[This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article.]
In the 21st century, calorie counts are ubiquitous in weight-loss advice, but historically they are a fairly recent phenomenon. In the late 19th century, a transatlantic coalition of researchers and reformers began to understand food as energy for human motors that could help to optimize human and social productivity, even on a global scale.
It was not until the early 20th century that calorie counting was introduced into weight-loss diets. This contributed to the emergence of fat shaming by suggesting that an individual’s excess body weight was the direct and causal result of eating more than their caloric needs, placing the responsibility for their body and health in the hands of that individual. Recent diagnoses of “the death of the calorie” confirm that the history of the calorie is a political one, in that they perpetuate the calorie’s legacy of framing weight loss as a capability of self-governing citizens.
Article
Calorie Counting
Nina Mackert
Article
Food and Philosophy
Andrea Borghini
The philosophy of food is an emerging field of contemporary philosophical scholarship, which distinguishes itself for its highly inter- and cross-disciplinary orientation as well as for the contamination of different schools and traditions of philosophy. Initially preoccupied with core issues concerning food ethics (e.g., vegetarianism and the ethics of agriculture) and food aesthetics (e.g., the nature of gustatory experience as well as its aesthetic value), the philosophy of food has since expanded to encompass a wide range of debates linked to food production, consumption, and representation. The list of topics includes, among others and in no particular order: food systems vis-à-vis climate change and environmental ethics; the ethics of dieting and obesity; food and cultural appropriation; questions concerning the identity of specific food items (e.g., natural foods, recipes, geographical indications); the aesthetic worth of specific beverages (among the most studied, wine, coffee, beer, whiskey); broad conceptions of food justice as found in local food movements, feminist approaches to the study of food, and social gastronomy. This list testifies not only to the broad spectrum of questions that philosophers have taken up, but also to the numerous methodologies that they have employed to address them.
