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In the 20th century, major progress was made in the near elimination of many nutritional deficiencies disorders in the United States such as rickets, pellagra, iodine deficiency, infantile scurvy, iron deficiency due to hookworm, and subclinical levels of vitamin A deficiency and folate deficiency. The vitamins and their roles in human health were characterized, and dietary requirements were established. The landmark studies of Joseph Goldberger revealed that the cause of pellagra was nutritional rather than infectious. The fortification of foodstuffs, nutrition education, home gardening, and federally supported feeding programs all were aimed at improving the nutrition of the U.S. population. The American diet also evolved in light of the newer knowledge of nutrition. Despite the tremendous advances in the 20th century, obesity and other challenges remain for nutrition and public health efforts in the 21st century.

Elizabeth Engelhardt examines Depression-era novels and other sources to examine foodways in Appalachian and southern mill towns in relation to the dietary disease of pellagra. Foraging the commons for wild greens, while not actually curing pellagra, was nonetheless curative for other reasons. Gathering wild greens challenged unbalanced diets and the overreliance on processed foods as well as the regimentation of corporatized clock time and the unhealthy conditions of factory life, consumerism, and commodification. Wandering and gathering in wild places may likewise be curative for at least some of the ills that threaten higher education today.

This chapter examines how two diseases – pellagra and trachoma – acquired either at the front or in British prison camps in Egypt first turned prisoners into contested objects of concern between the two sides and also provided a post-war pretext for the Turkish republic to extend its bio-political reach among the Anatolian population. A nutritional deficiency disease, pellagra appeared among Ottoman prisoners while in the camps. British doctors argued that the prisoners were already pellagrous upon arrival to the camps. While this might have been only partially true for some prisoners, many others became pellagrous due to the camp diet inadequate in vitamin niacin. After examining the politics of ‘pellagra’, the chapter turns to trachoma, which caused full or partial blindness among many prisoners. While pellagra disappeared quickly, within a few years of repatriation, trachoma brought home by the prisoners spread to nearly one-fifth of the general population of Anatolia. The prevalence of trachoma provided a pretext for the nationalist state to extend its control of the population in an attempt to manage people’s lives and habits. Knowledge and control gained through managing bodies was also a means for defining the identity of internal others.

Longevity is probably the most eloquent achievement in Italy’s history. In 1861 life expectancy at birth did not exceed 29–30 years, a testimony to the extraordinary backwardness of the country’s average living conditions at the time of unification. In the mid-2010s children in Italy can expect to live an average 82 years, and Italians rank fourth in the world, after Japan, Switzerland, and Australia, in a list of over two hundred countries. The chapter tells this success story and unravels the relative importance of the factors responsible for the dynamics of survival: improvements in public health services, progress in hygiene practices, progress in medicine, economic growth, and the role of better education. However, distributional analysis tones down the enthusiasm and neatly identifies the challenge for the near future: to narrow the gap in many health indicators between the north and the south.