John Ryan on Lisa Haushofer’s *Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition*

Lisa Haushofer’s Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition aims to provide a “new perspective on the development of the nutrition sciences and their intensifying relationship to the world of nutritional entrepreneurship during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”^[1] Haushofer’s work successfully meets her stated intent and offers a compelling exploration of the culturally transformative impact of scientifically engineered and commercially marketed food-like products, substances she calls wonder foods, that emerge during this period. Her thought-provoking journey seamlessly weaves together cultural history, environmental awareness, and gastronomic evolution as influenced by the nineteenth century’s trend of marrying the illusory promises of nutritional science with modern advertising and marketing appeal.

This marriage of technological advancement and emotionally powerful commercial rhetoric tantalizes us with food products that offer a transcendence beyond the limitations of geography, resource scarcity, and human physiology and hints at the ever approaching horizon of a new epoch of human flourishing. Her extensive exploration of the history of meat biscuits, self-digestive gruel, breakfast cereals, and yeast cubes take us through a narrative that eventually lands in a twenty-first century still plagued by similar illusory promises of wondrous food products that falsely offer panacea-like cures for obesity, malnutrition, aging, time management, and all other modern societal issues tied to our corporeal limitations rooted in our need to eat to live.^[2]

In making my way through Haushofer’s Wonder Foods, I couldn’t help but appreciate her implicit plea for the re-integration of food back into its cultural, geographical, and environmental gestalt from which it originally came. I read Haushofer’s examination of the intricate interplay between cultural history, nutritional science, and commercial marketing systems as the catalyst of the food industry’s transformation into a global leviathan that transports people, resources, and technology around the globe. Ultimately, this bifurcated industry seemingly offers only two viable commercial options – “high-end consumer products marketed to mostly well-nourished, affluent consumers as lifestyle products” or “emergency medicinal interventions into acute malnutrition in the context of global health campaigns.”^[3] Both of these options rely on scientifically engineered food solutions to combat growing social, economical, and environmental issues. They also exist on either end of the social, political, and economic spectrum and, according to Hausofter, emerged as a “consequence of systemic intellectual commitments in Western industrialized nations to capitalism, empire, resource extraction, and white supremacy.”^[4]

Consequently, Hausofter argues that food, as a product of its traditional cultural environments, emerged as incapable of meeting the geographic, economic, and physical requirements of an industrial world. Only through the technological advancements of nutritional science propelled by the engine of marketing ingenuity, could the expanding industrial world survive on wonder foods that stood out as “products at the intersection of the science and commerce of nutrition” and that “had become well accepted by consumers, prized by global health campaigners, and infinitely adaptable to changing nutritional fashions.”^[5] This intersection eventually allows the sublimation of cultural, emotional, and physical health into easily transportable and infinitely shelf-stable products that ultimately facilitate the ease of their popularization and proliferation to market.

Unfortunately, as Haushofer also so rigorously lays out, they invariably fail to deliver on their promise of quality and sustainability and infallibly facilitate the exploitation of indigenous and minority populations in the pursuit of increased labor efficiency, imperial expansion, and economic benefit for predominantly white, upper-middle class, male populations.^[6] Ultimately, this trajectory also results in an unhealthy and unsustainable disconnect between the food people eat and the natural environments from which it comes. In addition, this marriage of food, food science, and commercial marketing establishes a dangerous tradition of erasing not only the natural world from the food we eat but also the cultures and people from which these foods had traditionally originated.

In the realm of health food consumerism, Haushofer’s Wonder Food contextualization of the historical inequalities and socio-economic imbalances that a reliance on scientifically engineered, consumer-ready food products creates places her in conversation with similar popular contemporary writers like Michael Pollan and Raj Patel. Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma dissects the modern food industry’s exploitive power dynamics and that industry’s influence on individual food choices.^[7] Similar to Haushofer, Pollan navigates the historical impact that merging corporate interests, agricultural policies, and consumer behavior has in creating a complex web of inequalities in our current food system.

Patel’s Stuffed and Starved echoes Haushofer’s exploration of imperialistic motivations that catalyzed the push for products like Borden and Smith’s meat biscuit that “would bring about American imperial ambitions not only by collapsing continental space but also by accelerating American economic development.”^[8] Patel scrutinizes the impact of globalization on food production and distribution and unveils how multinational corporations perpetuate inequities in the name of increased economic productivity.^[9] Where Patel argues that this process inevitably leaves some communities malnourished while others are inundated with an excess of foods, Haushofer’s research examines the direct impact of imperialistic influences on culinary narratives that would eventually lead to similar inequalities in the name of increased productivity and successful colonial expansion. She pulls back the curtain on the historically false promises concerning wonder foods and argues that because they “have taken over not only our health food aisles and pharmacy shelves but also our nutrition culture, our therapeutic imagination, and our humanitarian impulses,”^[10] that these products “have grabbed our attention and resources to such an extent that we have allowed them to dominate our thinking about nutrition, limiting our possible relationships with food and restricting the kinds of nutritional solutions we are capable of imagining.”^[11]

In the end,  Lisa Haushofer’s Wonder Foods makes a compelling case for a more socially conscious and environmentally sustainable approach to our food choices. Her work urges us, through a historical lens, to reflect on the profound societal, economic, and environmental influences that our food production and consumption has had on the world, and more importantly, to be distinctly aware of who those choices affect, both historically and today.

Bibliography

Haushofer, Lisa. 2022. Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Patel, Raj. 2012. Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System – Revised and Updated. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House.

Pollan, Michael. 2007. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York, NY: Penguin Publishing Group.

^[1] Haushofer, Lisa. 2022. Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 9.

^[2] Haushofer, 182.

^[3] Haushofer, 15.

^[4] Haushofer, 6.

^[5] Haushofer, 15.

^[6] Haushofer, 5.

^[7] Pollan, Michael. 2007. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York, NY: Penguin Publishing Group.

^[8] Haushofer, 36.

^[9] Patel, Raj. 2012. Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System – Revised and Updated. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House.

^[10] Haushofer, 183.

^[11]Haushofer, 184.