The Aliment of Anxiety: Nutritional Advice Pertaining to Sugar in Post
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The Aliment of Anxiety: Nutritional Advice Pertaining to Sugar in Post-WWII Canada by Aleksandra Golubovic Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Dalhousie University Halifax, NS August 2014 © Copyright by Aleksandra Golubovic, 2014 Table of Contents Abstract iv Acknowledgements v Chapter 1 - Introduction 1 Recent Literature 2 Defining Sugar 6 Theoretical Contexts 11 Nutrition and the State in Canada 13 Sources Consulted 16 Conclusion 18 Chapter 2 - Ask the Experts 20 Beginnings 21 Voluntary Organizations 25 Constructing Authority 27 Misinformation and the Role of Advertising 29 Inquiries to the CCN 35 Limitations of State Authority 41 Conclusion 45 Chapter 3 -Tracing Change 49 Wartime 52 1950s 54 1960s 59 1970s 63 Conclusion 66 ii Chapter 4 - Industry 69 The Nutrition Foundation 72 The Sugar Research Foundation 75 Marketing 80 Other Strategies: Fluoridation 84 Conclusion 91 Chapter 5 – Affective Dimensions 94 Women and Bodily Control 97 The Modern Family and Malnutrition 102 Recalibrating Gender 105 Professionalizing Women 108 Dangerous Mothering 114 Eating Feelings 116 Conclusion 122 Chapter 6 - Conclusion 126 Bibliography 135 iii Abstract This thesis traces changes in dietary recommendations regarding sugar from WWII to the 1970s, considering the ways advice was shaped, disseminated, and digested as it related to three competing but interconnected factors: the emergence of the Canadian state as a nutrition authority, food industry involvement in nutrition education, and affective dimensions of food selection during a turbulent period of Canada’s social and political history. It shows how nutrition experts were sometimes fettered and sometimes abetted by their relationship to science and the state. It demonstrates that, despite nutrition advertisers’ focus on economics and science in framing their advice, non-rational, non- nutritive food selection motivators persisted, and may have been especially potent in the Cold War age of anxiety. By examining the place of a beloved but nutritionally ambiguous food such as sugar in dietary advice, this thesis reveals the ideological underpinnings of such advice, and illuminates nutrition experts’ changing concerns. iv Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to Shirley Tillotson for her guidance. Shirley, despite all the missed deadlines, rabbit hole excavations, intemperate adjectives and instances of alliteration over accuracy, you never seemed to falter in your belief that I was a capable student. Whatever its mysterious origins, your faith in me has been even more valuable than your encyclopedic knowledge of Everything. This thesis has been difficult, a breech baby. You allowed me the space to proceed in my own, occasionally backwards, way, and now that I am done, I am grateful. Thank you for knowing exactly how and when to challenge me, and for recognizing when I needed help. You are so good at what you do, and you are an absolutely delightful human being. Thank you. I am honoured to be your student. Todd McCallum and Jerry Bannister kindly served as my second and third readers. Thank you both for your patience, encouragement, and humour. Your interest in this project and the attendant quality of your observations, comments and criticisms added much more nuance, texture and dimension to this thesis than it would have had otherwise. Thank you. Two years ago, Colin Mitchell ushered me into this program and now Justin Roberts is finally letting me out. Thank you both for your excellent work as Graduate Coordinators. From my first correspondence with the History Department as part of the application process, Valerie Peck has been an invaluable source of assistance, information, and comfort. She and Tina Jones are incredible individuals who have both facilitated and enriched my experience immeasurably. Thank you both for everything you do. Mama i Tata, I can never adequately thank you for your unflinching support of my somewhat impractical academic ventures. I am incredibly privileged to have your generous financial support in pursuing post-secondary education. Even more generously, you have always trusted me enough to let me pursue it on my own terms, valuing my education over my marks. It was not important to you that I become anything other than myself through my studies. As such, you have never pressured me toward any particular avenues, allowing me instead to indulge my interests. For this, I shall be infinitely grateful (if perpetually unemployed.) Years ago, Peter Petro expressed the kind of quiet confidence in my intellectual abilities I had only ever seen from my parents (whose biological bias toward me makes them an unreliable source of information regarding my intelligence, beauty, or singing ability). Dr. Petro, I cannot tell you what it meant to have a relative stranger express such kind words as if they were matters of fact. Remembering the confidence you had in me has carried me through when I did not have any in myself. Thank you. I am eternally grateful for the existence of one Michael Hatton. Michael, your feedback, encouragement and friendship have been precious, and your willingness to assist me with all sorts of practical matters probably made the difference between completion and failure. Somehow you always managed to magically manifest and provide invaluable support at critical moments. I’m not sure where you found the time to write your own thesis. