Rumor of Globalization Desecrating the Global from Vernacular Margins

by Mukhopadhyay, Bhaskar

• ISBN13: 9780199327645
• ISBN10: 0199327645
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-11-27
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Here, Walter Gratzer offers a marvelous smorgasbord of stories taken from the history of nutrition, providing an engaging account of the struggle to find the ingredients of a healthy diet, and the fads and quackery that have waylaid the unwary.
Gratzer recounts this history with characteristic crispness and verve. The book teems with colorful personalities, a veritable who's who of medical history, and highlights the brilliant flashes of insight as well as the sadly mistaken leaps of logic in the centuries-long effort to understand how the body uses food. We see the ingenious experiments used to reveal the workings of the stomach, the chemical analyses that uncovered the nature of proteins, carbohydrates, and vitamins, and the slow recognition that malnutrition lay behind such terrible diseases as scurvy, rickets, beriberi, and pellagra. Along the way, we read about the invention of the tin can (which originally had to be opened with a hammer and chisel), learn why ancient Egyptians had thicker skulls than Persians, and find out about today's fads and fancy diets--some dangerous, others just daft.
Spiced with colorful anecdotes from the history of medicine and with sharp portraits of the scientists who helped or hindered our understanding of diet and digestion, Terrors of the Table is a must read for anyone interested in food and health.

Author Biography

Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay (PhD, Calcutta) is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has taught at Calcutta University, Jadavpur University and VU Wellington and held post-doctoral fellowships in France, the US and Britain. He has co-edited (with John Marriott and Partha Chatterjee), a six-volume compendium of archival materials on colonial India, Britain in India (1765-1905). Some of Mukhopadhyay's many journal articles have been translated into French and Chinese and he also writes in Bengali and is involved with Indian activist organisations.

Table of Contents

Part I
1. A Crowd in Odeonsplatz
2. Baptism of Fire
3. Two Tales of One Christmas
4. Dreams About a New World
5. Of Frontline Soldiers and 'Rear Area Pigs'
6. Occupation
7. Collapse
8. In the Shadow of the Somme
9. Blinded
Part II
10. Revolution
11. Hitler's Kampf against the List Veterans
12. Private Hitler's Reich
13. Hitler's Second War
Epilogue
Postscript: Hugo Gutmann's Story
Notes
Bibliography
Index