Xaq Frohlich (MIT):
Accounting for Taste
A history of regulating food labels in the United States, 1945-1995
Dilluns, 13 de desembre de 2010, 11:00-12:30 hrs. ( (CEHIC-UAB, Sala de reunió)
This paper examines the history of nutrition labeling in the United States as an example of how science and law have shaped our modern, everyday understandings of food, risk, and responsibility. It provides a brief description of that history, summarizing three styles of institutional enforcement: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) use of food “standards of identity” from the 1930s to 1960s, its introduction of voluntary ‘nutrition information’ labeling in the 1970s, and the development of the mandatory ‘Nutrition Facts’ panel in the 1990s. With each period the paper explores the ways that the FDA’s work to regulate nutrition labeling has entailed imagining, even “constituting” consumer-subjects through decisions about label design and content. Running across these activities was the FDA’s stated concern with “consumer confusion”. This paper examines the notion of consumer confusion and how it is put to work in constructing new understandings of food, and by extension, new foods and consumers. More broadly, the paper illustrates how legal, scientific, and corporate organizations attempt to shape the way consumers think about food through standards-setting and informational devices.
Xaq Frohlich is a Ph.D. candidate in MIT’s History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society Doctoral Program. His dissertation explores the history of nutrition science, food regulation, and changing cultural norms about food, diet, and health in twentieth-century America. In 2009-2010, he was a Fulbright Fellow in Spain pursuing research on the scientific rediscovery of the Mediterranean Diet and its 'reinvention' as a globally marketable, healthy lifestyle.
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