ABSTRACT
This book has covered a number of historical periods and social transformations that have been important in understanding the development of a science of food choice. One of the major aims has been to theorise the modern subject of food choice. In showing how this subject has been historically situated in modernity we have provided an account of nutrition that is quite different from others. Throughout this book it has been stressed that nutrition did not arrive unannounced, as it were, 150 years ago. It was pre-figured by a number of earlier concerns and problematisations about food and the body in Western culture. But neither was the emergence of nutrition an inevitable part of so-called scientific or medical progress. It was, instead, dependent upon a collection of historically fragile contingencies in which it became possible to consider food and the body in certain ways. At the beginning of this book three questions were proposed. They were:
1 What considerations were made regarding diet prior to the emergence of nutrition?
