FAD

(14) Darby began his review by lumping Carson with groups he considered to be antimodern "freaks." Silent Spring would appeal to readers such as "the organic gardeners, the anti-fluoride leaguers, the worshippers of 'natural foods,' and those who cling to the philosophy of a vital principle, and pseudo-scientists and faddists," wrote Darby.

(50) Bruce Scates, "Faddists and Extremists': Radicalism and the Labor Movement, South Eastern Australia, 1880-1898," PhD thesis, Monash University, 1987, 222-3.

A four-page spread in a 1923 issue of Photoplay featured glamour shots of eminent female scenarists, along with the promise that all were "normal regular women," not "temperamental 'artists,' not short-haired advanced feminists, not faddists." This image control continued into the 1940s, when one studio went so far as to recall previous press photos of a certain female writer-executive because they showed her wearing glasses; a more glamorous photo was promptly distributed.

Too often, their solid, eminently sensible and practical proposals are drowned out by the more sensational outpourings of the faddists, the snake oil merchants, and the spin doctors who swamp the mass media.

With admirable balance, he carefully disentangles the roles of food producers and processors, home economists, faddists, nutritionists, and political pressure groups in shaping broader cultural ideas of nutrition and taste.

Once relegated to "pipe dreams" of food faddists, the scientific community is beginning to embrace such concepts of nutrition with fervor.

As he traces the origins of the breakfast food industry to a few key innovations by nineteenth-century American food faddists, Hudson cannot resist editorializing, "Breakfast foods are perfect example of a twentieth-century consumer industry, with the demand almost wholly created and sustained by advertising and the retail price bearing no relation whatever to the intrinsic value of the goods" (p.

Their opponents derided them as an unrepresentative minority, composed of "petty" people, "obscure little cranks," 'faddists," "fanatics" or killjoys, "bodies that on principle are opposed to all sports and popular amusements," "interfering people, whose greatest pain in life is seeing others enjoy themselves" or "disappointed people in one way or another, out of whom the joy of life has gone." (9) The two sides produced much assertion but little data.

It is highly unlikely, though, that his thoughts on the subject ever reached much of an audience beyond an orbit of American health faddists. (3)