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. For their love and support throughout various stages of this process, from its incubation many moons ago, to this messy afterbirth, I thank Jovana and Jelena Golubovic, Mira Kremonic, Alec and Henry Lee, Emma Charles, DAS, Megan Cameron, Nick Crampton, Raf, Claudine Bonner, Sarah Kasupski, Alex Fenton, Stuart Coote, my Phrat Boiz and my Warrior Goddesses, the good people of El Salvador, and the staff at Uncommon Grounds. v Chapter 1: Introduction Earlier this year, the World Health Organization revised its stance on sugar consumption, halving its 2002 recommended daily intake to no more than 5% of total calories. While sugar has never enjoyed a sterling reputation, concern about its physiological and psychological effects has been steadily mounting since the Second World War. Once considered delightfully benign by most mainstream nutritionists, who, prior to the Second World War, recommended sweet food as an appropriate means of rounding out the diet, sugar was by the 1970s depicted as addictive and damaging even by those well inside of the fringes. And yet, it retained a place in Canadians’ diets throughout the post-war period, and, in numerous forms, continues to make up an appreciable percentage of our national caloric intake today. This thesis examines the change over time in nutritional advice regarding sugar consumption while tracing the emergence of the federal Canadian state as an authority on nutrition. It identifies the strategies employed by public nutritionists, why they were chosen, and how they were limited. Hundreds of millions of North Americans continued to enjoy sugar despite its souring reputation, and this thesis also looks at some of the affective aspects of food selection to explain why. It demonstrates that, despite the economical, scientific paradigm applied to food throughout most of the twentieth century, non-rational and non-nutritive food selection motivators persisted, and may have been especially potent in an age of anxiety. Looking at the place of a beloved but non-nutritive and potentially dangerous food such as sugar in national nutritional advice is useful in illuminating the changing concerns of public nutrition experts and the ways in which they were both fettered and abetted by their relationship to the state. Chapter Two identifies the individuals and organizations that steered nutritional policy in Canada from the war until the 1970s and describes the challenges they faced, both political and practical. Chapter Three focuses on sugar as a case study and tracks the change over time in advice regarding its consumption. It considers advice from government, voluntary organizations, industry and insurance companies, and links growing concern about sugar consumption to an emerging concern about the effects of modernity on Canadian bodies. Chapter Four details the interaction of industry and science, focusing on the ways industry research groups such as the Sugar Research Foundation and the Nutrition Foundation responded to criticism and endeavored 1 to contribute to the shape of nutritional advice. The ways that discussions around sugar were staged during these politically and socially turbulent years in Canada suggests that anxiety about the future was one powerful driver of the consumption of this nutritionally void but symbolically loaded food that conjured up comforting nostalgia and a sense of continuity with the best parts of the past. Therefore Chapter Five is concerned with the affective dimensions of dietary advice and looks at the ways in which discussions and advice about food and menus generally, and sugar especially, were also ideological discussions about gender relations, morality and self-control, liberty, and modernity. Recent Literature Food history in Canada is a small but varied and rapidly expanding field. For the purposes of this thesis, this review will highlight contributions to food history as they relate to the state, to science and technology, and to gender. Several studies of public nutrition and the Canadian state exist. Aleck Ostry has taken an institution-centered