The Western Nutrition Transition Revisited: Pathways of Dietary Change in Europe and North America since the 1950s
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
Rural History 2019
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
According to conventional wisdom, the postwar decades in the industrialized world witnessed the rise of the "Western diet" rich in processed foodstus (meat, vegetable oils, sugar etc.) and the culmination of the "classical" period of the nutrition transition, while the last few decades have featured a turn towards dierentiated products and qualitative substitutions ("food from nowhere" { "food from somewhere"). The paper revisits this argument in the light of the food balance sheets, which have been published by the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) since 1947. The analysis of the development pathways of 24 Western countries shows a more dierentiated picture: whereas it conrms the convergence along the dimensions of "meatication" and "oilication", dietary change was neither linear nor unidirectional. The argument of the Western nutrition transition turns out as a crude abstraction of the concrete pathways of dietary change European and North American countries took in the postwar decades.