Diet and the Disease of Civilization

Adrienne Rose Bitar

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813589664
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Öffentliche Landwirtschaftspolitik

Diet books contribute to a $60-billion industry as they speak to the 45 million Americans who diet every year. Yet these books don’t just tell readers what to eat: they offer complete philosophies about who Americans are and how we should live.  Diet and the Disease of Civilization  interrupts the predictable debate about eating right to ask a hard question: what if it’s not calories—but concepts—that should be counted?

Cultural critic Adrienne Rose Bitar reveals how four popular diets retell the “Fall of Man” as the narrative backbone for our national consciousness. Intensifying the moral panic of the obesity epidemic, they depict civilization itself as a disease and offer diet as the one true cure. 

Bitar reads each diet—the Paleo Diet, the Garden of Eden Diet, the Pacific Island Diet, the detoxification or detox diet—as both myth and manual, a story with side effects shaping social movements, driving industry, and constructing fundamental ideas about sickness and health.  Diet and the Disease of Civilization  unearths the ways in which diet books are actually utopian manifestos not just for better bodies, but also for a healthier society and a more perfect world. 

1

PALEOLITHIC DIETS AND THE CAVEMAN UTOPIA

“LIFE WAS GOOD for our Paleolithic grandparents,” recounts a 2001 diet book.¹ A 2013 diet laments that civilization has “transformed healthy and vital people free of chronic diseases into sick, fat, and unhappy people.”² But, as one Paleo leader promised, “Eating Paleo can save the world.”³

An estimated three million Americans currently follow some version of the Paleo diet and Paleo books are among the bestselling titles within an already blockbuster genre.⁴ At its most basic, Paleo diets reject agricultural products such as cereals and sugars for foods that could have been hunted or gathered—mostly high-fat, high-fiber meats and plants. In practice, “going Paleo” means everything from the ordinary to the outlandish.⁵ Some dieters avoid artificial light, eat raw beef, forsake shoes, let blood, intermittently fast, engage in polyamorous sexual relationships, and “adopt a primal attitude.”⁶ For others, the diet is just that—a diet of mainly meat and vegetables (occasionally fruits and legumes) adopted to lose weight or gain muscle. Most dieters practice Paleo to lose weight, but this “species-appropriate diet” allegedly cures over a hundred ailments ranging from Alzheimer’s to anxiety, epilepsy to acne.⁷

Despite its popularity, the Paleolithic diet has received little scholarly attention. The diet is not merely a collection of weight loss manuals but a complex and controversial social movement, indebted to a long history of primitivist nutritional counsel, divided by bitter philosophical splits, and alternately mocked and praised by mainstream medicine. In fact, the whole weight loss narrative genre has much to offer utopia studies; in particular, the caveman diet offers an embodied utopian practice embedded within a powerful story of an original, lost Paleolithic paradise.

But the caveman diet is more than a myth of a lost golden age and more than a handbook for weight loss; the diets are at once a manual for the body, the self, and society. Known by many different names—the caveman, Stone Age, evolutionary, or hunter-gatherer diet—Paleolithic diets have been heralded as the best “way of life,” a “revolution,” and, most importantly, the “the first glimpse of a new and better world.”⁸ The Paleo diet differs from the perpetual processes of self-improvement characteristic of most self-help literature by linking corporeal and social transformation, enlisting the body to measure and materialize the processes of recouping the utopia within. These diets uphold social dreams with shared origins (in the cave), a collective problem (the obesity epidemic), and common ends (health for all). As the 2013 The Paleo Manifesto puts it, the diet aspires “to understand where we come from, to make the best of where we are, and to craft a better future.”⁹

Such diets share the defining characteristic of many utopian visions—they are useful fictions. But this useful fiction is especially important to the body-utopia relationship because the caveman diet mixes myth and manual to create a new type of embodied utopia. Unlike medieval “body utopias” that relish excess, these caveman diets envision a new and different kind of body utopia characterized by calculated restraint and checked desire. By recalibrating the palate away from industrial foods, these foodways redefine pleasure as checked desire—not euphoric abandon. To borrow Ruth Levitas’s language, the diet promises to “re-educate desire” by teaching the palate to resist the extreme flavors of modern foods and, instead, value and desire “natural” Paleo foods.¹⁰

This mix of myth and manual not only reveals how these dreams guide and exalt banal body practices, but also tells us about the worlds and bodies we dream of creating. In fact, the place of the promised paradise is actually the body of the dieter as the body brokers the bond between mythic history and utopian future. Most broadly, the story is told like this: since civilization (particularly agriculture) is such a recent invention on the timeline of human evolution, “our genes are still in the Stone Age” and we must “follow what our ancient ancestors ate” to recapture “our natural birthright of health.”¹¹ In this narrative, the Paleo diet situates the individual body in the long, deep currents of human history, suggesting that the body is on loan from history and obliged to the future—and only one’s own property for a short-lived half-blink of evolutionary time.

Nearly three decades ago, The Paleolithic Prescription opened with two questions: “Who are we? Where do we come from?”¹² In 2010, Robb Wolf asked in The Paleo Solution, “What were we like as hunter-gatherers, and what happened when we changed to agriculture?”¹³ By 2013, the Ancestral Health Symposium convened six hundred caveman dieters to ponder the questions of “Where do we come from? Where are we going?” Paleo diets are part of a larger quest in American culture—the search for beginnings, the hunt for a homeland, the pursuit of a story that stakes its claim in where we come from to dream of where we should go.

