The Importance of Age Perceptions and Nutritional Science to Early Twentieth-century Institutional Diets

Scholars agree that increased intermingling of science and policy was a characteristic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Within the realm of food this development has been named 'nutrification' or the 'paradigm of nutritionism'. This article investigates this development in early twentiethcentury Scandinavia. The thesis is that societal perceptions of age and age-related food habits influenced the pace and degree to which nutritional knowledge was integrated into and affected institutional diets. The analysis is based on dietary regulations for Danish elderly homes. In order to inform discussions around the importance of age perceptions to the nutrification of institutional food, the findings are compared with research on school meals in Norway and Denmark. The analysis concludes that age perceptions greatly influenced the extent to which diets changed in public institutions. As a result, nutrification was a process with unevenly distributed effects among Scandinavian populations.