The Back of the Box: A Nutritional Label Guided Tour

Time: 12:00pm

Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation

You stare at them every time you eat a bowl of cereal or wait for the pasta water to boil. But what’s the real story behind nutritional labels? What’s the difference between RDAs, RDIs, and DRIs—or, for that matter, EARs and DVs—and how were they established? What’s a calorie, and how did anyone figure out how many we need? What’s a vitamin, and how were they discovered? In this Brown Bag Lecture, Catherine Price will take participants on a historical tour of a nutritional label, using as inspiration some of the foods they’ve brought with them for lunch.

Catherine Price is a freelance journalist and 2012 Société de Chimie Industrielle fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Her written and multimedia work has appeared in publications including The Best American Science Writing, the New York Times, Popular Science, O, the Oprah Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post Magazine, Salon, Slate, and Men’s Journal, among others. A graduate of Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, she’s a contributing editor at Popular Science and author of a parody travel guide called 101 Places Not to See before You Die (HarperPaperbacks, 2010) and The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook (HarperCollins, 2009). She writes about diabetes for ASweetLife.org. Her current project is a book about the history and science of vitamins and nutrition, to be published by Penguin Press.