Diet and the Disease of Civilization

Diet and the Disease of Civilization

by Adrienne Rose Bitar
Diet and the Disease of Civilization

Diet and the Disease of Civilization

by Adrienne Rose Bitar

eBook

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Overview

Diet books contribute to a $60-billion industry as they speak to the 45 million Americans who diet every year. Yet these books don’t just tell readers what to eat: they offer complete philosophies about who Americans are and how we should live. Diet and the Disease of Civilization interrupts the predictable debate about eating right to ask a hard question: what if it’s not calories—but concepts—that should be counted?

Cultural critic Adrienne Rose Bitar reveals how four popular diets retell the “Fall of Man” as the narrative backbone for our national consciousness. Intensifying the moral panic of the obesity epidemic, they depict civilization itself as a disease and offer diet as the one true cure. 

Bitar reads each diet—the Paleo Diet, the Garden of Eden Diet, the Pacific Island Diet, the detoxification or detox diet—as both myth and manual, a story with side effects shaping social movements, driving industry, and constructing fundamental ideas about sickness and health. Diet and the Disease of Civilization unearths the ways in which diet books are actually utopian manifestos not just for better bodies, but also for a healthier society and a more perfect world. 


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780813589664
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Publication date: 01/26/2018
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 243
File size: 3 MB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

ADRIENNE ROSE BITAR is an American cultural critic specializing in food, health, and concepts of American civilization. She is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. 

Table of Contents

Introduction 3
1 Paleolithic Diets and the Caveman Utopia 26
2 Devotional Diets and the American Eden 52
3 Primitive Diets and the “Paradise Paradox” 85
4 Detoxification Diets and Concepts of a Toxic Modernity 119
Conclusion 149
Acknowledgments 162
Notes 166
Bibliography 205
Index 225
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