On Melons and Melancholy | Los Angeles Review of Books

WHAT IS GOUT that we are mindful of it? An extraordinarily painful condition, as some of us know from personal experience, gout can feel like your nerves are seeking sweet release through your skin. I had my first attack when I was 28 years old, cycled 20–50 miles a week, ate a mostly vegetarian diet, and rarely drank. A sudden pain in the large joint of my right big toe led me to the doctor. Blood tests led to my surprising diagnosis. This was not the classic 18th-century “old, corpulent, port-and-pheasant” gout but “young, cool” gout, if such a thing exists. I have a modern medical explanation, rich in genetics, but reading Steven Shapin’s Eating and Being: A History of Ideas About Our Food and Ourselves (2024) reminded me that for many centuries, my suffering would have been understood differently. Physicians and laypeople alike saw health and disease as arising from diet and personal comportment, which were tools for managing our natures. Modern clichés like “you are what you eat” are echoes of an ancient and enduring system of care encompassing bodies, diets, and personal identity. Medicine often began in the kitchen, or as Andrew Boorde insisted in his 1547 Breviary of Health, “a good cook is half a physician.”

Throughout his career as a historian of science, Shapin has shown that scientific authority rests not simply on established fact but also on what people consider truth—and truth has a fundamentally social character. He has done this in books such as Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (co-written with Simon Schaffer, 1985), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (1994), The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (2008), and the admirably subtitled collection Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as If It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (2010). These works have made him a leading scholar of the Scientific Revolution, which supplies many of his case studies (see Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution, 1996). How do scientists (or “natural philosophers”) earn each other’s trust and the public’s trust? How do they establish what counts as scientific truth, and why do we believe them? These questions go far beyond the institutional settings of the sciences. They extend, Shapin argues in Eating and Being, into our kitchens and dining rooms.

If you’ve been following Shapin’s career for some time, you have probably sensed a food book in the works. For years, he has been writing about wine for popular and scholarly audiences in forums like Wineworld, The Wine Review, the London Review of Books, and Los Angeles Review of Books, chasing down the traffic between subjective and objective judgments about this beverage. In a 2016 essay for The Hedgehog Review, “Invisible Science: The Scientization of the Ordinary,” Shapin begins with a McDonald’s located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “roughly equidistant from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and close to one of the beating hearts of modern science and technology.” He goes on to explain not only that a Big Mac is the result of a great deal of scientific work, but also that public trust in the food system involves similar social dynamics to public trust in a genomics lab. In a 2020 article in Osiris, “Breakfast at Buck’s: Informality, Intimacy, and Innovation in Silicon Valley,” Shapin attends to the social dynamics at a prominent Silicon Valley watering hole where a lot of deals get thrashed out over the morning meal. An economy of innovation, resting on science and engineering, requires trust, and trust is something we establish through social rules—including the social rules of the table. My own personal favorite Shapin food essay, which appeared in the 1998 collection Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge,  is “The Philosopher and the Chicken: On the Dietetics of Disembodied Knowledge.” This essay seeks the origins of the myth that serious physicists and philosophers don’t think about food. Why do stories about Isaac Newton or Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, emphasize their disinterest in their own appetites? Perhaps, Shapin suggests, it is because we imagined for many centuries that in order to really think, we have to float above the distractions of our bodies. We assumed that the capacity to reason and to know was intimately related to a person’s character—until a new model of abstract “expertise” emerged that had nothing to do with the personality of the expert. Shapin’s essay starts with a story about how Newton ignored a chicken dinner; near the essay’s end, we learn the truth about how many chickens (among other victuals) Newton actually ate. The great mind eventually sat in a body so large that Newton’s arms protruded from either side of his carriage. The “disembodied” intellect wasn’t.

¤

In Eating and Being, Shapin explains that European understandings of the relationship between diet, health, and personal identity (“dietetics” for short) have involved an account of the natures of ourselves and our foods. Practitioners of dietetics sought to “prevent disease, maintain health, and prolong life,” not only by eating the foods that were correct for a given person, relative to their characteristics, but also by resting, sleeping, and working (and engaging in myriad other bodily functions) at the right times and in the right ways. Long before the microscope expanded the scientist’s sensorium, dietetic thought and practice worked with what was available to the senses. You looked at, felt, smelled, and tasted your food; you examined your own experience. And while physicians enjoyed great authority, many laypeople took seriously the advice to “be their own doctor.” Much of Shapin’s book describes how dietetic thinking became a common property employed by everyone, to the point where patients often felt comfortable drawing on their own experience to challenge the conclusions of a consulting physician. Dietetics could guide you to walk fast or slow, drink white wine or red, wake early or late—all varying with the seasons. Your body had a natural predisposition, but you could at least act to modify the “nonnaturals” of diet and personal comportment, usually through moderation.

