Paper short abstract:

This historical case, regulatory challenges posed by new diet foods in the U.S. in the 1960s, explores the ways law, science, and markets invest certain objects (in this case foods) with an embodied normativity that in turn shapes or enlists consumers in particular political economic movements.

Paper long abstract:

In this talk I describe how the appearance of three new diet food markets in the 1960s, and more generally a growing consumerist movement of "healthism", created problems for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in how it regulated food and drug markets through product classification. Each diet product would raise different concerns for regulators. Vitamins and vitamin-enriched foods were "surplus health", but potentially economic trickery known as "nutrition quackery". The second, low-calorie products with new artificial sweeteners, were associated with vanity-dieting and risk-taking with new food additives. The last, low-fat foods, raised a modern medical question of whether preventive care was just for the sick or for everyone. I look at arguments between FDA officials, industry lawyers, and medical professionals over whether these novel foods should be labeled "special dietary", with restricted marketing similar to prescription drugs, or opened up to the broader public for mass consumption. In part, the stakes were institutional: should consumers be empowered to take dietary decisions into their own hands, or would this subvert the role of doctors in treating patients? But the debate was also an argument about what was meant by "ordinary" consumer and "risky" food. Was an ordinary consumer "healthy" and not to be bothered about this hypothetical, future risk? Or, as would become what Dumit calls a "drugs for life" paradigm, did all consumers have some right or obligation to know about the potential that eating certain foods carried for developing future illness?