture

35

3: The Twentieth Century and Beyond: How Health Became a Science, and How Science Became a Religion

75

4: Converting to Food Faiths: Veganism, Paleo, and the Landscape of Spiritual Eating

121

5: Sacred Ancestors: Veneration, Generations, and Getting in Touch with Our Roots

147

6: Virtue: Perfecting the Moral Self through the Ritual Embodiment of Science

173

7: Community: Defining What Is Sacred through Food

195



Conclusion: Redemption: Salvation through Health and Saving the World through Food Bibliography Index

215

223

241

About the Author



253

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Series Introduction: Science and Religion as a Critical Discourse Lisa L. Stenmark and Whitney Bauman, series editors

Ian Barbour’s publication of Issues in Science and Religion (HarperCollins) in 1971 marked the beginning of what has become the broad interdisciplinary field of Science and Religion. But despite interest from a wide range of disciplines and a concern for a wide range of issues, the field continues to be marked by a concern for theoretical issues, particularly those that focus on the truth claims of religion and science. One result is that the discourse(s) of Religion and Science often lacks what one editor (Lisa) calls a “prophetic voice” and another (Whitney) a planetary perspective. This is a matter of some concern because there is a pressing worldwide need to address serious issues that exist at the intersection of western sciences, technology and religion, and there continue to be (serious) concerns about the status of scientific claims, and the totalizing tendency of scientific claims over and against religions and other knowledge systems. There remain ongoing concerns because the discourses involved in the western academic Science and Religion Discourse (SRD) have been historically complicit in creating many of the problems that we need to address. Religion and science needs more critical engagement—and religion and science need to more critically engage one another—an engagement which is often lacking within the Science and Religion Discourse largely because an emphasis on truth claims tends to downplay differences, but it is differences that mark the entry point for critical engagement. This series attempts to promote more critical engagement through a somewhat fuzzy use of the idea of “critical discourse.” Critical discourses and theories can, of course, refer to Critical Theory in the narrow sense (The Frankfort School—Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas—and their intellectual vii

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Lisa L. Stenmark and Whitney Bauman

descendants), but it can also be used in a broader sense, to refer to feminist, critical race theory, postcolonial, queer approaches within social sciences, and also legal theory and literary approaches. All of these discourses help to challenge dominant understandings of the world in order that multiple perspectives and experiences might be heard—and exploration of differences, not a resolution. Religion and Science as a Critical Discourse represents an alternative to a doctrines and discoveries approach—which emphasizes the truth claims of religion and science—exploring areas of disagreement as a way of opening up the science and religion discourses to more voices, and more perspectives. By critical discourse, we mean all of these, and more, because none of these approaches is sufficient, but all of them are crucial for thinking about the planetary community and our moral and ethical responsibilities to human and earth others. Not every criticism is critical, of course, and what all of these approaches have in common is that they engage in criticism with a purpose: because theory must challenge and transform human structures—not just for criticisms sake, but to create a more just world that is more attune to human— and planetary—flourishing. These approaches are suspicious of absolutes whether scientific or religious or otherwise. They understand all knowledge as historical and political—as shaped by human culture and human interests—and they are critical in the sense that they confront social, historical, and ideological structures within culture and society in the interest of justice and flourishing, but also as a way to open up space for sound judgments. This is criticism aimed at judgment in the sense that political philosopher Hannah Arendt understood it: the ability to think what we can do. Thus, a critical discourse involves a many-sided engagement with the human and natural worlds, including multiple social and cultural locations (most particularly non-Western perspectives. It is interdisciplinary (humanities, social sciences, natural sciences), and it is connected to action, not merely deciding what is the case, but also how to act in response. A critical discourse does not merely point out the problem—or complain about it—it suggests solutions and represents a call to action. Ultimately, this is all meant to promote an exploration of the intersection of religion and science that is not a discipline in the conventional sense of the word, but an approach, one that is oriented toward social transformation, justice and global issues. Food Faiths does a great job of demonstrating the fruitfulness of this approach, demonstrating the kinds of insights that are gained when we treat religion and science not as bodies of knowledge or fixed categories, but as names we use to describe certain categories of experiences. In this volume, Catherine Newell uses the categories of religion and science as a critical lens to engage in a kind of cultural criticism of the phenomenon that she calls “food faith,” placing it in the context of the broad sweep of American religion



Series Introduction

ix

and, more importantly, a period of time when discursive power begins to shift from religion to science, and replaces religion as a source of authority. But, even when scientific authority replaces religious authority, the structure remains religious so that scientific justifications blend with such things as conversion narratives: the names have changed, but the structure remains the same. By using religion and science as categories of analysis, Food Faiths not only allows us to see the shift of the center of gravity from religion to science, it also reveals the ways that the same social changes that shaped religious expression have impacted the way we use science. The same suspicion of authority/institutions that transformed the American religious landscape, transforms the scientific one as well. The democratization of knowledge and the turn to the individual as a source of intellectual authority, results in the conviction that individuals are all qualified experts to generate and interpret matters both scientific and religious knowledge. All of this directly translates into mistrust of science and such things as vaccine resistance in response to COVID-19, as non-professionals asserted their right to produce information. Ultimately, looking at the way that the history of “religion” and “science” is intertwined within food/health movements provides a framework for understanding the relationship between religion and science, while at the same time, the framework of religion and science helps us to understand the phenomenon of food faith.

Introduction “Nothing New under the Sun”‌‌‌

In 1837, Sylvester Graham—Presbyterian minister, temperance advocate, and self-appointed expert on diet, digestion, and adjudicating sin—published a tract on the most commonplace of foods: bread. “A Treatise on Bread and Bread Making” was part sermon and part history, and highlighted the importance of what he felt was the underappreciated cornerstone of the American diet. The treatise reflected Graham’s personal belief that he could “hardly do society a better service, than to publish the following treatise on a subject which, whether people are aware of it or not, is, in reality, of very great importance to the health and comfort of every one.”1 This essay was topically different from his previous publications, which were theology-adjacent explorations of contemporary epidemics and the function of the human digestive system—a topic on which, as we shall we, Graham expended hundreds of thousands of words—to foster or curb everything from sin to disease. Instead, “A Treatise on Bread and Bread Making” starts by examining the supply chain that moves wheat from farm to mill, then flour from mill to oven, and from the oven to the pantries of good Christian homes. Graham describes in detail a system that connects the soil where the wheat is grown to the bread that graces the table to both the physical and the moral health of American families—linkages that could easily be broken by something as innocuous as deficient flour. And that tenuousness, Graham felt, exposed a grievous problem. In the essay, Graham explains that a combination of low-quality wheat, the over-grinding of that wheat to make super-fine flour, and the unscrupulous behavior of commercial bakers resulted in bread that was, in his words, “trash.” Bread, which “in some form or another has been the principle article in the diet of mankind, from the earliest generations of the human race, to the present time” has been universally considered throughout history to be the “staff of life.”2 Graham surmises that a warm loaf for his readers’ supper was so common that the average person never wondered about its origins, composition, or the naturalness of what they were eating. But somewhere, 1

2

Introduction

between the first light of civilization and Graham’s own fallen era, an insidious change had disrupted hearth and home. The bread carried by the Israelites out of Egypt and consumed by Roman armies as they moved across Europe would be unrecognizable to Graham’s readers, he explains, because “the quality of their bread continued to be exceedingly simple and course for many generations.”3 That coarseness, which today we know as “whole grain,” was, as Graham correctly points out, the primary source of bread’s nutritious qualities. “There are a few products of the vegetable kingdom which are still higher in the scale of nutriment, than wheat,” Graham writes. “And God has constructed man in strict accordance with this general economy of nature. He has organized and endowed the human body with reference to the condition and qualities of those substances in nature, which He designed for the food of man. And consequently, while man obeys the laws of constitution and relation which should govern him in regard to his food, he preserves the health and integrity of his alimentary organs, and through them of his whole nature.” When we consume the whole bran, rather than only the wheat berry separated from the husk and ground into fine flour, we are eating as God intended and in accordance with our physical predisposition—a recipe for good health. We go astray—and then suffer from ill health4—when “in the preparation of wheat for bread-making, [we] began to put asunder what God has joined together, and to concentrate the more purely nutrient properties, by separating the flour from the part commonly called the bran.”5 As it turns out, Graham’s recommendation for healthy bread is akin to the advice of modern nutritionists: eat only “farinaceous” brown bread—the ghost of which survives today in his eponymous cracker—made from whole wheat grown in good soil and baked, if possible, by a loving Christian mother (most nutritionists today would probably leave out the mother). Graham, whose popularity and legacy we will discuss in chapter 2, was in many ways a nutritional prophet, especially when it comes to his suggestion that the dietetic deficiencies of bread begin with the soil where the wheat is grown. He notes that wheat harvested from fields that have been “dressed” with manure from cows and horses who were themselves raised on grasses, not grains, is of better quality than “the wheat and other cultivated products of the vegetable kingdom [which] are too generally, in civilized life, very considerably deteriorated, as to their wholesomeness, by the improper tillage of the soil.”6 Graham also notes that there is a connection between poor soil and sick animals, creating a deficiency that is passed on to the humans who consume the animals as food. “If such and similar results of improper tillage can become the sources of serious evil to the human family,” he writes, “through their effects on the flesh of animals which man devours, and on the milk and butter which he consumes, surely the immediate effects of such a deteriorated vegetable aliment on the human system must be very



“Nothing New under the Sun”

3

considerable.” This “deteriorated vegetable ailment” circles through animals to soil to humans, with the bottom line being that sick, undernourished soil will produce deficient wheat. In Graham’s view, a series of invisible binaries—healthy soil or poor soil, whole wheat or refined, stone ground or factory milled, baked at home or commercially produced—magnify or exponentially worsen the health benefits of bread. What he is trying to impress on his readers is that bread is not a neutral nutritional category. Farinaceous brown bread made from whole wheat grown in healthy soil, combined with the Grahamite prescription of avoiding of meat, alcohol, coffee, tea, and a long list of spices, provide the foundation for a long, happy Christian life of good health, and, that most precious gift in Graham’s system, good digestion. For Graham, the pinnacle of bread—the platonic ideal and the foundation of righteous living—occurs when a loaf is prepared by a Christian homemaker who “rightly perceives the relations between the dietetic habits and physical and moral condition of her loved ones, and justly appreciates the importance of good bread to their physical and moral welfare.” And even though Graham’s prophecy falters a bit with his assertion that only a wife and mother is a suitable agent for the preparation of spiritually nutritious bread, he foreshadows the credo of the modern slow food movement and the philosophy of clean eating when he proclaims that “proper materials, proper care, a due amount of labor, a suitable length of time, and proper temperature, are all, therefore, necessary to the making of good bread.”7 Nearly two centuries later the Christian vegetarian social movement popularized by Graham has fallen out of fashion as a diet, but we can hear echoes of Graham’s philosophy in twenty-first century books on food systems and dietary regimes. For example, Michael Pollan’s 2008 book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto—the bestselling follow-up to his 2006 blockbuster The Omnivore’s Dilemma—offers the diet axiom “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Unintentionally but fascinatingly, Pollan revisits in Defense some of the same territory Graham explored in “A Treatise on Bread.” Like Graham, Pollan is concerned with the industrial scale of food harvest and manufacturing, as well as the physiological toll this approach to food has on our well-being. In his discussion of how the “industrialization of eating” deposed cultural and ecological perspectives on food in twentyfirst-century America, Pollan similarly focuses on the interconnected processes—the “relationships among species in systems we call food chains, or food webs”—that are bound up us and “reach all the way down to the soil.” As with Graham’s “improperly tillaged” soil, Pollan underlines that “our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the entire food web,” and if “the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who

4

Introduction

drink the milk from them.”8 Of the sour and rancid refined flour that Graham railed against in the 1830s as “in direct violation of the laws of constitution and relation which the Creator has established in the nature of man,” Pollan likewise writes that the replacement of whole grain flour with refined white during the nineteenth century is the story of a product “cut loose from its moorings in place and time and marketed on the basis of image rather than nutritional value.” And, just as Graham suspected, Pollan confirms that, from a dietary perspective, the bread produced by “this gorgeous white powder was nutritionally worthless, or nearly so” yet has remained “one of the main staples of the Western diet.” If Graham could be transported to our century and brought up to speed on health and nutrition, he would probably agree with Pollan that the reductionist mindset “as a way of understanding food or drugs may be harmless, even necessary, but reductionism in practice—reducing food or drug plants to their most salient chemical compounds—can lead to problems.”9 Those problems, which we explore in later chapters, include but are not limited to: whiplash from changing nutritional recommendations; mass-produced, nutrient-poor but calorie-dense Frankenfoods; incommensurable dietary divides; and clinical diagnoses of an obsession with healthy eating, which is also known as orthorexia. Contrasting the perspectives of Graham in 1837 and Pollan in 2008 gives me a bit of a feeling of déjà vu and you, like me, might conclude that, as far as advice about diet and health goes, for the past two centuries there has been “nothing new under the sun.”10 Even with the benefit of modern science and postmodern hindsight, nearly 200 years after Graham nutrition experts are still worried about soil quality’s downstream health effects and the marketability of whole grains to American consumers who were raised on refined white flour. We might also notice how what were, for Graham, questions of morality and Christian redemption—what to eat, what to avoid, what food can do to you and your family, what havoc overly extracted and heavily manufactured food can create on personal and public health, the sinful turpitude to which individuals who eat poorly can descend, etc.—are repackaged by Pollan and others as secular, neoliberal questions regarding capitalism, ethics, and, most importantly for our purposes, science. But, that is not to say that the question of what to eat in the twenty-first century is any less about morality and redemption than it was for Graham. Even though Graham’s message of dietary piety is now viewed as antiquated, if not aberrant, the notion that our diet—as in both the science-backed justifications for what we eat and the lifestyle that accompanies those choices—might become a central organizing force in our lives has taken on new meaning in the new millennium. As, Steven Bratman—the physician who coined both the term and the terminology of orthorexia—puts it, dietary theories today “carry the gravity of religion” in our wider culture.11 Thus, here in the twenty-first



“Nothing New under the Sun”

5

century science-based dietary lifestyles have become, for many practitioners, essentially a religion. To understand the significance of this observation, we need to think for a moment about the massive changes that followed the magnetic poles of science and religion reversing in the twentieth century. For tens of centuries, religion was the north star in cultural arbitration and social organization, but in a matter of decades religion was edged aside (if not replaced) by science as a definitive authority. But even more confoundingly, what’s followed this switch has not been the secular, rationalist society philosophers once soothingly assured us would be the natural outcome of replacing religion with science. As scholar of religion Ninian Smart observed in his 1983 book, Worldviews, “Many people think that religion, for all its spurts of resurgence here and there, is on the way out—destined in the end to wind up as fairy tales. But it happens that symbols often work most powerfully when they are unseen and unrecognized.”12 With this in mind, what we will see is how in some cases—especially in the case of “diet as lifestyle practice”—science is incorporated into an individual’s worldview as both authority and arbiter, with a result that looks less like science and more like religion. This book explores how individuals internalize scientific knowledge regarding health, diet, and nutrition, which are then incorporated into their lives as the basis of a personal spiritual practice. In Food Faiths, we will examine how science is used to justify a diet-based lifestyle and investigate what I call “food faiths and spiritual eating”—a worldview comprised of practitioners who define themselves not by a religion but by their diet. This book is, then, about “food faiths”: diets that become a spiritual practice and the science that provides the authority for these spiritual beliefs. We’ll be dealing primarily with two food faiths in particular—veganism (which includes whole-foods plant-based [“WFPB”], ethical, environmental, and raw) and ancestral or Paleo (a broad brush that captures low-carbohydrate, high-protein and sometimes high-fat diets like keto, Atkins, or even Whole30, many of which also make claims about traditional or ancestral foodways or pre-industrial food consumption). Each represent one of the two main dietary paradigms that were born from religion—especially American Protestant Christianity—in the nineteenth century and were consecrated by competing scientific theories in the twentieth (the story of which we will trace in chapters 2 and 3). Besides these, however, there are many other flourishing food faith communities we will touch upon, such as locavore, clean eating (e.g., anti-GMO and pro-organic), gluten/soy/allergen free, macrobiotic, Mediterranean, and vegetarianism. Health claims for these diets are staked in diverse sciences like anthropology, ecology, systems biology, nutritional studies, biomedicine, and physiology; adherents view these sciences as central to their dietary lifestyle, a path to enlightenment, and a nebulously

6

Introduction

defined point of “health.”13 We will also look at the online communities, social media, and blogs that facilitated the growth of these faiths. These are the tools that helped build “imagined communities” of particular food faiths by allowing believers to share scientific research and personal discoveries in real time. This, in turn, enables the practitioner to locate themselves in relation to other members of their community, to older traditions suffused with religious practice, and to understand their praxis in relation to the entire biosphere—all qualities that we will see in chapter 1 meet the characteristics of practice-oriented spirituality. So, on one level this book explores how food, health, and diet can be a source of spiritual fulfillment and the foundation of a personal worldview, while on another I hope to illustrate how science and religion are metabolized in popular culture and merged to form the basis of an individual’s lived practice. Together, we will explore how belonging to a food faith represents a microcosm of a larger movement where individuals are grounding a personal spiritual practice in science, rather than religion. While dieting and diet culture are often disparaged as essentially superficial, diet as a spiritual practice sidesteps this criticism because it isn’t about physical appearance or clothing size: diet as a spiritual practice is about the pursuit of health and wellness via diet. And rather than a trend on which a practitioner hops on (or off), food faiths are recognizable precisely because they cause a transformation of an individual’s whole lifestyle, completely reshaping how an adherent lives and the values they espouse. The decision to practice a food faith closely follows the process a spiritual seeker undergoes in converting to a new religion. Much like a religious convert, followers abandon previously-held assumptions and even occasionally dip into a literalism that stresses the unambiguousness of the literature or sacred text, which in this case are scientific studies of anything from human genetics to randomized control trials on fat consumption. This is another distinguishing characteristic of the food faithful: practitioners insist on the fundamental importance of science in their new ways of thinking about food, health, and personal fulfillment. As a phenomenon, the growth of spiritual eating is significant because it illustrates how science and religion are conflated at a personal level. But food faiths are also potentially an unforeseen outcome of what scholars of religion have labeled “the rise of the ‘Nones’” in twenty-first century American society. In 2019, the Pew Research Council published an update on the increased percentage of Nones—Americans who answered “nothing in particular” when asked about their affiliation with an organized religion—that their organization had first highlighted a decade earlier. Pew’s initial survey results made international headlines in 2009, when they reported that Americans who thought of themselves as having “no affiliation” with an institutional religion were the fastest growing religious group in America. According to



“Nothing New under the Sun”

7

Pew, “the number of religiously unaffiliated adults in the US grew by almost 30 million over” the decade of 2009 to 2018/19.14 By early 2019, the number of Americans who described themselves as having “no affiliation” had risen from 17 percent in 2009 to 26 percent of the population, meaning that the Nones are not only a rapidly expanding religious group but also represent a quarter of the population of the US15 In the same report, Pew researchers noted that only “65 percent of American adults [polled in 2018/19] describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade.” Given the ascendency of Christianity throughout the twentieth century—during which nearly 90 percent of the population self-identified as Christian—this drop-off represents a startling decline. But, fascinatingly, in a 2012 survey of the rapidly expanding Nones, Pew researchers discovered that, rather than rejecting any kind of religious experience out of hand, nearly 68 percent of those polled claimed to believe in a higher power. Additionally, 55 percent reported thinking of themselves as either “religious” or “spiritual,” while only 42 percent of the Nones stated none of the above: neither spiritual nor religious. Thus even amongst the Nones—a group of mid-twentieth century demographers and sociologists once lumped together under the heading “the unchurched”16—there remains a strong connection to spirituality and spiritual practice: 58 percent indicate a sense of deep spiritual connection to nature and 21 percent say they pray every day.17 An important element in these data is, then, that even though a growing percentage of Americans have no affiliation with religious institutions, many still feel an affinity for uncoordinated and decentralized spirituality directed by an individual practice rather than a church, religious institution, historical rituals, or particular religious group. Given this context, Food Faiths also examines how the Nones are building a spiritual matrix around ideas and concepts that used to be within the purview of religion, but have been incorporated into a “non-religious” worldview; specifically, this book explores how food and what is deemed scientifically acceptable to eat becomes the basis for a spiritual practice. But instead of dietary guidelines shaped by religious tradition—such as delimiting kosher food or a religious calendar that dictates feast and fasting days— these spiritual beliefs are built on science in pursuit of health and wellness, broadly construed. In Food Faiths, I interpret Pew’s results as indicating that, in the absence of a connection to institutionalized religion, individuals are repurposing what used to the purview of religion—acceptable foods, particular diets, patterns of eating—to construct a spiritual practice that offers alternative rationales for belief, rather than enlightenment within the confines of an institutional religion. And where a religious practitioner might point to a particular holy text or sacred tradition as a justification or a guide for a spiritual practice, the food faithful point to science as their authority and the

8

Introduction

rationale for their conversion to this new way of eating. In fact, the Internet has created an unprecedented opportunity for the food faithful to share their conversion narratives—the story of an individual turning away from an old way of life and converting to a new faith, which have been a common component of the process of conversion to a new religion for centuries—and testimonials of their spiritual and physical enlightenment. Thanks to social media and weblogs (“blogs”), the food faithful can narrate their conversion to a particular science-based diet and share their personal experience in real time. And, like traditional religious conversion narratives, these testimonials chronicle the beginning of a new way of life over and against the perceived failure of an old way of living. We will study how fidelity to science becomes the basis for this conversion and the psychological significance of a conversion narrative in chapter 4. But complicating this scenario is that what branch of the sciences is viewed as an authority depends on which diet one is following. Followers of an environmental vegan diet, for example, base their choice to eliminate meat, eggs, and dairy on systems biology and ecologically-grounded anxieties about the effect of large corporate farms on the environment; they also argue that, besides the inherent cruelty of factory farms, cattle are the number one source of excess methane in our already-strained atmosphere and that waste from dairies and meat-production facilities are among the most toxic pollutants of local groundwater. A practitioner of a Paleo diet, on the other hand, eschews the whole grains and soy consumed by vegans—both for perceived deleterious health effects as well as agricultural research that suggests growing grains and legumes uses unsustainable amounts of water—for a diet of animal protein and unrefined (i.e., vegetable) carbohydrates. Paleo diets are based on sciences such as paleontology and anthropology, and pull research from both the study of ancient or traditional human diets—trying to decipher what our ancestors ate—and ancestral knowledge rooted in native cultures. We will compare these worldviews extensively in chapter 5. In chapter 6 we will explore how science-based dietary practice has fostered a new definition of the concept of “virtue.” What we will see is how virtue as it is practiced in the twenty-first century is much less about avoiding the parochial condemnation preached in previous centuries and has instead become, in some cases, a collective fear of public judgment for perceived moral failings, especially regarding food. The behavior described in this chapter—taking pains to be seen on social media as the kind of person who buys locally, eats sustainably, closely follows the seemingly-capricious discoveries of nutritional science, and chooses healthfully and ethically produced foods—has sometimes been derisively described as “virtue signaling.” But while the inversion of what constituted immoral conduct in the previous century has been reoriented to a moral compass set on food and diet, the



“Nothing New under the Sun”

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language of condemnation that characterized sermons of the Second Great Awakening might still sound familiar as the language of diet culture today. Further evidence examined in Food Faiths for science-based dietary lifestyles serving as the basis of a spiritual practice is grounded in the popularization of and evangelizing about a particular way of eating that proliferates online. In chapter 7 we will explore how modern Internet media, such as personal blogs or cooking websites, and social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Reddit, can foster a kind of imagined community, where individuals “will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”18 Within these online communities individuals share their personal stories, the fruits of their research, their observations, their recipes, offer support to their fellow food faithful, and include stories of their own conversion (or that of a loved one) and their newfound faith. In short, this online evangelism for spiritual eating records the achievement of the hope of so many religious seekers: to be born again and have new life, which will be the topic of the conclusion. Among a constellation of many more specific questions the general inquiry that motivates this book is, “In what ways are religion and science integrated and recombined in the twenty-first century?” (And you just thought this was a quirky little book about food!) As distinct entities and monolithic epistemologies, religion and science are usually depicted as anything from mortal enemies to mutually exclusive ways of knowing.19 However, as science and religion shape a given culture—in fiction, in discourse, in public policy, even in an individual—the two are nearly always conjoined in fascinating and remarkable ways. Specifically, at the level of Graham’s Christian, bread-baking mother or Pollan’s educated, enlightened consumer, food faiths represent a locus and a practice where religion and science cease to be discrete categories and instead become assimilated into personal spirituality. This book tries to understand how science sifts through the wider social and culture milieu and ultimately affects the religious and spiritual inclinations of an individual. Accordingly, in Food Faiths we will explore how individuals subsume science into their lives as a basis for a spiritual practice in pursuit of physical health, mental well-being, and ethical equanimity. Graham’s hope that his words will inspire “an improvement in the health and happiness” of those who abide by his teachings is still the guiding principle of the bloggers, social media influencers, cookbook authors, and popularizers of science-based diets today. The narratives used to affirm the spiritual eating movement repeat a need for vigilance, surrender to a regimen, and consistency, all of which are vital components in building a spiritual practice. But the food faithful also urge practitioners to educate themselves and non-believers on the scientific evidence for their way of eating, to build

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Introduction

community with the likeminded, and encourage a sense of moral authority in a world where dietary choices have, in many ways, become a litmus for virtuous behavior. What I hope this book will illustrate on a larger scale is the way in which religion and science are firmly integrated in the everyday lives of individual practitioners. As religious affiliation wanes in America, perhaps spiritual eating represents a new era of science-based spirituality. And, perhaps, the best way to see that in action is, as Graham suggested, through food. NOTES 1. Sylvester Graham, A Treatise on Bread, and Bread-Making (Boston: Light & Stearns, 1837), vi. 2. Graham, “Bread” (1837), 10, 16. 3. Ibid. 14. 4. Graham, with his fixation on the digestive system, noted especially that consuming white bread and other refined baked goods lead to constipation; as Michael Pollan (below) and others note in their own treatises on flour, consumption of refined grains also historically lead to nutritional deficiencies that included the much more serious—and often deadly—pellagra and beriberi. 5. Graham, “Bread,” (1837), 40. 6. Ibid. 33. 7. Ibid. 105, 92. 8. Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 102, 103. 9. Pollan 2008, 105, 108; Graham 41. 10. The full passage from Ecclesiastes (1.9) is “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” 11. Steven Bratman, Health Food Junkies: Overcoming the Obsession with Healthful Eating. (New York: Broadway Books, 2000), 20. 12. Ninian Smart, Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995). 13. Author’s note about diet, health, and food faiths as a spiritual practice: in this book I’m separating diets and dietary culture focused on weight loss or physical transformation from diets undertaken in pursuit of reclaiming, achieving, or maintaining health. While on their surface many food faiths might look or sound just like any other weight loss scheme, what differentiates food faiths from weight loss programs is the professed desire to achieve a personal and holistic sense of health. And while some of the food faiths we will explore are frequently leveraged as a weight loss method, for the individuals profiled here, weight loss is framed as a welcome but collateral benefit of a transformative lifestyle.



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14. Greg Smith and Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, October 2019). 15. This number is inclusive of “no affiliation”/Nones, plus atheists and agnostics. It’s also worth noting, however, that in neither year, nor in any intermediate polls, have the percentages of atheists or agnostics risen as precipitously as the rapid growth of “Nones.” Both have only risen modestly, from 2 percent to 4 percent for atheists and 3 percent to 5 percent for agnostics over the same 10-year period. “Nones,” meanwhile, have risen from 12 percent in 2009 to 17 percent in 2019. 16. The first person to suggest the term “the Nones” to describe this demographic also pointed out the differences between the Nones and the unchurched, about which more in chapter 1. See also Glenn M. Vernon, “The Religious ‘Nones’: A Neglected Category,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 7, no. 2 (1968), 226. 17. Cary Funk, Greg Smith, and Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, “‘Nones’ on the Rise: One-in-Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2012). 18. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 1991). 19. John V. Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

1

The Theory and the Theology of Diet, Science, and Religion

It has become commonplace in the last several decades of academic writing to pursue that most rare and sought-after volume: the text that appeals to both the scholarly community to which one belongs and the lay community to which one wishes to speak. In order to accomplish this fine balance, an academic author will magnanimously suggest that the interested non-academic reader is welcome to skip the theory or history or other academic background presented in the first chapter and head straight to the chapters that interest them. This is simultaneously vaguely insulting to the lay reader and meant as a veiled dare for their academic colleagues; “see if you’re smarter than I am” is sometimes (not always, but often) the subtext of such an offer. That said, I will not be remotely insulted if the reader who is here for the historical origins of food faiths and a discussion of what these communities look like in the twenty-first century chooses to skip this chapter. In fact, if any kind of reader finds it boring, I will not only understand, I will feel approvingly of their mental faculties. If you’re inclined to stay and ride out this first chapter, though, I do need to reiterate that the intention of this book is not to simply point out the ways in which modern diet culture imitates historical religion: conversion, community, virtue, etc. In fact, as we will see, there is an excellent argument already made that American diet culture has been explicitly and implicitly shaped by Evangelical Protestant Christianity.1 Indeed, as we move through our historical examples, we will see that twentieth century diet culture and even nutrition science owes a great deal to the Evangelical Protestant revival movements of the previous century and their emphasis on the democratization of knowledge, both Biblical and scientific. But what we will see when we explore twenty-first century food faith culture is how the combined forces of social media—as well as the technology that enables our convenient (and constant) consumption of that media—and our belief that science 13

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should be an arbiter of personal dietary choices is patterned less on American Christianity than it is a pivot toward a new form of spiritual practice. There are several forces shaping the contemporary market for the spiritual practice of food faiths, which obviously include the historical influence of American Protestantism. However, other meaningful and powerful forces include the acceptance and/or rejection of capitalism, the democratization of science and the growth of scientific literacy, America’s history as a nation of immigrants who brought their native foodways to their new home, and the consequentialist ethics of modern wellness culture.2 Hopefully what we will also learn is how when “religion” as a literal and an historical institution (which includes the varieties of American Evangelical Protestantism) began to lose its grip on American life, an acceptable substitute for a religious worldview for some— especially the food faithful—was science, which was adapted and applied to suit the spiritual needs of a new century. That is an argument that will be fleshed out in later chapters, and I do believe is important for considering how our feelings about the food we eat today is a manifestation of religious history as much as it is an outgrowth of our relationship with modern science. But I hope that one contribution of this book is its legitimization of science-based practices as a true spiritual practice. And by that, I mean: if you are, yourself, among the food faithful, I hope that the theory and theology that buttress the arguments made here lend you some grace and a sense of legitimacy. Your personal spiritual practice— whether it is religion- or science-based—matters, because it is of utmost concern to you. And if you stick with reading this opening chapter, you will not only have further evidence as to why that’s true, but also, hopefully, a few braces to prop up the discussion that follows. With all this in mind, we need to reiterate that this book is trying to do two things. On the one hand, it is meant to be read as a history illuminating how deep into American religious ideas of wellness and health the roots of our science-oriented food culture run. And it is in that spirit in which I suggest that if you’re here to get to the bottom of that story, you’re welcome to move right along to chapter 2, and perhaps circle back to this chapter later. However, the larger point of this book is to offer a gentle suggestion that we—scholars, theologians, practitioners—expand our understanding of spiritual practice to include practices that are grounded in secular and scientific thought. We might think of what follows our historical introductions (chapters 2 and 3) as “secular theology for the science-minded”; the remaining chapters are, I hope, a small contribution not only to the history of American religion but a glimpse of what spiritual life, untethered from institutional religion, might look like in the near future. But what all this means that this first chapter is an exploration of how the phenomenon of the Nones, food faiths, and the sublimation of science into a spiritual practice are all a demonstration

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of mid-twentieth century theologians’ and sociologists’ theories about the future of American religion. Specifically, these scholars predicted that, after over a century of religion’s conflation with cultural contexts and late-twentieth century “seeking” new and non-Western religious ideas, there would be a new manifestation of religion in the twenty-first century: spiritual practice. But before we can get to the twenty-first century, we have to rewind to the early half of the twentieth. MAKING CONCEPTUAL SPACE FOR SPIRITUALITY—UTMOST CONCERN In order to understand how individual spiritual practice gained a foothold in the landscape of American religion, we need to briefly review the religious landscape of the twentieth century. This will, in turn, help us understand the demographic changes in American religion observed by sociologists beginning in the 1980s. And to do this, we will briefly focus on one theologian in particular, Paul Tillich, and his reflections on the future of religion in the aftermath of World War II. It probably goes without saying, but following the chaos of the first and second world wars, both religious practitioners and the academics who wrote about them were at a loss for words. Over the course of just those few decades religion scholars and theologians alike watched in horror as religious persecution and genocide roiled Europe, terrifying political ideologies began to resemble religions with hordes of eager followers, and religious institutions began to crumble. Within this context, Paul Tillich was uniquely situated to observe both the close of the Enlightenment project in Europe and the changing tides of American religion. Tillich was a German Lutheran theologian and philosopher who—along with many of his Jewish colleagues—was dismissed for political and religious reasons from his academic position by Adolf Hitler in 1933. Fortunately, immediately after his dismissal he was invited to an academic position at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he spent the years of Hitler’s rule watching his homeland burn in the secular religious fire of fascism. He wrote and published numerous books and sermons during these intervening years expanding his Christian existentialism, but in 1946 he gave a lecture on the nature of religion in the post-World War II era. In it, Tillich proposed a definition of religion that freed practice from institution, and personal experience from historical convention. It was a definition shaped by in Europe’s growing secularism and America’s rebounding religious fervor, as well as the realization that political ideologies (such as nationalism and fascism) could rise to the level of a religion in their cultural influence. In Tillich’s definition, religion is not the sum of an historical or

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legal tradition, but is, instead, “the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of life.”3 For Tillich, religion is an experience, and thus religion becomes whatever an individual who is “grasped by” this experience says it is. Expressed as the reverse of historical—sometimes colonial, often reductive—definitions of religion, Tillich was leaving space for religion to be an experiential dimension outside of an institution, like the Roman Catholic Church, or a delimited set of laws and commandments interpreted by ordained exegetists, such as Orthodox Judaism. What Tillich wanted to do was explore the “gap between religion and culture,” the set-apart-ness of religion from the round of everyday life. And what he found was that “religion is more than a system of special symbols, rites, and emotions, directed toward a highest being; religion is ultimate concern; it is the state of being grasped by something unconditional, holy, absolute.” Religion is not just theism, the belief in God or gods or a higher being: religion is a personal sense of the significance of an object or a practice—it is the recognition of the sacred in or around an activity, a worldview, or a belief. And, departing from previous definitions of the sacred as necessarily separate from the secular, Tillich was arguing that the sacred could be found within the secular, too. Tillich’s definition made room for fascism as a kind of fanatical religious belief, true, but it also made space for other secular cultural beliefs and activities to be significant unto themselves, as well. The art and philosophy of antiquity, for example, could be of highest concern, as could political movements, as could—and here we see this theology put into action for our purposes—fascination with and belief in science. As we think about food faiths and science, the most important element of Tillich’s insight for us is that he sets the stage for some late-twentieth century sociological observations of American religion. Tillich’s assertion that what is of highest concern to an individual or a group constitutes a religion and that personal experience matters as much as history or institution in apprehending the sacred found a real-world application in American spiritual movements. Specifically, a practical outcome of this theology is the generational shift from “dwelling” to “seeking”—leading eventually, to “practice”—after WWII through the end of the century. FROM DWELLING TO SEEKING TO PRACTICE TO NONES In the introduction we touched briefly on the notion that the fastest growing religious group in America is the Nones—the religiously unaffiliated, who,

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when asked about a religion or organization to which they belong, have historically answered “nothing in particular.” But affiliation with religious institutions has been on the decline for the past fifty years; it was a slow burn from the late 1960s through the end of the twentieth century, and has accelerated in the early twenty-first century, driven at least in part by younger generations coming of age and older generations divesting themselves of religious identities once and for all.4 Comparatively speaking, from the perspective of religious demography and sociology of religion, American religious affiliation in the first half of the twentieth century was relatively stable, with origins deep in the religious culture of the previous century. But this stability was itself built on the tumultuous period of the Second Great Awakening, a Protestant Christian revival movement that ignited after the American Revolution and spread rapidly throughout the young country. The religious movement, which ran roughly from the 1790s to the 1840s, challenged the hegemony of Anglican and Congregationalist Protestant Christianity in America with its rejection of ecclesiastical authority and democratization of knowledge. The Second Great Awakening emphasized autonomy in seeking revelation, religious populism, and the right of the individual to read and interpret scripture for themselves. As American historian Nathan O. Hatch writes, the fallout of the American Revolution was that it “dramatically expanded the circle of people who considered themselves capable of thinking for themselves about issues of freedom, equality, sovereignty, and representation. Respect for authority, tradition, station, and education eroded. Ordinary people moved toward these new horizons aided by a powerful new vocabulary” of liberty and self-governance.5 Relatively new denominations such as Methodism, Quakerism, and the Baptists popularized an engagement with spirituality and a lived religious practice that distinguished American religiosity for more than a century. Besides this flourishing spiritual marketplace—where various denominations competed with one another for a larger share of the American soul—another important element of the Second Great Awakening was the sense of community built by the movement, which brought families from scattered homesteads together into one church (or sometimes just a revival tent) in the rural South and Midwest. And it was both the democratization of spiritual authority and the power of community that lasted well after the fervor of the Second Great Awakening cooled in the 1840s, when American religion settled into a relatively long period of belonging. From the early nineteenth century through the Cold War American religious life was characterized by individual and familial affiliation with a particular religion; population-wise, that religion was almost definitely a Protestant denomination of Christianity.6 And what denomination one belonged to was generally a circumstance of one’s forbearers; after the

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denominational and social churn of the Second Great Awakening, and in the wake of immigrants fanning out across the continent, most Americans inherited a religion, a denomination, a church from their family—and stayed. And as more people arrived from all points of the globe, churches bound people of faith together temporally and physically. Churches and temples (and, in the twentieth century, mosques and the temples of Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, and others) became the center of communities, not just for worship but as a marker of identity. For African Americans, for example, the church has been the seat of political organization and social cohesion for over two centuries. For American Jews, religious communities were places to process the devastation of genocide and hope for a new beginning. For Roman Catholics, the neighborhoods that grew up around a church became a crossroads of European, Latin American, and Caribbean countries—Ireland, Poland, Italy, Puerto Rico, Mexico—whose disparate national identities all converged under the gravitational pull of the church. From the Baptist Riverside Church in New York City, once attended by the city’s elite, to a white-washed, backcountry Church of the Nazarene in west Texas: for over a century one’s denomination and religious affiliation were a bulwark against becoming lost in a tide of conflicting identities. Belonging to a religion was a spiritual and a physical act.7 And because belonging to a religion also meant belonging to a community, this culture of belonging was a feature of American life for the better part of 125 years. The culture of belonging became particularly significant for the millions of European immigrants who arrived on the Eastern seaboard from the 1820s through the First World War. Modes of cultural identity—religion, geographic locality, language, fashion, vocation—that remained intact with first-generation immigrants faded with each successive generation born and raised in the United States; but as other markers of ancestry and ethnicity were diluted by America’s great “melting pot,” religion remained as a singular remnant of pre-diasporic identity.8 The descendants of Europeans from all quadrants of that continent would come together (eventually) as hyphenates: American—not Irish or Italian—Catholics. Or American—not Ukrainian or Belarusian—Jews. Or American—not Swedish or Prussian—Lutherans. And as pre-WWII sociologists discovered, those religious affiliations remained an important source of belonging and identity long after a sense of association with an ancestral country or language had faded. In the 1920s and 1930s, American sociologists discovered that intermarriage was sundering the sense of belonging to a country of origin even as it fostered religious identity. In fact, in the years between 1870 and 1940 in one New England city, intermarriage was “not general and indiscriminate but [channeled] by religious barriers; and groups with the same religions tend to intermarry. Thus, Irish, Italians, and Poles [Catholics] intermarry mostly among themselves, and

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British-Americans, Germans, and Scandinavians [Protestants] do likewise, while Jews seldom marry Gentiles.” As different nationalities merged into a single Americanism, religion became increasingly compartmentalized and a robust form of personal and social identity.9 Thus, from the pre-Civil War era through the post-WWII years, American religious life was marked by belonging, but also by the phenomenon of dwelling. Throughout the 1950s, the dominant form of American religion was adherence to and remaining within religious communities that had been inherited or transplanted, sometimes just a handful of generations before, by immigrant forbearers. Religious practice for most Americans was anchored quite literally to the foundations of a church, synagogue, or temple, which was itself affixed firmly at the center of the neighborhood or town that grew up around it. Many communities still maintained institutional religious integrity even as they “melted” into a generalized ideal of “being American.” And by 1955, fully 95 percent of Americans self-identified as religious—that is, affiliated with a particular religion and/or denomination. The majority of Americans, it seems, were firmly entrenched in the experience of dwelling. But, in the decades after what is considered this high tide mark of religious affiliation in 1955, the phenomenon of dwelling and the culture of belonging began to fade. Following the political, social, geographic, and demographic changes of the 1960s and 1970s, many Americans—particularly the post-WWII generation, the Baby Boomers—began engaging in what sociologists of religion like Robert Wuthnow, Wade Clark Roof, Robert Bellah, and others have described as religious seeking. In contrast to belonging and dwelling, seeking involves searching for new religious territory outside the bounds of institutional and historical religions (particularly Americanized versions of the Abrahamic traditions); moving away from and questioning inherited belief systems; and individuals creating a kind of bespoke spirituality made from the rituals, practices, and traditions of other—often non-Western—religions. Some people cite the Beatles and their well-publicized 1968 trip to India to learn transcendental meditation from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as the inspiration for the sudden interest in non-Western religious and spiritual practices among the Baby Boomers. Photos of the “Fab Four” decked out in marigold garlands sitting cross-legged at an ashram in Uttarakhand are iconic to this day—a visual heuristic of the 1960s counterculture and the seeking ideology.10 But the Beatles spiritual journey was a symptom of larger sociological changes, rather than a cause. General social upheaval defined the 1960s, especially in America; between the Civil Rights movement hurtling the nation toward an overdue reckoning, the anti-Vietnam war protests wracking universities and colleges, the budding environmental movement, debates on second-wave feminism and LGTBQ rights, the Cold War, and myriad other loci for social unrest, the 1960s were characterized by turbulence and rapid

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change. And a side effect of this sudden societal instability was that young Americans in the late 1960s deliberately fashioned themselves against the prevailing social mores of their youth. Belonging and dwelling—and the perception of their connection to institutions guilty of perpetuating and reifying the very evils motivating the counterculture protests—were out. Seeking and marigold garlands at an Indian ashram were in. The transformation from dwelling to seeking was accelerated by more than the countercultural and anti-establishment movements that live so rosily in the memories of Boomers today. Rather, what hastened the social and religious transformation was a major change in demographics that followed President Lyndon Johnson signing the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965. This act opened the US to immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America by retracting 1921 anti-immigration laws. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 stipulated that any future immigration would be restricted to only 3 percent of a population from a particular country already in the United States; given the over-representation of populations from northern and western Europe and the vanishingly small immigrant populations from the global East and South, immigration from the rest of the world was effectively curtailed for over 40 years. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act repealed the quota system, thus changing the demographics of immigrants; people immigrating to the US would no longer only be from Protestant-majority countries, which was part of the point of the 1921 law. And the religions that arrived after 1965 differed substantially from Christianity, in both theology and in practice. Religions with origins in the subcontinent of India—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism—or in China and Japan—Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Zen Buddhism—were quickly incorporated into the seeking-oriented religious marketplace. Islam, an Abrahamic religion, blossomed in the US as mosques were built—just like the churches and synagogues of nineteenth century precedent—to serve immigrant communities across the country. And, like the growing pains American Christianity underwent during the Second Great Awakening—when Protestant Christianity splintered into dozens of new and divergent denominations—late-twentieth-century American Christianity was forced to compete with other global faiths. All this is to say that, beginning in the 1960s, the American religious marketplace became an open market, one much more focused on individual choice—including what one chooses to believe. This trend away from dwelling and toward practicing religions other than what one’s family had practiced—or, of participating in alternative forms of spirituality, such as New Age, new religious movements, or practices like transcendental meditation— were what religion sociologists identified as seeking. The post-Enlightenment individualism and independence that seeded the young country’s philosophies on government, Protestantism, and the social contract in the eighteenth

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century was now extended to religious practice in the twenty-first. Bellah notes that by the 1980s many Americans felt religion was a private matter and that “an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any churches or synagogues.” Religious practice could be so individualized that it became what Bellah calls “religious privatism”—the proprietary ideology or worldview of an individual. The Boomers, their seeking, and their personalized spirituality were a hallmark of late-twentieth century religion; from the 1960s through the end of the century, seekers shaped a spiritual movement alternatively described as spiritual bricolage, cafeteria religion, and “Sheilaism,” a variety of religious experience named for the Boomer-aged woman who, in a circa 1985 interview with Bellah, explained that she’d named her personal religion after herself.11 Even while it was a defining era for seeking, the late 1960s was also the ideological and sociological beginning of the Nones. The first scholarly use of the term “none” to describe the religiously unaffiliated in America was by sociologist Glenn Vernon, who in a 1968 article titled “The Religious ‘Nones’: A Neglected Category” suggests that social scientists utilize the concept of the political independent as a model for identifying a cohort that previously had called “the unchurched.” “The social scientist classifies as ‘independent’ those who do not report affiliation with a particular political party,” Vernon explains. “The use of the ‘independent’ label suggests that the lack of political party affiliation does not mean that one is apolitical or has no political convictions. He is still viewed as a political person.” Vernon was troubled by the realization that researchers “have not made the same concessions for the religious independent.” In fact, Vernon argues, most social scientists are working from an assumption that those categorized in the 1957 US census as having “no religion” are lesser study subjects. Their language specifies “what a phenomenon is not, rather than what it is. Intentionally or not, such a use implies that only those affiliated with a formal group are religious.” Due to these erroneous classifications, Vernon asserts that the “‘Nones’ are a neglected category, included in research designs so that percentages might total 100, rather than because it is a category worthy of analysis” unto itself. His point is that the Nones are, in fact, an important and growing subgroup in American religion, and deserve counting by both social science and the “public media,” adding that the Nones should not be treated as “second class citizens.” He was also—to my knowledge—among the first to show that the percentage of Nones who say that they “don’t believe in a personal God, but [do] believe in a higher power of some kind” (18.8 percent) is only slightly higher than Presbyterians (11.4 percent) or Congregationalists (13.5 percent) who say the same. A more relevant statistic for the purposes of this book is that 8.2 percent of the Nones polled in 1957 said, “I find myself

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believing in God some of the time, but not at other times,” as did 8.6 percent of Methodists and Lutherans, and 8.3 percent of Jews.12 It was this latter idea—that the irreligious and unchurched still have a personal belief system—that drove some of the foundational twentieth-century sociological research on contemporary spiritual practice. The work of scholars like Bellah and Wade Clark Roof—who described the Baby Boomers as a “generation of seekers”—revealed the subtleties of the post-WWII cohort’s seeking as a two-pronged transformation: Boomers both actively rejected institutional and received forms of religion, but also sought their own spiritual gratification by sampling and exploring other religions and alternative spiritual practices. Spiritual seeking after the 1960s represented what sociologist Robert Wuthnow describes as an overall trend of “people losing faith in a metaphysic that can make them feel at home in the universe [as] they increasingly negotiate among competing glimpses of the sacred, seeking practical knowledge and practical wisdom” and “a shift from spiritual production to spiritual consumption.”13 But, some scholars of religion believed that, over time, these two elements—outward social dissent and inward self-satisfaction—would fail to fulfill not just seekers but the generations that followed the Boomers. Instead, Wuthnow predicted that in the twenty-first century a third alternative to dwelling and seeking would arise: practice-oriented spirituality, or spiritual practice. In his 1998 book After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s, Wuthnow chronicles the shifting religious landscape from the 1950s (dwelling) through the 1990s (seeking), noting that faith is “no longer something people inherit but something for which they strive.” He writes that although the faith of parents and grandparents is a useful guide (“if only in contrast”) to Americans finding their own, spirituality has become something inherently personal, an “assortment of activities and interpretations that reflect the past, that include new ways of understanding the past, and that envision on the horizon something distinctly different from the past.”14 According to Wuthnow, the spirituality of seeking actively roots out the sacred in spaces, traditions, and experiences disconnected from institutional religions, and creates “a sense of personal identity through an active sequence of searching and selecting,” collecting what works and rejecting what does not. Wuthnow believes that these elements of seeking—actively pursuing a connection to the sacred while building a personal spiritual identity—might be compelling in the short-term but ultimately are a foundation set in sand; Bellah’s observations on individuality in personal faith means, to Wuthnow, that the “fluid identities” built around spiritual seeking will need to find firmer ground. To do that, Wuthnow says, an alternative will have to be spiritual practice. Spiritual practice, as Wuthnow defines it, brings together dwelling and seeking, enabling an individual to live their values outside religious traditions

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while engaging in a meaningful lifestyle and worldview. But in contrast to dwelling and seeking, practice-oriented spirituality is active. “To say that spirituality is practiced,” Wuthnow explains, “means that people engage intentionally in activities that deepened their relationship to the sacred. Often they do so over long periods of time and devote significant amounts of energy to these activities.” He also notes that “in many cases, these activities are life-transforming.” Whereas prior iterations of religiosity were about either sustaining community (dwelling) or self-fulfillment (seeking), spiritual practices bridge both communal observance and individualism; additionally, spiritual practices “require individuals to engage reflectively in a conversation with their past . . . have a moral dimension [that instructs] people in how they should behave toward themselves and with each other, but [are] also an item of faith, encouraging people to walk each day with partial knowledge and in cautious hope.” Rather than anchoring or questing, practice-oriented spirituality gives practitioners “both roots and wings—roots to ground them solidly in the traditions of their particular faith, wings to explore their own talents and the mysteries of the sacred.”15 For the food faithful, the sacred—what is of utmost concern—is diet. But not diet in the modern sense of restricting or reducing food intake to lose weight; rather, they pursue diet in the sense of the word’s Greek etymological origins, where δῐ́αιτᾰ (díaita) means “way of living” or “mode of life.” The ultimate concern of the food faithful is building a practice—a lifestyle in pursuit of health, happiness, and community through food. This is how a food faith practice meets Wuthnow’s description of spiritual practice as an assemblage of “intentional activities concerned with relating to the sacred” that requires “deliberate effort” and “takes place in ordinary life.”16 Practice-oriented spirituality has several notable characteristics, nearly all of which the pursuit of diet as lifestyle meets and which we will explore here as foundational to thinking about science-based food faiths throughout this book. The characteristics highlighted by Wuthnow include: exercising discernment, a moral dimension, reconceptualizing reward, a social dimension, deep reflection, service to others, and—somewhat paradoxically—a connection to tradition. The first of these characteristics is an active pursuit of discernment; like practice-oriented spirituality, food faiths are about discovering an inner self that has transcendently become and now identifies with the diet as a way of life. Outsiders to a food faith might not understand an individual’s commitment to their practice and the potential sacrifices it requires, but the food faithful use their practice as a framework for living according to their values without needing to overthink their choices; having “mastered a complex set of skills,” Wuthnow explains, the practitioner “no longer thinks much about specific rules or techniques. They have internalized these rules to the point

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[that their practice] is now connected with who one is, not simply with roles that one may play.” What is internalized for the food faithful is the explicit moral dimension; as with other spiritual practices, a spiritual eater “follows a set of rules and tries to do what is right [even while some] of these rules are built into the practice itself; following them is morally binding because they are accepted as the way to conduct the practice.” Whether it is living as an ethical vegan or following the premises of an ancestral diet, these food faiths exercise “constraint over the way people live” which is “part of what distinguishes a practice from the mere development” of a skill, hobby, or avocation. Indeed, this kind of moral constraint involves the “shaping of the person as well—becoming habituated to the practice to the point that one can exercise wisdom when new situations necessitate making difficult judgments, learning how to get along with other practitioners, being willing to pay the costs that may be associated with one’s principles, and knowing how to relate the practice responsibly to one’s other obligations and areas of life.”17 Many among the food faithful tell stories of difficult conversations relating to holiday dinners or loved ones who ostracize them for their choices; despite this, the food faithful hold fast to their worldview, because practice “requires integrity, a commitment to the internal logic and rules of the practice itself . . . and imposes discipline on practitioners and demands their allegiance.” For this and other reasons, the food faithful, like the spiritual practitioners profiled by Wuthnow, describe their practice as rewarding, both for the provision of a “better way to live” as well as the experience of the social that comes out of sharing experiences or delving into a communal history. One element of spiritual practice that is especially visible in food faiths is deep reflection—a component of practice that has its roots in religious revolutions of previous centuries but that I believe is amplified by the Internet and social media today. According to Wuthnow, spiritual practice requires deep and intense reflection on who one is and what they stand for (factors he and other religion scholars observed was sometimes missing from spiritual seeking), resulting “in a core narrative that provides coherence to their practice over time. They develop a story about their spiritual journey, and this story provides a way for them to understand their origins, how they have changed, the role that crisis events or significant others have played in their lives, and where they think they are headed.”18 The story or journey becomes such a powerful source of coherence for the food faithful that it has led to the phenomenon (and occasional source of derision on social media) of even a simple recipe on a blog of an amateur chef/spiritual eater being annotated by a 1000-word personal essay on the meal’s creation.19 But this form of annotating the spiritual process of self-interpretation is familiar to many of the food faithful, who both personally and in social media engage with reshaping and redefining themselves as a follower of a specific diet. This process is

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“beneficial but not particularly easy or enjoyable” and involves setting aside previous iterations of oneself, letting go of the past, and allowing growth into this new version of the self. As with spiritual practitioners of other faiths and other journeys, it is at this point that the food faithful will turn to fellow practitioners who have walked the same path and whose stories offer a way to reinvigorate a commitment to the practice. Blogs, social media posts, and personal websites become guideposts for those seeking answers and for the newly converted. But these acts of contemplation must be centered on “considered self-reflection, examination of conscience, and a scrutiny of personal habits.”20 And it is this quality of reflection and examination that leads the food faithful to one of Wuthnow’s most distinct characteristics, which is service. The dimension that most delineates practice-oriented spirituality from dwelling and seeking is a feature of food faith practice, as well. Sometimes service looks like followers of a clean eating regimen petitioning the government for more support of organic farming or better labeling for genetically modified (GM) foods. Elsewhere, service takes the form of Black vegan activists working with other community organizers to bring farmers markets to neighborhoods stranded in “food deserts”—areas without access to grocery stores, which limits availability of fresh and nutritious foods. Or service can be as simple as a practitioner sharing recipes, shopping lists, and cooking techniques with curious seekers on their blog or channel. Whatever its form, service is an important aspect of food faith practice. Wuthnow suspects that after cultivating the inward reflexivity of practice that it seems to free practitioners from their own concerns “and other self-interested pursuits so that they could focus on the needs of others.”21 And those needs of others, from feeding the hungry to reconnecting with one’s ancestors to saving the planet, loom large in the practice of spiritual eating. RELIGION, CONTEXT, AND HISTORY—TRADITION If we could take a step back for a moment, though, we should take a brief tour of the ways religion and food are inexorably joined. In fact, perhaps one of the best ways to define what religion is is as a cultural movement in which a group of people collectively decide what, how, and when to eat; what food is “good” and what food is “bad”; and who view a particular way of eating as delineating what anthropologist Mary Douglas (somewhat problematically, but useful for our purposes) labeled “symbolic boundary-maintenance.”22 I don’t mean to say that diet is the best way to categorize what is and what is not a religion, but I do mean to say that a definition of religion that includes diet as a defining characteristic is probably overdue. Even the most casual

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student of global religions knows that one element nearly all of the world’s faith institutions—deist, non-deist, monotheistic, pantheistic, ancient, contemporary—share is a prohibition against or specific instructions on what to eat (with one notable exception and whose exceptionality makes it fit quite nicely in this rubric, which we’ll come to in a moment). Judaism, Roman Catholic Christianity, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism: each has either a law or a set of regulations governing diet and/or a strict calendar that dictates what may be eaten and when. These laws and regulations range from prohibitions on what animals can be consumed as meat, such as pork in Judaism and Islam, to injunctions against eating any meat in iterations of Buddhism, Jainism, and various practices in Hinduism. There are also abundant and conflicting declarations about the use and sacredness of dairy products across global religions; Judaism forbids the mixing of meat and dairy, while some branches of Hinduism consider milk an especially holy and healing food, and some observant Rastafarians don’t consume any dairy at all.23 In most religious traditions there are strict guidelines about the care and keeping of animals used as food; both Judaism and Islam have very explicit laws on how animals are to be slaughtered. In some religions there are even suggestions on vegetables that should be avoided. Very strict Jains, for example, do not eat root vegetables, because to pull the root out of the ground is to kill both the plant and whatever creatures co-exist with it. And nearly all these traditions trace the passage of the year through feasts and fasts: Christmas, Lent, Ramadan, Diwali, Yom Kippur—holy days and festivals are almost always notable for the presence (or absence) of food.24 The exception that proves the rule, however, is Protestant Christianity, which we have already established was, and still is, the most widely practiced religion in the US and was (as we will see) an enormous influence on nineteenth-century health reform movements, including dietary reforms. The revolutionary teachings of Jesus of Nazareth left open a question that became a point of symbolic contention for Peter and Paul, the early church’s leaders: whether or not to abide by and uphold Jewish dietary law. Generally speaking, Peter viewed their new faith as an important revision of Judaism—one liberated from the jots and tittles of the Pharisees, but still Judaism. From this perspective, Jesus’s disciples would need to continue following the dietary laws laid out in Leviticus. Paul, however, makes clear in his writings that the “Christ”-ians were something fundamentally new, meaning that all previous rules and regulations were null and void, including what to eat. Rules about what is and what is not kosher were now unnecessary, but—perhaps most significantly—rules about with whom, when, and where one may eat were also considered annulled. Paul was victorious in this particular theological scuffle, although it would take until the Protestant Revolution, 1500 years after Paul’s ministry, for Christianity to completely divest itself of dietary

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prohibitions. Several Christian denominations, such as Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and even some Mainline Protestant churches have traditions of abstention from meat and/or dairy and practices of fasting during the Lenten season, but American Evangelical Protestantism has technically never had any dietary restrictions. That said, the popularity of Sylvester Graham and other nineteenth century dietary reformers suggest that some Americans saw a connection between their Christian virtue, the morality of their actions, the shape of their bodies, and the food on their plate. It is a legacy that, I hope we will see, lives on in modern food faith practices, with the pursuit of health through dietary lifestyle replacing the search for sanctification. With that in mind, one of Wuthnow’s characterizations of spiritual practice in After Heaven that might sound contrary to food faiths is pursuing a practice from a religious tradition. Despite a connection to a formal and historical institution, the profusion of food faith communities on the Internet provides what Wuthnow describes as an opportunity for spiritual practitioners to fix “their spiritual practice in a specific tradition . . . rather than having to pursue their spiritual activities in a vacuum”; but whereas in some personal spiritual practices individuals incorporate an element of an institutional religious tradition, such as contemplative rituals, online food faith communities share a reliance on science to guide their choices in their way of life. Science-based dietary lifestyles are obviously not the same thing as centuries of religious tradition, but by anchoring their diet in a scientific worldview the food faithful are, as Wuthnow writes of spiritual practitioners, “less alone because they know they are following practices that people have been engaged in for generations.”25 Although there is real community in the ad hoc diet-based groups that form both online and off, I would also add that the practitioners of a food faith are actually “following practices that people have been engaged in for generations.” Following a Paleo, vegan, clean, or other lifestyle diet today is connected to a much longer historical precedent than most practitioners realize. The history of diet presented in this short book is by no means comprehensive, but I hope that this moderately concise exploration in the context of (mostly) American religion and science will encourage interested practitioners—or the mildly curious—to keep exploring the fantastically rich history of diet, food, health, and religion. For example, those interested in the hypothesis that calorie restriction extends human life could seek out the marvelous Luigi Cornaro (1467–1566) and his Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life. Cornaro popularized the idea that the corrective to the physical and moral exhaustion brought on by debauched overindulgence in food, alcohol, and sex was not the elimination of these delights, but rather their restriction. As he informed his readers in 1550, one of the long-lived Venetian’s secrets was restricting his daily wine intake to about 14 ounces, which is the equivalent of around two-thirds of a

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modern standard wine bottle (25 oz); I believe it is safe to say that no doctor would endorse drinking that amount of wine today, despite Cornaro’s living to 102 years old.26 Or a vegetarian or vegan might be intrigued by the philosophical and ideological stance of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his influence on the meat-free movement. Today Shelley is remembered as a romantic poet and husband of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. But Percy Shelley was famous in his own era for his widely-read essays on his conversion to vegetarianism in 1812. In “A Vindication of Natural Diet” (originally published in 1813) Shelley combines reflections on ancient myth, the “horror” of animal slaughter, and an anti-meat thesis similar to contemporary biophysiological arguments that the “structure of the human frame then is that of one fitted to a pure vegetable diet, in every essential particular.”27 This two-century-old claim—that the human digestive tract is more physiologically similar to the animal world’s vegetarians than its obligate carnivores, ergo humans are better anatomically suited to vegetarianism than carnivorism—is still used to validate meat-abstention today. Here in the twenty-first century, Shelley’s example of the vegetable-eater’s “ample and cellulated colons” have been granulated at the molecular level to survey the proteins extracted from a vegetable vs. a meat-eating diet. There might be nothing new under the sun, but there’s also more history in our dietary practices and philosophies than we know to look for. It’s especially important to situate spiritual eating practices in an historical context in order to push back against some of the common criticisms leveled against the food faith lifestyle; following a diet is often dismissed as “faddish” and diets are sometimes critiqued as an unnatural and a-historical intervention. Diets, in the modern sense of the word, are perceived as either functionally utilitarian—a method, efficient or not, for losing weight—but fundamentally superficial or spiritually antithetical to global food cultures and international cuisine. Like Graham, in In Defense of Food Pollan traces the matrilineal line of traditional foodways back to when asking what we should eat was “really just a fancy word for your mother.” At least since the advent of agriculture (if not longer), the question of what and how to eat have been a function of what is on hand and preparation methods handed down through multiple generations. But in the twentieth century, as we will see in chapter 3 and as Pollan explains, “mom lost much of her authority over the dinner menu, ceding it to scientists and food marketers (often an unhealthy alliance of the two) and, to a lesser extent, to the government, with its evershifting dietary guidelines, food-labeling rules, and perplexing pyramids.”28 As with religion, so with ethnic and traditional cuisine: centuries of food culture have been fatally disrupted and undone in just two generations. Modern diet culture reveals the deterioration of previous coherent food cultures in the United States; like spiritual seeking, today’s American diet is a bricolage

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of various ethnic and national foodways mixed with the mass-produced processed “edible food-like substances” that line the shelves of grocery stores. It is this grab bag of cultural appropriation and fast or processed food that has earned the American way of eating the nickname “SAD”: Standard American Diet (I will use this too-clever acronym many times in the following pages). Part of what a food faith practice does is remove the artificial innovations of processed food manufacturing and return the act of eating to a union of body, soul, culture, and health. That food faiths have this mitochondrial connection to ancient and ancestral foodways is, I think, evidence that spiritual eating is grounded in both science and tradition. A FINAL WORD ON METHOD If you will forgive one final aside before we pick up with our story, I’d like to prophylactically (and gently) elbow aside a potential criticism, and that concerns method. (This is also why I suggested I wouldn’t be offended if the reader elected to skip this chapter.) One question that gave me unease as I was researching this book was whether this project is a religious history or is this a religious ethnography? Certainly, a case could be made for either. If you have made it this far you’ve seen that we have had to dive into the history and the study of American religion in order to discuss modern patterns of diet and spirituality—an historical construction we will continue building in the forthcoming chapters. Ergo: this book is a history. However, we will also spend time interrogating the first-person testimonials of the food faithful, from their conversion narratives to their evangelizing to their stories of being saved by science, which is closer to ethnography. Both methods are qualitative, as is this book. So, the question on which this answer hinges is: are these online voices and the imagined communities they comprise—which are cached on the internet and available to anyone—an archive or the record of an ethnographic group? If these testimonials and digital spaces are an archive, that would imply that they are a record of something that has passed, which obviously is not the case. But an ethnographic group would mean that there was some kind of coherence or kinship between all these people; they all—from the vegans to the Paleos to the clean eaters—would have to agree that they are connected, rather than having a kinship foisted upon them by my scholarly observations and interrogations. Accordingly, and not to equivocate or take the coward’s way out, I think what we have here is both and neither. This is a work of cultural studies whose subject matter is religion and science, but which also leverages the methods of history and what we can clumsily describe as “techno-ethnographic” studies in order to explore a spiritual phenomenon.

