Spring 2008
Location: UC Santa Cruz: Oakes Mural Room
Works Presented:
Melanie DuPuis will be presenting her work on “sanitationism” with co-author Aaron Bobrow-Strain.
Industrialization of agriculture was built in part on the rise of what some scholars refer to as “sanitationism,” an ideology that feared bacteria as germs and placed its trust in industrial agriculture and the state as protector against germs. New Food Movements have re-embraced bacteria as fermenters, particularly those that focus on hunter-gatherer diets and colonic health. This paper will begin with the work of scholars who interpret this new digestive politics in relation to Donna Haraway’s work, seeing digestive microbiota as a kind of microbial companion species. The paper will build on these ideas but from a more contested “not in my body” political framing, looking at the discourse over one probiotic — inulin — in relation to the larger and longer history of digestion and its relation to the history of US political culture.
Carolyn de la Peña will be presenting her working paper “Diet Divas: Reconstructing Power and Pleasure for the First Women of Low Calorie Foods”
We typically think of “diet food” as a response to consumer demand. Women simply wanted to be thin, the logic argues, and so food companies responded to the need by creating diet beverages and low-calorie foods. This chapter from a book in progress suggests the story was more complicated. Female entrepreneurs in the canning industry, in women’s magazines, and in diet clubs saw opportunities for profit and prestige in creating and marketing diet foods. This chapter looks at the complex role of science, gender, and popular culture played on supply side of the first U.S. diet foods.