THE CAVEMAN DIET SUBGENRE, OR, HOW BREAD IS THE STAFF OF DEATH

Western weight loss literature has a long tradition of venerating “primitive” diets and ways of life. In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed his “state of nature” theory of natural man. Extolling physical freedom and unfettered politics, Rousseau used primitive health to illustrate his theory of the natural goodness of mankind. Despite the hardships of tooth-and-claw life, Rousseau claimed that primitive man suffered from fewer sources of illness.¹⁴ Since the nineteenth century, influential American diet reformers have conjectured about the diets of preagricultural peoples and recommended these “natural” foods to cure ailing moderns. In the 1890s, Dr. Emmet Densmore popularized a meat-heavy diet inspired by the “food of primal man,” claiming that “bread is the staff of death” and “imbecility, decrepitude, and premature death go hand in hand with luxury and plenty.”¹⁵ To the dismay of vegetarian leaders, “primitive” diets were not restricted to Densmore’s “anti-cerealism” or the low-carb cause.¹⁶ Throughout his long life, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) also speculated on “the ways and likings of our primitive ancestors of prehistoric times” to support his diet of grains and other farinaceous foods.¹⁷

Diet leaders have venerated the caveman—not simply the primitive—diet and ways of life since the 1920s. Between 1922 and 1924, French physiologist Charles Richet, the recipient of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, promoted his raw meat tuberculosis cure, later called the “caveman” treatment in newspaper coverage.¹⁸ Feeding tuberculosis patients pure raw meat juice produced encouraging results, ostensibly by reconstituting muscular tissues wasted by tuberculosis. In 1926, British surgeon Sir William Arbuthnot-Lane may have been the first to specifically recommend the “caveman’s diet” as a nutritional role model. Speaking to packed auditoriums across the United States, Arbuthnot-Lane insisted that all diseases were the “terrible price for civilization” since poor health directly resulted from civilized nutrition.¹⁹

Like Kellogg and Densmore, Richet and Arbuthnot-Lane called civilization the cause of disease and nature the cure. Unlike Kellogg and his contemporaries, however, early twentieth-century proponents of the “cavemen cure” used a modified vision of Darwinian thought and evolutionary history to speculate on humankind’s collective origins. Medical leaders often blurred these intellectual boundaries by alternately praising “pagan races” and man’s Paleolithic ancestors for their nutritional superiority.²⁰ Until the 1970s the term “caveman” was often shorthand for a meaty or low-carbohydrate diet that could refer to either contemporary “primitive” or Paleolithic peoples. In 1975, the Seattle gastroenterologist Walter Voegtlin self-published The Stone Age Diet, the first full-length caveman diet, and solidified the school of thought into a distinct subgenre of diet literature (Figure 1.1). A little-known treatise on the health dangers of civilization, The Stone Age Diet narrates the now-familiar story of Paleolithic man straying from “his narrow dietetic path,” acquiring the “doubtful assets of civilization,” and falling victim to heart disease, gallstones, and obesity. Voegtlin recommended a “meat-fat” Stone Age diet of unlimited fish, meat, cheese, and eggs. He forbade starches, sweets, and vegetables like cabbage, cauliflower, radishes, and onions. Dieters could only drink “coffee, tea, postum, sour cream (NO MILK), buttermilk, whiskey and water.”²¹ Only five of the 277 pages of The Stone Age Diet describe the actual diet; the rest is a long manifesto about the dangers of civilization and the true way to primitive health.

FIGURE 1.1. Walter Voegtlin’s self-published The Stone Age Diet is considered the first full-length Paleo diet book.

There is a noticeable historical gap in caveman-themed diet advice between the Great Depression and the late 1960s. The diet itself might explain the interlude: two landmark low-carbohydrate plans bookend the period, coinciding with the first flash of 1920s interest in caveman diets and the later program sparked in the 1970s and expanded in the early 2000s. Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s 1913 My Life with the Eskimo and the 1921 The Friendly Arctic drew from his experience with the Inuit to popularize an all-animal diet to a broad American public. As the 1919–1922 president of the Explorer’s Club, Stefansson also lectured across the United States promoting his blubber and organ meat diet for optimal health. After the 1920s, calorie-counting and more grain-based approaches elbowed out the low-carbohydrate diet until 1972, when Robert Atkins published his landmark Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution: The High Calorie Way to Stay Thin Forever.²² The 1972 book sold well but, more importantly, paved the way for the 1992 Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, a book that spent five years on The New York Times bestseller list and is “among the top fifty bestselling books in history.”²³ Like Atkins, Voegtlin pioneered a low-carbohydrate diet but distinguished his approach by “consider[ing] the matter of diet philosophically.” Noting the high stakes, Voegtlin recruits dieters and warns the irresolute that they “must be imbued with the crusader’s zeal, the single-mindedness of a martyr and a ‘do or die’ resolve.”²⁴

Changing representations of the Stone Age and cavemen might also account for the lull. The 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial politicized evolutionary theory and upset a fragile assimilationist peace, pitting ideas of modern science against fundamental Christian beliefs about mankind’s origins. Such a fiercely partisan theological contest may have dissuaded Americans from embracing a caveman-inspired diet. News coverage of the trial depicted unflattering portraits of hirsute, comical brutes, and archaeological discoveries of Neanderthal remains in Africa reinforced racist beliefs about inferiority. The Lost World, a popular 1925 film, dramatized white men defeating vicious “ape-men.”²⁵ Though the antimodern veneration of the primitive persisted, especially after the bloody combat of the first modern war degraded claims of an enlightened civilization, the caveman himself became a less-than-attractive model for a diet.²⁶

Fluctuations in ideal body size and shape can also explain the fickleness in diet popularity more broadly. Most social historians of dieting agree that “middle-class America began its ongoing battle...