Terrors of the Table: The Curious History of Nutrition

  • Walter Gratzer
Oxford University Press: 2005. 288 pp. £18.99, $30 0192806610 | ISBN: 0-192-80661-0

Terrors of the Table is Walter Gratzer's third book on the theme of science as entertaining anecdote. Since his retirement in 2002 from King's College London as a biophysical chemist, he has taken on the less seemly side of the scientific enterprise: the rivalry, envy, delusion, self-deception and outright fraud sometimes committed by researchers ostensibly engaged in the search for truth. As he explained in a radio interview in 2002, his purpose is “to astonish, to instruct and, most especially, to entertain”.

And what could possibly be more entertaining than the history of nutrition? This, Gratzer says, is “full of fascination and drama, for it encompasses every virtue, defect, and foible of human nature”. To reveal the drama — and a taste of the science that underlies it — he tells some familiar stories. We meet James Lind, who used lemons to counter scurvy; William Beaumont and his fistula patient; Christiaan Eijkman, whose milled rice and chickens revealed so much about beriberi; and a great many others. The stories are replete with sex, religion, suicide, an occasional murder and a riveting cast of characters. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, beheaded at the guillotine in the French Revolution, left behind a “high-spirited” widow, who married the physicist Benjamin Thomson (later known as Count Rumford). Thomson promoted the nourishing properties of soup and invented the drip coffee pot. The chemist Justus Liebig, Gratzer tells us, was “a giant, often wrong, but seldom in doubt”. Albert Szent-Györgyi, who won a Nobel prize for his work on vitamin C, had four wives, two of them 50 years younger than him.

Along with the gossipy details, Gratzer tosses in such diversions as a poem on food adulteration by G. K. Chesterton, and a menu from an 1868 London banquet that lists, among other delectables, “collared horse-head”. For readers who might still be interested in the science, an appendix explains the Krebs cycle, glycolysis and inborn errors of metabolism.

A taste of history: a Thanksgiving Day dinner in nineteenth-century New England. Credit: THE ART ARCHIVE/CULVER PICTURES

The stories are amusing but do not seem to be organized within any particular historical or social context. If the book has an underlying message, it is that “the paladins of progress were always up against the forces of reaction”. This message is especially evident in the final chapters, in which Gratzer confronts nutrition evangelists, miscreants, vitamin-mongers and the “higher quackery” of food adulterers, diet purveyors and cholesterol zealots. As a modern example, he points to the “hopelessly obfuscated question of salt intake”, because its connection to hypertension (except in a “small minority” of individuals) comes down to epidemiology and theology. “There are believers and disbelievers,” writes Gratzer, but “the sceptics have won the argument”. Really? He cites a sceptical journalist but ignores research reviews from decidedly secular groups, such as the 2005 US Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, that continue to interpret “small minority” as significant and to conclude that populations would be healthier if they ate less salt.

Such casual documentation is the most troubling aspect of Gratzer's anecdotal approach. It seems as though he has read books on nutrition history and written his own Readers Digest-style synopses. Entire sections lack citations, as do many quotations. I loved a comment attributed to Sydney Brenner — that he “long ago discovered the obesity gene: it is the gene that opens the mouth” — but the book gives no source.

Of Joseph Goldberger, the US Public Health Service officer who identified pellagra as a dietary deficiency, Gratzer writes: “Goldberger's first posting was to a quarantine station, responsible for inspection of ships arriving at the port of Pennsylvania.” No footnote is evident but the ‘further reading’ list mentions Alan Kraut's Goldberger's War (Hill & Wang, 2003), which I happen to own. Kraut says “Goldberger's first post would be New York” in 1899. He continues: “On April 24, 1900, Goldberger was reassigned by Surgeon General Walter Wyman to the Reedy Island Quarantine Station at Port Penn, Delaware, the station responsible for inspecting ships seeking entry to the port of Philadelphia” (citing a letter from Wyman to Goldberger in 1899). Only the most exacting of scholars will care whether this posting was Goldberger's first or second, but it suggests that the details of Gratzer's book are best taken with a modicum of that theological salt.

Nutritional problems ranging from infant malnutrition to obesity affect vast segments of the world's populations, and are caused as much by political, economic and cultural factors as by the lack or excess of nutrients and energy. The many determinants of nutritional status, and the difficulties inherent in figuring out what people eat from day to day, make studies in this field exceptionally challenging. The history of attempts to disentangle the effects of diet from other factors has much to teach us about the ways in which science and society interact. Gratzer's gentle mocking of human frailties makes pleasant reading, but does little to explain the complexity of the issues or the intellectual demands placed on scientists who try to address them. If Gratzer's book does any good at all, it will inspire students to take up this challenge.