Dietetic thought began in antiquity and lasted, in various forms, into the 18th century. Among our first recorded sources is the Hippocratic Corpus, written between 430 and 330 BCE and attributed to (but probably not written by) Hippocrates himself. In these texts, we see an understanding of “diet” that extends beyond the kitchen to the management of all of one’s activities. Dietetic thought tends to be qualitative rather than quantitative, in the sense that its conceptual foundations—the elements, the humors, and the spirits—all had attributes that might be relevant to a patient’s health. The elements—air, water, earth, and fire—were followed, thanks to the great influence of Galen (approximately 129–216 CE), by the humors: blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile. Blood and air shared the qualities of warmth and moisture; yellow bile, like fire, was thought to be dry and warm; phlegm was moist and cold like water; and black bile was dry and cold, like earth. None of these qualities were good or bad, per se, but since one humor tended to predominate in a person, the humors did correlate to temperaments. For centuries, a kind of Galenic psychology endured, to the point where 16th-century English theater audiences attended “comedies of humors,” in which each character represented one of the four humors.

In an interview for The Chronicle of Higher Education, the literary critic Len Gutkin drew out Shapin’s claim that “some expert categories, like the unconscious, ‘actually come to constitute the phenomenal base to which they refer.’” Shapin responded: “To generalize, the natural sciences inquire into things in the world; the human sciences may, under certain conditions, make things in the world.” Dietetics does both. It produces a set of ideas about how people can be—phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic, and so forth—that become human types at once social and natural. Serious or “hard” students were often expected to display the physical signs of melancholy, and scholars, the idea held, digested ideas easily but processed food with great difficulty. In the 18th century, the word “gout” could credibly carry certain assumptions about character and behavior, corresponding to the moral disorder of gluttony. The category of “gout-sufferer” lived and breathed larger than the phenomenon at its base. Categories still do that today. Consider that Hamlet’s “melancholy” finds echoes in a contemporary person’s “neurodiversity.” Both are characterological descriptions rather than pejoratives. They denote different kinds of persons.

While the humors are a well-known legacy of dietetic thought, the “spirits” (which Galen wrote about too) are less often discussed. Natural, animal, and vital spirits were essentially “airey, thin and clear substances”—fundamentally physical and yet so fine as to pass unglimpsed before the naked eye. The spirits served to explain how we turn the air we breathe and the food we eat into vital substances like blood, and they explained how we move our bodies. Just as the humors endured in European culture, so did the spirits, and in 1633, John Donne invoked his readers’ familiarity with the idea of spirits in his poem “The Extasie”: “As our blood labours to beget / Spirits, as like soules as it can, / Because such fingers need to knit / That subtile knot, which makes us man.”

There was no singular or normal version of health in dietetic thought. A medieval person found health in their own way, depending on whether they were melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric, or sanguinary. Chivalric cultures in Europe preferred the sanguinary because they associated it with “optimistic and valiant” temperaments, but our larger picture should be of a diverse range of desirable states of being rather than a narrow understanding of health. Different peoples living in different lands, from the British Isles to the Near East, were thought to have differing temperaments due to local climate and diet. Sex variation was also significant, even if most dietetic texts were written with a “male norm” in mind, and furthermore presumed that their readers had a great degree of choice as to their diet and mode of life—so the model patient of dietetics was comparatively well-off or even rich. As testimony to the implicit wealth of the patients of dietetic doctors, hunger hardly ever comes up in the written record of dietetics. But even if doctors usually treated clients who could afford to pay them, their advice passed into all orders of society, and all manner of people sought to “be their own physicians,” as in a saying generally attributed to the Roman emperor Tiberius: “After the age of thirty every man is either a fool or a physician.”

