American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 83, No. 3, 725,
March 2006
© 2006 American Society for Nutrition
Terrors of the Table: the Curious History of Nutrition
edited by Walter Gratzer, 2005, 288 pages, hardcover, $30. Oxford University Press, New York, NY.
Kenneth J Carpenter
Department of Nutritional Sciences
University of California
Berkeley, CA
94720-3104 E-mail: kcarp{at}calmail.berkeley.edu
This book can be looked at as a successor to Drummond and Wilbraham's The Englishman's Food: a History of Five Centuries of English Diet, published in 1939. Although it is not specifically addressed to conditions in England, the author is, again, a professor at the University of London, and, understandably, British researchers and stories of conditions in his own country feature prominently. The book starts with the work of Harriette Chick, of London's Lister Institute, who successfully tackled the serious problem of rickets in Vienna after World War I. She showed that rickets is not the result of poor hygiene and demonstrated, with the use of X-rays, that this condition could be cured with either cod liver oil or irradiation with ultraviolet light. The book continues with the work of the Cambridge nutritionist Elsie Widdowson, who showed that children in German orphanages after World War II thrived with very little high-quality dietary protein if they were supplied with unlimited quantities of bread.
In chapters 7 and 8, justice is done to the pioneers in the worldwide study of what are now recognized as vitamin-deficiency diseases, including Eijkman, Grijns, Goldberger, McCollum, Jansen, and Williams. Much of the remainder of the book deals with fads and quackery as well as some interesting illustrations. One illustration is an 1874 print of a Paris slaughterhouse that depicts ladies of fashion waiting to drink freshly drawn blood in the belief that it would improve their complexions. Another is a 1918 advertisement for OXO cubes (believed to contain meat extract), which claimed to fortify the system against the terrible influenza epidemic of that year. The author also describes the enthusiasms of those who believed in fasting, that health depended on the prolonged chewing of food, or that eating a relatively high-protein diet would result in autointoxication. He also discusses, with a certain amount of skepticism, contemporary ideas such as fiber being good and sucrose being bad for our systems.
The author is a retired biophysicist, not a nutritionist; nevertheless, he must have done a great deal of reading in the field of nutrition because I spotted only 2 small errors. Although the title indicates that it is intended to be a "popular" book, the author cannot restrain himself from being a scholar. The book is full of facts and well referenced, which makes it more suitable, I suspect, for readers of this Journal than for the general public. I recommend this book for bedside reading or to supplement a lecture on a particular nutrition topic. The book would also serve, given its reasonable price, as a prize for competitions among students or a gift to colleagues who may be moving elsewhere or retiring.
