Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Fiction Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

Revolution at the Table

The Transformation of the American Diet

by (author) Harvey Levenstein

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Initial publish date
Mar 1994
Category
Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780195043655
    Publish Date
    Mar 1994
    List Price
    $52.50

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Out of print

This edition is not currently available in bookstores. Check your local library or search for used copies at Abebooks.

Description

For most Americans in the 19th century, it wasn't what you ate, but how much you ate, that mattered. Late in the century, doctors wrote books like How To Be Plumb and the voluptuous woman was the ideal. The famed actress Lillian Russell, considered by many the epitome of beauty, weighed almosttwo hundred pounds. Today, in contrast, Americans seem obsessed with calories, diets and slimness, and with eating healthful amounts of vitamins, minerals, fats and proteins. What sparked this remarkable revolution in the way we eat. As historian Harvey Levenstein points out, the great American food revolution really occurred between the years 1880 and 1930. Focusing on this pivotal half-century, Levenstein provides a vivid account of the people and social forces that redirected the American diet, spiced with colorfulportraits of the reformers, scientists, businessmen, faddists and hucksters who promoted or exploited the eating revolution. Here we meet the MIT chemist Ellen Richards and the "scientific" home economists who failed to change workers' diets, but then succeeded with the middle class...the wealthyfaddist Horace Fletcher, the Great Masticator, advocate of a low-protein diet and "thorough mastication" (over 100 chews per mouthful)...the social workers who despaired over immigrants' eating habits, particularly their love of spicey, one-pot dinners...the flamboyant Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, andhis brother William, who invented corn flakes as a vegetarian health food...and Elmer McCollum, who discovered vitamins A and D, and who was later hired by General Mills tout the nutritional benefits of white bread. Levenstein serves up fascinating insights into the social, economic, and political forces that spurred the eating revolution--urbanization, immigration, technological and agricultural advances, and the changing role of women in society. He examines how nutritional science developed in America; howProhibition's ban on wine helped destroy French cuisine in America; how changes in women's work, marriage, and the family led to lighter, time-saving meals; and how giant food corporations used massive advertising budgets to change the way Americans prepared foods. By 1930, the eating habits of Americans had undergone an incredible metamorphosis. For anyone who has ever wondered why we eat what we eat, and why we sometimes change, this wide-ranging, colorful social history offers some illuminating and even surprising answers.

About the author

Contributor Notes

About the Author: Harvey A. Levenstein is Professor of History at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario.

Editorial Reviews

"Lively, instructive, and judgmental, Levenstein ponders the complex array for forces--including hygiene and home economics, Prohibition and promotioanl advertising, class structure and war--involved in changing the American diet toward greater homogeneity between 1880 and 1930."--James HarveyYoung, Emory University