The American diet book dreamland
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Climbing obesity rates and the long, complicated history of food and diet explains a lot about why weight loss is an estimated $60-billion-dollar industry, why two out of every three Americans are overweight or obese, why 45 million Americans diet every year, and how books like Loren Cordain's 2002 The Paleo Diet have ignited social movements. But obesity trends and historical context cannot explain what a diet is, or what it has meant over the last hundred years. History and politics and medicine have much to offer any study on weight loss in America, but they are not enough. We need to study the stories; the many and complicated ways American culture has made meaning from obesity and weight loss. We find these stories in diet books. Diet books are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and they are quickly becoming the screenplays by which we live our lives. With the onset of the obesity epidemic, diet books changed and unlike earlier texts, they are both myths and manuals -- manifestos, even -- to make this world a better place. They are new stories, with broader concerns and higher stakes. They draft new and different plans about American culture, the dangers of civilization, and the right course for this country. Like other powerful narratives, diet books offer insight into how America sees itself, blames itself, and what kind of civilization it promises to make for itself. Yet they do more than offer insight: my research shows that diet books are myths, manuals, and manifestos. They are useful fictions that function in the real world. As we will see, some diet books drive industries, change lives, draft new and unexpected political visions for the future of this nation. The story weight loss diets most often tell is a familiar one: in an Edenic world, the human race was naturally healthy and beautiful but humans fell into disease and despair. Today, obesity and modern disease are ruining our nation's health and impending doom can only be averted if Americans radically change their diets and ways of life. Diets follow the narrative arc of the Jeremiad by lamenting the loss of an original ideal, warning of society's impending downfall, and exhorting Americans to change their ways and return to that original ideal. It is unsurprising that diets narrate what is, arguably, the most familiar literary narrative in the Western world. More important for a deeper understanding, however, is how diets use the individual quest for self-improvemen to channel larger concerns about the success or failure of America and, even more broadly, the human race and its endeavors to make for itself a civilization. Diet Book Dreamland examines four popular philosophies according to their vision of paradise: the Paleo diet, the Garden of Eden diet, the Pacific Islands diet, and the many detox or detoxification diet plans. Each one of these new literary formulas have, over the last half century, crafted stories that structure civilization as a pathology and diet as the cure. When we consider obesity as a disease of civilization, then diet books reveal themselves as cures -- utopian manifestos -- for a better self, a healthier society, and a more perfect world.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Johnson, Adrienne Rose |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Program in Modern Thought and Literature. |
| Primary advisor | Fishkin, Shelley Fisher |
| Thesis advisor | Fishkin, Shelley Fisher |
| Thesis advisor | Freedman, Estelle B, 1947- |
| Thesis advisor | Wolf, Bryan Jay |
| Advisor | Freedman, Estelle B, 1947- |
| Advisor | Wolf, Bryan Jay |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Adrienne Rose Johnson. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- This document has been removed from online delivery at the request of the author.
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Adrienne Rose Johnson
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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