Active History

[This post is part of Foodscapes of Plenty and Want – a theme week at ActiveHistoy.ca that features podcasts exploring a number of topics related to the interconnected histories of food, health, and the environment in Canada. For more information and a schedule for the week, see the introductory post here.]

In the context of growing calls to deal with the so-called “obesity epidemic,” nutrition experts and all levels of government have been asked to work together to intervene in the diets of Canadians in order to prevent what is widely believed to be a looming public health crisis.  But this is not the first time that nutrition experts and various levels of government in Canada have joined forces to transform the bodies and health of the Canadian public.

Each of the talks that follow explore some of the historical precedents for cooperation (and disagreement) between nutrition experts and governments. Whether it is the much more contemporary fight against junk food and fast food outlets in schools or efforts by the government of Quebec to study and intervene in the diets of ordinary Quebecers, there is much we can learn about the social politics of nutrition in the past to help us understand the context of contemporary public health efforts. What, for instance, can we learn from these case studies about the advantages and pitfalls of scientifically grounded public policy, particularly when the scientific consensus around the components of a healthy diet have changed quite dramatically over the past century? What role to the politics, economics, and culture of food play in determining the nature and scope of public health nutrition programs?

Catherine Gidney, “’Nutritional Wastelands’: Vending Machines, Fast Food Outlets, and the Fight over Junk Food in Canadian Schools.”

To listen to Catherine’s talk, click here (or save by right-clicking and selecting ‘save file as’)

In September 2003 Cindi Seddon, the new principal of Pitt River Middle School in Port Coquitlam, B.C., introduced healthy food into the school cafeteria. Gone were the McDonald’s burgers and fries, KFC and Pizza Hut.  Instead, the new menu consisted of fresh sandwiches, bagels, macaroni and cheese, fruit and milk, In the vending machines Seddon replaced chocolate bars and caffeinated beverages with granola bars and fruit juices. Despite support from staff and parents, district officials subsequently overruled her actions. What prompted this reversal and how did fast food inundate school cafeterias in the first place?

Catherine Gidney

In her fascinating talk, Catherine Gidney examines the process by which school administrators in the 1990s began to sign exclusive soft-drink deals and introduce fast-food franchises into cafeterias as well as the reaction from parents, teachers, and students.  Educational and anti-corporate activists have illuminated, and decried, the increasing commercialism of Canadian schools as a result of the deep funding cuts to education since the 1980s.  Some contemporary work has examined the nature and impact of exclusivity deals in universities.  Yet there has been no systematic investigation of the entry of Big Food into Canadian public schools.

Based primarily on newspaper reports since the early 1990s, Gidney’s talk therefore examines the entrance of Big Food into Canadian schools. But it also does so by taking a long-term historical perspective from the 1950s to the present for context. It looks at the responses of teachers, students, parents, and trustees to this process and, in doing so, reveals some of the early local alternatives developed in reaction to unhealthy cafeterias.  Most importantly, it uncovers the process by which provincial governments, as a result of public outcry to increasing child obesity, school commercialism, and the underfunding of schools, have begun to implement bans on soft drinks and to introduce healthy food in cafeterias. 

Caroline Durand, “Patates, pain et lard salé valaient-ils mieux qu’un hot dog et des frites? La diète quotidienne et la santé au Québec, 1860-1945.” [French Language Podcast]

To listen to Caroline’s talk, click here (or save by right-clicking and selecting ‘save file as’) 

[Le français suit.] As Caroline Durand’s talk on the history of diet and health in Quebec shows, apprehensions about nutrition, health, and environment sometimes bring on nostalgia for the food of days gone by. This food is idealized by popular writers like Michael Pollan for, amongst other reasons, its supposed health benefits. But what do we actually now about daily diet in the past and the anxieties it provoked? Durand’s talk examines this question by describing the main changes that have occurred in the diets of francophone Quebecers between 1860 and 1945 and by analyzing expert commentary and advice on diet and health in the same period. It also addresses methodological considerations that flow from a context in which doctors, nurses, and teachers monitored the dietary regimen of their charges. How, for instance, do we compare dietary differences over time, when scientific and medical discoveries have changed the available sources, and descriptive and prescriptive discourses are often tainted by their author’s subjectivity?