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The narratives the food faithful construct online aren’t an archive, because they’re not preserved and collected with any particular care—just accumulated under the logic of Web 2.0 (the significance of which we will discuss more fully in chapter 3). Version 2.0 of the internet is what permits users to engage socially and across platforms, but does not necessarily make them a singular group. Thus, these aren’t the records of a tribe, either; the stories and experiences shared online and recounted here describe a form of lived spirituality and a variety of practices, and while communities are formed, they aren’t a distinct people or class unto themselves. Certainly, I use mixed methods mostly because this book is built on the intelligent and important work of historians and sociologists, but also because, as Jonathan Z. Smith famously asserted, there is no data for religion. “Religion,” Smith writes, “is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy.”29 What Smith’s declaration means to me that there’s no need to be constrained or defined by method in the first place; I’ve come to believe that trying to stay within the boundaries of a single method could artificially limit a comprehensive exploration of spiritual eating. So, if ever a book could hover methodologically at the edges of Schrödinger’s thought experiment about a cat in a box, this might be it. It’s both history and ethnography, as well as neither. It is a book about sciencebased contemporary spiritual practice and new forms in American religion, but also religious life without religion. And because food faiths are simultaneously spiritual and scientific, individual and communal, historical and novel, actively practiced and reflexively blogged, I’m giving myself permission to bow out of declaring a definitive method. Finally, whether based on beliefs about the sacredness of the Earth, holistic bodily and mental health, or making the world a better place for all humankind, Wuthnow’s definition of spiritual practice is one that allows the practitioner to join beliefs with actions and shape them into a lifestyle. This practice is the core of science-based food movements today. Food faiths are, I strongly believe, lifestyles in pursuit of creating a space, figuratively and literally, where one’s deep-seated beliefs—Tillich “beliefs of utmost concern”—are merged with the embodied act of eating. NOTES 1. See especially R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity, California Studies in Food and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

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2. For further thoughts on the connection between American capitalism and diet culture, see for example Amy Farrell, “The Narrowing of American Bodies: Christian Fitness Culture and the Politics of Body Size Reduction,” a review of Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity, R. Marie Griffith, American Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2006); Terry Poulton, No Fat Chicks: How Big Business Profits by Making Women Hate Their Bodies—and How to Fight Back (Secaucus, NJ: Carol Pub. Group, 1997); Christy Harrison, Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, WellBeing, and Happiness through Intuitive Eating (New York, NY: Little, Brown Spark, 2019); Alan Levinovitz, The Gluten Lie and Other Myths About What You Eat: And Other Myths About What You Eat (New York, NY: Regan Arts, 2015); Or Glicklich and Sara Cohen Shabot, “Perpetual Waiting: Analyzing Dieters’ Time in WW’s Instagram Posts,” Fat Studies 11, no. 2 (2022). 3. Paul Tillich, “Religion and Secular Culture,” The Journal of Religion 26, no. 2, 82. 4. It’s important to note that while the “Nones” are America’s fastest growing religious group, the number of religious adherence in some minority groups—especially among African American Christians—has remained stable. See the introduction to Christopher Carter, The Spirit of Soul Food: Race, Faith, and Food Justice (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2021); and Robert Joseph Taylor and Linda M. Chatters, “Importance of Religion and Spirituality in the Lives of African Americans, Caribbean Blacks and Non-Hispanic Whites,” The Journal of Negro Education 79, no. 3 (2010). 5. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 6. With apologies for the long aside: for the purposes of discussing American religion in the nineteenth century assuming the religion being practiced was some sort of Protestant Christianity is practical from a purely numbers-driven point of view; well over 90 percent of Americans were affiliated with a Protestant Christian denomination during that century. It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that variables similar to those being discussed here would come into play regarding Roman Catholicism due to the influx of immigrants, and Judaism, both due to immigration and the rise of Reform Judaism in the Midwest and Eastern United States. For now, however, we will stick to a generalized notion of denominations. 7. Robert S. Ellwood, The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 8. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew; an Essay in American Religious Sociology. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 18ff. 9. Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy, “Single or Triple Melting-Pot? Intermarriage Trends in New Haven, 1870–1940,” American Journal of Sociology 49, no. 4 (1944), 331, 339. 10. Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 70. See also Paul Saltzman, The Beatles in Rishikesh (New York: Viking Studio, 2000). 11. Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1986). For an ethnological view of “cafeteria

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religion” at work, see also Jim Naughton, Catholics in Crisis: An American Parish Fights for Its Soul (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996). 12. Glenn M. Vernon, “The Religious ‘Nones’: A Neglected Category,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 7, no. 2 (1968). 13. Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 3, 7. 14. Wuthnow 8. 15. Wuthnow 16–17, 169. 16. Wuthnow 170, 178. 17. Wuthnow 178–184. 18. Wuthnow 186. 19. For example, in a recent viral tweet a mystery writer joked that they were “gonna write a book about a recipe blogger that confesses to murder in every single recipe on their website but they never get caught because no one reads the 12 pages of text before the recipe.” Dea Poirier (@deapoirierbooks), February 14, 2021. 20. Wuthnow 188. 21. Wuthnow 192. 22. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo, Routledge Classics (London; New York: Routledge, 2005). She later accepted that she had used this delineation incorrectly in interpreting the food laws of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible, which she writes about in—among other places—the article “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus 101, no. 1 (1972). 23. K.S. Walters and L. Portmess, Religious Vegetarianism: From Hesiod to the Dalai Lama (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001). 24. B. Caballero, L. Allen, and A. Prentice, Encyclopedia of Human Nutrition (Elsevier Science, 2005). 25. Wuthnow 188. 26. Luigi Cornaro, Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life (London: Printed for Benjamin White, 1768). I highly recommend both Cornaro and this particular edition, which boasts an introduction and commentary by none other than Sylvester Graham. Characteristically, Graham never misses an opportunity in his notes to claim that if Cornaro had given up wine and meat entirely—instead of limiting quantities of both—he would “beyond all question have wholly escaped his yearly depressions of health, and stood a better chance to live a hundred and ten or twenty years, than he did to live a hundred, on the regimen which he adopted” (34). For further historical reflections on calorie restriction and life extension, see Daniel Schäfer, “Aging, Longevity, and Diet: Historical Remarks on Calorie Intake Reduction,” Gerontology 51, no. 2 (2005). 27. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Two Essays on Vegetarianism (Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1975). Further commentaries on Shelley’s transformational diet include Michael Owen Jones, “In Pursuit of Percy Shelley, the First Celebrity Vegan: An Essay on Meat, Sex, and Broccoli,” Journal of Folklore Research 53, no. 2 (2016); and Onno Oerlemans, “Shelley’s Ideal Body: Vegetarianism and Nature,” Studies in Romanticism 34, no. 4 (1995).

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28. Pollan (2008), 3. 29. J. Z. Smith and C. I. Lehrich, On Teaching Religion: Essays by Jonathan Z. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 80.

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Health Reformers, Vegan Farmers, and the Nineteenth-Century Religious Roots of Scientific Diet Culture

Before we can puzzle out the various contortions—spiritual and dietary—of twenty-first-century food culture, we do need to pause and try to understand how we got to now. And without dredging up thousands of years of history to work our way painstakingly through myriad religio-historical perspectives on food, a good a point as any to backdate the historical thesis of this book is America in 1832. From this date, we can reach just a generation or so into the eighteenth century and the germination of a new medical paradigm that was very influential in nineteenth-century nutrition, and as we move forward we can observe how science was decoupled from and then reintegrated with religious dietary directives. Likewise, we can connect this date to the beginning of several powerful dietary movements in America. Some of these were overtly religious, others were social correctives married to Christian purpose, and still others began as a new spiritual approach to health and healing but became ingrained as irrefutable medical science. We can also locate the roots of twenty-first-century mistrust of biomedicine—particularly the marketing of pharmaceuticals—and the charge to take one’s health into your own hands in the 1830s. Whether it was in a spiritual or a dietary sense (or both), in the nineteenth century the task of minding your and your family’s health through hygiene, temperance, and diet became a new American gospel. The year 1832 is a convenient starting point for a few other reasons, including that it is a political and social axis in American history: Andrew Jackson was elected president for a second time; Alexis de Tocqueville had just returned to France after completing his survey of American society and character, and began writing his now-classic book Democracy in America (published in 1835); through political machinations, the stage was set to 35

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force the relocation of tens of thousands of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears six years later; and, most important for this book, the Second Great Awakening was winding down. As we will see, historians of American religion have observed that the downturn of a religious revival has almost always coincided with an upswing in social reform movements. This last point is especially important for us, because the Second Great Awakening ushered in a different sort of revivalist movement: hygienic reform and a focus on health. This new social campaign was characterized by the enthusiastic volunteerism that Tocqueville remarked on in Democracy in America, writing, “In America certain ameliorations are undertaken with much more zeal and activity than elsewhere; in Europe the same ends are promoted by much less social effort, more continuously applied.”1 These zealously promoted “ameliorations” included temperance, prison reform, stamping out tobacco use and masturbation, and community coalitions devoted to implementing a slew of household and dietary reforms that would both improve individual health and increase moral order. With all this in mind, in 1832 one of the most influential health and moral reform movements in American history began. It joined religious zeal with a quasi-medical prescription for health and, although it sounded strange at the time, today we might recognize elements of this movement as a “diet and lifestyle program.” It was a program touted as saving people from wasting disease, bringing families together, and resolving some of the most perniciously sinful behaviors of its day. This miracle regimen was Sylvester Graham’s “science of human life.”2 SYLVESTER GRAHAM: A LIFE Graham might be the prototypical contemporary diet guru, save that he was born in 1794. His much-mythologized life begins with his birth as the seventeenth child of a Presbyterian minister, who died at the age of seventy-four just two years later. Some of Graham’s biographers have found psychological fodder in his ideal of brown bread baked by a loving Christian mother (which we read about in the introduction) because the circumstances of his own childhood were quite sad.3 Due to financial hardship, not long after his father’s passing Graham was sent was to live with a rotating cast of neighbors, relatives, and older siblings; his mother was later institutionalized after a mental breakdown when Graham was eight or nine. His elder brothers from his father’s first family of ten children were well-respected, landed men with incomes and educations. The seven younger Grahams, on the other hand, were left to the winds of fate, and the youngest of them all suffered the most; Graham foundered for much of his youth, oscillating between bouts of illness

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and depression with efforts to hold down a respectable job and finish his education. Considering these circumstances, it is no wonder that he struggled, or that he was, by his own admission, a rather difficult person.4 To understand Graham’s trajectory as what today we would call a lifestyle expert, it is helpful to know that after an unhappy, deprived childhood and a series of menial jobs, in his late twenties Graham was able to enroll in a college. His education had been cut short by ill health and lack of a stable home, but when he got the opportunity he began studying to become a minister like his father. Just when he finally felt he was headed toward a career (and financial solvency), his fellow students at Amherst Academy—exhausted by his posturing and self-importance—got him expelled on false charges, precipitating his own mental breakdown. But leaving school also forced him to reconsider how he would make his way in the world; a closed door revealed a whole new life for the seventeenth son of a minister. By the time he was in his early thirties, Graham had a wife, a family, and a revised calling: he decided to complete his studies so he could embark on a career as a travelling preacher. And once again, Graham had to rise above the circumstances that constrained him; in a nation crawling with itinerant evangelists, Graham found his niche in 1830 by accepting a position with the Philadelphia Temperance Society. Even though not all ministers began their careers either at a church or in a travelling ministry, Graham’s choice to work with the Temperance Society was appreciably different from the paths taken by other would-be clergymen. If a church and a fixed congregation were unavailable to a recently minted minister, the next logical step was to establish oneself as an orator—and preaching was something at which Graham excelled—who lectured on theological topics in a public space. But only those very devoted to a particular cause, such as temperance, passed up the opportunity to minister either within a church or to a larger community; volunteerism and social reform were left to the laity, with the ministry providing inspiration and occasional leadership.5 Graham’s affiliation with the temperance movement, however, was not necessarily because he was passionate about preaching against the evils of alcohol. Graham admitted that he avoided alcohol primarily because he could not stand the taste, despite living in an era when the majority of the country drank from morning through the night and consumed, among other spirits and fermented drinks, four or more gallons of rum per year.6 One plausible reason for Graham throwing in his lot with the Temperance Society rather than carving out a niche elsewhere was his interest in the medical sciences, particularly the new physiological approach to health and wellness. Like similar societies in other cities and states, the Temperance Society in Philadelphia was organized by Quakers and Methodists; but part of the appeal to Graham was that, unlike other temperance societies, the Philadelphia branch had medical doctors among its co-conveners.

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Graham layman’s interest in physiology and medicine was put to use in his Temperance Society sermons, where he incorporated recent medical findings and explained to rapt audiences how alcohol negatively affected not only the God-fearing soul, but the digestive system, as well. Soon this interest became more than fodder for his lectures, and in mid-1831 Graham left the society to devote himself full time to studying medical science. Graham was by no means an outlier in his autodidact study of medicine. In addition to the American mania for volunteer associations and improvement societies, Graham lived at a time when “democratic ideology received its sharpest expression in lay medicine.”7 Historian of American medicine Paul Starr, for example, counts Graham among the lay medical practitioners whose “informal practice” of medicine was “an extension of domestic care into the community.” The lay medicine practiced by Graham and others (especially women, Native Americans, and African Americans, none of whom were permitted to study medicine in American universities or professionally practice as physicians) functioned as “an organized and self-conscious alternative to the dominant profession” of medicine. The societal and health reforms that shaped Jacksonian America were powered by people like Graham, who studied medicine on their own reconnaissance.8 These DIY physicians created a theory of human health that they marketed to a receptive public through speeches, pamphlets, and sermons (which is not unlike the transmission of diet culture today, where dietary advice is promoted through books, blogs, and guest spots on television talk shows). The cultural and spiritual changes of the post-Revolution era and the Second Great Awakening—especially beliefs about self-determination and the skepticism of law-giving institutions (religious or governmental)—lead to what Starr calls a popular belief that “reflected an extreme form of rationalism that demanded science be democratic.” It was an article of faith that all professions, whether they were Christian, governmental, or scientific, could be democratized through the removal of individual gatekeeping and privileged professionals’ deliberate obfuscation. “For a time in the first half of the nineteenth century,” Starr explains, “the democratic claim of accessibility and universality prevailed in medicine.”9 And Graham was among those whose message was amplified not because he was an expert in medicine, but precisely because he wasn’t. Graham’s self-taught medical knowledge and his gift for pontificating soon converged on a subject peaking the interest of the American public: the importance of living morally not just for eternal reward in the afterlife but to achieve good health in this Earthly life. Graham’s Protestant worldview, according to Starr, “rejected the use of magic in healing the sick [but] believed that immorality and sin were a ‘predisposing’ cause of illness and that prayer was an appropriate, although not sufficient response” (my emphasis).10 For Graham and the legions who followed his teachings, good health

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was defined as ease of digestion, life without physical pain, and managing to avoid deadly (and, at the time, unexplained) diseases such as yellow fever, consumption (tuberculosis), and cholera. Ill health, on the other hand, was any or all of the above—as well as visible proof of personal moral pollution. Graham’s interest in physiology coincided with a paradigm shift in the understanding of the human body’s functionality. The ancient model of the body being governed by the four humors—yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood—was slowly being replaced by the science of the nervous system. The relatively new science of neurology was introduced to American medicine by Dr. Benjamin Rush in the late eighteenth century. Rush helped disseminate the theory that the nervous system was the main source of debility–in this new system, instead of an imbalance of humors illness was caused by the presence of “sedative powers” that reduced the brain’s capacity to function, which caused a breakdown of the body and which in turn could be healed by engaging the nervous system.11 Madness, which Rush had studied extensively, became his exemplar of all illness; he believed that because the nerves extend to “the seat of the mind” when they became “preternaturally irritable” they also “communicate more promptly, [causing] deranged action to the blood-vessels of the brain.”12 Like many of his medical colleagues— contemporary and historical—Rush wanted to understand the mechanism of disease, not just its physical effects; he was frustrated that the humoral model routinely failed to account for his patients’ symptoms. Rush also thought that a “state of debility could be caused by too much stimulation as well as by too little.”13 In other words, all symptoms—indeed all disease—could be traced back to the single handicap of an overstimulated nervous system. The theory that the nervous system was holistically responsible for everything from indigestion to cancer to mental illness pervaded not only the medical sciences, but the wider cultural landscape, as well. Admirers of nineteenth-century English literature, for example, can undoubtedly recall any number of fictional characters suffering from a self-diagnosed case of debilitated nerves. One of the most famous examples of this trope is Pride and Prejudice’s histrionic Mrs. Bennet, who exclaims to her husband, “Oh, Mr. Bennet! How can you tease me so? Have you no compassion for my poor nerves?” (To which her exasperated husband replies, “Oh, you mistake me, my dear. I have the highest respect for them. They’ve been my constant companions these twenty years.”)14 In any case, Rush’s scientific conclusions that frayed nerves were the cause of most illness made him a respected advocate for temperance in all things. Any food or drink that was considered a stimulant—especially alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco—were therefore best avoided, both for physical health and peace of mind. Instead, Rush advised imbibing warm drinks, “such vegetables as are least disposed to acidity,” avoiding of “ardent spirits,” and vigilance against the overconsumption of coffee and

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tea.15 In this paradigm, disease was the result of these external, stimulating force’s cumulative deterioration of the nervous system. This became further evidence of the prevailing moral philosophy of the era—which we will see is Protestant to its very core—that disease is the result of sinfulness and depravity. More than Rush’s science of the nervous system, this idea—that disease is both caused and perpetuated by immorality—is what influenced Graham’s philosophy on food, drink, and human health. Graham’s interest in the connection between temperance and physiology started when he began his ministry with the Philadelphia Temperance Society, where Rush’s teachings were considered gospel. And something about Rush’s physiological warnings regarding overstimulation as a precursor to disease fired his imagination. After Graham left the Temperance Society he recorded in his careful ledger notes the purchase of a fairly extensive medical library, presumably to continue studying the theory that overstimulation of the nerves induces inflammation in the digestive organs was associated with disease. He soon concluded that, in terms of the unhealthy effects of stimulating appetites on the body, the real culprit was gluttony, the most pervasive and odious of the seven deadly sins. Stimulation, intemperance, overindulgence, and excessive appetites of all kinds were, as he later explained in his massive book The Science of Human Life, the greatest of all causes of evil.16 Constant over-stimulation lead to all kinds of salacious tastes and opportunities to sin, which in turn caused a cascade of health ill effects, including susceptibility to disease. As many did then and many still do now, Graham believed that the primary (although not only) cause of over-stimulation and therefore disease was sex. Specifically, the body became susceptible to disease when an individual engaged in any sexual act that fell outside the Biblical consecration of sex for reproduction within marriage. Sex for pleasure (even within marriage) and masturbation were, to Graham, both the symptom and the contagion, and the subject of his 1838 sermon, “A Lecture to Young Men, On Chastity.” Today, popular histories and magazine articles about the cracker that bears his name focus on Graham’s preoccupation with sex; it seems that the equation of sexual stimulation with overloaded nerves is too memorable to be passed over without comment.17 But only focusing on the sexual element misses two important reasons for Graham’s under-stimulating diet of fruit, vegetables, homemade brown bread, and water. First, Graham genuinely wanted to help prevent disease by curbing the unhealthy appetites that lead to physical illness. And second, Graham believed that abstention from dietary gluttony could lead to other positive outcomes, which potentially included everything from an “equanimous” temperament to easing chronic complaints like asthma, migraines, or what today would probably be diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Despite the salacious headlines today, from the

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beginning of his career as a health reformer Graham’s mission was concerned less with sex and much more with holistic bodily and spiritual health. Graham’s forays into the spiritual and medical treatment of malaise, disease, and unhealthy predilections of the flesh came at a fascinating time in American religious history. By the 1830s, the barely half-a-century-old country was edging out of the Second Great Awakening, the religio-cultural movement that expedited the spread of relatively new Protestant Christian denominations throughout the nation. For nearly thirty years, adherents of sparsely practiced Christian denominations—such as Methodism and the Baptists—swelled, sometimes surpassing more established churches in numbers of followers. The rigorous Calvinist theology that dominated the pre-Revolutionary period was slowly replaced by “evangelical patriotism”— the same sense of election and providence that animated secular faith movements like “manifest destiny”—and faith in the workings of the Holy Spirit in the new nation.18 America’s religious zeal was one of the peculiarities remarked on by Tocqueville, who observed that the new nation was “perpetually warmed by the fires of patriotism.”19 In the free market of this religious economy purveyors of both new and old Christian denominations had to compete to recruit followers, and, once they had those followers, inculcate a zeal for creating the Kingdom of Heaven in the United States into their newly recruited souls. The glut of homegrown religious suppliers in the spiritual marketplace was possibly what kept Graham out of a church and forced him to make a living first with a temperance society and later as a lecturer: there were many thousands of willing ministers, but only so many converts to go around. It was in this free market spiritual economy that Graham developed his ministry; but in addition to his personal spiritual tastes (so to speak), Graham’s message was built on the work of physicians writing about dietary health. In his sermons and his writings, Graham brought contemporary scientific speculation about food and alcohols’ effects on the human body together with Christian moral teachings on temperance and gluttony. He became known over the course of the 1830s for his assertion that health was the natural, God-given state of the human body, and disease was due entirely to sinful behavior (and poor digestion). “Mankind ought to know that disease never results from the constitutional and legitimate operations of the human system,” Graham wrote. “If, then, the body becomes diseased, it is always the result of some disturbing, some offending cause; and the disease can only be kept up while such a cause continues to prevent the healthy operations of the system; and health can only be recovered by the healthy operations of the system.”20 Disease, in Graham’s science, is provoked by unhealthy stimulation and inflammation of the “nerves of organic life.” To prevent disease, one much resist anything—food, beverage, or behavior—that interferes with the

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“condition of the stomach.” When “this organ is in good health,” Graham explains, “and properly supplied with healthful food, and the function of digestion is vigorously and healthfully going on, then it is that all the vital functions of organic life are most vigorously and perfectly performed . . . then has life the most complete victory over the causes which induce death.”21 Foods that interfere with the “proper function” of the stomach include the aforementioned alcohol, but also meat, coffee, tea, mustard, any spice except salt, and water that was too cold or from an unclean source. And the reason for taking such care of the stomach is because that organ “cannot suffer alone: being, as it were, a kind of retina or sensorium to the nerves of organic life, the whole system of those nerves, and consequently all the organ is supplied by them, sympathize powerfully in all its conditions and affections, partake of all its irritations, and suffer a consequent debility.”22 In Graham’s spiritual and medicinal curative system, the gut was the source of all health-giving and heath-hindering physiological outcomes. The food’s journey through the alimentary canal went through what Graham refers to as “one sheet of sympathy,” a “sensorium” that regulated the nervous system and thereby the entire body. In short, in the Graham rubric of health, a diet of fruits, vegetables, homemade brown bread, and cool water curtailed both disease and sin by preventing excessive nervous stimulation. And it was this idea—that diet is intimately connected to morality and that disease is a function of individual dietary choices—that was transformative in the nineteenth century as well as foundational for dietary paradigms of the twentieth. THE ASCLEPIAN TABLETS OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY In 1832 Graham’s thesis was put to the test when cholera—the disease whose sweep through the major cities of Europe had been making headlines in East Coast newspapers for months—made landfall in New York City. Far from its murky origins in 1831, by 1832 cholera was a notorious and catastrophic public health emergency across India, the Middle East, and Europe. No major city was spared from the ruinous outbreaks that killed tens of thousands in a matter of weeks, and the cities of the Americas braced themselves for the disease’s unwelcome arrival. Even before cholera reached the Western hemisphere, its terrifying reputation was well-known and fear of its devastating symptoms was well-earned. Tragically, it wasn’t until London’s third cholera pandemic in 1854 that a physician named John Snow was able to show that the cholera bacterium was spreading via polluted drinking water. But even knowing the cause could not stop the onslaught of symptoms: within hours of exposure, the infected are wracked by diarrhea and vomiting, both of which

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lead to intense stomach cramps. Besides the crippling pain, the purgative effects of the Vibrio cholerae bacterium results in catastrophic dehydration, which can lead to a fatal shut down of the circulation system if it is not treated in time. It is such an aggressive and fast-acting infection that even today cholera infects 1.3 to 4 million and kills anywhere from 20,000 to over 143,000 people worldwide each year.23 The inevitable North American outbreak began in Montreal at the beginning of June 1832, and by late June had travelled by sea, or possibly the recently completed Erie Canal, to New York City. The pandemic had marched across Europe like an invading army the previous year, spreading from Russia to Hungary, Germany, and then France before crossing into London in January 1832. And whether it was a single “patient X” or an entire ship’s passengers disembarking from London or Paris, within weeks the disease had spread from the Old World throughout the New. But despite clear evidence of the pandemic’s east-to-west trajectory, Americans had been mentally rationalizing and imaginatively dismissing cholera’s potential danger for over a year. As medical historian Charles Rosenberg explains, the main outbreaks in Europe had been in the poorer sections of the large cities (the “slums”) where “filth, misery, vice, and poverty conspired to produce [cholera’s] unfortunate victims”; but in Americans believed that the healthy farmers and sturdy mechanics of the United States could . . . never provide such hecatombs of victims as cholera had claimed from among the pagans, Moslems, and papists of Europe and the East. America had no class to compare with the miserable slum-dwellers of Paris and London or with the brutalized serfs of Nicholas’ Russia . . . “With clean persons and clean consciences,” Americans were prepared to meet the disease without trembling.24

Meanwhile, American doctors reassured their public that cholera was “not a contagious disease, but may depend upon a change in the state of the atmosphere not cognizable by our senses, but which affects only those whose deranged digestive organs predispose them to the disease.”25 Cholera, the New York Board of Health explained, is transmitted by air, and in its aspirated form recombines with the neuro-biological system—those same nerves Dr. Rush warned everybody about—and inflicts those individuals who were already susceptible, where “susceptibility” was understood to mean weakness of some kind, including in morals. Anyone with a susceptibility to illness was assumed to have some sort of moral failing and, because poverty was considered a sure sign of iniquity, if the poor residents of the slums sickened and died it was inevitably their own fault. An anonymous American physician, who published a pamphlet titled “A Rational View of the Spasmodic Cholera: Chiefly with Regard to the Best Means of Preventing It,” wrote that

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“It is generally admitted that filthiness, drunkenness, debauchery, bad food, want, excess, indigestion, scanty or improper clothing, cold, fear, fatigue and anxiety, are predisposing causes; and that although the atmosphere of the sick may sometimes form a focus of infection, yet even this is not dangerous except to such as have been subjected to one or more of those causes.”26 By this calculus, the wealthy and morally upright had nothing to fear from cholera. As Rosenberg puts it in describing the lack of preparedness by New York City’s doctors: “Contagionism as a medical theory was frowned upon; invoking it could disrupt the social order, and it threatened the moral superiority of those who used the disease’s prevalence among the poor as pretense for proselytizing.”27 What happened when cholera reached New York City remains an important case study in public health history, and has fascinating resonances with modern pandemics. Over 3,500 people died in the 1832 summer outbreak, and despite the reassurances of the anonymous physician, it was not just poor who got sick: in a blow to the theory of the “moral superiority” of the wealthy, many of the city’s elites succumbed in identical proportions to the poor. Across social and economic boundaries, fewer than half of the infected recovered. The local government was overwhelmed by both the fatality rate as well as the ultimately predictable public protest that they had done nothing to protect their citizens. To add insult to outbreak, after the initial eruption the rich fled for the cleaner air of the country, leaving the burden of illness on the poor, especially those crowded together in New York’s tenements. Not surprisingly, in the aftermath the social status of the poorest victims was cited as proof of their susceptibility to illness and, consequently, evidence of their moral failings. Into this maelstrom waded Sylvester Graham, for whom this outbreak proved pivotal to his career. Even before cholera reached America, Graham saw an opportunity to move from theory to practice, and to take the results of his physiological studies and put them to work explaining how to fortify the body and the spirit against disease. He consolidated the theories of Rush and two French medical theorists—Xavier Bichat and Francois Broussais—in a public lecture that merged the results of his medical studies with his theological beliefs. In March 1832, as word of the disease was reaching the cities of Northeast America, Graham gave his lecture on cholera at the Baptist meeting house in New York to a crowd of over 2,000 people. The attendance was so extraordinary, and the sense of doom so great, that Graham was invited to repeat the talk several times throughout the summer up and down the East coast. In his “Lecture on Epidemic Disease Generally and Particularly the Spasmodic Cholera,” Graham laid out his physiological theories—that “the inner surface of the stomach is more peculiarly the centre of sympathy to the whole organic system. . . . so that every affection and every disturbance of

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the stomach, influences, in a greater or less degree, every organ and every function in the body”—and his broader religio-social beliefs in the efficacy of his diet of vegetables and brown bread for maintaining unstimulated virtue. Furthermore, in the lecture Graham contends that panic at the prospect of an outbreak, or widespread belief that an infectious disease will become an epidemic, is sufficient to cause a community to “develop the same symptoms and cause the same results,” and suggestions that his listeners remain calm, lest they induce the disease through the imaginative power of believing they are already infected. With this as his foundation, Graham argues that we can build on the phenomenon of physical symptoms of a disease manifesting themselves even when there is no illness to understand how “certain actions of the mind”—a mind of unhealthy appetites or unfounded fears—“may produce certain conditions of the nervous system, causing corresponding effects on the organs and functions of the body . . . may so act on the bodily sympathies, and through them, on the organs and tissues, as absolutely to induce the same involuntary phenomena in most or all; and thus render them extensively epidemic.” A body weakened by continued capitulation to tobacco, alcohol, rich foods, or the more salacious appetites, he advises, will destroy the organic nervous system and render the whole digestive system unable to extract the health-giving nutrients from food the body requires to function. As proof of the connection between pestilence and sin, Graham offers the example of the waste laid by cholera in the heart of Paris, where the “drunken and the lewd have fallen almost by hundreds and thousands before this terrible destroyer.”28 “Let me not be misunderstood,” Graham warns. “I do not say that mental action will absolutely induce spasmodic cholera, in any state of the body; but, that in certain conditions of the body, mental action may so affect the nerves of organic life, as to cause that gastro-intestinal irritation, which is the basis of all the symptoms of spasmodic cholera: and that continued mental action of the same character, may reduce the body, from any state of health, to that condition in which the disease may be superinduced.” Controlling the health of the mind and thereby maintaining one’s moral character could create an immunity to the first major epidemic in America’s short history. “Every appetite and every passion,” Graham explains—food, drink, and flesh—“should therefore be held in strict subjection to enlightened reason and moral propriety, if we would not increase our liability to be attacked by this terrible disease.” Residents of those tenements and slums, sinners who live in these morasses and refuse to change their evil ways will “become the sources of pestilence and death to those who have, perhaps culpably, neglected to improve their condition.” The only solution is to purify the body, the mind, and the soul, with a diet free of stimulants and by maintaining “the utmost composure and serenity; and happy is that man who has that peace with

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God, which will enable him at all times, even in the hour of imminent peril, to cast himself upon the protection of his heavenly Father, with sustaining confidence.”29 Meanwhile, many physicians were preaching precisely the opposite of Graham’s advice, suggesting that a diet rich in animal flesh and alcohol would strengthen the body against the disease; others agreed with some of Graham’s principles, but believed that following his program too closely would weaken natural immunity. The immediate medical effects of Graham’s diet went unremarked on, however, until two years later when Graham self-published an extraordinary pamphlet made up almost entirely of grateful letters from men and women who had adopted his program before or during the cholera outbreak. In “The Asclepian Tablets of the Nineteenth-Century” (a reference to the Greek god of medicine, Asclepius), many “Grahamites” extolled the diet not just for the physiological and spiritual benefits, but for saving their life. Some described how the diet seemed to make them immune to the disease. David S. Burger wrote that even though the disease was raging through the cities “I was very much among the sick of that terrible disease . . . I sat beside the sick, by the hour—watched with them, rubbed them, lifted them, etc., yet through the whole cholera season, I had not the least touch of the complaint, nor the slightest indisposition of any kind.” Similarly, Anson Willis explained how he “spent the whole of the past summer in the city, and visited the sick of the cholera in the hospitals and elsewhere, and was much exposed; but had not the least symptom of that, nor of any other disease about me,” and George Tracy “enjoyed the most perfect health” during the outbreak, “while every body else was full of dismay, we were perfectly composed, and without any apprehensions of danger in regard to ourselves.” Others, like James Little, exclaimed over the personal health benefits of the diet, saying, “I had not followed your System long, before my health began to improve; and in a little while all my difficulties left me; and for more than seventeen months, I have not had an unwell hour. Last summer, during the whole cholera season, I walked every day three miles out, and labored all day at the carpenter’s business, and then walked home at night; and through the season enjoyed excellent health.” Evander D. Fisher reported that, even though he lived at the outbreak’s epicenter in New York City, he and his family “never enjoyed better health than we did through the whole cholera season.” And each of the thirty-four letters echo the sentiment expressed by John B. Jansen, who wrote that he is now “perfectly satisfied, that, as a general rule, every man may enjoy health if he will; and that it is disgraceful to be sick.”30 There is no mention, of course, of those who followed Graham’s prescription but still became ill. But as these contemporary “tablets to the great god Asclepius” show, Graham’s followers saw a direct causal link between their improved constitutions, their newly serene souls, and their avoidance of

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cholera. They truly believed that by following his dietary advice they had not only sidestepped one of the great scourges of their time, but now “enjoyed better health” than ever before. And although they might sound rhetorically similar to some of the modern conversion narratives we’ll explore in chapter four, it’s important to note that “The Asclepian Tablets of the NineteenthCentury” were a powerful and remarkable testament to vegetarianism, which at that time was an unconventional—verging on anti-social—way of life. The concept of eating even one meal without meat was, at that time, not only foreign, but borderline heretical. But Graham’s endorsement of vegetarianism wasn’t solely the product of his physiological or theological studies; Graham’s ministry was also based in another well-known American enterprise: rebranding someone else’s ideas as your own. VEGETARIAN REFORMERS Two decades before Graham began his ministry and lecture circuit, a group of Christian reformers were codifying ideas about the connection between meat and sin. The Bible Christian Church was a sect convened in northern England in 1809 that followed the teachings of William Cowherd (the Bible Christians were sometimes called Cowherdites after their leader). Cowherd dissented from the Church of England in its teaching on original sin—that moral debacle of Eve, the serpent, and the apple—as endemic to humanity; instead, Cowherd believed that our free will enables us to choose good over evil without divine intervention. This theological perspective—that humankind is not inherently inclined to evil and can make good choices on our own reconnaissance—dated back to the fourth century and had been unpopular ever since. Nevertheless, Cowherd taught his followers that they were capable of great good and encouraged them to call themselves “Bible Christians” when asked about their denomination, because he “taught the doctrine that all religious principles should be drawn directly from the Bible.” And due to his own study of the Bible, Cowherd concluded that “abstention from the flesh of animals as food, and total abstinence from all intoxicating liquors” were, in fact, “religious duties.” He preached that “vegetarianism was a method of life taught in the letter and spirit of the Holy Scriptures.”31 Thus he taught pacifism and the avoidance of alcohol and meat, insisting that “in health, longevity, cheerfulness, mental and physical equipment, temperament and disposition, our members appear to be fully as well provided as those whose lives and bodies have been built up on a diet of animal flesh.”32 Cowherd’s reforms were immediate and practical. He emphasized self-improvement through education and helping the poor, who—in his church outside of Manchester—were numerous and appreciative of his

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church’s sensible aid in the form of food and medicine. Membership expanded rapidly, despite the requirement new followers sign a pledge to give up alcohol and animal flesh because of the church’s “sincere belief that kindness and consideration toward the humble and useful domestic animals was as much a part of the Great Creator’s plan as was the divine announcement ‘Peace on Earth, good will toward men.’” (Cowherd is reported to have said that if “God had meant us to eat meat then it would have come to us in edible form, as is the ripened fruit.”) After his death in 1816, Cowherd’s devotees kept his vision alive, expanding to different towns and establishing churches in impoverished parishes of major cities. And in 1817, under the leadership of Reverends James Clark and William Metcalfe, forty-one members of the Bible Christian Church departed England at Liverpool to bring the good news of the “vegetable diet” to the new world. Metcalfe wanted to expand the church to America since his ordination, stating that he felt their mission harmonized with the “civil and religious freedom of the people of the United States.”33 Metcalfe came to the church as a sickly young man, and later wrote that when he began studying under Reverend Cowherd his friends and family “laughed at me, and entreated me to lay aside my foolish notions of a vegetable diet . . . Some predicted my death in three or four months, [while others] hesitated not to tell me I was certainly suffering from mental derangement, and, if I continued to live without flesh-food much longer, would unquestionably have to be shut up in some insane asylum.” Although the resistance and dire predictions Metcalfe fielded were not an uncommon reaction to someone else’s vegetarianism (then as now), fortunately for the movement all these warnings were “unavailing.” Metcalfe’s leadership helped build and expand a religious community that “adopted a mode of life, in regulating the appetites and fulfilling the physical and organic laws of the body” in America; the church offered a way of life that “furnishes us with strength and activity sufficient to support the most laborious occupations, secures one of the all important blessings of life, the possession of health,—and qualifies us for the enjoyment of a more perfect mode of being and intellectual delights, than ever falls to the participation of the ‘Wine-bibber’ or the glutton.”34 This idea—that there was a “more perfect mode” of physical as well as spiritual being and that health was one of the “all important blessings of life”—is a concept that also informs Graham’s work. And in no small coincidence, the Bible Christian Church established the first American branch of their church in the very city in which Graham began his career as a temperance minister: Philadelphia.35 The reason they chose America’s second largest city (after Boston) was identical to Graham’s choice to build his ministry there; as historian Adam D. Shprintzen writes, the Church’s “attempts at converting individuals to a meatless diet fit seamlessly within the larger

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reform milieu that took hold in Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century. Individuals free of the overly invigorating influence of meat, Bible Christians believed, were more apt to make morally sound decision.”36 Thus, the first institutionalization of diet as practice in America was religious, tied firmly to Christian theology and exercised as an expression of faith. The church had been operating for over a decade when Graham began his research into the science of human life. Even though the ministers of the American church considered Graham’s ministry closely aligned with their own, Graham declined an offer to affiliate himself and his mission with the Philadelphia Bible Church (Graham and Metcalfe eventually worked together to form the American Vegetarian Society in 1850). Some historians speculate that Graham’s choice to continue his ministry as an independent speaker and author was theological, but also possibly financial. In fact, Graham begins his first discourse in The Lectures on the Science of Human Life by observing that he is “[u]ntrammeled by the opinions of those who have preceded him in a similar investigation, the lecturer has examined for himself every point connected with it, and has, in more than one instance, been led to the adoption of views altogether different from those generally entertained.”37 Added to this, even though Graham valued and adapted the theological insights of Cowherd and his followers, it’s possible that the most meaningful argument to him for avoiding meat and unwholesome foods was not doctrinal, but medical. Like his twenty-first-century dietary descendants, for Graham the decisive element of the vegetable diet was the physiological, biological, and generally scientific foundation on which his teachings lay. In The Lectures on the Science of Human Life, Graham states from the beginning that “instead of following in the ordinary route pursued by popular writers on the principles of hygiene,” he has tried “from an examination into the nature of human organism, of the vital laws with which it is endowed, and the effects produced upon it by external agents, to deduce the means best adapted to prolong its health and vigor to the latest possible period—in other words, to establish a correct system of hygiene upon the basis of physiology.”38 Graham is suggesting that previous diets and health programs failed to create lasting change because they were not based in science. They were either founded in religion without sufficient reasoning on “the higher order of God’s works, in which he has associated with organized matter”—from God’s ordering of the planets down to the symmetry he applied in creating minerals—or because “most or all of their opinions are the results of feeling, or what they miscal [sic] experience, rather than of deep reasoning and philosophical investigation.”39 Through his physiological studies, Graham concluded that, by using our God-given powers of observation and reason to solve disease, “the more deeply and extensively we push our investigations on this subject, the more fully are we convinced that human life, health, disease,

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diet, and general regimen are matters of as pure and nearly as exact science as mathematics. Indeed, human physiology, in the full sense of the term, is [by] far the most profound and important science that has ever occupied the attention of man.”40 In contrast to other programs reliant on feeling and mystical experience, his regimen is disconnected from both orthodox medicine and simple theological principles, and will instead use physiology and diet to elaborate “from them the profound truths and principles of science!”41 Throughout Lectures on the Science of Human Life Graham builds on the lessons of his “Lecture on Epidemic Disease” and “Treatise on Bread” by layering his theology over his understanding of physiology. We can see how his theories evolved, and that in the Lectures he doubled down on his assertion that caring for the gut by avoiding meat was Christian America’s only hope for bodily and spiritual wellness. As the Grahamite historian Richard H. Shryock put it, unlike other health movements that were “concerned with such matters as drink, women’s rights, and the peace movement—wine, women, and war,” what made Graham distinctive was that he “soon discovered, or at least believed that he had discovered, one more cause than had occurred to any of his colleagues. To put it plainly, [that] the way to a man’s salvation was through his stomach.”42 CANNOT LIVE ON BREAD ALONE Saying that Sylvester Graham was an influential figure in the nineteenth century is the proverbial vast understatement. Although even Graham gave up on the Graham program by the early 1850s—after the heyday of his successes as a writer and speaker, ill health prompted him to return to eating meat and taking small amounts of alcohol—his recommendations for a better, healthier life were taken to heart by many, both within and outside reform movements. Over the course of a decade, the Graham lifestyle expanded from individual practitioners to include the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity, boarding houses in which the rules for tenancy included abiding by Graham’s program, and even—briefly—the entire faculty and student body of Oberlin College. Oberlin College was, in the 1830s and 1840s, a national epicenter of Biblically-oriented social reforms, including abolition and the education of women and African Americans. In 1840 David Campbell, the former publisher of the Graham Journal, was hired by the college to implement Graham’s dietary program as a spiritual exercise in health and longevity. The small student body and their professors were already primarily vegetarian and had long before given up coffee and tea (both were viewed as “evil”). But Campbell’s Grahamite reforms not only forbade meat and caffeinated drinks,

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but also butter, sweeteners, condiments, spices, and any other seasonings, including black pepper. Essentially, the menu of the dining hall was reduced to water, vegetables, and Graham bread, all in moderation. In the beginning Campbell’s plan was eagerly embraced, and followed so zealously that when a professor brought his own pepper shaker to the dining hall he was later fired by the trustees for violating the dietary code. But even though there was no group of students in America so devoted to the project of spiritual and social reform, the changes began to create tension (I personally can’t imagine even the most enlightened contemporary university’s dining hall offering such a parsimonious menu without immediate and outright rebellion). Students began to dine off campus just to eat something different; one student even transferred to Western Reserve College to which he had walked in pursuit of a full meal, a distance of nearly 50 miles. Eventually, the strain proved too much, and in March 1841 Campbell was forced to leave after a group of students and town residents banded together and announced that the diet was “inadequate to the demands of the human system as at present developed.”43 The Oberlin experiment illustrates how, like so many of the dietary lifestyles that succeeded it, Grahamism was billed as the solution to a host of problems—medical, social, psycho-sexual—but implementing the regimen required a level of abstemiousness not even Sylvester Graham was prepared to follow. But in his popularizing of dietetic and hygienic principles, and even though he is referred to as a “quack” by modern medical historians, Graham’s system of prevention fits into what Starr calls an “anti-medical philosophy . . . characteristic of the day.” Aside from skepticism about professions generally, in early nineteenth century America “the popular protest against drugs and bleeding had been gaining headway for nearly a century before the Grahamites appeared upon the scene.”44 As Graham and his contemporaries were aware, if the disease didn’t kill you the proscribed medical treatment might very well finish you off. Medicine was worse than imprecise: both the practice and product were outright dangerous. Even the renowned Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes observed that “if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind—and all the worse for the fishes.”45 Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the drumbeat against physicians and their medicines grew louder, and more and more people turned to the prescription of a meatless diet, fresh air, clean water, temperance, exercise, and both moral and bodily hygiene. But the success of Grahamism in particular and the larger “vegetable diet” movement in general was not due solely to the cholera outbreak, skepticism of contemporary medicine, or even the good works perpetuated by the Bible Christian Church; rather, the discovery of personal health and popularity of hygienic social reform in some sense owed its success to the waning of the Second Great Awakening.

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As Ruth Clifford Engs explains in her book, Clean Living Movements: American Cycles of Health Reform, in the aftermath of religious awakenings and revivals in American history—First Great Awakening (c. 1730–1755), the Second Great Awakening (c. 1790–1845), and what she and other historians label the Third (c. 1855–1930) and Fourth (c. 1960–1980) Awakenings— what follows are “health-reform impulses or ‘Clean Living Movements.”46 In the decade or so after a national religious revival, the movement evolves into “a generalized and powerfully felt cultural critique.” Engs describes several “cycles of health reform” in American history which are almost all preceded by a religious campaign; once that religious movement fades it is generally followed by a “clean living movement.” Graham’s crusade is an archetypal demonstration of this phenomenon. The mechanism and the message differ each time, but what these cycles reveal is that after the market for religious reform has been saturated, Americans turn to cultural reforms, just like Graham and company’s moral/dietary movement. This cycle—a spiritual upheaval followed by a “clean living” social reform movement—has happened several times in American history. These clean-living movements are, in turn, accompanied by a related social/political policy agenda, which manifest as legislative bans on substances like alcohol and tobacco or abstinence and physical fitness programs that become part of educational curriculum. Engs explains that health-reform movements for the most part “have emerged in the wake of, or tangential to, a revival of religious interest. This religious climate and cultural awakening has yielded an evangelical fervor among some individuals or groups who then strove to eliminate a perceived problem.”47 That “perceived problem” might be a soul unwilling to gird itself morally because the flesh is literally too weak, and thus a whole new reform movement is convened to solve what today we would call a “moral panic.” As long as we’re adding historical context, we should also note that most nineteenth century Americans lived in conditions that could charitably be described as rough, and that the pre- and post-Civil War era diet is best summarized (as my junior high school history teacher so eloquently put it) with a guttural “blech.” The hygienic reforms of the Jacksonian clean-living movements were, in many ways, an altruistic attempt to put a Band-Aid on a fountaining wound: most Americans rarely (if ever) bathed, “public sanitation” consisted of open sewers running through busy city streets, and—despite the popularity of dietary crusades—American diets were “SAD” even before the ironic acronym was coined. Here in the twenty-first century, fast and processed food is blamed for America’s (and other countries’) dietary woes, but the nineteenth-century diet was just as nutritionally harrowing, and just as indigestible. Fruits and vegetables were rarely eaten fresh; if they were consumed at all, it was either after having been soaked in animal fats or baked

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into some kind of dense pastry. Meat—often cured or fried, or both—was a feature of nearly every meal, as were potatoes, which were also usually fried in animal fat. Coffee was, as we’ve seen, a contentious drink, partly because of its well-known association with dyspepsia and indigestion; but what was unknown at the time was that the indigestion was probably the result of coffee’s exacerbation of chronic dehydration. Almost nobody drank water, ever, either with their meals or otherwise. And, given the state of sanitation in most cities, this was definitely for the best. As historian Ronald Numbers writes, “For all its apparent vitality, America in the early nineteenth century was a sick and dirty nation.”48 Ironically, the tea, coffee, and “ardent spirits” cleanliving advocates were constantly protesting against probably saved more lives per year than all their health reforms put together; between the boiling, the anti-microbial tannins, and the germ-killing alcohol, the safest drinks for actual health were the ones believed to be the worst for salvation.49 With this larger context in mind, the power of the Grahamite movement was religious, social, and political, but it was also more than that: it was a change that seemed to generate true wellness. Not unlike today’s diet and lifestyle programs, Grahamism encouraged individuals to take their health into their own hands, and when they did, they genuinely felt better—a result many described as miraculous. Given the era’s dietary practices, we might cynically find it unsurprising that eating vegetables and whole grains was an improvement on fried meats and adulterated white flour, but it truly was a revelation for people used to living with discomfort, indigestion, and chronic pain to finally feel “well.” It’s no wonder they proselytized and tried to institutionalize their experience as social reform; similar to the converted today, the food faithful then believed that if everyone could experience wellness the world would be a better place. As Dr. John Yudkin (whom we will meet in the next chapter) once quipped, “The subject of nutrition is one which attracts the crank and the panacea-monger. Everyone is an expert, from the man who swears that there would be no war if we were all vegetarians, to the man who can prevent cancer by making us eat garlic.”50 With this in mind, it is easy to see how Graham’s movement—and its connections to dietary virtue and holistic well-being—have reverberations in our century. But before we continue our exploration of Graham’s legacy in the latter half of the nineteenth century, we should take a brief detour into how a Grahamite disciple took his principles to their furthest end. That disciple was Amos Bronson Alcott, a founding member of New England’s Transcendentalists who fused Graham’s dietary reforms with a spiritual movement in ways that still resonate with modern ethical vegetarianism and veganism.51 In fact, there were several Alcotts whose connection to Grahamism and a meatless diet helped sustain the movement’s notoriety into the twentieth century. Today, the best-known Alcott is the great American novelist Louisa

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May—author of Little Women—whose heroines virtuously lived by Graham’s recommendations in her novels.52 Her father’s second cousin, Dr. William Andrus Alcott, was the author of the 1838 book, The Vegetable Diet—an introduction to vegetarianism that in later editions included recipes and testimonials; Dr. Alcott was also the first president of the American Vegetarian Society.53 But it was Louisa’s father, Amos Bronson Alcott—a well-known education reformer and Transcendentalist philosopher—who became an internationally famous champion of the Grahamite hygienic clean-living movement. He was also at the center of one of Grahamism’s most infamous social experiments. In his career as a teacher, Alcott established several schools based on his teaching philosophy, which was divergent enough from contemporary pedagogy to gain considerable attention—both positive and negative. His ideas (later immortalized in the character of Professor Fritz Bhaer, Jo’s husband in Little Men) ranged from engaging students in conversation, rather than lecturing; avoiding rote lessons; and making sure the students were physically comfortable in their school houses with ample light, fresh air, and heat during the long New England winter. His teaching style unnerved some and inspired others. In any case nearly all of his forays into traditional education made him beloved by his students, but were ultimately financial and social failures.54 And despite his friends and colleagues in the Transcendentalist Club who admired his ideals—Ralph Waldo Emerson was such a close friend that, at various low points in Bronson’s financial escapades, he financed Alcott’s next career move—America simply did not seem receptive to Alcott’s philosophies.55 In 1842, after the failure of a school in Boston in which Alcott had put his whole heart (and whole savings), Emerson paid for Alcott to take a trip to England, where Alcott had been invited by a social reformer named James Pierrepont Greaves. Greaves had established a transcendental community in Surrey whose focus was both vegetarianism and education reform. In honor of the community’s inspiration, Greaves named his project the Alcott House. But by the time Alcott arrived in England, Greaves had passed away, leaving the project in the hands of a member named Charles Lane. Alcott was delighted to see his philosophies put into action, and so impressed with the success of the project that he asked Lane and other interested reformers to return with him to the United States so they could create another utopian community outside of Boston. In this “New Eden” the community would, as historian Barbara L. Packer writes, become a “society of people with chaste minds in healthy bodies” who would then “be able to achieve the perfection once thought lost by the Fall; strict vegetarian diets, cold baths, and exercise would undo the corruption” that had beset humankind after Eve’s disastrous

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apple.56 Lane accepted and in early 1843 sailed with Bronson, Lane’s nine-year-old son, and fellow Greaves acolyte Henry Wright to the States.57 The experiment in becoming a “co-social family” began the following June. Lane purchased an old farmhouse outside of Concord and named their compound Fruitlands. The group that moved there included the six Alcotts (Bronson, his wife Abigail [Abby], and his four daughters, Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and Abigail), Lane, Lane’s son William, Ann Page—an educator who, like Greaves, was a long-time advocate of Bronson Alcott’s teaching methods—and a half-dozen other believers (Wright had already determined that the “fanatical regimen” imposed by Lane was not to his taste, and returned to England). Their ultimate goal was based on a theological view of the human body unique, at that time, to Alcott’s interpretation of Transcendentalism, which was that the body was perfectible. Just as Jesus Christ had been a perfect human being, so could other humans become perfect; Alcott believed that beyond this, as historian Richard Francis explains, “the soul’s growth and development was determined, at least to a degree, by the nature of the nourishment it receives from its material environment.” Building both on Graham’s theories of “nutriment” and Emerson’s ecstatic vision of a recoverable, Christ-like essential human nature uncorrupted by the world, Alcott decreed that “Body is Spirit at its circumference”—or, as Francis writes of Alcott’s theology, that “the nature of the soul must be partly determined by the nutriment it receives from the world it is born into” because “physiology was an index of spirit.”58 From a more practical standpoint, the Fruitlands residents’ intention was to take Grahamite principles to their apogee and avoid not only the usual deadly triad of meat, alcohol, and “stimulants” like spices and tobacco, but abide by a lifestyle that today we might describe as ethical veganism. Lane and Alcott declared that no one in the “family” would take food from an animal—no dairy, no eggs—wear animal skins, or even use animals to haul or plow. The men’s collective ideals were loftier than the hay barn they famously left empty for the women and children to fill as they philosophically girded themselves for a new life on the land. But, with their hearts were hitched to the stars, their disinclination to hitch an animal to a plow soon became a problem; although they styled themselves as farmers (and even though Alcott had rudimentary experience farming and gardening), they were sages, not laborers. Ideals soon gave way to festering discontent, resentment, and surreptitious defiance. The first cracks began when Page was unceremoniously booted from the consociate family after Lane heard she’d eaten fish while dining with a neighbor; Lane and Alcott used every meal invitation to expound their holistic philosophy of diet, theology, and liberation, and expected other members to do the same. Ann Page’s dismissal was disappointing to Abby, Bronson’s

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wife, who privately voiced to her husband and vented in her diary that Lane was opposed to enslaving animals to work on the farm, but didn’t seem at all conflicted about turning her into their “beast of burden.”59 In fact, the men were so captivated by traveling on their lecture tour that they left their planted fields to go fallow; Abby, her daughters, and a young local boy she hired took over harvesting what they could save of their wheat crop after the first October storms, because the men were off lecturing about the good life of self-sufficiency on a farm. But the experiment came careening to a halt late in the same year it began when Lane realized that they had spent all their money and had nothing—especially food—to show for it. To cover his debts, he announced that he was selling the land and the house; everyone was free to do as they wished but must leave the farm—their only home—in the middle of a Massachusetts December. Because he still wanted the experience of living off the land and being part of a theologically-grounded community, Lane and his son joined a Shakers commune just down the road. Lane was quickly disabused of his romantic notions of that group as a philosophical model when he learned they rose well before dawn to do real farm labor— which included animal husbandry—and, worst of all, drank coffee; Lane soon returned to England with his son. But Bronson Alcott was devastated, and fell into a deep depression that manifested as a deathly illness from which his wife and daughters were unsure if he would recover. Somewhat chastened and considerably less idealistic, Alcott did physically recuperate, though his finances and mental health never truly followed. History has not been kind to the Fruitlands experiment, despite it being an inspiration for some of the American back-to-the-land movements that blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, many of Alcott’s contemporaries—including his daughter, Louisa—were unsparing in their appraisal of the community’s failures. In 1873, Louisa May Alcott published a short story satirizing the experiment that has since become beloved by both historians and feminists. “Transcendental Wild Oats” describes an experiment in “an effort to initiate a Family in harmony with the primitive instincts of man” begun in good faith that quickly devolves into hapless idealism. It is a portrait of feckless men whose hands “had held nothing heavier than a pen for years” stalking the countryside in their linen clothes and bare feet (“cotton, silk, and wool were forbidden as the product of slave-labor, wormslaughter, and sheep-robbery”; leather for shoes likewise were the products of enslaved cattle). The family’s leaders, Able Lamb (Bronson) and Timon Lion (Lane) travel the Eastern seaboard, where they preached vegetarianism everywhere and resisted all temptations of the flesh, contentedly eating apples and bread at well-spread tables, and much afflicting hospitable hostesses by denouncing their food and taking away their appetites,

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discussing the “horrors of shambles,” the “incorporation of the brute in man,” and “on elegant abstinence the sign of a pure soul.” But, when the perplexed or offended ladies asked what they should eat, they got in reply a bill of fare consisting of “bowls of sunrise for breakfast,” “solar seeds of the sphere,” “dishes from Plutarch’s chaste table,” and other viands equally hard to find in any modern market.

The men are so enamored of their philosophies and busy with their attempts to convert unbelievers that they leave all the work to the family’s women. As Louisa concludes, ultimately the experiment failed because when “the grain was ready to house, some call of the Oversoul wafted all the men away.”60 When winter arrives and with no harvest to show for their troubles, the non-consociate family (i.e., the Alcotts) are left by Lion with the notice that he must sell the house and the land, evicting the family into the harsh winter. Not unlike their fictional counterparts, many in the New England transcendentalist movement thought Bronson Alcott was “mad” or “unprincipled,” and even “the most kindly thought him a visionary, whom it was useless to help till he took more practical views of life.”61 Not even Bronson’s cousin William Alcott—Bronson’s best friend and philosophical kin—approved of the family’s great experiment (or, at least, declined to move to Fruitlands or contribute financially). Bronson Alcott, Abby, and his daughters all remembered the experience of the Fruitlands farm as a grievous failure, but were especially dismayed by the lack of offers of help they received when they were turned out of their home (Abby had previously characterized the Alcotts as “surrounded by those whose prejudices are intolerable”62). But in “Transcendental Wild Oats,” Louisa observes that it makes perfect sense that the people Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane had been lecturing about their evil, meat-eating ways just months earlier were not over-eager to help them after the implosion. In the story, “Abel’s” wife “Hope” notes that “his new beliefs had alienated many friends” and that to “live for one’s principles, at all costs, is a dangerous speculation; and the failure of an ideal, no matter how humane and noble, is harder for the world to forgive and forget than bank robbery or the grand swindles of corrupt politicians.” In addition to the “failure of an ideal,” what Louisa’s story captures—beyond the impossibilities of creating a Utopia in a world “not ready for Utopia yet”—was how the implicit judgment and literal moral superiority of the community toward their neighbors seemed unforgivable to that community; many friends, even those who thought Bronson was brilliant, “stood aloof, saying: ‘Let him work out his own ideas, and see what they are worth.’” Many of today’s food faithful might find kindred spirits in Lane and Alcott (or, “Brothers Lion and Lamb”), whose hearts were in the right place and whose actions were impressively bold. But the collapse of idealism into the reality of leaving “their Eden” to

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face the world again illustrates the difficulty of creating change in a world not ready for their message, especially through the inadequate medium of traveling sermons and spontaneous lectures. Aside from the context of Jacksonian America, the values enshrined by the Fruitlands experiment were both very forward thinking and a product of their time. The resituating of Graham’s teaching in the Christian moral matrix of abolitionism tied the consumption of animals and animal products with the proportionately morally urgent cause of ending slavery, uniting the idea of eating meat and using animals for labor or clothing into contemporary theological arguments against slavery. Today, some of this moral framework lives on in philosophical arguments against meat consumption that compares the historical struggle for civil rights and feminist social action with animal rights.63 From an historical perspective, however, Fruitlands tied the personal and the political to a belief that Christianity required deeds, not just words; a truly spiritual existence meant abstaining from harming others, whether beast, fish, foul, or one’s fellow humans—a belief that is thankfully much more mainstream today. MUSCULAR MEN AND CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS The Christian vegetarian movement and health reformers like Sylvester Graham made vegetarianism familiar to some Americans (or, at least a portion of Americans who lived in cities on the East Coast), but the diet certainly wasn’t for everyone. Most Americans continued to eat three meat-filled meals a day, and then some. Visitors to America from Europe admired “America the land of plenty” but were disgusted by American eating habits. “Observers held that most Americans were gluttons or something close to it,” writes historian Edward Pessen. Americans were “accused [by foreign visitors] of eating huge quantities of poorly prepared food with the manners and perhaps the charm of certain barnyard animals.”64 But at least part of their surprise at the American smorgasbord was how even an ordinary man could eat like a king, at least in terms of sheer volume. European and British visitors were astonished at the richness and variety of animal foods middle-class and wealthy Americans consumed in a single sitting, which for one noon meal might include “steaks, cutlets, eggs, ham, sausages, chickens fricasseed and barbecued; stewed and fried eels with [trout] . . . rolls, cakes, and an inexhaustible supply of excellent coffee.”65 American cuisine (such as it was) was little more than the output of an agrarian society—cooked meats, plain bread, baked goods, butter and cheese. It’s just that there was a lot of it. That said, even though most transAtlantic visitors came from long legacies of culinary tradition, most foreign guests of the young republic were not much more restrained in their culinary

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vices than their American hosts. Regency England famously witnessed some of the most excessive appetites in history—contemporary satire and cartoons spare very little in lampooning the Prince Regent’s voracious appetites, gastronomic or otherwise—which was turned against America’s colonial overlords as evidence of their decadence in the decade preceding the Revolution. America’s leaders, however, were not innocent of the culinary excess they weaponized as evidence of the king and company’s sins. Diplomatic travel on the Continent sharpened the appetites of several founding fathers for rich foods, fine wines, and intricate confections. Thomas Jefferson was so enamored of French cuisine that, after his time there as ambassador, he sent one of his slaves back to Paris to learn how to make the dishes he’d enjoyed in France at Monticello. And even though he styled himself a farmer who made his own beer and cider, Jefferson designed and built a dumbwaiter to send French wines up from his extensive cellar directly to his dining table. Likewise, John Adams—the nation’s first vice president and second president—presented himself as a man of the people and a taciturn northeasterner, through and through, but was secretly as fond of elegant and complicated European dishes as his vice president and successor, Jefferson. The fact that Jefferson and Adams tried to conceal their fondness for rich sauces, bouillabaisse, and refined flours speaks to the nineteenth century American sense that gastronomy equates to gluttony. The pride Americans took in their plain (albeit, substantial) foods was a spiritual mirror to the perception that enjoying refined cuisine was a sin, and without this shared gospel Graham’s mission would probably not have been successful. But for most Americans, the model diet was plain foods, uncomplicated cookery, and the fruit of the richness of the land: wheat and corn, meat both wild and farmed, and whatever could be grown nearby.66 That Grahamism offended this model was made plain in an inevitable corollary. Just as we will see that modern imagined communities of vegans inhabit a separate and dissident ecosystem from ancestral dietary and Paleo believers, Graham’s vision of a vegetarian America was soon confronted with a sudden interest in manliness and meat. In September 1858, a new column began in the New York Atlas, a local Sunday paper. First published on August 12, 1858, the Atlas was founded by two established New York City newspapermen, Anson Herrick and Jesse Fell, who wanted to curate a weekly that specialized in literary contributions— including serialized novels and poetry—as well as screeds on workers’ rights. The paper was successful from the start, and quickly grew to a circulation second only to the New York Herald for Sunday papers. The paper’s new column—which ran weekly through December—might be described in twenty-first-century terms as a “lifestyle section,” because the subject matter was, as summarized by the title, “Manly Health and Training.” The column’s author, Mose Velsor, advocated a fashion of manliness similar to

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the Muscular Christianity movement currently gaining adherents in England. This form of Christianity was an unincorporated and unaffiliated cultural campaign that joined “manly” exercises such as strength training and boxing with “chivalrous” beliefs in a Christian man’s duty to protect the weak and righteously defend God’s laws.67 The movement didn’t fully catch on in the States for another decade or two, but in his column Velsor borrows some of these ideals when he informs his readers that a young man with a foundation of being “well and hardy” is “more apt to become good, upright, friendly, and self-respected.”68 Men have ignored their physical development in favor of their mental and moral development for too long, he writes, and repressed “the animal part of a man,” i.e., the body. And in contrast to the prudish Victorian norm of body shame, Velsor argues that the body’s care and keeping is the route to health, which is “the foundation of all real manly beauty.” Furthermore, Velsor advises the “clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of fortune, idler” that “all study, and no developed physique, is death.” (This might not be a dig at philosopher/theologians like Bronson Alcott, but Velsor’s larger point concerning guarding “your manly power, your health and strength” does stand a bit at odds with the pacifistic and wholesome moral ideals of Alcott and Co.) And in a spasm of enthusiasm for his subject, Velsor concludes his first column with an exhortation that would be at home in a contemporary health editorial: “Give our advice a thorough trial—not for a few days or weeks, but for months. Early rising, early to bed, exercise, plain food, thorough and preserving continuance in gently-commenced training, the cultivation with resolute will of a cheerful temper, the society of friends and a certain number of hours spent every day in regular employment—these, we say, simple as they are, are enough to revolutionize life.”69 “Manly Health and Training” continued in this vein for thirteen columns, instructing readers on everything from the general (on diet: “if nine-tenths of all the various culinary preparations and combinations, vegetables, pastry, soups, stews, sweets, baked dishes, salads, things fried in grease, and all the vast array of confections, creams, pies, jellies, &c, were utterly swept aside from the habitual eating of the people, and a simple meat diet substituted in their place—we will be candid about it, and say in plain words, an almost exclusive meat diet—the result would be greatly, very greatly, in favour of that noble-bodied, pure-blooded and superior race we have had a leaning toward, in these articles of ours”) to the particular (on bedtime: “Ten o’clock at night ought to find a man in bed.”). But back in the twenty-first century, the column and its author made headlines when, in 2016, University of Houston graduate student Zachary Turpin revealed that Mose Velsor was actually a pseudonym of Walt Whitman. Whitman is, of course, the journalist-turnedpoet whose most famous work, Leaves of Grass, is considered a masterpiece of American literature.70 “Manly Health and Training” was written just after

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the first, poorly-received edition of Leaves of Grass was published. Before he turned to revising and expanding his opus, Whitman cobbled together whatever jobs he could for a year or two, which included distilling and reframing contemporary publications on health and wellness into an advice column. In fact, Turpin describes “Manly Health and Training” as “chock-a-block with quotations from, and outright theft of, other periodical writings [on health]. It is quite likely [Whitman’s] most plagiarized work.”71 Even though the content of “Manly Health and Training” was “borrowed” from other sources, the sentiments appear to be genuinely in line with Whitman’s personal feelings regarding health, diet, and masculinity. For example, several passages read as a direct repudiation of the Grahamites, in which “Velsor” explicitly recommends a diet of mostly meat, writing that the “simplest and most natural diet is the best; and lest we be misunderstood, we specify that we that we do not mean a vegetarian or water-gruel diet, but one of strengthening materials, beef, lamb, &c . . . ”72 This proclamation that meat is the “best” and “most natural” food for human health and longevity is echoed in Leaves of Grass; in section 19 of “Song of Myself,” Whitman upsets the hierarchical thinking of his era by inviting the reader to a table where we find that, This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger . . .

The poet notes that the meat is for “the wicked just same as the righteous” and that he “will not have a single person slighted or left away.”73 Besides his larger project of completely overhauling poetry as a literary genre, it seems Whitman was also thinking on a more domestic scale. His solution for “natural hunger” being a “most natural diet” of red meat can be read in both “Manly Health” and “Song of Myself” as a highly contextual rejection of Grahamism, particularly claims that a vegetarian diet was physically and spiritually natural. This notion of the “naturalness” of meat eating seems to have resonated with twenty-first century readers, to whom Whitman’s suggestions for so-called manly health sounded to food faith practitioners like the Paleo diet. Several early reviews of the essays described them as, in the words of a New York Times reviewer, “more than a little paleo” and seemed to bolster the claims of the Paleo movement’s assertions of historicity and health.74 But besides the Paleo practitioners declaring Whitman a forefather and that many passages fall under Turpin’s general description of the series as “an essay on male beauty, a chauvinistic screed . . . a eugenics manifesto . . . [and] a pseudoscientific tract,” some of Whitman’s instructions read today as both sensible and modern. Most of “Manly Health” sounds like the health advice regularly doled out in modern men’s health magazines: get up early in

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the morning to do your exercise regimen, which ideally includes lifting heavy weights and punching things; sitting too much is bad for you; instead of taking transportation, walk everywhere you can; avoid baked goods including sweets and bread (this suggestion in particular might have been a swipe at Grahamism); don’t eat potatoes, especially if they’ve been fried; and get fresh air regularly. Even though Whitman’s “Manly Health” is a diametrical contrast to the vegetarianism of the Grahamites, Whitman—and the sources from whom he prolifically borrowed—believed, like Graham, that good or poor health was entirely one’s own responsibility, a gift given by God that was a sin to waste, as well as a function of dietary choice. This was, of course, a theme in contemporary diet and health literature: it was the main point of the “Letters to the Great God Asclepius,” the purpose behind the “clean living movements” and their emphasis on personal and societal hygiene, and what would eventually become the American practice of Muscular Christianity. As Whitman scholars have noted for over a century, part of the poet’s philosophy was the “democracy of the human”—embodied freedom and the body as site of democracy.75 But, as with all freedoms, it goes both ways: to be free to also means to be free from (or vice versa). We will see how all this works itself out in the twentieth century in chapter 3, where we learn how endemic mistrust of the entwinement of the medical community with corporate interests caused people to take their health into their own hands. Then as now, the most straightforward path to taking control of one’s health has been changing how you eat; interestingly and ironically, the two faults lines in dietary changes haven’t budged much since Whitman and Graham. The axis of what constitutes healthy eating today still turns on the inclusion or exclusion of animal foods and the consumption (or not) of carbohydrates, the same pivot points as the nineteenth century. Despite this bifurcation, the attitude in Whitman’s essays and Graham’s lectures that a person is solely accountable for their health, poor health is the result of negligent or sinful behavior, and that a healthy body is the currency of social acceptance and a demonstration of good Christian character shows up again and again in health history. And nowhere is that lesson better exemplified than in the story of Ellen G. White and the Seventh-day Adventists. ELLEN G. WHITE, SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISM, AND THE LEGACY OF GRAHAMISM In December 1844, a seventeen-year-old woman experienced an ecstatic vision. As a survivor of a near-death experience as a child and as a sickly young adult, the boundary between this world and the eternal had always

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seemed more porous to her than for others—even her twin sister.76 From the age of eleven she had been convinced that the end of the world would arrive during her lifetime, and had been prayerfully preparing herself for God’s judgment by slipping out of bed at night to plead for the forgiveness that would allow her entrance to His Heavenly Kingdom. These anxieties were undoubtedly exacerbated by her family’s recent separation from the Methodist Church (which had technically disfellowshipped them first) in order to join a millennialist movement called the Millerites. Millerism was based on the teachings of a New York farmer and Baptist preacher named William Miller, who used the prophecies of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible to calculate the number of days remaining until the Second Advent of Christ. After an exciting series of prophetic near-misses, Miller settled on the date of October 22, 1844, as the end of the world—the date when the faithful would be taken up to heaven to live eternally with Christ, with the unbelievers left behind to suffer the pains of the apocalypse. But when that day came and went, and the Millerites remained on Earth along with everyone else, the movement sundered. Some of the Millerites lost their faith altogether. Others went back to their more conventional beliefs and rejoined the Protestant Christian churches they had abandoned. But a stalwart few, including young Ellen, thought there must be a message they had missed, some sort of middle ground between the Second Coming and the terrible reality of what came to be known as “the Great Disappointment.” On that cold December day in Maine, Ellen Gould Harmon fell to the floor during her prayer group in the throes of a vision that would recontextualize the meaning of the Great Disappointment for those who had awaited the Advent just two months before, establish her as a Christian prophetess within her community, and reconfigure her entire life’s course. What the teenage Ellen saw was a way to reconcile the millennialism of the Millerites with a doctrine that would open up their faith to growth and spiritual innovation. Through a whole series of visions—later validated by elders of her faith—Ellen Gould Harmon (later, Ellen G. White) helped lay the groundwork of a new American religion in which purity of the body and the soul go hand-in-hand, the Advent of Christ is joyously anticipated, and the Sabbath commanded by God should be kept on the seventh day of the week: Saturday, not Sunday. Ellen White quickly became the key prophetess of this new Protestant denomination, but also—and more importantly for our purposes—defined health in a way that brought together Graham’s proclamations, her own prophetical and theological insights, and the reform movements that changed the post-Awakening nineteenth century. In the first two decades after her 1844 vision, Ellen White transmuted from a piously meek girl into a woman made invincible by her own divine convictions. The teen who used to weep at her own cowardice in proclaiming the

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Gospel became a prolific preacher, prophet, and writer.77 Even after she married a fellow young Adventist, James White, a few years after her first vision and became a mother, she continued to recount her visions in sermons and personal narratives, which were later published by her husband in a dedicated specialty press. At times her health suffered tremendously from overwork and travel, and this stress, combined with the infirmity she had experienced since she was a child, made her prone to fainting spells, difficulty breathing, dropsy, rheumatism, and a cartload of symptoms that laid her up on bedrest for days at a time.78 Despite her frail constitution, White—like many of her peers—mistrusted doctors and only requested their services in moments of dire need. But her attitude toward medicine, physicians, and healing changed after her young sons suffered a particularly dangerous bout of diphtheria. The Adventist protocol for illness and injury at the time was to call church elders together to pray over the afflicted before summoning a doctor. But during an outbreak of diphtheria in January 1863, White by-passed this practice and instead healed her boys with treatments from a new therapeutic method called hydropathy, or “the water cure.” The water cure was a regimen that both embraced and scorned medical science—claiming to be the cutting edge of medicine while simultaneously rejecting traditional therapies and medicines; it was a perfect example of a reaction to what medical historian Starr calls “the objective ineffectiveness of early 19th century therapeutics” as well as a demonstration of applying “principles of natural reason that were intelligible to ordinary men of common sense.”79 The actual practice of hydropathy entailed the therapeutic application of cold water, with treatments ranging from dressing wounds with dampened bandages to fully immersing a patient in cold baths.80 Since its introduction in America in the 1840s the water cure had, in the words of popularizer Dr. Joel Shew, purified “the blood, not by any of the thousand-and-one of the nostrums of the quack, or of the multitudinous forms of drugs innumerable, but by the cleansing effect of Nature’s own best pure fluid.”81 It usually came with ancillary reforms in diet (Grahamism was frequently included in hydropathic prescriptions), dress, exercise, and health philosophy.82 Its promoters claimed that anyone could utilize hydropathy’s principles safely in the home to treat “common diseases of the day.” In fact, according to Dr. Russell Thatcher Trall (co-founder of the American Hydropathic Society, editor of The Water-Cure Journal, and Vice-President of the American Vegetarian Society), if home practitioners would “go a step further, and make themselves acquainted with the laws of life and health, they will well-nigh emancipate themselves from all need of doctors of any sort.”83 White used some of the hydropathic techniques suggested by Dr. James Jackson, one of the founders of American hydropathy practice, as an alternative treatment for her boys, and was so pleased with the results—full recovery, with no medication and no physicians—that she

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became an evangelist for the water cure. Not long after this incident, White had a vision that permanently reshaped her ministry as well as her personal views on health. White’s vision of the true meaning of health came in June 1863, six months after she was first introduced to hydropathy; she published the content fifteen months later as the first of many treatises on personal health and health reform.84 In the fourth volume of her collected writings and prophecies, Spiritual Gifts, in chapter 39—a chapter now titled simply “Health”—White lays out both her vision and its interpretation. The chapter begins with the stern remark that Adam and Eve were “noble in stature, and perfect in symmetry and beauty. They were sinless, and in perfect health. What a contrast to the human race now! Beauty is gone. Perfect health is not known. Every where we look we see disease, deformity and imbecility.” And when she inquired of the Lord “the cause of this wonderful degeneracy” she “was pointed back to Eden.”85 Since that time, the “appetite has controlled reason. The human family have followed in a course of disobedience, and, like Eve, have been beguiled by Satan: to disregard the prohibitions God has made, flattering themselves that the consequence would not be as fearful as had been apprehended. The human family have violated the laws of health, and have run to excess in almost everything. Disease has been steadily increasing. The cause has been followed by the effect.” From these proclamations follow a steady stream of invective directed against meat-eating (“After the flood the people ate largely of animal food. God saw that the ways of man were corrupt . . . and he permitted that long-lived race to eat animal food to shorten their sinful lives”), “stimulating drinks” (including coffee, tea, wine, and spirits, all of which “have confused the brain and brought down man to the level of the brute creation” [4aSG 124.3]), tobacco (“such a filthy practice [that] it is impossible for [users] to glorify God in their bodies and spirits, which are his” [4aSG 126.1]), drugs (“Drugs never cure disease. They only change the form and location. Nature alone is the effectual restorer” [4aSG 134.1]), and the “indulgence of gluttony” by eating more than two meals a day of rich foods such as “cake, pies, and puddings, and every hurtful thing . . . crowded into the stomach.” “Could such [indulgent people] be enlightened,” White muses of the gluttons, “they might have moral courage to deny the appetite, and eat more sparingly, and of that food alone which was healthful, and by their own course of action save themselves a great amount of suffering” [4aSG 130.2]. The polemic swings from theological excoriations against polluting the temple of the body entrusted by God to each human to domestic reflections on the toll unwholesome food can take on a family. White writes that in addition to raising children whose diets have left them “feeble, pale and dwarfed, and are nervous, excitable and irritable,” mothers have been so caught up in

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the fashion of entertaining that they have had “little time to instruct their children. Their precious time was devoted to cooking various kinds of unwholesome food to place upon their tables” [4aSG 132.2]. The chapter ends with a remarkable reinterpretation of Satan’s temptation of Jesus in the desert, in which Satan “boasted to the angels that he should succeed with the second Adam, Jesus Christ, by approaching him through the appetite” [4aSG 150.1]. Based on his experience in Eden, Satan thought he could lead Jesus astray by tempting him with food, but to his dismay, when Satan suggested Christ break his fast of forty days and appease his hunger by miraculously changing stones to bread, Christ defeated his tempter and his appetite by rejecting them both. “The words of God spoken from Sinai are the conditions of life,” White concludes. “Unbelievers, who are afflicted with infirmities, will require [believers] to work a miracle upon them, if God is with them. Christ’s followers should imitate the example of their Lord. Jesus, with his divine power, did not do any mighty works for Satan’s diversion. Neither can the servants of Christ. They should refer the unbelieving to the written, inspired testimony for evidence of their being the loyal people of God, and heirs of salvation.” According to White, to live in imitation of Christ and be healed from all illness requires renouncing both Satan and “unwholesome food.” The entire chapter is characterized by the same conflation of good health with Christian virtue that was a staple of previous reform movements, especially the Grahamites. The diet recommended in “Health” is Sylvester Graham’s system from his Lectures on the Science of Human Life—brown bread, fruit, and fresh water—which had also become an important component of hydropathic therapies. In fact, several scholars have noted that White— who claimed she hadn’t read the works of health reformers like Dr. Jackson, or anti-tobacco physician and Millerite minister L. B. Coles—echoed almost verbatim many of their pronouncements regarding food, medicine, and health.86 But one of the key differences between White’s philosophy and the regimens promulgated in contemporary books on health, hygiene, household management, diet, and disease is that, even as they rejected pharmacological “cures,” these regimes were based in science, particularly medicine and physiology (the mechanics of the human digestive system, for example, or the nascent attempts to map the nervous system). White, by contrast, appeals to a higher authority, claiming that she learned of the manifest dangers of coffee, tea, tobacco, medicines, and meat through her divine visions. Coles, for example, explains the toxic effects of stimulants like opium on the nervous system in his Philosophy of Health, writing that “the nervous system is the connecting medium—the medium of sympathy between mind and matter.” This is the source of the “wretched economy of all stimulants and narcotics on the nerves” whose systemic use induces “a morbid state of nerve, manifested in unhealthy excitability.” White similarly warns that “I was shown

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that the innocent, modest-looking, white poppy yields a dangerous drug. Opium is a slow poison, when taken in small quantities. In large doses it produces lethargy and death. Its effects upon the nervous system are ruinous.”87 But where Coles writes from the perspective of a physician about observable, compounded effects, White’s authority is the Lord Himself. This pattern—a medical recommendation rewritten and restructured as a prophecy—repeats throughout her work, where she builds connections between prophecy and hygiene, morality and temperance, food and health. But no matter their source, White’s proclamations have been a powerful guideline for maintaining health and moral order among Seventh-day Adventists for over a century and a half. Ellen White was by no means the only American prophet of holy wellness during the nineteenth century, and certainly not alone in uniting messages from the Divine with instructions on health reform. In fact, many of the post-Awakening new Christian movements emphasized diet and its connection to spiritual and physical health. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (sometimes colloquially known as Mormonism), revealed principles of healthy eating in his 1833 revelation “Word of Wisdom,” which was later included as part of the Church’s Doctrine and Covenants. The revelation forbids wine and other “strong drink,” tobacco, and hot liquids, suggests eating animal flesh “sparingly” and only in times of thanksgiving or famine, and encourages eating fruit and grain, which are described as “the staff of life.”88 Several other Christian groups also forbade tobacco or alcohol as part of their new revelation, like Jehovah’s Witnesses (founded in the 1870s) and Christian Scientists (founded in 1875). Jehovah’s Witnesses are prohibited from using tobacco, displaying drunkenness, or ingesting blood (per several injunctions in both the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament), although eating meat is not prohibited—provided the animal was not slaughtered by exsanguination—and moderate alcohol consumption is allowed. The founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, famously maintained that the only true healing could come from Jesus, and that health was accessible through prayer and study of the Gospels; the Bible, she counseled, “contains the recipe for all healing.” She discouraged what she called the “depraved appetite for alcoholic drinks, tobacco, tea, coffee, opium” which is “destroyed only by Mind’s mastery of the body.”89 All of these movements connected the health of the body with prayerful contemplation and temperance, but none went as far promoting a specific program of good health as Ellen White. Her prophecies affirming the divine gift of a healthy body and eliding medical science became the foundation of a popular movement whose moorings eventually slipped away from her church and into the wider culture.

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In fact, it was another one of White’s visions—this one on Christmas Day, 1866—that set the stage for the partitioning of the science of human health from religion in American society, keeping food and diet solidly within the realm of morality. In her vision, White saw that the Adventists should open their shared spiritual home to the sick and continue to practice the water-cure. But Adventists should also “have an institution of their own, under their own control, for the benefit of the diseased and suffering among us, who wish to have health and strength that they may glorify God in their bodies and spirits which are his.”90 NOTES 1. Alexis de Tocqueville and Isaac Kramnick, Democracy in America: An Annotated Text Backgrounds Interpretations Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 262. 2. Portions of this chapter originally appeared in my contribution to the book Gut Feeling: Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History, and Culture, edited by Manon Mathias and Allison M. Moore, chapter title: “Food Faiths: Gut Science and Spiritual Eating,” (London: Palgrave Press, 2018), 243–259 (reproduced with permission of Palgrave Springer Nature). 3. Sylvester Graham, A Treatise on Bread, and Bread-Making (Boston: Light & Stearns, 1837). 4. Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform, Contributions in Medical History (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1980), 5ff. Much of the biographical material here (and in most studies of Sylvester Graham) comes from Nissenbaum’s fundamental text on Graham’s life and historical context. 5. Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics, The Dorsey Series in American History (Homewood, Ill: Dorsey Press, 1969), 59–61. 6. Sharon V. Salinger, Taverns and Drinking in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 2–4. 7. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 47. 8. Pessen, 64ff. 9. Starr, 56–57, 59. Starr also notes that that “the public, through its legislators and its own private decisions, gradually relinquished that claim [of accessibility and universality] as it became convinced of the growing complexity of medical science and the limits of lay competence.” This historical moment feels both analogous to the early twenty-first century as well as, perhaps, predictive. 10. Starr, 35. 11. Alyn Brodsky, Benjamin Rush: Patriot and Physician (New York: Truman Talley Books, 2004), 91.

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12. Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind, The History of Medicine Series (New York: Published under the auspices of the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine by Hafner Pub. C., 1962), 101. 13. Rush quoted in Nissenbaum, 55. 14. Jane Austen and William Dean Howells, Pride and Prejudice, The Modern Student’s Library (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1918), 3. 15. Rush, 100–103. 16. Sylvester Graham, Lectures on the Science of Human Life, 2 vols. (Boston: Marsh, Capen, Lyon & Webb, 1839). 17. One fairly recent example is Adee Braun, “Looking to Quell Sexual Urges? Consider the Graham Cracker,” The Atlantic, January 15, 2014. 18. William Gerald McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977, Chicago History of American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 106. 19. Quoted in Pessen, 75 (Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 20. Sylvester Graham, The Æsculapian Tablets of the Nineteenth-Century (Provindence: Printed by Weeden and Cory, 1834), vi. 21. A Lecture on Epidemic Diseases Generally and Particularly the Spasmodic Cholera. With an Appendix Containing Several Testimonials—Rules of the Graham Boarding House, &C. By Sylvester Graham (New York: Day, 1833), 12. 22. Ibid 13. 23. World Health Organization, “Cholera: Fact Sheet,” WHO, http:​//​www​.who​.int​/ mediacentre​/factsheets​/fs107​/en​/. 24. Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years the United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 15. 25. Physician, A Rational View of the Spasmodic Cholera: Chiefly with Regard to the Best Means Preventing It (Boston: Clapp & Hall, 1832), 7. 26. Physician, “A Rational View,” 8. 27. Rosenberg, 77. 28. Graham, “Cholera.” 27, 29, 49. 29. Graham, “Cholera.” 32, 36, 51, 53. 30. Graham, “Tablets.” 22, 54, 80, 83, 92. 31. History of the Philadelphia Bible-Christian Church for the First Century of Its Existence, from 1817 to 1917, (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott company, 1922). 32. “History” 1922, 4, 20. 33. “History” 1922. 4, 25. 34. William Metcalfe and Church Bible-Christian, Bible Testimony, on Abstinence from the Flesh of Animals as Food: Being an Address Delivered in the Bible-Christian Church, North Third Street, West Kensington, on the Eighth of June 1840: Being the Anniversary of Said Church (Philadelphia: J. Metcalfe & Co. Printers, 1840), 5. 35. Clark thought that they should be an agriculturally based group, but Metcalfe thought they should stay in the city. Clark left to farm in Indiana and Metcalfe became the central figure in the urban church.

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36. Adam D. Shprintzen, The Vegetarian Crusade: The Rise of an American Reform Movement, 1817–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 12–13. 37. Graham, Lectures on the Science of Human Life, 11. 38. Ibid. 39. Graham 1839, pages 14, 16. 40. Graham 1839, 15. 41. Graham 1839, 12. 42. Richard H. Shryock, “Sylvester Graham and the Popular Health Movement, 1830–1870,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 18, no. 2 (1931), 172. 43. Maxine Kaplan, “College Once Banned Meat,” The Oberlin Review (2004), http:​//​www2​.oberlin​.edu​/stupub​/ocreview​/2004​/3​/19​/news​/article7​.html. 44. Starr, 179. 45. Quoted in Jacob Stegenga, Medical Nihilism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 11. 46. Ruth C. Engs, “Clean Living Movements: American Cycles of Health Reform,” (2001); Ruth Clifford Engs, Clean Living Movements: American Cycles of Health Reform (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2000), 3. 47. Engs, 2, 4, 7. 48. Numbers, Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White, 94. 49. Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006). For example, as Johnson explains of tea, “Brewed tea possesses several crucial antimicrobial properties that help ward off waterborne diseases: the tannic acid released in the steeping process kills off those bacteria that haven’t already perished during the boiling of the water. The explosion of tea drinking in the late 1700s was, from the bacteria’s point of view, a microbial holocaust” (95). 50. J. Yudkin, “The Causes and Cure of Obesity,” The Lancet (British edition) 2, no. 7112 (1959). 51. Another Transcendentalist figure whose name occasionally comes up in reference to Graham is Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was a good friend of Amos Bronson Alcott, and worked for a while as a tutor to Bronson’s two eldest daughters, Anna and Louisa May. But while Thoreau was a devotee of the elder Alcott’s teaching philosophy, they parted ways in regards to opinions on food. While Bronson lived as a vegetarian for much of his adult life, according to his friends Thoreau reportedly “ate whatever he was served, even meat, rather than make a fuss over their dinner table.” Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, ed. ProQuest and C. S. A. ProQuest (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). 204. 52. See, for example, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012). Tompkins notes that Rose Campbell in particular—a character in two of Alcott’s novels, Eight Cousins (1875) and Rose in Bloom (1876)—is raised by her enlightened physician uncle according to Grahamite dietetics (123–144). In the novel Eight Cousins, for example, one of the first domestic tasks the “spoiled but sweet” Rose learns how to do is bake

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brown, wholesome bread, a Grahamite detail that was totally lost on me when I read the book over and over again as a child. 53. William A. Alcott, Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men (Boston: Marsh, Capen & Lyon, 1838). 54. All his schools ultimately failed due to financial difficulties; a lack of students meant a lack of income in the form of tuition. Alcott was also fired from another school (not his own) when he admitted an African American child to the class. 55. Even though Emerson truly did feel a brotherly responsibility for Bronson Alcott, on more than one occasion Emerson became irritated with Alcott, referring to him at one point as “Plato Skimpole” (a nickname referencing both the famous philosopher and an infamously mooching Dickens character) (Barbara L. Packer, The Transcendentalists (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007). 147. 56. Ibid. Packer 148. Packer also notes that Emerson was horrified when he heard about Alcott’s proposal to his “English admirers” and wrote them a letter “warning them that Alcott was not to be trusted in practical matters” (i.e., money), which Alcott faithfully delivered as instructed (149–150). 57. Richard Francis, Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Francis’s book is by far the most thorough telling of the woeful tale of Fruitlands and its doomed cast of characters, which often exists as an anecdote in other histories of the Transcendentalist movement. 58. Francis, 20, 22. 59. This phrase from Abigail Alcott’s journals was one among many collated in Bronson Alcott’s published journals. Bronson’s diaries from the years 1842–1844 were lost, but after her death he and Louisa filled in some of the blanks in their collective experience at Fruitlands with Abby’s recollections. The brief and scant passages are discernably bitter in tone, leading Louisa to annotate such entries as August 26, 1843, wherein Abby writes of women wearing a “yoke” and acting as a beast of burden for their family, with the note “Poor woman!” (Amos Bronson Alcott, The Journals of Bronson Alcott, ed. Odell Shepard [Boston: Little, Brown and company, 1938], 154–155). Especially telling is the following paragraph, where Abby writes, “Miss Page made a good remark, and true as good, that a woman may live a whole life of sacrifice, and at her death meekly says, ‘I die a woman.’ A man passes a few years in experiments in self-denial and simple life, and he says, ‘Behold a god’” (155). 60. Louisa Alcott, “Transcendental Wild Oats,” The Independent . . . Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts (1848–1921) 25, no. 1307 (1873). 61. Louisa Alcott, 1873. 62. Abigail Alcott in The Journals of Bronson Alcott, August 22, 1842, 146. 63. We will discuss some of the confluence of civil and animal rights in chapter 5, but two hugely influential books on feminism and vegetarianism are Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory(New York: Continuum, 2000) and Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011). 64. Pessen, Jacksonian America; Society, Personality, and Politics, 25. 65. Pessen, Jacksonian America, 21.

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66. Andrew F. Smith, Eating History: 30 Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, Arts and Traditions of the Table (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 67. Donald E. Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 68. “Manly Health and Training,” 190. 69. “Manly Health and Training,” 185, 187, 188–189. 70. Alison Flood, “Walt Whitman Revealed as Author of ‘Manly Health’ Guide,” (2016). Turpin found the piece by searching digitized archives for Whitman’s known pseudonyms—of which there were several and included his mother’s maiden name, Velsor—and saw an advertisement for the New York Atlas’s articles on “manly training” by “Mose Velsor” in the New York Tribune; to his delight, when Turpin looked through the Atlas microfilm he found a 13-part series. 71. Zachary Turpin, “Introduction to Walt Whitman’s ‘Manly Health and Training,’” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 33, no. 3–4 (2016), 156. 72. “Manly Health and Training,” 197. 73. Walt Whitman, Sculley Bradley, and Harold William Blodgett, Leaves of Grass: Authoritative Texts, Prefaces, Whitman on His Art, Criticism, A Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1973). 46. 74. Jennifer Schuessler, “Found: Walt Whitman’s Guide to ‘Manly Health,’” New York Times,April 30 2016. 75. Jane Bennett, “Whitman’s Sympathies,” Political Research Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2016); Chris Carnahan, “Individualism, Education, and Whitman,” The Phi Delta Kappan 37, no. 3 (1955); Eva Beatrice Dykes, “Democracy and Walt Whitman,” Negro History Bulletin 6, no. 8 (1943); Jason Frank, “Aesthetic Democracy: Walt Whitman and the Poetry of the People,” The Review of Politics 69, no. 3 (2007); Henry Alonzo Myers, “Whitman’s Conception of the Spiritual Democracy, 1855– 1856,” American Literature 6, no. 3 (1934). 76. The reason for Ellen [Harmon] White’s ill health as a child is particularly harrowing: in what sounds like a fit of pique over some schoolyard argument, a classmate picked up a rock, threw it, and hit little Ellen squarely in the face, crushing her nose and forehead and putting her into a coma for several weeks. One can only imagine what would have happened to the young perpetrator and her family in today’s litigious society, but in the case of the Harmons, when the rock-thrower showed sincere remorse, Ellen’s family accepted the older girl’s offer of tutoring their daughter as part of her penance. (Numbers, Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White.) 77. Numbers, 60ff. 78. Numbers notes that White’s father was a hatter, and that during the many years she spent at home as a teen (instead of in school with her peers) after her accident, she frequently handled and stitched men’s felt hats. Numbers speculates—based on his research and that of others—that some of White’s symptoms, particularly in her teenage years (such as her trembling hands), could be attributable to mercury poisoning. He does, however, state that he doesn’t believe that her visions were related to mercury contamination (Numbers 47). Numbers also chronicles White’s many

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[alleged] ailments in an afterward titled “The Mind of Ellen White” (276ff.), in which he suggests that, even though post facto diagnoses are a dangerous indulgence for historians, there is good evidence to suggest that White had “somatization disorder with an accompanying histrionic personality style” (279). Put another way, White suffered from the belief she was suffering from a malady or serious disease. Numbers also points out that White definitely believed she was ill throughout her life, but lived to the “ripe age of 87.” 79. Starr, 56 80. Susan E. Cayleff, Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women’s Health, Health, Society, and Policy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 17. 81. Joel Shew, Hydropathy; or, the Water-Cure: Its Principles, Modes of Treatment, &C (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1844). Prologue, X. 82. Cayleff, ibid. 83. William Horsell, R. T. Trall, and Wells Fowlers and, Hydropathy for the People: With Plain Observations on Drugs, Diet, Water, Air, and Exercise (New York: Fowlers & Wells, 1855). 84. Numbers, fittingly, describes this interlude as White’s “conversion to health reform” (137). 85. Ellen Gould Harmon White, Spiritual Gifts. Facsimile Reproduction, 4 vols. (Washington DC: Review and Herald Pub. Association, 1944). 4aSG 120.1. Each successive quote is marked by the page and number on which it is found in the text. 86. Numbers and others note that some of White’s “proclamations” are actually passages from Dr. L. B. Coles’s Philosophy of Health (tellingly subtitled “Natural principles of health and cure, or health and cure with drugs: also, the moral bearings of erroneous appetites”). Numbers quotes whole passages of Coles next to White to illustrate how much her perspective was influenced by Coles. (L. B. Coles, The Philosophy of Health [Boston,1850].) White always maintained that she had absorbed these lessons organically and from the Lord. The less-charitable explanation, which Numbers also explores and for which there is historical evidence and personal testimony, is that White simply plagiarized Coles and others. 87. Coles, 14, 265. White, 4aSG 138.3. 88. Joseph Smith, Orson Pratt, and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints., The Doctrine and Covenants, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Containing the Revelations Given to Joseph Smith, Jun., the Prophet, for the Building up of the Kingdom of God in the Last Days (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1971), Section 89, verses 12–14. 89. Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health: With Key to the Scriptures, (Boston: Writings of Mary Baker Eddy, 2000), 406, verses 1, 30. 90. Quoted in Numbers, 154.

3

The Twentieth Century and Beyond How Health Became a Science, and How Science Became a Religion

In their various ways, Graham, Alcott, White, and even Whitman express a particularly Christian—often Protestant and somewhat consequentialist— philosophy of diet: the belief that what one eats has spiritual as well as social significance, that a proper diet is one that regulates the body according to Christian principles of temperance and moderation, and that dietary choices are actually moral choices that contribute to an individual’s salvation or dissolution. Over the first few decades of the twentieth century, however, the spiritual value given to diet would be replaced by a scientifically corroborated instrumentalization of food (though, as we will see, there are still manifest examples of morality influencing dietary practice today). With all that in mind, it is worth taking just one moment to view the architecture of this chapter before we leave the nineteenth century to descend into the twisting avenues and alleys of twentieth-century diet culture. We’ll begin with the story of the Kellogg brothers—John Harvey and his younger brother Will—because their story is a useful hinge from the nineteenth- into the twentieth-century dietary doctrines. The Kelloggs represent a shift from Christian-oriented views on health to a science-based perspective on nutrition, as well as an example of the institutional and entrepreneurial turn diet and wellness took after 1900. From there, we will turn to a mid-century rift in dietary science, when dueling scientific paradigms—represented by their own scientific avatars, Ancel Keys and John Yudkin—arrived at divergent conclusions about nutrition and health; more importantly, we will look at how one of these scientific paradigms was enshrined in medicine over the other. We will also explore how various political, industrial, social, and even medical 75

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institutions whose business was supposed to be the preservation of human health became entangled in (or sometimes even leveraged for profit) the lack of consensus on nutrition science; this conflation of financial interests with supposedly science-backed recommendations about everything from vitamins to macronutrients lead the American public to a considerable skepticism of the pharmaceutical, diet, and medical industries at the beginning of the twenty-first century. And finally, we will take a brief tour of the twenty-first century’s technological innovations, which enabled a Cambrian explosion of knowledge sharing regarding dietary practice, nutrition, the science of human health, and wellness. So, first we start with John Harvey and Will Keith Kellogg, who were born into the Seventh-day Adventist Church and found a path into health entrepreneurship because of their affiliation with that Christian community. Between the two of them, the famously acrimonious brothers fundamentally reshaped perceptions of nutritional science’s use for human health (physical and spiritual) and ideas about what food is. Their life’s work pushed food along a continuum that took it from bare sustenance with alchemical, alimentary, and virtuous qualities to a scientific, dietetic property that could be manufactured, packaged, and sold worldwide in a simple cardboard box. THE KELLOGGS BRING A NEW PARADIGM TO MARKET John Harvey and Will Keith Kellogg were, respectively, the tenth and fourteenth children (out of sixteen) of John Preston Kellogg, a Michigan farmer, broom manufacturer, and devout Seventh-day Adventist.1 John Preston was a trusted senior adviser in the church, an important financier of the Adventists’ publishing arm, and a close friend of the Whites. He had followed the leaders of his faith from his rural farm to Battle Creek, the geographic and symbolic heart of the Christian organization, where he and his wife, Ann Janette, raised their children as faithful Adventists. Battle Creek was home to the Western Health Reform Institute, which was the realization of Mrs. White’s 1866 Christmas Day vision; the Institute was a space for treating the sick but also an outlet for teaching the gospel of health as an avenue to salvation. The Adventist press, the Review and Herald (which published The Health Reformer and The Adventist Review, among other newsletters edited by James White), and various affiliated establishments were also located in the small Michigan town, which meant the Kellogg family was literally surrounded by their Adventist brethren. But despite numerous local Adventist acolytes to choose from, by his early teens John Harvey was viewed as a something of a “chosen one” amongst the church’s governance, especially by the Whites.

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The intelligent and compassionate (to all but his younger siblings) adolescent had a deservedly good reputation in town for his ingenuity, rapacious devotion to learning, and indefatigability, and was soon folded into the Adventist leadership. Even though he was frequently ignored by his own father—who later confessed that he didn’t expect the undersized and sickly boy to make it to adulthood—John Harvey was mentored by James White, who hired the 12-year-old to work at The Adventist Review. Such was John’s ambition, eagerness, and intellectual capacity that James White made John the editor of the church’s health magazine, The Health Reformer, at age 16. It was an appointment John took seriously, as he believed his ability with words was a gift from God and a way to serve humanity. One of the formative moments of John’s life was a vision he had in his late teens (he was around the same age as Ellen White when she had her first vision), in which he saw his divine purpose. In his vision, he was in front of a schoolhouse, waiting for his students, who were trudging uphill toward him; he understood that being their teacher was a sacred obligation, and that operating the schoolhouse was God’s will for his life. The vision was so powerful and clear that decades later he confessed that he still looked for the children’s faces, expecting to see them amongst his patients or in a crowd. But from that day, John Harvey declared that he “had found my life’s work. It was to the help children.”2 He spent his spare time teaching first his siblings then other local children, and stayed up late teaching himself difficult topics, such as mathematics and chemistry, so he could teach his pupils. When he was in his late teens John Harvey took over a one-room school, and even managed to come from behind to complete his teacher’s training at the Michigan State Normal College at the head of his class. But the Whites apparently had other plans. By 1872, and despite the affirmation of Ellen White’s visions, the Western Health Reform Institute was failing. It was run by incompetent doctors and indifferent staff, but controlled by members of the Adventist church whose authorities on health and medicine were God, Graham, and Mrs. White. As historian Howard Markel explains in his delightful biography of the Kellogg brothers, the Whites and the Adventist leadership “were worried about the paltry success of their Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, which at this stage was little more than a boardinghouse offering water cures and teaching the Seventh-day Adventist health regimen to visiting coreligionists. The doctors in attendance were buffoons, poorly trained, and not exactly inspirational.”3 Belatedly, the Adventists leaders realized that if they wanted their institute to be a creditable site of ecumenical health reform they would need real physicians: people trained at accredited universities and teaching hospitals, outside of the Adventist bubble of Battle Creek. The Whites decided that the heirs apparent to carry out this vision 2.0 were their own

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sons, Edson and Willie, and James’s protégé, John Harvey Kellogg. They offered to fund a half-year of study at the Hygeio Therapeutic College in Florence, New Jersey, an institution founded and run by Dr. Russell Trall; Trall was a close acquaintance of the Whites and among the first people with whom Ellen White shared her Christmas Day revelation about health, medicine, and diet. After this training, their elders (and Dr. Trall) believed that all three young men would be prepared to run the Western Institute as practicing physicians-in-residence. Dr. Trall was an early adopter of hydrotherapy in the US, and his Hygeian Home in New Jersey was a model for the Western Institute in Michigan. The college exclusively taught the techniques of what Trall termed “hygeiotherapy”—a wellness regimen that included hydrotherapy, a Grahamite diet, exercise, and massage. But despite his devotion to the Seventh-day Adventist way of life and desire to see the church succeed, John Harvey was initially reluctant to accept this opportunity from the church elders; not only did he feel a true calling was to be a teacher, the sight of blood made him faint—a true handicap for a doctor. He didn’t believe he was constitutionally suited to being a physician, but he did believe in both God and Ellen White’s vision for an Adventist center of health and healing, so he went. (That he was obedient despite his misgivings was conveniently forgotten many years later when these same Adventist elders accused Kellogg of disloyalty and unchristian beliefs.) But when the Battle Creek contingent—a group that included a young Adventist woman training to be a nurse and John Harvey’s elder half-brother, Dr. Merritt Kellogg—arrived in New Jersey, they found an institution well past its prime. Merritt, who attended the college years before, allowed many years later that “Dr. Trall did not conduct a medical school for his health but for the money there was in it.”4 Consequently, the school was understaffed to the point that the students had to fill in as instructors, with Merritt asked to teach anatomy, and John Harvey—who had mastered several relevant subjects during his teacher training the year before—was asked by Dr. Trall to teach chemistry. This request turned out to be the first stop on a long list of ways John Harvey Kellogg would change the existing paradigm of health from religion to diet and medicine. At the Michigan State Normal College, John Harvey trained in advanced theories in mathematics and science. Specifically, as a budding teacher, one of the subjects Kellogg was required to pass (and at which he excelled) was organic chemistry, which “sought to explain the chemical and physical actions underpinning every human and animal physiological mechanism.”5 It was a new way of thinking about the natural world, and Kellogg quickly grasped the importance to medicine of understanding the universal properties of matter from a chemical perspective. Medical education was becoming increasingly standardized throughout the nation, and one component of that

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change was moving away from a general and classical education—Latin, rhetoric, natural philosophy—to pedagogy that was more specialized and emphasized subjects like physiology, chemistry, and bacteriology.6 Young men (and the one or two women) who matriculated from medical schools were trained to view the human body through the lens of contemporary science; this program of reform in American medical education was intended to steer the practice of medicine toward a legitimate calling and career, with board certifications, licensing, and standardized exams.7 By contrast, the students at Dr. Trall’s college were receiving only one-quarter or less the amount of training other medical colleges were giving their students, but Merritt and John Harvey wanted to help compensate for deficiencies in student training. So, John volunteered to teach chemistry to his fellow students. And therein lay the seeds of conflict, because whereas John Harvey had been trained in the new paradigm that viewed the body as a living organism whose vitality was connected to the physical properties of the universe, Trall, as Markel writes, “heatedly objected to such notions, countering that a God-given (and driven) vital force controlled all of the inner working of the body.” Trall shut down the course, and by doing so changed the course of John Harvey’s medical education. After his ponderous and ultimately useless six-month indoctrination by Trall in New Jersey, John Harvey Kellogg realized he would need a real medical education to run the Western Institute, a point he somehow managed to impress on Mrs. White. The Adventist leadership grudgingly accepted Kellogg’s request for sponsorship to a conventional medical school, and sent him to University Medical School in Ann Arbor. But, after a year in the disorganized and discordant atmosphere of Ann Arbor, Kellogg again petitioned his patrons for a better school, and was permitted to transfer to the New York University Medical College at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. It was at Bellevue that John received a thorough education in both the science of medicine and in the value of what today we call public health; many of the patients Kellogg treated at Bellevue—the nation’s oldest public hospital, whose mission to this day is to serve the impoverished—were in terrible states of health, often due to a lack of basic sanitation and hygiene. The desperate straits of the population at Bellevue both broke John Harvey’s earnest Christian heart and cast him in the mold of a physician-reformer who believed simultaneously in his duty as a servant of Christ and the power of hygienic principles.8 After a few more forays into the wider world of modern medicine—including a brief residency to learn principles of surgery, despite his phobia of blood—in 1876 John Harvey Kellogg returned to Michigan to serve as director of the Western Health Reform Institute. The next year, Kellogg renamed the institute the Battle Creek Medical Sanitarium, a word coined by John by reconfiguring sanatorium, a hospice-like medical recovery facility, to

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sanitarium, named after the concept of sanitation and its close ally, hygiene. He named his younger brother Will Keith as his second-in-command; as Will was the more practical and business-minded of the two, John Harvey eventually installed him as the president and manager of the San’s food production arm, the Sanitas Food Company. Through good times and bad, John Harvey Kellogg was the scientific and spiritual leader of the “San” from his installation in 1876 until his death in 1943; needless to say, such an interminable administration had its fair share of scandal and controversy. By the beginning of the twentieth century, John Harvey had wrested state chartership of the Sanitarium from the Seventh-day Adventist church, been disfellowedshipped by same, lost financial control of Sanitas, rebuilt the San after it burned to the ground, alienated his brother Will, guided hundreds (if not thousands) of patients and readers to better health, and blown the investment opportunity of a lifetime: corn flakes.9 There are several apocryphal stories about the origins of what was first called “flaked corn,” but the only story that matters is the one accepted by the US Supreme Court, who ruled in 1907 that Kellogg’s Corn Flakes were the intellectual property of Will Keith Kellogg. Will Keith and John Harvey both saw the breakfast cereal’s potential, but where Will saw monetary opportunity John saw a health supplement and a way for former Sanitarium guests to have Dr. Kellogg’s nutritional wisdom at home. The nutritive philosophy preached at the San by John Harvey and his acolytes was essentially repackaged Grahamism, but backed up with the latest in dietetic science and in tune with Dr. Kellogg’s “biotic living” practitioners, who wanted food that was healthy, delicious, and convenient. In a way, corn flakes represented the same paradigm shift that caused Dr. Trall to end John Harvey’s short career as a professor of chemistry: as the sciences of physiology, nutrition, and anatomy moved from the observational practices of the previous era (e.g., anatomical dissection and comparative anatomy) toward the utilization of scientifically innovative tools, like the microscope, the picture of the human body become increasingly atomized. And as bodily functions received better explanations via biomechanical mechanisms such as physics and chemistry, the justifications for particular prescriptions left the realm of Christian doctrine and entered the space of biomedicine. So even though following God’s will was certainly the impetus for the Battle Creek Sanitarium’s prescribed health and hygiene, the new paradigm of medicine enshrined at the San was not set in the sand of Biblical injunctions and divine visions, but the foundation of science. This shift from religion to science as an authority for diet and nutrition was emblematic of a cultural transformation unfolding throughout the US, with nineteenth-century concerns about food’s effect on individual moralityreplaced by twentieth-century scientific research on human health.

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Part of the reason we are paused on the example of the San is because the Kelloggs—both John Harvey and Will Keith—exemplify the shift away from thinking of wellness as a goal of Christian reform and instead a function of applied science. For example, John Harvey still has a reputation for his rather prurient interest in digestion. Like Sylvester Graham, he believed that the human digestive system was the fulcrum of wellness, and that “constipation is a disease of civilization”: unheard of in humanity’s natural state and “perhaps responsible for more human misery, mental and moral disaster, and even crime, than almost any other cause that could be named.”10 But where Graham preached that the digestive tract was “one sheet of sympathy” whose potential moral effects reverberated through the nervous system, Kellogg understood that the stomach and environs’ significance was what today we call the human microbiome.11 The microbiome is comprised of the millions of homophilic bacteria and other microorganisms in the digestive system that actively extract nutritional energy from the food we eat. Today, a contemporary food faith practitioner might credit twenty-first-century dietary science for recommending probiotics—microorganisms believed to improve gut health—as they diligently take an “active cultures” supplement, drink kefir, and top their sandwiches with sauerkraut. But that same spiritual eater should know John Harvey Kellogg was evangelizing about Lactobacillus acidophilus—a potent bacteria ingested through fermented food that lives in the human digestive tract—at the turn of the twentieth century. In fact, he outlines treatments for reintroducing acidophilus to the gut flora in his book The New Dietetics, which unfortunately are not as simple as taking a capsule. In this comprehensive text (over 900 pages), Kellogg describes how acidophilus “appears as the dominant flora” in the gut of both young healthy children and farm or lab animals fed “food rich in carbohydrates and given no meat.” But for adult humans who ate meat and refined carbohydrates but few vegetables or grains, “the B[acillus]acidophilus is found in the stools only in very small numbers if at all,” the lack of which Kellogg links to constipation. The good news, Kellogg tells his reader, is that the flora can be healed by massive doses of the beneficial bacteria, which diminishes the destructive bacterium “until it disappears when the flora is ‘changed,’ and the B. acidophilus becomes dominant.”12 The bad news is that this transformation was best accomplished by one of the San’s most notorious procedures: therapeutic yogurt enemas. The treatment was supposed to repopulate the presumably depleted microbiota of the gut (in a rather unorthodox fashion) and improve overall health; whether or not the long-term claims were accurate, the procedure generally had the intended short-term effect of ending constipation with great immediacy. Similar scientific claims were used to justify the various water therapy treatments that had, prior to Dr. Kellogg’s tenure, been cloaked in vaguely biblical branding.

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But it was corn flakes that became the flagship health product of the San—the culmination of John’s governing nutrition philosophy and Will’s health entrepreneurship. All residential San patients—habituated to a turn-of-the-century diet of fatty meat and fried foods—were put on a strict vegetarian diet, heavy in fruit and whole grains, for the duration of their stay with the consequence that they felt their health had rapidly and miraculously improved. But, not surprisingly, many found the diet hard to stick with in their ordinary life, and wrote to the doctor that they missed how good they felt when they were in Battle Creek. With both his patients and health inventions constantly gyrating in his mind, John Harvey commissioned frequent prototypes (overseen by his wife, Ella,13 or Will Keith) of shelf-stable baked cereals and grains.14 He was constantly hunting for an edible innovation that was nutritious, aided digestion, and could be mailed to former San patients who wanted to bring their newfound wellness home with them. Some of the earliest versions of these experiments lead to a granulated variation on Graham bread, which could be softened in milk (for patients with dental problems, which was nearly everybody) and which Kellogg originally christened Granula before swapping the name to Granola. Granola was the first item packaged and sold as a mail-order product through their Sanitas Food Company.15 Not long after their small food distribution company was up and running, one of the Kelloggs (John, Will, and Ella each claimed it was them) fed baked grain through metal rollers. The result was a flake that could be baked a second time and still retained a satisfying—but not tooth cracking— crunch when eaten in a bowl of milk. Will immediately (and accurately) sensed a tremendous financial opportunity in the resulting flakes. If production was scaled up the flakes could be baked, boxed, shipped, and distributed all over the country, which would make Battle Creek, the San, and the Adventists themselves household names in ready-made nutritious foods. But John Harvey resisted removing production from the San’s kitchens, and also believed that marketing the cereal outside of the Adventists or the San was a misuse of his holy obligation as a physician. It took being scooped (forgive the pun) by a neighboring Battle Creek-based cereal company owned by one of Dr. Kellogg’s former patients, Charles W. Post, for Will to finally defy his brother, take ownership of the recipe, and seek investors. John’s lofty idea that health food should be above crude concerns like advertising and confidence in his own business acumen turned out to be a catastrophic mistake, but before he realized the scope of his blunder Will had taken control of the Sanitas Food Company, patented the method of production with his name as manufacturer, and finally broken free from his role as John Harvey’s whipping boy. By 1907, when Will officially changed the name of his cereal to W. K. Kellogg Company-branded Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes, the die was cast for Will’s cereal to be one of the

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century’s best-selling food products. Corn Flakes and the Kellogg Company’s breakfast cereals made him one of the wealthiest men in the country, leaving John Harvey with his supercilious ideals about health and nutrition intact but the bank account of the perpetually-cash strapped San hovering near empty.16 What is most important for us in reviewing this history, however, is that the gospel of whole grains preached by the Grahamites and validated by contemporary medical research became a marketing tool for the Kellogg brothers. Corn Flakes, Granola, and the rest were advertised as an organic broom for the digestive tract (a metaphor befitting the sons of a broom manufacturer), sweeping out slowly decaying meats and making patients’ bowel eliminations as regular as the sunrise. And even though most Americans would never visit the Battle Creek Sanitarium—or any of the other health retreats constructed by the Adventists throughout the twentieth century—they could partake in John Harvey Kellogg’s medical advice through his prolific writings and Will Kellogg’s nutritional innovations in his breakfast cereals. The meaning of John Harvey Kellogg’s transition from being in spiritual service to Mrs. White and the Adventist Church to a scientist and entrepreneur (though he identified still as a Christian) is of special importance to us here, as it represents a sea-change in the perceptions and meaning of food in the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. John Harvey Kellogg embodies both the end of an old paradigm and the beginning of a new one. He was handpicked to carry on White’s interpretation of Graham’s doctrines and implement the hygienic principles that married Christian morals with a strict dietary system. His practice as a medical doctor was supposed to be centered on using those principles, as well as the water cure, sensible dress, and prayerful rest to help spread the Adventist message of healing and faith. Instead, John leveraged both his medical training and his business savvy to redefine wellness, setting a precedent for the rest of the century. Even though neither their sibling or their business relationship was repaired, John Harvey and Will Keith Kellogg together represent the turn from the moral instrumentalization of food that began with Graham in the 1830s into the science-based and commercial instrumentalization of diet and nutrition that lasted throughout the twentieth century. And because both men lived well into the twentieth century (both died at the age of 91—John in 1943 and Will in 1951), they witnessed their coevolved food philosophies—the importance of the science of nutrition and the commercialization of manufactured health food—go from niche Christian guidance to the dogma of public health policy.

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A NATIONAL CRISIS OF HEALTH AND A NEW NUTRITIONAL PARADIGM In September 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had a heart attack. Although he was a war hero and a West Point alum, the fact was that at 64 he was an age when many American men began suffering from heart disease. Thus, because of his age and his stature as a national leader, in this moment Eisenhower symbolized and embodied a national health crisis. After he succumbed to his seventh heart attack 14 years later an autopsy revealed that Eisenhower had an adrenal pheochromocytoma (an adrenaline-secreting tumor) in his heart, which explained his vulnerability to myocardial infarction. But this first heart attack was a defining moment, not just for the Eisenhower administration, but, as we will see, for the governing dietary paradigm of the next several decades. The on-call physician for Eisenhower’s first heart attack misdiagnosed it as indigestion. But when treatments for heartburn were ineffective, the medical team realized that it was much more serious, and flew in Dr. Paul Dudley White, America’s leading cardiologist. Because the first coronary artery bypass graft surgery—bypass surgery—was still five years away (it didn’t become a common medical intervention until 1968), there weren’t standard treatments for heart attack victims. Eisenhower’s physicians, however, believed that physical activity had both a preventative and protective effect, so Ike literally attempted to muscle his way through his recovery. Leveraging the self-discipline he prided himself on, Eisenhower exercised, cut his weight, and changed his diet. As Clarence Lasby, author of the book Eisenhower’s Heart Attack, notes, in the aftermath of his heart attack Eisenhower turned his military stoicism and battle-honed focus toward his heart problems; by viewing his health woes as a battle, he marshalled himself into a medically-sanctioned diet and exercise overhaul. And, as per his doctor’s orders, this program included an almost obsessive maintenance of his blood cholesterol levels, which was a new biomarker in the growing medicalization of heart disease. Of course, as Lasby writes, in Eisenhower’s case the “avoidance of stress was the most difficult part of his battle plan.”17 But despite throwing himself wholeheartedly (as it were) into his healthcare regimen, Eisenhower didn’t get better. And soon his private concern for his health and physical fitness spilled over into a larger concern about the nation’s health. Around the time Eisenhower was stepping up his fitness regimen to combat heart disease, the results of a large-scale series of fitness tests of American and European youths were released. This test was devised to test general physical health, and consisted of simple body-weight movements (such

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as bent-leg sit-ups and toe-touches) performed over 90 seconds. The tests showed that American youths were far behind their European counterparts in every marker of physical fitness. Specifically, 57.9 percent of US children (of 4264 total) tested for physical fitness failed one or more of six tests for muscular strength and flexibility while only 8.7 percent of European youngsters (2870) did; furthermore, 44.3 percent of the US kids failed the one flexibility test versus only 7.8 percent of the European children, and 35.7 percent of the US youths failed one or more of the five strength tests versus only 1.1 percent of the Europeans (in Austria and Switzerland, the rate of failure was 0.5 percent). Interestingly, there were virtually no differences between urban or rural children, rich or poor. All failed equally.18 Dubbed “the report that shocked the president,” the research was performed over the course of seven years by Dr. Hans Kraus, M.D., Associate Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at New York University, and Ruth (Bonnie) Prudden, Director of the Institute for Physical Fitness at White Plains, NY (who would later become a household name as a fitness guru).19 All of this was interpreted by relevant government officials to mean that US kids were malnourished weaklings and that something needed to be done, the sooner the better. This was not the first time (and certainly not the last, as we will see) that the American government would act on concern that its populace was unfit—physically or otherwise. The results were concerning enough that Eisenhower and his team of doctors convened a new government program that would increase physical health over a young American’s lifetime. Called the President’s Council on Youth Fitness—which has undergone several name changes but is known today as the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition (PCSFN)—the council’s mission was to actualize Eisenhower’s wish that the country’s youth become “physically as well as mentally and spiritually prepared for American citizenship” through physical activity and scientifically sound nutrition.20 For the latter half of the twentieth century, the PCSFN represented the minor third of three federal arbiters of the science of health, nutrition, and diet in American culture: the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the PCFSN, with the former two having a tremendous political influence on the American diet and definitions of health for over a century. In contrast to nineteenth-century quasi-spiritual definitions of health, what we will briefly touch on here is how, since their founding in the twentieth century, these federal agencies have operated with the maxim that good health was the outcome of a scientific understanding of nutrition and physician-approved dietary practice. However, like the moral scolds of yore, the health advice pedaled in the twentieth century by US government agencies has been what some scholars have suggested is a new moralism noteworthy for its “forceful and overblown rhetoric, public panic

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and misinformation, and a very solid and shiny veneer of scientific validity” and what feels like “health at gunpoint.”21 That Eisenhower—the acme of a good American Christian soldier—trusted physicians to craft national policy regarding the health of the nation’s youth represents a newfound faith in biomedicine, the science of nutrition, and the machinations of federal entities like the PCSFN and USDA. And it wasn’t just Eisenhower and his doctors who said that the American people should trust nutrition science and its deployment through centralized, policy-making organizations; it soon became, to borrow a phrase from the man himself, a government-sponsored health industrial complex. Even as the government was insinuating itself into the American dietary landscape throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the scientific paradigms meant to ground nutritional recommendations in fact—rather than fashion or tradition—were still up for grabs. But by the late 1960s, a nutritional hypothesis that would shape the dietary recommendations of the USDA, influence the Eisenhower administration’s directives for the PCFSN (as well as the president personally), and open the FDA up to approving a slew of ostensibly health-enhancing drugs became entrenched in American culture. Today, some nutritionists, physicians, and public health officials argue that it was this dietary edict that is responsible for the steep rise of metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease that Americans are still reeling from in the twenty-first century. Others maintain that this dietary dogma—which focused on dietary fat consumption—holds up under scientific scrutiny. Either way, in the twentieth century, the complex macronutrients of food (fat, protein, carbohydrate) began to be scientifically and socially rendered into their component molecules, and more and more urgently christened as either having absolutely no or an entirely deleterious effect—depending on the source (and it seems, at times, on the day)—on human nutrition. This granular partitioning of food into good and bad is what Gyorgy Scrinis, an Australian professor of food policy, calls “nutritionism.” Nutritionism describes what Scrinis sees as the implicit goal of the health and wellness industry: that humans should “understand and engage with food and our bodies in terms of their nutritional and chemical constituents and requirements—the assumption being that this is all we need to understand” in order to be healthy. It was the same attitude that governed John Harvey Kellogg’s dietary prescriptions and it is the overriding philosophy of modern industrial food systems today. Nutritionism means, for Scrinis, that “food and the body at the genetic level is emerging as the dominant means of control” and is creating a “genetic-industrial food system.”22 Michael Pollan used Scrinis’s term in his 2008 In Defense of Food, writing that nutritionism is “not a scientific subject but an ideology . . . [which] are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions.” With the

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ideology of nutritionism and food as, in Pollan’s phrasing, a “genetic abstraction” in mind, we can now turn to the most formative dietary paradigm of the twentieth century: the lipid hypothesis. As we will see, the lipid hypothesis effectively pushed out or overruled other dietary recommendations until the end of the century. And this theory in human nutrition and public health owes its popularity to the work of one man: Ancel Keys. So, in this corner, we have Ancel Keys, the lipid hypothesis, and the Seven Countries Study. Keys was a dual PhD, who began his career with a degree in oceanography in 1930, and added a second doctorate in physiology in 1936. In 1938, Keys’s first contribution to nutrition research in his Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene at the University of Minnesota lead to the development of a portable, nonperishable field ration containing enough sustenance for two weeks at 3200 calories a day; the resulting product was deployed just a few years later during WWII and became known as the K-ration, in honor of its inventor. A few years after that and in an experiment that remains significant to nutrition research and eating disorder treatment today, from November 1944 to December 1945 Keys lead a human subjects study on the effects of starvation.23 The intention of the study—dubbed the Minnesota Starvation Experiment (or MSE)—was to test the physiological effects of starvation or severe caloric restriction, as well as the presumed psychological effects. Physicians wanted to be prepared to help war prisoners and refugees with their physical and mental rehabilitation after the end of the war. So Keys’s team recruited 36 conscientious objectors for the experiment. They had a 12-week baseline, a 24-week “starvation period” (during which the 32 subjects who stuck it out lost more than a quarter of their body weight), and a recovery phase, in which Keys’s team aided the volunteers in their recuperation. The experiment has become infamous as an example of human subjects research that would never get past an IRB committee today, but Keys and his colleagues made sure to secure informed consent. As Mennonite, Quaker, and members of other Historic Peace Churches (as well as several Nones), their volunteer conscientious objectors had suffered public ridicule for withdrawing from the military draft; they were unfavorably contrasted with “America’s brave boys” fighting and dying in Europe and the Pacific. Thus, they leapt at the chance to show that they were just as devoted to cause and country as the military men by serving as Keys’s research subjects.24 What Keys et al. discovered was that starvation—defined as “a severe deficiency in caloric energy intake, below the level needed to maintain an organism’s life”—has both unexpected physiological and profound mental effects.25 The progression of starvation to organ failure was already known, and the MSE never pushed their subjects to a dangerous edge; however, it came as a surprise to the team that the dramatic reduction in calories provoked

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depression, aggression, and despair. The scientists observed that their subjects became apathetic and irritable; the men self-reported feelings of melancholy and food obsession (some also noted, disturbingly, that they’d had cannibalistic dreams). The men were eating 1600 calories a day on average—a number actually well above what modern advocates of the calories-in/calories out (CICO) philosophy of weight loss follow with the help of apps and website calculators.26 In addition to its parsimony, their starvation diet was also heavy in roots and tubers, the vegetables it was assumed people stuck in blockaded or occupied European countries would survive on. Keys’s team waited five more years to publish their findings in a two-volume, 1300 page book, but the immediate results of the year-long study helped remediate the POWs and concentration camp victims who suffered profound starvation during the war. Even today, the study is referenced in treating anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and other eating disorders. But Keys’s next stop on the subject of nutrition was the Seven Countries Study, which changed the course of American medicine, nutrition, and diet culture for decades. In the early 1950s, Keys embarked on a global, comparative study that explored the connection between human heart health and its correlation with diet. His curiosity about the connection between diet and heart disease was piqued during a trip to Italy with his wife, where they had traveled for a respite from a research trip in northern Europe. In Naples, Keys observed that the working-class men ate “a little lean meat once or twice a week . . . butter was almost unknown, milk was never drunk except in coffee or for infants . . . pasta was eaten every day, usually also with bread (no spreads) and a fourth of the calories were provided by olive oil and wine. There was no evidence of nutritional deficiency but the working-class women were fat.”27 In looking at the overall health of the working-class men of Italy, Keys found very low rates of heart attack and relatively few middle age men who were overweight. By comparison, Keys saw an epidemic of heart disease and obesity among middle-aged American men, which was accelerating in tune with the nation’s growing GDP. American businessmen and executives (as well as its presidents) were suffering from heart disease in unheard of numbers. Theoretically, America was among the most privileged and medically advanced societies in the world; Italy, in contrast, had suffered tremendous post-war economic losses, which should have led to malnutrition, not protective health benefits. And yet these Italian men were healthy while white, upper-class American men were sick. But what could be the cause? A better question, Keys thought, was: could what the Italian men ate be responsible for their good health, and vice versa? Keys tested his hypothesis—that cardiovascular disease (CVD) and coronary heart disease (CHD) were related to diet—by commencing an epidemiological comparative survey of the US and six other countries: Italy, Greece,

