Acquired Tastes
Stories about the Origins of Modern Food
How modern food helped make modern society between 1870 and 1930: stories of power and food, from bananas and beer to bread and fake meat.
The modern way of eating—our taste for food that is processed, packaged, and advertised—has its roots as far back as the 1870s. Many food writers trace our eating habits to World War II, but this book shows that our current food system began to coalesce much earlier. Modern food came from and helped to create a society based on racial hierarchies, colonization, and global integration. Acquired Tastes explores these themes through a series of moments in food history—stories of bread, beer, sugar, canned food, cereal, bananas, and more—that shaped how we think about food today.
Contributors consider the displacement of native peoples for agricultural development; the invention of Pilsner, the first international beer style; the “long con” of gilded sugar and corn syrup; Josephine Baker's banana skirt and the rise of celebrity tastemakers; and faith in institutions and experts who produced, among other things, food rankings and fake meat.
Contributors: Benjamin R. Cohen, Thomas D. Finger, David Fouser, Lisa Haushofer, Michael S. Kideckel, Faron Levesque, William Thomas Okie, René Alexander D. Orquiza Jr., Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Adam Shprintzen, David Singerman, Tashima Thomas, Amrys O. Williams, Anna Zeide
Reviews
“The editors of this book cared deeply about the craft of writing…. The result is a collection written mostly by academics…but its brief pieces read more like magazine essays than like scholarly articles. Acquired Tastes, therefore, provides an engaging set of snippets from exciting recent and forthcoming projects. It deserves wide readership.”— Brian Leech, Agricultural History
“[These] engagingly written, intriguing stories…[provide] an exciting and important addition to studies on food as well as other related fields of study, including the history of business and capitalism, environmental history, and the history of technology.” —Ai Hisano, Technology and Culture
“Acquired Tastes reminds readers of the (im)balance of power that often tilts political and economic decisions toward the interests of the few rather than the many…. [It offers] instructive angles on the origins of modern food, and it is their collective accomplishment to show the directions in which to push our knowledge.” —Martin Bruegel, Food and History
“The authors of Acquired Tastes have provided a compelling case for their claim that the transition to modern food began long before the Second World War. Thanks to its breadth, the book has much to offer educators in multiple disciplines, and is an enjoyable and informative read for anyone interested in food history.” — Rod Thomson, Food, Culture & Society
“[A] collection of great American food history writing.” —Jonathan Rees, Global Food History
“This book will certainly help interested readers give their consumptive habits the thoughtful attention they deserve and highlight for them that just as our current food ways and woes came from particular decisions made by particular people reacting to their particular circumstances in the past, so too the choices we make today will shape the diets of our descendants.” —Diana Gitig, Neo.Life
“Food culture is too often limited by an obsessive focus on the new and now. The essays in this excellent, rigorous collection are a pointed reminder that the past is very much the present, and the future, too.” —Helen Rosner, staff writer, The New Yorker
“An endlessly fascinating collection of stories about the invention and popularization of modern food. A constant thread traces the idea of nutritional reform through science and its sinister relationship with scientific racism, as well as efforts to challenge white supremacy in the global food system.” —Paul Freedman, Yale University
“These lively, wide-ranging essays about the surprising forces that shaped American eating habits make a stellar contribution to food scholarship.” —Laura Shapiro, author of Perfection Salad
Related post-publication material
October 11, 2021 Episode 209 of The Road to Now podcast
September 1, 2021 Interview on NewsTalk Ireland Radio
August 19, 2021 “Lessons from a Weekend Writing Retreat,” by Helen Rubinstein and Anna Zeide, about the origins of Acquired Tastes
August 17, 2021 Episode of New Books Network Podcast
August 13, 2021 “The Hidden Lives of Modern Food,” MIT Reader
Pure Adulteration
Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food
Do you trust your food? How do you know that what you’re eating is what you thought you were eating? Is it because you know the source, you trust the label, you made it yourself, or some combination of each? Upheaval in agriculture and food production in the later 1800s threw all these questions into tumbling relief, spawning a debate called the pure food crusades. The confusion wasn’t new as claims of adulterated (contaminated) food were nearly timeless. But the terms of the debate became ever-more confusing with the introduction of foods from factories and not just fields. Conventional agricultural production and food identity were radically upended in just a half century with those new factories, new manufactured products, and new ways of buying, cooking and knowing food. Add to this that trusting food has always meant trusting people, yet trusting people was also increasingly difficult in the face of Gilded Age hucksterism, con men, and duplicitous cheats. Challenges to character and authenticity wrought by a world in flux brought this question to the forefront: What did it take to find sincere people and sincere food?
