Session Abstract

Nutrition and food policy is a field that has been mostly left to historians of science or to economists.  Yet a historical approach to food and nutrition can yield great insights into a societal and governmental processes. This session examines the different ways in which nutrition or food policies express Latin American states‘ notions of modernization.  The first two papers (Brinkmann and Aguilar-Rodríguez) focus on the middle-class notion that cow milk was a particularly healthy food the consumption of which needed to be fostered through a variety of measures. The two papers complement each other, one focusing on Mexico, the other on Brazil.  Berth focuses on food policy in times of high political mobilization in Nicaragua. Pernet, finally, examines the food policy of an Latin American branch office of the UN Organization for Food and Agriculture, FAO, adding another important actor in policy making to the discussion. The panel will thus allow to develop a panorama of roughly a hundred years of food policy and how it was related to the visions of modernization in the different cases. Both the chair and the commentator are also specialists in the field, and we hope to turn the panel into a special issue for a journal.