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Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Finland, and Japan. Throughout the 1950s, Keys recruited 16 cohorts of over 12,000 men ages 40–59 from 22 countries all over the world for his study. When the results were published in 1958 (the final final version of the study was 25 years in duration and published in 1970), it caused quite a stir. His conclusions later became known as the lipid hypothesis, named for the water insoluble fatty acids Keys believed were causing all the trouble. Keys’s conclusion was that saturated fats—the lipids found in animal and dairy products—raised blood cholesterol (also a lipid) levels; higher levels of blood cholesterol were associated with build-up of arterial plaque in the heart, leading to heart disease and heart attacks. Specifically, Keys surmised that the higher rates of saturated fat consumption was correlated with the high rates of heart disease and death from cardiovascular disease in wealthy, Western countries like the US Both Keys’s hypothesis and conclusion emphasized that hypertension—e.g., high blood pressure—was associated with stroke risk and coronary heart disease; that CVD is correlated to total blood serum cholesterol; and that, in countries where overall consumption of animal products was low, there were lower rates of hypertension, stroke, and heart attack. Conversely, in wealthier countries where consumption of animal products and high-saturated fat foods were elevated, rates of heart disease—and heart attack—were correspondingly high.28 Keys presented some initial theories in 1955 at a cardio-medical conference, where his ideas were met with skepticism—mostly due to his speculative methods but also because he was neither an epidemiologist nor a cardiologist. But among the attendees was a newly-converted evangelist for the lipid hypothesis: Dr. Paul Dudley White, Eisenhower’s cardiologist, who accompanied Keys to preach to his fellow physicians. Keys could not have received a better endorsement of his theories then when Dr. White followed up Keys’s talk by announcing to his colleagues that he was so persuaded by this theory that he had put the president on the low-fat diet he believed all Americans should follow. (As historian Harvey Levenstein drily notes in his marvelous book, Fear of Food, even though Dr. White prescribed exercise and a low-fat diet to the president, “there was no thought of telling [Eisenhower] to quit smoking”29—which White, Keys, and most cardiologists knew was as statistically significant in Keys’s theory as any of his dietary metrics.) Despite the cardiologists’ agnosticism regarding both Keys’s hypothesis and methods, White was delighted to report that he had turned Keys’s theories into a treatment for America’s highest-ranking citizen. Keys, in turn, wasted no time leveraging his growing network of like-minded physicians and their influence on major medical organizations, such as the American Heart Association (AHA) and American Medical Association (AMA), to accept his theory and recommend a low-fat diet to the American people. He soon popularized his ideas in a book that was part autobiography, part cookbook,

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and part standard issue diet advice called Eat Well, Stay Well. Co-authored with his wife Margaret and published in 1959 (later with a forward by Paul White), in the book Keys states that “there is much reason to believe that our modem luxurious American diet, rich in calories and saturated fats, is a major health hazard.” He writes that scientists “now know that the likelihood of future coronary heart disease rises steeply with the level of cholesterol in the blood [and] that the level of cholesterol in the blood rises with the amount of saturated fat in the diet,” which was a conclusion that most scientists hadn’t necessarily accepted at the time. But fortunately for the reader, Keys explains that this book joins “the art of cookery with the science of nutrition, making the old art more sophisticated, extending the new science to focus on the long-range health of the adult.”30 That this scientific theory—presented as an undisputed fact to the (presumably) non-scientist reader—should be the final arbiter of health was taken for granted. As Levenstein and others have noted, part of the success of Keys’s theories were that they flattered the American notion of wealth and abundance, especially highlighting Keys’s explanation that in other countries “heart disease afflicted mainly rich men, who were the only ones who could afford fatty foods. Heart disease was much more widespread in the United States . . . because practically everyone there could afford a rich man’s diet.” And from this financial perspective, it is probable that Keys’s theory also triumphed because “there was so much money to be made from it.”31 As the low-fat doctrine spread in both medical and popular literature, food manufacturers rushed to create products that would meet the new standards for good heart health. This marketing bonanza culminated with the AHA—a nonprofit research and educational organization whose nutrition committee Keys joined a few years after his first appearance at the cardiology conference—permitting foods that it deemed heart healthy to carry their endorsement on their labels.32 Manufacturers of vegetable oils and margarine flooded the market, claiming in their advertisements that these substitutes for animal-fat based lard and butter would function almost as artery cleansers, flushing the newly branded “bad fats” out and preventing future heart disease.33 Preying on America’s dietary fears was good for the industrial food business: from the early 1950s through the early- to mid-1970s, sales of margarine doubled and the consumption of vegetable oil rose by that same number in just under a decade; over the same time span, sales of eggs fell by more than a quarter (too much cholesterol!) and butter fell by more than half (jam-packed with saturated fat!), while the dairy industry scrambled to promote their skim and non-fat products.34 Keys’s thesis was taken as a new, revelatory gospel, but from the beginning there were scientists, physicians, and public health officials skeptical

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of his correlative conclusions; today some critics classify his claims as less science than reified dogma.35 Part of the problem of Keys’s Seven Countries Study—which was pointed out by his earliest detractors—was that even though he surveyed 22 countries, he only published the major findings from seven (hence the title). Some of the skeptics who cross-examined Keys’s conclusions were epidemiologists, physicians, biochemists, and medical researchers who were curious to know why the other fifteen countries were left out. And in fact, when Keys’s graphs were redrawn with the missing countries filled in, the 1:1 correlation of “fat calories as a percent of total” and “death rates due to heart disease” looks less like the perfect up-bending arc Keys originally published and more like buckshot. In the original graph, Japan appears in the bottom left, representing both low rates of fat consumption and CHD; it then swoops up to the US as the plot point where the highest consumption of fat converges with the most deaths from heart disease. But several countries not in Keys’s original graph had fat consumption rates almost double that of Italy, including France, Switzerland, West Germany, and the Scandinavian countries; on Keys’s perfect swoop Italy was the next data point after Japan, but when all countries were included it was suddenly clear that Italy had mortality rates nearly identical to France.36 Others noticed the obverse: some countries were kept in the final study despite confounding lifestyle and environmental factors. For example, a few critics knowledgeable about Christian traditions found it problematic that the majority of the blood lipid tests in Greece were taken during the Lenten season; throughout the six or so weeks of Lent members of the Greek Orthodox Church—a sizable portion of the Grecian population—adhere to a diet almost entirely free of animal products, including dairy. Naturally, their blood lipid levels were low just before Easter, but probably increased again after the Easter feast and its celebratory lamb dishes. Also troubling was that Keys never differentiated between kinds of fats or dietary sources of cholesterol, and continued to preach his comprehensive doctrine despite pushback by nutrition scientists to distinguish between, say, animal- and plant-based fats; several contemporary health and biostatistics researchers argued that there were qualitative lifestyle difference in populations that ate a lot of animal protein (e.g., the United States) and those that did not (i.e., most of post-WWII Europe, like Yugoslavia or Italy) that ought to factor into his statistics.37 In a similar vein, early twenty-first-century epidemiologists noted that the countries at the top of Keys’s graph—the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK—were early adopters of artificial trans fats. Trans fats are made from industrially manufactured partially hydrogenated vegetable oil; first used in the nineteenth century to produce margarine, trans fats were eventually and ubiquitously employed by the flourishing post-war fast food industry (to be fair, Keys thought this might be part of the story, as

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well). Today, the most potent associative links to heart and metabolic diseases have been traced to trans fats, eclipsing the risks of fats from other, natural sources.38 Still others protested that Keys’s plot points on his graphs didn’t just correlate with fat consumption: mortality also correlated almost perfectly with sugar consumption as a percent of caloric intake (this will be very important in about one paragraph). But the skeptical voices were drowned out for much of the rest of the century by Keys’s acolytes, the food industry, and even the U.S. government (this will be important in about three pages) who made his low-fat recommendations into dietary canon.39 Though accusations of correlative conclusions and cherry-picked results continued to dog his reputation, for a full generation Keys was considered a hero. Some, especially Ancel Keys, thought he should have won the Nobel Prize in medicine; indeed, several public health experts claimed in the 1960s and 1970s that Keys’s insights would help eliminate heart disease in America by the year 2000 (a prediction that has aged, as the saying goes, like milk). Keys was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1961, hailed as a prophet for espousing the Mediterranean diet, and brutally and efficiently took down any challenges to or corrections of his theories. As the century wound down many doctors and popular nutrition writers continued to beat the low-fat drum, despite the mounting evidence against Keys’s conclusions; besides his questionable methodology, a series of public health crises—the population-wide rise in diabetes, concerns over childhood obesity, the stubbornly unchanging percentages of Americans suffering from CHD, etc.—belied the low-fat ideology.40 And now there are those who believe that the paradigm’s bubble would have burst sooner if we had listened to another dietary prophet who was a contemporary (and critic) of Ancel Keys: John Yudkin. And so, in this corner we have John Yudkin and the Case Against Sugar Yudkin was, in many ways, a perfect foil for Ancel Keys. A British physiologist and nutritionist, Yudkin likewise held two degrees, although his were a PhD in biochemistry and an MD, both from Cambridge; he was also named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1938. Yudkin was the son of poor Russian-Jewish immigrants, making him a long-shot to complete his undergraduate studies, let alone two graduate degrees. Like Keys, he contributed to the war effort through science; he served as a physician in West Africa during World War II, where his work inspired him to rethink received nutrition wisdom. In 1944, he published the Cambridge School Children Study, a watershed analysis of children’s health and nutrition. His primary research at the time was on vitamins’ potential effectiveness in supplementing an inadequate diet, and decided to test his hypothesis that vitamins could ameliorate nutritional deficiencies caused by the war. In January and February of 1942 he and his team launched their study of over eleven-hundred children between the ages of 4 and 11; half the children were given pellets containing

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approximately half the daily recommended dosage of vitamins A, B, C, and D, and the other half were given a control or placebo (Yudkin notes that neither the teachers nor the parents were aware that some of the pellets were placebos). What they discovered was that “appreciable differences were seen between those living in a poorer area of the town and those in a better-class area. Compared with the latter, the children from the poorer area were on the average 0.8 in. shorter, 2.6 lb. lighter, had 2 percent less haemoglobin, and a grip about 1.25 kg. weaker, and showed more changes in conjunctival epithelium.”41 What Yudkin’s team learned was that the children who grew up in poverty had worse health outcomes—measurable in height, weight, hemoglobin, and overall strength—than their compatriots from wealthier families just across town. When the studies were repeated with children in Scotland, similar conclusions were reached. These results lead Yudkin to believe that nutrition was a significant element of public health and social well-being, not just personal health, and that there were dangerous, predictable health outcomes for children raised in poverty due to nutritional shortcomings in their diet. Furthermore, he realized that dietary culture—what and how we eat without really thinking about why, like the food available in grocery stores or that we order in restaurants—could significantly influence public and personal health. After the war, he noticed that even though food was no longer scarce in the UK (although it was still rationed for almost a decade), due to advances in manufacturing the nutritional profile of foods was declining while their abundance grew. Rather than just changing health outcomes for one or two children, he wondered: what if applied nutrition science and these same advancements in manufacturing could lift the health of whole communities? After the war, appalled by what he’d learned and eager to offer practical solutions to the science of malnutrition, Yudkin helped establish one of the first BSc degrees in nutrition in Europe at Queen Elizabeth College (QEC) in London. At QEC, he built a program centered on his conviction that scientifically-researched nutrition programs could create a strong and healthy population. But instead of focusing broadly on the diseases of abundance (like heart disease), Yudkin was interested in overnutrition as the result of sugar in the Western diet. Yudkin was particularly keen on the idea that sugar—which had gone from a carefully rationed ingredient during the 1940s to an additive in many mass-produced foods by the 1950s—was causing not just weight gain and tooth decay, but metabolic diseases such as diabetes and even atherosclerosis (the buildup of plaque in artery walls that can lead to a host of medical emergencies, including and especially heart attack).42 In postwar US and UK, processed and manufactured foods had become ubiquitous; given this environment, Yudkin was particularly annoyed to find ads for both slimming (which is British for “dieting”) and processed, sugar-laden junk

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food side-by-side in popular media. National statistics on weight gain seemed to be rising in tune with the availability of commercial sweets, and Yudkin believed that many physicians, public health officials, and nutrition scientists were blind to the toll sugar and other refined carbohydrates were taking on the public’s health.43 In 1959, just four years after Keys shared his initial epidemiological conclusions with the heart surgeons, Yudkin published results from a series of experiments. Writing in the medical journal The Lancet, Yudkin explains that he put some patients on a low-fat, low-calorie diet while he gave others a diet that severely restricted carbohydrate but where fats and proteins were allowed “to satiety.” What he found was that the patients who were on the low-carbohydrate diet lost more weight—nearly double their low-fat counterparts—and concluded that in the future, the goal of weight loss treatment should be “to increase physical activity, and to give a diet designed to be lower in calories while still of optimal satiety. This in practice means a diet which need be restricted only in carbohydrate.”44 This was the thesis of his own popular 1958 diet book, This Slimming Business, which, like Keys’s forays into diet and lifestyle publications, was quite successful.45 Even though his slimming books sold well, Yudkin believed his message wasn’t getting through to the larger population, so in 1972 he published an unequivocal admonition of sugar titled Pure, White, and Deadly. Yudkin’s intention was to convince lay readers that this seemingly innocent and ubiquitous ingredient was, as the title suggests, a nutritional wolf in sheep’s clothing. He writes in the introductory chapter that “if only a small fraction of what is already known about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive, that material would promptly be banned.”46 Pure, White, and Deadly was not a diet book, per se, but a history, a popular science book, and a polemic all rolled into one; it begins with a brief overview of what sugar is and how it is manufactured, and then moves into a carefully explicated catalogue of sugar’s many sins—social and medical. And contrary to the lipid hypothesis, which had consumed nutrition science and public health literature for a decade, Yudkin lays the blame for the epidemic of heart disease squarely on sugar. In the book, Yudkin frequently mentions the “dogmatic Keys” and his fellow proponents of the lipid hypothesis, stating that he personally had “found that there was a moderate but by no means excellent relationship between fat consumption and coronary mortality, which did not become closer even when one separated the fats into animal and vegetable. A better relationship turned out to exist between sugar consumption and coronary mortality in a variety of countries.”47 Yudkin unabashedly identifies himself as one of the early doubters of Keys’s lipid hypothesis, noting that there was copious data to support his own theory about sugar from the same 22 countries Keys studied, which is 16 more than “the six referred to by Keys . . . [But] these other figures did not seem to fit into the beautiful

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straight-line relationship—the more fat, the more coronary disease—that was evident when only the six selected countries were considered.”48 Ultimately, Yudkin writes, each of us must take the evidence presented and “make up your mind quite firmly that you really want to reduce your sugar intake. It may be that you are beginning to worry about your waistline, or your dentist’s bills, even if you don’t really believe all I have said about ulcers and diabetes and heart disease.” With these incentives to choose from, Yudkin believes that the power of mind over matter will prevail in eliminating sugar and assures his reader that “you won’t find it too difficult.”49 For vocalizing his doubts about the entrenchment of the lipid hypothesis and taking a stance against the sugar industry’s machinations in pedaling a dangerous and addictive product, Yudkin essentially lost his career. The industrial and manufacturing interests indicted in Pure, White, and Deadly responded with damage-control tactics like orchestrating book reviews accusing Yudkin of writing science fiction instead of science fact, petitioning other research organizations to pull his funding, and getting invitations to professional conferences retracted. One of the more dramatic displays of “it’s either him or us” politics was the abrupt loss of his university’s support, who gave into the threat by various trade groups of withdrawing his entire department’s research funding. The QEC reneged on Yudkin’s retirement, shut down his lab, and stuck him in a windowless back office. And on top of these indignities were the contemptuous remarks of America’s most famous physiologist, Dr. Ancel Keys, who dismissed Yudkin’s theories as being “without basis.” Without a shred of irony or self-awareness, Keys even sniffed that “Yudkin’s views appeal to some commercial interests with the result that this discredited propaganda is periodically rebroadcast to the general public of many countries”—a denunciation that could easily also have been said of Keys.50 In a truly bittersweet (in every sense of the word) coda to Yudkin’s career, his research on sugar and public health—and his speculation that the sugar industry’s rejection of “criticisms of the effects [of sugar] on health” was because they simply “do not wish it to be known”—has been vindicated. In the twenty-first century, several champions of Yudkin’s theories emerged, brandishing solid physiological and molecular evidence of sugar’s connection to metabolic and cardiovascular disease that the population and laboratory studies of the 1960s and 1970s were unable to demonstrate unequivocally.51 Additionally, Yudkin’s theory that the sugar industry knew more than it was letting on was dramatically borne out by a 2016 exposé of the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), the sucrose industry’s trade association and lobbying arm. Dr. Cristin Kearns, a dentist-turned-researcher, published an article in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Internal Medicine detailing her years-long investigation into internal SRF documents, in which she discovered that in 1967 the trade association paid Harvard University

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researchers to publish a literature review acquitting sugar of any connection to coronary heart disease. In the face of mounting medical data (and the unrelenting onslaught of John Yudkin) regarding their product, Kearns explains that the SRF commissioned a review that would state “there was ‘no doubt’ that the only dietary intervention required to prevent CHD (coronary heart disease) was to reduce dietary cholesterol and substitute polyunsaturated fat for saturated fat in the American diet.” Not only did the SRF pay the researchers directly—rather than sponsor research on sugar, fat, or heart disease from an appropriate academic distance—but they also had a hand in editing the publications that followed: a two-part literature review in the New England Journal of Medicine. Kearns describes the review as serving the particular interests of the sugar industry “by arguing that epidemiologic, animal, and mechanistic studies associating sucrose with CHD were limited” and that any future interventions or studies “needed to yield a definitive answer to the question of how to modify the American diet to prevent CHD [were those] that exclusively used serum cholesterol level as a CHD biomarker.”52 Even though it is not unusual for an industry to sponsor flattering research on their products, the cardinal sin uncovered by Kearns’s investigation was that researchers were paid to make another nutrient look like the culprit while concealing their own product’s culpability. As Marion Nestle, the now-retired chair of New York University’s Department of Nutrition and Food Studies and expert in food politics, explains in her commentary on Kearns’s JAMA article, there is “little doubt that the intent of the industry-funded review was to reach a foregone conclusion. The [SRF-sponsored] investigators knew what the funder expected, and produced it. Whether they did this deliberately, unconsciously, or because they genuinely believed saturated fat to be the greater threat is unknown. But science is not supposed to work this way” (my emphasis).53 In this case, the sugar industry paid scientists to publicly blame America’s health woes on fat, shutting down any debate on the connection between sugar and heart disease—thereby consecrating the lipid hypothesis—for almost half a century. You might be wondering why all this wangling over scientific paradigms is relevant to food faiths and spiritual practice today. There are several reasons, the first of which is captured in Nestle’s incisive comment: the dogmatic thinking that lead to unquestioning support for the lipid hypothesis and deliberate concealing of sugar’s negative health effects is a feature, not a bug, of scientific paradigms in general, and nutritional science paradigms in particular. There are numerous eras in the history of science where the formulation and testing of new a hypothesis is swamped by a concerted effort to preserve an old idea; sometimes a new idea is stymied just because the old theory seems to work (more or less), but sometimes it is because scientists have careers staked on the old theory’s success.54 The lipid hypothesis is a

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classic case of what philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called “preserving the phenomena,” where a scientific theory that has heretofore appeared to answer relevant questions begins to crack under the weight of contradictory evidence; but when the incommensurable evidence against the old theory can no longer be made to fit, the theory is preserved by either throwing out, explaining away, or concealing new data.55 Even though a reproducible and falsifiable hypothesis—one that can be tested through the scientific method— is the hallmark of science, ideas and concepts that routinely fail to be proven but are difficult to disprove hang on well past their expiration date. But sometimes, with great resistance and a tsunami of evidence, scientific paradigms are slowly overturned. And so it has been for the paradigms that governed nutrition science through the latter half of the 1900s: evidence that did not preserve the phenomena of the lipid hypothesis and data that contradicted the holy writ of sugar’s innocence in heart disease was squelched, and forced to await a new generation of scientists, researchers, and dieticians. Beginning in the early 2000s, these experts turned their skeptical eye to nutritionism, which brought about an overdue correction of the lipids vs. sugar (or, more generally, fats and/or proteins vs. carbohydrates) debates. For one thing, historians showed that there was no scientific reason for all macronutrients—fats and carbohydrates—being worked into a comprehensive hypothesis of human health and heart disease; the two paradigms were kept separate mostly because of the mutual dislike of their authors for one another.56 But there has also been epidemiological and experimental evidence demonstrating that the nutrionism-ist conviction that the culprit in poor health outcomes must be a single macronutrient is just scientism—the reductionist and unflagging belief in science to explain all phenomena—writ in the language of nutrition science. Rather than thinking broadly about ecologies or co-morbidities or even the microbiome, the search for a single saboteur molecule derailed the whole enterprise; a common complaint amongst the food faithful today is that nutritionism pushes out other valid theories of human health and diet to the detriment of public health and actual science, leaving the average person stranded in the land of SAD.57 But on the scale of whole populations and from a public health perspective, these spiritual eaters’ observations are correct that something appears to have gone terribly wrong: deaths from heart disease have declined since the 1970s—a fact some experts attribute to pharmaceutical interventions, advanced surgical procedures, and better diagnostics—but diagnosed heart disease has remained steady. Added to this, metabolic diseases—diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure—have increased sharply since 1980. All of this suggests that perhaps nutrition science pulled the wrong card from a stacked deck.

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But another reason for this dive into the history of the dueling paradigms of fat and sugar is because the two worldviews that comprise the biggest split in our modern diet culture are the progeny of the dialectic between Keys and Yudkin: the high-carb/low-fat (which today includes vegan, whole-food plant-based, macrobiotic, and Mediterranean) diet and the low-carb/high-protein and/or fat (i.e., Paleo, keto, Whole30, ancestral- or traditional-foodways) diet. The legacy of these two researchers’ public (and rancorous) scientific debate still plays out in food faiths communities’ attitudes toward science, health, and biomedicine today, and continues to influence beliefs about health and wellness in American culture. Furthermore, because Keys’s theories won the day, they have become enshrined in hearts, minds, and US public health policy. The generational belief that “the fat you eat is the fat you wear”—or even the old saw “you are what you eat”—was considered common dietary wisdom by everyone from purveyors of low-fat diet programs (readers of a certain age will remember Stop the Insanity) up to doctors, dietitians, scientists, and public health officials.58 And it was this reflective acceptance by the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition physicians as well as the scientists working for the USDA that caused some retrospective skepticism among the twenty-first century food faithful, who collectively began to wonder who—or what—was really in charge of nutrition science. INDUSTRIAL INFLUENCE AND ITS INEVITABLE DISCONTENTS It’s possible that the debate about which nutrient was causing cardiovascular disease would have remained purely academic if it were not for the intervention of US government and public health-adjacent agencies. The US government has been advising Americans on what to eat from the beginning of the twentieth century; that counseling has been more-or-less benevolent, a kind of paternalistic nudging that generally has the best interests of its citizens in mind. Historically, this prodding stemmed from the enormous economic stakes of redistributing a surfeit of agricultural goods across the nation; it was the US Department of Agriculture’s job to ensure that surplus agricultural produce was sold somehow, which apparently included the federal government telling Americans to drink milk whether they wanted to or not.59 But the lack of a coherent and established food culture in the US (a consequence of being a nation descended from immigrants who melted into the mainstream, which we discussed in chapter 1) also freed the government to champion foodways based in nutrition science, rather than tradition or history. The USDA genuinely wanted to aid America’s farmers and guide its citizens on eating nutritiously. But the extent to which these honorable goals can get

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garbled in the mix of science, industry, and culture became clear in 1977, when Senator George McGovern of South Dakota convened a committee on the status of nutrition, food, and health in America. The children who inherited the low-fat paradigm were only a generation or two removed from the first Americans to receive dietary advice from the USDA, which began issuing nutrition guides in 1894. Focused on macronutritients—protein, carbohydrate, fat—the earliest USDA nutrition guides were attempts to translate “nutrient intake recommendations into food intake recommendations” and provide “a conceptual framework for selecting the kinds and amounts of foods, which together provide a nutritionally satisfactory diet.”60 But as nutrition science evolved, so did the USDA guides, changing recommendations from macros to food groups (what the USDA termed the basic four: milk, meat, grains, fruits and vegetables) to vitamins (recommended daily allowances of vitamins C, B, E, and on through the alphabet) in an attempt to minimalize malnutrition and maximize health. The guides were for the most part a-political, as their focus was helping Americans understand which nutrients are necessary to maintaining good health. But this political agnosticism changed after the McGovern Committee Report. Officially titled “The United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs” when it was convened in 1969, the committee’s intention was to root out causes of malnutrition and highlight the hunger epidemic roiling the wealthiest country on Earth. Like Yudkin in the UK twenty-five years earlier, Democratic Senator George McGovern of South Dakota was scandalized by governmental indifference to malnutrition in the US, where it was explained away as ignorance or laziness and the obvious connections of health with socioeconomics and the suburban-urban divide were ignored. McGovern’s colleagues were skeptical of his crusade and he had to petition Congress for a full year to receive funding for his committee, to which he appointed the few other politicians likewise concerned about their constituents’ health.61 As the bi-partisan committee learned about the complicated food production and distribution network in the US, they found a two-fold problem: Americans with too little to eat and Americans eating too much, which in either case resulted in citizens who were unwell. Thus, with both Yudkin’s undernourished children and Keys’s corpulent businessmen on their minds, the McGovern committee decided to establish clear guidelines on healthy and nutritious eating by clarifying and expanding the USDA’s recommendations. In January 1977, the committee released their Dietary Goals for the United States, whose purpose was to “point out that the eating patterns of this century represent as critical a public health concern as any now before us” and act as “a practical guide to promote good eating habits [and hopefully] also act as a catalyst for government and industry action to facilitate the achievement

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of the recommended dietary goals.”62 Noting that “[o]ur national health depends on how well and how quickly Government and industry respond,” McGovern’s first statements to the press on January 14 brought together the two warring paradigms that Keys and Yudkin had rent asunder: Too much fat, too much sugar or salt, can be and are linked directly to heart disease, cancer, obesity and stroke, among other killer diseases. In all, six of the ten leading causes of death in the United States have been linked to our diet. Those of us within Government have an obligation to acknowledge this. The public wants some guidance, wants to know the truth, and hopefully today we can lay the cornerstone for the building of better health for all Americans, through better nutrition. Last year every man, woman and child in the United States consumed 125 pounds of fat, and 100 pounds of sugar.

To combat these issues, the report offered basic goals for dietary changes, buying guides for consumers, and recommendations for “action within Government and industry to better maximize nutritional health.” McGovern concluded his introductory remarks with his hope that “this report will perform a function similar to that of the Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking,” which he acknowledged didn’t necessarily stop people from smoking, but prodded the cigarette industry to modify “its products to reduce risk factors, and many people who would otherwise be smoking have stopped because of it.”63 But, like the cigarette industry—who claimed to be transforming their products for safety and health while manipulating the science showing nicotine was addictive and a public health risk—the food industry giants circled their wagons. They unleashed lobbyists and lawyers on Congress with the directive to get any negative language about their product removed from the report’s basic goals and to make sure future nutrition guides were revised to be more favorable. Specifically, the sugar, cattle, dairy, and egg industries objected to the report’s language of “eat less.” The nutrition guide suggested eating less high-fat meat (i.e., red meat) and dairy products to limit saturated fat, fewer eggs for the same reason, a drastic reduction in the amount of sugar consumed, and instead advised eating fruits, vegetables, and whole grains (dietary advice that could have been written by Sylvester Graham). “What are the risks associated with eating less meat, less fat, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, less sugar, less salt, and more fruits, vegetables, unsaturated fat and cereal products—especially whole grain cereals?” the report’s authors ask, and answer that there are “none that can be identified and important benefits can be expected.” The risks were apparently not to human health, but to the multi-billion-dollar food industry, whose reputations and financial stakes were on the line. Their senators and representatives (some of whom were up for re-election in

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1980) hopped to answer the howls of objection. Several committee members immediately backed off of their initial recommendations and pivoted toward an ameliorated message, including the committee’s chairman, Senator McGovern. McGovern was castigated by the cattle farmers of his own state for suggesting that Americans eat less red meat and that beef was gravely high in saturated fat. Infamously, after the initial fallout and over the course of 1977, the guidelines to eat less meat, eggs, dairy, and sugar were revised with the significantly weaker and confusing language of “choice.” The second draft of the report, released in December, changed the dietary guides to say that Americans should “decrease consumption of animal fat, and choose meats . . . which will reduce saturated fat intake.” This language of choice did little to clarify to Americans which foods were good for them, as the average person didn’t necessarily know that red meat is high in saturated fat without the USDA telling them so in the first place. But the report did help consecrate the low-fat diet as a governmental recommendation, and became the foundational paradigm of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA). The compellation and publication of the DGA was a direct outcome of the McGovern committee’s findings, and since 1980 have been issued every five years by the USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services. Despite being knitted into the next official USDA food guide, the vague directive in the DGA to “choose” a low-fat diet left most Americans out to sea as to what they should actually be eating.64 But at the same time that the message of which fats were bad and why got garbled and with the power of the food producers (including industrial food manufacturers) preserved, a new industry of low-fat food production was born. Almost overnight, the “choice” to eat low-fat became simple: industrial foodstuffs like potato chips made with artificial fat substitutes (remember Olestra?) and breakfast cereals containing more sugar than grains hit supermarkets and airwaves pontificating on their low- and fat-free benefits to heart health. Americans paid billions for what the food faithful might recognize as the twentieth-century version of the Standard American Diet; added to the nineteenth century’s fried meats and refined breads were thousands of processed food products, built with the industrial ingenuity of Will Kellogg’s corn flakes but minus the earnest commitment to wellness. In this processed food gold rush, high-calorie/lownutrient “Frankenfoods”—food products made in a laboratory by industry scientists who replaced natural fats with synthetic imitations—flooded the market. Today, the food used as an object lesson in this era of nutrition science gone corporate is the original junk food: cookies. The industrial food product formerly known as cookies were designed in a lab, stripped of the fat that made them moist and tasty, and pumped with massive amounts of high fructose corn syrup (a sugar substitute made from corn) that generated a calorie count higher than a wild-caught cookie; the addition of high doses of

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sugar and sugar substitutes became standard operating procedure when food scientists discovered that the added sweetness made the fat free version more palatable. And so Americans who had been told to “choose foods low in fat” skipped right over fresh fruits and vegetables—which, alas, have no army of lobbyists or massive advertising budgets to speak to their low-fat bona fides—and chose fat free cookies. The garbled interpretation of the language of choice (“I must choose low-fat foods for health . . . these cookies are lowfat . . . therefore, cookies are healthy and I choose to eat them”) has been dubbed by some “the SnackWell phenomenon,” named for the Nabisco cookie that was the prototypical example of a non-fat-but-high-calorie snack.65 The unintended consequence of the government’s simultaneous endorsement of the low-fat diet and haste to placate the food industry is perhaps best summed up in Pollan’s variation of the Abrahamic aphorism: “So can a notorious junk food pass through the needle eye of nutritionist logic and come out the other side looking like a health food.”66 Using science and technology to precisely calibrate macronutrients in food research and development was a boon for the industry, but it was a bust for American health; although there is a great deal more highly entertaining public health history here, suffice to say that the upswing in American consumption of manufactured foods and correlative rise in metabolic and cardiovascular disease tracks right onto the sanctioning and spread of Frankenfoods.67 Even Graham crackers, the descendants of Sylvester Graham’s wholesome brown bread, were larded with sugar, rebranded as low-fat, and marketed as a health snack. When the facts are laid out, it seems strange that a government committee—ostensibly trying to guide citizens toward a nutritious diet, firmly grounded in science—would change its recommendations in response to the demands of various food industries. Furthermore, it seems highly questionable that this same government committee would put all their chips on a scientific theory—the “low-fat ideology”—that some committee members felt was unproven or didn’t really understand.68 And it was concerning that a single committee could be a hinge on which so much of American public health and diet turned. There were, over the next decades, both long- and short-term scientific and epidemiological studies whose results alternatively confounded or confirmed the low-fat paradigm sanctioned by the government; the recommendations swung back and forth so frequently that many Americans just stopped trying to keep track. But the McGovern committee was only one example of a government entity who unsuccessfully tried to serve two masters—biomedical science and the international corporations that produced food and pharmaceuticals—and found its hand forced by the financial clout of the corporate commerce and trade groups. Beginning in the late 1980s, and in addition generalized anxiety around food and disease, a new worry appeared: that pharmaceutical companies

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were engaging in underhanded marketing tactics, with the benediction of the FDA, to sell name-brand medications to suffering Americans. Direct-toconsumer (DTC) advertising by pharmaceutical companies required what some have criticized as “selling a treatment by selling a disease”;69 rather than a remedy, many felt Big Pharma was inventing a problem and then offering a mitigated cure.70 But the larger share of the ballooning drug market included treatments for diseases that biomedicine had recently attributed to diet: heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and on. This transformation of patient into consumer in the marketplace of personal health was paralleled in a variety of government-sponsored institutions, where instead of financing public health interventions and subsidizing vegetables, funding was allocated to research on highly profitable treatments—drugs, surgeries, mechanized therapies, and expensive medical procedures. It was the stuff of Ellen White’s worst nightmares: the unfettered marketing of medicines that were not designed to cure, but to be profitable. The breadth of Big Pharma’s tactics—intense government lobbying, coercive advertising, influencing potential proscribing physicians with money and gifts—lead former insiders like Dr. Colin Campbell (one of the popularizers of the whole-foods plant-based diet) to observe in his 2005 book The China Study that there are more than “a few scientists who are willing to sell their souls to the highest bidder.”71 The patient had become a consumer, but many people weren’t buying it. Health was a commodity that many Americans felt they could not afford. REVOLUTION AND INSURRECTION—FROM BOOKS TO SOCIAL MEDIA TO DISCOVERING FOOD FAITHS The close of the twentieth century left many open questions about nutrition, health, food, and diet, which dovetailed with the trend toward an institution-less embrace of the spirituality of practice (as we discussed in chapter 1). But though some spiritual seekers combined religious traditions with dietary practice, for the rest of the nation diet continued to be a function of science and marketing, rather than culture and history. Many peoples’ idea of what to eat and why didn’t come from a shared culture or the pursuit of pleasure, but from the latest and loudest dietary craze. The prevailing diet culture of the late twentieth century was usually some combination of fad diet books—books making outsized weight-loss promises and offering detailed eating plans focused on adding or removing a specific macronutrient—along with fast and processed foods and government nutrition plans, all served with a heaping (but still mostly invisible) side of industry influence. Soon, however, much of this culture would transform in unexpected ways.

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Three important developments in the first decade of the twenty-first century were responsible for a sea-change in the way Americans thought about food, diet, and health. Taken together, they close out a long history—that for our purposes, began with Sylvester Graham nearly 200 years earlier—that helps us understand how a diet could go from something marketed by selfstyled experts to an entire lifestyle based in science and oriented toward the spirituality of practice. The first of those developments was a succession of popular books, written by nutrition experts and science journalists, that helped expose industry influence on American foodways, the development of American fast food culture, and the cycle of our food systems—the great chains of agriculture and commerce that are the mainstay of the American diet. The second important development was the growth and ubiquity of social media platforms. Social media facilitated food faith communities gathering and sharing their stories and their science in real time, which is a far cry from awaiting a monthly delivery of The Health Reformer, the Seventh-day Adventist journal that John Harvey Kellogg edited for nearly seventy years.72 The Internet itself enabled ordinary citizens to search enormous digital databases for scientific evidence supporting their practice. And finally, the mighty wind that truly fanned the flame of modern food faiths was everyone’s favorite personal computing device/pocket-sized slot machine: the smartphone.73 The first of three books that helped shape the zeitgeist of nutrition and food in the twenty-first century was Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001).74 The book approaches food and politics from the perspective of the workers who are the backbone of the industry, rather than the industrialists whose influence shapes how we eat. Schlosser, a journalist, became interested in “the dark side of the all-American meal” (which is the book’s subtitle) while researching an article about migrant farm workers. He chronicles the lives of the people whose labor provides every part of a fast food meal and the social, environmental, and public health consequences thereof: the tomatoes harvested, the cattle slaughtered, the meals prepped and served through a drive-thru window. The book—which also explores the expansion of these restaurants across the US and details the development of fast food from flavor lab to slaughterhouse—has been compared in scope and significance to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. It’s an apt comparison, as both books expose the federal and state laws that protect corporations while endangering human lives through the packaging, slaughtering, and selling food on the enormous scale of American fast food culture. Schlosser punches a hole in the notion of “it’s only a burger” by showing the considerable cost of America’s favorite drive-thru meal to the workers, the animals, and the environment. The book was a bestseller. Schlosser’s tour de force was followed the next year by Marion Nestle’s Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition & Health (2002).75

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Nestle, whom we met earlier in this chapter, is a decisive critic of the political jockeying that circumscribed the McGovern Report. And she is mistrustful of the role lobbyists and insiders have on the American diet mostly because she lived it. Less than a decade after the McGovern report’s contested release in 1977, Nestle—a biochemist by training and a scientist of human nutrition by vocation—was tapped to be the senior nutrition policy advisor for the Department of Health and Human Services, a position she held from 1986 to 1988. She spends part of Food Politics recounting the political tightrope she and others were forced to walk as they edited the Report on Nutrition and Health for the Surgeon General; the task was a crash course in politics, with every nutrient and molecule of federally approved food guides wrangled over in the push-pull of government and industry. She knew this haggling over the jots and tittles would be consequential for biomedicine, public health, and the multibillion-dollar food business for decades to come. Nestle intends for her exploration of the entanglement between the food industry, the US government, and nutrition science to expose “the ways in which food companies use political processes—entirely conventional and nearly always legal—to obtain government and professional support for the sale of their products. Its twofold purpose is to illuminate the extent to which the food industry determines what people eat and to generate much wider discussion of the food industry’s marketing methods and use of the political system.”76 Nestle’s snapshot of how the sausage is made (so to speak) in Washington illuminated how government agencies could be forced by high-ranking political officials to take direction from influential industry lobbyists, rather than nutrition or biomedical science. The result of this political football, Nestle feels, is a government machine that prioritizes commerce over the health and safety of American citizens. The book sold relatively well when it was first published, but it’s had a long second life; citing Nestle’s observations about food politics and the naked attempts by food manufacturers to influence public health, many in the food faithful community have pointed to her pioneering work as the origin of their skepticism of industrial foodways. Perhaps the book that definitively lifted the genre of food journalism out of the ghetto of miracle diet books to the top of bestseller lists was Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006).77 Building on the work of Schlosser and Nestle, Pollan begins with the question, “What should I eat for dinner?” This seemingly quotidian reflection opens a discussion on how our food today is technologically mediated and essentially divorced from the natural processes that fed humanity for thousands of years. Pollan is interested in food chains, and the ways in which those chains both sustain us and are unsustainable. To illustrate this conundrum, Pollan’s book is divided into four sections, and each section explores a different aspect of the American food system. The first section begins in a cow feedlot, which is the initial

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stop on the food chain that supports the multi-billion-dollar fast food business. At the feedlot, Pollan notes that the cows are fed corn (which is notoriously bad for the cows’ health) to expedite their growth and cut costs; corn represents another link in the food chain: it is the most heavily subsidized crop in the US, and its surplus is used in everything from industrial food manufacturing to animal feed. Next, Pollan takes the reader on a tour of the organic food industry, which he reveals is just as financially voracious as the industrial and non-organic corporate farms that are the mainstay of American agribusiness. Pollan spends the third interlude at a midsized, multi-crop farm in Virginia that manages to avoid both the scale and the carbon pollution of mono-product, industrial farms through intensive attention to the land and the season. The book ends with Pollan hunting, gathering, growing, and cooking his own meal of wild boar, chanterelle mushrooms, fresh garden greens, and homemade pasta. The Omnivore’s Dilemma brings together economics, environmental science, and cultural studies, and argues that we should see and reflect on all three when we talk about what to eat—not just nutritional information or convenience. Pollan’s admittedly laborious and logistically difficult final homemade meal leads him to reflect on how for “countless generations eating was something that took place in the steadying context of a family and a culture [as] a set of rituals and habits, manners and recipes”— all of which have been lost in just a generation or two. Although that past is impossible to recapture, he encourages his reader to “imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.”78 These books were just three of several dozen on the industry, context, evolution, and culture of food published in the first two decades of the twentyfirst century. In the early 2000s, these books were shelved in the diet section of a (real or virtual) bookstore, but soon they constituted a new genre (which was paralleled in many ways by an equally successful new genre of food documentaries79). A short roster of influential authors and their books include journalists Gary Taubes’s Good Calories, Bad Calories, Michael Moss’s Salt, Sugar, Fat, and Greg Crister’s Fat Land, novelist Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, businesswoman Mireille Guiliano’s French Women Don’t Get Fat, and sports nutritionist Matt Fitzgerald’s Diet Cults; these and many others infiltrated a market previously dominated by books marketing dietary strategies, and instead offered history, science, and a new perspective on what Pollan called “our national eating disorder.”80 Instead of chasing another diet about a newly-vilified nutrient (gluten, fat, sugar, etc.) or feeling confounded by the famous French paradox—that the wineswilling, cheese-guzzling, baguette swinging, lipo-philic French not only don’t get fat, but appear to have lower rates of heart disease compared to

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Americans—these books suggested that perhaps what we should be discussing is “an American paradox: that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.”81 In their own way, each of these books was a response to the twentieth-century tide of nutritionism that washed out bigger pictures of health, culture, and whole foods, and this new genre placed especial care on illuminating the bureaucratic and organizational structures (government offices, nutrition science) that enabled this shift. Despite that the subjects presented in these volumes encompassed everything from American diet culture to the history of nutrition science to outright moral condemnation of modern foodways, many of these books were tuned to the same key and played some of the same notes. While the theses and themes vary, most of these books included reflections on how government-sponsored wellness is frequently and invisibly a front for the processed food industry; that to create testable hypotheses, nutrition science and allied disciplines— epidemiology, physiology, endocrinology, and on—must focus on one nutrient or ingredient; this kind of focus on testable hypotheses, which is valuable in other scientific arenas, can be reductionist when it comes to understanding diet and health; sterile research experiments like randomized control trials that examine the effects of the addition or subtraction of various nutrients to a diet leave out confounders like environment and culture that might also explain good or poor health outcomes; the combined effect of all these forces has been an unequivocal disaster from a public health perspective, condemning millions of Americans to cancer, diabetes, and heart disease; weight-loss diets as short-term solutions don’t work—the only way to create real transformation and cultivate health is through a lifestyle change; there are billions of dollars at stake in biomedicine and pharmaceuticals, another large industry that many of these authors claim will do whatever is necessary to keep citizens just sick enough to rely on their wares, so please look after your own health so that you do not end up needing medicinal intervention; and, even though the unmaking of dogma is acknowledged to be difficult, the reader is encouraged to be skeptical, follow these lines of research back to their origins for themselves, and, above all, eat real food—food that comes from a plant, rather than food that was made in one.82 Had this literary revolution remained between book covers and on library shelves, it’s probable that food faiths might have been a bit more niche— perhaps part of a seeker’s mentality but not up to the level of a spiritual practice. But the neutron bomb of the information revolution rapidly changed the popularity of food-focused lifestyle choices. The ubiquity of the Internet (easily connected to via the fast and cable-free variety proffered at coffee shops and in waiting rooms on a personal computing device) at the start of the twenty-first century enabled people who might never read a diet book the opportunity to encounter fresh perspectives on nutrition and wellness. One

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theme that emerges from testimonials among the food faithful is surprise that the information they read online differed substantially from nutritional information they had been given by doctors, learned in school, or gleaned from the oft-revised USDA food guides. In personal blogs, editorials, informational websites, and videos, proponents of various food faiths could share everything from their day-to-day experiences as a vegan/clean/ancestral eater, to diet-compliant recipes, to restaurant suggestions, to summaries of scientific articles complete with hyperlinks to relevant journals. And this easy access to up-to-date scientific research enabled online information on and about food faiths to flourish. Suddenly, what used to require a library card and hours combing through the stacks to find even a single relevant article could now be done with a quick search online and an open-access scientific or medical journal. Freed from analog research that either required admission to a university library or a very patient interlibrary loan specialist, an interested convert could suddenly explore the latest discoveries in ethnobotany or ketosis or metabolic syndrome, all in a few keystrokes. Additionally, the information offered to anonymous Internet readers via blogs and thematic websites was the opposite of the slick expertise or celebrity endorsement of best-selling diet books; diet or lifestyle advice shared on a blog or personal website is usually framed as practical guidance by a friendly non-specialist—an ordinary curious and concerned citizen, just like their followers. The curators of diet sites are sometimes but, not always, experts; more often, food faith blogs are curated by someone who bills themselves as an interested layperson who has done their own research, imbibed the facts, and is now repackaging scientific information into practical food shopping suggestions and recipes. The distillation of entire food philosophies into bite size blogs or short videos made what had previously been available mostly via long form media, such as books, or a paid subscription program, like Weight Watchers, suddenly abundant and easy to understand. It was a small revolution and a good example of what computer programmers and web designers dubbed Web 2.0: the proliferation of websites in the early 2000s that prioritized user-generated content, rather than the passive consumption of information. And the easier access meant that sharing everything from one’s own conversation narrative to the particulars of a specific redemptive dietary practice could now be done rapidly and without the need for either programmers or dietitians. Acceleration of this revolution came just a few years into the new millennium, with the double-whammy of the rise of social media and a swift market saturation by the smartphone. In 2006, a popular social media website previously available only to American and Canadian college students opened registration to anyone over the age of 13. Just a few months later, the site formerly known as “the Facebook” went global, and by 2022 had nearly 3 billion

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users. In its march toward Internet domination, Facebook swept competing websites into obscurity (such as MySpace) or bought them outright (like Instagram), and become a cornerstone of the new information age. Facebook began as an online tool for students to share social updates with large groups of friends (and, rather infamously in its earliest iteration, as a platform for college students to rate the attractiveness of their classmates), but it has blossomed into a worldwide media network worth over half a trillion dollars. And it was Facebook, Twitter, and their kin—social media platforms built on information sharing, both personal and professional—that enabled the rapid transmission of the good news of various food faiths. The work of curating the food blogs or informational diet websites of the early Web 2.0 could now be reduced to a presence on a new platform of short-form, thematic, personal updates. And it is a platform that is unprecedentedly popular. Because, rather than seeking out and personally curating a list of informative blogs or websites, a food faith convert can now find a like-minded community on Facebook, Reddit, or Instagram with a quick search and click of the “follow” button. And instead of shouting into the void of the Internet searching for users, a blog or website owner can share their dietary lifestyle, offer quick and interpretative explanations of the science supporting their practice, and market their brand on TikTok, Twitter, or YouTube. Set free from the constraints of time and space, online communities can gather together from around the world to discuss diet, science, and health. The information revolution enabled a revolution in eating. But when things really got interesting was the introduction of the smartphone. When he first introduced it in 2007—just a year after Facebook opened registration to non-college students—Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that the best thing about the iPhone was that it was simple, and simplifying. It combined the convenience of a cellphone with the touch-screen and computing technology of Apple’s hugely successful music player, the iPod; Jobs proclaimed that this recombination meant users only had to carry one device, rather than juggling a cell phone and an MP3 player (and sometimes also a personal digital assistant, or PDA, like the Newton). By all accounts, Jobs never wanted the iPhone to be the app-based, all-purpose computer it’s become—he originally envisioned it as a music playing device from which you could make phone calls, send or receive texts, and access the Internet.83 But, in just a few years, websites accessible via Internet browser were repackaged and sold as downloadable applications (aka apps). Now users didn’t have to check Facebook or update Twitter by accessing the website via a browser: these actions—and more!—could be done easily and instantly through smartphone apps. With their ease-of-use, apps abetted the smartphone’s evolution into a machine tailor-made for the social media age. The smartphone apps for TikTok,

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Instagram, and other Web 2.0 platforms enable users to take and share photos and videos, post links, send and receive messages instantly, follow and be followed by other users, and generally immerse themselves in a particular—in our case, dietary—worldview. And, as Silicon Valley apostates have recently revealed, these apps are deliberately designed to be addictive—intentional digital rabbit holes through which a user falls into a wonderland of likes, links, and an echo-chamber of harmonious agreement.84 A world of information and whole platforms of cooperative community members are available to a spiritual eating convert, and all accessible from the tiny computer that fits in the palm of your hand. The confluence of these technological innovations, the social media communications revolution, an expanding general knowledge of food policy and the history of nutrition science, and a growing distaste for the machinations of industrial food manufactures and big pharma all created an ideal environment for the diet-based spirituality of practice. The easy availability of scientific information, the sharing culture of social media platforms, and the newly-awakened sense that true health is not just the absence of illness or weight-loss inspired a new generation of seekers. And, for many in the growing cohort of Nones, the way to bodily wellness and spiritual purpose is a food faith practice. With this in mind, we should begin by exploring how people convert to a food faith in the first place. NOTES 1. John and Will were the fifth and ninth children of their mother, Ann Janette, who was John Preston’s second wife and stepmother to his five children with his first wife, Mary Ann, who passed away from tuberculosis at age 29. TB remained a specter in the Kellogg family for decades, with John Preston ultimately succumbing to “consumption” at age 73 in 1881, and John Harvey suffering from reoccurring and resurgent bouts of pulmonary tuberculosis throughout his life (Markel 28–29). Howard Markel, The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017). 2. Quoted in Markel, 39. 3. Markel, 40. 4. Quoted in Markel, 45. 5. Markel, 46. 6. Starr, 112, 113–114 7. Starr, 113. 8. Several biographers believe that it was Kellogg’s time at Bellevue that shaped his views on sexuality. Kellogg famously preached—and abided by—celibacy. Even though he married San nurse Ella Eaton and they remained happily married for nearly

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four decades, it was widely known that the marriage was unconsummated, and that Dr. and Mrs. Kellogg slept in separate rooms, an arrangement that suited their mutual beliefs regarding sex and chastity. But Markel and others speculate that the ravages of sexually transmitted diseases Kellogg witnessed at Bellevue convinced the young doctor—far more adamantly than even the teachings of the Church—that sex of any kind was little more than an avenue to wasting disease and a horrible death. 9. Neither medical or food history has been particularly kind to John Harvey Kellogg, and with good reason: in later life, he became an uncompromising eugenicist. That said, most historians believe that both Kellogg brothers deserve better than how they are often portrayed; John Harvey in particular appears to have 1) truly believed he was doing the Lord’s work, whether or not it had been dictated by Ellen White, 2) was a man of God himself, and remained steadfastly so, even when his Church accused him of being otherwise, and 3) was genuinely devoted to helping humankind. For all of his faults, which seem to be many (vanity, selfishness, lack of brotherly love—when it came to Will, anyway—and a compulsion to rub elbows with the rich and famous), he went out of his way to help people, seemed to genuinely care about his patients’ health, adopted or fostered literally dozens of children, used a sliding scale to charge for his surgeries so that the wealthy could fund the destitute, and worked hundreds of hours a week to teach people at the San and elsewhere through his writings about health and diet. His philosophies are justifiably ugly to our modern minds, but in his own way John Harvey Kellogg really was a true physician-reformer. 10. John Harvey Kellogg, The New Dietetics, What to Eat and How: a Guide to Scientific Feeding in Health and Disease (Battle Creek, Mich: The Modern medicine publishing co, 1921), 72. 11. Again, many commentators like to make much of both of these men linking digestion, bodily health, and masturbation. But, at a certain point the scholar— acknowledging the historical reality of the connection—is left to wonder how much this was genuinely the hill each was prepared to die on (and no doubt: both Graham and JHK honestly believed masturbation was a scourge among America’s youth) versus how much it has been made the central figure of the debate after the fact for humorous effect. 12. Kellogg (1921), 522. 13. John Harvey’s wife was named Ella, as was Will’s. The Kellogg brothers also had an older sister Ella, who died when they were children. Ella was also the name of the wife of their main rival in the burgeoning Battle Creek breakfast food/wellness spa retreat center industry, C. W. Post. In the case of Kellogg’s corn flakes, however, it was John Harvey’s Ella who was actively involved in the cereal’s creation, not any of the other ones. (Gerald Carson, Cornflake Crusade [New York: Rinehart & Company, 1957]). 14. In addition to four US patents, John Harvey Kellogg developed several medical techniques for treatments and surgery, pioneered electric light treatment for what today we know as seasonal affective disorder (the other SAD), constructed a variety of exercise machines, and commissioned recipes for a milk made from soybeans and a mock meat made from vegetable and legume proteins.

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15. Carson, 93ff. James Caleb Jackson, one of the popularizers of the water cure and from whom Ellen White seems to have acquired several of her ideas about health and nutrition (including the idea for a health spa, which she was inspired to do after visiting Jackson’s “Our Home Hygienic Institute”), had already created and sold a spiritually similar product called Granula. The Kelloggs changed the name to granola, and unwittingly titled another favorite breakfast food. 16. Smith (2009), 141–152. 17. Clarence G. Lasby, Eisenhower’s Heart Attack: How Ike Beat Heart Disease and Held on to the Presidency (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997). 18. Robert H. Boyle, “The Report That Shocked the President,” Sports Illustrated, August 15, 1955. 19. For more about Prudden’s fascinating life, see Danielle Friedman, Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2022), 5ff. 20. Quoted by President George W. Bush in his 2006 proclamation of National Physical Fitness and Sports Month. 21. Jonathan Metzl and Anna Rutherford Kirkland, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, Biopolitics, Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 200. James J. Gormley, Health at Gunpoint: The Fda’s Silent War against Health Freedom (Garden City Park, NY: Square One Publishers, 2013). 22. Gyorgy Scrinis, “Sorry Marge: Gyorgy Scrinis Cautions against the Ideology of ‘Nutritionism’ (Essay),” Meanjin, December 2002. 23. Kelsey Miller, “The Starvation Study That Changed the World,” Refinery29. com, https:​//​www​.refinery29​.com​/en​-us​/minnesota​-starvation​-experiment. 24. Todd Tucker, The Great Starvation Experiment: Ancel Keys and the Men Who Starved for Science(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 25. Harold Steere Guetzkow and Paul Hoover Bowman, Men and Hunger: A Psychological Manual for Relief Workers (Elgin: Brethren Publishing House, 1946). 26. CICO diets should depend on the caloric needs of the individual, but suffice to say that there is a Reddit group called r/1200isplenty. The effects of Keys’s low calorie diet on volunteers and the even more severe calorie cuts advocated by some modern weight loss apps has created a resurgence of interest in the 1944 study. 27. This description is from a journal article written by Keys in the early 1980s (A. Keys, “From Naples to Seven Countries—a Sentimental Journey,” Prog Biochem Pharmacol 19 (1983).) that has since been made famous by one of Keys fiercest twenty-first-century critics, Gary Taubes (Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011] 24–25). 28. Among the many sources (including Keys) that explore the history of this claim, are: D. Katz and Paolo Emilio Puddu, “Ancel Keys and the Seven Countries Study: An Evidence-Based Response to Revisionist Histories White Paper” (2017); Ancel Keys, Epidemiological Studies Related to Coronary Heart Disease. Characteristics of Men Aged 40–59 in Seven Countries (Tampere1966); Seven Countries a Multivariate Analysis of Death and Coronary Heart Disease (Cambridge: Harvard

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University Press, 1980). Katherine D. Pett et al., “The Seven Countries Study,” European Heart Journal 38, no. 42 (2017). 29. Harvey A. Levenstein, Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry About What We Eat (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 130. 30. Ancel Benjamin Keys and Margaret Keys, Eat Well & Stay Well (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 3–4. 31. Levenstein, 136, 137. 32. Ann F. La Berge, “How the Ideology of Low Fat Conquered America,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 63, no. 2 (2008). Le Berge notes that the problem with this type of endorsement was that “fresh foods were not labeled. This exclusion could suggest to consumers that processed foods were the heart-healthiest. Following protests, the AHA withdrew the program, but reinstated it in 1993” (Le Berge, 150). 33. Infamously, Fleischmann’s margarine ran a series of print ads of a young boy blowing out birthday candles with the caption, “Should an 8-year-old worry about cholesterol?” and the notation that their product was suitable for “all age groups.” The battle that ensued over this overstepping in claims is recounted in Levenstein, chapter 10. 34. Levenstein, 147. 35. La Berge writes that she uses the term ideology “because I came to see low fat as an over-arching belief that captured the minds and hearts of American medical and diet culture in the 1980s and 1990s. Supported by scientific studies, promoted by the federal government, the food industry, and the popular media, low fat became the dominant dietary belief of health care practitioners, health popularizers, and a substantial part of the American populace,” 140. 36. You can imagine Americans’ collective shock at the so-called French Paradox that emerged in the early 1990s, which was named for the fact that, despite eating diets replete with saturated fats (and plenty of red wine), the French lived longer and had lower rates of CHD than their American friends. This was part of the reason for John Yudkin’s twenty-first-century defendants’ (below) irritation that he had not been listened to sooner: Yudkin and others had been saying for years that the little bubble representing France was sitting squarely parallel to Italy’s dot on Keys’s graph of fat consumption relative to heart disease. (See, for example, Jean Ferrières, “The French Paradox: Lessons for Other Countries,” Heart 90, no. 1 [2004].) As it turns out, however, the paradox may have nothing to do with fat at all, and might just be a function of portion size (Paul Rozin et al., “The Ecology of Eating: Smaller Portion Sizes in France Than in the United States Help Explain the French Paradox,” Psychological Science 14, no. 5 [2003]). 37. J. Yerushalmy and H. E. Hilleboe, “Fat in the Diet and Mortality from Heart Disease: a Methodologic Note,” NY State J Med 57, no. 14 (1957). 38. This is a favorite recent hobby horse among scientists today, but just a smattering of articles on the topic include: D. Mozaffarian and R. Clarke, “Quantitative Effects on Cardiovascular Risk Factors and Coronary Heart Disease Risk of Replacing Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oils with Other Fats and Oils,” Eur J Clin Nutr 63 Suppl 2 (2009); K. Oh et al., “Dietary Fat Intake and Risk of Coronary Heart

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Disease in Women: 20 Years of Follow-up of the Nurses’ Health Study,” Am J Epidemiol 161, no. 7 (2005); C. M. Oomen et al., “Association between Trans Fatty Acid Intake and 10-Year Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in the Zutphen Elderly Study: A Prospective Population-Based Study,” Lancet 357, no. 9258 (2001). Robert Clarke and Sarah Lewington, “Trans Fatty Acids and Coronary Heart Disease,” BMJ (Clinical research ed.) 333, no. 7561 (2006). 39. One of the most vociferous and thorough recent defenses of Keys comes from Pett et al., “The Seven Countries Study,” (2017). The authors reply to many of the methodological objections recounted here and conclude that, “Allegations that SCS was deliberately designed in order to find specific, preconceived outcomes are decisively without merit” (51). 40. Le Berge, 152ff. 41. J. Yudkin, “Nutritional Status of Cambridge School-Children,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 4362 (1944). Specifically, the kids got “5,000 i.u. vitamin A, 1 mg. vitamin B, 25 mg. vitamin C, and 500 i.u. vitamin D” (4362). 42. Rachel Meach, “From John Yudkin to Jamie Oliver: A Short but Sweet History on the War against Sugar.” In David Gentilcore and Matthew Smith, Proteins, Pathologies and Politics: Dietary Innovation and Disease from the Nineteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 97ff. 43. Without descending into needlessly detailed and non-humanistic explanations, please just know that 1) sugars (e.g., sucrose) are, scientifically speaking, carbohydrates and 2) refined carbohydrates—like the white bread everyone from Graham to your grandmother has railed against—are broken down by the body as, basically, sugar. Your digestive system treats a slice of white bread essentially the same way it treats a candy cane or a can of soda: with a spike of your blood sugar [glucose] levels, a flood of insulin to regulate, and a subsequent “crash” in available energy. These sugars also raise your blood triglyceride levels, which over time (spoiler alert!) becomes a major risk factor for metabolic and—you guessed it—cardiovascular disease. 44. Yudkin (1959), 1138. 45. So successful, in fact, that he published seven follow-up books on the topic of weight control and nutrition. This Slimming Business was published with the title Lose Weight, Feel Great in the US, where slimming is an adjective, not a verb. 46. John Yudkin, Pure, White and Deadly: The Problem of Sugar (London: Davis-Poynter, 1972), 2. Pretty much anywhere and everywhere the book is quoted, this quotation is used; what is left out are the mountains of evidence Yudkin complied to substantiate this claim. 47. Yudkin (1972), 86. And because the rest of the paragraph is fascinating, here it is: “I found that there was a moderate but by no means excellent relationship between fat consumption and coronary mortality, which did not become closer even when one separated the fats into animal and vegetable. A better relationship turned out to exist between sugar consumption and coronary mortality in a variety of countries. The best relationship of all existed between the rise in the number of reported coronary deaths in the UK and the rise in the number of radio and television sets . . . this suggestion is not so stupid after all. The factors that have been implicated in causing coronary thrombosis include several that are associated with affluence—sedentariness, obesity,

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cigarette smoking, fat consumption, sugar consumption. On the one hand, therefore, the incidence of coronary thrombosis will be higher in those countries in which there is greater affluence as measured by any index such as cigarette or fat consumption, but also by the number of television sets or motor cars or telephones. On the other hand, many of these indices of affluence are likewise indices of sedentariness. People who have TV are likely to be physically less active than those who do not. So it is not entirely silly to point to these relationships.” These are all indicators that Yudkin claims Keys and others ignored. 48. Ibid. 49. Yudkin (1972), 163. 50. Ancel Keys, “Coronary Heart Disease: The Global Picture,” Atherosclerosis 22, no. 2 (1975), 175. 51. Two defenders in particular have become popular advocates of Yudkin’s theories: the aforementioned Gary Taubes and pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig. A sampling of their respective work includes: Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease (New York: Hudson Street Press, 2012); Robert H. Lustig, Laura A. Schmidt, and Claire D. Brindis, “The Toxic Truth About Sugar,” Nature 482, no. 7383 (2012); Robert H. Lustig et al., “Isocaloric Fructose Restriction and Metabolic Improvement in Children with Obesity and Metabolic Syndrome: Fructose Restriction and Metabolic Syndrome,” Obesity 24, no. 2 (2016); Gary Taubes, “Is Sugar Toxic?” New York Times Magazine, April 17 2011; The Case against Sugar, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016). Both men are at the center of considerable controversy themselves, but covering these skirmishes would take up another whole book. 52. Cristin E. Kearns, Laura A. Schmidt, and Stanton A. Glantz, “Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research,” JAMA Internal Medicine 176, no. 11 (2016). In the JAMA pieces, Kearns and her co-authors list other industry-sponsored reviews, of which there were several. Kearns also published a preliminary version of her findings with Gary Taubes (Kearns and Taubes, “Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies: How the Industry Kept Scientists from Asking: Does Sugar Kill?” Mother Jones December 2012). 53. Marion Nestle, “Food Industry Funding of Nutrition Research: The Relevance of History for Current Debates,” JAMA Internal Medicine 176, no. 11 (2016), 1685. 54. Beginning with Max Planck’s maxim—“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die”—three economists tested the idea that science advances “one funeral at a time.” They discovered that, indeed, there is a more rapid acceptance of new ideas and that the “the loss of a luminary provides an opportunity for fields to evolve in new directions that advance the frontier of knowledge” (Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen, and Joshua S. Graff Zivin, “Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?” American Economic Review 109, no. 8 [2019]). 55. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 56. See Meach in Gentlecore and Smith.

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57. On the methodological scale of human subject trials, there have been both long- and short-term studies showing that low-fat diets do not achieve the health outcomes promised by the reigning nutritional hypothesis of the twentieth century. Some of the largest cohort studies ever attempted—the Framingham Study, the Women’s Health Initiative, the Nurses’ Study—all left open the question of whether a low-fat diet actually prevented heart disease (or cancer, or diabetes, or Alzheimer’s, etc.). For a non-academic but highly readable summary of recent research involving short-term/small cohort studies, see Kris Gunners, “23 Studies on Low Carb and Low Fat Diets—Time to Retire the Fad,” healthline.com (March 24, 2020), https:​//​www​ .healthline​.com​/nutrition​/23​-studies​-on​-low​-carb​-and​-low​-fat​-diets. 58. Alan Levinovitz, The Gluten Lie and Other Myths About What You Eat: And Other Myths About What You Eat (New York: Regan Arts, 2015), 74–77. 59. Both Nestle (2002) and Schlosser (2001) go into this in much more detail. 60. Carole Davis and Etta Saltos, “Dietary Recommendations and How They Have Changed Over Time” in Elizabeth Frazão, America’s Eating Habits: Changes & Consequences, Agriculture Information Bulletin (Washington, DC: US Dept. of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Food and Rural Economics Division, 1999), 35. 61. McGovern suggested the idea of a commission exploring hunger and malnutrition in 1968, but when none of the other congressional committees—such as the House or Senate committees on agriculture—offered their support, he decided to create his own. 62. United States. Congress. Senate. Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Eating in America: Dietary Goals for the United States: Report of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, U.S. Senate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977). 63. Dietary Goals for the United States, Supplemental Views (Washington: US Govt. Print. Off., 1977). 64. “Supplemental Views.” Fascinatingly, the American Medical Association also objected to the first edition, noting that Americans should not simply change their diet in pursuit of good health, and demanded language stating that anyone changing their diet should consult with a physician and follow their doctor’s individual and specialized advice. 65. La Berge, 155–156. Marlene Merritt, “The Snackwell Effect,” Acupuncture Today, June 2010. Nicole Mercado Fischer et al., “The Evolution of the Heart-Healthy Diet for Vascular Health: A Walk through Time,” Vascular Medicine 25, no. 2 (2020). 66. Pollan (2008), 53. 67. Nestle, Pollan, Taubes, et al cover this in much more detail than I have space for. 68. Both Keys and Yudkin testified before the committee, where a mystified McGovern replied to Yudkin’s statement that cholesterol was not a risk for heart disease that this information was “exactly the opposite of what my doctor told me” (Ian Leslie, “The Sugar Conspiracy,” The Guardian [April 7, 2016], https:​//​ www​.theguardian​.com​/society​/2016​/apr​/07​/the​-sugar​-conspiracy​-robert​-lustig​-john​ -yudkin). See also Gerald M. Oppenheimer and I. Daniel Benrubi, “McGovern’s Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs Versus the Meat Industry on the Diet-Heart Question (1976–1977),” American Journal of Public Health 104,

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no. 1 (2014). Oppenheimer and Benrubi explore in detail how the committee members’ grasp of nutritional science was not entirely equal to the task of formulating science-based dietary recommendations for the nation, writing that the senators “were faced with issues they were professionally incapable of resolving: conflicts within science over the interpretation of data, questions of scientific validity, and notions of proof. Ultimately, it was a lack of scientific consensus on all these factors, and not simply political acquiescence, that allowed special interests to gain a foothold in the debate and secure a modification of the initial guidelines on meat consumption.” 69. Metzl and Kirkland, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality. See also, Stegenga (2017). 70. In fact, there have been several Congressional committees that have investigated this concern. One committee reported in 2003 that research illustrates how some advertising to consumers “results in patients seeing their doctors and discussing previously undiagnosed conditions. We must acknowledge that direct-to-consumer ads are also designed to market and sell these products” (1). The stated purpose of these investigations is “to examine the potentially misleading and deception tactics used in direct-to-consumer advertisements for prescription pharmaceutical products,” but very little seems to have come from it. United States. Congress. Senate. Special Committee on Aging, Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Prescription Drugs: What Are the Consequences?: Hearing before the Special Committee on Aging, United States Senate, One Hundred Eighth Congress, First Session, Washington, DC, July 22, 2003, S Hrg (Washington: US G.P.O.: For sale by the Supt. of Docs., US G.P.O., Congressional Sales Office, 2003). See also: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Commerce Science and Transportation. Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs Foreign Commerce and Tourism., Direct to Consumer Advertising (Dtc): Hearing before the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs, Foreign Commerce, and Tourism of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, United States Senate, One Hundred Seventh Congress, First Session, July 24, 2001, S Hrg (Washington: US G.P.O.: For sale by the Supt. of Docs., US G.P.O., 2004); United States. Congress. House. Committee on Energy and Commerce. Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations., Direct-to-Consumer Advertising: Marketing, Education, or Deception?: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, One Hundred Tenth Congress, Second Session, May 8, 2008 (Washington: US G.P.O.: For sale by the Supt. of Docs., US G.P.O., 2008). 71. T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health, (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2005), 266. 72. The name was changed to Good Health in 1879—thirteen years after it was first published (1866)—and continued under that name until it was disbanded in 1955. 73. One of the first people to suggest that smartphones were attention addiction devices is former Google engineer Tristian Harris, who has written about this idea extensively. For more information on this intriguing metaphor, see Harris, “Smartphone Addiction: The Slot Machine in Your Pocket,” DER SPIEGEL (2016).

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74. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001). 75. Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, California Studies in Food and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Food Politics was followed by Safe Food—which closely examined the politics involved in everything from food distribution to GMOs—which was in turn followed by the enormously successful What to Eat in 2010. The idea for the latter volume was inspired by the people who approached Nestle after publicity events for Food Politics expressing confusion over what they should eat, rather than what they should not—a question that turned government guidelines and most contemporary diet books on their head. This is similar to the explanation given by Michael Pollan for writing In Defense of Food not long after authoring The Omnivore’s Dilemma: he was often besieged after speaking events by confused Americans who just wanted to know the hell they should eat. 76. Nestle (2002), 1ff. 77. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin Press, 2006). 78. Pollan (2006), 410. 79. A roundup of documentaries cited on various websites include: Forks Over Knives, the 2011 documentary featuring Drs. Colin Campbell and Caldwell Esselstyn, which is cited on many WFPB websites; Blackfish, Cowspiracy, and Earthlings (narrated by Joaquin Phoenix), which are popular mentions on vegan sites; Food, Inc. and Fed Up are often mentioned on Paleo, keto, and other clean eating sites. 80. Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (New York: Anchor, 2008).; Michael Moss, Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us,(New York: Random House, 2013); Greg Critser, Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003).; Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp, and Camille Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life,(New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007); Mireille Guiliano, French Women Don’t Get Fat,(New York: Knopf, 2005); Matt Fitzgerald, Diet Cults: The Surprising Fallacy at the Core of Nutrition Fads and a Guide to Healthy Eating for the Rest of Us (2014). 81. Michael Pollan, “Our National Eating Disorder” (New York: The New York Times Company, 2004). Also, as previously discussed, Keys famously left France off of his graph in the original Seven Countries Study. 82. This is an aphorism that shows up in many places, but I first encountered it in Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 83. Jobs’s original introduction of the iPhone from 2007, in which he explains that the ability to make phone calls is the “killer app,” is available to watch on YouTube (Jonathan Turetta, “Steve Jobs Iphone 2007 Presentation (Hd),” [YouTube, 2013]). This now almost quaint underselling of one of the most successful devices of all time—and the consequences of that device for our lives—has been written about many times over in the past decade, but for a brief and concise explanation of the cultural and game changing disruption of the smartphone, see Cal Newport, “Steve Jobs Never Wanted Us to Use Our iPhones Like This,” New York Times (2019).

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84. There are innumerable books and articles that explore the phenomena of social media, but a particularly poignant plea for vigilance in the rise of the so-called attention economy is Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2018).

4

Converting to Food Faiths Veganism, Paleo, and the Landscape of Spiritual Eating

Now that we’ve traversed the long and conjoined history of health, diet, religion, and nutrition science from Sylvester Graham up to the Internet Age, we can delve into a few case studies on the ways in which the food faithful participate in a practice-based spirituality. And the most logical place to begin is how and where many of the food faithful begin their own practice: with a conversion. Whether or not you consider yourself a food faith convert, it is possible that you have, at some point over the course of the twenty-first century, ventured onto the Internet to look for a recipe, a bit of health advice, or to read a news story about food—changes to governmental food policy, say, or the financial and environmental costs of large-scale corporate farms. This latter information is readily available from commercial or conventional media sources, such as a news or government site; but, as discussed in the previous chapter, this type of material can also be found on a food blog or personal website. The sites themselves may differ in content and style, but one thing they have in common is that they are often the work of a single individual; while they might not have professional editors or content creators, the trade-off is that many food blogs and websites have a very personal touch. Diet-compliant recipes might be introduced with a preamble that includes a personal story of discovery that has occurred since joining a food faith or iterative photos of a recipe being prepared; health and nutrition news could be situated in the context of an individual’s experience and its meaning for their dietary practice; or the latest scientific research or policy updates might be reframed in terms of pertinence to singular dietary choices or interpretations of nutritional research. Also, because conventional blogs are built from a template—designed by websites like Blogger or WordPress—they come 121

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with an About Me section, where the site curator can introduce themselves, explain the reason they practice a particular food faith, and share the longer story (with photos) of their transformation to their new lifestyle. Through these narrative devices personal websites and first-person food blogs allow both the voice and the experience of the blogger to come through, shape the story, and promote a particular diet in ways that feel immediate and personable. Likewise, as these websites grow and build a larger community of the food faithful, they’ll sometimes include the transformational stories of other readers, as well. For example, from 2009 until 2016 on the website “The Happy Herbivore” certified plant-based nutritionist, cookbook author, and blogger Lindsay Nixon included among the recipes and lifestyle suggestions a segment called “Herbie of the Week.” Although not officially endorsed by or connected to a specific doctor or author, the website promotes the whole-foods plant-based diet recommended by figures such as Dr. Colin Campbell (a biochemist with a specialization in human nutrition), Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and Dr. John McDougall (both physicians). Premised on veganism, the whole-foodsplant-based diet excludes all animal products (meat, dairy, eggs, honey), as well as all processed foods (prepackaged frozen meals, soda, mass-produced baked goods), refined sugar, and oil. In their books The China Study and Eat to Live, doctors Campbell and Fuhrman highlight scientific studies on the efficacy of the diet for reducing or eliminating heart disease and cancer as proof of the diet’s effectiveness in promoting health, but websites like “The Happy Herbivore” contain a more personal kind of testimony on the process of becoming healthy. The “Herbie of the Week” section offers first-person narratives of individuals who have given up their allegiance to the Standard American Diet (SAD) in favor of a new, enlightened form of eating. Week after week, individuals whose life changed for the better because of their new outlook on diet share their testimonials of conversion from an old way of life to a new faith: faith in good health, long life, and science to heal their bodies and their minds. The stories shared by the Herbies1 follow a familiar pattern: a person who was clinically unwell in some form (ranging from skin problems like acne, to digestive issues like Crohn’s disease, to a diagnosis of stage III cancer) sees the light; changes their ways by cutting out meat, dairy, and oils; and experiences remarkable and almost spontaneous wellness. Often, the Herbie’s story includes an instance of realization or understanding—a revelatory moment when the reality of bodily unwellness meets the truth of biomedical science, physiology, or the realities of ecological devastation created by industrial agriculture. Several Herbies relate how a diagnosis or the results from Western medical tests of blood pressure, cholesterol, and body composition were their wake-up call. “Almost 8 years ago I weighed 256 pounds and was

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miserable,” explains a Herbie. “I went to my yearly check up with my doctor and she informed me that I was obese, pre-diabetic, and had high blood pressure. I had to do something.” Others recount the moment they understood the environmental toll agribusiness takes on the planet as their moment of enlightenment, or explain how their reflections on animal sentience guided their choice. Whatever the impetus, many of the Herbies explicitly describe this change of heart as a conversion and utilize this language in their narratives. One woman writes that “my husband and I discussed it and made the decision to convert to plant-based vegan” while another explains that she wonders “why I ever ate that stuff in the first place when there are so many yummy fruits and veggies to enjoy . . . I’ve converted three people at work [to plant-based eating].”2 The notion that converting others to this lifestyle is a natural extension of one’s own experience is evidenced in a 2018 article on the blog titled “I’m Vegan but My Partner Isn’t: 10 Tasty Recipes to Help Them Convert.”3 The language of conversion, and the experience of being among the diet converted, is not limited to becoming a vegan. Although the vegan diet is, in some circles, considered sufficiently subversive as to require a conversion, other diets illicit similar language in the personal descriptions of a lifestyle change. Elsewhere on the Web, an adherent to the Paleo diet on the website “Mark’s Daily Apple” recounts his success in spreading “the many benefits of this awesome lifestyle” and how he tries “to explain the many reasons, all based on research and evidence” for living according to what website founder and author Mark Sission has termed the “Primal Blueprint.”4 The Paleo diet was popularized by Dr. Loren Cordain, an exercise physiologist, after the publication of his book The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat in 2001. In his first book, Cordain explains how his early-career academic research into effective diets for athletes dovetailed into his longtime fascination with early Homo sapiens, and he encouraged his readers—especially athletes—to follow a diet based on that of our ancient ancestors.5 Following the initial premise of Cordain’s research, the Paleo diet looks to evidence in the archeological record left by our Paleolithic ancestors, as well as our own genome, for evidence of what humans “should” be eating. According to the gospel of Paleo, humans evolved for 2.5 million years eating meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, and some nuts, ranging the land and functioning as hunter-gatherers. Evolutionarily speaking, our current diet and lifestyle are hardly a millisecond in the vast scale of our genetic development. This means that, from a physiological and anthropological standpoint, people should avoid eating dairy, legumes, starchy vegetables, grains, or any other type of food that humans began eating 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture. (Needless to say, all forms of fast, processed, or junk food are discouraged.) Paleo adherents point to the

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low levels of heart disease and cancer—the top two so-called “diseases of civilization”—among modern hunter-gatherer societies and extrapolate from the relative scarcity of these diseases in non-agricultural societies to the concept of eating a hunter-gatherer-like diet being good for one’s health today. In short, anyone searching for true wellness in our modern world should eschew the trappings of civilization and follow in the footsteps of Grok, the Stone Age mascot and archetype of “Mark’s Daily Apple,” which is focused on the Paleo diet and its attendant lifestyle of “primal living in the modern world.” Grok is the faceless emblem of the website and Primal Blueprint brand, and is depicted in profile as a wild-haired, muscular man wearing a loin cloth and holding a spear, paused midair in a graceful jeté (this image of Grok, in fact, looks not unlike Nike’s Air Jordan logo, and is possibly meant to capture a similarly marketable sense of athleticism and masculinity). Similar to the Herbies’s storyline, Grok’s imitators recount how they followed the maxim “What Would Grok Eat?” and explain that by thinking like a Stone Age hunter-gatherer in their dietary choices they cured various metabolic diseases (diabetes, stroke, heart disease), lost weight, and regained their health. Before eliminating non-Paleo foods from his diet, one convert writes that he “was desperate to change [his lifestyle] and knew if I didn’t I was going to have a slow miserable death” if he continued on his current path. But after adhering to the Paleo diet for ten months, and even without all his health problems miraculously disappearing, he is still “convinced that this is the only way to live and I hope my short story can be of some use to you.” Others believe their lives were saved by following the evidence of humanity’s genetic blueprint in their day-to-day lives. Another man writes that his inspiration came from “looking at hunter-gatherer-related [Internet] pages (I’d always had a thirst for knowledge about prehistoric peoples)” where he was “instantly dumbstruck by the sense in everything I read . . . finally I saw what I needed presented in a way that used science, logic and common sense without the sensationalism you see surrounding other ‘diets.’ [Paleo] was so much more than a simple diet; as I saw it, it took care of everything that makes the human body and mind thrive, and with countless studies to back it up.” Likewise, a young woman who was frustrated by modern diet culture became convinced by the argument that we should eat according to our primal and genetic blueprint. She explains that at first, “I was skeptical. You know the knee-jerk reactions: ‘It’s not healthy to cut out an entire food group,’ ‘Low-fat is the best way to lose weight,’ ‘I can’t live without my Fiber One bars,’ etc. Even though I doubted the Primal concept at first, I read some pages on MDA [Mark’s Daily Apple] and started thinking.” She goes on to explain because of her background as “a science teacher, the premise behind it made sense.” With the scientific bona fides substantiated, she went all in, and now “I’ve reached the six-month mark, and I’m not turning back.”6

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She—like so many other spiritual eaters who have offered a testimonial or curate their own food faith website—is sharing with her fellow online Groks the narrative of her conversion. CONVERSION—THEN AND NOW There are more than a few echoes of Graham’s “The Asclepian Tablets of the Nineteenth Century” in the testimonials featured on food faith websites, but these testimonials are more than just summaries of an individual’s experience with a particular diet. Again and again—between the powerful stories of healing and harrowing tales of illness—the food faithful describe their change in dietary identity as a conversion. But what is at stake in this conversion is not necessarily the sort of Paul on the Road to Damascus moment—a bright light, a sudden realization, a complete overhaul of lifestyle and belief system—that we think of when we imagine a conversion experience. Religion scholar Lewis Rambo, whose book Understanding Religious Conversion we will explore in much more detail below, explains that conversion is a series of steps that include “a change from the absence of a faith system to a faith commitment,” “a change of one’s personal orientation toward life,” “a spiritual transformation of life, from seeing evil or illusion in everything connected with ‘this’ world [to] a manifestation of God’s power and beneficence,” and above all “a radical shifting of gears that can take the spiritual lackadaisical to a new level of intensive concern, commitment, and involvement.”7 Moreover, Rambo and other scholars of religious conversion note that this process generally develops slowly over time, and only after deep consideration and reflection. In this sense, the paradigmatic American conversion narrative might be the testimony of one of the Second Great Awakening’s most prominent characters, Charles Grandison Finney. Finney is remembered today by historians of religion as an evangelical, revivalist Presbyterian minister, and by modern participants in social justice movements as an outspoken abolitionist and proponent of equal education for women and men of all races first as a professor and then as the president of Oberlin College. (Though he was not president at the time, it was Finney who originally had the idea to make Oberlin’s students and faculty abide by the Graham diet, the ill-fated religio-social experiment we read about in chapter 2.) But Finney didn’t come by his faith in a familial way; rather, the Father of Modern Revivalism began his influential career after he underwent a conversion.8 And it is worth considering Finney’s experience of shifting from “the spiritual lackadaisical” to an “intensive concern, commitment, and involvement” with Christianity, as the narrative aspects of Finney’s experience bear on our conversation here.

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In 1818, when he was twenty-six, Finney moved to a small town in upstate New York to study law. In his own conversion narrative, Finney recalled that he had “never lived in a praying community” for the most part (although his family were members of a local Baptist church, Finney dismissed his experiences there as having any effect on his later conversion), and in reference to his patchy parochial education, considered himself “as ignorant of religion as a heathen.”9 Not long into his legal studies, however, he began to notice a theme. In many of his books on common law, the authors referenced the Biblical figure of Moses as a legal authority. It was a defense that Finney remembered “excited my curiosity so much that I went and purchased a Bible, the first I had ever owned.” He began checking references in legal texts against the Bible, then reading the Bible on his own time (frequently throwing his law books over his open Bible whenever a friend or colleague came by so they wouldn’t see what he was reading), until finally his interest led him to the doors of a local church. Even this proved unsatisfactory, a situation Finney initially blamed on the obtuseness of the minister. He found “it impossible to attach any meaning to many of the terms which [the minister] used. What did he mean by repentance? And what did he mean by faith?” On top of this, he was “particularly struck by the fact that the [congregation’s] prayers that I listened to, from week to week, were not, that I could see, answered.” At first, Finney blamed his lack of progress in understanding on the minister, on the prayer meetings, on the flatness of it all. But, in grace granted by many decades of retrospective, Finney realized that for all his earnestness in seeking, he was still “very proud without knowing it. I had no regard for the opinions of others, and was unwilling to have anyone know that I was seeking the salvation of my soul.” Finney was so reluctant to share his spiritual journey with anyone else, that when he prayed “I would only whisper, after having stopped the key-hole to the door, lest someone should discover me.” One morning, as he walked to his office after a restless night, Finney recalls that “something seemed to confront me.” From nowhere, he was overwhelmed with a barrage of questions: “What are you waiting for? What are you trying to do? Are you endeavoring to work out a righteousness of your own?” In the manner of intellectual puzzles that resolve themselves while the brain is doing something mundane, Finney suddenly understood everything. He writes: Just at this point the whole question of salvation opened to my mind in a manner most marvelous to me. I saw, as clearly as I ever have since, the reality and fullness of the atonement of Christ. I saw that his work was a finished work; and that instead of having, or needing, any righteousness of my own to recommend me to God, I had to submit myself to the righteousness of God through Christ.

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Salvation seemed to me an offer to be accepted; it was full and complete; and all that was necessary on my part, was to give up my sins, and to accept Christ. North of the village lay a piece of woods, and I turned and bent my course toward these woods, feeling that I must be alone, and away from all human eyes and ears, so that I could pour out my prayer to God.10

Even after his revelation, when he was metaphorically gobsmacked by his sudden and immediate understanding of the meaning of faith, Finney admits to the remarkably human instinct to conceal himself from the prying eyes of his neighbors: “As I went over the hill, it occurred to me that someone might see me and suppose that I was going away to pray. Yet probably there was not a person on earth that would have suspected such a thing, had he seen me going. But so great was my pride, and so much was I possessed with the fear of man, that I crept along under the fence, till I got so far out of sight that no one from the village could see me.” In the woods, he knelt and prayed and left the forest a changed man. But it would be several more years before Finney set the young country on fire with his call to conversion, and shared with strangers his discovery of grace. The significance of Finney’s biographical conversion narrative is not just how it is generalizable to other experiences of conversion, but the fact that it takes the form of a narrative at all. Why, over fifty years after the event, should Finney have taken the time to write out his conversion experience? Because, as Wade Clark Roof notes, personal narrative in religious experience has a broad “usage and function. We tell stories not so much to illustrate as to affirm who we are and what gives identity, purpose, and meaning to our existence . . . Narrative is motivated by a search for meaning; when people tell stories, essentially they bring order and direction to their lives.”11 This is specifically true of conversion, which leads to what other scholars describe as a “biographical reconstruction,” which is “what converts often call a testimony, and scholars generally call a conversion narrative.”12 And as with Graham’s testimonials and Finney’s biographical narrative, the story of a conversion follows a narrative arc, which scholars have noted follow the metanarrative schema of “creation, fall, redemption.” Although historically this has been the case in Christian conversion narratives—as it loosely traces the narrative trajectory of the Bible—we see a similar pattern of “creation, ill-health or revelation, redemption via diet” in the stories told by the food faithful. From the retrospective point of having converted, the conversion looks inevitable—like the natural outcome of a series of events. This is in part because, as a fresh convert, the narrative is written from the perspective of a new framework of the self as well as in the larger context of creating a personal myth. In an exploration of the psychology of self-transformation in conversion narratives, psychology of religion scholar Ulrike Popp-Baier

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writes that creating “a personal myth involves creating a story about oneself as a temporal being that has a past, and relating the present to this past in order to form a perspective of the future.”13 This is how, Rambo explains, “the reconstruction of one’s biography is a central element in the converting process. Biographical reconstruction and the resulting narrative give new meaning to a person’s definition of self, identity, relationships, and God (or some other comprehensive understanding of the world and life). Adopting a new story involves resonating with a story (for whatever reason the new story is relevant to the person), finding or building connections between ‘my’ story and ‘the’ story, and retelling or incorporating of the story into one’s own life narrative.”14 In the therapeutic model of well-being, telling a story about one’s own life is key to beginning down the road toward healing.15 What I also hope to illustrate by exploring the testimonials of the diet converted as evidence of a legitimate psychological, philosophical, and spiritual conversion is that scholars should take the spiritual lives of the Nones seriously. Many scholars of religion already do, but it is important that the study of religion view the Nones as more than a pale imitation of religious practitioners, but as spiritually-oriented individuals in their own right. As touched on in chapter 1, some of the popular interpretations of the Nones is that they are borrowing religious practice and rituals to create their own spiritual bricolage and Sheilaistic faith. But I think that these conversion stories support the theory that these online food faith communities comprise a real spiritual movement. They are communities that collectively delineate the sacred as the biological, medical, and environmental outcomes for human health associated with a particular diet—a diet based in science, rather than a scripture or religious tradition. Not only does the lived experience of the diet converted and the food faithful represent the formation of and adherence to a genuine spiritual practice, but that experience is itself demarcated by a conversion. Conversion to this spiritual practice—the pursuit of health via diet—sometimes completely reshapes how a particular adherent lives; after their conversion some followers of a diet, like Finney after his conversion to Christianity, upend relationships, abandon previously held assumptions, and sometimes become virtually fundamentalist in their insistence on the importance of science in their new ways of thinking about food, health, and personal fulfillment. With science as the basis for the conversion, followers of a given diet radically change their day-to-day way of life from the lackadaisical acceptance of SAD to a new level of concern. But, as we just discussed, the diet converted are not reading a Bible or visiting a temple—they are having another kind of conversion altogether. So, to what are they converting? In a word: science.

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SCIENCE AS THE SCRIPTURE OF THE CONVERTED For close to two centuries, Western society has accepted the assumption that science and religion are in conflict with one another and that this separation is irreconcilable. But, in the case of an individual food faith practitioner, we find that religion and science are integrated into the spirituality of practice. With this in mind, where this conflation of religion and science is most obvious is in the conversion narratives on websites such as The Happy Herbivore or Mark’s Daily Apple. Specifically, the first-person testimonials on these websites illustrate how diet becomes a spiritual practice, which we defined in chapter 1 as a lifestyle centered on a set of daily activities and practices that inform and shape the pursuit of a higher calling or goal. In the case of online conversion narratives, the higher calling is a physically embodied form of enlightenment ambiguously defined as “health” that comes from the deployment of science through a particular way of eating. Popular science and Internet media have enabled individuals to integrate science and religion though their diet by incorporating scientific concepts into a practiced spirituality. We will explore the stages of conversion to a food faith, but first we need to understand what diet people are converting to (for the sake of simplicity and as already discussed, in this chapter our primary points of contrast will be vegan and Paleo diets) as well as what precipitated their conversion. And we will take a brief tour of the ontologies—historical, sociological, anthropological, psychological—that have tried to elucidate the process of conversion. But, perhaps even more important than understanding the how of conversion is grasping the to what: the doctrine that undergirds the diet and lifestyle that becomes such a significant break from the previous lifestyle that the acceptance of and change to this new way of life necessitates a conversion. In traditional religious conversion, the answer to this question has generally been straightforward: converts were either following Finney’s model and renewing their commitment to a form of religion with which they had been raised or, in a more extreme break, a convert might leave one religion for another one altogether (Christianity to Islam, Judaism to Buddhism, etc.). But in the case of food faiths, the conversion is not just to a diet, per se. Because, as with a religious conversion, the change of mindset with dietary conversion is both emotional and philosophical—an answering of the call or a mysterious tug in a new direction with the culmination of study, forethought, and reason. The emotional and spiritual reasons for conversion are legion (and some of which we will examine in later chapters), but by far one of the most powerful stimulants for the initial conversion to a particular diet has less to do with the distal reasons like weight loss and curing brain fog, and everything to do

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with the proximal mechanism on which these claims rest. Thus, amongst the cohort of the diet converted, there is no greater authority on which to rest one’s beliefs than science. But which science? And what do we mean by “science” in this context, anyway? In his 1987 book, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour begins his exploration of the concentric histories of a scientific idea with a series of observations on the double-helix model of DNA. First we observe a computer scientist and a molecular biologist fawning over a three-dimensional model of the molecule in 1985; then we jump back in time to the Cavendish Labs in 1951, just before James Watson gave a fateful twist to the paper model of DNA on his desk, revealing the molecule’s structure; and finally we land in the middle, in 1980, where the computer that will render the three-dimensional model of DNA in 1985 is still in prototype, full of bugs and a year behind schedule. Latour’s argument is that at a certain point what is considered understood as scientific fact becomes taken for granted, and, in turn, becomes a building block for a new generation of lived scientific practices, something we saw “in action” in the formation and promulgation of the lipid hypothesis in chapter 3. He explains that, in scientific circles, we “learn to live with two contradictory voices talking at once, one about science in the making, the other about ready-made science.” Latour is speaking specifically about scientists and their perspectives on generating scientific knowledge—building knowledge atop what is already considered scientific consensus—and the way in which even purportedly settled scientific questions leave room for further exploration. But his description of what he calls “ready-made science” is particularly useful in explaining how science is perceived by non-scientists, especially those who have not “penetrated from the outside the inner workings of science and technology, and then got out of it to explain to the outsider how it all works”; these outsiders end up knowing science “through popularization only.” Because, when science is popularized, armchair scientists use the same building-block assumptions as scientists, taking for granted a complicated scientific theory or explanation as true; this is what Latour calls a black box. Latour famously borrowed the concept of the black box from cyberneticians, who, he explains “draw a little box” around commands or calculations too complex and “about which they need to know nothing but its input and output.” And, with a black box, “no matter how controversial their history, how complex their inner workings, how large the commercial or academic networks that hold them in place, only their input and output count.”16 For the computer scientist in 1985, the double-helix model of DNA discovered in 1951 is a black box; it is considered a settled piece of information. In the case of food faiths, we see a similar

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black box effect, because spiritual eaters view the science of their choice as a “black box,” a mechanism in which the “scientific [is] made invisible by its own success.” “When a machine runs efficiently,” writes Latour, “when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity.”17 At a certain point in the lifetime of a scientific concept, the theory behind the concept ceases to matter and all emphasis is put on the output of that theory; the double-helix is settled fact, so now we move to creating a computer program that will model that structure in three dimensions. Likewise, in the appropriation of science by spiritual eaters, only the theory (the input) and the results of that theory for the body (the output) matter; the details of how the theory works or is constructed are not necessarily important for the diet converted. Thus, one element spiritual eating conversions have in common across the board is the black boxing of science: evidential input is gleaned from generalized scientific principles, and while the actual, testable content of the corresponding theory is important it becomes black boxed. In our Paleo example, the generalized principles include how the fossil record shows our Paleolithic ancestors having better teeth than their modern progeny, while some of the minutia—for example, how microbes found in the dental plaque of ancient European skeletons reveal that the Neolithic change to consumption of farmed wheat and barley is associated with more oral bacteria than in previous generations of huntergatherers—get black boxed; similarly, in environmental veganism the input gleaned from scientific principles—the wages of beef production on the environment—is the black box enclosing graphed comparisons of the nearly identical levels of methane emissions from dairy cows and petroleum harvesting in California.18 What is significant to the practitioner is the output, which are the cures, general sense of well-being, physiological evidence, and the ancillary environmental changes that inspire the evangelistic element of the testimonials and narratives of diet conversion. UNDERSTANDING DIETARY CONVERSION In Understanding Religious Conversion, Lewis Rambo emphasizes that, “contrary to popular mythology, conversion is very rarely an overnight, all-in-an-instant, wholesale transformation that is now and forever.” It is, instead, a process, where “all conversions . . . are mediated through people, institutions, communities, and groups.” With this in mind, we will move through Rambo’s description of the conversion process, and explore the ways in which a change in diet to a particular food faith follows the seven stages of conversion—a process revealed in the conversion narratives shared by the food faithful online. And in Rambo’s taxonomy, the first step is context,

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which is the ecology of the conversion process. The context, according to Rambo, “encompasses a vast panorama of conflicting, confluent, and dialectical factors that both facilitate and repress the process of conversion” and “embraces an overall matrix in which the force field of people, events, experiences, and institutions operate on conversion.”19 For the food faithful, the context in which they operate is an ecology of history, tradition, religious perspectives on food, science, health marketing, and easy access to information on all of the above via the Internet. As we’ve seen, from Sylvester Graham to John Harvey Kellogg to the lipid hypothesis, America has a long history of struggling to define health, creating a cultural and religious identity around food, and, over the course of the twentieth century, substituting science as a guide for what and how to eat. This is the ecosystem in which the diet converted will begin their journey—the space in which science and self will be explored. Likewise, in terms of tradition and history, Rambo writes that pluralism— in diet as in religion—“can create alienation and confusion; in consequence, individuals may eagerly choose a new religious option to lessen anxiety, find meaning, or gain a sense of belonging.”20 Perhaps uniquely in the world, and as we discussed briefly in chapters 1 and 2, America’s longest culinary tradition is a lack of a coherent cultural tradition. Historically, the majority of people who followed a specific diet did so for cultural or religious reasons. And, given the religious diversity of the United States, most Americans either know someone of another faith or themselves follow a specific diet for religious reasons (e.g., a Jewish person who keeps kosher will know a Roman Catholic who doesn’t eat meat on Fridays during the Lentin season). But aside from the foodways of Native Americans, every other kind of diet—religious or no—followed in the US was imported from a different country of origin. Here in the twenty-first century, this kind of pluralism in eating can be an absolute pleasure, but it can also add to nutritional confusion and anxiety over what to eat. And that anxiety in the pluralistic dietary marketplace can be mitigated by choosing a food faith. “If you are someone who needs rules in order to eat healthily, an omnivore diet becomes an endless negotiation between angels and devils, and everything you eat involves a decision,” writes one vegan convert. “The joy of veganism is that you have to make only one decision: to eat no animal products. Once that’s done, you barely have to give food another thought.”21 It is quite likely that America’s food pluralism is part of the reason for the success of science as an arbiter of food choice: in cultures and countries where there is a strong food tradition nutrition science is often secondary to custom, but in a food culture unmoored from history or convention science can become a logical substitute for tradition and a useful guide.

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Finally, the context in which the food faithful live and practice is a veritable ocean of nutritional and scientific information. The informational changes we discussed at the end of chapter 3—social media’s convergence with easy access to scientific data—has also enabled sharing conversion narratives and the creation of online communities, as well as unleashing a deluge of health marketing and what journalist Rina Raphael has called “the gospel of wellness.”22 Health marketing, in particular, is everywhere. The packaged food we buy, the books on the bestseller list, every other commercial on TV, the social media feeds to which we subscribe—Americans are constantly bombarded with images and messages about achieving and maintaining optimum health, which is usually vaguely defined in popular media as synonymous with weight loss. Of course, all of this is accelerated by the Internet. Although the Internet is not a context Rambo anticipated, the exchange of ideas, the communities formed, and the easy access to information provided by the Internet is a revelation unto itself, because context is “the most comprehensive of all the stages [and] is the dynamic force field in which conversion takes place.” Even though we live in a culture of drive-thrus and packaged food making health claims, the sense of estrangement from what is genuinely nourishing and nutritious created by this food ecosystem and its context can be a powerful force in and of itself; as Rambo notes, while “people may feel alienated from society and the church, we are all influenced by the dynamic force field of the context.”23 But according to our previously-quoted vegan convert, the “ceaseless clamor of adverts and billboards urging you to eat things you shouldn’t is miraculously silenced” by making this dietary change. “Junk food can shout at you all it likes; you can no longer hear.”24 The next step in the process of conversion that Rambo explores is crisis, which is the catalyst for change. In Rambo’s process, crisis is what “force individuals and groups to confront their limitations and can stimulate a quest to resolve conflict, fill a void, adjust to new circumstances, or find avenues of transformation.”25 According to their testimonials, among the food faithful crisis takes many forms. The first, and by far the most referred to, is some form of bodily unwellness—an amorphous condition that includes, but is not limited to, disease, chronic illness, physical discomfort, skin issues, or a general sense of dysphoria; many are not sick in a clinical sense, but believe that they should and could feel better given the alchemical properties of diet and lifestyle. Sometime this unwellness is an ongoing issue, such as an autoimmune disorder that requires extensive management and pharmaceutical intervention. One Paleo convert struggling with an autoimmune disease recounted how frightening it was when his rheumatologist put him on a medication that required careful surveillance of his liver and kidneys; how toxic and “dangerous was the medication to have the doctor order monthly blood work to monitor my liver and kidney function?” he wondered. “This was the

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impetus for the start of my journey to taking my own health into my own hands and find alternative natural methods to put [his arthritic condition] into remission.”26 Other times, the crisis is ignited by the results of a biomedical exam that reveals high blood pressure or the discovery that one is teetering on the edge of type II diabetes, or just generally exposes that one has been ignoring their physical health. “My wakeup call was a photo of me that a relative posted on Facebook,” writes another Paleo practitioner. “It was then that I realized my denial [of her declining physical health] and I decided to make a permanent change.”27 The stimulus for the crisis doesn’t even have to be one’s personal health: several testimonials recount the illness or death of a loved one as a “catalyst for change.” But sometimes the crisis originates in a dramatic health scare, such as a cancer diagnosis or a heart attack. A vegan convert cites his cardiac arrest as the stimulus for converting to a vegan diet; ironically, he had just attended a presentation where he had learned that “out of 25 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, only four people would make it to the hospital, and only one would walk out alive. Little did I know that less than three weeks later, that one very lucky person would be me.” Following his medical recovery—and the discovery that he had flatlined for four minutes— he has become “a low-fat plant-based evangelist to anyone who will listen. I believe it is the right thing to do for my body and for the planet, and I am living proof that this works—emphasis on the living.”28 Beyond unwellness, a crisis can be the result of revelations about 1) where our food comes from and 2) how that food comes to us. With this in mind, a powerful argument for converting to a food faith is the treatment—and especially the industrial-scale slaughter—of animals raised for food. The study of animal cognition (the scientific study of animals’ emotions and intelligence) has been the source of the crisis that leads to a dietary conversion among some food faithful. For example, a Herbie writes that she found her motivation to change her diet after watching the 2013 documentary Blackfish, which chronicles the story of a captive orca whale in a theme park; following the film, she was no longer able “to handle my disgust at the far-reaching human exploitation of animals [and] I decided this was the kick in the butt I needed to officially make the switch to a plant-based lifestyle. If I could not give up animal products for my own health, I could certainly become vegan for the animals.”29 And it’s important to note that animal welfare does not inevitably lead people to become vegetarians or vegans; some on the meat-eating side of the ledger also cite the treatment of animals in an industrial agricultural setting as their reason for converting to eating only humanely raised animals (we will encounter some of these converts in chapter 5). The application of scientific innovation to food—such as the development of GMOs, the sale and marketing of ultra-processed foods, environmental degradation—can also be catalysts of crisis. The manipulation of food at a

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chemical level through genetic modification or through additives creates a sense of crisis for individuals who are concerned about the untested effects of these substances on themselves and their family; assurances from government agencies that modified foods are safe frequently has the opposite effect in this particular state of crisis. Likewise, many cite the Anthropocene as a crisis unto itself, which in turn leads to reconsidering how their food choices contribute to global warming. Some converts explain that they began to see how the scale of industrial agriculture and its environmental effects were inversely tied to their personal health. One follower of the Primal Blueprint writes that because her understanding of both the “health and environmental impacts of following the PB made complete sense” she decided to follow the diet and “was all in” on the lifestyle.30 But in every case the crisis cited by the convert fulfills what Rambo calls the two basic types of crises: “crises that call into question one’s fundamental orientation to life, and crises that in and of themselves are rather mild but are the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.”31 In our examples, both a cardiac arrest event—a reorientation to life—and a documentary on animal welfare—the straw the broke the camel’s back—lead to the adoption of a vegan diet. Both instigated a crisis that eventually lead to dietary conversion. Next in Rambo’s taxonomy is quest: the active search for a truth, any truth. As Rambo parses various types of and amplifies previous findings on conversion—including that a purely emotional and capricious conversion is not the norm—he highlights the fact that most scholars of religion believe that conversion comes out of the intellectual pursuit (the quest) for a conceptual system. This intellectual quest for a conceptual system among the food faithful is often what leads them to science. If “crisis” begins with a health scare or medical emergency, “quest” picks up with the frightening realization that an individual now needs a pharmaceutical or surgical intervention—angioplasty for a blocked artery, insulin to treat type II diabetes, beta blockers for high blood pressure—to regain their good health, and includes the scramble that ensues to understand the situation or implement a system to resolve it. Amongst the diet converted, quest can be frantic online research performed on the heels of a diagnosis or a trip to the bookstore to find a book on managing a particular disease. While the quest can be an active search for answers, it can also involve a passive vulnerability—an openness to new ideas and new communities that didn’t exist before the crisis; it is in this way that “the conversion process is an interplay of forces of attraction, resistance, and repulsion.” And because “converts are often active agents in their own conversion” the “path to transformation is not always clear and direct, but they are able to seek out beliefs, groups, and organizations that serve their perceived needs.”32 With this in mind, the Internet is among the most significant tools in aiding

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questing food faithful to find the community and information that will ultimately help them create personal change. Rambo notes that quest is an ongoing process that intensifies during times of crises, but it is not a clean break or sequential step. Many among the food faithful recall in their narratives how the event (or events) that precipitated converting to a food faith involved an escalating crisis which was mitigated by serial rummaging on Google. A single mother of seven children describes receiving a diagnosis with a cellular disease that is “is incurable and progressive, and there is no treatment” as devastating, but also a “relief, simply because now I knew what was wrong, and I had proof of what was wrong, and I would never again have to listen to a doctor tell me that maybe I was just tired, or stressed out.” So, she explains, like many people “in my shoes before and after me, I turned to the Internet for help.” She writes, I learned a ridiculous amount about the cellular respiratory chain. I read all the medical journals. And, eventually, I found Paleo, with its success stories in everything from weight loss to curing autoimmune diseases! The more I read, the more hope it offered. And, so, despite some skepticism, I tried giving gluten-free a go. Three days later, my IBS-like symptoms that caused me to run to the bathroom 5–6 times a day or more were gone! . . . And, after going off my thyroid meds that I had been taking since I was 19, my thyroid was fine. Just like that, I saw obvious health improvements and began to lose weight! It seemed so miraculous that I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. I began to ease my way to Paleo, over about 9–12 months, and two years later, I’m still eating mostly Paleo.33

Nested within the quest for change are several motivational factors, two of which Rambo finds especially significant: the search for power and the longing for transcendence. Personal power, Rambo explains, is an integral component of spiritual experience, and the quest for power can range from “the power to heal and the power to be successful, to the power to gain control over one’s life and the power over death.”34 The pursuit of transcendence, on the other hand, is demonstrated by the convert’s subsequent recollection that personal change was not merely “a defense coping mechanism,” but evidence of a new developmental stage in which they are pursuing intellectual or moral maturity.35 Both of these motivations are demonstrated in the testimonial of the actress Alicia Silverstone. As a practitioner of veganism and as an animal rights activist, Silverstone writes that becoming a vegan was, for her, a repudiation of a career in Hollywood that made demands on her physical person and her personal character. “The decision to be vegan was one I made purely for me, and expression of my truest self and deepest beliefs,” she explains. “It was the first time I’d stood up and said a definitive ‘NO!’ My real self began to emerge. It was powerful.”36 In either case—emotional or philosophical,

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spiritual or scientific—quest provides motivation to pass through the crisis and seek a resolution. This notion of passing from a reactive to an active stage is augmented by what Rambo calls the encounter—the moment that brings together the potential convert with the religious advocate, which in our examples is generally the result of an Internet search.37 That Internet search could lead the potential convert to all kinds of websites and offers of possible solutions or explanations. Perhaps in searching for a dietary intervention for heart disease the as-yet-unconverted will read on Paleo websites about how the absence of atherosclerosis amongst hunter-gatherer communities contrasts with early agricultural civilizations, whose poorer health is believed to be the result of the cultivation and consumption of grains. Perhaps a potential convert hoping to control uncomfortable IBS symptoms will find the Whole30 website, which promises a program to help “heal your digestive tract.” An individual might be looking for more information on reducing consumption of animal-based foods and discovers r/vegan on Reddit. And then, each of these individuals could decide to follow a whole-foods plant-based diet, rather than abide by the advice given on any of the websites. But the point of the encounter is that the convert experiences a range of ideas and the people who advocate for those ideas, and then realizes that there is a constellation of choices. The convert might then decide among the dietary options by evaluating which diet presents the best and most relevant black boxed science—the best purported outputs—that will resolve their health, philosophical, or spiritual crisis. This is the pivotal moment when the spiritual seeker encounters an advocate—a person or group who, Rambo explains, “assesses the potential target audience and formulates persuasive tactics to bring converts into the religious [or dietary] community.”38 In the case of food faiths, the advocate might be a person whom the convert knows personally. A Paleo convert recounts that she “heard about the diet from a friend whose daughter had very severe cancer but she is now cancer free 4+ years.” The friend’s daughter practiced Paleo herself and also knew Dr. Cordain. This practitioner writes that she has had two melanomas “and have been striving to keep them at bay with diet and low stress and I have osteoporosis also which I want to combat with diet.”39 For this particular convert, the personal experience of a friend’s daughter was sufficient testimony for her to make a dietary change. Or, as happens in food faith communities, the seeker discovers a guru, of sorts—an authority on the diet whose credentials might be medical, like a physician, or an “influencer” whose personal transformation has garnered popular or even celebrity status. A convert to “Nutritarianism”—the whole-foods plant-based practice proffered by Dr. Fuhrman—explains that her journey began as she was watching TV, “flipping through the channels and came to the PBS channel featuring Dr. Fuhrman talking about the Nutritarian diet style. A light bulb went on

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and I realized I needed to change my eating, it was time.” Having found her advocate, she writes that she wants “to thank Dr. Fuhrman for the education he provides. He helped save my life.”40 “Personal and social conditions rarely facilitate change,” Rambo writes. Instead, “what makes any voluntary conversion process possible is a complex confluence of the ‘right’ potential convert coming into contact, under proper circumstances [e.g., crisis] at the proper time [e.g., quest], with the ‘right’ advocate.”41 Sometimes, in the case of food faiths, the right circumstances are a personal social network, and other times a chance encounter with an expert through the media. But this is, of course, the power of the Internet: it facilitates encounters of a potential spiritual eater with an advocate via social media, personal blogs, streamed documentaries, and informational sites. Rather than having to personally wade through scientific studies or evaluate competing nutritional claims, the convert can rely on the advocate’s word— their testimony and their professional or physiological experience—instead. Relationships among the diet converted are significant, because whether they are person-to-person or via the Internet, the movement from quest to encounter and beyond is generated by getting to know an individual or a personality who espouses a particular way of eating. More importantly, the advocate can offer 1) in vivo evidence of the diet’s efficacy and/or 2) explanations of the science that supports the diet in real time. After meeting an advocate comes what Rambo calls interaction, when a potential convert learns more about “the teachings, life-style, and expectations of the group” and is afforded “opportunities, both formal and informal, to become more fully incorporated into it.”42 Interaction is when a dietary novitiate might join a gym—Paleo practitioners are frequently (but not always) proponents of high-intensity training and weight lifting, as happens at a CrossFit gym—or a yoga studio. Or, the convert might begin making non-food related choices that align with the moral logic of the food faith, like “almost-but-not-yet vegans” who stop wearing clothes made from animals— such as wool and leather—and begin to buy beauty or cleaning products that are designated cruelty-free. A Paleo convert decided that, for her, Paleo is not just a diet, but also about “living as close to nature as possible in our modern world while still enjoying modern conveniences.” With this in mind, she is careful about what beauty products she uses or makes her own, which she considers “more natural.”43 Rambo labels the interaction stage “the matrix of change,” because it is the point at which the convert elects to either deepen their practice or to pass on the lifestyle transformation; it is a period known as the process of “encapsulation.” Encapsulation in food faiths represents a subsumption into the world of the diet; outside of the world of a particular spiritual and dietary practice, the beliefs and choices a convert makes might seem antisocial or extreme, but

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within the world of the dietary practice these choices are affirmed for their “validity and value.” While within religious conversion there are different types of encapsulation, in dietary conversion the “ideological encapsulation” involves what Rambo describes as a “cultivation of a worldview and belief system that ‘inoculates’ the adherent against alternative or competitive systems of belief” so that converts are “reminded of the purity and sacredness of their beliefs, the destructiveness of the beliefs of the outside world, and often, the special responsibility that adherents bear for preserving the ‘truth.’”44 And although ideological encapsulation is common across all food faiths, perhaps the converts to veganism most embody this change. One vegan convert writes about how she found her life’s purpose when she watched the 2011 documentary Vegucated. After several exposures to veganism and animal ethics dating back several years, she realized in the moments after the documentary ended that “my seatbelt was buckled. This time, I was ready.” From that moment on she wanted “nothing to do with meat or cheese or milk or any of it” but also slowly discovered her “niche” by leaving a corporate job and becoming “a nutrition junkie, wellness addict, health guru and plant-based advocate.” Once you “know in your heart you are on the right path,” she recounts years after her conversion, “you are exactly where you need to be.”45 Rambo identifies four dimensions of interaction enabled by encapsulation: relationships, rituals, roles, and rhetoric. The first three—with whom the convert now interacts, the newly unique practice in which they engage, and how the convert now identifies themselves—are all significant elements of the conversion to food faiths, but it is worth noting that rhetoric—how the convert now speaks and thinks differently from before—is doubly-significant. Many new converts to a dietary practice will change their social circle in order to eat with people who also follow their diet, or will find activities that help them engage with their new way of life. But the food faithful might be unique among the converted for their adherence to science as a form of rhetoric. Rhetoric, in Rambo’s matrix, “provides an interpretative system” that offers “guidance and meaning to the convert” and which “includes the various linguistic interpretations of a person’s actions, feelings, and goals.”46 Rambo notes that, in a Christian conversion and generally speaking, the language of the convert is informed by a theological principle or the Bible, as when Finney writes that he “I saw, as clearly as I ever have since, the reality and fullness of the atonement of Christ”—Biblical language befitting a convert who had pored over the Bible prior to his conversion. But, in the conversion to a food faith, science is the scripture to which the convert subscribes. What tips the balance in dietary conversion for these spiritual seekers is the scientific output of the diet. After moving through the quest and the encounter with a website or diet guru, the potential convert encounters rhetoric about the efficacy of a diet; specifically, they learn how the input—heart disease, IBS,

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eczema—is mitigated or even resolved—lowered triglycerides, less bloating, cleared skin, i.e., the output—by the black boxed science on which the diet is based. This rhetoric makes the logic of the diet inarguable, and inevitable: you can’t argue with physics, or chemistry, or biology (except, of course you can!). The bottom line of Rambo’s matrix of change is how the evocation of the rhetoric of science in food faiths is a powerful tool in enlisting or inviting people to convert to a diet. In several testimonials, converts to a vegan lifestyle write that the reason they made a dietary change was the scientific data on how the industrial cultivation of livestock is a major environmental pollutant that destroys local ecologies. Paleo practitioners who have eliminated gluten cite physiological and immunological studies ostensibly showing how gluten causes inflammation and leaky gut, even when the convert does not suffer from celiac disease. Science comprises its own kind of rhetoric and basis for conversion, one that is key to the concept of testimony. The scientific studies cited by the food faithful are a “mode of understanding” and an opportunity for “attribution,” which in turn provides an opportunity for the convert to conform to a role—a vegan, a person who is “gluten free”—that requires a certain type of conduct from them. Once a convert has weathered the previous five stages, the “fulcrum of the change process” comes full circle, according to Rambo, with commitment. Commitment is reached sequentially after the other steps, and functions as a definitive caesura on the previous period of exploration. When a convert reaches this point, explains Rambo, “this commitment decision is often dramatized and commemorated—sealed with a public demonstration of the convert’s choice.” For the convert to a new religion commitment might take the form of a baptism or ritual of confirmation, but in food faith practices this public demonstration comes in a digital form, such as a tweet announcing that one has decided to become a vegan (leading to a date that some vegans celebrate as their “veganiversary”) or a self-portrait (“selfie”) of the convert posted to Instagram explaining that this photo documents them at the beginning of their health journey. It is a form of personal rebranding that takes a private exploration into the public sphere. Beyond the public declaration, Rambo identifies five elements that round out the commitment stage: decision making, rituals, surrender, “testimony manifested in language transformation and biographical reconstructions,” and motivational reformulation.47 Rambo writes that decision making is “an integral part of the commitment stage” because the decision “to cross the line into a new life” can be a moment of joy and generate a sense of freedom, as it offers both social rewards and cogitative benefits, such as “ultimate meaning and solutions to practical problems”—like a fulfilling daily spiritual practice, but also what to order at a restaurant. Rituals reinforce both this sense of meaning and quotidian concerns, as rituals of a public declaration of change function to buttress

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the rejection of the old and acceptance of the new. The “heart” of conversion rituals involves “the difficult combination of saying no and saying yes” and implies that an individual is “’turning away from’ the past and ‘turning to’ a new future.”48 “I am still a work in progress,” writes one Paleo convert, but “I am so many light years away from the woman I was before I started this journey.”49 And before we turn to focus on surrender and testimony, it’s worth noting that “motivational reformulation” in dietary conversion is as varied as it is in religious conversion, with the food faithful citing reasons that range from the personal (health, well-being, a connection to ancestors) to the practical (finding a rubric for dietary choices, being part of a community) to the global (environmental concerns, pandemics). The final two elements of the commitment stage—surrender and testimony—have particular relevance for food faiths. Surrender, Rambo explains, is the “inner process of commitment,” which makes it one of the most difficult concepts of conversion to capture or define from an outsider’s perspective, because “insiders see such surrender as absolutely essential to a new life.” One typical element of surrender is the submission to an authority; for the religious, Rambo writes that this authority can be a “guru, teacher, institution” that guides the convert’s “actions, associations, and beliefs.” For the food faithful, however, the guru or teacher represents the higher authority of science, whose “detailed prescriptions and proscriptions must be rigorously followed.” It is not enough to listen to Dr. Fuhrman or Dr. Cordain: the food faithful must actively trust that the science substantiating the diet—plant-based, vegan, Paleo, keto—is accurate, and from there, Rambo explains, surrender by “what might be called ‘giving up’ or ‘giving in,’ which may require the figurative ‘leap of faith.”50 “Success is a direct result of thoroughly studying, understanding, and assimilating the science behind Dr. Fuhrman’s nutritional recommendations,” explains a convert of her change to a whole-foods plant-based diet, “and then making the firm decision to tenaciously act upon, and hold fast to earning health back, no matter what.”51 This “holding fast” can appear to an outsider like a credulous “giving in” to an esoteric or punitive system, but Rambo explains that what looks like passive surrender to a practice actually brings “an enormous burst of both energy and relief. Energy that was consigned to maintain the conflict [of worldviews] is now channeled into a new life, and the convert may feel incredible vitality and empowerment, with the possible effect that he or she can resolve major problems easily [and now has] hope for transformation, healing, and renewal.”52 As one of our previous converts to veganism explains, “The world suddenly becomes blissfully calm . . . If you eat only things that grow, the opportunity to eat anything very bad for you becomes so vanishingly small that you can pretty much stop worrying about it. Instead of trying to shoehorn into your diet the things everyone agrees you should eat more of—vegetables,

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seeds, legumes, fruit—you find there is room for [everything] without having to think about it.”53 Another of our vegan converts explains that this moment of surrender made her feel like “I got my brain back! These days [post-conversion], I get to eat as much as I want of foods that I love . . . I’m so grateful for that.”54 There is freedom for many converts in having a system and a practice to surrender to. Finally, commitment also involves testimony, what Rambo defines as “the narrative witness of a person’s conversion,” which he explains entails “two interacting processes: language transformation and biographical reconstruction.” The same use of language—the adoption of rhetoric—that forms the basis of interaction now figures the final stages of commitment as an “adaption of this modified rhetoric to explain one’s conversion experience, to tell one’s own story.” Each of the snippets of narratives and testimonials we have encountered here are examples of biographical reconstruction: the use of narrative to complete the process of conversion. Given the importance of language to the transformation of “one’s consciousness and perception of the world,” Rambo writes, “it is not surprising that testimony is the adaptation of this modified rhetoric to explain one’s conversion experience, to tell one’s own story.”55 Moreover, testimony both solidifies the convert’s “biographical reconstruction” and reflects their commitment to this new way of life. “Why am I telling you all of this?” one Paleo convert asks. “Because I wish somebody had told me a lot sooner! I want my success story to inspire and help you to lose weight and regain your health. I am a scientist by training . . . I know how to scrutinize a scientific journal article, and I look forward to sharing and disseminating new relevant research findings as they are published. This way of living is grounded strongly in science already, and the published evidence in favor of it is mounting steadily.”56 With the conversion complete and the practice of the dietary lifestyle change reflexive, the convert can now move on to experience the outcome of their choices: the consequences. Rambo identifies several consequences of conversion across many dimensions, but of particular relevance to us here are the intellectual and ethical consequences. The consequences of intellectual conversion “requires the person to confront all forms of false ideology and consciousness that distort understanding and interpretation. Logic and rigor are required of the intellectual convert.”57 For a Paleo convert, the “logic and rigor” of the sciences that support the change are the litmus that shield a practitioner from rebounding. “I was discovering the scientific foundation for the Paleo template,” writes a convert who is also a physician. “This wasn’t some crazy fad that dissolved under scientific scrutiny. Nor even was it historical reenactment based on our understanding of the diets of Paleolithic man. The tenets of the Paleo diet and lifestyle are each supported

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by physiology, cell and molecular biology, and nutritional sciences. I was nerding out! I couldn’t stop talking about Paleo, to my friends, to my family, to my husband, to my hair dresser, to my dental hygienist. I needed an outlet for my enthusiasm, so a mere two months after adopting the Paleo diet, I had the idea to start a blog. It would be a place for me to share the recipe creations I was coming up with at home, a place to talk about the science supporting this way of life, a place to share my experiences, and a mechanism for helping others discover solutions to their health woes.58

This same science-based logic and rigor animates transitions to vegan or plant-based diets, with veganism containing the additional dimension of being an ethical or moral conversion, which, as Rambo explains, “challenges the person to move from mere gratification of immediate personal needs to living by consistent principles of justice. Moving from a personal hedonistic calculus to other-directed living by and for justice is mandatory in this type of conversion.”59 Thus, a vegan convert asserts that they “went vegan because I couldn’t call myself an environmentalist if I wasn’t.” After years of vegetarianism, this convert realizes in retrospect that they believed were “doing the right thing and then I woke up and became a witness to all the horrors that come with the meat and dairy industry. There is no reason to eat meat and dairy; it’s bad for our bodies, it is bad for our environment and it is extremely horrible for animals.”60 The consequences of conversion for the food faithful are of course a new perspective on food, diet, and health, but also a new mindset, a new authority, and a practice that will animate their choices in all aspects of their life. What I hope this journey through Rambo’s taxonomy illustrates as we apply it to the testimonials of the diet converted is that we—as scholars of religion, as interested laypeople, or as spiritual eaters ourselves—should recognize that diet can be a spirituality of practice. The depth of feeling and change of lifestyle mean that this conversion to a food faith diet is as sincerely felt and long lasting as any religious conversion. And now that we have examined the process of converting to a food faith, we can transition into examining some of the shared beliefs and rituals that animate these dietary spiritualties of practice, starting with a shared belief in the efficacy of sacred ancestors. NOTES 1. Nixon and her followers reject the word vegan because it describes a lifestyle to which not all of the Herbies subscribe. The bottom line for the Herbies is the health effects of their diet choices, and for many the environmental effects, as well. Lindsay S. Nixon to happyherbivore.com, 2011, https:​//​happyherbivore​.com​/2011​/10​/im​-not​ -vegan​-anymore​/.

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2. Lindsay Nixon, “Happy Herbivore, Herbies,” https:​//​happyherbivore​.com​/topic​/ Herbies. “Ann,” “Amy,” and “Sherry.” 3. Linsay S. Nixon to happyherbivore.com, 2018, https:​//​happyherbivore​.com​/2018​ /02​/im​-vegan​-my​-partner​-isnt​-10​-tasty​-recipes​/. 4. “3 More Success Stories from the Primal Front | Mark’s Daily Apple,” (2016); Mark Sisson to marksdailyapple.com, 2019, https:​//​www​.marksdailyapple​.com​/ retired​-reborn​-and​-pursuing​-my​-passion​/. “Bob.” 5. Loren Cordain, The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat (New York: J. Wiley, 2002). 6. “3 More Success Stories from the Primal Front | Mark’s Daily Apple.” 7. Lewis R. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 2. 8. Barry Hankins, The Second Great Awakening and the Transcendentalists: Greenwood Guides to Historic Events, 1500–1900, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004), 187. 9. Charles Grandison Finney, Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney (New York: A. S. Barnes & company 1876), 7ff. 10. Finney, 13–14. 11. Wade Clark Roof, “Religion and Narrative,” Review of Religious Research 34, no. 4 (1993), 298. 12. Ines W. Jindra et al., “Gender, Religiosity, and the Telling of Christian Conversion Narratives,” The Journal for the Sociological Integration of Religion and Society 2, no. 1 (Spring 2012), 2. 13. Ulrike Popp-Baier, “Narrating Embodied Aims. Self-Transformation in Conversion Narratives—a Psychological Analysis,” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/ Forum: Qualitative Social Research 2, no. 3 (2001). 14. Lewis R.Rambo, “Theories of Conversion: Understanding and Interpreting Religious Change,” Social Compass 46, no. 3 (1999). 15. Risto Moisio and Mariam Beruchashvili, “Questing for Well-Being at Weight Watchers: The Role of the Spiritual-Therapeutic Model in a Support Group,” The Journal of Consumer Research 36, no. 5 (2010). 16. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 3, 13, 15. 17. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 18. Christina J. Adler et al., “Sequencing Ancient Calcified Dental Plaque Shows Changes in Oral Microbiota with Dietary Shifts of the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions,” Nature Genetics 45 (2013); Antti Sajantila, “Major Historical Dietary Changes Are Reflected in the Dental Microbiome of Ancient Skeletons,” Investigative Genetics 4 (2013); D. R. Gentner et al., “Emissions of Organic Carbon and Methane from Petroleum and Dairy Operations in California’s San Joaquin Valley,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 14, no. 10 (2014). 19. Rambo, 20. 20. Rambo, 22.

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21. Decca Aitkenhead, “5am Ice Baths and a Strict Vegan Diet: My Year of Living (Very) Healthily,” The Guardian (2018). https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/lifeandstyle​ /2018​/jan​/06​/ice​-baths​-vegan​-diet​-year​-living​-healthily. 22. Rina Raphael, The Gospel of Wellness (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2022). 23. Rambo, 165. 24. Aitkenhead, “5am Ice Baths and a Strict Vegan Diet: My Year of Living (Very) Healthily.” 25. Rambo, 166. 26. “The Inflammation and Pain Caused by as Was Gone for Good | Mark’s Daily Apple,” (2018). https:​//​www​.marksdailyapple​.com​/the​-inflammation​-and​-pain​ -caused​-by​-as​-was​-gone​-for​-good​/. 27. “7 Paleo Success Stories to Inspire Your Weight Loss Efforts,” (2020). https:​//​ chriskresser​.com​/need​-to​-lose​-weight​-get​-inspired​-by​-these​-5​-paleo​-success​-stories​/. 28. “After Cardiac Arrest Nearly Killed Me, I Went Vegan,” (2020). https:​//​www​ .forksoverknives​.com​/success​-stories​/after​-cardiac​-arrest​-nearly​-killed​-me​-i​-went​ -vegan​/. 29. Lindsay Nixon, “Happy Herbivore, Herbies.”— Catherine,” Happy Herbivore (May 2014). https:​//​happyherbivore​.com​/2014​/05​/how​-catherine​-plant​-based​-weight​ -loss​-headaches​/. 30. “Feeling Happy and Healthy, Medication-Free | Mark’s Daily Apple,” (2019). https:​//​www​.marksdailyapple​.com​/feeling​-happy​-and​-healthy​-medication​-free. 31. Rambo, 46. 32. Rambo, 56, 63. 33. “Managing Mitochondrial Disease with Paleo: Guest Post by Jody Allard, Primal Palate | Paleo Recipes,” (2020). https:​//​www​.primalpalate​.com​/paleo​-blog​/ managing​-mitochondria​-disease​-with​-paleo​-guest​-post​-by​-jody​-allard​/. 34. Rambo, 64. 35. Rambo, 64. 36. Alicia Silverstone and Victoria Pearson, The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet (New York: Rodale, 2009), 10. Silverstone’s is actually one of my favorite conversion stories: after realizing that she wanted to completely boycott cruelty to animals by committing to the vegan lifestyle she had been dabbling in for years, she decided to definitively begin the next day. So, that night, she and her then-boyfriend “grilled the final steak in our freezer and sat down to our last nonvegan supper. It was quite solemn. I remember crossing myself like a Catholic even though I’m Jewish, because this was a total act of faith.” 37. Rambo, 66. 38. Rambo, 66–67. 39. “Paleo Success Stories | Paleo Leap,” (2017). https:​//​paleoleap​.com​/success​ -stories​/? 40. “Kim’s Story,” (2020). https:​//​www​.drfuhrman​.com​/success​-stories​/1092​/kims​ -story. 41. Rambo, 87. 42. Rambo, 102.

