Sarah Tracy
Sarah W. Tracy is Director of the Medical Humanities Program in the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma. Lately she has examined Ancel Keys's role in developing the K Ration; as part of a larger biography of Keys that places his 70-year career in the evolving context of the human and biomedical sciences. Keys is best known for his 1940s research on human starvation and rehabilitation and for his promotion of the "traditional" Mediterranean diet as a means of securing cardiovascular health. The K Ration, however, gave Keys his first opportunity to apply the interdisciplinary field science framework that he had acquired at the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory in the mid-1930s. In helping to create the Army's first thoroughly modern combat ration, Keys introduced a holistic food-engineering standard for subsistence meals that embraced both food (and advertising) psychology and food technology. She presented a talk on her unpublished research at the IAS in November of 2008.
The interview can also be downloaded as an audio file (.mp3 - 53.6 MB).