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The Political Economy of Nutrition in the Eighteenth Century*

Eighteenth-century European writers frequently described foods as ‘nourishing’. Nourishing foods were acknowledged to play a central role in building the healthy, energetic populations identified as key to commercial and political success, but their objective scientific characterisation proved impossible. In practice, only the people actually eating the food could determine its nutritive power. Eighteenth-century nutrition was perforce a form of embodied knowledge, not a set of scientific facts. 
 
This article contrasts nutrition's unquestioned importance to enlightened political and economic discourse with its evolving position within scientific and vernacular systems of knowledge. Despite intense investigation of food chemistry, the embodied experience of eaters remained stubbornly central to all discussion of a food’s ability to nourish. The vernacular nutritional evaluations of ordinary people infiltrated more lofty discussions of diet to create an uneasy and unequal dialogue. Elite schemes to promote particular foodstuffs as suitable for the labouring population thus relied not simply on the expert opinions of scientists, but also on the bodies and opinions of the very people at whom these campaigns were aimed. Only in the nineteenth century was nutrition converted into an objective, quantifiable object of knowledge.