Food matters: The influence of gender on science and practice in the nutrition profession. An institutional ethnography

This case study concerns how changing definitions of gender, science and practice converged to shape the nature and direction of work in the American food and nutrition profession. The study uses methods of qualitative analysis to describe the work of nutrition practice during this century. Specifically, it works from sociologist Dorothy Smith's method for an institutional ethnography and builds upon two data sets. The first is an interview series with people who have taught or studied in the Nutrition Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University from the late 1930s to the early 1990s. These interviews focus on the subjects' varied professional work experience during this time. The second is drawn from historical records about the Program at Teachers College from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the present. These data include a record of all dissertations completed in the program. An analysis of these dissertations is unique and provides a useful kind of historical record to examine trends in a profession. The study highlights three periods in the profession from the viewpoint of the relationship between the science and practice of nutrition: (1) the late 1930s and 1940s as a time of "good fit" between the two domains of science and practice; (2) their separation in the 1950s and 1960s; and (3) the transition of the late 1960s and 1970s leading into the situation since then when practice, principally done by women, has realigned the nature of what it does and what it knows to the "market lines" of the political economy--the food and health care industries, the government, the food and agricultural sciences and the nutrition and health-related sciences. Subjects identified the concept of nurturance, the everyday knowledge it generates and all that associates with it, including food itself, as a complex of understandings that is now vulnerable and risks disappearance inside the profession. In a society that is in serious need of nurturance, people--both inside and outside the profession need to find a way to value and learn from the experience of practitioners who provide that nurturance.