NYU’s Institute of Public Knowledge is hosting the launch of Practicing Food Studies, edited by Amy Bentley, Fabio Parasecoli, and Krishnendu Ray. I wrote the Foreword. We will all provide brief perspectives on our quarter century of teaching food studies. For information and registration, click here. For 30% off on the book, click here.
Weekend reading: Vitamania!
Catherine Price. Vitamania: Our Obsessive Quest for Nutritional Perfection. Penguin Press, 2015.
I blurbed this one:
Catherine Price gives us a journalist’s entertaining romp through the fascinating history of the discovery of vitamins, and their use and marketing as objects of health obsession. Faith in vitamins, she advises, should be tempered by scientific uncertainty and dietary complexity, and the understanding that foods are better sources than pills.
This is the second excellent book I know of with that title. This one came out in 1996. It focused on supplements and their marketing.
Both have interesting things to say about why so many of us take vitamin supplements, regardless of the lack of evidence that they do us much good.
As I keep observing, there just isn’t much evidence that vitamin supplements make healthy people healthier.