Steven Shapin is professor emeritus of the history of science at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (with Simon Schaffer); The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation; The Scientific Revolution; A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England; and Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority.

“Eating and Being is a history of dietetics, and of the ideas about eating that succeeded it, all the way up to the unpoetic calorie. Shapin is an eminent historian of science whose work has taught us much about the social worlds in which scientific knowledge was created, and he argues here that thinking about food is also a way of thinking about some of the most fundamental categories of human physiology, personality, and morality. . . . Shapin traces the slow and uneven transformations in the ways people imagined their bodies to work, how food made flesh; in his telling, this isn’t a story of radical change but of ‘layered pasts, a surface through which supposedly past sentiments intermittently intrude, one in which some elements of the past were never completely submerged.’”

• List of FiguresIntroduction: What’s for Dinner?Chapter 1: The Words and Ways of Traditional DieteticsChapter 2: Medicine, Morality, and the Fabric of Everyday LifeChapter 3: How to Know about Your Food and How to Know about YourselfChapter 4: You Are What You Eat: Types of People and Types of FoodChapter 5: Talking Back to the Doctors: Medical Expertise and Ordinary LifeChapter 6: Dietetics Modernized? Mathematics and MechanismChapter 7: Dietetics Revolutionized? Common Sense, Common Life, and Chemical ExpertiseChapter 8: Nutrition Science: Constituents and Their PowersConclusion: The Way We Eat NowNotesBibliography

Steven Shapin is professor emeritus of the history of science at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (with Simon Schaffer); The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation; The Scientific Revolution; A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England; and Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority.

“Eating and Being is a history of dietetics, and of the ideas about eating that succeeded it, all the way up to the unpoetic calorie. Shapin is an eminent historian of science whose work has taught us much about the social worlds in which scientific knowledge was created, and he argues here that thinking about food is also a way of thinking about some of the most fundamental categories of human physiology, personality, and morality. . . . Shapin traces the slow and uneven transformations in the ways people imagined their bodies to work, how food made flesh; in his telling, this isn’t a story of radical change but of ‘layered pasts, a surface through which supposedly past sentiments intermittently intrude, one in which some elements of the past were never completely submerged.’”

• List of FiguresIntroduction: What’s for Dinner?Chapter 1: The Words and Ways of Traditional DieteticsChapter 2: Medicine, Morality, and the Fabric of Everyday LifeChapter 3: How to Know about Your Food and How to Know about YourselfChapter 4: You Are What You Eat: Types of People and Types of FoodChapter 5: Talking Back to the Doctors: Medical Expertise and Ordinary LifeChapter 6: Dietetics Modernized? Mathematics and MechanismChapter 7: Dietetics Revolutionized? Common Sense, Common Life, and Chemical ExpertiseChapter 8: Nutrition Science: Constituents and Their PowersConclusion: The Way We Eat NowNotesBibliography

Steven Shapin is professor emeritus of the history of science at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (with Simon Schaffer); The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation; The Scientific Revolution; A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England; and Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority.

“Eating and Being is a history of dietetics, and of the ideas about eating that succeeded it, all the way up to the unpoetic calorie. Shapin is an eminent historian of science whose work has taught us much about the social worlds in which scientific knowledge was created, and he argues here that thinking about food is also a way of thinking about some of the most fundamental categories of human physiology, personality, and morality. . . . Shapin traces the slow and uneven transformations in the ways people imagined their bodies to work, how food made flesh; in his telling, this isn’t a story of radical change but of ‘layered pasts, a surface through which supposedly past sentiments intermittently intrude, one in which some elements of the past were never completely submerged.’”

• List of FiguresIntroduction: What’s for Dinner?Chapter 1: The Words and Ways of Traditional DieteticsChapter 2: Medicine, Morality, and the Fabric of Everyday LifeChapter 3: How to Know about Your Food and How to Know about YourselfChapter 4: You Are What You Eat: Types of People and Types of FoodChapter 5: Talking Back to the Doctors: Medical Expertise and Ordinary LifeChapter 6: Dietetics Modernized? Mathematics and MechanismChapter 7: Dietetics Revolutionized? Common Sense, Common Life, and Chemical ExpertiseChapter 8: Nutrition Science: Constituents and Their PowersConclusion: The Way We Eat NowNotesBibliography