Uncertain Futures, Imperfect Pasts: An Interactive History Salon
Spadina Museum: Historic House & Gardens
285 Spadina Road
spadina@toronto.ca
416.392.6910
$12 per session or $40 for all four (plus HST)

Sunday, Nov. 13, 2 to 4 pm
The Shape of History: Body Image and Diet in the 1920s and Today
Speaker: Jill Andrew, Bite-me Film Festival

In 1918, Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters' Diet and Health with a Key to the Calories was published, introducing the concept of a calorie restriction to the general public. Hunt Peters also drew firm connections between fatness and moral depravity, sin and even treason. Her ideas proved wildly popular in a culture whose perception of the ideal body was changing rapidly. Society saw an explosion in slimming books and treatises and the creation of a diet industry. Jill Andrew, award-winning journalist and founder/director of Bite-me: the Toronto International Body Image Film & Arts Festival, leads a discussion on the 1920s emergence of the diet industry's effects on what we eat and wear today; what we think is beautiful and healthy; and the connotations around being "skinny" or "fat."