A Sociological Exploration of Modern /Colonial Cosmology and Food

319 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007.My dissertation demonstrates that this cosmological shift has been profoundly reductionist. In modern chemical research on nutrition, the scientific methods have been reductionistic in that a nutritional scientist can only break a given food down into its component parts, measured in chemicals, and study them one by one, even if complex interactions and contexts might be ignored. Such scientific analysis and through it, ways of conceptualizing food, ignores the possibility that the whole food might be more than or different than the sum of its parts. And the particulars of what the scientific analysis looks at is further constrained by the fact that such work has been conducted under the ageis of agencies of the state or for-profit corporations. In modern scientific theories, as foods consist of invisible chemical components, a powerful expert is required who can inform or withhold information from the majority. My dissertation argues that these processes have led to an epistemological crisis surrounding food and nutrition, even though knowledge about the elemental components of food may seem to have improved.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD