Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food by Benjamin R. Cohen (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food by Benjamin R. Cohen Lydia Kinasewich Cohen, Benjamin R.–Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 315 p. How do we know the food we buy is safe and authentic? How do consumers know whom to trust? In late-nineteenth-century America, insufficient food regulation concerned many American citizens. These questions ultimately framed the legal and social debates about adulterated food, establishing a precedent for increased regulation in the early twentieth century. Benjamin Cohen’s Pure Adulteration uses these debates to define the era of adulteration as a period when methods of production and national identity shifted from agrarian to industrial. He situates concerns about adulterated food within the broader historical context of the growing uncertainty about purity and health in the West. [End Page 204] Cohen’s socio-cultural approach to the history of the adulteration era illustrates how the social context of the late-nineteenth-century Gilded Age shaped environmental and legal developments surrounding food production. Rather than solely focusing on the development of legislation or particular products that elicited fears about adulteration, Cohen uses legal and social commentary about adulteration to examine the culture of mistrust that shaped this era. To structure Cohen’s inquiry, Pure Adulteration is divided into three sections along with an introductory case study. The introduction focuses on the trial of Chevalier Alfred Paraf, who was accused of producing oleomargarine, a product viewed in the Gilded Age as adulterated butter threatening the safety and morality of America’s food system. Cohen uses Paraf’s trial to consider themes of cultural mistrust, the changing relationship between manufactured food and the environment, the growing geographic distribution between production and consumption, and the development of government legislation to enforce the scientific analysis of adulterated goods in America. Cohen bridges these themes by demonstrating how social, moral, legal, and environmental concerns about adulteration culminated in a growing enforcement of adulteration by the early twentieth century. The first section, “The Culture of Adulteration,” analyzes how cultural beliefs about truth and sincerity shaped how people understood what constitutes pure and healthy food (p. 27). Cohen examines how this era of adulteration in America was defined by responses to fears about safety and mistrust in the changing system of food production. He argues that the growing concerns about adulteration arose in the mid-nineteenth century due to a shift from community-based sustenance practices to an increasingly industrialized system of production that left people feeling estranged from what they were eating, both by distance and familiarity. He challenges, however, the “distance-equals-adulteration equation,” proposed by other historians to explain the cultural loss of trust in manufactured food (p. 26). Rather, he argues that these fears about adulteration were exacerbated in nineteenth-century America due to a population that was increasingly weary of immoral merchants (p. 32). To support his argument, Cohen references nineteenth-century literature from the likes of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and domestic economists to reflect the cultural mistrust that fuelled this era of adulteration. Cohen examines the connection between the environment and food production in the second section, “The Geography of Adulteration.” He considers how a shift from agrarian to urban methods of production sparked mistrust in manufactured foods as consumers struggled to trace the sources of what they were eating. He assesses three products—margarine, cottonseed oil, and glucose—that were the subject of many of the adulteration debates. In different capacities, margarine, cottonseed oil, and glucose shed light on how new, manufactured foods challenged beliefs about what people were eating and the role the environment and technology played in this consumption. The debates on oleomargarine revolved around the idea that consumers were being poisoned or cheated by the introduction of these new and unfamiliar products. As agricultural production systems shifted to factory settings, the food manufactured through this industrial system was distributed and marketed primarily to grocers, fostering mistrust between consumers and producers. [End Page 205] The final section of Pure Adulteration, “The Analysis of Adulteration,” focuses on the development of a standardized system of testing for adulterated food. Cohen...