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But by the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, however, a new cultural framework that
crossed the boundaries of thermodynamics, political economy, experimental physiology,
and eugenics had begun to emerge in Colombia, converging in the social problem of
nutrition. Centered on the analogy of the human body as a heat engine that transforms
energy, local scientists began to conduct surveys of the eating habits of the “working
classes,” analyses of the chemical and caloric composition of their foods, and studies on
the metabolic characteristics of different regional populations. The results of these
investigations were used to push the government to “restore the energies” of an
impoverished population that was consistently thought to be weak and racially inferior,
but capable of physiological and hereditable improvement. The cry of conservative elites
for political and moral “regeneration” at the turn of the century also had a biological
component—the optimization of the human motor. In the 1920s and 1930s, several
campaigns and institutions were created for this social engineering, aimed at producing a
modern, healthy, and industrious citizen. These campaigns gained special political force
after the Liberal Party returned to power in 1930.
Keywords: food science, race, nation, Colombia, eugenics, social engineering, physiological regeneration, human
machine, nutrition, diet, modern citizen
Beginning with the enlightened absolutism of the Spanish monarch Charles III, colonies
in the Americas began to undergo profound changes in their administration, education,
and cultural life. In the universities, new insights on modern science were introduced,
and socialization and print media were promoted for the purposes of discussing and
disseminating useful knowledge that would work in favor of agricultural, commercial, and
industrial prosperity. Additionally, natural resources and the health of the Latin American
population were understood as central elements for increasing the crown’s economic and
political power.1 The botanical expeditions financed by Charles III in Peru, Mexico (then
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New Spain), and Colombia (then New Granada), as well as the sanitation reforms that
took place in the principal colonial cities, were a clear example of this latter component.2
In the midst of this new attitude on how to govern nature and the local population,
several descendants of Spaniards who had been born in New Granada and who had
appropriated enlightened European science for their political projects began to argue
that an adequate diet could play an important role in the regulation of the corporeal
functions and moral dispositions of the different New Granada populations according to
the climate in which they lived. These Criollos had constructed a geographic discourse
that emphasized the idea that the elevated Andean regions, such as those that they
inhabited, offered ideal conditions for physical, moral, and intellectual activity that
Europeans considered exclusive to its geography, while the lowlands represented
barbarism and were an obstacle to civilization.3 These climatic discourses allowed the
enlightened criollos to present themselves to the privileged local residents from the
Iberian Peninsula as legitimate agents of civilization and progress in internal colonial
areas, as well as to reaffirm their perceived ethnic superiority over the rest of the local
population (indigenous, mestizos, and black people).4
During the Middle Ages, the notion of constitution was associated with different physical
and moral traits, some positive and some negative. Food, which in turn had the qualities
of the dry, wet, hot, and cold, served as a major therapeutic to restore humoral balance
and to regulate some aspects of a person’s character. Learned colonists applied these
ideas to the project of colonial expansion in the New World. They began to think that the
human body was mutable, and that the effects of climate and food could transform a
Spanish body into an Indian one, or vice versa. If the climate was a shared factor,
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adequate food (from European origin) was then the key to maintaining a racial distance
between colonists and Indians. As mentioned by Rebecca Earle, during the colonial
expansion race “was in part a question of digestion.”7
In the overall framework of this humoral and racial physiology, diet was understood by
enlightened Criollos at the end of the colonial period as an external agent that had some
of the greatest effects on a person’s physical and moral constitution. As the learned
Criollo Francisco José de Caldas noted, the characteristics of different foods renewed a
person’s blood, tissue, and temperament, and could ignite or extinguish the “fire of
passions.” Some of these foods weakened and debilitated the body while others
invigorated it; therefore, when used sparingly, they could moderate “the terrible forces of
lust,” and when used in excess, they were corruptive.8 With their own bodies in mind,
these enlightened Criollos proposed educational reforms that would serve to “create
robust men and correct the defects of their climate, in order to make them virtuous and
learned men.”9 Adequate dietetics was fundamental for achieving this goal. For example,
for intellectual activity in the cold Andean climates, it was recommended to avoid the
consumption of “crude and heavy foods,” as they “slow blood circulation, make nervous
fluids sluggish, and reduce sufficient vibration and flexibility from sensory fibers, so that
the imagination, the entire soul, and thought shall be brilliant and easy.”10 In the hot
lowlands of New Granada, where it was thought that the climate was less favorable for
intellectual activity, heavy and fatty foods were recommended for counteracting the
“volatile nature of the fluids” and the “laxness of fibers.”11
The power of food to cancel out the effects of heat and humidity in people’s mental and
physical capacities had its limits. In the “foothills of the Andes,” an enlightened criollo
from Popayán asserted that everything seemed to indicate that “it would never be
possible for a poet, an orator, a musician, a painter, or any other daring genius capable of
honoring their country to make it out of those regions of fire.”12 It was also recommended
that women who inhabited hot regions not breastfeed their children, since it produced a
milk that was “less succulent and dense,” greatly influencing the children’s constitution.
Meanwhile, learned Criollos continued to circulate the idea from the early modern period
that moral characteristics could be transmitted via this bodily fluid, outlawing the use of
wet nurses of other races.13
In addition to attempting to regulate the physical and moral characteristics of their own
bodies, the Criollos made reference to the diet of other racial groups. In general,
indigenous people of the Andes—who were considered the least barbaric of the New
Granada region—were portrayed as a population that had suffered a process of moral and
physical degeneration during colonial expansion, due to dietary, climatic, and political
causes. With regard to the “lower population”14—which was characterized as the mixture
of white, indigenous, and black people—of Andean cities such as Santafé and Popayán,
they were described as weak and dull, due to their diet based on potatoes and chicha, an
indigenous drink made with fermented corn.15 Thus, the dietetic discourses served to
explain a supposed racial inferiority within these groups, but it simultaneously allowed
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the elite to generate a process of Hispanicization to elevate them from their “lethargy”
and “stupidity” and make them into effective subjects for economic advancement.16
Although these discourses showed that the bodies and diets of different populations were
beginning to be perceived as objects of political intervention for the moral and material
progression of society,17 it was not until the end of the 19th century that specific
nutritional research and food policies were considered. Beyond prohibiting the
immoderate consumption of chicha and regulating diets in hospitals,18 later colonial
authorities appeared to interpret people’s diets as a private matter, according to which
the Greek maxim “know yourself” stood for having a personal knowledge of dietetics that
permitted the maintenance of one’s health and self-regulation based on outside
conditions. Nevertheless, the learned Criollos’ ideas about climate, diet, and Andean
civilization would inform the nation-state projects of the republican elite throughout the
19th century.
