Problems of changing food habits cut across ordinary discipline lines, in addition to involving contributions from both pure and applied sciences. There is a mass of literature and recorded experimentation on many aspects of the problem, ranging from studies of soil agronomy which illuminate the question of whether the habit of eating locally grown food is or is not the most nutritionally valuable behavior, through data on the content of diets, data on the relationship between purchasing power and diet, studies of historically changing diets, animal experiments in individual taste and preference and their relation to nutrition, and records of the cultural integration of food through case histories of individuals whose gastrointestinal disorders can be shown to be systematically related to the way in which learning to eat was combined with other types of learning.

As the Committee's task was to integrate existing materials and devise new ways of tapping existing knowledge on the problem of cultural change, a primary requirement was to develop a point of view, an approach which could make systematic use of additions to knowledge in all of the fields from which research results could be expected. New information is continually coming out on the perishable quality of vitamins in vegetables on a steam table ; on a new experiment in a rat's preference for the food which he ate less often regardless of whether it was a more or less nutritious food ; on the relative palatability of different varieties of the same food ; or, on the other hand, on detailed studies of purchasing habits of subcultural groups, or of striking shifts in the consumption of different foods under various sorts of pressure (advertising, wartime shortages, etc.) ; on new experiments in the relationship between anxiety and acidity in the stomach. All of these findings have to be fitted together to provide a systematic and coherent scientific background for recommendations directed toward changing the dietary pattern of American culture.

Furthermore these findings have to be examined also to provide orientation for the Committee's responsible task of estimating clearly the relationship between any particular change which may be introduced in the dietary patterns, or the culturally standardized methods of inculcating food habits, and the impact of such a change on other parts of our culture or the culture of other peoples of the world with whom we come into contact through lend-lease, relief and rehabilitation procedures. For example, an increased knowledge of nutrition which is acquired by mothers without any concordant alterations in their methods of child training may produce feeding problems which have a far more serious effect upon the child's development than the less perfect diet which the child ate without pressure. Gifts of relief white flour, while temporarily stemming famine, may fasten upon a population which traditionally ate whole grains a habit with disastrous repercussions for their future health. The way in which substitutions necessitated by war are presented to the public may have later effects on the acceptance of those foods. Authoritarian methods used in enforcing nutritional standards may endanger democratic participation in other community activities. Alterations in the source of the food, as when individual food tickets are given to children in emergency mass feeding situations, may result in a breakdown of parental authority which was primarily sanctioned by the food-giving functions of the family. Only by putting each recommended innovation and the methods suggested for bringing it about against the total cultural picture, is it possible to guard against initiating changes which, while nutritionally desirable in the narrow sense, may be socially undesirable in a wider sense.

The principal discipline represented among the Committee members is cultural anthropology, and the conceptions of cultural anthropology have been used in developing the approach. Food habits are seen as the culturally standardized set of behaviors in regard to food manifested by individuals who have been reared within a given cultural tradition. These behaviors are seen as systematically interrelated with other standardized behaviors in the same culture. In attempting to estimate the strength of any given item of behavior, e.g., preference for meat, aversion to milk, etc., this item is not treated as isolated, but is referred to the total complex of behaviors which constitute the food habits. Similarly, in considering methods of change, of innovation or alteration in existing patterns, recourse is had not merely to traditional psychological pronouncements on learning, but also to the habits of learning of Americans in 1943, and furthermore to learnings or resistances which involve the body as directly as do habits connected with food. Moreover, the interaction between the culturated individual and his environment has two aspects in any consideration of food habits, interaction with the food producing and food distributing systems, that is, adjustments to the physical environments, and interaction between the individual organism and the actual food. While cultural factors are expected to account in very large degree for the food habits of mankind, there is also the possibility that combinations of foods may exert a certain degree of coercion upon physiological responses, so that the constitution of foods themselves must also be taken into account.

A dynamic description of the total food habits pattern of a culture or subculture can be approached in a number of different ways. A minute survey of the food eaten at any given time by adults may be combined with careful observations and experimentally instituted attempts to change that pattern. For example, if we had a complete picture of the current eating habits of the members of an upstate New York community, adequate verbal accounts of the grounds upon which they rationalized their current procedures, and records of attempts to introduce new foods and alter both their meal pattern and the combinations in which foods were habitually eaten, together with verbatim records of acceptances and refusals and reasons given, it would be possible to construct an adequate description of the contemporary pattern, not only its overt content but also its deeper emotional content, of the terms in which the people of that community seek and accept food, the fears and repugnance which deter them from eating other food, the situations in which they will share food, or accept food differently prepared or served, and of the states of mind which might result from any drastic alteration in their traditional food habits.

