The Unspoken History of Early Dietitians & Eugenics
And what it can teach us about present failures in the nutrition field.
Lenna Frances Cooper was an early dietitian who ran the food service at John Harvey Kellogg's medical spa, the Battle Creek Sanitarium, in the early 1900s. She co-founded the American Dietetic Association, now known as the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND or the Academy). Until very recently, the Academy presented an award each year in her name.
Cooper was also a colleague and close friend of known eugenicists, John Harvey Kellogg and his wife, Ella Eaton Kellogg.
You might know that J.H. Kellogg invented cereal. Did you know he also hosted a National Conference on Race Betterment in 1914, which featured "Mental and Physical Perfection Contests"? He opened his conference presentation with:
We have wonderful new races of horses, cows, and pigs. Why should we not have a new and improved race of men?1
UH NO I'M GOOD THANKS.
Eugenicists at the time believed in "race betterment" through horrifying tactics like the forced sterilization of women of color, women living in poverty, and those with disabilities, as well as slightly less horrifying practices that encouraged white, wealthier, non-immigrant couples to produce more children. They also espoused individual control over one's environment, which early home economist Ellen Richards called the science of "euthenics."
After the 1914 Race Betterment Conference, the Journal of Home Economics quoted early home economist Annie Dewey on euthenics, and it sounds a lot like healthism:
"Euthenics is ... the preliminary science on which eugenics must be based; it seeks to emphasize the immediate duty of man to better his conditions by availing himself of knowledge already at hand which shall tend to increase health and happiness. He must apply this knowledge under conditions — which he can either create or modify. Euthenics is to be developed through sanitary science, through education, and through relating science and education to life."
The journal editors thought this approach could be a fun sister science to eugenics, noting:
However far the science of eugenics may carry the race towards perfection, unless its sister science, euthenics, goes hand in hand, the race will certainly deteriorate as surely as it has in the past.
For the Kelloggs, diet was a key lever of environmental control to prevent "race degeneracy," and Lenna Frances Cooper helped them advance this agenda through her work overseeing the food at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, her role as the first director of the Battle Creek School of Home Economics, and through the vegetarian cooking column she wrote for Good Health, the Sanitarium's magazine.
The First Wellness Influencer?
In The Secret History of Home Economics, journalist Danielle Dreilinger describes Cooper's lifestyle, which sounds eerily like that of a modern-day wellness influencer:
She believed in long walks, no makeup, eight glasses of water a day, a vegetarian diet, and the power of nutrition to transform health…. Every month, she suggested delicious, vegetable-heavy, seasonal dishes and explained the science behind their health benefits.
Food-wise, Cooper was also ahead of her time, writing about avocado and agave, and developing a vegetarian Thanksgiving menu that featured Protose, the Kelloggs' nut-based meat alternative — all in the early 1900s.
It is jarring to see her cheerful recipes for Peach Shortcake and Creamed Okra on Toast sitting alongside articles with titles like "The Need of Reform in Teaching Primitive Races." In her newsletter, Dreilinger wrote about her search into Cooper's past, and said she didn't find evidence that Cooper openly supported eugenics, but neither did she speak out against it.
All we have on record is her silence on the issue. It is somewhat ironic then, that until very recently the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics had an annual award called the Lenna Frances Cooper Memorial Lecture Award, given to a dietitian who is a notable and inspiring speaker, and a role model to other nutrition professionals.
Changing in the Dark
After a group of dietitians started speaking up a couple years ago about Cooper's longtime professional and personal ties to known eugenicists, and loudly wondering if this was quite the right look, especially for a very white profession, the Academy finally changed the name to the Distinguished Lecture Award. That's good, right?!
Well…the thing is, they changed the names of all their awards named after individuals, and they did it quietly, with little fanfare and no explanation. What could have been an opportunity to talk about the misguided and harmful beliefs of early dietetics and home economics, to perhaps construct a healing bridge from the past to the present, and commit to a different path toward the future was instead a quick and silent dismantling in the dark. There is no honor in such a change.
And that's the thing about Lenna Frances Cooper's legacy, and how it has been handled by AND — it's the silence of uncomfortable white women. It's not taking a stance. It's "we don't need to make this political." It's not saying anything because you are personally safe from harm. It's not being brave enough to say, "These are my values, and I will loudly stand up for them." It's so quiet. It's so scared. And it's a failure of the field.
I'm thinking about that terrible time when the Trump administration was deliberately sowing confusion and fear around food and health programs like SNAP, Medicaid, and WIC, so immigrant families feared that use of those programs would lead to deportation, or bar them from future citizenship. The specific targeting of documented and undocumented immigrants in this proposed public charge rule — and Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric in general — holds whispers of eugenics, as do quotes like this one, from a 2019 Atlantic article on the topic:
Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, argues that the public-charge rule is valuable because it keeps out low-skill immigrants, who, he says, are likely to take in more government services than they pay for.
In short, it is abhorrent. It has had very real effects on immigrant households, especially those with children. Dietitians are very familiar with the importance of these programs for the health and nutritional status of children in particular. Can you guess what the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics said about it at the time? Or anytime since?
Silence. Nothing. Of course. Lenna Frances Cooper would be proud.
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