Pure adulteration : cheating on nature in the age of manufactured food / Benjamin R. Cohen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cohen, Benjamin R., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Food adulteration and inspection--United States--History--19th century.

Food adulteration and inspection.

Food adulteration and inspection--United States--History--20th century.

History.

United States.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xv, 315 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Summary:

In the latter nineteenth century, extraordinary changes in food and agriculture gave rise to new tensions in the ways people understood, obtained, trusted, and ate their food. This was the Era of Adulteration, and its concerns have carried forward to today: How could you tell the food you bought was the food you thought you bought? Could something manufactured still be pure? Is it okay to manipulate nature far enough to produce new foods but not so far that you question its safety and health? How do you know where the line is? And who decides? Benjamin R. Cohen uses the pure food crusades to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods and the perceived problems they wrought. Cohen follows farmers, manufacturers, grocers, hucksters, housewives, politicians, and scientific analysts as they struggled to demarcate and patrol the ever-contingent, always contested border between purity and adulteration, and as, at the end of the nineteenth century, the very notion of a pure food changed. Purity became a scientific rather than environmental concept--one based on analyzing the product instead of the process. In the end, there is (and was) no natural, pre-human distinction between pure and adulterated to simply uncover and enforce; we have to decide. Today's world is different from that of our nineteenth century forebears in many ways, but the challenge of policing the difference between acceptable and unacceptable practices remains central to daily decisions about the foods we eat, how we produce them, and what choices we make when buying them.

Contents:

The appearance of being earnest

The culture of adulteration

Surfaces and interiors

Household, grocer, and trust

The geography of adulteration

Margarine in a dairy world

Oil without olives and lard without hogs

Glucose in the empire of sugar

The analysis of adulteration

Analysis as border patrol

Food and the government chemist

Epilogue: the persistence of adulteration.

Notes:

"A number of maps included throughout this book refer readers to https://purefood.lafayette.edu/. The maps included here are static versions of a larger series of dynamic maps tracing changes in various features of the three main cases in this book between the 1870s and 1910s. Readers should refer to that site for further maps and images from the book." -- page [ix]

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

ebook version :

ISBN:

9780226377926

022637792X

OCLC:

1089862448