Another approach to the dynamics of the food complex is to study the ways in which, within any given culture, good habits are inculcated in the growing child. Such an approach involves descriptions of the post partum procedures, breast feeding, supplementary feeding, weaning techniques, sanctions invoked to narrow the child's acceptance within socially approved limits, sanctions invoked to widen the child's acceptance to include all socially prescribed foods, and ways in which gifts of food, threats of deprivation of food, and situations involving food are integrated in the system of character formation. On the basis of such analysis, it would be possible to prescribe the lines which would have to be followed if effective change were to occur, and the implications of changed food habits for the rest of the personality.

Neither type of study is yet available in any complete form. During the last two years two field expeditions, one consisting of seven field workers under the auspices of the University of Chicago,* and one of two field workers under the auspices of the Nutrition Division † of the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services, have made preliminary studies of this kind which provide us with the most extensive body of data yet collected on intensively observed small communities in a modern culture. Neither study approximates the sort of completeness which can be obtained on a primitive society. Preliminary memoranda have been prepared, using living primary sources, on the culturally differentiated food habits of certain subcultural groups in the United States. 1 , 13 , 14 , 28 , 29

As there was no immediate prospect of financing intensive cultural studies of American food habits, it was decided to devise a flexible instrument by which a quick appraisal of some of the more significant motivations could be arrived at. Professor Kurt Lewin,‡ 15 of the State University of Iowa, developed a test based upon intensive interviewing, which he tested out upon some 2300 school children in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This test can be used rapidly with groups of school children in any area and brings into relief such dynamic relationships as the degree of association between food which is disliked and food which is healthy; which types of food are presided over by the mother, the father, contemporaries, teachers, and health authorities; how food behavior is expected to change with increasing maturity and independence, etc.

A related instrument which can be used in defining the content and pattern of regional food practices has been devised by W. Franklin Dove. 7 8 - 9 Dr. Dove's many other papers cover an integrated attack upon the whole problem of regional food patterns, nutritive value of foods, and the possibility of altering natural foods so that they make a more ideal contribution to a given food problem.

From these various sources of data, combined with other partial sources of material on diet, resistance to change, rationalizations of resistance, etc., it is possible to identify various important social psychological characteristics of the American food pattern such as: the role of European peasant concept tions of status which have given an importance to white bread, much sugar, meat every day, etc. ; the Puritan tradition of a connection between food which is healthful and food which is disliked, and the tendency in communities with a Puritan tradition to use food for purposes of reward and punishment and to handle delicious food as the reward for eating healthful, but disliked food; the equally definite Southeastern food pattern in which the emphasis is not upon health and duty but upon personal taste and a personal relationship between the eater and his food. Other tendencies which may be identified include the emphasis upon appearance of food rather than taste, an increasing preference for refined, purified, highly processed foods in which there is a minimum of waste material, and a parallel emphasis upon purity, packaging, etc. Culturally standardized objections to complex food dishes in which the constituents cannot be identified may also be referred, as may the characteristics listed above, to the situation in which people with very widely different food habits have found themselves in close association with each other, dependent upon alien cooking, alien serving, alien ownership and management of food distributing agencies. An investigation conducted by the Committee into ways in which emergency feeding could make maximum allowance for cultural differences in food habits 3 showed that the most practical way of avoiding giving offense to anyone in a mixed group is to cook single foods with a minimum of seasoning and serve all condiments separately. Contemporary cafeteria procedures in America and the large development of self-selected types of meals are an example of a social institution which is adapted to a variety of mutually incompatible food habits. It is probable that many other characteristic American attitudes toward foods, including taboos on all subjects which may arouse disgust during eating, may be referred to the experience of different mutually unacceptable food patterns. Up until the last year, with the exception of some types of company-owned towns, very few Americans under forty have ever had the experience of having money to buy food which, however, could not be obtained. The attitude of many European peasants who treat bread as sacred and guard against a single crumb falling on the floor has vanished in a country in which food was the certainty and money the uncertainty.

