Cultural shifts in developed countries in the last two centuries: Attitude to nutrition

Abstract

Nutrition process and practices are one of the basic elements of the human routine life. This process has a significant cultural and historical imprint and subject to social changes. The paper is devoted to food studies. Food studies is the new interdisciplinary field that includes critical analysis of food and its contexts in science, art, history and society. Food studies cover wide range of sociocultural issues related to food and nutrition. All these issues reflect the approach to nutrition not as to satisfaction of basic human need in food but as to significant and historically variable sociocultural practice and part of the lifestyle. The paper examines how the attitude to various types of food and drinks has changed over the course of two centuries, as well as to nutrition in general in developed countries. The data source is a collection of books created by Google as the only source of long-term data. The time frame for the various changes has been established. Some of our results confirm the established opinions, others are unexpected.