In spite of the new regime’s weakness and increasing political instability, the government
turned a great deal of attention toward scientific education and, beginning in 1826,
created medical schools at the new republican universities.20 The enlightened Criollo
communities began to be regarded as symbolic heroes in the pantheon of the fathers of
independence, and were looked upon as precursors of a national science that would
become a source of patriotic pride and a political instrument for the country’s
organization.21
Thus, Caldas’s proposal that human geography was the “basis of all political
deliberation,” as well as the geographic model of civilization in the Andean highlands and
barbarity in the lowlands, were central examples in the discussions on national
construction throughout the 19th century.22 As part of these discourses, food physiology
became one of the resources that accounted for regional differences in the republican
project and gave legitimacy to a hierarchical social order. Until the second half of the
19th century, the teachings of Hippocrates and Galen continued as a way of
conceptualizing the human body’s function and its relationship to climate and diet.23 The
hygiene treatises published in Colombia during this period, in which dietetics was taught,
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stated that food was an important factor “for the customs of the inhabitants of different
regions and the fate of the empires.”24
The influential doctor and hygiene professor José María Merizalde claimed in 1828 that
most “sober and temperate” populations were those that did not eat meat and committed
the fewest crimes. As he explained, “all uncivilized peoples are cruel and their customs do
not persuade them to be this way: this cruelty comes from their diet; they go to war as if
going hunting and treat men like they treat bears.”25 This relationship between cruelty
and meat consumption was useful for Merizalde—who had participated in the wars of
independence as a military doctor—to construct a framework for interpreting the
incipient republic’s political stability and progress in terms of regional dietary habits. In
effect, he claimed that it was precisely their diet that had shaped the “mild-mannered
personality” of the inhabitants of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense, although this was not the
case in the plains of Casanare:
in which the diet of almost every inhabitant is meat that they consume in greater
quantities than cassava and cassava bread. For this reason the plains have
generated a cruel and bellicose nature, quite different from the people of
Cundinamarca, whose soldiers have been more humane during war, and very
tranquil in times of peace … Consequently, it can be inferred that the inhabitants
of Cundinamarca are healthier, more humane, and have greater longevity.26
It was also proposed that the diet of different regions influenced the humoral
constitutions of the inhabitants and their attitude toward work and discipline. It was
claimed, for example, that the tendency to eat humid and cold foods, as well as fatty
substances, was one of the reasons—in addition to the heat and humidity—that the people
living on the banks of the Magdalena River (largely considered zambos, or of mixed race)
were “choleric, phlegmatic, indolent, lazy, and content with very little to sustain them.”27
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federalist project was the most ambitious scientific undertaking of the 19th century in
Colombia: the Chorographic Commission.30 Beginning in 1850 and for more than ten
years, its members traversed much of the country’s territory with the intention of
providing the knowledge necessary to modernize government administration, encourage
foreign immigration, and promote a specific conception of Colombian nationality.31 Using
maps, statistical tables, itineraries, images, and travel accounts, they constructed a
representation of the territory and its inhabitants that highlighted its regional diversity
while maintaining an altitudinal hierarchy of civilization.
Within the racial taxonomies that were utilized, the notion of “regional types” was
incorporated in an effort to “attach one population to a particular territory and to a
determined physical environment” and generalize its moral and physical features.32 The
country’s poor Andean population, the farmer “type” from the highlands, was portrayed
as one of the most favorable for the nation’s progress, in large part for their “temperate”
constitution and due to their light and plant-based diet. Manuel Ancízar, for example, one
of the commission members and an important liberal political leader of the period,
replicated the dietetic-political discourse of the aforementioned hygienists in the
following terms:
In this peasant [an “old and strapping Indian” from the Vélez region], I saw the
small Granadan farmer from the highlands personified … Temperate above all
others, since he is sustained by vegetables and chicha, spending only half of his
daily earnings at most: obedient, hardworking, and honest, he is certain to meet
his few needs with several domestic industry products, and is neither greedy of
others, because there is no need for it, nor envious of the luxury of the wealthy, as
he does not suffer from hunger or nakedness, he does not view with anger the
abundance of goods in others’ hands.33
In the midst of the liberal reforms of this period—such as the elimination of indigenous
protections, the abolition of slavery and of tariff barriers, or the elimination of tithing—
which were intended to encourage economic liberalism and integrate the indigenous and
black populations into a market economy, the elites felt that the Andean farmer “type”
would further improve their attitudes toward civilization and progress via
miscegenation.34 This miscegenation (whitening) was understood as the “absorption of the
indigenous race by the Europeans,” which ultimately would generate a population that
was “homogeneous, vigorous, and well-defined, whose nature will be intermediary
between the impulsiveness of the Spaniard and the patience and calm of the Muisca
Indian: a population happily adaptable to the work of agriculture and mining.”35
Additionally, beginning in the 1860s, the idea that the indigenous people of the Andes
(the Muiscas) were “temperate by nature” was seen as related to anatomical and
physiological characteristics that were understood to be inherent to their race, partially
displacing a humoral conception of the functioning of the human body. For example, the
doctor Antonio Vargas pointed out in 1865 that, based on clinical observations, the
indigenous people from Cundinamarca had a natural capacity for the manual labor of
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cultivating the highlands due to their wider chest, which allowed greater respiratory
capacity and more dynamic digestion, compensating for their frugal and non-nutritious
diet. These anatomical and physiological characteristics helped compensate for the
effects of the lack of oxygen present in the air of the elevated regions. Under these same
conditions, the white people, with a lesser respiratory capacity and a greater need for
nutritious and abundant food, were predisposed, argued Vargas, to a sedentary and
intellectual life. Black Colombians, on the other hand, constituted the “working race” of
the hot lowlands.36
In addition to racially and geographically organizing the labor capacities of the different
populations,37 Vargas’s words reflected that these same capacities were being related to
the quantity of oxygen and nutrients present in the internal functions of the human
body.38 In later decades, this new physiological point of view would add layers of meaning
to the notion of race and the model of Andean civilization, which the liberal political
leader José María Samper synthesized in the same period as Vargas as “at the top,
civilization—toward the middle, neglect—at the bottom, violence and the horrors of
slavery.”39
It was only in the political context of the so-called conservative Regeneration from the
end of the century that a series of institutional, scientific, and economic factors were
blended that enabled the quantification of diet and corporeal functions in terms of energy,
which, in turn, rendered them open to comparative studies and political intervention. The
Criollo elites had carried out a process of economic integration during the 19th century
with the goal of converting the indigenous and black populations into effective
participants in a market economy and an efficient workforce, while keeping them at the
margins of political life.42 With the dawn of the 20th century, this project was becoming
one of energy optimization for the workers’ bodies (now understood as heat engines for
transforming energy), framed in a local process of emergent industrialization and with
growing concern for increasing the productivity of the country.43
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Conservative Regeneration
