ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the way nutrition discourse circulates in contemporary Western culture. Our purpose here is to map the changing nature of the government of food choice, especially as it has been constructed by nutrition, since the Second World War to the present. We will see how new rationalities, new calculations and tactics have developed over the past fifty years with an expressed concern for the nutritional health and happiness of individuals. We will also look at the effects of these concerns on the way individuals govern themselves through the ethics of nutrition, particularly the way this ethical comportment fits into other forms of regime. The material presented in this chapter focuses particularly on the Australian reception of nutrition. This experience, to a large extent, mirrors that of other communities in Western culture – especially in the United States and the United Kingdom – where nutrition has become an important health-related concern since the Second World War. More recently, a number of other European and Asian countries have developed an interest in nutrition so that dietary guidelines or goals have now been established for nearly all countries in the industrialised world (Trichopoulou and Vassilakou, 1990). We should note, too, that these concerns have been ‘exported’, as it were; they have been applied to, and, indeed, taken up by, some cultures in the developing world where changing political, economic and social structures have ushered in Western eating habits and Western disease patterns.