By the early twentieth-century, trusting food would mean trusting labels. Pure Adulteration (University of Chicago Press, 2019) tells the story of the transition from trust in the agrarian world to trust in the analytically certified consumer market. It uses debates about purity and adulteration—debased, corrupted, or contaminated food—to examine how new manufacturing practices challenged cultural ideas of “nature” and “natural” and how those challenges resulted in new science-based food regulation. In the end, people would wonder if industrial, manufactured food was a con too. The result was modern food regulation based on the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and anchored by the new authority of chemical analysis.
A digital companion to the book, purefood.lafayette.edu, hosts maps that illustrate the changing circumstances of late-nineteenth century food geographies. The maps begin with a tour of one of the century’s most notorious con men, the Chevalier Alfred Paraf. They then provide visual access to changes in legislation, commodity production for oleomargarine and cottonseed oil, and export patterns for three contentious adulterants of the era, oleomargarine (and oleo oil), cottonseed oil, and glucose (“grape-sugar”).
Reviews
"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?" —Deborah Blum, Science
“Cohen’s writing style, often ironically humorous with asides that can read like a podcast rather than a monograph…engages with and gives cultural structure to questions that persist to this day. Pure Adulteration deserves a wide audience, consisting of both scholars and the general public alike, and will reward them for the effort.” —David Blanke, Journal of American History
"Cohen[’s] book is erudite and whimsical, richly documented with vintage advertisements and production statistics….[He] walks us through a formative moment." —Sarah Tracy, Literary Review of Canada
“This is a scholarly book…made enjoyable by Cohen’s gentle, witty voice and crystal-clear writing style. Illuminating and enjoyable.” —Sarah Hood, Culinary Historians of Canada
“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.” —Michelle Mart, H-Soz-Kult
" '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." —Daniel Matthews, Times Literary Supplement
"Engaging and accessible…this work will likely find an audience among general readers as well as those studying American history or food science….Recommended. All readers." —S.E. Fancher, CHOICE
“[W]ell-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.” —Carolyn Cobbold, Ambix
"Cohen offers a fresh take on familiar tales of food fraud and its detection.…Pure Adulteration is a breezy read. Cohen draws upon colorful anecdotes and characters to make the story of food adulteration entertaining and compelling. He also makes excellent use of visual evidence to reinforce his vivid storytelling, including maps of commodity flows and political cartoons….Pure Adulteration analyzes the pure food crusades on food fraud but lets the reader decide if they leave a bitter taste in the mouth." —Xaq Frohlich, Environmental History
"Never have analytical chemists had a quirkier and more entertaining chronicler. This is not dry organizational history. . . . 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." ―Kendra Smith-Howard, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
"A much-needed fresh take on the era of adulteration….Cohen’s [book] adds to the growing work at the intersection of food studies and environmental history, which help us to see the consumer side of food systems as fundamentally connected to labor, agriculture, advertising, and science….Cohen seamlessly weaves his historical analysis together with personal anecdotes and fascinating insights, making this book a fun and exciting read. It is an approachable book for undergraduate students or general readers, but will also offer compelling insights for scholars of the nineteenth-century U.S. interested in food, environment, consumerism, and regulatory policy."―Jay I. Stone, Food, Culture & Society
"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."—Jonathan Rees, Agricultural History
“Cohen’s work is meticulously researched. His prose is engaging, with vignettes and moments of personal narrative that situate his own experience with products….Cohen’s engagement with diverse literary and visual sources makes the book a rich snapshot of the culture that created the pure food moment [and his] approach is so inviting that nonspecialists will find the book accessible, informative, and entertaining.”—Clare Gordon Bettencourt, Social History of Alcohol and Drugs
"Cohen has assembled a compelling set of stories, recounting the deeds of food charlatans and chemists of various stripes, and uses these stories to open up his serious exploration of the place of food in modernity’s radical reorientation of relations with nature. It’s a work of revelation, uncovering the many hidden ingredients that have gone into the foods we consume." —Douglas Sackman, author of Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden
"A richly detailed, intellectually sophisticated account of the conflicts at the core of our personal and social identities. Cohen wears his learning lightly and knows how to tell a good story, so the book is a pleasure to read as well as a fresh and illuminating perspective on a central theme in American cultural history." —Jackson Lears, author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920
"What makes some foods pure and real and others not? Cohen traces the colorful history—and geography—of this question. Timely and engaging, Pure Adulteration shows that industrialization changed not just where food comes from but also where and to whom we look for reasons to trust it." —Susanne Freidberg, author of Fresh: A Perishable History
"Cohen’s important book corrects standard narratives of adulteration and regulation, which tend to give outsized credit to Harvey Wiley and The Jungle. He demonstrates persuasively that American ideas about ‘purity’ changed enormously over the time period he considers, moving from an experiential and primarily agricultural concept to a consumer-oriented standard whose ultimate arbiter was laboratory analysis." —Helen Zoe Veit, Michigan State University
