On his book Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food
Cover Interview of March 25, 2020
In a nutshell
Pure Adulteration is about the origins of
manufactured food. More centrally, it is about the struggles people had with
the introduction of new foods in the later 1800s. The book follows the “pure
food crusades” that raged between the 1860s and early 1900s as a window onto
those forms of resistance and accommodation.
That era revealed confusing new tensions in the ways people
understood, bought, trusted, and ate their food. Cultural factors help explain
why anyone cared. They show that a prevailing suspicion of cheats, frauds,
hucksters, and con men—and an associated fervor for sincerity, authenticity,
and honesty—provided the foundation from which the era was born.
Environmental factors help explain how the prevailing
cultural concerns made things worse. New supply chains, complex commodity
flows, far-flung land-use patterns, and theretofore unknown ingredients all
formed a new infrastructure of food and agriculture that made the view from
farm to fork thick and opaque.
Together, that host of cultural and environmental conditions
shaped the pure-food crusades and the set of chemists, analysts, and public
health officials bent on commandeering and policing the concept of purity. The
brunt of those collective changes led to this: whereas into the mid-nineteenth
century it was still common to understand food purity based on its origins, its
provenance, and its purveyors, by the early twentieth century the concept of
purity had moved from its agricultural setting to be relocated into the hands
of the analyst and lab. Purity had become a scientific concept policed by
government agencies and backed by certified analysis. It would be the analysts
and scientists who drew the line between pure and adulterated.
All of that suggests that a different way to give the “in a
nutshell” answer is that Pure Adulteration is about how people changed
the way they drew the line between pure and adulterated. There is (and was) no
natural, pre-human distinction that we can simply uncover and enforce; we have
to decide where to draw it and how to police it.
Today’s world is different from that of our
nineteenth-century forbearers in so 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.
I want readers to see how people made meaning about big key
terms that we may otherwise take for granted: nature and artifice, authenticity
and insincerity, purity and adulteration. Trust and confidence sit at the
center of all of those terms—whether we trust people, why we do, what we trust
them about, how we challenge those modes of trust and belief. I hope readers
gain the view that modern, post-war worries over industrial food identity and
health have their basis much earlier in century-old modes of producing, buying,
and consuming food. If we want food reform today, we need to have a clearer
understanding of the foundations of our manufactured, industrial food system.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Pure Adulteration is about the origins of manufactured food. More centrally, it is about the struggles people had with the introduction of new foods in the later 1800s. The book follows the “pure food crusades” that raged between the 1860s and early 1900s as a window onto those forms of resistance and accommodation.
That era revealed confusing new tensions in the ways people understood, bought, trusted, and ate their food. Cultural factors help explain why anyone cared. They show that a prevailing suspicion of cheats, frauds, hucksters, and con men—and an associated fervor for sincerity, authenticity, and honesty—provided the foundation from which the era was born.
Environmental factors help explain how the prevailing cultural concerns made things worse. New supply chains, complex commodity flows, far-flung land-use patterns, and theretofore unknown ingredients all formed a new infrastructure of food and agriculture that made the view from farm to fork thick and opaque.
Together, that host of cultural and environmental conditions shaped the pure-food crusades and the set of chemists, analysts, and public health officials bent on commandeering and policing the concept of purity. The brunt of those collective changes led to this: whereas into the mid-nineteenth century it was still common to understand food purity based on its origins, its provenance, and its purveyors, by the early twentieth century the concept of purity had moved from its agricultural setting to be relocated into the hands of the analyst and lab. Purity had become a scientific concept policed by government agencies and backed by certified analysis. It would be the analysts and scientists who drew the line between pure and adulterated.
All of that suggests that a different way to give the “in a nutshell” answer is that Pure Adulteration is about how people changed the way they drew the line between pure and adulterated. There is (and was) no natural, pre-human distinction that we can simply uncover and enforce; we have to decide where to draw it and how to police it.
Today’s world is different from that of our nineteenth-century forbearers in so 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.
I want readers to see how people made meaning about big key terms that we may otherwise take for granted: nature and artifice, authenticity and insincerity, purity and adulteration. Trust and confidence sit at the center of all of those terms—whether we trust people, why we do, what we trust them about, how we challenge those modes of trust and belief. I hope readers gain the view that modern, post-war worries over industrial food identity and health have their basis much earlier in century-old modes of producing, buying, and consuming food. If we want food reform today, we need to have a clearer understanding of the foundations of our manufactured, industrial food system.