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Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019): 69-70         ©  American Folklore Society 2020

Review of: 

Diet and the Disease of Civilization 
Adrienne Rose Bitar. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. Pp. 
234, notes, bibliography, index. 

Review by: Kristin M. McAndrews 
______________________________________________________________ 

In Diet and the Disease of Civilization Adrienne Rose Bitar utilizes hundreds of diet 
books, pamphlets, and food diaries to examine the influence of mythic narratives on 
diet books in the United States. Using an interdisciplinary approach, she explores how 
folkloric motifs are shaped, engaged, and rehashed in diet lore. As a result, Bitar 
creates a compelling argument about the connections between diets and national 
identity. 

Through close examination, Bitar’s text analyzes diet lore from the inside out. She 
demonstrates how Americans are influenced by powerful folkloric ideas that affect the 
physical, emotional, and national body. Bitar writes that “these diets remember an 
original, innocent world and mourn the descent of the human race into modern 
disease” (6). The central argument of the text is that diet narratives reveal the way in 
which storytelling motifs coalesce and spread through American culture. While the 
diets presented are different, each one uncovers how our diet nation’s cultural 
consciousness has been engineered by storytelling. Through cultural and narrative 
exploitation, in the United States the term “diet” has become an unabashed four-letter 
word. 

The book is organized in four compelling chapters. In Chapter One, “Paleolithic Diets 
and the Caveman Utopia,” Bitar shows how these diets pull towards myths and stories 
that stimulate ideas about how food and culture can be much improved by utilizing a 
basic or simpler approach to eating. The author explains that the “Paleo [diet] myth 
redefines a new type [of diet] of refined, slow pleasure,” with a “peaceful vision of 
gender relations” that “overturns scholarly thinking about brutish caveman 
masculinity” (6). While the stories about these diets venerate “pre-agricultural diets” 
they give minimal practical advice about the supposedly basic fare. 

In Chapter Two, “Devotional Diets and the American Eden,” Bitar says that “Fall of 
Man and Fall of a Once-Blessed Nation” are melded into one narrative that shames 
Americans into changing “their way of life and improve the health of a nation” (52). 
She likens them to “the tradition of the jeremiad” in how the diets “their way of life and 
improve the health of a nation” (52). The chapter focuses on how suffering and self-
denial are primary themes of diets such as “Pray Your Weigh Away” and “Garden of 
Eating” varieties, and finds that the type equates the pleasure of eating with lust and 
fattening foods with defilement. Nevertheless, Bitar points out how “imaginative and 
complex” the faith-based diets are, commonly describing the “aesthetics of food,” and 
encouraging adoptees “to imagine a material vision of the Garden of Eden” (73). 



70     McAndrews, Review, Diet & Disease Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019) 

In Chapter Three, “Primitive Diets and the ‘Paradise Paradox,’” Bitar investigates the 
significance of nineteenth century literary theories on the health and diets of Pacific 
Islanders. She shows how colonial narratives both eroticize and blame Natives for their 
poor diets, specifically targeting the Shintani diet. Particularly popular in Hawai’i, the 
diet was developed for obese and diabetic patients. In order to engage dieters—mostly 
local people—the narrative of the diet drew from traditional folkloric stories that reflect 
thematic moments in colonial literature. Bitar finds that the narrative erases diversity 
and “localizes people to a fixed place,” and broadly “constructs the Islands as a 
paradise, peopled by indulgent innocents, isolated from the larger world and the 
advances of time” (94). I appreciated Bitar’s close reading of these particular diet 
narratives as they do “ignore the serious issues of sovereignty, race, and inequality 
because they are dreams, myths, the hopeful stuff of stories” (95). 

The final chapter, “Detoxification Diets and Concepts of a Toxic Modernity,” was quite 
enlightening as detoxification through numerous means is incredibly popular in 
contemporary American culture. Bitar argues that these diets are “utopian and 
optimistic, offering hope for a better body and a better world.” In the “discourses of 
toxic” she explains how “many Americans have dreamt of health and purity in a world 
too often seen as sick and ugly and sad” (148). In today’s political reality, this “wistful 
vision” might make Americans yearn that, if only this diet lore were true, then perhaps 
we could detoxify the current US administration by putting politicians on juice fasts to 
cleanse the meanness out of them. 

While Diet and the Disease of Civilization overall is an enjoyable and informative read, 
I did find the book’s invocation of the Slow Food Movement and Michael Pollan’s The 
Omnivore’s Dilemma too easily and incompletely associated with diet lore and the 
narrative of the Edenic: I would like to have seen fuller consideration of Slow Food’s 
and Pollan’s groundedness in social, food, and animal justice. Ultimately, however, I 
found Bitar’s arguments on diet lore in the United States artful and captivating, and 
they provide important lessons for the reader.  