The patterning of food habits in other cultures is not only a significant source of materials from which useful abstractions may be drawn 10 , 17 , 22 , 31 and a necessary background for understanding subcultural groups in the United States; 1 , 13 , 14 , 28 , 29 the food habits of other peoples are also significant for us because of the task of feeding liberated and war torn countries. Not only must the rations which we send be adapted to existing supplies of food, to carefully ascertained nutritional requirements and to the exigencies of transportation, but also, if they are to be of maximum use, the rations must be adapted to the food habits of the inhabitánts of the various countries. The Committee has set up a series of cultural food experiments in which samples of a variety of concentrated emergency rations * are tested and worked over by groups of nationals of the various European countries to whom we may expect eventually to send food. On the basis of recommendations developed out of these test situations it will be possible to send with supplies of emergency rations detailed instructions in the native language as to the most acceptable method of cooking them.

As world food plans develop, the more data which we have upon ways in which existing supply can be adapted to traditional patterns so as to provide good nutrition, the more effective world-wide policies for improving nutrition will be.

In any study of food habits, it is important to define the patterns into which the available foods are arranged, such as number and form of meals, and the cultural—as opposed to the nutritional—equivalences which can be invoked within these patterns. So while a nutritional substitute for meat may be milk, the cultural substitute may be a “casserole” in which the container has been substituted for the thing contained, and food that is in no sense a substitute for a protein will be accepted when presented on the table in a suitably shaped container.†

Meal patterns are equally arbitrary and important, and alterations in the time or designation of a meal may mean severe nutritional dislocations, as when some Eastern Europeans, upon immigrating to America, dropped the second breakfast, or when odd-shift workers eat three meals, none of which is breakfast; ‡ and so the foods which customarily appear only at a breakfast table, fruit juice, cereal with milk, and eggs, tend to disappear from the diet. Shopping habits may have equally far reaching effect upon family food habits ; for instance, since rationing, increased shopping by men and children of high school age has been reported. In the North American food pattern, the father presides over meat and fish, the mother over milk, vegetables, fruit juices and liver, while adolescents tend to demonstrate their independence by refusing to eat what is good for them. A shift in shopping habits resulting from the difficulties of using rationing coupons, increasing or irregular employment of women, etc., may therefore also affect the actual content of the meal, for, as Professor Lewin's study § has demonstrated, the person who controls the channel controls the diet of the family.

Recent studies of the effect of methods of food preparation on vitamin loss 12 , 27 have pointed up the close relationship between habits of food preparation, such as the sharecropper's habit of leaving greens cooking on the stove while going to work in the fields, 30 or the forehanded housewife's habit of preparing vegetables before breakfast, and the nourishment which families will finally receive from the food prepared in this way. Similarly, the growth of institutional feeding, with increased dependence on the steam table, may have important nutritional implications so that a carefully cultivated habit of selecting a balanced meal which would be efficacious under one condition of food preparation may be wholly inadequate under other circumstances. Where meals have been set in a pattern of family life, either with the southern emphasis upon catering to the tastes of each member of the family 5b or the northern emphasis upon moral overhauling of family members' behavior, conditions which isolate the individual and force him to eat alone may have important nutritional implications: the food associated with family living may be rejected entirely or overconsumed.

Studies like those of Dr. Curt Richter 32 , 33 on the ability of individual animals to select their own optimum diets also suggest that the nutrition of a people may be affected by habits of rigid food service in which each individual is served an exactly balanced meal without regard to individual preference. Such habits of food service as the individual plate and later types of blue plate service which are even invading the home all serve arbitrarily to standardize the food eaten by one person. Although it may be argued that such an arbitrarily balanced meal would be superior to the meals habitually eaten by the worst fed third of our population, there is a danger that the conventions of a balanced meal—plate service—may become established in the higher income levels and sift down as a style to the lower income levels, without the necessary knowledge to see that the meal is really balanced. The sort of individual adjustment which human beings, as well as rats, may conceivably make to an inadequate diet, such as reduction in caloric intake when the protective foods fell below a certain minimum, would then be ruled out by a food habit which had been nutritionally meaningful at a different income level. The whole tendency to train children in terms of “eating what's on your plate” introduces the same type of rigid category in the individual's relationship to his food.

