Conclusion

This concluding chapter summarizes the major insights of the previous chapters and explores the balance of gains and losses modernity has created within the history of humanitarian nutrition. This “Faustian pact of modernity” produces incredible results, but exacts terrible costs. It generates wealth and opportunity, but leads to the destruction of tradition. It produces new freedoms, but imprisonment in bureaucratic machinery and selfish individualism. It creates material comforts, but the destruction of the natural environment. The chapter shows how this account of modernity makes for an excellent description of humanitarianism and its history. To conclude, the chapter presents some lessons and recommendations.

Justus Liebig and the Rise of Nutritional Science

This chapter explains how theories of gelatin and osmazome were eventually replaced by a more modern approach to the diet. It illustrates this change by comparing two very similar products that emerged over the space of just a decade: a substance called Osmazome Food, which was promoted by Alexis Soyer, and one known as Extractum Carnis, or “extract of meat,” which was promoted by the founder of modern biochemistry, Justus Liebig. These two products were essentially the same, but were marketed in radically different ways: the former framed by classical dietetics; the latter by modern nutritional science. The chapter shows how classical dietetic tradition, which had spread throughout Europe in the Renaissance, died away with modern biochemistry, and Liebig's science shifted attention inside the body. This had four main implications which profoundly changed how food was judged, how nutritional authority was conducted, how food was removed from its social context, and how food became a tool of progress.