SEVEN   BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

We eaters, alas, don’t reap nearly as much benefit from nutritionism as food producers. Beyond providing a license to eat more of the latest approved foodlike substance, which we surely do appreciate, nutritionism tends to foster a great deal of anxiety around the experience of shopping for food and eating it. To do it right, you’ve got to be up on the latest scientific research, study ever-longer and more confusing ingredients labels,* sift through increasingly dubious health claims, and then attempt to enjoy foods that have been engineered with many other objectives in view than simply tasting good. To think of some of the most delicious components of food as toxins, as nutritionism has taught us to do in the case of fat, does little for our happiness as eaters. Americans have embraced a “nutritional philosophy,” to borrow Jane Brody’s words, that, regardless of whether that philosophy does anything for our health, surely takes much of the pleasure out of eating.

But why do we even need a nutritional philosophy in the first place? Perhaps because we Americans have always had a problem taking pleasure in eating. We certainly have gone to unusual lengths to avoid it. Harvey Levenstein, who has written two illuminating histories of American food culture, suggests that the sheer abundance of food in America has bred “a vague indifference to food, manifested in a tendency to eat and run, rather than to dine and savor.” To savor food, to conceive of a meal as an aesthetic experience, has been regarded as evidence of effeteness, a form of foreign foppery. (Few things have been more likely to get an American political candidate in hot water than a taste for fine food, as Martin Van Buren discovered during his failed 1840 reelection campaign. Van Buren had brought a French chef to the White House, a blunder seized on by his opponent, William Henry Harrison, who made much of the fact that he subsisted on “raw beef and salt.” George H. W. Bush’s predilection for pork rinds and Bill Clinton’s for Big Macs were politically astute tastes to show off.)

It could well be that, as Levenstein contends, the sheer abundance of food in America has fostered a culture of careless, perfunctory eating. But our Puritan roots also impeded a sensual or aesthetic enjoyment of food. Like sex, the need to eat links us to the animals, and historically a great deal of Protestant energy has gone into helping us keep all such animal appetites under strict control. To the Christian social reformers of the nineteenth century, “The naked act of eating was little more than unavoidable…and was not to be considered a pleasure except with great discretion.” I’m quoting from Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad, which recounts the campaign of these domestic reformers to convince Americans, in the words of one, “that eating is something more than animal indulgence, and that cooking has a nobler purpose than the gratification of appetite and the sense of taste.” And what might that nobler purpose be? Sound nutrition and good sanitation. By elevating those scientific principles and “disdaining the proof of the palate,” Shapiro writes, “they made it possible for American cooking to accept a flood of damaging innovations for years to come”—low-fat processed food products prominent among them.

So scientific eating is an old and venerable tradition in America. Here’s how Harvey Levenstein sums up the quasiscientific beliefs that have shaped American attitudes toward food for more than a century: “that taste is not a true guide to what should be eaten; that one should not simply eat what one enjoys; that the important components of foods cannot be seen or tasted, but are discernible only in scientific laboratories; and that experimental science has produced rules of nutrition which will prevent illness and encourage longevity.” Levenstein could be describing the main tenets of nutritionism.

Perhaps the most notorious flowering of pseudoscientific eating (and protonutritionism) came in the early years of the twentieth century, when John Harvey Kellogg and Horace Fletcher persuaded thousands of Americans to trade all pleasure in eating for health-promoting dietary regimens of truly breathtaking rigor and perversity. The two diet gurus were united in their contempt for animal protein, the consumption of which Dr. Kellogg, a Seventh-Day Adventist who bore a striking resemblance to KFC’s Colonel Sanders, firmly believed promoted both masturbation and the proliferation of toxic bacteria in the colon. During this, the first golden age of American food faddism, protein performed much the same role that fat would perform during the next. At Kellogg’s Battle Creek sanitarium, patients (who included John D. Rockefeller and Theodore Roosevelt) paid a small fortune to be subjected to such “scientific” practices as hourly yogurt enemas (to undo the damage that protein supposedly wreaked on the colon); electrical stimulation and “massive vibration” of the abdomen; diets consisting of nothing but grapes (ten to fourteen pounds of them a day); and at every meal, “Fletcherizing,” the practice of chewing each bite of food approximately one hundred times. (Often to the rousing accompaniment of special chewing songs.) The theory was that thorough mastication would reduce protein intake (this seems certain) and thereby improve “subjective and objective well-being.” Horace Fletcher (aka “the great masticator”) had no scientific credentials whatsoever, but the example of his own extraordinary fitness—at fifty he could bound up and down the Washington Monument’s 898 steps without pausing to catch his breath—while existing on a daily regimen of only 45 well-chewed grams of protein was all the proof his adherents needed.* The brothers Henry and William James both became enthusiastic “chewers.”†

Whatever their biological efficacy, all these dietary exertions had the effect of removing eating from social life and pleasure from eating; compulsive chewing (much less hourly enema breaks) is not exactly conducive to the pleasures of the table. Also, Fletcherizing would have forcibly drained food of the very last glimmer of flavor long before the hundredth contraction of the jaw had been counted. Kellogg himself was outspoken in his hostility to the pleasures of eating: “The decline of a nation commences when gourmandizing begins.”

If that is so, America had little reason to worry.

America’s early attraction to various forms of scientific eating may also have reflected discomfort about the way other people eat: the weird, messy, smelly, and mixed-up eating habits of immigrants.‡ How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity, which is exactly what you don’t want in a society dedicated to the ideal of “Americanization.” To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history; in theory, at least, nutritionism proposes a neutral, modernist, forward-looking, and potentially unifying answer to the question of what it might mean to eat like an American. It is also a way to moralize about other people’s choices without seeming to. In this, nutritionism is a little like the institution of the American front lawn, an unobjectionable, if bland, way to pave over our differences and Americanize the landscape. Of course in both cases unity comes at the price of aesthetic diversity and sensory pleasure. Which may be precisely the point.