François Guérard (left) and Caroline Durand (right)

By cross-examining descriptions of meals and diets, nutritional advice, information about general population health, and secondary sources, Durand retraces the effects of industrialization and urbanization on the eating habits of peasantry and on workers in Quebec. In doing so, she shows that expert concerns about diet did not always arise from changes experts observed or from the discovery of cause and effect relationships between diet and illness. Experts’ apprehensions seem more often to have been produced by the social, political, or economic context of the time and by scientific discoveries that transformed the way dietary information was collected at the outset of the twentieth century. Her fascinating talk therefore brings together the history of practice and discourse, in order to enrich our understanding of the history of dietary regimens in Canada, and to clarify the roles of different social actors in the definition of dietary problems.

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Les craintes actuelles concernant la nutrition, la santé et l’environnement provoquent parfois un sentiment de nostalgie pour l’alimentation d’autrefois, idéalisée entre autres pour ses avantages supposés pour la santé. Mais que sait-on de l’alimentation quotidienne du passé et des inquiétudes qu’elle suscitait ? Notre communication traitera de cette question en décrivant les principaux changements survenus dans la diète des Québécois francophones entre 1860 et 1945 et en analysant les commentaires et les conseils sur l’alimentation et la santé émis par les experts de l’époque. Nous aborderons aussi quelques considérations méthodologiques découlant du contexte dans lequel les médecins, infirmières et enseignantes observent le régime alimentaire de leurs contemporains. Comment comparer des diètes à travers le temps lorsque les découvertes scientifiques et médicales modifient les sources disponibles et que les discours descriptifs et prescriptifs sont souvent teintés par la subjectivité de leur auteur ?

En croisant descriptions de repas et de diètes, conseils nutritionnels, sources sur l’état de santé de la population et sources secondaires, nous retracerons l’impact de l’industrialisation et de l’urbanisation sur l’alimentation des paysans et ouvriers du Québec. Nous montrerons que les inquiétudes des experts sur la diète ne proviennent pas toujours des changements observés ou de la découverte d’une causalité entre la diète et une maladie. Leurs craintes semblent naître plus souvent du contexte social, politique et économique et des développements scientifiques, qui transforment la manière de récolter de l’information sur l’alimentation au début du vingtième siècle. Nous joindrons donc l’étude des pratiques à celle des discours pour enrichir et nuancer notre compréhension de l’histoire des régimes alimentaires au Canada et éclairer le rôle de quelques acteurs sociaux dans la définition des problèmes alimentaires. 

François Guérard, “La recherche et la boîte à lunch: l’alimentation des Québécois de 1937 à 1975.” [French Language Podcast]

To listen to François’ talk, click here (or save by right-clicking and selecting ‘save file as’)

[Le français suit.] After 1930, the Canada’s federal and provincial governments embarked upon research that sought to address several crucial questions: what did people eat, what nutritional value did their food have, and what changes should be made to their eating habits? In his talk, François Guérard examines research in these areas in Quebec, the results of that research, and the research’s contribution to new public health policies between 1937, when Quebec health officials began to investigate dietary questions, and 1975, when the Quebec results of a pan-Canadian study were published.

Guérard shows that over these decades a whole series of investigations were undertaken in contexts such as cities, the countryside, schools, at home and in the factory, on schoolchildren, families, workers, as well as on elderly people. These investigations, on which many different institutions worked together, have left traces in government archives as well as in a multitude of publications such as government department reports and journal articles. Such sources, he argues, enable us to pick up on the beginnings of dietary research on Quebecers and on the research questions that researchers once asked. These dietary researchers, starting at with a rudimentary methodology, studied dietary deficiencies, but eventually they focused on overweight individuals and the problem of obesity. Over time, Guérard suggests, they gradually expanded their undertaking to cover a complete range of ages and social groups, while sounding the alarm for increased public awareness.

