Histories of the pure food movement typically describe the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act as a quintessential Progressive Era reform. Benjamin Cohen’s Pure Adulteration, by contrast, locates the fight for pure food in the Gilded Age, providing a longer, deeper, and more comprehensive look at the issue’s origins. Cohen’s book traces the economic and agricultural changes that generated novel foodstuffs, the cultural anxieties that prompted concerns about food adulteration, and the ways in which scientific analysis sought to assist consumers and restore trust in the food system.
One original contribution of Pure Adulteration is to place the history of concerns about food adulteration within the cultural context of nineteenth-century fears of “confidence men.” Just as Americans worried about being duped by swindlers in land deals or business schemes, so too did nineteenth-century Americans’ anxieties about moral character shape the way they evaluated foodstuffs. Urbanization and westward migration made it more difficult for purchasers of food to use community reputation to determine the quality of a product or the trustworthiness of its purveyor. Cohen tackles the concepts of purity and adulteration as ably as Mary Douglas’s anthropological classic Purity and Danger, but, drawing on literary texts and adulteration laws as sources, with a careful eye to the nineteenth-century American context.
Pure Adulteration is no less attentive to the material changes in agriculture that generated suspect foods. Its middle chapters closely analyze three targets of adulteration complaints: oleomargarine, cottonseed oil, and glucose. The book’s chapter on cottonseed oil provides an especially rich perspective on nineteenth-century economic developments. The number of cottonseed mills, and the proportion of cottonseeds crushed, increased rapidly between 1870 and 1910. A distinctive by-product of the South’s biggest crop, cottonseed oil integrated the region into the national economy: soap makers used the oil to manufacture soap, textile and machine operators to lubricate machines, and meat-packers to adulterate lard. Cohen’s analysis makes explicit the connections between agriculture and industry, but it also reveals the web of interdependence that linked disparate agricultural economies. Northern cattle feasted on grain supplemented with cottonseed oil. Moreover, cottonseed oil production waxed when corn production (and thus, hog lard production) waned. Hence, in Cohen’s telling, it is not simply the capitalization of railroads, the centralized ascendance of Chicago’s meat-packers, or the increasing distribution of northern manufactured goods that incorporated the nation’s economy in the late nineteenth century. Southern industrialists also fueled northern agricultural changes and proved essential in fostering the development of the meat-packing trade. By drawing attention to the export trade in cottonseed oil and glucose, Cohen also reminds readers of the centrality of agricultural commodities, and not just manufactured goods, in forging ties to the global economy and building the case for American imperialism.
Cohen’s chapter on glucose underscores the range of meanings the term “purity” conveyed to nineteenth-century Americans. Glucose—a term used in the nineteenth century to describe sugars made from beets, sorghum, grapes, or corn—generated a variety of concerns about purity. As with other manufactured foods, critics worried that residues of the manufacturing process (in the case of glucose, sulfuric acid) would persist in the food. They faulted glucose manufacture for polluting waterways. Glucose critics also expressed concern that it would even be peddled as a more authentic “natural” food—as a stand-in for honey, for instance. In this way, concerns about glucose mirrored those posed by oleomargarine. Advocates for glucose, by contrast, pitched the product by appealing to its moral purity, especially in contrast to the moral taint surrounding sugar produced by slave labor or in colonial circumstances. Beet sugar advocates appealed to the “civilized” nature of starch-based glucose compared to the “barbaric” production of cane sugar. Cohen’s attention to this moral, production-based claim of purity used to evaluate food is welcome. But he might do more to interrogate the sugar beet defenders’ analysis of agricultural labor. Given the twentieth-century history of exploitative Mexican migrant workers in sugar beet fields and Caribbean laborers in Florida cane fields, it would be useful to lay out more clearly how accurately the sharp rhetorical contrasts reflected actual differences in nineteenth-century labor relations between colonial cane fields and domestic agriculture.
The book’s final section discusses how efforts to keep the American food supply free of adulteration elevated the position of analytical chemists as the arbiters of purity and danger. Never have analytical chemists had a quirkier and more entertaining chronicler. This is not dry organizational history. Pure Adulteration traces the development of professional identity playfully—even revisiting the lyrics chemists sang together to forge their esprit de corps. These professional developments were critical, for analytical chemists—especially Harvey Wiley—became central figures in the creation of the Pure Food and Drug Act and were empowered, as staff of the USDA’s Division of Chemistry, to enforce it. Mistrust in the food system still motivated debates over purity, but analytical chemists began to shift the measure of purity from a moral evaluation of those who made, sold, or manufactured food, or from the sensory experiences of how food tasted and smelled, to analytical measures of products themselves.
Like the nineteenth-century foods it explicates, Pure Adulteration satisfies precisely because it recombines familiar ingredients—in this case, cultural, economic, and intellectual history—in a novel form. It is genuinely good history by any measure.
