University of Chicago Press
Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food
Key Metrics
- Benjamin R Cohen
- University of Chicago Press
- Paperback
- 9780226816746
- 9 X 6 X 1.2 inches
- -
- Science > History
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
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.
Author Bio
Benjamin Cohen is a historian, environmental studies, and Science & Technology Studies (STS) scholar. He co-hosted the internet's only undefeated podcast about small college life, Various Breads and Butters (try here too) from 2015 until its finale in 2019. He is an Associate Professor of Engineering Studies and Environmental Studies, and an affiliated member of the History Department, at Lafayette College in Easton, PA.
In work beyond campus, he is a Series Editor for “Public Thinker” at Public Books, an editorial board member for MIT Press’s History for a Sustainable Future book series, and a long-ago Lists Editor at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. From 2005 until 2011, he taught in the Department of STS at U.Va., where he was a founder and director of The UVA Food Collaborative and founder and curator of the now-defunct but once grand Thornton Hall Art Gallery.
Cohen was trained as a historian and an engineer, worked in industry for a few years as a polymer researcher, and then pursued graduate work as a return to historical studies. He earned a Ph.D. on the History Track of STS from Virginia Tech (2005), writing about environmental history and the history of science. That became Notes from the Ground, set within the early American Republic. His second book, Pure Adulteration, carried that interest into the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a story about the origins of modern food regulation, the pure food crusades, and new worries over sincerity, artifice, and nature. He also co-edited Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food (MIT, 2021) with Anna Zeide and Michael Kideckel. Each project works to explore the origins of modern industrial food and agriculture. In teaching and local activities, he works with students, faculty, others across campus, and community members to move beyond the limitations of that industrial system. The co-edited Technoscience and Environmental Justice (with Gwen Ottinger) is a contribution to this second area of research.
In the time left over he writes for various forums outside the academy, some interviews, some satire, a few personal essays, and most of it on-line.
Source: brcohen.net
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