A historical survey of American diet books has been waiting to happen, and Adrienne Rose Bitar has carried out this project with great success. She finds these books to be in dialogue with American culture and that, no matter which diet book you open, the theme is about civilization in decline. Dieting, whether paleo, devotional or detox, is the body’s struggle against toxic modernity and back to a better, earlier, society. In these books, civilization is a disease and the only way to cure oneself is by going back to a more innocent eating era.
Drawing from utopian scholarship, Bitar argues that these diets present “a tragic vision of a life of hope,” which is constantly disappointed but renewed again. The constant renewal of hope is evident in the long history of books that present a diet plan; it started with William Banting’s Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public...