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43. “My 10 Year Journey from Atkins to Paleo . . . Finding Health by Going against the Grain of Standard Dietary Advice: Laurie’s Health Story,” (2018). https:​ //​ditchthewheat​.com​/my​-10​-year​-journey​-from​-atkins​-to​-paleo​-lauries​-health​-story. 44. Rambo, 104, 106–107. 45. “My Vegan Story,” The Glowing Fridge, (2020). https:​//​www​.theglowingfridge​ .com​/my​-vegan​-story. 46. Rambo, 108, 118. 47. Rambo, 124. 48. Rambo, 127–128. 49. “My Paleo Success Story: 65lbs Lost and I Beat Depression,” (2020). https:​//​ agirlworthsaving​.net​/2014​/06​/my​-paleo​-success​-story​.html. 50. Rambo, 132–133. 51. E. Boller and J. Fuhrman, Starved to Obesity: My Journey out of Food Addiction and How You Can Escape It Too! (Post Hill Press, 2019). Emily Boller is a famous success story of Dr. Fuhrman’s dietary lifestyle, whose story on his now-defunct blog, Disease Proof, she incorporated into her book. 52. Rambo, 135. 53. Aitkenhead, “5am Ice Baths and a Strict Vegan Diet: My Year of Living (Very) Healthily.” 54. Silverstone, 6. 55. Rambo, 137. 56. “The Curious Coconut,” The Curious Coconut (2020). https:​//​thecuriouscoconut​ .com​/blog​/my​-journey​-back​-to​-health. 57. Rambo, 146. 58. “Dr. Sarah’s Story,” The Paleo Mom (2019). https:​//​www​.thepaleomom​.com​/ about​/dr​-sarahs​-story. 59. Rambo, 146. 60. “10 Life-Changing Vegan Stories That Will Amaze You,” (2020). https:​//​ plantbasednews​.org​/news​/10​-life​-changing​-vegan​-stories​-that​-will​-amaze​-you​-copy.

5

Sacred Ancestors Veneration, Generations, and Getting in Touch with Our Roots

In the introduction to his cookbook Afro-Vegan: Farm-Fresh African, Caribbean, and Southern Flavors Remixed, vegan chef and pop culture omnivore Bryant Terry explains that he wrote this book for several reasons. The most important of those reasons, though, is the failure in American culture to appreciate African cooking techniques, food cultivation methods, and the centrality of “African-diasporic people in helping define the tastes, ingredients, and classic dishes of the original modern global fusion cuisine.” His odyssey of educating and engaging the tastes of Americans began (as so many elements of dietary transformation do) with a Google search. He was researching the term “African-American beans,” but instead of an article about the varieties of legumes used in traditional Afro-diasporic cuisine— green beans, red beans, black-eyed peas—he found hundreds of pages of global recipes for bean dishes and “not one result about the variety of beans and legumes historically grown and eaten” by African Americans. For Terry, this moment is illustrative of the “invisibility and marginalization” of the contributions of the people and food of the African diaspora, but also an opportunity to “appreciate the people who gave birth to this rich culinary heritage.”1 But beyond this absent sense of obligation, Terry writes that something else has been lost, as well. He explains that everyone—especially people of African descent—should “honor, cultivate, and consume food from the African diaspora.” These foods (rice, legumes, root vegetables like yam and cassava, seedless fruits such as melons, fruits, leafy greens) and traditional methods of preparation “carry our history, memories, and stories” and “connect [all Afro-diasporic people] to our ancestors and bring the past into the present day. They also have the potential to save our lives.” Terry points out that in the US, African Americans suffer some of the highest rates of 147

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“preventable diet-related illnesses, such as heart disease, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes.” These tragic numbers are well-known to physicians, public health workers, and advocates who work to eliminate the health disparities that separate African Americans from other cohorts. And while there are many programs that suggest medical and/or social interventions, Terry writes that although many factors “contribute to the increase in chronic illnesses . . . I would argue that the disconnect from our historical foods is a significant contributing force” to these health outcomes (emphasis added). For Terry, as well as other proponents of variations on the vegan diet, the key to resolving these health inequities and medical conditions (and not only among African Americans) goes beyond science, although that plays an important part; rather, one forgotten component is a connection to an ancestral culture. In Afro-Veganism—a movement that is encapsulated but not contained in Terry’s work as a chef—that ancestral culture is the diet that sustained pre-diaspora African peoples, which can be reclaimed by eating the starchy roots and tubers, legumes, fresh fruits and vegetables, and ancestral grains of Africa. Terry’s claim that using “culturally appropriate food [is] an important criterion for determining what is ‘healthy’” is an example of a distinctly spiritual justification for a particular diet: looking to our cultural ancestors as a model for attaining health. But it is not only our cultural ancestors who can teach us how to live healthy, full lives to our greatest potential—our genetic ancestors have answers for us, as well. Belief in the efficacy of genetic ancestors is consistently found in several dietary worldviews, but especially in what some practitioners call a “traditional” diet. A traditional diet—which is not synonymous with Paleo, although we might describe the two diets as cousins a few times removed, as they come from the same family of sciences but different branches—includes the pre-industrialized foodways of Indigenous and native peoples from all over the world, especially herding, agrarian, and hunter-gatherer societies in Europe, South America, and Australia. It’s based in part on the anthropological work of turn-of-the-twentieth century visitors from North America and Western Europe, who observed that these so-called traditional (sometimes called “pre-industrial”) communities were living much as their ancestors had for centuries. Many of these observers were physicians or had medical training, and were struck by the fact that the native peoples they met in their personal, governmental, or missionary excursions had almost none of the medical problems afflicting their friends and neighbors back home. From the tops of the Swiss Alps and the Peruvian Andes to the middle of the Australian Outback and the American Mojave Desert, the locals who lived according to their traditional and local diet appeared to suffer no heart disease, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, or stroke; they also had none of a wide variety of more mundane health complaints, such as appendicitis,

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diverticulitis, tooth decay, varicose veins, ulcers, or hemorrhoids.2 In fact, the origin of the label “Western diseases” to describe everything from cardiovascular disease to cavities comes from the realization that native peoples—who, unlike their North American and Western European foils, generally ate more fiber, no sugar or flour, diverse animal fats, and a variety of fresh plants—had none of these afflictions. These diseases, it seemed, were endemic to Western civilization but almost entirely absent from a traditional way of life—and a traditional diet. Despite the considerable diversity of foodways, the early advocates for traditional diets believed that because native and traditional diets sustained healthy communities all over the world, humans have physiologically adapted to eat a variety of foods that range across global ecosystems, and should diversify their diets accordingly. The father of the traditional diet in twenty-first-century food faith practices is Weston A. Price, a Canadian-American dentist who surveyed regional and indigenous diets around the world in the early 1900s. His 1939 book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects, is considered by his acolytes today the bedrock of a nutritional philosophy that favors fats from animals either pasture-raised or wild-caught, sprouted and fermented foods, and avoids pasteurization of dairy and alcohol.3 Paleo and traditional diets part ways on macronutrients like fats (Paleo adherents prefer their meat lean; traditionalists favor omega3-rich foods and offal) and food groups like dairy or grains (Paleo excludes both as flawed adaptations in the human evolutionary track, while traditionalists encourage the consumption of unpasteurized or “raw” milk products and unrefined grains), but what these two diets do have in common is a single but singular molecule: the human genome. The belief that the cure for Western diseases can be found in the wisdom of traditional diets is exemplified by the book Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Dr. Catherine “Cate” Shanahan. Dr. Cate, as she’s branded herself, tells a conversion story not unlike those we discussed in the previous chapter. For Shanahan, the long road to applying molecular biology and genetics to human nutrition began with her own intractable body, particularly the connective tissues in her legs, knees, and ankles. She struggled with cascading running-related injuries throughout high school and college, where she developed a case of shin splints so severe that it nearly cost her a track and field athletic scholarship. The persistence of her injuries made her think that there was a “molecular root of physical problems” and inspired her to switch her major from chemical engineering to genetics.4 But even after graduate studies in genetics and an MD, she found herself still hampered by pain; in particular, pain in her right knee so severe that she could hardly walk sent her out for “exploratory surgery, injections, physical therapy, and [even to] a Hawaiian kahuna.” After years of resisting the suggestion of her

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husband, a professional chef, that she look into nutrition as a possible avenue to healing, Shanahan finally descended down the rabbit hole of traditional diet. Like Terry, she began to feel that the secret to good health must lay in culinary traditions that had sustained cultures for generations but had been wiped out by modern food science and the Standard American Diet. But where Shanahan diverges from Terry on the importance of ancestors’ foodways is on the matter of genetics. What Shanahan came to believe was that “the health of your genes represents a kind of inheritance”—what she terms our “genetic wealth”—which we can tend to and improve upon at a genetic level if we eat the food “we’re designed to eat.” Dr. Cate explains that epigenetics—the study of how external or environmental forces cause changes to gene expression—supplies “scientific support for the idea of [deep, i.e., genetic nutrition] by giving molecular evidence that we are who we are, in large part, because of the foods our ancestors ate.”5 In a dietary sense, epigenetics is concerned with how the foods we eat are causing the expression of some genes—genetic predispositions to certain cancers, for example—and suppressing others—such as those responsible for the regenerative properties of bones and tissues, as Dr. Cate experienced first-hand. Only by returning to the diet of our genetic ancestors can we restore our own genetic health. In this genetic interpretation of diet and nutrition, Dr. Cate agrees with Bryant Terry when she writes that “many of us have health problems [because] we no longer eat in accordance with any culinary tradition” and that “our physiques have been sculpted, in part, by the foods our parents and grandparents ate (or didn’t eat) generations ago.”6 But her solution is not resuming a cultural culinary practice, as Terry advises, but to use diet for individual genetic rehabilitation through ancestral eating—repairing the body by repairing the genes—as well as a method by which to connect with our genetic ancestors. Thus, she explains that the secret to “genetic health and wealth” lies in her Four Pillars of traditional cuisine: meat on the bone, organs and offal (what chef Anthony Bourdain, whom Shanahan references as an inspiration, memorably termed “the nasty bits”), raw plant products, and fermented foods. Shanahan takes umbrage with the Paleo diet, writing that it is based on scant evidence and an incomplete understanding of genetics, but both Paleo and traditional diets represent a potent worldview that connects followers to a profoundly different era in human history. Before we had the difficulties of living together as a functional civilization, people lived uncomplicated lives of hunting and gathering in every ecological niche, and rejoiced in their bodies “as a strong man to run a race.” Dr. Cate’s epigenetic perspective on diet contains an appealing story of humanity’s origins: by returning to our genetic roots, and thereby suppressing “unnatural” gene expression caused by modern life, we are affirming a creation story based not on the Bible or any

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religion but in Darwinian evolution. As she writes, “as far as human health is concerned[,] once upon a time really existed. In the good old days, people enjoyed an almost idyllic physiologic prosperity. This prosperity was earned, in large part, by the maintenance of an intimate relationship between the people and the land, their animals, and the edible plants that rounded out their diets.”7 This sense of a connection to an idealized genetic and cosmogonic forefather exemplifies philosopher of science Mary Midgley’s point that “the theory of evolution is not just an inert piece of theoretical science. It is, and cannot help being, also a powerful folk-tale about human origins. Any such narrative must have symbolic force.”8 Accordingly, someone searching for true wellness in our modern world should eschew the trappings of civilization, delve deep into our genetic origins, follow Dr. Cate’s Four Pillars, and “serve as the modern emissaries of our distant relatives, carriers of an ancient secret (i.e., heath) once intended to be shared only with members of the tribe. Today, we are that tribe.” In this genetic ancestor model of dietary worldview, by eating in accordance with our hereditary blueprint we are bringing the past into the present. But—as Terry also observes of the cultural ancestor model— Dr. Cate writes that “ancient peoples understood food to be a holy thing, and eating [as] a sanctified act . . . in consuming food, each of us comes in contact with the great, interconnected web of life.”9 Whether genetic or cultural, our ancestors are ourselves . . . and our dietary destiny. Although both vegan and traditional dietary cultures make science the authoritative measure, what we are seeing here are just two examples of how many food faith practitioners subscribe to a worldviews grounded in ancestor veneration. But the type of ancestor venerated is dependent on the food faith practiced. In this chapter we will be exploring the tension between cultural and genetic ancestor veneration in food faiths by viewing them through the perspectives of vegans and their food faith counterparts—which we are painting with the broad brush of traditional, ancestral, and Paleo practices. Vegans and those who advocate for a traditional diet might preach seemingly divergent lifestyles, but both refer to “ancestors” as a justification and a standard for their dietary practice. When they raise the specter of ancestors, however, these dietary worldviews align themselves with the antithesis of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century American cultural experience, especially when it comes to food, diet, and health. In nearly every argument where ancestors are summoned to corroborate a particular nutritional claim, the implication is that all of these people—whether they belong to living, global cultures or are phantoms reconstructed from archeological evidence—have escaped the great curse of the Standard American Diet, and therein lies the value of their story. Specifically, as we will see, every foodway—from ancient hunting and gathering to Ayurvedic healing practices to pre-diaspora African food

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traditions to contemporary Asian diets of rice and vegetables—becomes fodder for comparison to the failings of the modern American diet. The straw man American who gorges on “doughnuts, cheese puffs, domesticated beef, [and] soda pop” is juxtaposed with the enlightened ancestor—cultural or genetic—whose diet exemplifies how we should be eating, according to science.10 The specter of the ancestor is raised in stories of the SAD-eating sinner but, in this particular literary genre, the ancestor lived in Paradise—a space where humans existed in prelapsarian goodness and harmony—until the inevitable Fall, which brought us sin and potato chips. In each narrative, the reader is offered a choice: continue down this road to perdition by indulging in fried foods and refined flour—thereby courting disease, an early death, and serving as a cautionary tale for future generations—or become the prodigal child who returns to the ways of their ancestors by eating the foods that will restore them to health. On both sides of this choice there is a fluid relationship to science; science is the raison d’être of the diet, even as it is the justification for using the qualitative case study of the ancestor. The recourse to the ancestor makes it the higher authority and a final argument—an ancestor is an authority greater than even the science, which, paradoxically, the case of the ancestor proves. But, similarly to the essentializing of various sciences that we see in spiritual eating communities, which ancestor is dietarily deified depends on the food faith being hallowed. While in some cases, it is a cultural ancestor whose influence becomes exemplary and others it is a genetic ancestor who provides the pattern to be emulated, across the board where “we” collectively come from becomes a powerful prototype of and reason for a particular diet. THE TROPE OF THE SACRED ANCESTOR—A BRIEF SCHOLARLY INTRODUCTION Despite their differences, when it comes to the concept of our antecedents what both traditional and vegan diets have in common—besides their grounding in science—are spiritual roots in the concept of a sacred ancestor, whose cultural, moral, and physiological example can be relied on today to guide practitioners toward good health and right living. Ancestors are, of course, an important component of various historical and institutional religion, but their significance and invocation in Western practices have dimmed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; even in New Religious Movements and New Age practices, as well as in twenty-first-century individual spiritualities, the centrality of an ancestor for legitimating and grounding a religion’s rituals and beliefs have fallen somewhat to the wayside. However, if we glance back at the history of sacred ancestors in global religions, we might see a precedent

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for why ancestors are summoned to legitimize the science-based dietary lifestyles of the food faithful today. With that in mind, before delving into the multifaceted spiritual influences of ancestors on contemporary dietary practice, it might be helpful to explore why ancestors are so spiritually significant in the first place. Sacred ancestors aren’t necessarily a meaningful litmus for spiritual practice—let alone religiosity—in the context of Western Protestant Christianity, which both actively and passively informs so many aspects of American life, including modern diet culture (which we discussed in chapter 2). So it is important to note (perhaps particularly for the food faithful, who might not be aware) that for many religious traditions, the experience and example of the ancestor has been the bedrock of lived practice for thousands of years. And to take a brief glance at the trope of the sacred ancestor itself as well as its significance in the field of religious studies, I will lean on a framework suggested by Mircea Eliade. It is unfashionable these days in academe to look to Eliade—a omnivorous mid-twentieth-century scholar of religion whose broad conclusions about homo religiosus have been both refined and refuted—for theoretical guidance, but in the case of these two conflicting dietary worldviews his perspective on ancestors, the concept of return, and the repetition of religious forms is useful as a general framework. Eliade’s concept of sacred time is methodologically helpful in conceptualizing the commonalities between vegan and traditional dietary worldviews, as well as the religious chassis on which these diets are built. In his 1954 book, The Myth of the Eternal Return (sometimes subtitled in one of its many reprintings as Cosmos and History), Eliade identifies a cyclical perceptive of time common among ancient religions, in which time and history periodically regenerates or are regenerated by rituals, ceremonies, rites, and spiritual practices. Eliade writes that meaning of these human acts and their value “are not connected with their crude physical datum but with their property of reproducing a primordial act, of repeating a mythical example.” With this in mind, marriage is a rite that echoes “mythical prototypes” while nutrition “is not a simple physiological operation; it renews a communion.” All of these acts, Eliade explains, “are repeated because they were consecrated in the beginning (‘in those days,’ in illo tempore) by gods, ancestors, or heroes.”11 We repeat them not just because we were commanded to by the gods, but because these are acts sanctified by our ancestors; these “rituals and significant profane gestures” only “acquire the meaning attributed to them, and materialize that meaning” because they are the deliberate repetition of acts “posited ab origine by gods, heroes, or ancestors.”12 Usefully for our purposes, Eliade’s exploration of the concept helps expand the definition of ancestor cited repeatedly by proponents of different dietary worldviews. Rather than just a deceased forbearer, Eliade explains that an ancestor is an individual who has fused into archetypal category—sometimes

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a hero, but more often a complicated person or persons whose life then provides an example of how to live now. Eliade writes that the “transformation of the dead person into an ‘ancestor’ corresponds to the fusion of the individual into an archetypal category” today. The time of the ancestors consecrated by their actions is both sacred and reproduced by the imitation of their acts in this current, profane time. What happened then is unimpeachable, and also provides a formula and a pattern for how we should live now. We bring that past back along time’s curve when we recreate what our ancestors did—or ate, for that matter. Through this recreation, we literally re-create: we recreate our world and ourselves according to an archetype. Through this imitation and repetition of what Eliade calls “paradigmatic gestures,” there is an “implicit abolition of profane time, of duration, of ‘history.’”13 Finally, Eliade observes that “that life cannot be restored but only re-created through repetition [which] is very clearly shown in curative rituals”—which I would argue includes diet.14 The perspective that individuals, communities, and their descendants can restore and recreate their lives through the repetition of the actions of their ancestors resonates with Terry’s concept of Afro-Veganism and what we are calling here the cultural ancestor model: looking to “culture, tradition, and memories [to] build community around the table.”15 It also, not surprisingly, echoes Dr. Cate’s suggestion that by “celebrating the living art of ancient, traditional cuisine” and following our genetic ancestors, we can “allow real food to connect our bodies to nature” and let nature speak “through that sustenance directly to our DNA, to the living, intelligent engines that drive our physiologies. Health is beautiful.”16 By connecting with our ancestors—however ancient or near—through the curative ritual of diet, we can achieve true health, the twenty-first-century version of redemption. THE CULTURAL ANCESTOR—OR, OUR VEGETARIAN FOREFATHERS For the purposes of this chapter, we can date the popularization of the idea that vegetarianism—and eventually veganism—is a part of a cultural inheritance back to the Philadelphia Bible Church. A theological cornerstone of their worldview was the Biblical fact that the two human residents of the Garden of Eden were never told they could eat animals. It’s true that God ordered them to “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth,” He also told them that He had given them

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[E]very plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.17

In what became a model for Christian vegetarianism for generations, William Metcalfe (whom we met briefly in chapter 2) taught that God is clearly asserting that humans should eat only fruits, seeds, and plants; tellingly, the Lord—in His infinite wisdom—says nothing about eating animals. Thus, “at the very commencement of the book of Genesis” the “primeval law of Divine Revelation was undoubtedly given to direct the families of mankind in the selection of their appropriate food” which was, “according to the precept,” to be “wholly vegetable.” And lest we conclude that this law “was intended only by its all-wise Author to be applicable to Adam” and only for the duration of his and his consort’s stay in Paradise, Metcalfe writes that “[i]n so judging we should undoubtedly err.” He asks whether generations of Jews and Christians alike have “ever disputed the reality of the enjoyments of the primitive race of men, especially whilst they continued in their integrity?” In thinking of these cultural ancestors, Metcalfe notes that it is a universal belief that Adam and Eve were “encompassed” by “the lovely scenes of Paradise, and guided and influenced by the mild principles of this divine law” and that the lives of these proto-predecessors were “more intellectual, more spiritual, and every way superior to any thing experienced in our day by degenerated human nature. So entirely have men, in all subsequent times been persuaded of the truth of this view of the subject, that the period has been emphatically denominated the Golden Age” (emphasis mine).18 In Metcalfe’s interpretation, humans had Paradise within their grasp—a sublime existence of living harmony with the natural world—but they lost it. So now the only way to attain Paradise was to try to live as our ancestors were instructed by the Lord: by eating “every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit” for food, but no animals. This first chapter of Genesis and the proclamation that His creation may only eat the plants of the Garden, not the animals, has influenced a wide variety of Abrahamic religious movements. For example, in the vegetarian philosophy of Rastafarianism, I-tal—the belief that vitality (the root word of Ital) comes from eating living plants instead of dead flesh—these same Biblical verses are cited as evidence of the lifeforce conferred by the Almighty through plant foods. Likewise, the Jewish Veg organization explains that, “according to the Torah, God asked humans to be vegans in his very first conversation with Adam and Eve.”19 In conjunction with the science that supports

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veganism’s benefits to human and global health, veganism has religious roots in both the Vedic principle of ahimsa—nonviolence toward all living beings—and in the theological assertions of Saint Francis, whose reflections on the democracy of all God’s creatures is foundational to the premises of ethical veganism. Animals in our modern food system, writes philosopher Peter Singer, are “treated like machines that convert fodder into flesh,” despite the evident sentience that is today backed by scientific research and which was the reason Saint Francis preached to the birds when the ears of the Church were closed.20 These scientific and spiritual mechanisms can nurture social and political activism. Breeze Harper, editor of the book Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society, explains that becoming an ahimsa-based vegan is, in effect, an act of decolonizing the body and engaging in “health activism that resists institutionalized racism and neocolonialism.”21 The notion of a sublimated Golden Age is a common thread that holds both cultural and genetic ancestor narratives together (it is also, as we shall see, one of the rip cords critics of each perspective can pull to bring the well-spun narrative down). Indeed, it is important to consider the generative stories that apply to each, such as Terry’s formulation of Afro-Veganism and the foods of the African diaspora. “There is an affective dimension to food that we all intuitively understand,” writes Reverend Christopher Carter—a professor of religion as well as a practicing minister and vegan. In his book The Spirit of Soul Food: Race, Faith, and Food Justice, Carter explains that eating “can be a contemplative experience. Ancestral dishes can remind us of what is real, true, and sacred in our lives. The affective dimension of food can help people feel connected to their communities despite being thousands of miles apart.”22 For Terry and other African American vegans, the golden age was before the enslavement of Africans by white Europeans—before the forced exodus and relocation of Africans from their land and the food that formed the bedrock of a multiplicity of cultures. But it is also an in illo tempore that can be recaptured by rejecting modern American foodways—especially remnants of a racist and colonial diet—and embracing the cultural inheritance of whole foods whose literal and symbolic roots are in Africa. The notion that African Americans should eat the foods grown, gathered, and cultivated by their ancestors for the sake of their health and well-being— as suggested by Terry and other self-identified Afro-Vegans—has recently achieved notoriety due to its growing popularity in the National Basketball Association (NBA). One notable evangelist for the whole-foods plant-based movement for both its health and cultural benefits to African Americans is John Salley, a four-time NBA champion. For Salley, the lesson of ancestral foods carries with it the lacuna of centuries of enslavement in the Americas. In contrast to the plants, roots, and grains of Africa, Salley is among those

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who point out that the culinary heritage of slavery is celebrated today as Southern or soul food, completely neglecting the legacy of deprivation and cruelty of slavery-era circumstances. “They [white slave owners] used to make us eat chitterlings—the intestines of the pig—because we weren’t allowed to eat the bacon,” Salley explains. “We ate pigs’ feet because they cut them off after they walked in their own shit and they didn’t want to eat the thing. And we would grab them, wash them and pickle them because we had nothing else. Only because it was what we were forced to do, it became natural. And that’s where we run into this huge problem.”23 Likewise, Carter agrees that soul food is a nutritionally problematic foodway, but also represents how “Black people were forced to make the best out of the worst, and this improvisational ability is how we survived. Our ancestors ate what we now call soul food in order to preserve their communities and promote their flourishing.” As an adult he became a vegan, but Carter writes that he is “proud to have come from people whose culinary habits reflect our ability to ‘make a way out of no way.’”24 But the urge to “make a way out of no way” has led to the “huge problem” Salley, Terry, Carter, and Harper all note, which is the unconscionable numbers of African Americans suffering from the effects of diet-related diseases and the disproportionate health burden Black people bear in the United States. Salley, in particular, is determined to help lower the rates of cardiac arrest in former NBA players—men who, in their prime, were considered some of the best athletes in the world, and today die disproportionately at a younger age than their white peers. These voices are just a handful representing the Afro-Veganism movement, which combines religion and activism with African identity and empowerment. Some African-American vegans chose the lifestyle as an outgrowth of their affiliation with religious groups such as the Nation of Islam, Black Hebrew Israelites, and Rastafarianism, all of which either forbid or severely limit the consumption of meat. (NOI and some segments of the Black Hebrew Israelites prohibit the consumption of pork in keeping with Jewish and Islamic law [respectively]; Rasta practitioners maintain a vegetarian diet while one sect of BHI—the African Hebrews Israelites of Jerusalem—are vegan). Others came to the Afro-Vegan movement through adjacent civil rights activism and consciousness raising on health disparities in the African-American community. Civil rights leaders like Coretta Scott King, Dick Gregory, and Rosa Parks abstained from meat (or, in the case of King and Gregory, from animal products altogether) as an extension of their beliefs in equality, compassion, and nonviolence; more recently, Dexter Scott King and Angela Davis have merged their social activism with their avocation of ethical veganism. Today, and according to the website of the AfroVegan Society, Afro-Veganism brings together multiple threads of advocacy, identity, and seeking an end to centuries of cruelty and domination through

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civil rights activism and a vegan diet. As author and vegan activist Aph Ko writes in the group’s “African-American Vegan Starter Guide,” “many of us have come to the conclusion that our experiences of racial oppression are deeply entangled with animal oppression on a fundamental level.”25 With this in mind, as Terry and others explain, veganism is more than a movement for “rich White people”—a caricature built on the misconception that veganism is prohibitively expensive and an esoteric interest only among the privileged. Instead, vegan activists of every race enthusiastically work to decolonize diet, creating positive outcomes for communities that have suffered due to food insecurity, systemic racism, and living in food deserts; to express solidarity with creatures who have also suffered enslavement and extermination; and to reconnect an historically disenfranchised group with their cultural roots through food.26 The mission of Terry and other Afro-Vegan activists—to create vegan dishes with Afro-diasporic foods like starchy roots and whole grains and change the health outcomes of the African American community—fits within this paradigm of decolonizing and connecting. But Afro-Veganism is just one example of the invocation of cultural heritage to validate a plant-based diet. Cultural ancestors are also used generally by vegan and plant-based proselytizers as substantive evidence of the diet’s validity. One example is Dr. John McDougall. Beginning with his first book, The McDougall Plan, published in 1984, the physician and founder of the eponymous residential treatment center—which offers, among other services, a 10-day introductory nutrition-based intervention program for heart disease and cancer—McDougall frequently evokes the power of cultural precedent in his prescribed diet. In his 2012 The Starch Solution: Eat the Foods You Love, Regain Your Health, and Lose the Weight for Good!, McDougall begins with a story—some version of which he has told in his previous five books—about how he came to his theory on the connection between a plant-based diet and human vitality. When he was a newly-minted MD his first appointment was as the sole in-house physician for a 5000-employee sugar plantation in Hawaii. It was there McDougall noticed that, instead of the trajectory of aging he’d learned about in his medical studies—with younger patients being essentially heathy and the elderly suffering from the usual diseases that accompany old age, such as arthritis, heart disease, and cancer—the flow was reversed. Among his patients, the “elderly immigrant generation remained trim, active, and medication free into their nineties. They had no diabetes, no heart disease, no arthritis, and no cancers of the breast, prostate, or colon.” But, fascinatingly, their children were “a little heavier and not as healthy” and their grandchildren were “suffering from the most profound health problems, the same ones I had spent my years learning about during my medical training.”27 Confused by this “reversal of fortune” (and note how his language is echoed in Shanahan’s notion of genetic wealth), McDougall considered every aspect

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of their lifestyles that might be responsible for this flipped script. And, naturally, he settled on one important variable: how these families “had gone from a traditional diet in their countries of origin to fully adopting an American diet.” McDougall, of course, does not mean “traditional” in the same sense that Weston A. Price’s acolytes like Dr. Cate interpret the word, but rather the fact that McDougall’s oldest patients were still eating the starch-based diet on which they had been raised. These elders were immigrants from Japan, Korea, China, and the Philippines, where rice and vegetables were and continued to be dietary staples, while their Hawaii-born children incorporated some Western foods into their own diet, and their grandchildren had “cashed in the life-sustaining starch-based diet of the grandparents for a diet rich in meat, dairy, and processed foods.” Buoyed by this insight, McDougall began looking beyond the cultures of his patients in Hawaii to “traditional diets around the world.” And like Price et al., what he found was that diet was “the missing ingredient—and the most fundamental one—in human health.” But unlike Shanahan and other modern advocates of a traditional or ancestral diet, McDougall suggests that now, and throughout human history, we are and should consider ourselves “starchivores.” McDougall counters the claims of the Paleo crowd by suggesting that a diet centered on starchy plant foods is the “real Paleolithic diet” because the “majority of calories for most hunter-gatherer societies came from plant-foods, not animal-foods.” And what was good enough for our ancient ancestors then is likewise good enough for our cultural ancestors now. “The story is the same the world over,” McDougall explains. “Whether rice in Asia, potatoes in South America, corn in Central America, wheat in Europe, or beans, millet, sweet potatoes, and barley around the globe, starch has been at the center of food and nutrition throughout human history.” Like Sylvester Graham’s evocation of the Romans and their battle-ready bread, McDougall cites Incan warriors who “switched to quinoa for strength prior to battle,” as well as the Mayans and Aztecs of Central America who were known as “the people of the corn” and the ancient Egyptians whose “starch of choice was wheat.” Everywhere “around the world, six foods have provided our primary fuel: barley, corn, millet, potatoes, rice, and wheat. If the map hasn’t convinced you, science documents it well: Over at least the past 13,000 years, starch has been central to the diets of all healthy, large, successful populations.” And those effects last into the modern period. “Look at a globe,” McDougall challenges his readers, because “any region with a large population of trim, healthy people reveals the same truth: Healthy populations get more of their calories from starch. Eat a traditional meal in Japan, China, or most any Asian country and you will find your bowl filled with rice, possibly alongside sweet potatoes and buckwheat.” The cultural ancestors of his first patients long ago in Hawaii can and should serve as a model for

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all of us today. The problem, as he sees it, is that society’s “unwillingness to respond to this vast base of knowledge [i.e., eating starch], from ancient to modern, has resulted in the greatest health crisis known to humankind.”28 We have ignored cultural ancestors at our peril. McDougall isn’t the only whole-foods plant-based advocate to cite the origins of civilization and culture as evidence for a diet based on grains and vegetables. Looking to other ancient cultural ancestors, vegan endurance athlete Rich Roll and his chef/yogi wife, Julie Piatt, write in their book The Plantpower Way that one of the incentives for Rich to go plant-based was recalling how in the first years of their relationship Julie had turned to “the principles of Ayurveda—a system of alternative medicine derived from ancient Hindu culture that promotes balance through stress reduction and a predominantly plant-based diet—to completely heal and eradicate a golf ball-size cyst in her neck.” That Julie used ancient wisdom to heal herself “confounded” her doctors and the other medical specialists who, after returning herself to health, still insisted that “Julie’s condition could never be resolved without surgery.”29 In these and other cases, the connection to cultural ancestors, however remote and perhaps no relation, serves as a source of guidance, healing, and health. Among the plant-based or vegan dietary worldviews, a cultural ancestor is more than a guide; an ancestor is, as Eliade explained, a beginning—a prototype, an originator, a reason. With a cultural ancestor as a precedent, the way forward to a new lifestyle also includes an important historical antecedent. But, as we already know from meeting Grok in chapter 4, the wrangling over history doesn’t belong solely to plant-based diets: it is also foundational to the worldview of traditional diets, which range from the more recent and historically non-Western to a deep dive into human genetic history. GENETIC ANCESTORS—OR, OUR OMNIVOROUS MITOCHONDRIAL MOTHERS The twentieth-century discovery of the structure and agency of the human genome changed the historical and ethnographic “mismeasures of man” of previous centuries into a fundamentally new portrait of humankind, where external differences dimmed and phenotypes could be washed away by a universal genotype. The revelation that humans share 99.999 percent of their genetic makeup with one another has offered a warm contrast to the myriad misuses of science that attempted to prove different human phenotypes were actually separate species.30 But, fascinatingly, the story of human evolution that emerged from the young field of genetics appeared to be an arrow pointing toward the present as well as toward a murky past. The sciences that study

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our human ancestors—archeological and anthropological research into where we literally and figuratively came from—converged on the topic of genetics and generated a neo-Darwinian dialog about what we had been “selected for” in terms of our physical bodies. The way this science has been used in dietary circles, however, became something of an essentialist argument predicated on a very idealized interpretation of what life was like at the dawn of the Paleolithic age. Genetics only definitively emerged as a science after Gregor Mendel’s experiments with his pea plants became widely known in the early twentieth century, but it was the rise of molecular genetics after the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 that really put a shine on the concept of a genetic ancestor. Over the course of the twentieth century, instrumentalizing the science of human genetics became a mania. Perhaps nothing so clearly represents the employment of the concept of a hereditary blueprint dictating the parameters of a healthy diet than Dr. Cate’s exhortations to think of our personal genetic wealth begot by our ancestors and the inheritance we will pass down to future generations. This popular focus on genetics in diet arguably begins with the introduction of the Paleo diet at the end of the twentieth century. Followers of Weston A. Price—like Cate Shanahan—correctly point out that Price’s mostly pre-WWI research into diet also dealt with familial inheritance, but because the mechanism for passing on traits wasn’t discovered yet Dr. Price’s discoveries remained somewhat niche throughout the twentieth century. While arguably a version of the Paleo diet originated in the nineteenth century (if that’s truly how we’d like to characterize Walt Whitman’s—excuse me, Mose Velsor’s—suggested diet), the twentieth century had its first taste of the socalled caveman diet when gastroenterologist Walter L. Voegtlin published the book The Stone Age Diet: Based On In-Depth Studies of Human Ecology and the Diet of Man in 1975. Voegtlin’s theories were based almost entirely on his observations as a gastroenterologist, the comparative anatomy of which lead him to the conclusion that 1) humans have the digestive tracts of carnivores and 2) we should eat meat almost exclusively.31 His demonstrably false conviction that humans were not adapted to eating plant foods—including grains—or dairy products proved to be less problematic than his explicit eugenicists ideals, and the book was largely forgotten, mostly because Voegtlin died later that same year.32 But Voegtlin’s book was among the first of a long list of books on our Paleolithic ancestor’s diets that insisted this diet represented a whole new way of life in our modern age, not just another grasp at weight loss. The first scientific paper to suggest combining knowledge gleaned from anthropology and genetics in order to make medical and dietary recommendations was a 1985 New England Journal of Medicine article titled “Paleolithic Nutrition: A Consideration of Its Nature and Current Implications” by S.

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Boyd Eaton, a physician, and Melvin Konnor, an anthropologist. In the article they assert that “human genetic constitution has changed relatively little since the appearance of truly modern human beings, Homo sapiens sapiens, about 40,000 years ago. Even the development of agriculture 10,000 years ago has apparently had a minimal influence on our genes”—a refrain that would eventually become gospel in the Paleo dietary worldview. According to Eaton and Konnor, this means that the “range of diets available to pre-agricultural human beings determines the range that still exists for men and women living in the twentieth century—the nutrition for which human beings are in essence genetically programmed” (emphasis added).33 This language of genetic programming and “the dietary patterns of our remote ancestors” has become a leitmotif of Paleo and traditional diet literature, including Dr. Cate’s epigenetic philosophy. In 2002, one of Eaton’s disciples, Loren Cordain, helped ignite the interest in eating in accordance with our genetic heritage in his book, The Paleo Diet. In keeping with Eaton and Konnor’s thesis, Cordain assures his readers that “the Paleo Diet is the one and only diet that ideally fits our genetic makeup. Just 333 generations ago—and for 2.5 million years before that—every human being on Earth ate this way . . . I didn’t design this diet—nature did. This diet has been built into our genes” (emphasis added).34 But the narratives that buttress traditional and Paleo diets are contingent on a folk tale not unlike Reverend Metcalfe’s evocation of the long-lost Eden. Indeed, the portrait of both traditional and Paleolithic ancestors as living in an Edenic, natural paradise is generally a feature of topical books and blogs— showing up in everything from the Weston A. Price Foundation’s “Wise Traditions in Food, Farming, and the Healing Arts” online journal to books about the Paleo diet. Anecdotally, one of the first books I ever encountered on the topic of traditional and ancient foodways was the 2001 book The Origin Diet, by dietician Elizabeth Somer. She explains that our human body is the “product of the nutrients available over the course of hundreds of millions of years. No matter how excellent the architect’s plans, the building (our bodies) would never have been built without the necessary materials. Since food provides the fundamental materials that determined how we evolved, you literally are what you, your parents, grandparents, and every ancestor before that ate.” She also tells a lovely tale of our evolution and how it’s both genetically and intimately tied to the variety and forms of food we ate—roots, seeds, vegetables, meat—when we left the forest for the savannah. Her history of our ancestors culminates with Homo sapiens sapiens (“that’s us,” Somer notes), who, by 40,000 years ago had fanned out up through Africa and across Eurasia. “Dress them in suits and ties or little black dresses and heels and they’d look like everyone else on the street today, maybe better. Their limbs were leaner and more agile than those of any of their predecessors. They were slightly taller that we—the men averaged 5’10” and the women were at least

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5’6”—and they had beautiful smiles (only 2 percent of the fossil teeth show any sign of tooth decay).” In Somer’s happy tale, “our Paleolithic grandparents” surpassed every other Homo species in the fossil record to live full lives where “food was abundant and life was good.”35 In Somer’s narrative, these ancestors represented “a giant leap unprecedented in the history of the world” who lived in “perfect balance with their environment” until the Neolithic period, when “our ancestors switched from foraging to farming.”36 It is at this point that the Paleo narrative takes a dark turn into what geographer and historian Jared Diamond called the “worst mistake in the history of the human race”: the rise of agriculture.37 In evolutionary terms, Somer and others tell us, agriculture was an abrupt about-face, a turn in the evolutionary stream against which the force of tens of thousands of years of adaptation flowed. As health entrepreneur John Durant writes in his book The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health, the cultivation of plants and animals— rather than the gathering and hunting of same—created what Durant terms a “genetic mismatch.” Humans “aren’t adapted to sitting at desks all day long, eating Twinkies and drinking Pepsi,” writes Durant of our presumable dietary conundrum. “Humanity spent most of its evolutionary existence living as hunter-gatherers on the African savannah; therefore humanity was better adapted to that type of lifestyle.”38 Our true destiny is to follow in the footsteps of our ancestors, to wear their genes, so to speak, as a lifestyle and, as health educator Chris Kresser explains in Your Personal Paleo Code, join “this health revolution based on the latest cutting-edge science, seeking to eat and live in closer harmony with human genetics and biology.”39 Historian Adrienne Rose Bitar describes narratives like those of Cordain, Somer, Diamond, Durant, Kresser, and others as “Paleo utopias,” where “the caveman diet offers an embodied utopian practice embedded within a powerful story of an original, lost Paleolithic paradise.” In this story, the vanished paradise of our pre-agriculture origins can be recaptured in the body, because the body sits “in the long, deep currents of human history, suggesting that the body is on loan from history and obliged to the future—and only one’s own property for a short-lived half-blink of evolutionary time.”40 Bitar’s assertion that these “Paleolithic diets argue that this better body makes a better world, the improving self creates an improved society, personal and social transformations go hand in hand” echoes Mary Midgley’s critique of the New Darwinism. Midgley observed that modern accounts of human evolution fall into two distortions: the Social Darwinist idea and the Escalator Fallacy—the idea that evolution is “a steady, linear upward movement, a single inexorable process of improvement, leading (as a disciple of Herbert Spencer’s put it) ‘from gas to genius.’”41 Although the Social Darwinist concept—the theory that the evolution of life is contingent on competition, and that “survival of the fittest” maps onto social hierarchies and individual economic

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success42—does not appear in Paleo utopic diets, the Escalator Fallacy does; this fallacy is simultaneously central to the arguments made about our genetic ancestors (that they were the culmination of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and adaptation), but also that the escalator slowed to a stop (or began treading in reverse) when we forsook our traditional diets. Whether or not we agree with the characterization of these origin stories as “Paleo utopias,” the common denominator in the tale of the genetic ancestor is that science proves we are living out of step with our evolutionary roots. Paleo advocates adhere to the narrative that humans were on a steady rise in fitness and ability, but that escalation crashed during the Neolithic period when agriculture began. Likewise, advocates of a traditional diet believe that the backward grind of disease and debility happened due to diet, but in their timeline the fall occurred in the more recent change-over from primitive subsistence lifestyles to our modern industrialized society. Either way, they believe that the method by which we can repair the broken escalator—carrying better genes forward whilst getting back in touch with the genes of our ancestors—is a diet in tune with our genetics. As Bitar points out, the purveyors of the Paleo diet “insist that Paleo is not merely an individual plan for self-improvement but a collective solution to a species-wide health crisis, broadly defined.”43 If we stick with the escalator metaphor, then this diet is a power source that will turn the stalled machine back on because, as Cordain writes, by moving “backward in time with your diet, you will actually be moving forward. You’ll be combining the ancient dietary wisdom with all of the health advantages that modern medicine has to offer. You will reap the best of both worlds.”44 The Paleo diet achieved mainstream recognition with Cordain’s book, but it experienced wide proliferation with the growth of websites like Mark Sisson’s “Mark’s Daily Apple” (which was the source of several conversion narratives in chapter 4) and lifestyle blogs like “Nom Nom Paleo,” “Balanced Bites,” and “The Paleo Mom.” But, unsurprisingly, it has also received a large share of criticism, and not just from vegans who object to the abundance of meat in the average Paleo dieter’s day. The Paleo diet is an interesting test case of Kuhn’s scientific paradigms: despite a scientific theory being perceived as no longer accurate, true believers will continue to carry on working within that paradigm, ignoring or attempting to disprove any evidence contrary to their beliefs—even when that evidence comes from scientists themselves. One example of scientific pushback against the Paleo diet comes from Christina Warinner, a molecular anthropologist and specialist in the microbiomes of ancient humans who gave a TEDx talk in 2012 titled “Tracking Ancient Diseases Using . . . Plaque.” In it, the self-described “archeological geneticist” actually echoes the language of Shanahan, Cordain, and others,

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by explaining that the most important health challenges today are not caused by simple mutations in our genome, but rather result from a complex and dynamic interplay between genetic variation, diet, microbes and parasites, and our immune response. Diseases like cancer and metabolic disorders, Warinner explains, have a strong evolutionary component that directly relates to the fact that we live in a very different environment than the ecosystems in which our bodies evolved. And in order to understand hereditary and autoimmune diseases, we need to move past studies of the human genome alone and toward a more holistic approach to human health in the past, which Warriner and her team do by studying ancient “dental calculus.”45 One year later, however, Warriner followed up her first video with another TED Talk (TEDxOU), this one titled “Debunking the Paleo Diet.” In her second video, Warriner is not trying to undermine the “genetic mismatch” thesis of traditional diets; she reiterates what Cordain, Durant, and others have said repeatedly: that we are living out of sync with our genes (as when Somer writes that “chronic disease is not the inevitable consequence of aging, but rather is the inevitable consequence of living out of sync with our evolutionary origins”46). Warriner even admits that she finds the premise of the Paleo diet interesting because it “purports to put archaeology in action, to take information we know about the past and use it in the present to help us today.”47 But Warriner is after something deeper than merely agreeing that we have genetic ancestors who can teach us about ourselves and our physical health; she there to point out how the “version of the Paleo Diet that’s promoted in popular books, on TV, on self-help websites and in the overwhelming majority of press has no basis in archaeological reality.” Moving deliberately through the various claims promulgated by proponents of the diet, Warriner explains that, yes, we do indeed have ancient ancestors whose DNA lives on within us, but what the fossil record and her own research tell us is that the theories that cohere the Paleo diet are myths. For example, Warriner debunks the “the meat myth”— the theory that early humans ate a diet heavy in lean red meat—a point that is proven both by our own anatomical adaptations and the fossil record. The proof is in our mouths, where we have “generalist dentition, so we have big molars that are there to shred fibrous plant tissue. We do not have carnassials, which are the specialized teeth that carnivores have to shred meat.” Warriner then shreds, so to speak, one of the cherished foundations of the Paleo diet (as well as followers of the WFPB diet): that we did not evolve to consume milk past the age of our weaning. She explains that “we do actually have some genetic mutations in some populations that are adaptive to animal consumption, but it’s to milk, not meat, and these arose in certain populations during agricultural periods primarily in Europe and Africa.” Additionally, Warriner clarifies that we’re biased toward the belief that we were primarily a meat-centric species because the plants our ancestors consumed were too

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delicate to survive digestion, let alone fossilization; because bone material “is 80 percent mineral by weight, it’s going to preserve better and longer over thousands of years than delicate plant remains.” Our heritage as plant-eaters got washed away in the fossil record; it’s too ephemeral (which is the same claim made by McDougall in The Starch Solution). That said, her work with dental calculus explodes another favorite thesis of the Paleo diet, which is that our ancestors did not eat grains. “Even with the limited research we have,” Warriner explains, “we can say that there is an abundance of plant remains inside the dental calculus of Paleolithic peoples. And these things include grains, including barley. We’re finding barley inside Neanderthal teeth, or inside the plaque. We also have legumes and tubers.” Additionally, she points out that “we have stone tool evidence from at least 30,000 years ago—that’s 20,000 years before the invention of agriculture—of people using stone tools that look like mortars and pestles to grind up seeds and grain.” Finally, she illustrates (to a highly amused audience) the central irony of the modern Paleo way of eating, which is that the foods we have now don’t even remotely resemble “what our Paleolithic ancestors ate. That’s just not true. Every single food that’s pictured in [in advertisements for the Paleo diet] are all domesticated foods, products of farming, of agriculture. They’re from the Neolithic transition” (emphasis added).48 Warriner ends her cri de coeur for a rational use of the anthropological, archeological, and medical sciences by explaining that “there is no one Paleo diet. There are many, many Paleo diets” and that “dietary diversity is key, that we need to eat fresh foods when possible and that we need to eat whole foods. So, anthropology and evolutionary medicine have a lot to teach us about ourselves and new technologies are opening up new windows into the past. But we still have a lot to learn from our Paleolithic and our Neolithic ancestors.” And for this perspective, Warriner was pilloried in the Paleo community. It is important to note, however, that Warriner never, technically speaking, denies that we have genetic ancestors whose lifestyle we should consider an important prototype for our own twenty-first-century lives; rather, what she objects to is what Marlene Zuk, an ecology professor with a specialization in evolution, calls a Paleofantasy. Zuk borrows the term paleofantasy from anthropology, where it was originally coined to describe “Paleo utopia” stories we read about above—those that tell a happy story of prelapsarian human existence that came crashing down with the rise of agriculture—but specifically refers to the hypotheses based on limited scientific evidence from the fossil record, not necessarily genetic evidence.49 Zuk expands this definition to include the contemporary focus on our genetic ancestor, particularly the mismatch theory we encountered in Durant and other proponents of the Paleo lifestyle: that we are cavemen (and cavewomen) living in an environment mismatched with the genes

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inherited from our ancestors. For Zuk, the mismatch theory might be the most unscientific element of paleofantasies, because to believe ourselves “misfits in our own time and of our own making flatly contradicts what we now understand about the way evolution works—namely, that rate matters. That evolution can be fast, slow, or in-between, and that understanding what makes the difference is far more enlightening, and exciting, than holding our flabby modern selves up against a vision—accurate or not—of our well-muscled and harmoniously adapted ancestors.”50 In fact, once we factor in these inconvenient truths about genetic evolution and environment—that it is not an escalator, but more like “a broken zipper, with some teeth that align and others that gape apart”—we can ask other important questions, such as, “Did we really spend hundreds of thousands of years in stasis, perfectly adapted to our environments? When during the past did we attain this adaptation, and how did we know when to stop?” (emphasis added).51 Furthermore, leaving aside all of the recent adaptations we do know about, we also have the science of genetics to thank for showing us not only that we’ve changed relative to our Paleolithic ancestors, but that, at times, that change has been rapid. Thanks to genomics and other genetic technologies we can now “determine how quickly individual genes and gene blocks have been altered in response to natural selection. Evidence is mounting that numerous human genes have changed over just the last few thousand years—a blink of an eye, evolutionarily speaking—while other are the same as they have been for millions of years, relatively unchanged from the form we share with ancestors as distant as worms and yeast.”52 None of this is to say that the Paleo diet fails as a lifestyle. To the contrary, the utopia it represents to Bitar and others is one where practitioners can live out “the social dreams of original goodness and faith in the future.” The Paleo diet represents a connection to a genetic ancestor, but also hope. The act of “dreaming of the past” is powerful precisely because it “reminds us of the cavemen we come from and the world we hope to create.”53 The allegorical embodiment of humanity’s genetic ancestry through diet does not stop with the Paleo era; as we have seen, the narrative of the genetic ancestor leads from our Paleolithic forefather right through the Neolithic era—when hunter-gatherer societies on some continents were slowly outcompeted in the agricultural transition—and rolls eventually on to the Early Modern age. The proponents of traditional diets don’t reach all the way back to the Stone Age for their genetic ancestor, but they do use many of the same tropes as the Paleo movement to substantiate their dietary lifestyles. Nina Planck, a prominent farmer’s market advocate, de-converted vegan, proponent of traditional diets, and author of the 2006 book Real Food: What to Eat and Why reminds her readers that “in the blink of an evolutionary eye” omnivores—who evolved for almost three million years eating “mostly

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animal foods,” with a predilection for the rich fats and dense calories of organ meats and bone marrow—went from hunting mighty megafauna to foraging and domesticating both wild plants and wild animals for food. Planck tells us that this evolutionary turn, though more recent than our Paleolithic period, is nonetheless an important part of our genetic heritage. Echoing other ancestral narratives, she closes her book with a reflection on how when “an Iron Age man slipped into a peat bog in Denmark twenty-two hundred years ago, his stomach held the remains of sixty species of plants. Our brains are wired and our bodies are built to hunt and gather. Hunger is our motivation, variety is the result, and health is our reward.”54 In Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Diets: How Paleo, Ancestral and Traditional Peoples Really Ate, the president of the Weston A. Price Foundation quotes the organization’s eponymous muse on the journeys that inspired his conclusion on the ancestral diet: “I’ve spent several years studying the primitive people in various parts of the world, and I have come as a missionary from them to the people of modern civilization. And I beg of you to learn of their accumulated wisdom, and if you do, you, too, can have strong healthy bodies, without so much disease as we suffer from these days.” (Fallon qualifies that primitive is Price’s descriptor of the peoples’ “nonindustrialized” lifestyles, not of the people themselves, for whom he had “great admiration.”) Fallon interprets Price’s reaction as a reversal of twentieth and twenty-first century received wisdom, because it is an “amazing thought—that the so-called ‘primitive’ people of the world could come as missionaries to modern civilization, missionaries with the gift of their ‘accumulated wisdom,’ so that people today might live without disease.”55 For Price’s acolytes, the connection from his fieldwork to modern industrialized society is the accumulation of inherited traits—genetic and comestible. In the case of ancestors—be they spiritual, cultural, or genetic—Eliade writes that although differing “in their formulas, all these instruments of regeneration [including diet] tend toward the same end: to annul past time [and] to abolish history by a continuous return [through] the repetition of the cosmogonic act” of our ancestors. And while vegan and traditional diets reside on opposite ends of a spectrum (as we have seen, one embraces what the other rejects), what I find significant is the common spiritual purpose of following the example of these sacred ancestors—either cultural or genetic. The acceptance of an ancestor and the active participation in recreating their foodways becomes a form of practice that sustains a food faith—turning it from a mere diet into a spiritual practice. Paleo, traditional, and vegan lifestyles all contain vestiges of religious belief and represent what Eliade says “deserves our attention . . . [which] is the eternal repetition of the fundamental rhythm of the cosmos: its periodic destruction and re-creation.”56 Far from opposites or antagonists, what we see are the similar and implicit moral, ethical, and

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religious dimensions of these diets. They are founded in a concept of humanity steeped in beliefs about our bodies, our cultures, our spiritual purpose, and human health; these worldviews preach that humans are intimately connected to their past and to our forbearers, and are replete with value judgments about the moral and spiritual implications of the Anthropocene. In short, they are grounded in what Bryant Terry describes as a desire to “reclaim our ancestral knowledge and embrace our culinary roots.”57 NOTES 1. Bryant Terry, Afro-Vegan: Farm-Fresh African, Caribbean & Southern Flavors Remixed (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2014), 2ff. 2. Pollan (2007), 91. 3. Weston A. Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (La Mesa, CA: Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, 2008). For a quick, complete list of the tenets of Price’s followers’ diet, see https:​//​www​.westonaprice​.org​/health​-topics​/abcs​-of​-nutrition​/ dietary​-guidelines​/. The Weston A. Price Foundation has recently become a site of controversy for statements that are either definitely—or interpreted as definitively— anti-vaccination. It is well beyond the scope of this book to consider the scientific sparring that goes on between the pro- and anti-vaccination movements (or even the vaccination agnostics, of which there seem to be many in the WAPF), but suffice to say that the WAPF has both gained and lost adherents for these points of view. 4. Catherine Shanahan and Luke Shanahan, Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food (New York: Flatiron Books, 2017), 8. 5. Shanahan, 10, 18. 6. Shanahan, 6. 7. Shanahan, 104. 8. Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears (London: Methuen, 1985), 1. 9. Shanahan, 8. 10. This straw man list of foods is from pages 18–19 of Elizabeth Somer’s book The Origin Diet, which is covered in more detail below. 11. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper, 1959), 4. 12. Eliade, 5–6. 13. Eliade, 10, 35, 46–47. 14. Eliade, 81. 15. Terry, 4. 16. Shanahan, 283–284. 17. Genesis 1, 29–31. NRSV. 18. William Metcalfe and Church Bible-Christian, Bible Testimony, on Abstinence from the Flesh of Animals as Food: Being an Address Delivered in the Bible-Christian

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Church, North Third Street, West Kensington, on the Eighth of June 1840: Being the Anniversary of Said Church (Philadelphia: J. Metcalfe & Co. Printers, 1840), 3ff. 19. Jewish Veg, “Jewish Values in Action,” https:​//​www​.jewishveg​.org​/jewish​ -values​-in​-action. 20. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, A New York Review Book (New York: New York Review, 1975). 21. A. Breeze Harper, Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society (New York: Lantern Books, 2010), xv. 22. Christopher Carter, The Spirit of Soul Food: Race, Faith, and Food Justice (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 15. 23. Tom Haberstroh, “The Secret (but Healthy!) Diet Powering Kyrie and the Nba,” (2017). https:​//​bleacherreport​.com​/articles​/2744130​-the​-secret​-but​-healthy​ -diet​-powering​-kyrie​-and​-the​-nba​?utm​_source​=pocket​&utm​_medium​=email​&utm​ _campaign​=poc​%E2​%80​%A6. 24. Carter, 12–13. 25. Afrovegan Society, “African-American Vegan Starter Guide” (September 2016), 18. 26. There are several books on veganism that write about the mission to decolonize diet from the perspective of marginalized groups, including Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel, Decolonize Your Diet: Plant-Based Mexican-American Recipes for Health and Healing (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2015); and Gideon Mailer and Nicola E. Hale, Decolonizing the Diet: Nutrition, Immunity, and the Warning from Early America (New York: Anthem Press, 2018). Decolonizing diet also shows up in books advocating a traditional indigenous diet, such as Sean Sherman's The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which, by the way, wins handily as my favorite title in this book’s bibliography. 27. John A. McDougall and Mary A. McDougall, The Starch Solution: Eat the Foods You Love, Regain Your Health, and Lose the Weight for Good! (New York: Rodale, 2012), xv. 28. McDougall, xv, 3, 7–8, 17. 29. Rich Roll and Julie Piatt, The Plantpower Way: Whole Food Plant-Based Recipes and Guidance for the Whole Family (New York: Avery, 2015). 30. For a thorough and engaging look at this history, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). 31. Walter L. Voegtlin, The Stone Age Diet: Based on in-Depth Studies of Human Ecology and the Diet of Man (New York: Vantage Press, 1975). 32. Katherine A. Beals, “Pondering Paleo: Is a Paleolithic Diet the Key to Achieving Optimal Health and Athletic Performance?” ACSM’s Health & Fitness Journal 20, no. 6 (2016); Adrienne Rose Johnson, “The Paleo Diet and the American Weight Loss Utopia, 1975–2014,” Utopian Studies 26, no. 1 (2015). 33. S. B. Eaton and M. Konner, “Paleolithic Nutrition: A Consideration of Its Nature and Current Implications,” New England Journal of Medicine, no. 5 (1985), 283. 34. Cordain (2002). 35. Ironically, our physiological tendency toward gaining fat rapidly when we eat diets rich in refined sugar and carbohydrates, and the difficulty we experience when

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we attempt to lose that fat, point toward the opposite conclusion. In fact, many physiologists now believe that our predisposition toward gaining and retaining weight is an evolutionary response to dealing with huge swings in feast and famine. When “our Paleolithic grandparents” had access to abundance, they ate and gained weight, but when famine inevitably returned they relied on their bodies’ own stores to supplement their meagre rations. Our personal battles with our weight are, in a way, as much a part of our genetic inheritance as our big brains and our nuchal ligament. 36. Elizabeth Somer, The Origin Diet: How Eating Like Our Stone Age Ancestors Will Maximize Your Health (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2001), 4, 8–11. 37. Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover (1987). https:​//​www​.discovermagazine​.com​/planet​-earth​/the​-worst​-mistake​-in​ -the​-history​-of​-the​-human​-race. 38. John Durant and Michael Malice, The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health (New York: Harmony Books, 2013), 5–6. 39. Chris Kresser, Your Personal Paleo Code: The 3-Step Plan to Lose Weight, Reverse Disease, and Stay Fit and Healthy for Life (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013). 40. Johnson, “The Paleo Diet and the American Weight Loss Utopia, 1975–2014,” 102–103, 110. This article was later reproduced as a chapter in Bitar’s (nee Johnson’s) book Diet and the Disease of Civilization, which is cited below). 41. Midgley, 6. Spencer’s acolyte was a biologist with the too-on-the-nose name of Edward Clodd. 42. Midgley writes that while this pernicious theory has “been exposed as nonsense” it persists because of its “strong dramatic force, as well as various political uses,” despite the best efforts of social biologists to get rid of it (6). 43. Johnson, 111. 44. Cordain, 7. 45. Christina Warinner, “Transcript of ‘Tracking Ancient Diseases Using . . . Plaque,’” in TED (2012). https:​//​www​.ted​.com​/talks​/christina​_warinner​_tracking​ _ancient​_diseases​_using​_plaque​/transcript. 46. Somer, 21. 47. Christina Warinner, “Debunking the Paleo Diet | Christina Warinner | Tedxou,” in TEDxOU (YouTube, 2013). Transcript, “Debunking the Paleo Diet.” 48. She continues by showing a photo of a model breakfast from a Paleo diet plan, in which “the blueberries are from New England, the avocados from Mexico, and the eggs, from China. This would have never appeared on any Paleolithic plate.” She elaborates that the blueberries in the picture are about twice the size of wild, but “real” avocados only have a thin layer of flesh. And this is to say nothing of eggs, which, Warriner points out, for most birds are something they produce a handful of times a year, not once a day. 49. Specifically, Zuk credits anthropologist Leslie Aiello, president of the WennerGren Foundation (an organization that supports research in social/cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological/physical anthropology, linguistics, and other related disciplines), for coining the term.

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50. M. Zuk, Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 6–7. 51. Zuk, 9. 52. Zuk, 12. It’s also worth noting that Zuk’s own research is on the recent physiological changes that have evolved in Hawaiian crickets, who have developed a wing mutation that makes them silent in just 5 years, or fewer than 20 generations. This is a remarkable development that has unfolded so rapidly that it is “the equivalent of humans becoming involuntarily mute during the time between the publication of the Gutenberg Bible [1455] and On the Origin of Species [1859].” 53. Adrienne Rose Bitar, Diet and the Disease of Civilization (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 44. 54. Nina Planck, Real Food: What to Eat and Why, 1st US ed. (New York: Bloomsbury Pub, 2006), 274. 55. Sally Fallon, Nourishing Diets: How Paleo, Ancestral and Traditional Peoples Really Ate (New York: Grand Central Life & Style, 2018), 1ff. 56. Eliade, 81, 115. 57. Terry, 3.