At the end of the 19th century, Colombia underwent a political transformation
characterized by a conservative, centralized, and interventionist administration. In 1878,
Rafael Núñez, one of the principal leaders of this process, announced in the republic’s
senate the famous phrase “regeneration or catastrophe,” shaping a new political
language to refer to the organization of the state and the conditions of the nation.44 The
administrative regeneración, considered highly necessary due to alleged excesses by the
radical liberals of previous decades, had to be accompanied by a moral and corporeal
regeneration of Colombia’s poor population, whose regional diversity had to be
homogenized via a national unity based in Catholicism and Hispanicism.45 Additionally, the
central government became more and more interested in expert knowledge in order to
tackle the social issues generated by the country’s slow modernization.
Medicine was central to this “scientification” of social issues in the attempt to diagnose
and propose treatments for the social pathologies that practitioners were identifying.46
This profession, in turn, saw an increase in its political power and social influence. In
1873, the Society for Medicine and the Natural Sciences was created, becoming a
government advisory panel on health-related topics in 1890 named the National Academy
of Medicine. In 1886, the National Board of Public Hygiene was established, representing
one of the first steps in a long process toward institutionalization and centralization of
public health in Colombia.47
In the midst of these political transformations and pursuits of “regeneration,” the local
discourses surrounding the relationship among food, race, and nation acquired new
meaning. In the framework for a new conception of the human body’s function,
Colombian hygienists began to stress the idea that a diet high in protein and calories was
an essential element for national progress and the racial regeneration of the population;
as such, public policies should be responsible for regulating the production, distribution,
and consumption of food. For example, Dr. Carlos Michelsen set forth a theory of the
relationship between food and civilization at the end of the 19th century that was
diametrically opposed to the ideas held by hygienists and politicians of the mid-19th
century. On the basis of international dietary statistics, this doctor from the National
Board of Public Hygiene claimed that “the grandeur, power, strength, and morals of well-
run countries develop in direct proportion to their consumption of meat,” and that Bogotá
consumed less than a quarter of the meat necessary for “a population to be healthy,
strong, hard-working, and prosperous.”48 From a thermodynamic point of view that “the
work that an individual expends is proportional to the amount of protein used in the
diet,”49 several hygienists drew a connection between diet and the “future of the race”
and related the physical and moral characteristics of workers from different regions to
the energy content of their diets.50
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This food cartography that accounted for the possibilities of national progress arose from
a culture of nutrition that, as Harmke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham have noted,
was the product of modern nation-states that hoped to control the bodies of their citizens
in order to increase the capacity for production.51 Before the development of bacteriology
and its great impact on societal organization and human conduct,52 laboratory science had
already moved into the sociopolitical sphere of nutritional physiology and public health.
Chemists like Justus von Liebig in Germany had succeeded in connecting organic
chemistry with human physiology in the 1840s. He constructed a nutritional paradigm
that singled out nitrogen-based foods, especially those of animal origin, as the basis for
corporeal work and muscle growth. Animal protein thus appeared as the principal source
of progress for modern Western society. With more meat consumption would come
greater individual vigor and greater collective progress and civilization. Liebig then
proposed a series of social reforms for the government to regulate the production,
distribution, and price of meat; a rational diet system was required for the growing
working class in Germany in order to increase productivity, following the same principles
that applied to military rations.53
Although Liebig’s protein paradigm was later called into question (by demonstrations that
fats and carbohydrates were also sources of energy), his quantitative approximation to
food chemistry, as well as his emphasis on establishing diets that would improve a body’s
efficiency and productivity, were central elements in the political aims of the Colombian
hygienists who wanted a modern society of healthy and productive citizens. Indeed, in the
last decade of the 19th century, research was beginning to quantify the food habits of the
country’s different populations in terms of nutrients and calories. In these studies, food
was understood as the quantity of fuel that the body needed to consume for optimal
performance according to environmental conditions and the work to be done. At the heart
of this analysis was the goal of increasing the “productive power of the country” to the
extent that it could actually “restore the strength that had been destroyed by work,” thus
avoiding the “destruction of the living machine.”54
Although these studies continued to mention race (whether in regional terms, such as the
“Antioqueño race,” or ethnic terms, such as the “Muisca race”), in general the emphasis
was on the body of a “working class” that was conceptualized as an energy-transforming
heat engine.55 From this perspective of energy efficiency, a new framework of regional
hierarchization and differentiation was proposed. Poor inhabitants from regions such as
the (Atlantic) coast, Antioquia, or the Casanare plains were characterized as stronger,
more loquacious, and more intelligent than those from the highlands of Boyacá and
Cundinamarca due to their more nutritious diet with greater meat protein content. In
fact, these studies pointed out a “physiological absurdity” in Colombia, since meat
consumption diminished as altitude increased.56 This absurdity was related to the idea
that a meat-heavy diet could compensate for the “high-altitude aggressions,” such as lack
of oxygen.57 In the case of the Bogotá savanna, it was noted that the presence of meat in
the working-class diet was almost nonexistent, while consumption of corn constituted the
basis of this diet. Low consumption of protein, as well as an elevated consumption of
chicha—this high consumption of chicha was explained by some physicians as the
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physiological effect of bodies with a large energy deficit—were given as principal causes
of a process of racial degeneration among the poor populations of the Colombian Andean
regions.58
The historical roots of this process of racial degeneration were identified by several
conservative doctors as the result of liberal politics in the middle of the 19th century. For
example, the claim was made that the “Muisca race” had tended toward a substantial and
restorative diet during the colonial period that produced a strong and intelligent
population. These doctors argued that the politics of economic liberalism in the mid-19th
century, like the suppression of indigenous protections, led to physiological misery for a
mestizo race that, under other political circumstances, would have been well-suited to the
atmospheric and climatic conditions of the Andean highlands.59
Although they were referring to different historical, social, and biological causes, elites in
the first two decades of the 20th century indiscriminately spread the notion that the poor
populations of Colombia, in spite of regional and racial differences, were undergoing a
process of “physiological degeneration” that prevented them from becoming an efficient
workforce for the nation’s progress.60 At the same time, medical authorities were
petitioning the government to take regulatory food measures for the “working class” and
establish dietetic regimens according to climatic conditions. These measures, which were
aimed at improving the human body’s energy levels, were understood as an integral part
of the local eugenic movement. The optimization of the human machine—the
physiological regeneration of the poor population—was thus understood as an acquired
characteristic that one could inherit so that future generations of workers would be more
efficient and have a greater work capacity.61 This social-engineering project for the
construction of the Colombian citizen that incorporated elite ideals of a healthy, hard-
working, and efficient poor population began to unfold in the first two decades of the
20th century and would gain political strength in the 1930s.
