Food, Medicine, and the Quest for Good Health: Nutrition, Medicine, and Culture

Synopsis

What we eat, how we eat, where we eat, and when we eat are deeply embedded cultural practices. Eating is also related to how we medicate. The multimillion-dollar diet industry offers advice on how to eat for a better body and longer life, and avoiding harmful foods (or choosing healthy ones) is considered separate from consuming medicine-another multimillion-dollar industry. In contrast, most traditional medical systems view food as inseparable from medicine and regard medicinal foods as the front line of healing. Drawing on medical texts and food therapy practices from around the world and throughout history, Nancy N. Chen locates old and new crossovers between food and medicine in different social and cultural contexts. The consumption of spices, sugar, and salt was once linked to specific healing properties, and trade in these commodities transformed not just the political economy of Europe, Asia, and the New World but local tastes and food practices as well. Today's technologies are rapidly changing traditional attitudes toward food, enabling the cultivation of new admixtures, such as nutraceuticals and genetically modified food, that link food to medicine in novel ways. Chen considers these developments against the evolving food regimes of the diet industry in order to build a framework for understanding diet as individual practice, social prescription, and political formation.

Copyright:

2009

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Book Size:

144 Pages

ISBN-13:

9780231508919

Related ISBNs:

9780231134842

Publisher:

Columbia University Press

Date of Addition:

03/24/21

Copyrighted By:

Columbia University Press

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Cooking, Food and Wine, Health, Mind and Body, Technology, Medicine

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.