Pure Adulteration

Benjamin R. Cohen uses the pure food crusades at the turn of the twentieth century to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods in the United States. 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?
 
In Pure Adulteration, 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.
 
In the end, there is (and was) no natural, prehuman distinction between pure and adulterated to 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.

Benjamin R. Cohen is associate professor at Lafayette College. He is the author of Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside and the coeditor of Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food and Technoscience and Environmental Justice: Expert Cultures in a Grassroots Movement.

Table of Maps
Prologue

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

"Well-written and deftly crafted. . . . Cohen’s book is a compelling read that combines colourful characters and fascinating geographies of commodities and cultures with important philosophical and intellectual discussions over what constitutes food or fraud. This book is a timely one as debates over food regulation and standards likely will dominate future trade talks between the US, Britain and other territories across the world."

"As Benjamin R. Cohen notes in his thoughtful book Pure Adulteration, it is difficult to find a time or a place in history that lacks purveyors of food and drink attempting to cheat their unsuspecting customers. [Cohen] brings up the age-old problem of adulteration as essential context for his more recent case study of the underlying issues. . . . [He asks] a range of provocative and intriguing questions about U.S. food systems. What, for example, does this fight for food purity tell us about the changing nature of the country; its shifting culture, commerce, and politics; and its emerging scientific power?"

"Good food writing makes you think about what you eat in a different way. Good food history helps explain how and why we eat what we eat now. The fact that Benjamin Cohen can accomplish both of these tasks simultaneously is a considerable achievement. . . . Pure Adulteration masterfully explains the complicated early days of a movement that is more relevant to today's times than ever before."

"Cohen is a historian and engineer, and his book is erudite and whimsical, richly documented with vintage advertisements and production statistics. . . . [He] walks us through a formative moment."

"Pure Adulteration does a great job of explaining the complicated interrelationships of various industries (like cottonseed with wheat and pork) and the ways that new food products affected international trade. . . . The work is perhaps at its most intriguing when it reveals the many ways foods and racial prejudice have been interconnected. . . . Made enjoyable by Cohen’s gentle, witty voice and crystal-clear writing style. Illuminating and enjoyable."

"Cohen explains how the ideal of purity and the sin of adulteration came to shape which foods Americans viewed as acceptable and which as unacceptable at a time when they had decreasing control over how food was produced. . . . Cohen’s thoughtful argument is made stronger by his cogent writing as well as numerous illustrations. His writing is clear and precise, striking an enjoyable balance between the formal and the informal. It has become common for historians to make more use of the first person to give readers entrée into a complex narrative, but not everyone weaves together the different tones with the skill that Cohen does." 

" 'Trusting food meant trusting people.' This truth, as well as many of the anxieties of America’s Gilded Age chronicled by Benjamin R. Cohen in Pure Adulteration, resonates strongly in the twenty-first century. Indeed, it is remarkable how little ideological, and psychological, distance has been covered. . . . Cohen depicts a cat-and-mouse game between ever-adapting adulterers and 'pure food' crusaders, which set the tone for our current labyrinth of regulation. . . . The products have changed, but the moral handwringing and naturalistic nostalgia continue."