Food, Health and Welfare in the Long Twentieth Century: Introduction

Abstract

Spanning from the  s to the  s, this special issue presents six essays addressing complementary topics relating to food, health and welfare during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the late twentieth century, three key periods of transition in American welfare provision. It grew out of the  Historians of the Twentieth Century United States Winter Symposium, which received generous support from the British Association for American Studies, the David Bruce Centre for American Studies, and the Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences at Keele University. Featuring contributions from scholars from the UK, the US, and continental Europe at various career stages, these essays highlight key continuities in the ways that race, gender, and – more implicitly – wealth shaped understandings of health, deserving-ness, and an individual ’ s capacity for self-government. First, by scrutinizing the emergence of calorie counting during the Progressive Era, Nina Mackert details how health, now fi gured in terms of weight and body shape, became adopted as key markers of Americans ’ ability to govern themselves, and consequently their suitability for exercising citizenship. In doing so, she historicizes norms of ability. This focus on healthy bodies was predominantly promoted by middle-class white men (and, to a lesser extent, women), and provided further rationale for excluding racial others, women, immigrants, the poor, and the disabled. But this understanding of health also held some emancipatory potential: despite being restricted to the able-bodied and those with the wealth and education to pursue such dieting advice, advocates of African American uplift embraced a close attention to diet to refute health-based rationales for supposed black inferiority. Next, with particular attention to the ways in which food served as a tool for organizing social movements, Alice Béja analyzes meat boycotts that spread across American cities in early  , pushed by workers to protest the high price of the commodity. The response of socialists and