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À partir des années 1930, les gouvernements fédéral et provinciaux au Canada ont lancé des recherches visant à répondre à quelques questions cruciales : que mange la population, quelles sont ses carences nutritionnelles, quelles modifications devraient être apportées à ses habitudes alimentaires? La présente communication aborde cette activité de recherche au Québec, ses résultats et sa contribution à la définition de nouvelles politiques de santé publique, de l’année 1937 lorsque les responsables sanitaires québécois lancent leur première enquête, jusque 1975 alors que sont publiés les résultats pour le Québec d’une étude pancanadienne.

Au fil des décennies, toute une série d’enquêtes ont été menées à la ville, à la campagne, à l’école, au foyer ou à l’usine, dans les boîtes à lunch ou les cafétérias, auprès d’écoliers, de familles, de travailleurs ou encore de vieillards. Ces enquêtes auxquelles ont collaboré diverses institutions ont laissé des traces dans les archives gouvernementales ainsi que dans plusieurs publications telles des rapports de ministères et des articles de revues. Pareille documentation permet d’appréhender les débuts de la recherche sur l’alimentation des Québécois, de même que les questionnements de l’époque. Les chercheurs, à l’aide d’une méthodologie d’abord approximative, ont longtemps traqué les carences avant de finalement s’inquiéter de l’embonpoint. Ils ont progressivement élargi leurs démarches à toute l’échelle des âges et des groupes sociaux, et sonné l’alarme en appelant à l’élaboration de programmes éducatifs plus énergiques.

[This post is part of Foodscapes of Plenty and Want – a theme week at ActiveHistoy.ca that features podcasts exploring a number of topics related to the interconnected histories of food, health, and the environment in Canada. For more information and a schedule for the week, see the introductory post here.]

As it travels from field to table, food transforms – and is transformed by – a whole range of social, cultural, economic, environmental, scientific, and political relationships.  Your morning bowl of Corn Pops, for instance, is more than just a surprisingly sugar-laden meal (12 grams of sugar per 30 gram serving!) but is the product of a complex international system defined by a whole array of agricultural subsidies, trade agreements, nutritional policies, massive marketing budgets, and the whims of distracted shoppers who meant to pick up something healthier but thought that it was a good sale and, really, deserve a treat once and a while!

Each of the talks below assess some of the complex ways in which the science, politics, and economics of Canada’s globalized food system have transformed our relationship with food and agriculture. Whether it was the battles over Canadians’ right to a (spreadable!) substitute to butter, the role of Nova Scotia apples in redefining our bodies and international markets alike, or the underappreciated role that fertilizer has played in transforming our bodies and landscapes, each talk provides a window into the way we can use food to understand larger historical processes.

Caroline Lieffers, “‘A Wholesome Article of Food’: Rhetoric of Health and Nation in Canada’s Margarine Debates, 1917-1924?

To listen to Caroline’s talk, click here (or save by right-clicking and selecting ‘save file as’)

As Caroline Lieffers shows in her talk, the seemingly mundane food product, margarine, provides a lively and useful site for understanding Canadian politics and society during the 1910s and 1920s. In 1886, the federal government outlawed the manufacture, importation, and sale of margarine in Canada. The product remained illegal until 1948, albeit with the exception of a brief hiatus between 1917 and 1924. Lieffers therefore explores the often overheated rhetoric employed by both sides of the debate during this seven-year period, which saw an intense propaganda war as butter and margarine supporters attempted to influence an uncertain legislative situation. She shows that, as a flexible concept with natural rhetorical weight, health emerged as a key battle cry: both sides recast their financial and political interests into this seemingly inviolable project of personal and national wellbeing. Indeed, as evolving models of food production and human nutrition intersected with an unstable economy and Canada’s new place in global affairs, the notion of “health” extended from the individual to the collective body.