Related post-publication material
April 5, 2023 “The Great Big Butter Battle,” on the Not Past It podcast
January 27, 2022 “Trusting the Grocer,” for The Recipes Project
January 27, 2021 Interview on Well Tempered/WKND Chocolate with Lauren Heinick
October 9, 2020 Episode 588 of Food Sleuth Radio
October 8, 2020: “Your Food Isn’t ‘Natural’ and It Never Will Be,” at Wired
September 29, 2020: Interview at Public Books
March 25, 2020: Interview at Rorotoko
February 10, 2020: “Food in the Era of Adulteration,” Episode 161 of The Road to Now
January 24, 2020: “The Great Electric Sugar Con,” for PBS American Experience
December 19, 2019: Pure Adulteration and “The Page 99” test
December 10, 2019: “5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers,” LitHub
Notes from the Ground
“In the course of the period marked by the birth of modern scientific discourse, the map has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the condition of its possibility.” —Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
“Listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache...not simply because he has a toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilization, a man who is ‘divorced from the soil and the national elements,’ as they express it now-a-days.” —Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Notes from the Ground (Yale, 2009/2011) is about how and why dirt became an object of scientific interest. To that end, it is a story of defining the modern landscape with scientific means. The book examines the historical and cultural basis from which agriculture and science first came together in America, a combination that begins in the early Republic of the later eighteenth century and becomes fully manifest by the mid-nineteenth. It explains how and why agrarian Americans—yeoman farmers, gentleman planters, politicians, and policy makers alike—accepted, resisted, and shaped scientific ways of knowing the land. It also asks questions about credibility and authority: when advocates claimed to know something new about the soil, why did anyone else believe them? Taking the knowledge and credibility questions together, in its larger ambition Notes from the Ground is a study of how science became a culturally credible means for humans to interact with the environment.
Reviews
“Notes from the Ground encompasses the entire subject of science and the environment during the nineteenth century. Cohen writes with grace, clarity, and insight about the 'georgic science' of American farmers—a philosophy that resonates in the present, meant to ‘reveal rather than conceal our connections to the land.’” —Steven Stoll, author of Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America
“Cohen takes readers back to the Early Republic to explore how people thought about land and production, ingeniously demonstrating how day-to-day labor in fields and barns led farmers to adopt and create their own scientific approaches. This is a crisp and clever book.” —Deborah Fitzgerald, author of Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture
“Notes from the Ground, by explaining how new technologies were evaluated and accepted in practice, transforms our understanding of antebellum Southern agriculture.” —David Nye, author of America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings
“Cohen contributes to the study of Virginia’s agricultural development by documenting the increasingly specific knowledge that the gentleman farmers of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison’s times tried to foster. Using diaries, published writings, and private correspondences, Cohen recreates a geographical view of their efforts to come to grips with the changing panorama of the eastern United States.” —Margaret Rossiter, American Historical Review
“Notes from the Ground is a healthy reminder that the roots of modern agriculture go deep. It provides a useful tonic to the popular mythology of a sudden transformation during the mid-twentieth century. [Notes] is the product of deep thought and careful research. It is written with concise and clever prose and contains lovely pictures and refreshing insights. It will surely be welcomed by scholars.” —Carrie Meyer, Journal of American History
“Cohen has uncovered a remarkable and little-known record of scientific activity. By drawing our gaze down to crumbling earth and by tracing the growing network of Americans who gleaned knowledge from their fields as well as from books, Cohen shows agriculture to be a central motivating force in American science, a little-examined realm of scientific practice, and a vital direction for the history of chemistry.” —Emily Pawley, Chemical Heritage Magazine
“Notes from the Ground [is] a tightly argued, engaging, and important analysis that will be valuable for any scholar interested in changing attitudes about the land.” —Mark Finlay, Technology & Culture
“[Cohen] provides essential background for the eventual emergence of the land-grant complex and industrial agriculture. Notes from the Ground is an impressive monograph that deserves a wide readership.” —Mark Hersey, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
“As a thick description of the emergence of a new way of scientific knowing, one that eschews the teleology of scientific modernization and insists that science came wrapped in culture, Notes from the Ground is a stimulating new interpretation of a well-chronicled moment in American agricultural history.” —Paul Sutter, Agricultural History
“Notes from the Ground is a welcome addition to the debate on work and environments that has been nuanced by Richard White and others. [It] reflects Cohen’s valuable roots as a historian of science [and] treads ground familiar to environmental historians, making intriguing connections between nature as agent and the effects of georgic science in the nineteenth century.” —Hayley Goodchild, Environmental History
April 2013: Roundtable review at H-Environment, by S. Stoll, M. Finlay, D. Goldstein, R. D. Hurt, and J. Hamblin
