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Food, Medicine, and the Quest for Good Health by Nancy Chen

Recent decades have seen an increased trend toward the medicalization of social phenomena previously situated under the purview of alternative authorities—from drug and alcohol use to hyperactivity in adults and children. The increasing consumption of health foods, nutraceuticals, vitamin supplements, and genetically modified and engineered foods has brought the practice of eating even closer to subjection by medical authorities. Nancy Chen describes the transition in the last several years from eating and medicating as an individual act of agency to yet another supervised practice in an existing normative structure. In Food, Medicine, and the Quest for Good Health, she examines the increasingly blurred boundaries between food and medicine. The text contains an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion, and is divided into two parts: (1) food as medicine and (2) medicine as food. In this exceptionally readable text, the author examines diet as the exemplification of individual practice, social relationships and political formations. Chen discusses the ways in which food and medicine were once considered very distinct categories in the United States, which has not been true for all societies. An anthropologist by training, Chen follows in the steps of Claude Levi-Strauss’s work The Elementary Structures of Kinship in which he re-located anthropology from the natural sciences to cultural grounds. Chen emphasizes a cultural understanding of food and the meanings that it has in a society. Throughout the text she examines the ways in which food and medicine are shaped by social norms—effectively separating food and medicine from the biological sciences and situating them in culture. She discusses the manner in which certain foods are eaten at certain times; observations of religious fasting and feasting; issues of food storage and access; the utilization of certain foods as indicators of social class; the use of hands and utensils in eating; the rules regarding who in a community eats what and when; and even what a society will consider food. Chen begins the text by addressing the consumption of healing foods and their associations with longevity. Drawing on historical accounts of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), she recounts the utilization of various herbs, spices and animal parts in order to effect positive outcomes on the physical body. She highlights the parallels that exist between the practices found in TCM and those within ancient Greek and Islamic cultures. Spices receive particular attention. They functioned as markers of class location, as components of healing, cooking and medicine, and even as currency in numerous societies across the globe. Even today in the United States, many of the most traditional celebratory foods—from pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving to gingerbread houses at Christmas—heavily emphasize the inclusion of spices. The advent of the dietary supplement industry had its origins in the traditional consumption of longevity-increasing herbs. The quest for longevity was frequently situated around the consumption of three herbs: ginkgo, ginseng and rhubarb. For millennia, these three herbs have had a reputation for lengthening the human lifespan. In recent years, these traditional herbs, no longer used only as flavor enhancements in food, have come to be widely available in pill and capsule form. Chen’s second chapter looks at the issues of dietary prescriptions and comfort foods. She closely examines the valorization and vilification of salt, sugar and fat in diet. The issue of dieting in the United States is one of significant cultural importance. There is considerable pressure to meet narrow dietary and aesthetic