"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.
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.
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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.