2014/03/12 by Steven Shapin
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Australian History and Society #Diverse Musicological Studies #Historical Architecture and Urbanism
paper · doi:10.1111/1468-2281.12059
openalex publication_date 2014/03/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
There is deep historicity to the adage ‘You are what you eat’. For a very long time, the relations between aliment and identity − personal and national − were understood in terms of Galenical dietetics and modes of analogical reasoning from the qualities of food to the qualities of people. ‘Hot’ foods, for example, made for a ‘hot’ temperament, and the stolidity of the ox might be transferred to people who ate its flesh. This article tracks the historical career and cultural significance of these relations, and, with the decline of both traditional dietetics and of analogical reasoning by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it describes the different cultural vocabulary used in modernity to talk about food and identity.