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The National Board of Public Hygiene was designated as the institution responsible for
defining “the quantity and proportion of the food materials” in schoolchildren’s diets in
Colombia, just as the Pediatric Society of Bogotá, founded in 1917, counseled the
nutritional aspects of the social project Gotas de Leche (“Drops of Milk”).62 Initially a
private instution, Gotas de Leche supported poor mothers who were unable to nurse their
children by supplying them with milk and health assistance. The press depicted Gotas de
Leche as a space to produce “beautiful models of race and strength” and to achieve
“renovation within the poor population.”63
With the Liberal Party’s rise to power in the 1930s after almost half a century of
conservative governments, the role of the state in the moral and biological improvement
of Colombia’s poor population via nutrition acquired a much larger presence. As
President Alfonso López Pumarejo, leader of the liberal “Marching Revolution,” declared,
the transformation of the nature of the Colombian population had much to do with the
configuration of several food practices based in modern nutrition.64 This revolution was to
take place in the context of growing industrialization and a greater urban demographic,
as well as the entrance of the country into a global market economy due to the strength
of the coffee trade during the liberal period, which lasted until the end of World War II.
The intention of the liberals was to modernize the government apparatus with specialized
departments, structure a popular cultural policy, and link the economy, health, and labor
as a duty of the state.65
The research pioneered at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries,
drawing connections among the poor population’s food, health, and productivity, began to
multiply and gain the support of a number of governmental institutions, resulting in the
greater prominence of the social problem of food and a particular approach to it. The
project of “strengthening the race” and lifting it out of its “biological tragedy” now
implied a “direct intervention of the State on the industrial factors of the production,
transportation, distribution, and consumption of food, as well as on nutritional education,
which naturally must be at the forefront.”66 Therefore, the ignorance of Colombia’s poor
population about nutrition, which was said to be reflected in their traditional food habits,
had to be reversed using educational campaigns accompanied by other policies and
cultural institutions. As the liberal hygienist and subsequent Minister of Hygiene Jorge
Bejarano said, it was essential to create a national council of food in order to find a
solution to the “national problem” of malnutrition, “in which there is not only a social
component, but also biological and racial ones, which are necessary to study in all of their
minutiae.”67
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Additionally, the ministry had the support of the Comptroller General of the Republic, a
position that had been created in 1923 because of a recommendation from the North
American mission on economic matters that the government had employed that same
year (the Kemmerer Mission). At the end of the 1930s, this institution requested a
number of studies on the working class’s conditions and standards of living in the
country’s principal cities. Many of these studies completed systematic analyses of the
diet, creating statistical tables that included types of families, food consumed, prices,
chemical composition of food nutrients, and caloric and vitamin content, among other
factors.68 The level of malnutrition identified was pinpointed as a main cause of the “racial
degeneration” of the local population, and a rational diet was presented as the key to
overcoming the “biological tragedy” that was said to be a “colonial legacy” that had
persisted up to that point.69 Several of the studies’ results were published and
disseminated by the Ministry of Labor, Hygiene, and Social Security in order to “make
comprehensible to the public the basis of the biological policy” that the government was
trying to develop and to “form a clear awareness of sanitation in all of the country’s social
classes.”70
During the same decade, institutions aimed at providing food assistance that had been
developing for years, such as Gotas de Leche and school dining halls, gained strength and
acquired official status. Both of these institutions hoped to indoctrinate mothers and
children with the principles of a scientific calorie-based diet and to teach them to
understand their bodies as heat engines that needed to be in optimal shape in order to
transform energy from food into productive work. They also created “school vacation
camps” where rural adolescents from different regions came together for three-month
periods for their “physiological restoration” and were taught a hygiene regimen that
included physical education and a rational diet.71 Both the dining halls and the camps
were coordinated by the Ministry of Education, which began an important cultural
diffusion campaign in 1935 called Biblioteca Aldeana (“Village Library”).72 The content of
these libraries, disseminated to every municipality within national territory, included, first
and foremost, a series of technical handbooks with practical knowledge for the rural
population. Knowledge of energy-based food and of body–machine function were central
subjects taught by several of these handbooks.73
In addition to attempting to regulate and institute specific diets with the goal of restoring
energy to an urban and rural working class that continued to be viewed as weak and
racially inferior, albeit open to hereditary and physiological improvement, the liberal
government was also interested in knowing the traditional customs (including food
habits) of these social groups in different regions. The Economic Geographies of
Colombia and the National Folklore Survey were institutionalized efforts to describe in
detail the food traditions, among other things, of the “masses” of every region in the
country.74 This social conglomerate, whom liberal leaders of the era considered a kind of
“national soul,” emerged as a central force for the transformation of the country,
reflecting changes in the relationship between the elites and the working class, as well as
in traditional forms of domination.75 The democratization of the culture included a new
interest in popular traditions. While traditional drinks such as chicha continued to be
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Despite this food nationalism, a physiology- and energy-based conception of the human
body remained profoundly connected with a racialized view of the working population in
the plan for creating the modern citizen, as well as a dietary hierarchy expressed in
caloric terms.
