IncorporatedknowledgeandthemakingoftheconsumernutritionalscienceandfoodhabitsintheUSA,GermanyandSwitzerland(1930sto50s).docVIP

Tagung vom 26. – 28. Februar 2004 Universit?t Bielefeld “Knowing Consumers: Actors, Images, Identities in Modern History” Incorporated knowledge and the making of the consumer: Nutritional science and food habits in the USA, Germany and Switzerland (1930s to 50s) Jakob Tanner (University of Zurich, Switzerland) [Draft version. Do not quote without permission of the author] 1. Introduction 1. My paper starts with the assumption that the notion of a ‘consumer-revolution’ is problematic, because it stipulates a dichotomy between an inert and relatively stable period before and a dynamic phase after a supposed threshold into the modern area has been crossed. In accordance with Giovanni Levi, one of the main protagonists of micro-storia, I think it is much more appropriate to focus on a century-long and still unaccomplished process of accumulation – not only of consumer goods, but also of the social practices and the cultural competences that are needed to be a ‘good consumer’, able to navigate in an appropriate manner in a huge and agitated ocean of goods and services. This way, a number of important frictions and non-simultaneous developments will come to the foreground. A micro-analytical perspective is not a pleading for “small is beautiful”, not a self-limitation on tiny contexts, but such an approach permits to reconstruct social change in a much more differentiated way than the macro-view. When historians go beyond the household-statistics, when they look at food entitlements in families, when they include informal procurements of foodstuffs, then they are able to reveal a more complex picture of class-divisions, of asymmetries in gender and family relations, of differentiations between generations and variations of regional patterns. Empirical data normally covers households as the central consumer unit, which means that many dimensions of inequalities tend to be camouflaged. Nonetheless the family and the household are important factors in the process of the