Food Reform Movements

Social historians have defined two cycles of American history characterized by an efflorescence of social movements aiming to reform both the individual and the society at large: the Jacksonian Era, from the 1830s to the 1850s, and the Progressive Era, from the 1890s to the 1910s. The reform impulse thrived wherever there was a perceived vice, abuse, or corruption of industrial civilization that needed to be changed, corrected, or improved. Studies of “antebellum” and “progressive” reforms have thus been made across a very broad spectrum of interests, from temperance and antiprostitution crusades to housing and sanitation laws. However, it is only fairly recently, starting in the 1970s and 1980s, that historians have discovered the figure of the “health reformer”, frequently specializing in “food reform”—or depending on the context “diet,” “dietetic,” or “dietary reform”—that is the zealous drive to change the way Americans eat or grow foods, based on religious or secular claims to truth.