Caroline Lieffers

Concern for Canadians’ welfare, Lieffers suggests, encompassed concepts as varied as adulteration and hygiene, calories and vitamins, ethnicity and civilization, economics and industry, nationalism and war. She therefore uses these issues to demonstrate how food embodied the larger social trends and tensions of its time: margarine was freighted with, among other things, Canadians’ confusion around food science, attitudes toward race and otherness, the reality of women’s political influence, and the emerging roles of both industry and government in dictating food choices. Moreover, as both sides appealed to the sacred importance of health, they also sought to control its definition and their respective products’ contribution to it. Margarine’s history, Lieffers argues, reminds us that health is a negotiated rather than absolute ideal.

James Murton, “Following the Body Through the Early Global Food Chain, from Nova Scotia to Britain.”

To listen to James’ talk, click here (or save by right-clicking and selecting ‘save file as’)

Around the turn of the last century, nutrition science increasingly pictured the body as something which could be made healthy through the ingestion, not of food, but of a proper set of nutrients.  In doing so it remade a 19^th century conception of the body as something “porous and open” to its environment, wherein a healthy body was one in sync with its environment. In his talk “Following the Body Through the Early Global Food Chain, from Nova Scotia to Britain,” James Murton follows the body through the global food system, riding on the back of an early global food – Nova Scotian apples. Murton argues that conceiving of food as a set of nutrients able to nourish any body made the consumption of faraway foods thinkable.  But what, he asks, were the effects on human and environmental health of the severing of relationships between food, bodies and environments?  Apples (and fruit generally), he convincingly shows, are an especially interesting case, because unlike earlier global food commodities (sugar, salt cod, wheat), they were meant to arrive in homes and be consumed in an unprocessed form, to appear as if they had just come off the tree.  As Murton argues, achieving this goal required an increasingly intense application of industrial technology and state management, in a process that changed the relationships around this particular food in both producing and consuming places.  He therefore asks: how did the establishment of global food change the forces acting on the body?  How did it change the way the body was constructed?

Joshua MacFadyen, “‘The Chemistry of Food’: An Environmental History of Biotechnology and Synthetic Fertilizers in Canada, 1891-1940.”

To listen to Joshua’s talk, click here (or save by right-clicking and selecting ‘save file as’) 

Joshua MacFadyen

Joshua MacFadyen’s talk, “‘The Chemistry of Food’: An Environmental History of Biotechnology and Synthetic Fertilizers in Canada, 1891-1940,” focuses on the work of the Dominion Experimental Farm and the dominion chemist Frank T. Shutt as a means of exploring the often untold and underappreciated history of synthetic fertilizers in Canada. Between the time of Shutt’s graduation from Chemistry at University of Toronto and his retirement in 1933, MacFadyen argues, German scientists had isolated the nitrogen fixing properties of legumes (1888), produced synthetic ammonia (1909), and developed the industrial nitrogen fixing processes (1931) that produced the intensive and petrochemical-based agriculture of the twentieth century. Some historians argue that over 3 billion people owe their existence to these technologies. Less determinist approaches try to understand why any farmer would adopt these expensive soil treatments.

As MacFadyen’s talk shows, at first Shutt was wary of “commercial plant food,” and he hoped that the Experimental Farm could help farmers become independent of expensive inputs by adopting a scientifically balanced mixed agriculture. However, the interwar period witnessed more revolutionary changes in food production and the birth of what Deborah Fitzgerald has called “The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture.” By the end of his career, Shutt had joined the revolution and, as MacFadyen argues, the Experimental Farm developed a “nitrogen lab,” appeared in industrial journals like the plainly titled “Better Crops with Plant Foods,” and advised farmers to incorporate synthetic fertilizers in lieu of locally available, organic options. By analyzing these developments, MacFadyen offers a new perspective on the agricultural revolution that transformed both Canadian farms and their diets.

[This post is part of Foodscapes of Plenty and Want – a theme week at ActiveHistoy.ca that features podcasts exploring a number of topics related to the interconnected histories of food, health, and the environment in Canada. For more information and a schedule for the week, see the introductory post here.]