These works on physiology, the body, and food have introduced new elements to the
theoretical discussion on the pertinence of relating the notion of race—and scientific
racism—to historical discourses and practices on human difference, exclusion, and
hierarchization during the colonial period.81 These theoretical discussions take on special
relevance from a Latin American perspective that advocates for taking into account the
“coloniality of knowledge” as a constituent element of the modern projects of nation-state
construction.82 Nevertheless, the discourse and knowledge of dietetics have hardly been
kept in mind, at least in the case of Colombia, when it comes to analyzing what some
academics have called the “genealogies” of Latin American nationality.83
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As part of the eugenics movements in Latin America from the first half of the 20th
century—generally informed by neo-Lamarkian hereditary theories—a proper diet was
understood to be a central element in the racial improvement of a population, as well as
to produce healthy and productive bodies.89 Within this general framework of construction
of modern citizens, food science had been analyzed in relation to public health campaigns
and policies, nutritional education programs, and food assistance programs, among other
things, under conceptions of race, gender, and class.90 For the Colombian context, in
addition to the processes of food production and consumption, some of these issues had
also been approached from the analysis of specific food items such as meat, chicha, and
panela.91
Primary Sources
In the Colombian archives, there is no specific collection of primary sources dedicated
exclusively to food science. However, in the National Library of Colombia and in the Luis
Ángel Arango Library, both in the city of Bogotá, there exists an extensive collection of
manuals on urbanity, health, physiology, domestic economy, and child care that represent
an important source of information on nutritional and dietetic discourses from throughout
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the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. In these libraries, it is also possible to
consult the medical-degree theses that students used to publish upon completing their
studies. Several of these theses, first published in the 1880s, address issues of food and
nutrition physiology. Both libraries possess a virtual catalog from which PDF versions of
these materials can be downloaded. The historical archive of the Library of the National
University of Colombia contains a complete collection of these theses and offers a digital
collection from which a great deal of material relevant to the history of nutrition can be
downloaded.
The reports that the ministries used to present to the national congress every year
(especially those from the Ministries of Government, Education, and Labor, Hygiene, and
Social Security) represent a rich source of information on food and nutrition policies for a
large part of the time period analyzed. The Library of Congress of Colombia, also located
in Bogotá, has a complete collection of these reports. Additionally, the municipal reports
from various Colombian cities contain relevant information, although there is no single
archive that has them.
There are several scientific journals with relative longevity that make it possible to track
the development of nutritional practices and discourse and their relationship to notions of
race and nation. The Revista de Higiene, the official communications outlet for public
health in Colombia created at the end of the 1880s, or the Revista Médica, initiated with
the creation of the Society for Medicine and the Natural Sciences in 1873, are two
relevant examples. In Medellín, the Anales de la Academia de Medicina de Medellín
began in the late 1880s. In Cali, the Boletín Médico del Cauca began publishing in the
1890s. The Revista Nacional de Agricultura, created in the 1910s, and the Anales de
Economía y Estadística, published by the Comptroller General of the Republic beginning
in the 1930s, are both good resources on this subject. One of the main journals for health
popularization in the 1930s, funded by the government and widely circulated in many
regions of Colombia, was Salud y Sanidad, published between 1932 and 1942. In this
resource, a number of different dietary health campaigns may be followed.
The aforementioned Nacional Library and Luis Ángel Arango Library have the majority of
these journals, though they do not have every issue. The University of Antioquia Library
has digitalized a large part of the Anales de la Academia de Medicina de Medellín, which
may be consulted online, and in the Library Jorge Garcés in Cali, the Boletín Médico del
Cauca is available. The Jorge E. Cavalier Library of the National Academy of Medicine in
Bogotá also has several of these journals, as well as an important collection of treatises
on hygiene and medicine from the 19th and 20th centuries.
In addition, there are several cultural journals spanning many years, such as Cromos,
published since 1916, or El Gráfico, founded in 1910, that are a rich source of historical
nutritional analysis. They provide not only articles but also food advertisements of value
to scholars.
Page 16 of 29
Further Reading
Appelbaum, Nancy, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, eds. Race and
Nation in Modern Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Arias, Julio. Nación y diferencia en el siglo XIX colombiano: Orden nacional, racialismo y
taxonomías poblacionales. Bogotá: Uniandes, 2005.
Bourges, Héctor, José M. Bengoa, and Alejandro O’Donnell, eds. Historia de la nutrición
en América Latina. Panama City: Sociedad Latinoamericana de Nutrición, 2009.
Camacho, Juana. “Embodied Tastes: Food and Agrobiodiversity in the Colombian Andes.”
PhD diss., University of Georgia, 2011.
Camacho, Juana, Alejandro Guarín, and Shawn van Ausdal, eds. “Historias de las comidas
y la comida en la historia.” Revista de Estudios Sociales 29 (2008): 1–196.
Counihan, Carole, ed. Food and Culture: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Cullather, Nick. The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Earle, Rebecca. The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in
Spanish America, 1492–1700. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third
World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Kamminga, Harmke, and Andrew Cunningham, eds. The Science and Culture of Nutrition,
1840–1940. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995.
Laudan, Rachel. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2013.
Page 17 of 29
Phillips, Jim, and David F. Smith, eds. Food, Science, Policy and Regulation in the
Twentieth Century: International and Comparative Perspectives. New York: Routledge,
2001.
Pierce, Gretchen, and Áurea Toxqui, eds. Alcohol in Latin America: A Social and Cultural
History. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014.
Pilcher, Jeffrey M. ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.
Pilcher, Jeffrey M., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Food History. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012.
Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Super, John C., and Thomas C. Wright, eds. Food, Politics, and Society in Latin America.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.