December 2011: Organization & Environment, by M. Roth, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 486-489
August 2011: Journal of Southern History, by A. Marcus, Vol. 77, No. 3, pp. 698-699
January 2011: Environmental History, by H. Goodchild, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 348-349
Winter 2011: Agricultural History, by P. Sutter, Vol. 85, No. 1, pp. 146-147
January 2011: Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, by M. Hersey, Vol. 119, No. 1, pp. 81-82 [pdf here]
January 2011: Technology & Culture, by M. Finlay, Vol. 52, No. 1, pp. 188-190 [pdf here]
December 2010: Isis, by P. Lucier, Vol. 101, No. 4., pp. 892-893
September 2010: Journal of American History, by C. Meyer, Vol. 97, No. 2, e-version [pdf here]
Summer 2010: Chemical Heritage Magazine, by E. Pawley, Vol. 28, No. 2, p. 44
April 2010: Choice, by L.S. Cline, Vol. 47 [available on-line]
April 2010: The American Historical Review, by M. Rossiter, Vol. 115, No. 2, pp. 541-542
Technoscience and Environmental Justice
Over the course of nearly thirty years, the environmental justice movement has changed the politics of environmental activism and influenced environmental policy. In the process, it has turned the attention of environmental activists and regulatory agencies to issues of pollution, toxics, and human health as they affect ordinary people, especially people of color. This book argues that the environmental justice movement has also begun to transform science and engineering. The chapters present case studies of technical experts' encounters with environmental justice activists and issues, exploring the transformative potential of these interactions.
Technoscience and Environmental Justice first examines the scientific practices and identities of technical experts who work with environmental justice organizations, whether by becoming activists themselves or by sharing scientific information with communities. It then explore scientists' and engineers' activities in such mainstream scientific institutions as regulatory agencies and universities, where environmental justice concerns have been (partially) institutionalized as a response to environmental justice activism. All of the chapters grapple with the difficulty of transformation that experts face, but the studies also show how environmental justice activism has created opportunities for changing technical practices and, in a few cases, has even accomplished significant transformations.
Reviews
“This book brings together many of the top scholars at the intersection of science and technology studies and environmental justice studies to explore how scientists and engineers engage with environmental justice issues and activists, often in the face of significant institutional constraints. Through detailed case studies, the scholars break new ground by showing how both the topics studied and methods used to understand difficult environmental justice issues have undergone significant innovation.” —David Hess, Professor of Sociology, Vanderbilt University
“This collection brings empirical insight and fresh analytical perspective to issues of science, engineering, and environmental justice. In presenting scientific identities and practices as dynamic rather than static, it takes us beyond science-citizen dualities and opens up transformative possibilities for both science and environmental change.” —Alan Irwin, Copenhagen Business School, author of Citizen Science
“The questions raised by the authors about environmental justice and the transformation of science and engineering related to environmental decision making are important and have been largely neglected in the literature until very recently. The rigorous and scholarly discussion of how risk science can be transformed by values associated with the environmental justice movement is quite impressive.” —Elaine Vaughan, Research Professor and Professor Emerita of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine
Fall 2012: Social Science Journal, by L. Alm, Vol. 49, pp. 556-557
June 2012: Organization & Environment, by K. Elliot, Vol. 25, No.1, pp. 204-206
Spring 2012: Chemical Heritage Magazine, by J. Roberts, Vol. 30, No. 1—
Resetting the Table in the Lehigh Valley
This book was written by students in the Spring 2014 semester of “Technology and Nature” at Lafayette College I taught. The 19 students—representing eight majors across campus and including sophomores, juniors and seniors—took the subject of local food as their topic and the Lehigh Valley as their site of attention. The book followed many weeks of background study about the ways those two unwieldy concepts, technology and nature, could fit together. Their goal, lofty though admirable, was to propose a way to promote sustainable technologies for the sake of an ecologically healthy food system. Rather than the industrial model of technology and agriculture, that is, they considered what it takes to imagine technologies that promote environmental health, not undermine it. The eight chapters of the book proceed in three parts. First, two chapters canvas historical and cultural backgrounds that have led to our current food system and the local context of the Lehigh Valley that frames the analysis to follow. Second, four chapters bring us from farm to fork by assessing alternative technologies for production, small-farm management, distribution, and consumption. A final part includes two chapters. One assesses the role of culture and policy in leading change for sustainable agriculture. The other discusses how we need to get beyond technology alone in our goal of building a sustainable future. In the end, the students find that a more sustainable food system is one that is scale sensitive, ecologically attentive, and economically feasible. It will not come about, they show, by new technologies alone, but with new ways of understanding the relationships between technologies and nature.
Interested readers can find a hard copy in Special Collections at Lafayette’s Skillman Library, under this call number.
A pdf version is available at the Lafayette Sustainability website here.