6

Virtue Perfecting the Moral Self through the Ritual Embodiment of Science

The language of American morality was perhaps perfected during the First Great Awakening, when in 1741 the great Congregationalist minister Jonathan Edwards set out to scare the pants off an indifferent congregation. On July 8, Edwards delivered a sermon meant to hammer home to his listeners that, “There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.” Rhetorically chock full of the proverbial fire and brimstone (which, in the case of Edward’s sermon, are not literary allusions), the minister waxes on about death, self-wrought destruction, and the perilous ground on which the average sinner finds himself. These sinners “are liable to fall of themselves, without being thrown down by the hand of another,” Edwards warns, “as he that stands or walks on slippery ground needs nothing but his own weight to throw him down . . . as he that stands on such slippery declining ground, on the edge of a pit, he cannot stand along, when he is let go he immediately falls and is lost.” The pit into which the sinner will fall is hell, and the hand that holds the sinner so tenuously or lets him slip belongs to God. “There is no want of power,” Edwards explains, “in God to cast wicked men into hell at any moment.”1 And this is all just by way of introduction. Extrapolating from the text “Their foot shall slide in due time” from Deuteronomy 32.35 in the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament), Edwards takes his listeners on a journey to the heart of hell and back again. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” became justifiably famous as the standard by which sermons of the First Great Awakening were measured against for decades, but also for the tone it set. In Edwards’s perspective, there is no margin of error or opportunity to fail and gently be brought back into the fold. “Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a 173

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rotten covering,” Edwards concludes, “and there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will not bear their weight, and these places are not seen.” Nearly three hundred years later, in a 2009 article provocatively titled, “Is Food the New Sex?,” journalist Mary Eberstadt explains that for “many people, schismatic differences about food have taken the place of schismatic differences about faith.” The article is an exploration of the theory that in many of today’s secular cultures we have substituted fear of the wrath of God and the penalty of sin for fear of the wrath of disease and the penalty of unwellness. Any modest perusal of contemporary culture will illustrate the new maxim that people don’t fear God’s punishment anymore: they fear cancer or weight gain or autoimmune disease. Indeed, occasionally the rhetoric of the food faithful includes dire warnings about how our diets are going to make us suffer, just as the God of Edwards’s sermon makes the sinners He lets slip through His divine fingers suffer when they hit the rock bottom of hell. The terror Edwards wanted his listeners to feel after hearing that they were the unconverted about to fall into the inferno is akin to the terror purveyors of a particular diet or food philosophy tap into when they warn against our unscientific, unexamined SAD diet. For example, the opening lines of the controversial vegan book Skinny Bitch echo Edwards while leveraging the cultural obsession with weight loss when the authors write, “Use your head. You need to get healthy if you want to get skinny. The first thing you need to do is give up your gross vices. Don’t act surprised! You cannot keep eating the same shit and expect to get skinny.”2 Using language that is slightly less harsh but no less uncompromising, the founders of the Whole30 program— who assert that it is not a diet but “a monumental transformation in how you think about food, your body, your life, and what you want out of the time you have left on this earth”—reprimand followers who lament that abiding by the diet’s strict rules for a full month is hard. “It is not hard,” they write of giving up dairy, alcohol, grains, legumes, sugar, and additives for thirty days. “Don’t you dare tell us this is hard. Quitting heroin is hard. Beating cancer is hard. Drinking your coffee black. Is. Not. Hard.”3 However the message is phrased, the bottom line of these and other regimes is that only balm for this fear is repentance and clean eating. The dietary philosophy of clean eating preaches eating whole, mostly plant-based foods; avoiding processed and genetically modified (GM) foods; encourages consuming only organically grown or raised plants and animals; and limiting or even excluding (not always, but often) various food groups or macronutrients, like grains (a group) or carbohydrates (a macronutrient). Because it’s not a diet, per se, clean eating can be subsumed into either side of the lowfat/high-carb vs. low-carb/high-protein or -fat paradigms, but as a lifestyle it fosters a form of virtue that, while irreligious, demands an uncompromising

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adherence and a rigorous form of the spirituality of practice. And sometimes the price of salvation is too high. In this chapter we will explore how the meaning of virtue and its practice has been revised in the twenty-first century to be less about the parochial condemnation Edwards preached against in the eighteenth century and instead become a collective fear of public judgment for perceived moral failings in regards to food. The disinclination to compromise, offer consolation, or suggest that this will be easy—the rhetorical tactics that colored sermons during both of America’s Great Awakenings—are familiar as the language of diet culture today. The “slippery declining ground” motif is alive in any media promoting clean eating, and the pit edge on which every individual hovers can only be the Standard American Diet. With that in mind, in this chapter we’ll explore two methods of the practice of virtue in food faith communities: moralistic therapeutic scientism and virtue signaling. But first—what was that about food and sex again? FOOD, SEX, AND VIRTUE: MORALITY IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM Professor of psychology Paul Rozin famously quipped in his essay “Food Is Fundamental, Fun, Frightening, and Far-Reaching” that Sigmund Freud “chose to frame the clash between our biology and society in terms of the mastering and socialization of our sexual impulses. It seems to me that he would have had a stronger case with eating.” Rozin acknowledges that even though “both food and sex are biologically basic, the need for food is more frequent, more compelling, and frankly, more important in both daily life and in evolution of animals and humans.” It is important for sustenance, but also because it is intrinsically—and sometimes invisibly—part of our culture. Echoing the rhetorical frameworks that stress no compromise in the pursuit of healthy eating, Rozin writes that there “is a sense among many Americans that food is as much a poison as it is a nutrient, and that eating is almost as dangerous as not eating.” Food is so culturally circumscribed that the meal—the socio-cultural representation of an entire history, ecology, and economy—with “its elaborate culinary preparations and social conventions is a far cry from wolfing down foods.” Because of these constraints, there is “actually a more elaborate cultural transformation of our relationship to food than there is to sex.”4 With this in mind, we can return to Eberstadt’s theory, which is that food—what and how we eat—is the basis for a new morality, the principles guiding right and wrong behavior; in fact, Eberstadt offers an important contextualization for the idea of virtue in food faiths. She argues that modern

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diet culture is popular, in part, because it provides the opportunity to practice secular virtue. In particular, the nutritional culture wars (whose battlefield is social media) utilize older, religious rhetorical strategies of shame and fear, virtue and redemption; it is this war of words that results in millions sharing stories and images online expressing their experience of a lived spiritual practice, one that contains some of the same notions of virtue and struggle Edwards described and defined nearly three centuries ago. Echoing Rozin, Eberstadt observes that of all the “truly seismic shifts transforming daily life today . . . is the chasm in attitude that separates almost all of us living in the West today from almost all of our ancestors, over two things without which human beings cannot exist: food and sex.”5 Besides the nod to ancestors, Eberstadt notes that even though Western culture has theoretically evolved to a space—literally and philosophically—where humans can have all they want of each without much social censure, we might expect that the brakes would be let up and we could “pursue both with equal ardor when finally allowed to do so.” But instead, what has happened is “nearly the opposite”: now that we live in a “no affiliation” world where the stigma of gluttony for any kind of appetite should be lifted, Eberstadt muses, it seems that “when many people are faced with these possibilities for the very first time, they end up doing very different things—things we might signal by shorthand as mindful eating, and mindless sex.” Eberstadt’s theory deals primarily with what today we would call clean eating. And, by doing so, her argument sets aside the Health at Every Size (HAES), fat-acceptance, and “anti-diet culture” movements—where diet culture is defined as “a system of beliefs that equates thinness, muscularity, and particular body shapes with health and moral virtue; promotes weight loss and body reshaping as a means of attaining higher status; demonizes certain foods and food groups while elevating others; and oppresses people who don’t match its supposed picture of ‘health.’”6 Eberstadt’s concerns are not with body image, body shape, or weight loss as cultural values as much as they are with perceptions of food itself. But, for now, let’s consider Eberstadt separately, particularly when she notes that as “consumers of both sex and food, today’s people in the [temporally, i.e., twenty-first century] advanced societies are freer to pursue and consume both than almost all the human beings who came before us; and our culture has evolved in interesting ways to exhibit both those trends.” In order to illustrate this, Eberstadt turns away from facts and figures, and invites her readers to examine this new morality by imagining some of the “broad features of the world seen through two different sets of eyes: a hypothetical 30-year-old housewife from 1958 named Betty, and her hypothetical granddaughter Jennifer, of the same age, today [2009].” Besides nailing the fact that a woman born in the late 1970s or early 1980s was almost definitely

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named Jennifer, Eberstadt’s thought experiment explores how these two women would feel about sex and food.7 Betty, she writes, believes that “just about every exercise of sex outside marriage is subject to social (if not always private) opprobrium. Wavering in and out of established religion herself, Betty nevertheless clearly adheres to a traditional Judeo-Christian sexual ethic.” Betty “feels that sex, unlike food, is not de gustibus. She believes to the contrary that there is a right and wrong about these choices that transcends any individual act. She further believes that the world would be a better place, and individual people better off, if others believed as she does. She even proselytizes such on occasion when given the chance.” Jennifer, on the other hand, “is otherwise laissez-faire on just about every other aspect of nonmarital sex. She believes that living together before marriage is morally neutral, and actually better than not having such a ‘trial run.’” Jennifer also “accepts the consequences of her libertarian convictions about sex. She is pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, indifferent to ethical questions about stem cell research and other technological manipulations of nature (as she is not, ironically, when it comes to food).” Betty thinks sex is a moral issue with a definitive “right action,” but Jennifer feels that sex is a personal choice—and, furthermore, none of her or anyone else’s business. The currents switch, however, when it comes to food. In Betty’s kitchen, except for the occasional potato there is little that is fresh, and even less that was not previously frozen; her freezer is packed with the meat she serves as the centerpiece of meals, which is accompanied by sides made from the contents of “one or two jars or cans,” with which her kitchen is well-stocked. Because Betty lives and cooks before the advent of the lipid hypothesis, she eats many “substances that people of our time are told to minimize—dairy products, red meat, refined sugars and flours,” and if she abides by any maxim in her eating, it is to clean your plate: raised during the Great Depression, this is the only food rule Betty follows, and as an adult she still considers not doing so “bad form.” But our early-millennium Jennifer is her grandmother’s opposite in every way. Eberstadt writes that Jennifer wavers “in and out of vegetarianism” but is “adamantly opposed to eating red meat or endangered fish.” The litany of Jennifer’s feelings on food include that she is also opposed to industrialized breeding, genetically enhanced fruits and vegetables, and to pesticides and other artificial agents. She tries to minimize her dairy intake, and cooks tofu as much as possible. She also buys “organic” in the belief that it is better both for her and for the animals raised in that way, even though the products are markedly more expensive than those from the local grocery store. Her diet is heavy in all the ways that Betty’s was light: with fresh vegetables and fruits in particular. Jennifer has nothing but ice in her freezer,

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soymilk and various other items her grandmother wouldn’t have recognized in the refrigerator, and on the counter stands a vegetable juicer she feels she “ought” to use more.

The energy that Betty puts into reifying social norms about sex are paralleled or even surpassed by Jennifer’s moral beliefs about food. Whereas Betty grew up with a single rule about eating and many complicated rules about sexual relations—who can have it and why, the consequences thereof, the centrality of the issue for social cohesion—Jennifer experiences many of these exact same strictures as complicated rules about food and eating not just “cleanly,” but morally. Betty and Jennifer are fictitious, but their juxtaposing morals are real. A 2016 Pew survey (yes, Pew again) on public views of American’s eating habits notes that food has become “a potential source of social friction as people follow their own ideologies about what to eat and how foods connect with people’s ailments.” Pew reports that over half of Americans (54 percent) believe that, compared to even just the 1990s, people “pay more attention to eating healthy foods today,” but, an identical number also say that “eating habits in the US are less healthy than they were 20 years ago.” The survey recorded that 72 percent of American adults believe that “healthy eating habits are very important for improving a person’s chances of living a long and healthy life”; however, “only 47 percent think that genetics and hereditary factors are critical to improving a person’s chances of a long and healthy life. Thus, most Americans consider their future health within their own grasps— if only they eat and exercise adequately.” With that in mind, 58 percent agreed with the statement that “most days I should probably be eating healthier.”8 Perhaps not surprisingly, given our historical introduction, views on food are tightly tied to knowledge of science. One possible reason for the hypothetical-but-all-too-real Jennifer’s feelings about food is, as Eberstadt notes, that “people today are so much more discriminating about food [because] decades of recent research have taught us that diet has more potent effects than Betty and her friends understood, and can be bad for you or good for you in ways not enumerated before.” The vaguely Judeo-Christian values that fortified Betty’s morals have ebbed in a country that is increasingly—as we learned in the introduction and chapter 1—unaffiliated with either (or indeed, any) religion. On the other hand, beliefs about how to eat healthy are, according to Pew’s research, “closely linked with people’s level of knowledge about science.” The Pew researchers discovered that an astounding “92 percent of those high in science knowledge say the core ideas about how to eat healthy are pretty well understood as do 78 percent of those with medium science knowledge.” And this knowledge of what is considered healthy translates to many of the concerns that circumscribe Jennifer’s diet, as well as the

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broader dietary philosophy of clean eating: anti-genetic modification, fresh and local, and organically grown. For many, it seems that the organic label has become a metonym for morality—for right and wrong behavior—but also for health, with more than “half (55 percent) of the public [saying] that organic fruits and vegetables are better for one’s health than conventionally grown produce” and over three-quarter of those who bought organic food explaining they did so because “they were looking for healthier foods.” With long-term health outcomes inextricably linked to food—regardless of the actual correlation between heredity, genetics, and predisposition to disease— right eating becomes conflated with right living, and anything else feels like a moral misstep. And the ante of virtue is upped to exclude any foods that are not organic or “natural,” and therefore—in the parlance of Leviticus—unclean. But, as historian of religion Alan Levinovitz writes in his book Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science, the problem with “natural” as a category is that it creates an “oppositional binary between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’” and “inhibits constructive dialogue about humanity’s most pressing problems.” This binary of natural/unnatural “trades complicated truths for the comfort of clear categories. It encourages dogmatism over compromise, certainty over humility, and simplicity over nuance.” And, Levinovitz explains, this cultural focus on the category of “natural”—natural foods, natural treatments, natural lifestyles—reveals how much of the morality around diet is simply congenital and clandestine religion. “’Unnatural,’” he writes, “has always connoted evil. . . . [Because] ‘natural’ is a religious term. The impulse that guides so many shopping carts and parenting decisions is thoroughly theological. ‘Nature’ is another term for God; ‘natural’ a synonym for holy. ‘Unnatural’ acts are violations of nature’s wise commandments, laws inscribed in the structure of reality and ignored at our peril. Only humans are capable of such violations, since by definition anything unnatural—synthetic, artificial, fabricated, manipulated, manufactured—is caused by us, not nature” (his emphasis).9 Levinovitz’s exploration of “natural” echoes food historian Rachel Laudan’s observation that while wanting food to be natural “has become an article of faith” it might come “as something of a shock to realize that this is a latter-day creed.” She explains that for our ancestors, both ancient and recently familial, “natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad.”10 Aligning oneself with what’s “natural” reads here in the twenty-first century as subscribing to a morality that considers natural foods and clean eating virtuous, while conveniently forgetting the term’s religious origins and fairly recent revision. As Eberstadt notes, many twenty-first century Americans have become “puritanical about food, and licentious about sex.” In the 1950s the moral matrix around sex provided an opportunity to practice virtuous behavior,

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but in the twenty-first century food has become an outlet for virtue. And the sketchy morality that underpins virtuous eating is not merely an example of an empty cultural practice aping religion; rather, the ambiguous sense of virtue that governs moral behavior in food faith communities closely resembles the muddled morality practiced by the declining populations of some religions today. At the heart of both lies a vaguely understood higher power (God on the one hand, science on the other), on whose authority rests the ability to separate the sheep from the goats and adjudicate the virtuous and clean from the immoral and SAD. MORALISTIC THERAPEUTICS, VIRTUE SIGNALING, AND THOUGHTS ON BACON Sociologist Christian Smith has been studying the religious lives of American teens and emerging adults for decades. But the religious proclivities of the teenagers of the early 2000s (mid-generation Millennials) in the US seemed to Smith, and his co-researcher Melinda Lundquist Denton, to be of a different kind than either their older Millennial counterparts or the youngest Millennials and oldest Generation Z teens. What Smith and Denton discovered in a 2002–2003 survey of 3290 teenagers from across the country was that even though roughly three-quarters of American teens identified as Christian, very few of these teens seemed to have a definitive grasp of Christian teaching.11 As they explain in their 2005 book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, what they discovered was just “how poorly many teens, in spite of their claims to the contrary, are able to see and articulate religion’s role in their life.”12 For the most part, religion functions mainly in the background to their daily life, rather than a foregrounded ultimate concern, and the majority of the teens they interviewed displayed a “lack of focus and enthusiasm about religious faith.”13 While fascinating and certainly of relevance to our conversation in the first chapter about the changing aspects of American religion in the twenty-first century, what is especially interesting for our purposes is how these teens (who are now adults) conceive of the purpose of religious feeling. Smith and Denton go to great lengths to explain that these young Americans are not among the growing “spiritual but not religious” movement unfolding at the time of their writing; the majority of the Nones from the 2012 Pew survey were well into their twenties and beyond, making the first large cohort of Nones a phenomenon concentrated amongst older Millennials and Generation X. Smith and Denton even note that among the bulk of their respondents “being ‘spiritual but not religious’ is present among only a very small minority of teens. Most, in fact, have not even heard of the spiritual but

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not religious mantra, and many of those who have do not really know what it means.”14 This is likely because the interviews for Soul Searching—the “National Study of Youth and Religion”—were conducted a full ten years before the first Pew Research poll indicated that the phenomenon of the Nones was a new major wave in American religiosity. But what is important to us is the classification of the belief system of these youths by the authors as what they term “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD) describes a set of thoughts and feelings that are not limited to teens, and actually appears to the authors to be a widespread and popular faith among Americans in general. MTD is “about inculcating a moralistic approach to life. It teaches that central to living a good and happy life is being a good, moral person. That means being nice, kind, pleasant, respectful, responsible, at work on self-improvement, taking care of one’s health, and doing one’s best to be successful.” Furthermore, this philosophy is about “providing therapeutic benefits to its adherents”—the work of “being good,” in this theology, goes both ways, and rewards the devotee with goodness in return. And even though its roots might be traced back to many different religions and practices—which include the religions with which many of the teens were raised, such as Judaism, Hinduism, or Evangelical Protestantism—MTD “is not a religion of repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of a sovereign divine,” or, “of spending oneself in gratitude and love for the cause of social justice, etcetera.” Instead, Smith and Denton write, MTD is “centrally about feeling good, happy, secure, at peace. It is about attaining subjective well-being, being able to resolve problems, and getting along amiably with other people.”15 The creed of this religion, such as it is, and its basic tenets, are summarized by the authors as: 1.  A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth. 2.  God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. 3.  The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. 4.  God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. 5.  Good people go to heaven when they die. Furthermore, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is moralistic precisely because of the tentative grasp of moral behavior the practice encompasses; they are not morals, per se, but general guidelines that help make both the practitioner and their world better in some solipsistic way.

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If what is really at stake in MTD is “providing therapeutic benefits to its adherents,” rather than definitively shaping behavior or orienting a believer toward a higher power, what we are able to take from this is a framework for conceptualizing how spiritual practices and secular concerns can fit within the same structure. And, by swapping out “God” in this formulation—however ill-defined the deity was in the original—with a different higher power, we can see how MTD might also explain the ambiguous morality of Eberstadt’s Jennifer when it comes to food. Because it is not a lack of faith that defines food faith lifestyles as non-religious, but a lack of a traditional or institutionally religious godhead. What guides a spiritual eater is godlike in its power, but missing any divine moral code. So, as with Smith and Denton’s teens, a moralistic framework is grafted onto the one higher power in which the food faithful believe and that structures every part of their conduct when it comes to food: science. As previously discussed, in many cases the science that holds together food faiths is black boxed: the inputs and outputs matter, but the details of how the science of, say, amylase function or gene variation in human populations work are, for the average practitioner, fuzzy, to say the least. But, like Smith and Denton’s teen subjects, who might not understand even the rudimentary theological elements of the institutional religion they claim to follow, adherents to a particular food faith engage in a similar reflexive faith in the science on which their diet is founded and rarely trouble themselves about details. Despite a layman’s grasp of the science—often a second- or third-hand translation from research papers into a comprehensible narrative by the guru of that particular diet or on a social website—as the grounds the efficacy and truth of a particular theory, the food faithful will sometimes engage in a form of scientism. As we briefly touched on in chapter 3 in our discussion of scientism’s sister philosophy of nutritionism, scientism is the reductionist belief that science—especially the natural sciences—is the only reliable source of human knowledge, and that science provides “a satisfying and reasonably complete account of everything we see, experience, and seek to understand [and] of every phenomenon in the universe.”16 While one key feature of food faiths is the dueling sciences parried by spiritual eaters against conflicting worldviews, the single bottomless font of wisdom and the ground of all truth is science; if the messages get corrupted, say the food faithful, it is due to the messengers, not the source itself. It is a matter of translation, not interpretation. Not unlike the schisms that result in new religious denominations, even though the phenotype changes explored in epigenetics cited by followers of a traditional diet might conflict with the genetic oncology studies cited by whole-food plant-based eaters, the bottom line of science’s authority in adjudicating health via diet remains unchallenged. This belief in science as an ecumenical resolution to dietary disputes illustrates how deep the faith in

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science goes as well as a larger culture of scientism. Or, as some might say, science in this philosophy becomes the substitute for a divine adjudicator, and maybe even a not-so-angry God. The food faithful don’t necessarily practice Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, but they do practice a close and secular cousin, what I am calling Moralistic Therapeutic Scientism (MTS). MTS turns the desire to “feel good and be happy” from a basis in institutional religion and places it in knowledge of the sciences. By switching out the authority of God with the authority of science, we get a glimpse of the moral basis of many food faith communities: 1.  Science exists that explains the world and human life on earth. 2.  Science shows that people should be good to their bodies and both nice and fair to themselves by eating nutritious foods. 3.  The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. 4.  Science does not need to be particularly understood except when it is needed to resolve a problem. 5.  Good people are recognizable by their principled eating habits and those that lack the discipline to eat healthily will suffer from illness before they die. But whereas MTD defines being good in the context of a remote but loving God-like entity, the measure of goodness in Moralistic Therapeutic Scientism is the science in which one’s dietary practice is founded. As we have seen, diets rooted in ancestral foodways make extensive use of paleontology, physical anthropology, genetics, and physiology, and diets that fall into a vegan/whole-food plant-based paradigm utilize diverse sciences such as environmental and atmospheric disciplines or biomedical studies of cancer and heart disease. Whichever side of the Keys/Yudkin paradigm the food faithful find themselves on, the only justification for dietary choices that seem objective and morally foregone is the recourse to science. But obviously, the point of practicing a food faith is not just the objective, scientific rationale for the diet, but the personal experience—the conversion, the bodily transformation, the total change in worldview, the practice—that becomes a lifestyle. Because morality is inevitably tied to action and to choice, the morals of the food faithful are demonstrated as a new set of behaviors that distinguish who they were “then” from who they are “now.” And demonstrations of that changed behavior frequently play out on social media. There is an implied moralistic discrepancy in conduct when a young woman writes in a bold, text-only image on Instagram that she has “switched liquor & discotheques for green juice & yoga” and includes hashtags that include #healthylife, #cleaneating, and #celeryjuice (which she notes is “so good to prevent acne, BTW”).17 And the behavior that results from MTS—taking

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pains to be seen on social media as the kind of person who buys locally, eats sustainably, chooses healthfully and ethically produced foods, and eats clean—has sometimes been derisively described as virtue signaling. Although “signaling” can refer to evolutionary biological research into methods of impressing one’s fitness on a desirable partner (the most common explanatory metaphor is a peacock’s colorful tail signaling his fitness to a would-be mate), in modern discourse “signaling” has been used to sneeringly describe “self-glorifying online behavior.”18 In political or social contexts, virtue signaling is the act of making a statement or claim that’s bound to win approval from a certain group or to show how morally evolved one is, without having to take real or difficult action. As one editorial sums it up: “Have you ever offered your thoughts and prayers in the aftermath of a disaster? Do you express your beliefs through hashtags? There’s actually a name for that: virtue signaling. This newly prominent phrase sums up actions (mostly online) that send the message ‘I’m a good person’—though they might not be accompanied by doing anything good at all.”19 And the type of actions that come under scrutiny as social media aggrandizement often have to do with food: call-to-action posts on Twitter with incendiary hashtags (e.g., #nogmo); video lectures about the moral imperative of organic farming shared and re-shared on Facebook; “snaps” of gluten-free, non-GMO, vegan meals published as stories on Snapchat or featured in videos on TikTok; or muzzy Instagram photos taken at farmer’s markets. Pictures of food on Instagram have actually inspired their own field of study; “food Instagram” is defined by media studies scholars Emily Contois and Zenia Kish as “a quasi-genre on the platform distinguished by recognizable aesthetic conventions, the presence of both everyday users and industry professionals, and a shared focus on representations of food, eating, and food-related phenomena. We consider how users engage food Instagram to construct identity, to seek influence, and to negotiate aesthetic norms, institutional access, and cultural power, as well as social and economic control.”20 But despite the potential for derision, for the food faithful these forays into social media and participation in food Instagram are not empty gestures; rather, they are heartfelt displays of what they consider to be a truly virtuous action: eating with faultless moral acuity in a SAD-dominated society. The fascination with and connection of food to virtue, to purity, and to right action has roots deep in Western religion, particularly Roman Catholic ascetic practices. In Europe during the Middle Ages, women ascetics—some of whom were eventually sainted—famously instrumentalized food to demarcate their virtuous conduct. As Carolyn Walker Bynam explains in her 1987 book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, food was sometimes the singular method by which socially and spiritually disenfranchised women could control “self and environment.”21 Specifically,

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Walker Bynum argues that the extreme ascetism women engaged in, was more than what some scholars term “holy anorexia.”22 Instead, the “extreme asceticism and literalism of women’s spiritually were not, at the deepest level, masochism or dualism but, rather, efforts to gain power and give meaning.” By renouncing food through abstemious fasts and giving food away to feed the hungry, they controlled their bodies and figuratively merged with Christ through their holy actions, undermining both (male) clerical and (male) legal authority in one fell swoop. They wore their virtue on their fasted bodies as their fasted bodies. The medieval practices that merged food-related activities with moral action might have faded with the Enlightenment, but the sense of connection between virtue and abstention from food—from gluttony—lived on in Christian practice well into the twentieth century, infiltrating even modern, secular American culture. In her 2004 book Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity, scholar of religion R. Marie Griffith explains how this same conflation of virtue with a body honed by discipline over gluttony “is an end that Protestantism’s specific American forms boldly pursued: a devotional project aimed at bodily perfectibility.”23 There is, in a sense, a legacy of virtue in eating and the rigorous attention to the body that runs from medieval mystical women to early twenty-first-century bloggers and influencers, all of whom seek the transcendence that can only come from governing one’s diet. And the acme of this pursuit might have been reached with clean eating. Clean eating—that amorphous dietary lifestyle focused on quality and whole foods, ideally from organic and local sources—is an excellent opportunity for virtue signaling, as it is predicated on purity and carries a through-line of abnegation. Practitioners of clean eating abjure processed and industrial foods, condemn the use of pesticides and genetic modifications, and frequently seek to cut their diets down to “natural foods” deemed by the science they follow as healthy and unadulterated. In reflecting on clean eating’s popularity as an internet hashtag and a point of pride, commentators watching the diet and its backlash happen in real time surmised that its reputation stems from the fact that it brings together, as food writer Bee Wilson observers, two “distinct but interrelated versions” of diet: “one based on the creed of ‘real’ food, and the other on the idea of ‘detox.’” The whittling down of diet to either unadulterated foods or foods that help cleanse the body of supposedly dangerous toxins meant “it was only a matter of time before the basic idea spread contagiously across Instagram, where fans of #eatclean could share their artfully photographed green juices and rainbow salad bowls.”24 What could be more virtuous than eating whole, natural foods that help heal the body? Moralistic Therapeutic Scientism dictates that science is infallible and the greatest good is avoiding disease and caring for the body through one’s food choices. Clean eating, then, offers “a dream of purity in a toxic world.”

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It also affords an engagement with the modern cycle of virtue by declining to eat the junk and processed foods that form the basis of SAD, and through force of virtue will choose the plant, organic, and unadulterated foods that are considered genetically, organically, and wholesomely clean. And while diet and nutrition have filled the void of moral behavior and provided an avenue for feeling virtuous, the inverse of this equation are the behaviors that constitute the iconoclasm that lead Jonathan Edwards to his chilling conclusions three hundred years ago. But, virtue is thrown into starkest relief when contrasted with vice, and on the Internet the food nominated to represent iniquity is bacon, because perhaps no other food so neatly represents the newest form of amorality than the salt-cured, fat-larded, aged and smoked cuts of fried pork. Bacon is, of course, an animal product, a fact made troubling by the compounding common knowledge that pigs are intelligent animals. If it were not for their status as meat producers (pigs are the only animals who are raised solely for meat production), they would make excellent pets; people who keep them as companions claim they are as good or better friends than dogs. Recently and in response to public outcry, several American states have passed laws attempting to reform hog farms, where pigs are fattened in small cages that restrict their movement—situations that make the animals aggressive or engage in self-harm—and drains their waste into local water tables. Communities in North Carolina have sued some of the largest pork producers, citing concerns about “environmental justice and economic fairness” and claiming that the corporate greed that allowed the farms to house 14,000 pigs in a relatively small space was “responsible for the odor, flies, buzzards, and heavy truck traffic” that make their daily lives miserable and their water undrinkable.25 Meanwhile, in California, when the terrible and brief lives of swine on hog farms were made public the Initiative Measure (Prop. 2) was passed in 2008, which stated that any “farm owner or operator within the state shall not knowingly cause any covered animal to be confined in a cruel manner.”26 Obviously, the suffering of an intelligent animal is the reason that bacon (or any animal product) is not part of a vegetarian or vegan diet. But even in diets that rely heavily on animal products, like Paleo or keto, bacon is persona [porcina?] non grata. “Bacon” is an all-encompassing term for a salt-cured cut of pork prepared from belly, loin, shoulder, or back; in most cases, it is sliced thin but in a way that preserves equal parts of muscle and visceral fat. Between the curing and the frying, bacon is that rare food that achieves the sinful triumvirate of being absurdly high in sodium, saturated fat, and nitrates. It’s thanks to the confluence of these negative traits that bacon is frequently excluded from lifestyle diets: Paleo diets reject bacon for being too high in fat and traditional diets avoid bacon because it is high in sodium

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(I’m sure you can work out the ethical vegan reasons for yourself). And all of this is to say nothing of bacon in a religious context: vegetarian religious practices in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Seventh-day Adventism all obviously forswear bacon, and the dietary prohibition that unites Judaism and Islam is the ban on consuming swine. Ergo, no bacon. But despite these, and numerous other, marks against bacon, it retains a rare status as not just a beloved food, but a symbol of dissonance, debauchery, and deliciousness. There are entire cookbooks devoted to bacon. Images of bacon adorn everything from notebooks to pajamas, sometimes in a visual repeating pattern reminiscent of old computer screensavers or Homer Simpson’s dreams, with a double serving floating across a white background.27 There are decorative candles that burn with a bacon scent, novelty kitchenware and coffee mugs celebrating bacon, and social media sites devoted to praising bacon’s many attributes. Beyond its status as a breakfast food, bacon can be candied, preserved, turned into jam, added as a sandwich topping, chopped into bits, freeze dried, and used as to wrap everything from fruit (such as figs) to baked goods (bacon doughnuts are a local delicacy in some cities) to other meat (the bacon-wrapped turkey leg seems to be a reoccurring avatar of licentiousness in social media). As American novelist Francine Prose writes of her own affection for the breakfast side dish technically forbidden by her Jewish faith, “I’ve often wondered whether the proscription against pork might have something to do with how supremely delicious it is. What better way to test people’s faith than to forbid them to eat something that sends out such mouthwatering aromas from their neighbor’s kitchen or, more likely, their neighbor’s desert encampment? Is it any wonder that the world’s major religions, at least as far as I know, don’t prevent their followers from eating any number of less universally popular items—for example, Brussels sprouts?”28 An oft-repeated lament among those contemplating becoming vegan or vegetarian is that—despite knowing that bacon is tied to animal cruelty as well as its nutritional and environmental failures—bacon is something many feel they are unable to quit. In a fairly archetypal story of recidivism, a lapsed vegetarian recalls her inability to resist a Las Vegas breakfast buffet’s “ceiling-high stack of bacon” as precipitating her “fall from grace,” which— despite paroxysms of guilt the following day—were preceded by feeling “simultaneously awful and wonderful. Though the top of my mouth felt as if I had eaten a can of Crisco, all that protein gave me vivid dreams, and I had the energy of one of the Bull Ship Pirates from the hourly Treasure Island show.”29 Bacon is a hashtag, a tagged photo, a restaurant. Bacon, in other words, is a twenty-first-century symbol of sin, celebrated as the antithesis of clean eating. And it goes without saying that it could not attain such status as a symbol of rebelliousness against puritanical ideas about food if those puritanical ideas didn’t exist in the first place. In fact, our 1950s Betty would

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definitely have had bacon in her freezer and cooked it every day. But today, bacon is less virtuous than a salad. Because of this, eating bacon—either in private or on social media—is an indication of where someone stands morally in a culture—and nutrition—war. HEALTHIER THAN THOU: ORTHOREXIA AND THE UNHEALTHY SIDE OF CLEAN EATING The dark side of these nutritional culture wars, and the darkest side of dietary virtue signaling, is not just the consumption of bacon, but is society’s newest form of disordered eating: orthorexia. The two best known iterations of disordered eating are probably anorexia nervosa—a condition characterized by severe food restriction and extreme measures to gain or preserve an unhealthfully low weight—and bulimia—a disorder that involves binge eating followed by physical purging. But in the late 1990s, after reflecting on his own fraught and emotional relationship with food, physician Steven Bratman suggested that orthorexia be included as another form of disordered eating. Orthorexia is characterized by the dangerously severe restriction of food to solely what an individual deems healthy or clean. According to Bratman and other researchers, the consequences of orthorexia are just as dire as anorexia and bulimia, especially because an individual suffering from orthorexia “often receives praise and social capital for their virtuous devotion to their healthy way of life.” Bratman coined the term orthorexia nervosa by bringing together “ortho,” which is Greek for true or correct, and “orexis,” meaning appetite. He recognized the disorder as a disease, however, because of his own struggle with eating as a young man. Before he became a physician, Bratman lived and worked as a chef on an organic farm at a commune and retreat center, where he met people of all kinds of faiths, which included food. His story of being a cook recounts how—even though the main dish at all the commune’s meals was vegetarian—there was a bit of an intellectual blood sport over what was considered healthy. “All communes attract idealists; ours attracted food idealists,” he explains. “On a daily basis I encountered the chaos of contradictory nutritional theories.” He watched and was alternately swayed by the turf wars waged between the vegans vs. the raw foodists vs. the macrobiotics vs. the meat eaters. At the height of his own struggle with healthy eating, he was engaging in five-day fasts after every “slip,” refusing all processed food, and, in his estimation, looked as emaciated as a prisoner-of-war. As a renunciate, he felt virtuous; but “gradually I began to sense that something was going wrong. The poetry of my life was disappearing. My ability to carry on normal conversations was hindered by intrusive thoughts of food. The need to obtain

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meals free of meat, fat, and artificial chemicals had put nearly all social forms of eating beyond my reach. I was lonely and obsessed . . . I had been seduced by righteous eating. The problem of my life’s meaning had been transferred inexorably to food, and I could not reclaim it.” His admiration for these various foodways began to wane, and then to grate, eventually leading Bratman to fantasize about writing a satirical cookbook “for eating theorists” in which each food in a healthy diet is listed as both “divine” and “the worst pestilence one human being ever fed to another.”30 Bratman eventually found his way out of his eating patterns with the help of spiritual leaders, time, and perspective. One transformative moment came when the person whose eating habits Bratman most admired stopped his diet cold turkey, as it were. When Bratman asked what had prompted this change, his friend explained that his revelation “came to me last night in a dream: Rather than eat my sprouts alone, it would be better for me to share a pizza with some friends.”31 But others are not so lucky, and continue to struggle for years. Bratman’s account of how orthorexia unfolds is that it “often begins innocently, as a desire to overcome chronic illness, lose weight, to improve general health, or to correct the many bad habits of the American diet.” He explains: Most of us resort to an iron self-discipline, often enhanced by a lofty feeling of superiority toward those who continue to eat a normal diet. Over time, what to eat, how much, and the consequences of dietary indiscretion come to occupy a greater and greater proportion of our mental life. The effortful act of eating the right food may even begin to invoke a sense of spirituality. As [it] progresses, a day filled with wheat grass juice, tofu, and quinoa biscuits may come to feel as holy as one spent serving the destitute and homeless. [But a “failure” is experienced] as a fall from grace. The only remedy is an act of penitence, which usually involves ever stricter diets or even fasting to cleanse away the influence of unhealthy foods.

This spiraling is not contained to the individual’s experience of virtuous feeling, but expands to include “conceited superiority over anyone who indulges in impure dietary habits” and ends with “the meaning of life [having] been displaced onto the bare act of eating.”32 Bratman clarifies that he never intended to denigrate or debate the value of a healthy diet for ameliorating disease and living a long life; as a physician, he believes in the power of food to heal. But, as he repeatedly points out, “Eating the perfect diet might make you less likely to get cancer, and it could prevent bloating and give you more energy—but it won’t make you happy. Using food as primary refuge is a form of spiritual materialism” (his emphasis).33 It is, as Mose Velsor (Walt Whitman) warned in the nineteenth century,

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a case of “taking too minute and morbid care of the health, and, therefore, losing it as effectually as by taking no care at all.”34 Even though clean eating is not a problem unto itself, Bratman and other survivors of orthorexia feel that eating so austerely that one’s diet becomes a modern version of medieval asceticism—that same spiritual search for redemption, autonomy, and socially-acceptable displays of virtue performed by those medieval women mystics—can lead to a sanctimoniousness that becomes an end unto itself. The instrumentalization of food and fasting to become Christlike in word and deed has turned inward and into a quest for purity and social admiration; Bratman warns that for some people, seeking praise, adulation, and self-righteousness through a healthy diet can lead to loneliness, isolation, and further illness. In fact, in the second decade of the twenty-first century several popular clean eating bloggers and Instagram influencers publicly stepped back from their dietary lifestyle, citing a range of physical and psychological ailments: degenerative spinal disks, disordered eating patterns, hair loss, anxiety, extreme fatigue, skin rashes, body dysmorphia, migraines, depression, amenorrhea. Nearly all were women, and nearly all had originally turned to some form of clean eating to heal themselves from a variety of maladies, from acne to indigestion to more serious medical diagnoses, such as autoimmune disease or cancer. Some identified as whole-food plant-based vegan, some as gluten-, legume-, wheat-, and/or dairy-free organic locavores, some as raw foodists or juice fasters, and some as just generally interested in a healthy diet. But each faced a moment when it became obvious that the common denominator of their sense of physical or mental unwellness was the diet they followed with, as Bratman characterizes it, “food puritanism.”35 Besides the physical manifestations of orthorexia, several of these public figures noted the decision to withdraw was doubly difficult because clean eating had become their “brand”—the product they were promoting and selling on social media, which was their own dietary lifestyle. By confessing to struggling with orthorexia and changing their diet, they were in danger of losing their marketing and business opportunities, as well as followers. Because social media (particularly Instagram) amplifies its subjects and creates an echo-chamber effect, the decision to retreat from clean eating felt to many of their Internet disciples like a betrayal.36 Some were told by their followers that they should apologize for profiting from a diet culture that they now recognized made them—and possibly their devotees—sick; others who chose to modulate their clean eating habits in the name of their physical and mental well-being received death threats.37 They could heal themselves, but they could not fix a culture that equates clean eating with virtue, or that defines moral turpitude by the decision to eat bacon rather than a salad.

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And perhaps this die was cast long before Instagram. Supposedly, on the occasion of Edwards giving the sermon to a neighboring minister’s unstirred congregation—the flock in question having been unmoved by the message of the Great Awakening happening all around them—Edwards was continually interrupted by the moaning and the weeping of the crowd before him. “What can we do to be saved?” they cried from the pews, terrified into submission by Edwards’s ghastly depictions of the punishments that awaited them below. “You had need to consider yourselves,” Edwards explains toward the end, “and awake thoroughly out of sleep. You cannot bear the fierceness and wrath of the infinite God . . . [you] who are unconverted, do not you know that you are going down to hell?” Instead of falling into the pit, the unrepentant masses have the “extraordinary opportunity” to receive mercy, because “many that were very lately in the same miserable condition that you are in, are now in a happy state.” They repented, and were told they had been saved. Nearly 300 years later, Americans are still looking for redemption. NOTES 1. Jonathan Edwards, American Imprint Collection (Library of Congress), and John Davis Batchelder Collection (Library of Congress), Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8, 1741, at a Time of Great Awakenings, and Attended with Remarkable Impressions on Many of the Hearers (New York: Printed by G. Forman . . . for C. Davis . . . 1797). 2. Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, Skinny Bitch: A No-Nonsense, Tough-Love Guide for Savvy Girls Who Want to Stop Eating Crap and Start Looking Fabulous! (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2005). 3. Melissa Urban, Dallas Hartwig, and Alexandra Grablewski, The Whole30: The 30-Day Guide to Total Health and Food Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). 4. Paul Rozin, “Food Is Fundamental, Fun, Frightening, and Far-Reaching,” Social Research 66, no. 1 (1999). 5. Mary Eberstadt, “Is Food the New Sex? A Curious Reversal in Moralizing,” Policy Review, no. 153 (2009). 6. Christy Harrison, Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness through Intuitive Eating (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2019). 7. Jen Gerson, “The Jennifer Epidemic: How the Spiking Popularity of Different Baby Names Cycle Like Genetic Drift,” National Post (2015). 8. Pew Research Center, “The New Food Fights: U.S. Public Divides over Food Science,” (2016). 9. Alan Levinovitz, Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020), 4, 5. 10. Laudan, “A Plea for Culinary Modernism.”

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11. Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 32. 12. Smith and Denton, 130. As they put it: “In our in-depth interviews with U.S. teenagers, we also found the vast majority of them to be incredibly inarticulate about their faith, their religious beliefs and practices, and its meaning or place in their lives. We found very few teens from any religious background who are able to articulate well their religious beliefs and explain how those beliefs connect to the rest of their lives,” 131. 13. Smith and Denton, 135. As an example of the lackadaisical and inarticulate set of beliefs displayed by many of their interviewees, Smith and Denton quote an interview with a young Protestant woman (who in the transcript yawns through most of the exchange). When pressed to explain her answer of “good” and “powerful” to describe what image she has of God, the young woman says, “Tall.” And in reply to a question about what God has done in her life, replies, “I, well, I have a house, parents, I have the Internet, I have a phone, I have cable” (135). Needless to say, this portion of the book received a great deal of attention from youth ministers of various Christian denominations across the United States after its publication (R. Albert Jr. Mohler, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism—the New American Religion,” The Christian Post [2005]). 14. Smith and Denton, 127. 15. Smith and Denton, 163. 16. Austin L. Hughes, “The Folly of Scientism,” The New Atlantis, no. 37 (2012). 17. Cristina, Yali, (@yalicristina), Instagram 2023: https:​//​www​.instagram​.com​/ yalicristina​/. 18. David Shariatmadari, “‘Virtue-Signalling’—The Putdown That Has Passed Its Sell-by Date | David Shariatmadari,” January 20 2016. 19. Mark Peters, “Virtue Signaling and Other Inane Platitudes” The Boston Globe, December 24, 2015. 20. Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish, Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022). 21. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 208ff. 22. Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 23. R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity, California Studies in Food and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 13. 24. Bee Wilson, “Why We Fell for Clean Eating” The Guardian (2018). 25. Barry Yeoman, “Jury Awarded Hog Farm Neighbors $3.25 Million. Will Three-Quarters of That Be Erased?” Charlotte Observer (2020). https:​//​www​ .charlotteobserver​.com​/news​/business​/article239694633​.html. 26. “CA, Farm Animal Cruelty, Chapter 13.8. Farm Animal Cruelty. § 25991. Definitions. | Animal Legal & Historical Center” (2020). https:​//​www​.animallaw​.info​

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/statute​/ca​-farm​-animal​-cruelty​-chapter​-138​-farm​-animal​-cruelty​-​%C2​%A7​-25991​ -definitions. 27. “Snackwave: A Comprehensive Guide to the Internet’s Saltiest Meme” (2017). https:​//​www​.thehairpin​.com​/2014​/09​/snackwave​-a​-comprehensive​-guide​-to​ -the​-internets​-saltiest​-meme​/. 28. Francine Prose, “Faith and Bacon,” Saveur, November 16, 2009. https:​ //​ www​.saveur​.com​/article​/Kitchen​/Faith​-and​-Bacon. Let it be known: I love Brussels sprouts. 29. Novella Carpenter, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 55. 30. Steven Bratman, “Health Food Junkie: Obsession with Dietary Perfection Can Sometimes Do More Harm Than Good, Says One Who Has Been There,” Yoga Journal, no. 136 (1997). A sampling of his proposed cookbook includes: “Spicy food is bad; cayenne peppers are health-promoting. Fasting on oranges is healthy; citrus fruits are too acidic. Milk is good only for young cows (and pasteurized milk is even worse); boiled milk is the food of the gods. Fermented foods, such as sauerkraut, are essentially rotten; fermented foods aid digestion. Sweets are bad; honey is nature’s most perfect food. Fruits are the ideal food; fruit causes candida. Vinegar is a poison; apple cider vinegar cures most illnesses. Proteins should not be combined with starches; aduki beans and brown rice should always be cooked together.” This is, perhaps, the most excellent summary of our current dietary incommensurability I have found in my research. 31. Steven Bratman, Health Food Junkies: Overcoming the Obsession with Healthful Eating (New York: Broadway Books, 2000), 12. 32. Ibid, 9ff. 33. From Bratman’s introduction to Jordan Younger’s Breaking Vegan: One Woman’s Journey from Veganism, Extreme Dieting, and Orthorexia to a More Balanced Life (2016). 34. Mose Velsor, “Manly Health and Training, with Off-Hand Hints toward Their Conditions,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 33, no. 3–4 (2016), 194. 35. Bratman (2000), 212. 36. Pixie G. Turner and Carmen E. Lefevre, “Instagram Use Is Linked to Increased Symptoms of Orthorexia Nervosa,” Eating and Weight Disorders 22, no. 2 (2017). 37. “What Happened When the Blonde Vegan Wasn’t Vegan Anymore | Well+Good,” (2020); Brittney McNamara, “The Dark Side of Wellnes” (2020).

7

Community Defining What Is Sacred through Food

Roughly 2400 years ago, Hippocrates—the father of Western medicine— described what today we call environmental determinates of community health in his treatise “Airs, Waters, Places.” In it, he writes that “the constitutions and habits of a people follow the nature of the land where they live.”1 Specifically, Hippocrates declares that “whoever would study medicine aright must learn” about the seasons, the winds, local water supplies, the soil, the direction the town faces, the political economy, and the form of government of a particular location, and “lastly, consider the life of the inhabitants themselves.” The treatise moves systematically through every permutation of wind direction (“sheltered from the south [winds] but from the quarter between north-west and north-east”), water source (“brackish surface water, warm in the summer and cold in the winter”), and town location (“those that face east are likely to be healthier than those facing north or south even if such places are only a furlong apart”). Hippocrates (or, more likely, someone writing within his corpus) identified both the “local diseases” and the health ontology of an individual living in each space.2 In short, he recognizes not only the importance of physical location, but also the power of community to magnify or depreciate human health. Where we live, how we live, and with whom we live are indispensable components in achieving and maintaining good health—possibly even more than the science-based dietary interventions that bring seekers to food faiths in the first place. Individual holistic health rises and falls with the wellness of the community to which one belongs. And that community, as we will see, need not be material or local— many of the communities formed by followers of food faiths exist in the labyrinthine landscape of the Internet (a geography Hippocrates certainly never foresaw), gathering and sharing and fighting and excommunicating with as much energy and commitment to their purpose as, well, a community. The sense of identity formed through conversion and the opportunity to practice a 195

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food faith finds its outlet in joining a group of the likeminded, which today— thanks to social media—can happen both virtually and in real time. But, before we explore these ideas further, we should explore one of the most powerful studies on the benefits of community and locality to human health, which probably would have come as no surprise to Hippocrates: the Blue Zones studies. THE BLUE ZONES AND THE POWER OF COMMUNITY IN CREATING HEALTH In the early 2000s—twenty-five centuries after “Airs, Waters, Places”— epidemiologists Michel Poulain, Giovanni Mario Pes, and their colleagues traveled to Sardinia, an island-region of Italy in the Tyrrhenian Sea famous for its beauty since the Bronze Age. They went hoping to verify a persistent rumor in their research circles that Sardinia is home to a large population of men and women living into their 80s, 90s, and, occasionally, well past the century mark, with very few signs of the normal markers of aging, like frailty, cognitive decline, or disease. The aged Sardinians reportedly still worked as herders and farmers long past when most others would have retired after a lifetime of backbreaking labor. They were also reputably still mentally sharp and considered valued members of their church and village. Unlike in many Western cultures—including the US—Sardinia’s elderly were cherished by their communities for their knowledge, experience, and wisdom. What was particularly fascinating to the team was that the mountains of Sardinia were home to some of the oldest men in the world, and the largest population of men over the age of 100 globally. Women on average outlive men, so it is rare to find even a modest population of men in their 90s. Using data extracted from local birth and death records, as well as self-reported surveys of Sardinia’s elder population, the researchers created a compelling demographic map that showed a concentration of nonagenarian and centenarian men in the eastern, mountainous portion of the island. To illustrate this effect, the map was shaded from light to dark blue right where the mountains meet the sea. In a shorthand explaining the significance of the bullseye at the center of the concentric colored circles, Poulain and Pes called the area with the most centenarians the “Blue Zone.”3 The term is an accident of ink color, but it is a theory that has understandably generated a lot of interest. Is there something special about the island of Sardinia that fosters long life? Or is there something special about the Sardinians’ way of life that makes them live so long? With the support of National Geographic magazine, Dan Buettner, a reporter and later author of The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve

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Lived the Longest, traveled with a team of researchers around the world to areas where a significant percentage of people lived a long (into their 90s and beyond) and healthy (cognitively alert, physically active, and socially engaged) life. They were hunting for places—for communities—where people had up to a three times better chance of living to a century. Furthermore, they were searching for folks living “good years” free of debility and enjoying “a sense of social connectedness.” This connectedness, Buettner writes, “seems to give you a sense of well being,” though no one knew if this is because being part of a community raises endorphin or lowers cortisol levels, or both. Researchers looked for decades for the biological markers that might explain why social connection is such an integral part of living a long, healthy life but “they haven’t been successful at finding them. [All they know is that] something happens that makes life more worthwhile. The days take on more meaning” and are extended into decades.4 Although the expedition ultimately discovered nine interconnected lifestyle factors that contributed to the profusion of healthy elders (hence the book’s subtitle), the team’s original goal was to identify other places that could be netted in with that same blue ink on a map and categorized as a zone that nurtures exceptionally long lives. The terms of qualification went beyond finding the world’s oldest man or woman: the point was to discover whole communities of people who were, even in very advanced age, living healthy, full lives. After Sardinia and conferring with Pes and Poulain, Buettner & co.’s next stop was the prefecture of Okinawa in Japan, where they worked with Canadian doctor Bradley J. Willcox and his team. In 2001, Willcox, his physician brother, Craig, and their Japanese geriatrician colleague and founder of the Okinawa Centenarian Study (OCS), Dr. Makoto Suzuki, jointly published a book titled The Okinawa Program: How the World’s Longest-Lived People Achieve Everlasting Health—and How You Can Too. The book’s purpose was to introduce the lifestyle of Okinawa—with its emphasis on family, community, and its reputation as a “real-life Shangri-la”—to the Western world and offer a program that “focuses not just on the absence of disease but also on optimum health, both physical and psychospiritual, cultivated through a lifestyle conducive to wellness.”5 It was successfully marketed as a diet book (tellingly, they followed up their first book four years later with The Okinawa Diet Plan: Get Leaner, Live Longer, and Never Feel Hungry), but The Okinawa Program was more about the day-to-day lives of residents. The book was based on the wealth of information that came out of the OCS’s decades-long public health survey of the residents of the Ryukyu Islands, the southernmost islands of the Japanese archipelago that comprise the prefecture of Okinawa. In a nation known for the longevity of its citizens—Japan has the longest lifespans of any country, for both men and women—the native

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inhabitants of Okinawa live even longer; researchers from around the world have been intrigued with the islands for centuries (there are thirteenth-century Chinese sources remarking on the long lives of the islands’ residents). After World War II and during the American occupation of Japan, gerontologists, anthropologists, physiologists, and physicians of nearly every subdiscipline became fascinated with not just the longevity of the Okinawans, but the quality of life they enjoyed throughout their many years. Just like the Blue Zones researchers, The Okinawa Program’s authors weave a fascinating tale of an island where time seems to have stopped. As with previous studies of Okinawa’s elderly, Wilcox and his colleagues were astounded by their level of activity and social engagement. Beginning in 1975 with the OCS, Suzuki—and later Willcox, Willcox, and colleagues— observed, interviewed, and followed over 700 of Okinawa’s nonagenarians and centenarians in their day-to-day life. Besides their medical and personal histories, the researchers wanted to understand how the island’s elderly lived. Were they, like many of their Western counterparts, confined to their home or an assisted living facility? Did they seem isolated or despondent about their past? How did they spend their days? What they discovered, as per the rhetoric of diet and health books, was shocking. Women in their 90s went out every day to walk the slippery rocks lining the island, hunting in tidal pools for sea vegetables. Men well into their 80s and 90s were teaching courses on mutubu-udundi, an indigenous and ancient martial art, to children and adults a fraction of their age. When they approached the home of a man in his late 90s, they called out to a someone walking in from the garden whom they assumed was the nonagenarian’s son. To their astonishment, the man with a hoe over his shoulder was not the 70-something year-old son: he was the man himself. This interlude, in which the expectation of finding an elderly person resting at home was confounded by discovering they were out working or socializing, was repeated several times over the course of these longevity projects. But also impressive were the wide familial and social circles people of every age shared in Okinawa. The islands are infused with a spirit of “yuimaru [which] is similar to the ‘help thy neighbor’ ethic of the farmers of the American Midwest and the Canadian prairies,” Willcox et al write. “These kinds of personal relationships are powerful stuff. [The team’s] studies and other significant research show that they not only help to extend our lives but also seem to offer protection from illness.” Likewise, most of the elderly and many of the not-so-old belonged to a moai, a small group of five or six friends raised together since childhood; Buettner, like the Willcoxes before him, was charmed by these groups, who gather almost daily to drink tea (or sake), gossip, and laugh, and have lived in their small community their entire long lives.6

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But these are only two places where, as one Greek nonagenarian put it, “people forget to die.” Interestingly, and despite the global reputation of the US as a wasteland of SAD and Western diseases, the next Blue Zone the National Geographic team identified was in Loma Linda, California, the home of one of the largest populations of Seventh-day Adventists in the world. After decamping from Battle Creek in the early twentieth century, the church’s leaders expanded on Ellen White’s counsel that Adventists create refuges of health and healing around the world. Loma Linda was chosen as a site for a sanitorium, but soon became home to a university (what began as the Loma Linda College of Evangelists and is today Loma Linda University—a school focused on the health sciences) and a medical center (the Loma Linda University Medical Center, a world-renowned hospital and level 1 trauma center). A small town in the Inland Empire, today Loma Linda is the heart of the Adventist commitment to “make man whole” by furthering “the healing and teaching ministry of Jesus Christ.” Even though Loma Linda is technically in the heart of San Bernardino county, it has—through urban planning and a geographic quirk in the southern California San Gabriel mountain range—remained relatively cut off from the expansive greater Los Angeles metropolitan area in spirit and in kind. And although the town is not exclusively populated by Adventists, the university—with its medical-based curriculum and affiliated Adventist church—has led to a high concentration of Adventists in the town, which has in turn has influenced policy and local laws. For example, because of Adventist prohibitions on meat and unwholesome food, there are very few fast food chains in the city limits, and the handful of franchised restaurants in town have specialized vegetarian options not available to the larger American market. Likewise, public smoking is banned and the Adventist church-owned grocery store does not sell meat. This anomaly in the southern California landscape represents several elements that the National Geographic team identified as meaningful predictors of longevity: a large community centered on faith and family; an orientation toward a sense of purpose in life; and, important but perhaps not as significant as the former two examples, a diet focused on plants, rather than meat or processed foods. After Sardinia, Okinawa, and Loma Linda, the Blue Zones team rounded out their global survey with Ikaria, an island in Greece, and the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, as sites with a statistically significant population of men and women who’ve reached 90 and beyond. Each location was distinct, and what made the research so intriguing were the commonalities between the people, the places, and the cultures that seemed to nurture long and healthy lives. Geographically-speaking—and except for Loma Linda—each of the Blue Zones is an island or removed by an isthmus from the mainland. Almost all are spaces where inhabitants move naturally, living in what in

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larger cities are called walkable neighborhoods, with the key difference that many of the Blue Zones are in areas with significant natural topography (hills, ocean, forests), creating an added layer of necessary dexterity. As for community, in every one of the Blue Zones the elders are considered an important resource and valued for their knowledge. In several locations, the concept of retirement is unknown. In Ikaria, for example, ninety-year-olds farm their own grapes to make wine to sell and to share, while in Sardinia great-great grandmothers help care for the youngest children in the family. At Loma Linda University hospital, Dr. Ellsworth Wareham—a cardiothoracic surgeon and one of the pioneers of open-heart surgery who was born in 1914 and passed away in 2019—officially retired at the age of 95 and gave lectures on preventative medicine up until the year before he passed (he became a vegan when he was 49 years old). One other element of the Blue Zones lifestyle that seemed to be popular with the research team and early readers of the expedition results was that, with the exception of the Adventists, all of the Blue Zones shared a habit of moderately consuming alcohol, with red wine featuring prominently in the Sardinian and Ikarian way of life. This brings us to an interesting parallel between Hippocrates’s “Airs, Waters, Places” and the investigative work of the National Geographic team. “Airs, Waters, Places” has been dismissed in some quarters as “geographic determinism,” but Hippocrates’s conclusion that community health is interdependent with place and people was one of the guiding concepts of the National Geographic study, which has been borne out across several measures of physical and mental well-being.7 Airs, waters, and places must be studied as determinants of health, because, as Hippocrates writes, a “physician who understands them well, or at least as well as he can . . . will enjoy good health himself for the most part but he would be very successful in the practice of medicine.” Here, Hippocrates is tasking physicians with looking past the data point of a single person to their social and physical context and thinking about the health of a whole community. And this was likewise the mission of the Blue Zones research team: examine the whole, not just the individual parts that are the components of a healthy and long life. Because even though few people believe that the inhabitants of a place forced to drink brackish water “will thus have moist heads full of phlegm, and this, flowing down from the head, is likely to disturb their inner organs,” Hippocrates’s conclusion that personal health is the outcome of both your physical environment and the people around you (i.e., you tend to have the same health outcomes as the people in your immediate community) is still meaningful today.8 But, the history of Western medicine of the past two centuries has been a chronicle of a single patient who, in the chilling words of Michel Foucault, “is the accident of his disease, the transitory object that [the disease] happens to have seized upon.”9 In this definition of health—the definition rejected by food

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faith communities since Sylvester Graham—health is the absence of disease and managed by medicine. And even though the World Health Organization declared in the twentieth century that health included mental and social wellbeing, definitions that quantify health—especially public health and biomedicine—frequently focus on scientific-based tactics to cure disease.10 Indeed, the key insight of both Hippocrates and the Blue Zones research is that the determinants of health include an entire qualitative system, one portion of which is a community. What both the research team and Hippocrates are describing are ecosystems of health—spaces where environment and culture converge to sustain longer-than-average lives and better-than-average good health. But Buettner warned against giving into nutritionism as an explanation for good health and a long life, reminding his readers that in many of these ecosystems “diet only partly explained higher life expectancy . . . Social structure might turn out to be more important” (my emphasis).11 Despite a cultural fixation with food and nutrition as determinates of good health, in the Blue Zones diet turned out to be just one of several lifestyle choices that converged in a Venn diagram of longevity. Against Buettner’s warning against nutritionism, the media fawned over the proportions of macronutrients in Blue Zones diets, and largely ignored other diet- and exercise-related behaviors, such as not overeating, moving naturally (i.e., walking, gardening), and drinking wine that appeared to be equally important for longevity (about which more in the conclusion to this chapter). But added to these dietary principles were less quantifiable concepts, like spending time with family, having a life’s purpose, surrounding yourself with lifelong friends, and belonging to a community, both faith-based and neighborly. In a way, the Blue Zones researchers were proving Hippocrates’s thesis: beyond his declaration “to let food be thy medicine,” Hippocrates was right that your community matters to your long-term health. But of significance to scholars of religion, a common element in longevity in every Blue Zone is a vibrant spiritual life, either as a robust devotion to a local church or a deep commitment to spiritual exercises such as prayer and meditation. Whether Roman Catholic (Sardinia and Nicoya), Greek Orthodox (Ikaria), or Seventh-day Adventist (Loma Linda) Christians, or participants in ancestor worship (Okinawa), Buettner’s team found that belonging to a religious community can extend life expectancy by about a third and with as great a cumulative effect as daily exercise.12 The major insights of the Blue Zones research were that the real engine of a long, healthy life seems to be a sense of spiritual purpose, as well as belonging to a community. From a public health perspective, belonging to a community appears to work in two dimensions—both individually and community-wide. On an individual level, being part of a community can mitigate all kinds of life-limiting stressors, like anxiety, loneliness, and

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depression, and at a macro level a community operates in the way described by Hippocrates: environment and culture work in tandem to shape the health outcomes of a group, either for better or for worse. At the wider level of a whole community, the tides of health and socially acceptable habits—for example, smoking on the one extreme, exercise on the other—ebb together. You stand a better chance of being healthy if you live in Boulder, Colorado than you do if you live in, say, Rockford, Illinois.13 But what if your community is virtual? Do your behaviors and your perspectives change in the same way they might by belonging to an online food faith community as they would if you lived in Loma Linda and ate at vegetarian cookouts with the town’s residents every week? Even though it is not my intention to conclude one way or another just how powerful the psychological sense of belonging is in an online community, I do believe that the case of food faiths—whose communities are often virtual forums—provide a compelling example of how the health benefits of belonging can be as contagious in online communities as they are in Blue Zones. IMAGINED COMMUNITIES AND VIRTUAL CHURCHES—IN-GROUPS, OUT-GROUPS, AND APOSTATES One of the most comprehensive definitions of religion comes from Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist whose opus The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is still foundational to the study of religion. In his 1912 book, Durkheim begins his mental excavation of religion’s cultural origins by defining what he means by religion, which he notes has a distinctively communal vibe as a “society whose members are united because they imagine the sacred world and its relations with the profane world in the same way, and because they translate this common representation into identical practices, is what is called a Church.”14 Furthermore, he writes that a “Church is not simply a priestly brotherhood; it is a moral community made up of all the faithful, both laity and priests,” and that this moral community is held together by bonds that make it fundamentally an imagined community. Despite the emphasis on the communal, however, Durkheim acknowledges that there will be times when, rather than community, what appears to be fostered is independence— what he calls cults, as well as today’s unaffiliated who are spiritual but not religious. But, even when independence appears to shift communal identity, Durkheim explains that actually these “are not distinct and autonomous religious systems but simply aspects of the religion common to the whole Church of which the individuals are part”; an individual and independent practice actually still originates from the larger, communal, and historical

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whole. Thus, even in our contemporary stew of food faiths as spiritual practice, Durkheim could point out that each is rooted in and descended from a denomination that historically preceded it (which is why we began our whole historical adventure with Sylvester Graham).15 All of this leads to Durkheim’s famed definition of religion: A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. The second element thus holds a place in my definition that is no less essential than the first: In showing that the idea of religion is inseparable from the idea of a Church, it conveys the notion that religion must be an eminently collective thing (his emphasis).16

Durkheim spends the duration of Elementary Forms moving backwards in time and journeying around the world to explain what he means when he says that “religion must be an eminently collective thing,” but we can pause here to reflect on what a definition of religion as a community means for our understanding of a science-based spiritual practice. If the defining element of a religion is a moral community, then, as we discussed in the previous chapter, food faiths meet this requirement quite handily. Of course, the way this particular moral community gathers is substantially different than the way institutional religions have gathered for centuries—which is to say, a religious community is generally one that gathers in person, in time and in space. But the communities built around food aren’t a corporeal community, because one of their predominant features is that they are a product of Web 2.0. In this sense, food faiths are communities that were formed digitally—and right in the nick of time. At the end of the twentieth century, sociologists warned that humanity was sitting on the precipice of being the loneliest generation in human history as the social conventions and civic engagement that used to generate communal ties faded.17 Between changing demographics, the isolation of suburban life, and the end of religious dwelling, a crisis of seclusion and separation seemed imminent. But then, a digital miracle occurred: the Internet. Suddenly, in terms of food faiths, would-be converts and novitiates and even high holy gurus could gather together to learn, to teach, and to share the science that forms the gospel of right eating. And, while many social scientists have expressed concern that social media and Internet use is more isolating than it is uniting and that virtual communication is no substitute for face-to-face interaction, in some cases (of which I argue food faiths are one) the support of an online community can be a powerful force for personal change, collective expression, and spiritual practice.18 From communities on social media sites,

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such as Facebook or TikTok, to the multitudes of diet and wellness subreddits on Reddit.com (r/keto, r/vegan, r/Paleo, r/vegetarian, r/plantbased—they are legion), to forums housed on the websites of popular food bloggers, whole factions of the like-minded and diet-converted are sharing their stories, offering words of encouragement (or approbation), contributing diet-specific scientific research, and generally building communities around their food faiths. Namely, they are forming what Benedict Anderson calls imagined communities. Anderson, a political scientist, was speaking specifically about the phenomenon of nationalism in his 1980 book of the same title. In Imagined Communities, Anderson explains that political communities—specifically, nations—are “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Furthermore, he writes that these communities are distinguished “not by their falsity/ genuineness”—i.e., their population size or the fact that most members of this tribe will not have face-to-face contact—but “by the style in which they are imagined.” That is to say, they are united by the common interests and goals holding their fiction of a nation-state together. Because ultimately, what marks any fraternal order as a true community is “a deep, horizontal comradeship”; despite inequalities and imbalances that may exist in practice, in the theoretical space of an imagined community—geopolitically or on Reddit— all are fellow seekers working toward a larger goal.19 Although the first edition of Anderson’s monograph was shaped by global historical politics and armed conflict, in the years since the Internet became ubiquitous the concept of a community where members “will never know most of their fellow-members” but “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” has become a useful framework for describing relationships that transpire exclusively online. Social scientists and media theorists agree that what transpires on sites as varied as Tripadvisor to Twitter meets the description of an imagined community, where “the imagined community is a valuable set of beliefs and practices that underlie and bolster the effective meaning and functioning of the virtual communities.”20 In fact, the idea that within online forums and subreddits devoted to diet real communities are cohering brings us back to Durkheim’s description of a religion—a “unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” With science to guide them, members of these virtual food faith communities collectively designate the foods that bring good health, over and against the foods that defile—the foods that are sacred versus the foods that are profane. This act of defining the sacred leads, in turn, to the enthusiastic evangelism for which

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many food faith communities are known, manifesting as online proselytizing via social media, blogs, and community forums. The relationships and communities built online are no less real for being ephemeral, and their delineation of the sacred—the science that circumscribes food faiths—is no less significant for the members of these communities than a holy text within an established religion. There are numerous food-oriented communities on social media sites like Facebook, where people practicing the same diet or interested in the same activism (animal rights, anti-GMO, etc.) can meet to share information and ideas. Likewise, the programmatic hashtag feature on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram allows the likeminded to find one another across accounts and posts; hashtags like #vegan or #paleo are searchable, but also permit users to curate whom they follow and the pages to which they subscribe. Additionally, social media influencers—found on these platforms, plus Snapchat, YouTube, and other sites—use their Internet-acquired celebrity to shape their brand (e.g., a dietary lifestyle), cultivate sponsorship, and, in some cases, spur their followers into collective action on a meaningful topic. Sometimes online communities will organize and engage in social protest for aligned causes— such as ethical vegans protesting animal welfare on factory farms; or other times, they encourage one another to petition government officials—as when followers of traditional and Paleo diets wrote to their government representatives asking the USDA to update the US Dietary Guidelines with current research on the lipid hypothesis or to divest advisory panels of food industry scientists who might have a conflict of interest.21 One example of a food faith community engaging in political action is Vani Hari’s FoodBabe.com and her “Food Babe Army.” In 2014, the blogger—who advocates for “for living a healthy life [in order] to drive my energy into investigating what is really in our food, how is it grown and what chemicals are used in its production”— posted a petition on her website demanding that the fast food sandwich chain Subway remove azodicarbonamide from their bread.22 “Azodicarbonamide,” she explains, “is the same chemical used to make yoga mats, shoe soles, and other rubbery objects. It’s not supposed to be food or even eaten for that matter. And it’s definitely not ‘fresh’”—the final comment being a swipe at Subway’s tagline. Members of Hari’s online community responded in droves, signing and reposting her petition on social media; in just three days and in a bread-loving crusade that would make Sylvester Graham proud, over 50,000 people signed the petition, leading Subway to phase out their use of the chemical. Afterwards, Hari thanked her community, writing, “Little did I know that this blog would change the world . . . [This] is an amazing reminder to me of how powerful our collective voice has become. Keep it up Food Babe Army!”23

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Although Hari is a divisive figure in the world of online food blogs (she is less divisive among scientists, who uniformly consider her incitements against various chemicals dangerous24) an online community using their collective voice to affect change as activists and consumers is less the norm than a group who shares experiences, offer testimonials, ask questions, and consider relevant science. On the forum for Whole30, a user who just wrapped up her first 30 days closes a summary post of her experience with “Thanks so much W30 community! I have enjoyed reading everyone’s questions, getting advice and growing healthier together!! Let’s keep at it!” Elsewhere in the forums, when a member who had faithfully posted an update every week missed one, another member chimed in with the encouraging words, “I keep checking for your weekly update . . . while I am absolutely indebted to you for your valuable insight on my log, I love reading about your journey. I hope all is going well, that struggles are being surmounted (or at least treated with gentle reflection), and that you are back to sleeping well.”25 In the forum for her website TheKindLife.com, actress Alicia Silverstone commented on the compassion with which users speak with and to one another, noting “This community is really special. Everyone on this website is so supportive, positive, and helpful, I just have to thank you all from the bottom of my heart! This has really become a place where we can all come and feel supported . . . It has become like a little family!”26 In these virtual—in the sense of being online and being imagined—communities, Durkheim’s assertion that religion is a display of collectivity relative to sacred things and the “beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community . . . all those who adhere to them” is observable online. There are even online communities for folks who have left a food faith community—real, virtual, or both. Bright Line Eating (BLE) is a dietary practice and program focused mostly on weight loss via clean eating and whose Calvinist-like principles are premised on the theory that processed foods— especially sugar and flour—are addictive, which means that eating “everything in moderation” can lead to a cycle of bingeing.27 An important aspect of BLE is what the program’s website describes as an “incredibly close-knit Online Support Community”—called the Masterminds Group—that helps followers stay accountable to the program and to each other. For some, the community aspect is the brightest line, and the hardest to leave, even when they realize the program is no longer serving their needs. One blogger leaving this food faith to join the ranks of the HAES movement wrote that it was actually her BLE group who helped her make the decision to go. “I’ve come to rely upon and cherish the relationships that I have and the growth that I am experiencing that are grounded in being a part of two rocking mastermind groups,” she wrote. “Something that came out of my formal Mastermind call today is the impetus for this blog post . . . And the beginning of my goodbye.