Weismantel, Mary J. Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes. Prospect
Heights, IL: Waveland, 1988.
Notes:
(1.) Renán Silva, Los ilustrados de Nueva Granada 1760–1808: Genealogía de una
comunidad de interpretación (Medellín: Banco de la república/EAFIT, 2002).
(2.) Mauricio Nieto Olarte, Remedios para el Imperio: Historia natural y la apropiación del
nuevo mundo (Bogotá: ICAHN, 2000); Adriana Alzate, Suciedad y orden: Reformas
sanitarias borbónicas en la Nueva Granada 1760–1810 (Bogotá: Universidad del Rosario,
2007).
(3.) Regarding enlightened science’s debate on the supposed inferiority of the nature and
inhabitants of the Americas, see Antonello Gerbi, La disputa del Nuevo Mundo: Historia
de una polémica, 1750–1900 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993).
Page 18 of 29
(5.) As Julio Arias states, this Criollo environmentalism helped construct a human
hierarchy that was “supported in the interaction between the Hippocratic tradition, the
Catholic moral regime, naturalist expert knowledge, and the project of civilization.” Julio
Arias Vanegas, “Seres, cuerpos y espíritus del clima, ¿pensamiento racial en la obra de
Francisco José de Caldas?” Revista de Estudios Sociales 27 (2007): 16–30; 28. For a
general historical panorama on the environmental paradigm to account for human
difference, see David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture, and
European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
(6.) Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the
Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650,”
American Historical Review 104.1 (1999): 33–68; Rebecca Earle, The Body of the
Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Alexandre C. Varella, “A dietética
no novo mundo: Aliementos para a natureza e o governo dos corpos de índios e
espanhóis, entre os séculos XVI e XVII,” in Al otro lado del cuerpo: Estudios biopolíticos
en América Latina, edited by Hilderman Cardona and Zandra Pedraza, 23–52 (Bogotá:
Ediciones Uniandes, 2014).
(7.) Rebecca Earle, ““If You Eat Their Food …”: Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish
America,” American Historical Review 115.3 (2010): 688–713; 697.
(8.) Francisco José Caldas, “El influjo del clima sobre los seres organizados,” in
Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada (Bogotá: Biblioteca Popular de Cultura
Colombiana, 1942), 194.
(9.) Francisco Antonio Ulloa, “Ensayo sobre el influxo del clima en la educación física y
moral del hombre del Nuevo Reyno de Granada,” Semanario del Nuevo Reyno de Granada
31–41 (1808): 276.
(13.) On the idea that breastfeeding could transmit moral inclinations and the idea that
the milk of wet nurses (Jews, Muslims, and conversos; black, indigenous, and mestiza
women) could transform humoral composition—ideas that were present in both the
Page 19 of 29
Iberian Peninsula and the colonies of the Americas, see Max S. Hering Torres, “Saberes
médicos—Saberes teológicos: De mujeres y hombres anómalos,” in Cuerpos anómalos,
edited by Max S. Hering Torres (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2008).
(14.) Francisco José Caldas, “Estado de la Geografía del Virreinato de Santafé de Bogotá,
con relación a la economía y el comercio,” in Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada
(Bogotá: Biblioteca Popular de Cultura Colombiana, 1942), 22.
(16.) Pedro Fermín Vargas, Pensamientos políticos y memoria sobre la población del
Nuevo Reino de Granada (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1944), 99. For a general discussion
on these issues, see Frank Safford, “Race, Integration, and Progress: Elite Attitudes and
the Indian in Colombia, 1750–1870,” Hispanic American Historical Review 71 (1991): 1–
33.
(17.) Nieto, Orden natural y orden social; CastroGómez, La hybris del punto cero.
(18.) Alzate, Suciedad y orden; Adriana Alzate, “Comer en el hospital colonial: Apuntes
sobre la alimentación en tres hospitales neogranadinos a finales del siglo XVIII,” Historia
Crítica 46 (2012): 18–42; Estela Restrepo Zea, El Hospital San Juan de Dios 1635–1895:
Una historia de la enfermedad, pobreza y muerte en Bogotá (Bogotá: Universidad
Nacional de Colombia, 2011).
(19.) Marco Palacios and Frank Safford, Colombia: País fragmentado, sociedad dividida,
su historia (Bogotá: Editorial Norma, 2002), 229–271.
(21.) On the construction of a scientific tradition in Colombia during the 19th century, see
Diana Obregón, Sociedades científicas en Colombia: La invención de una tradición, 1859–
1936 (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1992).
(22.) Julio Arias, Nación y diferencia en el siglo XIX colombiano: Orden nacional,
racialismo y taxonomías poblacionales (Bogotá: Uniandes, 2005); Alfonso Múnera,
Fronteras imaginadas: La construcción de las razas y de la geografía en el siglo XIX
colombiano (Barcelona: Planeta, 2005); Anna-Telse Jagdmann, Del poder y la geografía:
“La cartografía como fuente de legitimación en Colombia” (PhD diss., Freie Universität
Berlin, 2006); Lina Del Castillo, “The Science of Nation Building: A History of Geographic
Sciences in Colombia, 1821–1921” (PhD diss., University of Miami, 2007).
(23.) Zandra Pedraza, En cuerpo y alma: Visiones del progreso y de la felicidad (Bogotá:
Uniandes, 1999), 115.
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(24.) José Félix Merizalde, Epitome de los elementos de higiene, o, De la influencia de las
cosas fisicas i morales sobre el hombre, i de los medios de conservar la salud: Estractados
de Estevan Tourtelle, traducidos al castellano, i añadidos con otras observaciones nuevas
por José Félix Merizalde (Bogotá: Imprenta de Pedro Cubides, 1828), 176.
(25.) Merizalde, Epitome de los elementos de higiene, 177. This manual was a summary
that Merizalde wrote of a hygiene treatise by the French doctor Estevan Tourtelle, to
which he added many of his own observations.
(28.) On the myth of racial equality at the beginnings of the Colombian republic, as well
as the implicit racism present in the actions of the first republican elites, see Marixa
Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution,
Colombia, 1795–1831 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007).