Despite the common rule of “quod sapit nutrit” (“what tastes good is good for you”), not every tasty morsel was good for every person. “Melons were potential killers,” Shapin tells us, as they contributed to the production of phlegm and general moisture; pears were nearly as bad, and people were advised to cook them rather than eat them raw. Cabbage and beans could exacerbate melancholy, and so could pigeons, rabbits, geese, ducks, goats, and boar. Since balance was desirable, people were instructed to eat foods that helped keep their temperamental tendencies in check; a person with a melancholic disposition (philosophers and scholars were often melancholy) should avoid foods that exacerbate that tendency. Sanguinaries and cholerics could thereby tolerate watery melon or cucumbers better than phlegmatics. Onions were seen as hot, so cholerics, whose dispositions were already hot, had to avoid them; phlegmatics, on the other hand, could eat onions and benefit from their heat. A standing preconception held that tough workers could best enjoy (and tolerate) tougher meats, and could thrive on bull’s beef—the idea of British beef as a fortifying national dish echoed earlier associations between beef and the doughty peasantry of England. In reality, of course, the tougher meats were also cheaper, suggesting that class underlay the dietetic understanding of who should eat what. In many cases, eaters were thought to take on the qualities of the animals they ate. One promoter of New World colonization insisted that the “Savages” got that way by eating the flesh of wolves and bears, whereas the English often described beef not just as their food but also as a source of national identity. If the beef-eating English could define themselves against the “effete” tables set by other nationalities, Jean-Jacques Rousseau would ascribe to the English a cruelty built from dining on “rosbifs.”

During the later 17th and 18th centuries, the proponents of a new scientific medicine gradually displaced dietetics in both thought and common practice. Mathematics and machines supplied natural philosophers with new intellectual tools and metaphors for understanding nature. These could explain the workings (and failures) of our bodies in attractive new ways. René Descartes, in his 1637 book Discourse on the Method, argued that knowledge of nature would eventually give us mastery of nature. He hoped that a completed philosophical project would in fact enable him to greatly exceed the normal human lifespan.

The new natural philosophy subscribed to an entirely novel idea: progress. Dietetics, by contrast, had no such notion. The humors, elements, and spirits reflected a basically stable and static understanding of the world. The new modernizing medicine rejected the “dead hand of authority,” as some called it, employing mathematics and observation instead of relying on tradition. The resulting “iatromechanism” (that is, a mechanical medical science) may not have lasted as an explanatory basis for human health in relation to nutrition—an emergent science of chemistry eventually replaced it—but succeeded in offering a new style of dietary expertise: one less rooted in personal observation of the fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats of the natural world, and more reliant on the authority of educated physicians. It was harder and harder to act as one’s own physician with confidence. The practical advice iatromechanists gave, however, was not so different from the recommendations of dieteticians. They both emphasized balance and moderation, while explaining the workings of the body in very different ways. As Shapin puts it, the iatromechanical revolution yielded a “pastiche of old and new.”

If iatromechanism didn’t stick, the 17th and 18th centuries nevertheless radically altered medical thought. More and more physicians ignored an old holistic premise of dietetic thought: the unity of “is” and “ought”—in other words, the way the natural world divulged an ideal of ordered equilibrium that was prescriptive, so that one strove to emulate it. Dieteticians had observed the natural world as a set of qualitative tendencies embodied by elements, humors, or spirits in balance with one another. Human health was subject to the same balancing, but a bite of onion, peach, or mutton held more than simply physical significance. There was no distinction between what was good for you and what was inherently good. This sense of potential human alignment with the larger natural world and its goodness is what the decline of dietetics cost European imaginations.

Perhaps dietetics lasted so long because of the way it straddled the natural and the moral realms, the “is” and the “ought.” Even today, the term “natural” has normative force, relative to “unnatural,” and any medical practice that invokes nature can hope to benefit from the legitimacy that nature grants. An important lesson of Eating and Being is that the modern expert culture, which severed “is” from “ought” in both scientific knowledge and medical practice, has not fully succeeded in eradicating nature’s legitimating power. We may no longer believe that so-called “hard” or serious students have sallow complexions and weak or empty bellies, nor may we think we can know the results of eating a peach by observing its gross physical qualities, but many of us still implicitly believe in a larger natural order of which we are one small part. Dietetics endured until the people whose health it vouchsafed, and the world in which they lived, no longer comprised a meaningful whole. It endured until an apple seemed to have chemical constituents rather than qualities.

¤

Scholars have written on dietetics before, but Eating and Being illuminates its intellectual and cultural dynamics like no prior work. When the book addresses such 19th- and 20th-century scientists as Justus von Liebig and Wilbur Olin Atwater, Shapin demonstrates that even a modernizing nutritional science equipped with protein, calories, and vitamins has never moved past the idea that we somehow are what we eat. Nutritionists merely recast this idea in new terms. The book is also remarkable for its methodological attunements. Shapin points out that many historians of science and medicine have passed over dietetics as uninteresting, not only as a body of outmoded medical thought but also because it lasted so long. Attracted to phases of sudden change that we can try to explain, we tend to ignore periods of cultural and intellectual stability, denying ourselves the chance to analyze why particular medical, gustatory, scientific, and philosophical ideas endured in the first place. Dietetic thought benefited by combining “is” and “ought,” the natural and the moral, because this meant that dietetics could serve as the voice of nature in the sphere of human culture.