When the culturally standardized dietary behavior has been described and analyzed, it is possible to consider the implications of experiments such as that of Festinger 11 on the preference manifested for the food less often eaten, or the relevancy of experiments in transfer of learning, etc., and to integrate them so that they will help in determining how to change American food habits and the results of such changes. Thus in every consideration, we do not think of an abstract human being eating an abstract food, but of particular human beings, members of an identifiable subculture of the United States, eating particular foods with definite qualities in addition to the socio-psychological values which have been assigned to that food by the culture. We do not ask, “How can we change food habits ?” but rather, “How can we change the food habits of a community of second generation Americans of Polish, or Italian, or Hungarian extraction, where both men and women work in the mills and the average grade completed is the fifth?” or “How can we change the food habits of southern sharecroppers whose food habits are tied into a one crop method of production, type of credit allowed by the stores, rolling stores, habits of catering to individual preference and assigning ill health to the effects of particular foods, who live in a caste society where there is a characteristic rejection of any food identified as ‘animal,' i.e., likely to lower the eater, etc.?” For such groups, definite methods can be discussed. Upon what ages of children, through what agencies, through what media should nutritionally valuable habits be urged ? What sanctions should be used ? How should new foods be presented or old, nutritionally undesirable foods be disparaged? Who should become the surrogate of the new nutrition knowledge, the mother, the teacher, the physician, the baseball hero, or moving picture actress, a puppet character like “Little Jackie” of the Dental Hygiene Division, South Carolina Public Health Service, the “government” ? Should the emphasis be upon converting each individual to purposeful, careful eating or upon altering the style of American meals so that individuals will be well fed without having to exercise conscious and unremitting nutritional vigilance? 19 , 20 , 35

Asking questions like these shifts the deliberations from such questions as, “Isn't the radio a good medium, shouldn't it be used more ?” or “Wouldn't prestige and status be the easiest way to influence people? ” to precise problems which can be stated in such a way that they can be answered. These precise questions become, “Under what conditions will individuals, with a known character structure, with known attitudes toward and ideas about food, eating a known diet, and with other known behaviors which will be affected by and will affect their food habits, tend to resist or accept an alteration in food preparation, food content, food proportions?” The task of applied science then is to set up a program for controlling a social process in such a way that the desired changes will occur, instead of a program aimed at the reform of identified individuals.

While it is possible to predict upon the basis of our available knowledge the general lines which acceptance of or resistance to change will follow, the Committee has found it necessary, in making specific recommendations, to make current studies of American attitudes on such matters as reduction in meat supply, relationship between food and morale, etc. The underlying attitudes which appear in these materials remain constant, and the studies are designed to reveal the situational impact of news, world events, and strictly contemporary conditions. A method of analysis of verbatim materials collected by the voluntary work of individuals and institutions throughout the country has been developed by Rhoda Métraux,* so that it is possible for the Committee to bring knowledge of basic cultural processes and American social psychological behavior to bear upon concrete problems. This method is not related to a Gallup poll. There is no intention of counting or getting an estimate of the number of individuals who would say they would be willing to drink more or less milk or eat soy bean products ; the aim of the analysis is to show how existing situations are being interpreted by people of culturally standardized attitudes. So that by asking a question such as “How do you think people would feel if they were asked to eat more bread ?” it is possible to work out whether more bread, as at present valued by Americans to whom it is not a principal food but to which an aura still attaches, will be regarded as a deprivation or an indulgence, a request to “eat something that is good for you,” or a “reduction in the standard of living.”

Recent developments in psychosomatic medicine have provided another approach to the problem. By studying the characteristic personality structure of individuals who manifest different marked gastrointestinal disorders or who come to clinics for treatment of obesity, food allergies and asthmas, 6 and anorexias, 34 it is possible to gain insight into the dynamics of the normal character development within our society and the role which food plays in that development. These extreme cases can serve as barometers of tendencies which appear, in less severe forms, in the general population. The delicate interrelationship between the way in which eating is culturally stylized and the expression of anxiety, fear, dependency, etc., can be shown from such detailed studies as Dr. Bruch's on obesity * and Drs. Wolff and Mittelman's 26 on the way in which such conditions shift over time.

