Vitamins, Nutrition, and the Great Depression

Happy New Year! For some reason in the United States, January 1st means an austerity reaction to the overindulgence of the two previous months - from Halloween candy to New Year's Eve champagne and canapes. And while I think balance is necessary in life, I don't appreciate the diet culture nonsense that shames people into extreme restriction and grueling workouts. Teen Vogue did a piece last year on the history of diet culture. 

But while New Year's resolutions and diets rarely work out, the discovery of vitamins in the 20th century (yes, 20th) led to great leaps in nutrition education for ordinary people. When I stumbled across this British film from 1938 in 2022, I wrote a brief reaction for Patreon members, which I'm reposting here for everyone. Whatever resolutions you have (or don't have), I hope one of them is to keep consuming food history content! 

(The following content was originally published for members-only on Patreon in August, 2022.)

I'm always on the hunt for food history primary sources, and there are lots of great videos on YouTube. I'm most partial to the original digitized films, rather than videos created in the modern era. I don't usually go for British stuff, in large part because the Brits have so much more historiography on food history than Americans do. But I found this film fascinating.
Created in 1936, it summarizes some of the recent discoveries of vitamins, and the impact of food and nutrition on children and the general population, with emphasis on calcium and iron intake. 

The Great Depression, which began with the Crash of 1929 and continued until the outbreak of World War II, created real hardship and hunger around the world. The prolonged malnutrition of the Depression would lead to many governments, including the United States government, to attempt to address nutrition for the general public, using the most recent research.

Like many nutritional guidelines of the time, this film emphasizes the importance of milk consumption. Milk boosterism is controversial in the modern era, in large part because non-White people are far more likely to be lactose intolerant. Milk also has problematic associations with whiteness and purity. "The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk: Food Oppression and the USDA" is an academic paper by a law professor, not a food historian, but it raises some interesting points. 

Nutrition is complicated. We made great strides between 1890 and 1950 in understanding nutrition and vitamins, but the problem with nutrition as a field is that it tends to apply the same advice to wide swaths of an incredibly diverse population. Health (or lack thereof) is caused by a whole host of factors besides diet and activity level, including genetics, environment, and even some factors we're only just now starting to understand, like gut biome and epigenetics. Obesity in particular can be caused by a whole host of factors outside of the control of the individual, especially generational trauma, which can be expressed by ancestral malnutrition, transgenerational exposure to toxic chemicals (especially DDT), environmental factors (especially exposure to endocrine disruptors like BPA) and other stress factors including transgenerational genocide, displacement, and famine. (If you want to read the scientific studies, this paper summarizes several.)

Although the field is changing, many nutritionists and certainly official nutrition advice still reflects the bias (conscious or unconscious) of a century ago.
 
That being said, I am personally a dairy enthusiast, especially full-fat dairy, which I think has been too-long vilified. But while I grew up drinking skim milk like water, today I only drink a small glass of milk a few days a week, or on breakfast cereal or fruit as a dessert. But plain yogurt, sour cream, cottage cheese, cream, cheese, and butter are staples in my household. I can certainly understand why dairy grosses some people out, especially those who didn't grow up with it, but I blame my 100% Scandinavian roots for my addiction. Better locally-produced dairy than coffee, alcohol, or drugs, in my opinion. 

But I digress. I found the video interesting not only for its commentary on milk, but also its addressing of the problem through government intervention, which in some circles has become increasingly unpopular. But that was the turning point of the Great Depression in many ways, politically and socially. We went from Herbert Hoover's idea of the Depression, tactics he honed during the First World War as United States Food Administrator - that business was best run by executives, that businessmen were the most knowledgeable and capable of solving problems, and that public-private partnerships that profited everyone were the best way to handle crises. All of those tactics largely worked during WWI. They failed miserably during the Great Depression. It took FDR recycling his cousin Teddy's ideas of a Fair Deal into a New Deal to galvanize the nation and get us on the road to recovery. Whether or not we would have recouped the enormous public investment without a World War is debatable, but it certainly saved hundreds of thousands of people from outright starvation, malnutrition, and despair. 

If you want to learn more about nutrition history and the discovery of vitamins, check out my podcast episodes:

Full of Pep: The Controversial Quest for a Vitamin-Enriched America - Part I 
​
Full of Pep: The Controversial Quest for a Vitamin-Enriched America - Part II 

And one of my recorded talks:

When Sugar Was Good For You: The Development of Nutrition Science in America 

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