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The other members of my Mastermind Group were in total agreement” that her exit was for the best for her mental and physical well-being.28 Conversely, when another blogger was weighing the value of remaining in BLE, it was the contrast between the BLE Facebook community and her in-person church community that was the deciding factor. She realized that BLE no longer aligned with her value for connection and community at a monthly church potluck, where—in keeping with the strict eating rules that members of BLE insist are nonnegotiable—she would eat food she brought, alone. “There is something to be said about busy families taking the time to prepare or buy a dish to share and then spending a part of their likely busy Sunday to have fellowship with other families,” she writes. “It was lovely.” But, she explains, When I was on BLE, I would bring my dish to share but not enjoy the food that others were offering. Instead, I’d return to my chair and get out my massive lunch box and eat my previously measured out food portions. I realize it is ultimately not important what other people thought of this and, at the same time, it was awkward and uncomfortable. There was at least one instance where everyone else was already done, including the small kids who ate pretty darn slowly . . . Finishing what I had brought was important though because my adherence to the BLE rules depended upon it. If I had continued to stay on the diet, there may have come a time when I would just opt out of the event all together rather that feel isolated from my community.29

Like Steven Bratman’s guru who decided a pizza with friends was preferable to eating sprouts alone, this blogger—and many others in online food faith communities—chose to step away. Some imagined communities are formed by those seeking refuge from the diets they practiced that they now felt no longer worked, or were dangerous in some way. There are sites that have created communities of fugitives from low-carb diets (like Paleo or keto), explaining on one website that this is a community for those “whom low carbing has stopped working, or never worked to begin with.”30 There are numerous forums and resources for those who wish to, in the words of another website, “squarely acknowledge and discuss the sometimes serious problems that can occur on alternative diets but often go unreported, and to go beyond the simplistic dogmas readily available elsewhere—in fact almost everywhere—to ‘explain them away’” and offer an objective examination of the “subjective, ‘blinded naturalism’ [that] has become more or less endemic in the vegetarian, raw-food, and alternative diet movements.”31 As American novelist Francine Prose notes, “Anyone who has survived high school will be inclined to agree that food taboos have something to do with the seemingly hardwired and ineradicable human impulse to clump together in groups and invent arcane membership rules to exclude

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others. If we are what we eat, we are also what we don’t eat, and others are what they do and don’t eat, and so forth. Food has always, obviously, been part of how we define ourselves.”32 Others might chose to step from an old into a new diet. On Reddit, there are virtual spaces for a member of one food faith community to officially defect to another. There is a community for the formerly vegan (r/exvegans), a community for vegans who are frustrated with the accommodating and mixed messaging of r/vegan (r/vegancirclejerk), and communities for those who have de-converted from dietary lifestyles altogether (r/antidiet, r/intuitiveeating). In every corner of the Internet, there is a community that welcomes all who wish to practice with them, and to give succor to the apostates who have left or lost their faith. In every case, what is shared is not just science and/or dogma, but the power of a community that is both real and imagined. TRUE COMMUNITY AND ECOLOGIES OF HEALING (VIRTUAL OR OTHERWISE) An inescapable common denominator between all the Blue Zones are—as you might expect, since this is a book about food and diets—the diets of each region. In fact, when the Blue Zones was first publicized, the results—the “nine lessons”—were essentialized in popular media on the limited answer to the question, “What do these old people eat that makes them live so long?” Buettner predicted that this would happen, writing that, “In the United States, when it comes to improving health, people tend to focus on exercise and what we put into our mouths—organic foods, omega-3’s, micronutrients” rather than examine the larger social and cultural systems that might sustain healthy, happy communities.33 Instead of focusing on the friendships and family endemic to Blue Zones societies, Buettner felt that the story was transformed into a justification for the over $30 billion Americans spend on nutritional supplements and vitamins each year. The popular response to the Blue Zones research was not embracing the idea that community is connected to good health and longevity; the focus in the media was almost completely on diet. The news that most Blue Zone cultures consume moderate amounts of alcohol was received with gladness, but less well publicized was that one of the unifying practices of these communities was belonging to a faith community. This observation was lost in the noise about how the antioxidants in red wine made it a health food (a questionable conclusion) and the longevity benefits of consuming olive oil, which contain omega-3 fatty acids (aka, the good fat and the only one that Keys approved of). Both resveratrol—the main antioxidant in red wine—and fish oils with omega-3s were soon repackaged in pill form, branded as longevity enhancers, and sold by companies that

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billed their wares as miracle cures. And instead of talking about the ecology of health, press about the Blue Zones study devolved into nutritionism and a molecular breakdown of the foodways of each culture. The qualitative and thoughtful research about the ecologies of health, explored as systematically as Hippocrates chronicled communities thousands of years ago, was subsumed by the fetishization of the quantitative research about diet. Eventually, even the Blue Zones researchers got on board, with Buettner publishing a follow-up book in 2015 titled The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World’s Healthiest People. Fortunately, the story of the Blue Zones did not stop with a diet book. Even as the dietary message was evangelized in the press, many real communities used the conclusions of the Blue Zones to rethink their lifestyles. To help them achieve this and after the success of the Blue Zones research, Buettner and his team founded the Blue Zones Project, a consultancy company. The mission of the Blue Zones Project is to create “a nation of Blue Zones communities—healthier cities, states and businesses where people live longer, better” and implement an “evidence-based program that uses the secrets of the ‘Blue Zones’ to transform communities” by improving the built environment, promoting physical activity, and both forming and “nurturing social groups that support healthy habits.”34 And these efforts to bring Blue Zone principles to various communities have been remarkably successful, and are able to boast “double digit drops” in smoking and blood pressure and the successful implementation of “walking moais”—groups who gather to walk and talk each day. But, of course, not everyone can live in a community that has transformed itself to make good health a transmittable outcome. Instead, many will continue to rely on their imagined communities for support, guidance, and friendship. Or, as a conversation on Reddit’s r/vegan demonstrates, when one user posted “i [sic] need vegan friends everyone here eats venison send help” another replied “We can be internet friends” and a third chimed in “Yeah, we can all be friends!!”35 Hippocrates was, in some sense, quantifying the qualitative, taking what seemed at the time to be ancillary factors in health, like water sources and forms of governance, and identifying them as causes of good or poor wellbeing. And today our definitions of health are multi-factorial: diet, exercise, location. But the things that can’t be quantified, like a belief system, or a sense of purpose, or a community, until recently have been left out. Buettner writes that for people to be healthy, according to any definition, “they need to live in an ecosystem, so to speak, that makes it possible. As soon as you take culture, belonging, purpose or religion out of the picture, the foundation for long healthy lives collapses.”36 What is revealed by the Blue Zones study is more than social scientific: it also illustrates the necessity of the human

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factors—the community—that creates a person and shapes good health, just as much as winds, waters, and location. NOTES 1. Hippocrates et al., Hippocratic Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983). 2. As stated in the oath attributed to Hippocrates, one important consideration for health is a physician who vows to “follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous.” That same concept is at work here. 3. Michel Poulain et al., “Identification of a Geographic Area Characterized by Extreme Longevity in the Sardinia Island: The Akea Study,” Experimental Gerontology 39, no. 9 (2004). The authors explain in the article that blue was an easier color gradient to use in ArcGIS than other color schemes. 4. Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2012), 19. 5. Bradley J. Willcox, D. Craig Willcox, and Makoto Suzuki, The Okinawa Program: How the World’s Longest-Lived People Achieve Everlasting Health—and How You Can Too (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2001), 8. 6. Tara Parker-Pope, “The Power of Positive People,” New York Times (2018). 7. Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years,” The New England Journal of Medicine 357, no. 4 (2007); “Quitting in Droves: Collective Dynamics of Smoking Behavior in a Large Social Network,” The New England Journal of Medicine 358, no. 21 (2008); “Social Contagion Theory: Examining Dynamic Social Networks and Human Behavior,” Statistics in Medicine 32, no. 4 (2013); James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis, “Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network: Longitudinal Analysis over 20 Years in the Framingham Heart Study,” BMJ 337 (2008); Peter S. Bearman and James Moody, “Suicide and Friendships among American Adolescents,” American Journal of Public Health (1971) 94, no. 1 (2004); Sarah Monley, Erin Seaverson, and Stefan Gingerich, “Good Health Can Be Contagious,” Benefits Magazine 51, no. 1 (2014). 8. Sarah Monley, Erin Seaverson, and Stefan Gingerich, “Good Health Can Be Contagious,” Benefits Magazine 51, no. 1 (2014). 9. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 59. 10. Frank P. Grad, “The Preamble of the Constitution of the World Health Organization,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 80, no. 12 (2002). Specifically, the first line of the original 1946 constitution states: “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” 11. Dan Buettner, “The Island Where People Forget to Die,” New York Times (Online) (2012). 12. Buettner (2012), 252.

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13. Dan Witters, “Naples, Florida, Metro Tops U.S. in Well-Being for Third Time” Gallup.com (2018). While the title may seem to belie my example, the fact of Boulder’s ascendency in healthy living shows up in this and many other surveys of well-being and happiness, including another National Geographic study lead by Dan Buettner on the happiest people, and their communities, in the world (Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones of Happiness: Lessons from the World’s Happiest People (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2017). Also, no disrespect to Rockford meant: my great-Aunt Jean lived there for nearly all of her 96 years. 14. Emile Durkheim and Karen E. Fields, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1995). 41. 15. Specifically, Durkheim explains that although “these cults [i.e., practices that have broken away from the mainstream] seem, by definition, to be independent of the group” this is not the case. Furthermore, he seems to anticipate our contemporary religious moment when he writes that “not only are these individual religions very common throughout history, but some people today pose the question whether such religions are not destined to become the dominant form of religious life—whether a day will not come when the only cult will be the one that each person freely practices in his innermost self. But, let us put aside these speculations about the future for a moment” (43–44). I respectfully suggest that this might be that moment. 16. Durkheim, 44. 17. Naturally, some of the popular notions on this principle comes from Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 18. Efstratia Arampatzi, Martijn J. Burger, and Natallia Novik, “Social Network Sites, Individual Social Capital and Happiness,” Journal of Happiness Studies 19, no. 1 (2018). Zeynep Tufekci, “The Social Internet: Frustrating, Enriching, but Not Lonely” Public Culture 26, no. 1 (2014). 19. Anderson, 5–7. 20. Camelia Grădinaru, “The Technological Expansion of Sociability: Virtual Communities as Imagined Communities” Academicus International Scientific Journal 14, no. 14 (2016). See also: Kavoura Androniki, “Social Media, Online Imagined Communities and Communication Research,” Library Review (Glasgow) 63, no. 6/7 (2014); Steve Fox, “The New Imagined Community: Identifying and Exploring a Bidirectional Continuum Integrating Virtual and Physical Communities through the Community Embodiment Model (Cem)” The Journal of Communication Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2004); Anatoliy Gruzd, Barry Wellman, and Yuri Takhteyev, “Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community” The American Behavioral Scientist (Beverly Hills) 55, no. 10 (2011); Androniki Kavoura and Maria Teresa Tiago Borges, “Understanding Online Communities on Social Networks Via the Notion of Imagined Communities: The Case of Tripdvisor” IJWBC International Journal of Web Based Communities 12, no. 3 (2016); Kevin Weiskirch, “Digital Imagined Communities: The Role of the Internet in Creating, Maintaining, and Spreading the Resurgence of Transcontinental and Transitional Far Right Ideas” (2019); Xi Cui, Jian Rui, and Fanbo Su, “From Immediate Community to Imagined Community: Social Identity and the Co-Viewing of Media Event,” Global Media and China 1, no. 4 (2016).

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21. Nina Teicholz, “The Scientific Report Guiding the Us Dietary Guidelines: Is It Scientific?” British Medical Journal 351 (2015). Teicholz notes that in 2010 there were only 2000 public comments on the guidelines received, but over 29,000 were received ahead of the 2015 report. In 2020, the Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services received more than 62,000 comments (Andrew Jacobs, “New Dietary Guidelines Draws Criticism from Health Advocates” New York Times [2020]). In both cases, the logarithmic increases were driven by the online advocacy of various groups—both formal lobbying and scientific organizations as well as ad hoc food faith communities—who shared links to the regulations on the government website, where comments are collated, and publicized the open comment period on social media. 22. Vani Hari (2014), https:​//​foodbabe​.com​/subway. Vani Hari, “Subway: Stop Using Dangerous Chemicals in Your Bread.” For what it’s worth, Subway was in the process of removing the harmless chemical from its bread when they received the petition. 23. Foodbabe.com/about-me. Hari also lists at least another dozen “big changes we have made in the food industry” that she claims are due to the work of her and community to “learn the truth about harmful ingredients in processed foods and how to avoid the stuff the food industry is trying to hide.” She also notes that she did not “go to nutrition school to learn this.” 24. Courtney Rubin, “Taking on the Food Industry, One Blog Post at a Time” New York Times (2015). Yvette D’Entremont, “The ‘Food Babe’ Blogger Is Full of Shit” (2017). For D’Entremont (a chemist) and others, Hari represents the opposite of a responsible deployment of nutrition science to the public. 25. whole30.com, “Whole30,” https:​//​forum​.whole30​.com​/​#organization, https:​//​ forum​.whole30​.com​/topic​/58492​-contessas​-food​-freedom. 26. Alicia Silverstone, “What We’ve Been up to on Thekindlife.Com | the Kind Life,” https:​//​thekindlife​.com​/blog​/2010​/01​/what​-weve​-been​-up​-to​-on​-thekindlifecom. 27. Susan Peirce Thompson, Bright Line Eating: The Science of Living Happy, Thin, and Free (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, Inc., 2017). See also https:​//​brightlineeating​ .com​/what​-is​-ble​/. The four bright lines are sugar, flour, meals, and quantity—and according to the website, the program “facilitates a paradigm-like identity shift necessary for people to stick with it long-term, get all the way down to goal weight, and happily, gleefully, stay there.” 28. Wendy Solganik, January 25, 2018, http:​//​healthygirlskitchen​.com​/2018​/01​/end​ -of​-healthy​-girls​-kitchen​.html. 29. Andrea Tollison, May 23. 2019, https://thiswellseasonedlife.com/ bright-line-eating-reviews. 30. Evelyn Cokur to The Carb-Sane Asylum, 2011, http:​//​carbsanity​.blogspot​.com​ /p​/who​-is​-carbsane​_29​.html. 31. Tom Billings, “Beyond Vegetarianism—Raw Food, Vegan, Fruitarian, Paleo Diets” https:​//​www​.beyondveg​.com​/index​.shtml. This is truly an agnostic community, welcoming in their apostasy offering support to any one from the following food faiths and dietary practices: “paleolithic diet; vegetarianism; veganism; raw food diet; raw foods; paleolithic nutrition; vegetarian; vegan nutrition; ex-vegetarians;

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anti-vegetarian; failure to thrive; living foods; cooked foods; clinical nutrition; natural hygiene; fruitarianism; fruitarian; hunter-gatherers; prehistoric; cave man; fasting; instinct;instinctive eating; anopsology; meat eaters; meat eating; neanderthin; low-carb; zone diet; protein power; eating disorders; 100 percent raw.” 32. Prose, “Faith and Bacon.” 33. Buettner, The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. 34. “Blue Zones Project®—Blue Zones,” https:​//​www​.bluezones​.com​/services​/ blue​-zones​-project​-old​/​#section​-2. 35. User Kill_the_Worms on r/vegan subreddit, Reddit. February 9, 2019. https:​//​ www​.reddit​.com​/r​/vegan​/comments​/aoths6​/too​_real​/. 36. Buettner (2012).

Conclusion Redemption: Salvation through Health and Saving the World through Food

As we’ve seen again and again, many of the people who subscribe to a food faith cite science as the axis on which their belief in the diet turns. That is, indeed, one of the main premises of this book. And yet, with only a tentative understanding of the science cited as scripture, the food faithful will make holistic changes to their lives and shout from the mountain tops about the remarkable results achieved through their diet-based practice. But in this chapter, let us pause to ask: what if, by the time they make that leap, they’ve primed their bodies with their minds, their hearts, and their new affiliation with a community to glean the maximum health and nutrition benefits from that diet? What if the reason for their success is not the science, per se, but the faith in the science? These questions bring us back to previous observations regarding conversion, community, and reconceptualizing the sacred in a science-focused world. Preliminary psychological and physiological research suggests that if somebody truly has buy-in to their diet and lifestyle—if they wholeheartedly believe they are eating to maximize their health, nourish their bodies, and save their own lives—then it is plausible that the power of this belief is, in some real sense, sustaining them. The testimonials of people who claim they are “living their best life” because they converted to a new way of eating and who proselytize about the wonders this lifestyle change worked on them might, in fact, be feeling the effects of their own confidence in the efficacy of this way of living. It is possible that what is creating this sense of salvation and the embodied miracle of good health is the belief in the diet itself. So, as we wind down our exploration of food faiths, perhaps we should consider the question of whether a global revolution in diet should also be a spiritual revolution—one that shows how by uniting science, religion, and moral purpose true believers can, quite literally, change the world as well as changing themselves.

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SALVATION THROUGH HEALTH AND FOOD FOR THOUGHT In 1977, a group of Swedish scientists conducted the second of three experiments testing the levels of iron absorption in both Swedish and Thai medical and nursing students. In this oft-cited nutrition study, they gave two sets of students—one group in Sweden (25 female and six male medical students), one group in Thailand (52 nursing students and a few nursing aids)—several different meals laced with an iron solution that included a traceable isotope for follow-up study. The permutations of the meals included wheat rolls baked in Sweden and shipped frozen to Thailand; a fairly standard Thai dish of rice and vegetables spiced with chili paste, fish sauce, and coconut cream prepared in Thailand and shipped frozen to Sweden; and variations on both meals that were “minced finely”—a euphemism for ground up beyond recognition—and served as a slurry. Both before and several times after each meal the subjects’ iron levels were tested. Everyone seemed to absorb the iron from the wheat rolls equally, but the Thai subjects absorbed twice as much iron as the Swedish students after the Thai meal (many of the Swedish medical students reported that the meal was “very spicy”). In a follow-up experiment, the Thai subjects were given the Thai meal after it had been liquefied in an industrial blender (one can only imagine what a disgusting bowl of goop rice, vegetables, and fish sauce looks like in its pureed form) and had their iron levels tested again. Fascinatingly, this time the Thai women absorbed 70 percent less iron than they had when they ate the same foods as a whole meal. Similarly, when Swedish subjects were later given a whole foods meal of hamburger, string beans, and mashed potatoes (not a traditional Swedish recipe, per se, but perhaps more palatable to the Swedes than a spicy Thai dish), they absorbed well-over twice as much iron as they did when the same meal was served to them in liquid form. The authors note that this study is probably the first to show that “factors such as consistency and/or appearance affect the absorption of a nutrient.”1 The researchers hypothesized that the reason for the discrepancies in iron absorption in the case of a familiar versus an unfamiliar meal (e.g., Swedes eating a Thai dish), and the in the general lack of nutrient absorption when the whole foods were blended and consumed in liquid form, is related to a physiological response to food called the cephalic phase of gastric secretion. What this means is when we see food we know we will enjoy, “mouthwatering” becomes more than metaphorical: the physiological response of salivation is a signal that our digestive system is secreting both saliva and gastric juices in the stomach, thus preparing the body to strip every last nutrient from the food about to be consumed. In other words, we get more nourishment from food we

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enjoy; our bodies prime themselves when we see or smell food we like and we extract the maximum sustenance from food we look forward to eating. On the one hand, this information could be used to justify a diet poor in the macro- and micronutrients that both science and popular wisdom tell us sustain good health. In terms of common knowledge, your grandmother’s grandmother, for example, knew quite well that brown bread is better for you than cake, and she didn’t need Sylvester Graham lecturing her to spot the difference; today we all intuitively know that no amount of mouthwatering will make French fries a more nutritious dinner choice than green salad. But, on the other hand, what this study does illustrate lies at the heart of the lessons of the Blue Zones, the Mediterranean Diet, or even the French Paradox: food that is steeped in tradition, family, and careful cultivation, but that also imparts joy, seems to be the food that best fuels and sustains us.2 In a certain sense, perhaps it’s no good to only eat foods we intellectually feel we should be eating—foods that are onerous to eat or tasteless to our palette, scientific studies and fetishization by diet bloggers not withstanding—because it’s possible that by consuming such food we’re not maximizing our health anymore. As one summary of the Swedish study put it, “If you are one of those ‘nutrition martyrs’ who eat foods that you really don’t enjoy just because they are ‘good for you,’ it’s likely that you aren’t absorbing much of the nutrients from those foods.”3 Likewise, it seems that the genes of our ancestors may actually make us better suited to one kind of diet (high-carbohydrate, á la veganism) versus another (high-protein or high-fat, as with Paleo or traditional diets); in fact, some folks just seem to process certain foods differently—and better—than others. Scientists have uncovered several examples of this conundrum, the most famous of which is probably the in/ability to digest lactose—the sugar in cow’s milk dairy—as well as the ability to process starches. In the starch example, even though everyone’s saliva contains alpha-amylase, the enzyme that transforms molecules from starches into sugars, some people absorb more nutrients from starchy foods than others. And that’s because in some starchheavy dietary cultures it isn’t unusual for relatively large portions of the population to carry more than one copy of AMY1, the amylase-coding gene. This genetic result of the kinds of population pressures Darwin tried to tell us about—plus other factors like stress, circadian rhythms, microbiome, and so on—determine who can easily glean nutrients from starches; other people who are perhaps the descendants of populations who historically relied on foods high in protein and fat won’t carry multiple copies of AMY1, because their ancestors didn’t eat many starches. And this matters because “amylase production strongly influences how you metabolize starchy foods—and whether those foods send your blood sugar on a gravity-defying rollercoaster

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or more leisurely undulation. When people with low amylase consume starch (especially refined forms), they experience steeper, longer-lasting blood sugar spikes compared with those with naturally high amylase levels. Not surprisingly, low amylase producers have a heightened risk of metabolic syndrome and obesity when eating standard high starch diets.”4 Some people will naturally flourish on a diet high in starches (e.g., Keys’s paradigmatic diet and McDougall’s “starch solution”) but others on the same diet might develop metabolic syndrome (e.g., Yudkin’s hypothesis that too many carbohydrates leads to higher triglycerides and CVD). There are other examples of these permutations, but all come down to individual bodies and singular genomes. In a roundabout way, this brings us back to observations regarding conversion, community, and reconceptualizing the sacred in a science-focused world. If somebody truly has buy-in to their diet and lifestyle—if they really and honestly believe they are eating to maximize their health, nourish their bodies, and save their own lives—then it is possible that the power of this belief is, in some real sense, sustaining them. The testimonials of people who converted to a new way of eating and who proselytize about the wonders this change in lifestyle worked on their body and their mind might, in fact, be feeling the effects of their own confidence in the efficacy of this way of living. It’s absolutely possible that what is genuinely creating this embodied miracle is the belief itself. All this is to say, there might not be a single right answer to the question “what is the absolute, most correct diet by which to live?” For all the conversion stories in which an adherent to a food faith proclaims that they have discovered the One True Way, it might turn out that the story is more complicated.5 But, if there one thing we can all agree on it is that each food faith and spiritual practice is, in the end, searching for holistic wellness: bodily health, mental well-being, and ecological healing for the planet through the foods we eat and the industries who bring them to us. Advocates have been saying for years that the health of individuals and whole populations is tied to the health of the land from which our food comes—indeed, as we saw in the introduction, Sylvester Graham said as much in the 1830s. So, if we can’t settle on a food faith that is scientifically proven to be the best for us physically, what might happen is we were to agree on a diet that could save the Earth and all of her occupants? SAVING THE SELF AND SAVING THE WORLD WITH FOOD With this in mind, we should close by considering the 2019 EAT-Lancet commission report on global health, diet, sustainability, and culture. In a report

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tellingly titled “Food in the Anthropocene: The Eat–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems,” the authors argue that if we—as a global community—are going to both feed ten billion people by 2050 and curtail the rise of diet-related morbidity, we will collectively need to rethink our diet as a species. The commission explains, “Food systems have the potential to nurture human health and support environmental sustainability; however, they are currently threatening both.” The problems are mounting, because “much of the world’s population is inadequately nourished and many environmental systems and processes are pushed beyond safe boundaries by food production, a global transformation of the food system is urgently needed.” Consequently, the commission recommends a diet primarily of vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and legumes, with a drastic reduction of animal products (especially red meat), and the virtual elimination of sugars and refined, processed foods. With these changes enacted, the commission writes that by applying their “global food system modelling framework . . . it is possible to feed a global population of nearly 10 billion people a healthy diet within food production boundaries by 2050.” But, they warn, this “Great Food Transformation will only be achieved through widespread, multisector, multilevel action that includes a substantial global shift toward healthy dietary patterns, large reductions in food loss and waste, and major improvements in food production practices.”6 This assessment has been a long time coming, because food faith practitioners from both sides—ethical vegans on the one hand and advocates of traditional diets on the other—have converged on the conclusion that diet is the key to saving the Earth from ourselves. As Lierre Keith—a writer, farmer, and feminist activist—puts it: “These political passions [to save the planet] are born of a hunger so deep that it touches on the spiritual . . . I want my life—my body—to be a place where the earth is cherished, not devoured; where the sadist is granted no quarter; where the violence stops. And I want eating—the first nurturance—to be an act that sustains instead of kills.”7 And although we’ve seen throughout this book the grappling between two science-based dietary paradigms whose lifestyle application can become a spiritual practice, the one thing their practitioners are in total agreement is that here, at the precipice of the Anthropocene, what might make a difference is choosing a food faith in part to save the world. It could be the solution for the soul, for the body, for the mind, and for the Earth. So, even though it is noble and important and there are whole libraries of scientific research to substantiate it, I believe that the Great Food Transformation is both necessary and unlikely to happen unless it is tied to personal spiritual practice. Based on the history and the case studies presented here, saving the world by changing how we eat will not happen solely through

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enlightened global governmental policy or the impassioned pleas of scientific experts in climate sciences, nutrition studies, or atmospheric sciences. The best and only way to ensure a transformation of the scale the Lancet authors propose is to frame the question of diet as a moral necessity—a food faith for the Anthropocene. Until diet is a spiritual practice for every Earthling, and we reconnect with the moral center and religious history of what we eat and why, it is probable that the Great Food Transformation will fail before it can even begin. There are many reasons to act, but also to hope. Perhaps at no other time in our history has this idea—that what we eat is a moral choice with consequences for peoples, places, and the planet—resonated with more significance than the years following the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic was not just global—its disrupting effects were profoundly entangled with food. Its origins were in a seafood market where fresh-caught fish, live animals, and people freely comingled, and where a coronavirus beat the one-in-a-million odds and leapt from an animal to a human to begin its lethal spread. COVID19 brought food supply and distribution chains around the world to their knees: farmers struggled to get their wares to grocery stores, distributors wondered what to do with products meant for now-closed restaurants rotting in warehouses, and citizens of some of the wealthiest countries in the world lined up for food distribution by local food banks as whole communities were rendered food insecure virtually overnight. It was a dark time for humanity, but it also illustrated just how interconnected and interdetermined our collective foodways are everywhere on our finite little planet. And it certainly won’t be the last time we are confronted with these problems. Marion Nestle gave us the tools to think about these problems when, in her 2006 book What to Eat, she concludes by counseling her readers: The choices you make about food are as much about the kind of world you want to live in as they are about what to have for dinner. Food choices are about your future and that of your children. They are about nothing less than democracy in action. I truly believe that one person can make a difference and that food is a great place to begin to make that difference. Yes, you should use personal responsibility—informed personal responsibility—to make food choices you believe in. Exercise your First Amendment rights and speak out. And enjoy your dinner.8

What we choose to eat today is not only part of an intricate web of commerce and community, but is connected to an entire ecology that joins our physical bodies to the planet, to history, and to what—for thousands of years—our ancestors considered sacred. Food, as we have hopefully seen repeatedly throughout this book, unites us all.

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Today the scales have fallen from many eyes, and people previously uninterested in adopting a dietary lifestyle see how the choice of what to eat for dinner can reverberate around the world. So, perhaps the bright side of a dark historical era is that more people will find community, health, and redemption in a food faith, and create the Great Food Transformation one convert at a time. As Sylvester Graham told his audience in the face of the advancing cholera epidemic, “All the interesting effects of organic life are embraced in the economy of the grand vital function of Nutrition.”9 NOTES 1. L. Hallberg et al., “Iron Absorption from Southeast Asian Diets. II. Role of Various Factors That Might Explain Low Absorption,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 30, no. 4 (1977), 545. See also “Iron Absorption from Southeast Asian Diets,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 27, no. 8 (1974); “Iron Absorption from South-East Asian Diets and the Effect of Iron Fortification,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 31, no. 8 (1978). 2. P. Rozin et al., “Attitudes to Food and the Role of Food in Life in the U.S.A., Japan, Flemish Belgium and France: Possible Implications for the Diet–Health Debate,” Appetite 33, no. 2 (1999). 3. Joanne Soolman to Soolman Nutrition, October 25, 2013, http:​//​soolmannutrition​ .com​/2013​/10​/meal​-enjoyment​-and​-nutrient​-absorption. 4. Denise Minger, “4 Reasons Why Some People Do Well as Vegans (While Others Don’t),” Healthline (2020), https:​//​www​.healthline​.com​/nutrition​/4​-reasons​-some​-do​ -well​-as​-vegans​#4​.​-PEMT​-activity​-and​-choline. See also G. H. Perry et al., “Diet and the Evolution of Human Amylase Gene Copy Number Variation,” Nat Genet 39, no. 10 (2007); Niccolo’ Rossi et al., “Ethnic-Specific Association of Amylase Gene Copy Number with Adiposity Traits in a Large Middle Eastern Biobank,” NPJ Genomic Medicine 6, no. 1 (2021). 5. Fitzgerald, 11ff. 6. Walter Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene: The Eat–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems,” The Lancet 393, no. 10170 (2019). 7. Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability (Crescent City: PM Press, 2009), 1ff. 8. Marion Nestle, What to Eat (New York: North Point Press, 2006), 524. 9. Graham (1832), 6.

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Index

activism, social media and, 205–6, 212n21 Adams, John, 59 addiction: apps and, 110; smartphones and, 117n73 advocates, and encounter, 137–38 affiliation, religious: changes in, 6–7, 17–19, 22. See also Nones African Americans: Alcott and, 71n54; and ancestral diet, 147–48, 156–57; Oberlin and, 50; and religious affiliation, 18 African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, 157 Afro-Vegan (Terry), 147 Afro-Veganism, 147–48, 154, 156–58 agency: Grahamism and, 53; Whitman and, 62. See also choice language agnostics, demographics of, 11n15 agriculture, Diamond on, 163 ahimsa, 156 Aiello, Leslie, 171n49 “Airs, Waters, Places” (Hippocrates), 195–96, 200 alcohol: Blue Zones and, 200, 208; Cowherd and, 47–48; Graham and, 37–38, 40; Rush and, 39–40 Alcott, Abigail, 55–57

Alcott, Amos Bronson, 53–58, 71n54, 71n59 Alcott, Louisa May, 54–57, 71n52, 71n59 Alcott, William Andrus, 54, 57 alpha-amylase, 217–18 alternative medicine: Ayurveda, 160; Graham and, 38 American Heart Association, 89–90 American Medical Association, 89, 116n64 American paradox, 106 American Protestant Christianity: and changes in religion, 17; and diet culture, 13–14; Edwards and, 173–74; and food faiths, 5; and food issues, 26–27; Graham and, 38–39; Muscular Christianity, 60; in nineteenth century, 40–41; Seventh Day Adventists, 63–68 American Revolution, and religion, 17 American Vegetarian Society, 49, 54, 65 ancestral diets, 5, 147–72 Anderson, Benedict, 204 animals: cultural ancestors and, 156; traditional religions and, 26; treatment of, 134, 186. See also meat anorexia nervosa, 188 241

242

Index

Anthropocene: and conversion, 135; food faith for, 220–21 anxiety, and conversion, 132 apocalypse, Millerites and, 63 apps, 109–10 archaeology, Warriner and, 164–66 asceticism: Bratman and, 190; Walker Bynum and, 184–85 “The Asclepian Tablets of the Nineteenth-Century,” 46–47 atheists, demographics of, 11n15 atherosclerosis, 93 athleticism, Paleo and, 124, 132 attention economy, 119n84 Austen, Jane, 39 authority, and surrender, 140 Ayurveda, 160 azodicarbonamide, 205 Baby Boomers, 19, 21–22 bacon, 186–88 bacteria: microbiome, 81–82; tea and, 70n49 bad foods: Graham and, 1–2; Pollan and, 4 Battle Creek, 76; Medical Sanitarium, 79–81 Bauman, Whitney, vii–ix beans, Terry and, 147 Beatles, 19 belief: Nones and, 21; in science, 13–14, 90, 215–21 Bellah, Robert, 19–21 Bellevue Hospital, 79, 110n8 belonging, 18–19; online community and, 202 Benrubi, I. Daniel, 116n68 Bible: Cowherd and, 47; Edwards and, 173–74; Finney and, 126; and vegetarianism, 154–55 Bible Christian Church, 47–49 Bichat, Xavier, 44 biographical reconstruction, 142 Bitar, Adrienne Rose (Johnson), 163–64 black box, Latour on, 130–31, 182

Blackfish (documentary), 134 Black Hebrew Israelites, 157 blogs, 121–22 Blue Zones, 196–202, 208–10 Blue Zones Project, 209–10 Boller, Emily, 146n51 books, diet: Afro-Vegan, 147; The Blue Zones Solution, 209; In Defense of Food, 3–4, 118n75; Graham and, 1–3; Keys and, 89–90; late twentieth century and, 103–7; What to Eat, 118n75, 220; Yudkin and, 94 Boulder, CO, 202, 211n13 Bourdain, Anthony, 150 brand, clean eating as, 190 Bratman, Steven, 4, 188–89, 193n30 bread: Graham and, 1–3; Pollan and, 4 Bright Line Eating (BLE), 206–7, 212n27 Broussais, Francois, 44 Buettner, Dan, 196–98, 201, 208–9, 211n13 bulimia, 188 Burger, David S., 46 Cambridge School Children Study, 92 Campbell, Colin, 103, 122 Campbell, David, 50–51 cancer, Warinner and, 165 capitalism and diet culture, literature on, 31n2 carbohydrates, 92–98, 114n43 cardiovascular disease, 84, 86, 88–89, 97, 114n47; African Americans and, 148, 157; Yudkin and, 94 Carter, Christopher, 156–57 cereals, 80, 82–83 choice language: McGovern and, 101; Nestle and, 220. See also agency cholera, 42–44 cholesterol, 84, 89–91, 116n68 Christianity: decline of, 7. See also American Protestant Christianity Christian Scientists, 67 church, Durkheim and, 202–3

Index

civil rights movement, and diet, 157 Clark, James, 48, 70n35 clean eating, 174–79; unhealthy aspects of, 188–91; and virtue signaling, 185 Clean Living Movements, Engs on, 52 climate change, and conversion, 135 coffee, 3, 40, 42, 51, 53 Coles, L. B., 66–67, 73n86 commercialism: Kelloggs and, 83; Keys and, 90 commitment, and conversion, 140–42; elements of, 140 community: Blue Zones and, 196–202; food faiths and, 5–6, 25, 195–213; for fugitives, 207–8, 212n31; in-person, 207; nature of, 195–96; online, 202–8; Second Great Awakening and, 17; social media and, 109–10 conscientious objectors, and starvation study, 87–88 consequences, and conversion, 142–43 constipation, Graham and, 10n4 context, and conversion, 131–33 Contois, Emily, 184 conversion, 6, 121–46; history of, 125– 28; nature of, 125, 131–43; science and, 129–31; stages of, 131 conversion narratives, 7–8, 122–24; on crisis, 133; Finney and, 125–27; motivation of, 127 cookies, 101–2 Cordain, Loren, 123, 162, 164 corn, Pollan and, 105–6 Cornaro, Luigi, 27–28, 32n26 corn flakes, 80, 82–83 Costa Rica, 199–200 COVID-19 pandemic, 220 Cowherd, William, 47–49 crisis, and conversion, 133–35; Bitar and, 164; types of, 135 CrossFit, 138 Crister, Greg, 106 cults, Durkheim and, 202, 211n15

243

culture: and diet, 93, 148; and religion, 16, 52 curators, 107, 121–22; and community, 205; and encounter, 137 dairy, 98; Paleo versus traditional diets and, 149; Warriner and, 165 Davis, Angela, 157 decision making, and commitment, 140 decolonization of diet, 157–58, 170n26 deconversion, 190, 206–8, 212n31 definitions of health: Foucault and, 200– 201; Graham and, 39; White and, 64; WHO and, 210n10 definitions of religion: Durkheim and, 202–3; Tillich on, 15–16 dehydration, in nineteenth century, 53 Denton, Melinda Lundquist, 180–81, 192nn12–13 diabetes, 93 Diamond, Jared, 163 diet: nineteenth century, 52–53, 58–59; term, 23; theory and, 13–33. See also Standard American Diet Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 101 diet culture: definition of, 176; Evangelical Protestant Christianity and, 13–14; history of, 35–74; late twentieth century and, 103; literature on, 31n2; and virtue, 176 diet recommendations, 218–21; Bratman and, 193n30; Graham and, 3, 45; Kellogg and, 78, 80; Paleo, 123; Seven Countries Study and, 88; White and, 66; Whitman and, 60 digestion: Graham and, 42, 45; John Kellogg and, 81–82; Whole30 and, 137 diphtheria, 64 direct-to-consumer marketing, 102–3, 117n70 discernment, food faiths and, 23 disease(s): African Americans and, 148, 157; cholera, 42–44; Graham and, 41–42, 44–47; Rush and, 39; tea and,

244

Index

70n49; Warinner and, 165; Western, 149; White and, 64–65 documentaries on food, 118n79; and conversion, 134, 139 Douglas, Mary, 25 Durant, John, 163 Durkheim, Émile, 202–3, 211n15 dwelling, 19 eating disorders, 188–91 Eaton, S. Boyd, 161–62 Eat Well, Stay Well (Keys), 89–90 Eberstadt, Mary, 174–80 ecosystems, and health, 201 Eddy, Mary Baker, 67 Eden. See perfectibility/utopia education: Alcott and, 54; John Kellogg and, 78–79; Kellogg and, 77–78; Oberlin and, 50; Yudkin and, 93 Edwards, Jonathan, 173–74, 190–91 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 84–86 elders, Blue Zones and, 199–200 Eliade, Mircea, 153–54, 168–69 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 54–55, 71nn55–56 encapsulation, 138–39 encounter, and conversion, 136–38 enemas, John Kellogg and, 81 Engs, Ruth Clifford, 52 environmental recommendations, 218–21 environmental veganism, 8, 131 epigenetics, 150 Escalator Fallacy, 163–64 ethical veganism, 55, 136, 157 ethnicity, and religious affiliation, 18 ethnography, 29 eugenics: John Kellogg and, 111n9; Voegtlin and, 161 Evangelical Christianity. See American Protestant Christianity evolution: Midgley and, 151; Shelley and, 28; Somer and, 163; and weight retention, 171n35; Zuk and, 166–67, 172n52

fads, 28 Fallon, Sally, 168 familiar foods, and iron absorption, 216–17 family, and religious affiliation, 17–18 Fast Food Nation (Schlosser), 104 fat: lipid hypothesis, 84–92, 115n57; McGovern and, 100; Paleo versus traditional diets and, 149; substitutes for, 101 fear: Eberstadt and, 174; Graham and, 45; Rozin and, 175 Fell, Jesse, 59–60 field rations, 87 Fifties: and nutrition guidance, 84–98; and sex versus food, 177 Finney, Charles Grandison, 125–27 First Great Awakening, 52, 173 Fisher, Evander D., 46 fitness tests, 84–85 Fitzgerald, Matt, 106 Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 85 FoodBabe.com, 205, 212nn22–23 food chains, Pollan and, 3 food faiths, 1–11; for Anthropocene, 220–21; nineteenth-century roots of, 35–74; and redemption, 215– 21; term, 5; theory and, 13–33; twentieth-century roots of, 75–119 food groups, 99 food industry, 98–103, 107; and Blue Zones, 208–9; and fats, 90; Nestle and, 104–5; and sugar, 95–96 food Instagram, 184 Food Politics (Nestle), 104–5 Foucault, Michel, 200 Fourth Great Awakening, 52 France, 91, 113n36 Francis, Richard, 55 Francis of Assisi, saint, 156 Frankenfoods, 101 Freud, Sigmund, 175 fugitives from food faiths, 190, 206–8, 212n31

Index

Fuhrman, Joel, 122, 137, 146n51 gastric secretion, 216–17 gender. See masculinity; women genetically modified organisms (GMOs), 134–35, 174 genetic diets, 149–50, 160–69; ancestors and, 148–49; Paleo and, 123–24; Warinner and, 164–66; Zuk and, 166–67 gluttony: Graham and, 40; versus virtue, 185; White and, 65–66 God: Moral Therapeutic Deism and, 181; Nones and, 21 government: Nestle and, 105; and nutrition, 85–103 Graham, Sylvester, 1–3, 9, 221; Bible Christian Church and, 48–49; and cholera, 44–47; on Cornaro, 32n26; life of, 36–42; and scientific foundation, 49–50 graham crackers, xiii, 102 Grahamism, 50–58; implementation issues, 51; legacy of, 63–68 grains: McDougall and, 159; Paleo versus traditional diets and, 149; traditional diets and, 160; Warriner and, 166 granola, 82, 112n15 Great Food Transformation, 219–21 Greaves, James Pierrepont, 54 Greece, 91, 199–200 Gregory, Dick, 157 Griffith, R. Marie, 185 Grok, 124 Guiliano, Mireille, 106 “The Happy Herbivore” (website), 122–23, 143n1 Hari, Vani, 205, 212nn22–23 Harmon, Ellen Gould (White), 63–68, 72n76, 73n78 Harper, Breeze, 156 Harris, Tristian, 117n73 Hatch, Nathan O., 17

245

health: Eddy and, 67; White and, 65. See also definitions of health Health at Every Size (HAES) movement, 176 Herrick, Anson, 59–60 high fructose corn syrup, 101–2 Hippocrates, 195–96, 200, 209, 210n2 holistic wellness, 218 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 51–52 human genome, 149, 160. See also genetic diets humoral theory, Graham and, 39 hydropathy, 64–65, 81 hygeiotherapy, 78 hypertension, 89 Ikaria, 199–200 imagined communities, 202–8 immigrants: changing demographics of, 20; and religious affiliation, 18 In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Pollan), 3–4, 28, 118n75 influencers. See curators information revolution, 107–8; and conversion, 132–33 Instagram, 184 interaction, and conversion, 138–40; dimensions of, 139 intermarriage, and religious affiliation, 18–19 Internet, 104, 107–8; effects of, 7–8; and encounter, 137–38; and information overload, 133; and quest, 136; and reflection, 24; and virtual community, 202–8 iron absorption, food familiarity and, 216–17 irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), 41, 137 Islam, 20 isolation, versus online community, 203–4 Italy, 88, 91, 196 Jackson, James Caleb, 66, 111n15 Jansen, John B., 46

246

Japan, 91 Jefferson, Thomas, 59 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 67 Jewish Veg organization, 155–56 Jews: and bacon, 187; and religious affiliation, 18 Jobs, Steve, 109, 118n83 Johnson, Lyndon B., 20 Johnson, Steven, 70n49 joy, and food, 217 junk food, 101–2 Kearns, Cristin, 95–96 Keith, Lierre, 219 Kellogg, Ella, 82 Kellogg, John Harvey, 110n8, 111n9, 111n13; life of, 76–83 Kellogg, John Preston, 76 Kellogg, Merritt, 78–79 Kellogg, Will Keith, 111n9; life of, 76–83 Keys, Ancel, 87–92, 114n39; criticisms of, 90–92, 94; and Yudkin, 94–95 Keys, Margaret, 90 King, Coretta Scott, 157 Kingsolver, Barbara, 106 Kish, Zenia, 184 Ko, Aph, 158 Konnor, Melvin, 161–62 K-ration, 87 Kraus, Hans, 85 Kresser, Chris, 163 Kuhn, Thomas, 96–97, 164 La Berge, Ann F., 113n32, 113n35 Lactobacillus acidophilus, 81 lactose, 217 Lane, Charles, 54–57 Lane, William, 55–56 language: and commitment, 142; and food faiths, 139; and morality, 173; and naturalness, 179. See also conversion narratives Lasby, Clarence, 84 Latour, Bruno, 130–31

Index

Laudan, Rachel, 179 lay medicine, Graham and, 38 Levenstein, Harvey, 89 Levinovitz, Alan, 179 lifestyle practice, diet as, 5–6, 23; development of, 104; encapsulation and, 138–39; nature of, 30; Paleo and, 167. See also practice lipid hypothesis, 84–92, 115n57; criticisms of, 90–92, 94 Little, James, 46 Loma Linda, CA, 199 longevity, 27–28; Blue Zones and, 196–99 low-carb diets, fugitives from, 207–8 low fat trend, 101–2, 115n57 Lustig, Robert, 115n51 macronutrients, 86; Blue Zones and, 201 malnutrition, 99 margarine, 90–91, 113n33 Markel, Howard, 77, 79 marketing, 83, 90, 102–3, 113n33; and information overload, 133 “Mark’s Daily Apple” (website), 123, 164 masculinity: meat and, 58–62; Paleo and, 124 Masterminds Group, 206–7 masturbation, John Kellogg and, 111n11 McDougall, John, 122, 158–60 McGovern, George, 98–101, 116n68 meaning, 209; Blue Zones and, 201–2; orthorexia and, 189 meat: bacon, 186–88; McGovern and, 101; nineteenth-century diet and, 58–62; nineteenth-century reformers and, 47–50; Pollan and, 105–6; traditional diets and, 150, 157; traditional religions and, 26; Warriner and, 165; White and, 65 medical diagnosis, as crisis, 133–34, 136 medicine: and definition of health, 200–201; Graham and, 37–38;

Index

Grahamism and, 51–52; John Kellogg and, 78–79, 111n13; trust issues and, 68n9, 86; White and, 64 Mediterranean diet, 88, 91–92 mental health issues, Graham and, 39 metabolic syndrome, 86, 218 Metcalfe, William, 48–49, 70n35, 155 methodology, 29–30 microbiome, 81–82 Midgley, Mary, 151, 163–64, 171n42 milk, 98, 165 Millennials, mid-generation, and religion, 180–81, 192nn12–13 Millerism, 63 mismatch theory, 166–67 Moralistic Therapeutic Scientism (MTS), 183, 185 morality: changing views of, 4; disease and, 43; food faiths and, 24; government and, 85–86; Graham and, 38–39, 45; nineteenth-century, 40; twenty-first-century, 175–88; veganism and, 143; White and, 66. See also virtue moral panics, Engs on, 52 Moral Therapeutic Deism (MTD), 181–83 Mormons, 67 Moss, Michael, 106 motivational reformulation, and commitment, 140–41 movement, Blue Zones and, 199–200 Muscular Christianity, 60 narratives. See conversion narratives National Basketball Association, 156 National Geographic study, 196–202 Nation of Islam, 157 nature/naturalness: Graham and, 2; Levinovitz and, 179; Paleo and, 138; refugees and, 207; Whitman and, 61 Nestle, Marion, 96, 104–5, 118n75, 220 neurology, 39 Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica, 199–200

247

nineteenth century, 35–74; diet in, 58– 59; living conditions in, 52–53 Nixon, Lindsay, 122–23, 143n1 Nones: beginning of, 21; rise of, 6–7, 16–17; study of, 128; term, 11n16, 21 Numbers, Ronald, 53 nutritarianism, 137 nutrition, Eliade and, 153 nutritionism, 107, 201; criticisms of, 97; term, 86–87 Oberlin College, 50–51, 125 Okinawa, 197 olive oil, 208 The Omnivore's Dilemma (Pollan), 105–6 Oppenheimer, Gerald M., 116n68 organic foods, 106, 179 original sin, 47 orthorexia, 4, 188–91; term, 188 Packer, Barbara L., 54, 71nn55–56 Page, Ann, 55–56 Paleo diet, 5, 8, 121–46, 160–69; and bacon, 186; and crisis, 135; criticisms of, 150–51, 159, 163–67, 171n48; and interaction, 138; principles of, 131; and quest, 136; and science rhetoric, 140; versus traditional diets, 149; Whitman and, 61 Paleofantasy, 166–67 pandemics: cholera, 42–44; COVID-19, 220 paradigm shifts, 96–97, 164 Parks, Rosa, 157 patriotism, evangelical, 41 perfectibility/utopia: Alcott and, 54–58; conversion narratives and, 127; Cowherd and, 47; cultural ancestors and, 154–60; genetic diets and, 162–63; Metcalfe on, 155; Paleo and, 166–67; Shanahan and, 150–51; virtue focus and, 185; White and, 65

248

Index

periodicals: Adventist, 76; Graham Journal of Health and Longevity, 50; versus social media, 104 Pes, Giovanni Mario, 196 pharmaceutical industry, 102–3, 107, 117n70 Philadelphia Bible Church, 48–49, 154 physical fitness, 84–85 Piatt, Julie, 160 Planck, Max, 115n54 Planck, Nina, 167–68 pluralism, Rambo on, 132 politics, social media and, 205–6, 212n21 Pollan, Michael, 3–4, 28, 86–87, 102, 105–6, 118n75 Popp-Baier, Ulrike, 127–28 pork, 157 Post, Charles W., 82 Poulain, Michel, 196 poverty: and disease, 43; and health, 93 power, quest and, 136 practice, spiritual, 15–16, 22–23, 183; characteristics of, 23–25; definition of, 22, 30; diet as, 14; importance of, 14, 219–20; individualization of, 21; Nones and, 7. See also lifestyle practice President's Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition (PCSFN), 85 Price, Weston A., 149, 161, 168, 1169n3 Primal Blueprint, 123–24, 135 privatism, religious, 21 probiotics, 81 Prose, Francine, 187, 207–8 Protestant Christianity. See American Protestant Christianity Prudden, Ruth (Bonnie), 85 public health, 79, 93, 99 Pure, White and Deadly (Yudkin), 94 purity, 174–75; and orthorexia, 188–91; Seventh Day Adventists and, 63. See also clean eating; morality purpose. See meaning

quality of life, Blue Zones and, 196–98 quest, and conversion, 135–36 quota system, 20 Rambo, Lewis, 125, 128, 131–43 Raphael, Rina, 133 Rastafarianism, 155, 157 rationalism, Graham and, 38 Reddit, 137, 208 redemption, 215–21; changing views of, 4; Finney and, 127 reductionism, 107, 182–83; Blue Zones and, 208–9; criticisms of, 97; Kellogg and, 80; pharmaceutical industry and, 102–3; Pollan and, 4 reflection, food faiths and, 24 reform movements, 52–58; and education, 50–51; Seventh Day Adventists, 63–68 relationships: and encapsulation, 139. See also community religion: and bacon, 187; changing views of, 5; and food, 25–29; Graham and, 2; and methodology, 29–30; mid-generation Millennials and, 180–81, 192nn12–13; in nineteenth century, 35–74; and science, 9, 14, 27, 129–31; theory and, 13–33; in twentieth century, 75–119; White and, 66–67. See also definitions of religion repentance, 174–75 restricted-calorie diets, 112n26; Keys and, 87–88; tradition and, 27–28 resveratrol, 208 revival movements, 13, 17, 41 reward, food faiths and, 24 rhetoric: and commitment, 142; and encapsulation, 139. See also conversion, narratives; language rice, McDougall and, 159 rituals: and commitment, 140–41; Eliade and, 154; and encapsulation, 139 roles, and encapsulation, 139 Roll, Rich, 160

Index

Roman Catholics, 18, 184–85 Roof, Wade Clark, 19, 22, 127 Rosenberg, Charles, 43 Rozin, Paul, 175 Rush, Benjamin, 39, 44 sacred ancestors, 147–72; cultural, 154–60; Eliade and, 168–69; trope of, 152–54 sacred time, Eliade and, 153 salivation, 216–17 Salley, John, 156–57 salt, 100 sanitation: John Kellogg and, 79–80; in nineteenth century, 52–53 Sardinia, 196 saturated fats, 89, 101 Schlosser, Eric, 104 science: and ancestral diets, 152; belief in, 13–14, 90, 215–21; changing views of, 5; and conversion, 129–31; and food faiths, 5–7, 10; and genetic diets, 160–69; government and, 102; Graham and, 49–50; information revolution and, 178–79; Kellogg and, 80, 83; late twentieth century and, 103–10; Moralistic Therapeutic Scientism and, 183; Nestle and, 96; in nineteenth century, 35–74; and rhetoric, 139; Shanahan and, 150–51; as substitute for religion, 14, 27; theory and, 13–33; in twentieth century, 75–119; Warriner and, 166; Zuk and, 166–67 scientism, 97, 182–83 Scrinis, Gyorgy, 86 Second Great Awakening, 17, 36, 41, 52, 125 sedentariness, 115n47 seeking, 19–22; and conversion, 135–36 service, food faiths and, 25 Seven Countries Study, 87–92; criticisms of, 90–92 Seventh Day Adventists, 63–68; and Kelloggs, 76; in Loma Linda, 199

249

sex: versus food, 174–80; Graham and, 40–41; John Kellogg and, 110n8, 111n11 Shakers, 56 Shanahan, Catherine “Cate,” 149–51 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 28 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 28 Shew, Joel, 64 Shprintzen, Adam D., 49 Shryock, Richard H., 50 Silverstone, Alicia, 136, 145n36, 206 simplicity, veganism and, 132 sin: bacon and, 186–88; Edwards and, 173–74; Graham and, 38–39; Metcalfe on, 155; nineteenth-century reformers and, 47–50 Singer, Peter, 156 Sission, Mark, 123 Sixties, 19–21 slavery, and food, 157 Smart, Ninian, 5 smartphones, 104, 109–10, 117n73, 118n83 Smith, Christian, 180–81, 192nn12–13 Smith, Jonathan Z., 30 Smith, Joseph, 67 smoking, 89, 100, 199 SnackWell phenomenon, 102 Snow, John, 42 Social Darwinism, 163 social media, 108–9; and community, 205; and food faith communities, 104; and reflection, 24; and science, 13; and virtue signaling, 183–84 soil, Graham and, 2 Somer, Elizabeth, 162–63 soul food, 157 spiritual eating, 5–6 spirituality, 15–16; Blue Zones and, 201, 208; Nones and, 7; study of, 128. See also practice, spiritual Standard American Diet (SAD), 28–29, 151–52; history of, 58–59 starch, 158–60, 217–18 Starr, Paul, 38, 51, 64, 68n9

250

Index

starvation, Keys and, 87–88 Stenmark, Lisa L., vii–ix stimulants: Coles and, 67; Oberlin and, 51; Rush and, 39–40; White and, 65 stomach, Graham and, 42, 45, 50 stories. See narratives; conversion narratives Subway, 205, 212n22 sugar, 92–98, 114n43, 114n47; individual metabolism and, 218; McDougall and, 158; McGovern and, 100; substitutes for, 101–2 Sugar Research Foundation, 95 surrender, and commitment, 140–42 Suzuki, Makoto, 197–98 Taubes, Gary, 106, 115n51 tea, 3, 40, 42, 51, 70n49 Teicholz, Nina, 212n21 temperance: Graham and, 37–38, 40; Rush and, 39–40 Terry, Bryant, 147–48, 169 testimonials: and commitment, 140, 142; Graham and, 46. See also conversion, narratives TheKindLife.com, 206 theology, 13–33; Alcott and, 55; Graham and, 49–50 Third Great Awakening, 52 This Slimming Business (Yudkin), 94 Thoreau, Henry David, 70n51 Tillich, Paul, 15–16 time, Eliade and, 153 tobacco, 65, 89 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 35, 41 Tracy, George, 46 tradition: food faiths and, 25–29; Moral Therapeutic Deism and, 182; Wuthnow on, 27 traditional diets, 148–49; and bacon, 186. See also ancestral diets Trall, Russell Thatcher, 64–65, 78–79 transcendence, quest and, 136 Transcendentalism, 53–54, 70n51 trans fats, 91–92

“A Treatise on Bread and Bread Making” (Graham), 1–3 Turpin, Zachary, 60–61 twentieth century, 75–119; late, 103–10; religion in, 15–25 twenty-first century: and morality, 175– 80; and sex versus food, 177–78 United States, 101 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 85, 98–99 utmost concern: diet as, 23; Tillich on, 15–16 utopian beliefs. See perfectibility/utopia vaccination, Price and, 169n3 Vedic principles, 156 veganism, 5, 121–46, 170n26; Alcott and, 55–58; and encapsulation, 139; environmental, 8; principles of, 131; race and, 158; and science rhetoric, 140; Silverstone on, 136; term, 143n1; Terry and, 147–48 vegetables: McDougall and, 159; traditional diets and, 160; traditional religions and, 26 vegetarianism: ancestors and, 154–60; community and, 199; history of, 28, 47–50 Vegucated (documentary), 139 Velsor, Mose (Walt Whitman), 60–62 Vernon, Glenn M., 11n16, 21 virtual communities, 202–208; nature of, 204 virtue: and clean eating, 174–75; food faiths and, 173–93. See also morality virtue signaling, 183–84 vitamins, 92, 99 Voegtlin, Walter L., 161 Walker Bynum, Caroline, 184–85 Wareham, Ellsworth, 200 Warinner, Christina, 164–66, 171n48 water, in nineteenth century, 53 water cure, 64–65, 81

Index

Web 2.0, 30, 107 weight loss programs, 107; versus food faiths, 10n13 Wenner-Gren Foundation, 171n49 Western diseases, term, 149 Western Health Reform Institute, 76–77, 79 What to Eat (Nestle), 118n75, 220 White, Edson, 77–78 White, Ellen G., 63–68, 72n76, 73n78 White, James, 64, 76–77 White, Paul Dudley, 84, 89–90 White, Willie, 77–78 Whitman, Walt (Mose Velsor), 60–62 Whole30, 137, 174, 206 whole-foods plant-based (WFPB) diet, 5, 159–60; and encounter, 137

Willcox, Bradley J., 197–98 Willcox, Craig, 197–98 Willis, Anson, 46 Wilson, Bee, 185 women: Alcott and, 56–57, 71n59; Oberlin and, 50; Walker Bynum and, 184–85 World Health Organization (WHO), 201, 210n10 World War II, and religion, 15–16 Wright, Henry, 55 Wuthnow, Robert, 19, 22–24, 27, 30 Yudkin, John, 53, 92–98, 113n36, 114n47, 115n51, 116n68 Zuk, Marlene, 166, 171n49, 172n52

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About the Author

Catherine L. Newell is an associate professor of religion and science at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. She is the author of Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America’s Final Frontier (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), which traces post-World War II American zeal for space exploration back to nineteenth-century religious belief in American manifest destiny. She was the 2017 David B. Larson Fellow in Health and Spirituality at the John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. In addition to her work on space exploration and food faiths, she has published articles and book chapters on dystopic science fiction and nature religion; the religious origins of American vegetarianism; and how Biblical injunctions to “rule over the Earth” still inflect debates about environmental science and management in the twenty-first century.

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