(34.) Safford, “Race, Integration, and Progress”; Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation Making:
Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
(37.) Mónica García, “Clima, enfermedad y raza en la medicina colombiana del siglo XIX,”
in Patologías de la Patria: Enfermedades, enfermos y Nación en América Latina, edited by
Gilberto Hochman and Steven Palmer, 59–74 (Buenos Aires: Lugar Editorial, 2012); Max
Page 21 of 29
(39.) José M. Samper, Ensayo sobre las revoluciones políticas y la condición social de las
repúblicas colombianas (hispano-americanas); con un apéndice sobre la orografía y la
población de la Confederación Granadina (Paris: E. Thunot et C. Press, 1861), 299.
(42.) Safford, “Race, Integration, and Progress”; Larson, Trials of Nation Making; Arias,
Nación y diferencia en el siglo XIX.
(43.) Stefan PohlValero, “The Energetic Body: Machines, Organisms and Social
Thermodynamics in Colombian Path to Modernity,” in The Routledge History of Latin
American Culture, edited by Carlos Salomon (New York: Routledge, 2016).
(44.) María del Pilar Melgarejo Acosta, “Trazando las huellas del lenguaje político de La
Regeneración: La nación colombiana y el problema de su heterogeneidad excepcional,” in
Genealogías de la colombianidad: Formaciones discursivas y tecnologías de gobierno en
los siglos XIX y XX, edited by Santiago CastroGómez and Eduardo Restrepo, 278–307
(Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2008).
(46.) Javier Sáenz Obregón, Oscar Saldarriaga, and Armando Ospina, Mirar la infancia:
Pedagogía, moral y modernidad en Colombia, 1903–1946 (Bogotá: Uniandes, 1997).
Page 22 of 29
(48.) Carlos Michelsen Uribe, “Carnes: Su consumo en Bogotá,” Revista de Higiene 3.29
(1891): 227–229; 228; and Carlos Michelsen Uribe, “Carne,” Revista de Higiene 1.4
(1887): 55–59; 55.
(50.) Stefan PohlValero, “‘La raza entra por la boca’: Energy, Diet, and Eugenics in
Colombia, 1890–1940,” Hispanic American Historical Review 94.3 (2014): 455–486.
(51.) Harmke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham, eds., The Science and Culture of
Nutrition, 1840–1940 (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995).
(52.) Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1988). For Colombia’s case, see Jorge Márquez Valderrama, Ciudad, miasmas y
microbios: La irrupción de la ciencia pasteriana en Antioquia (Medellín: Editorial de la
Universidad de Antioquia, 2005); Mónica García, “From Medical Geography to Germ
Theory in Colombia, 1860–1900” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2009).
(53.) Mark R. Finlay, “Early Marketing of the Theory of Nutrition: The Science and
Culture of Liebig’s Extract of Meat,” in The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840–1940,
edited by Harmke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham, 48–74 (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995).
See also Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of
Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Philipp Sarasin and Jakob
Tanner, eds., Physiologie und industrielle Gesellschaft: Studien zur
Verwissenschaftlichung des Körpers im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1998).
(58.) PohlValero, “‘La raza entra por la boca.’” See details of the discourses on meat
consumption and hygienist practices of the era in Ingrid Johanna Bolívar, “Discursos
estatales y geografía del consumo de carne de res en Colombia,” in El poder de la carne:
Historias de ganaderías en la primera mitad del siglo XX en Colombia, edited by Alberto
FlórezMalagón (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2008). For the case of
chicha understood as social pathology, see Óscar Iván Calvo Isaza and Marta Saade
Page 23 of 29
(60.) Although the majority of the intellectuals who participated in the discussion on “the
race problems in Colombia” shared the general idea of the “degeneration” of Colombia’s
poor population, the causes argued for this situation were multiple and varied. For a
historiographical review of this debate, see Catalina Muñoz, “Estudio introductorio: Más
allá del problema racial: El determinismo geográfico y las ‘dolencias sociales,’” in Los
problemas de la raza en Colombia: Más allá del problema racial: El determinismo
geográfico y las “dolencias sociales,” edited by Catalina Muñoz (Bogotá: Editorial
Universidad del Rosario, 2011).
(62.) Bolívar, “Discursos estatales y geografía,” 254; PohlValero, “‘La raza entra por la
boca.’”
(63.) Jorge Bejarano, “Las Gotas de Leche: Su significado y valor social,” Cromos 8.181
(1919): 189–190; 190.
(66.) Rubén Gamboa Echandía and Héctor Pedraza, Higiene integral y alimentación del
niño (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1940), 50. See also Laurentino Muñoz, La tragedia
biológica del pueblo colombiano: Estudio de observación y de vulgarización (Cali:
Editorial América, 1935).
(68.) Many of these studies were published in the Comptroller’s journal, Anales de
Economía y Estadística.
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(72.) On the cultural project Biblioteca Aldeana, see Silva, República liberal.
(74.) Bolívar, “Discursos estatales y geografía,” 264–265. For a detailed study on the
Folklore Survey, see Renán Silva, Sociedades campesinas, transición social y cambio
cultural en Colombia: La encuesta folclórica nacional de 1942: Aproximaciones analíticas
y empíricas (Medellín: La Carreta Editores, 2006).
(76.) Natalia Robledo Escobar, “Higiene y panela: Cambios en el discurso y las políticas
del estado colombiano en el marco de las transformaciones neoliberales,” Maguaré 24
(2010): 197–231.
(78.) Jeffrey M. Pilcher, ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998).
(80.) Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial
Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 2012); Alexandre C. Varella, “A dietética no novo mundo: Aliementos para a
natureza e o governo dos corpos de índios e espanhóis, entre os séculos XVI e XVII,” in Al
otro lado del cuerpo: Estudios biopolíticos en América Latina, edited by Hilderman
Cardona and Zandra Pedraza, 23–52 (Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, 2014). On the
configuration of a “racial physiology” in the colonial Americas, see Jorge Cañizares
Esguerra, “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and
Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650,” American Historical Review
104.1 (1999): 33–68; Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, Nature, Empire and Nation: Explorations
of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2006).