In addition to the long-time contributions to our understanding of the part which learning to eat plays in character development, clinical studies can be utilized as indicators of the immediate reactions of selected parts of the population to threats of food shortage, or drastic alterations in diet. Both Dr. Bruch's † recent researches and a cooperative project now under way with the Emotions and Food Therapy Section of the American Dietetic Association, 21 in which food clinicians are making systematic observations of striking alterations in the behavior of clinic patients, are designed to tap this source of information. From psychiatric investigations we may also hope to get material on the more inarticulate bases of acceptances and rejections of food. 23

While it is clear that any final adjustment of the food habits of a nation to the current findings of nutrition can best be established by a basic alteration in the culturally defined style of what is a meal and what is food, exigencies of wartime conditions have made it necessary to resort to special measures to accomplish immediate changes and adjustments to shortages and substitutes. Here the Committee was confronted with an already established program of directed social change. The officials of the change were trained home economists, some 15,000 members of a profession which developed about 35 years ago, in which many of the pioneers are still alive and, despite a membership from all over the country, in which the ethos and occupational style is quite homogeneous. In all directed efforts to alter existing food habits, the home economist is in a key position, whether to give food demonstrations, calculate new menus to fit shortages, set up new methods of food preservation, direct the professional propagandist of newspaper or radio, or train the neighborhood leader who was to carry word of mouth messages into homes not reached by other media. Preparation of materials in a form which could be used by home economists and experiments in procedures which would facilitate their tasks have therefore been an essential part of the Committee's work. A series of experiments by Professor Lewin,* have been designed to demonstrate methods of group decision in which the home economist could function most perfectly as an expert, with a minimum call upon her for the performance of miscellaneous activities not as directly dependent upon her special training.† The interdependence of the method of instruction at the top of a chain of communication and the reception which the information will receive at the bottom is also of importance in implementing the nutritional program. 4 , 24

Types of community organization most appropriate for the dissemination of information about food have also an important bearing on the wartime adjustment to food conditions and so the problem has been raised as to the relative efficiency of different forms. The study made by Mr. Koos at Cornell University Medical College in 1942 ‡ suggested that lines of friendship were not the best lines for the diffusion of nutrition information, and this finding was confirmed by the studies of Cussler and de Give. 5 This resistance may be systematically related to the phrasing of changes of food habits in moral terms and the objection to the exploitation of pleasant friendship relationships to pass on morally sanctioned information. The study of Passin, et al, 2 also showed that exchange of recipes for festive dishes was the only food content of personal relationships in the Southern Illinois community which they studied. While the block plan,§ 25 which invests a neighbor with a government sanction of patriotism and patriotic license for intrusion into domestic affairs, is probably more suitable than friendship lines, here also nutrition information can be discussed more efficiently if the emphasis is upon adjustment of meals to wartime conditions rather than upon eating correctly, upon helping a woman to adjust a process rather than urging her to be good. The neighborhood and block leader may show almost as much resistance to passing on information to her neighbors as she does to passing on information to her friends if that information is cast in terms which suggest that she is trying to reform her neighbor. If, on the other hand, nutrition information comes as news of ways in which food shortages or food shifts can be dealt with efficiently, such information will be passed on much more willingly and effectively.

During the entire war and immediate post-war period it will be necessary to implement two tasks: to devise ways in which the health of the people may be maintained by the most skillful use of the existing food supplies ; to present an increased utilization of knowledge of nutrition in such a way that it does not become associated with the wartime period of deprivation, to be rejected later. 18 The long-time task is to alter Amercian food habits so that they are based upon tradition which embodies science and to do so in such a way that food habits at any period are sufficiently flexible to yield readily to new scientific findings. In order to accomplish this goal, the food habits of the future will have to be sanctioned not by authoritarian statements which breed rigid conformity rather than intelligent flexibility, but by a sense of responsibility on the part of those who plan meals for others to eat. At the same time it will be necessary to invent channels through which new findings can be readily translated into the meal planning of the woman on the farm, in the village, and in the city. To devise such a system of education, communication, and change which will link the daily habits of the people to the insight of the laboratory, and at the same time contribute to the development of a culture which produces individuals who are generally better adjusted as well as specifically better fed, is a task which requires a recognition of the total cultural equilibrium. Further, the application of science to improve eating habits may become empty and meaningless if it is not paralleled by efforts to apply science so as to increase the supply and adequate distribution of food. Efforts to better the nutrition of the world simply by altered production and distribution will also fall short of their goals unless corresponding and congruent changes are made in the patterns of consumption. The science of applied nutrition stands at the point 20 where a variety of techniques has been developed to deal with different aspects of the problem, and the most pressing problem is the integration of all of these techniques.