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SUMMARY:Beefing up science: British Bovril\, bulging biceps and nutrition 
 science - Lesley Steinitz (Faculty of History)
DTSTART:20130225T130000Z
DTEND:20130225T141500Z
UID:TALK42487@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:29667
DESCRIPTION:The current horse meat scandal may remind us of nineteenth-cen
 tury food adulteration scandals\, but it also raises the more subtle issue
  of how food choice is so much a matter of taste and habit. Lesley will be
  talking about another food\, Bovril beef extract\, which was unfamiliar w
 hen it was introduced near the end of the nineteenth century. This brown g
 loopy aromatic liquid is still sold\, albeit with a modified recipe\, and 
 continues even now to be portrayed as possessing the enduring qualities of
  national pride\, endeavour\, strength and resilience. This paper is in la
 rge part the story of how the Bovril company managed to create this brand 
 image and embed it in British culture around the turn of the twentieth cen
 tury (despite being implicated in horse meat adulteration scandals back th
 en too). The devices that the company used to construct it were\, surprisi
 ngly for a substance that seems simple and mundane\, built around the clai
 ms of great chemists and physicians and based on powerful scientific claim
 s for healthy and invalid nutrition\, claims which it managed to sustain f
 or many decades. But while they were overtly based on nutritional science\
 , they were sustained over the longer term because Bovril's image was root
 ed in Britain's beef culture\, the traditional medicinal value ascribed to
  beef tea and the slowly changing social\, political and scientific concer
 ns of the period exemplified by the physical culture movement.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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