For many generations, dietetics made sense of our foodways from farm to table while offering the promise of long life with illness held at bay. What Max Weber rendered in terms of “enchantment” (i.e., “the disenchantment of the world,” a phrase Weber adapted from Friedrich Schiller) is most simply a sense of the binding meaningfulness of life—a sense shared from hut to hovel to house, and from field to palace. What we lose through disenchantment is the feeling that the structures we build for ourselves, the second nature that we call culture, can properly stand in the place of original nature itself. Modern nutrition, its deepest intellectual groundwork established in the 17th century and refined by generations of scientists, cannot do this, and has no affinity for the task, but dietetics could.

In a sense, Eating and Being continues a line of thought Shapin developed earlier in “The Philosopher and the Chicken”—all through the book, I heard that essay, as it were, scratching and pecking in the yard out back. That essay’s target was the myth that philosophers and scientists are just fundamentally different types of people, which is the kind of idea one can develop in a world preoccupied with the moral qualities of different human types. And that essay’s conclusion was that expert cultures in the modern world have dispensed with the connection between morality and knowledge, just as modern science and medicine have severed “is” from “ought.” Before Eating and Being even begins, two epigrams from our post-dietetic modern world invite us to think through the relationship between eating and morality. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911), defines digestion as “the conversion of victuals into virtues,” while Bertolt Brecht, in Die Dreigroschenoper (1928), writes, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral,” (“first feed the face, and then talk right and wrong” in the popular English translation, The Threepenny Opera). Perhaps our food does serve us well, when we digest it. But as Brecht implies, if we can only talk about morality after we eat, then perhaps our morals are like something else that follows eating: shit. Brecht goes on: “For even honest folk may act like sinners / unless they’ve had their customary dinners.” I found myself wondering, as I closed Shapin’s book, about the meaning of his playful choice at the book’s beginning. Bierce and Brecht seem to me to describe what happens when our food culture becomes divorced from moral culture, when social inequalities and a lack of communal provisioning leave many hungry while the rich throw their leftovers away.

And what of contemporary food writers who extol the virtues of whole foods, slow foods, and eating “food. Not too much. Mostly plants”? In his book’s conclusion, Shapin observes that writers such as Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, and movement builders like Carlo Petrini (founder of Slow Food), have remoralized our foodways. They have done this by arguing that, in modernity, industrialized agriculture not only pollutes our planet but also endangers our health. Furthermore, Big Agribusiness and the spread of the “Western diet” threaten delicious, local food traditions around the world. Much of Pollan’s work constitutes an attack on “nutritionism,” a term he takes from the sociologist Gyorgy Scrinis, which means a reductive view of food that breaks every banana, every salmon, and every stick of butter down into its constituent nutrients and views them not primarily as foods but as numbers in the columns of daily sustenance. By using the phrase “a delicious revolution” to describe her work at Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolyard project, Waters invokes political morality, even as she implicitly connects her work to the history of progressive activism in Berkeley. If the past 20-plus years of food writing have involved some moralizing, well, perhaps the impulse to moralize has never disappeared. Meanwhile, contemporary cookbooks that describe an “ideal” life with food, consisting of home cooking and long evening dinners with extended family and friends, offer a kind of soft-focused moralizing of their own.

Shapin has described (in the aforementioned Chronicle interview) that he came up as a scholar in the 1970s and ’80s in an environment “not much defined by disciplines.” It’s worth quoting him at greater length:

What would happen if you took a problem—and for my little group in Edinburgh the problem was how to describe science as a typical form of culture—and brought everything available to bear on that problem? That’s a world we’ve substantially lost. Disciplinary professionalism and the bureaucratic culture of continuous evaluation helped put an end to that sort of thing.

In some ways, Eating and Being is a scholarly monograph of a traditional sort, richly and sometimes even discursively footnoted—the product of many years of study. It earns its authority the old-fashioned way. And in other respects, Eating and Being defies categorization, the kind of work a scholar can do when they are not narrowly confined by departmental audit culture or disciplinary conformity. The result is that Eating and Being is a genuine pleasure to read and think about. The issue the book raises is profound: in our gardens, in our kitchens, and at our tables, every morsel links eating and being. “You are what you eat” never seems to vanish, no matter what analytic tools you apply to those five words. “Tonight, I am making Tuscan bean soup for dinner” are Shapin’s opening words, and there’s a lesson in the implied movement of hands, spoon, and pot. If you are what you eat, there is a special pleasure in cooking the meal yourself.