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(81.) Jorge Cañizares has contended, for example, that Criollos in the Americas in the
17th century constructed a vision of innate differences among races, with the double aim
of justifying their superiority to the indigenous populations and defending themselves
from the negative characterizations that Europeans had made about their homeland. For
Cañizares, this “Criollo patriotism,” in the face of European ideas about the influence that
climatic and astrological forces had on bodies, resulted in the first forms of modern
racism; Cañizares Esguerra, “New World, New Stars.” Rebecca Earle and Alexandre C.
Varella have emphasized that humoral dietetics helped construct a mutable, unfixed view
of bodies, while also discoursing on racial differences and social subordination: Earle, The
Body of the Conquistador; Varella, “A dietética no novo mundo.”
(82.) Edgardo Lander ed., La colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales:
Perspectivas latinoamericanas (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2000); Santiago CastroGómez, La
poscolonialidad explicada a los niños (Popayán: Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 2005).
(83.) See, for example, Santiago CastroGómez and Eduardo Restrepo, eds., Genealogías
de la colombianidad: Formaciones discursivas y tecnologías de gobierno en los siglos XIX
y XX (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2008).
(84.) For example, José Luis Peset, Ciencia y libertad: El papel del científico ante la
independencia americana (Madrid: C.S.I.C, 1987); Thomas Glick, “Science and
Independence in Latin America (with Special Reference to New Granada),” Hispanic
American Historical Review 71 (1991): 307–334.
(85.) Nieto Olarte, Orden natural y orden social; CastroGómez, La hybris del punto cero;
Alzate, “Comer en el hospital colonial”; Restrepo Zea, El Hospital San Juan de Dios. It is
worth noting that the history of science in the European context has paid relatively little
attention to nutrition during the 18th century. A recent exception is E. C. Spary, Feeding
France New Sciences of Food, 1760–1815 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,
2014).
(86.) To cite just a few examples, Safford, “Race, Integration, and Progress”; Nancy
Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt eds., Race and Nation
in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Larson,
Trials of Nation Making; Arias, Nación y diferencia en el siglo XIX; Lina Del Castillo, The
Science of Nation Building; Claudia Leal and Carl Langebaek, eds., Historias de raza y
nación en América Latina (Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, 2010); Appelbaum, “Envisioning
the Nation.”
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(87.) An exhaustive list of the works that have tackled these questions would be
extremely long. Some outstanding references are Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics:
Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991);
Eduardo A. Zimmermann, “Racial Ideas and Social Reform: Argentina, 1890–1916,”
Hispanic American Historical Review 72.1 (1992): 23–46; Dain Borges, “Puffy, Ugly,
Slothful and Inert: Degeneration in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880–1940,” Journal of Latin
American Studies 25 (1993): 235–256; Javier Sáenz Obregón, Oscar Saldarriaga, and
Armando Ospina, Mirar la infancia: Pedagogía, moral y modernidad en Colombia, 1903–
1946 (Bogotá: Uniandes, 1997); Zandra Pedraza, En cuerpo y alma: Visiones del progreso
y de la felicidad (Bogotá: Uniandes, 1999); Carlos Ernesto Noguera, Medicina y política:
Discurso médico y prácticas higiénicas durante la primera mitad del siglo XX en Colombia
(Medellín: Fondo Editorial Universidad EAFIT, 2003); Zandra Pedraza, “El régimen
biopolítico en América Latina: Cuerpo y pensamiento social,” Iberoamericana 4 (2004): 7–
19; Marisa Miranda and Gustavo Vallejo, eds., Darwinismo social y eugenesia en el mundo
latino (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2005); Diego Armus, ed., Avatares de la medicalización en
América Latina 1870–1970 (Buenos Aires: Lugar Editorial, 2005); Jorge Márquez
Valderrama, Ciudad, miasmas y microbios: La irrupción de la ciencia pasteriana en
Antioquia (Medellín: Editorial de la Universidad de Antioquia, 2005); Julia Rodríguez,
Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the Modern State (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2006); Diego Armus, La ciudad impura: Salud, tuberculosis y
cultura en Buenos Aires, 1870–1950 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Edhasa, 2007); Marisa
Miranda and Álvaro Sierra, eds., Cuerpo, biopolítica y control social: América Latina y
Europa en los siglos XIX y XX (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2009); Adriana Novoa and Axel
Levine, From Man to Ape: Darwinism in Argentina, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010).
(88.) Pilcher, ¡Que vivan los tamales! 77–97; Pohl–Valero, “The Energetic Body.”
Page 27 of 29
(90.) Several examples are Francisco de Assis Guedes de Vasconcelos, “Fome, eugenia e
constituição do campo da nutrição em Pernambuco: Uma análise de Gilberto Freyre,
Josué de Castro e Nelson Chaves,” História, Ciências, Saúde—Manguinhos 8.2 (2001):
315–339; Paulo Drinot, The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race, and the Making of the
Peruvian State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 161–192; Sandra
AguilarRodríguez, “Cooking Modernity: Nutrition Policies, Class, and Gender in 1940s
and 1950s Mexico City,” The Americas 64.2 (2007): 177–205; Sandra AguilarRodríguez,
“Alimentando la nación: Género y nutrición en México (1940–1960),” Revista de Estudios
Sociales 29 (2008): 28–41; Joel Vargas, “Alimentar el cuerpo social: Ciencia, dieta y
control en México durante el Porfiriato (Master’s thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México, 2011); Pedraza, En cuerpo y alma; Noguera, Medicina y política; PohlValero,
“‘La raza entra por la boca’”; Zandra Pedraza, “La diffusion de una dietética moderna en
Colombia: La revista Cromos entre 1940 y 1986,” in Entre medicos y curanderos: Cultura,
historia y enfermedad en la América Latina Moderna, edited by Diego Armus, 293–329
(Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2002); Solon Calero Ruíz, “¿Somos lo que
comemos?” Pedagogías sociales en las prácticas de alimentación: Producción de la
corporalidad y relaciones de conocimiento en comedores escolares de Colombia (Cali:
Universidad Autónoma de Occidente, 2014); Mayali Tafur Sequera, “Antes que comer, hay
que alimentarse: Reconociendo al sujeto del discurso de la educación nutricional en
Colombia” (Master’s thesis, Universidad de los Andes, 2015).
Stefan Pohl-Valero
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