While there is perhaps nothing more satisfying that eating a couple (okay, six) freshly baked cookies right out of the oven or a steaming poutine purchased at 1:30am on the streets of Montreal, most of us are also acutely aware that many dangers also lurk in our favourite foods. Breathless warnings of a national “obesity epidemic” alone might be enough to make us regret eating that entire poutine or those six cookies, but what about the risk of salmonella, e-coli, listeriosis, Mad Cow disease or hepatitis A lurking in everything from that salad you had for lunch (to make up for the late-night poutine) to that sad looking ham sandwich you foolishly picked up from the conference table at work yesterday? And what role should the state play in ensuring our access to safe and healthy foods?

These kinds of questions are, of course, not new and – as the two talks below attest – need to be understood in relation to larger historical changes in the relationship between “Food and the Public’s Health.” How, for instance, can we understand obesity as a contemporary public health problem without understanding how rates of obesity have changed over the past century? And what can we learn from the successful efforts to eradicate bovine tuberculosis in the early twentieth century, particularly in light of contemporary efforts to combat something like Mad Cow disease? The two talks provided below provide some important answers to these questions while giving us some valuable insights into the relationship between the past and present of public health.

Kris Inwood, Lindsey Amèrica-Simms, and Andrew Ross, “The Change in BMI Among Canadian Men, 1914-1945”

To listen to this talk, click here (or save by right-clicking and selecting ‘save file as’) 

Andrew Ross (left) and Kris Inwood (right).

In their talk, Kris Inwood, Lindsey Amèrica-Simms and Andrew Ross attempt to understand the historical origins of what is often (controversially) called the modern “obesity epidemic.” In particular, they examine the Body Mass Index (BMI) for 40,000 Canadian male soldiers measured between 1914-1918 and 10000 soldiers measured between 1939-1945 in order to identify the broad contours of BMI change in Canada over time. In particular, they ask: Did our current trend towards higher and higher levels of obesity begin before the Second World War, or is it an entirely postwar phenomenon?

In order to do so, they establish for each period the relationship between age and BMI, and then investigate possible shifts in the relationship for more specific groups defined in terms of occupation and location.  Their goal, they suggest, is to establish the change in BMI and the extent to which it may be attributed to a changing experience of particular (a) ages, (b) occupations, (c) regions, (d) urban vs rural, and (e) the extremes of very high and very low BMI.  And in doing so they provide some important context for the current debate about the sources of long run obesity increase and, therefore, the policy choices that need to be made to address the problem of obesity more generally.

Lisa Cox, “The Historical Roots of Foodborne Illnesses: Bovine Tuberculosis Eradication in Canada, 1895-1960.”

To listen to Lisa’s talk, click here (or save by right-clicking and selecting ‘save file as’) 

Lisa Cox

Outbreaks of diseases such as Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (Mad Cow disease), swine flu and avian influenza (bird flu) over the past couple of decades have focused a glaring spotlight on the relationship between the environments where we produce our food and the problem of foodborne illnesses. As Lisa Cox’s talk shows, these outbreaks are not simply a unique product of our modern global food system – they also have deep historical roots.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Cox suggests, death lurked in the cups of thousands of Canadian children. Bovine tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis), a strain of tuberculosis transmissible from cattle to humans, infected thousands of children through milk tainted with deadly bacteria. As Cox shows, the quest to eliminate this threat involved treating milk itself through a vigorous campaign to introduce pasteurization to the country. While this in itself was a long and arduous process, Cox points out that a larger transformation was taking place simultaneously on the nation’s farms. Beginning in 1895, the Canadian government began an active campaign to rid the nation’s herds of bovine tuberculosis. It would take several decades and millions of dollars to achieve and Cox explores how this was accomplished. She argues that the eradication of bovine tuberculosis was as much a bureaucratic achievement as it was a scientific one. The science of bovine tuberculosis, although scientifically researched throughout this period, was fairly well established by the late nineteenth century. It was thus the bureaucracy of disease control, which would undergo significant transformations until its ultimate form that saw the eradication of bovine tuberculosis.