A Rainbow Palate

Reviewed by: A Rainbow Palate: How Chemical Dyes Changed the West's Relationship to Food by Carolyn Cobbold Peter Thompson (bio) A Rainbow Palate: How Chemical Dyes Changed the West's Relationship to Food By Carolyn Cobbold. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. vii + 282. A Rainbow Palate: How Chemical Dyes Changed the West's Relationship to Food By Carolyn Cobbold. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. vii + 282. At its broadest level, Carolyn Cobbold's new book, A Rainbow Palate, reminds the reader that the vibrant colors associated with many contemporary foods are produced by chemical dyes. These colors have a distinct history tied to both the expansion of industrialized chemistry in the nineteenth century and the continued consumption of mass-produced food. Thus, A Rainbow Palate fits into a growing body of literature that attempts to bridge the history of modern chemistry to that of food consumption. Other recent texts making a similar effort include: Benjamin Cohen, Pure Adulteration (University of Chicago Press, 2020; Ai Hisano, Visualizing Taste (Harvard University Press, 2019); E. C. Spary, Eating the Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012); E. C. Spary, Feeding France (Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Heiko Stoff, Gift in der Nahrung (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2015). Since the large-scale industrialization of food production, arguably beginning in earnest in the nineteenth century and accelerating exponentially in the twentieth, questions surrounding the origins, methods of cultivation, and composition of our food have become commonplace. Indeed, Cobbold employs contemporary distrust of so-called "processed food" in order to create the stakes for her late nineteenth-century story, in which synthetic dyes were first introduced into food production, and then debated and legislated. In doing so, her book attempts to accomplish two major tasks. First, it pushes the insights of many historians of science into an earlier period, arguing that the fuzzy demarcation between modern scientific experts and socially-embedded or politically-motivated actors has a history that predates the twentieth century. Secondly, the book narrates social and political responses to the inclusion of dyes in foodstuffs, attempting to draw out some of the earliest arguments that surrounded the purity of food in a moment when daily life appeared increasingly permeated by often unknown and undetectable chemical substances. Cobbold's distinctive contributions to this scholarship become apparent from her deep research into the history of coal tar dyes, revealing the ways in which a profit-driven commitment to the discovery of new synthetic chemicals and their corresponding consumer markets encouraged the inclusion of textile dyes in food (chs. 3–4). This was part of a larger trend during the late nineteenth-century explosion of European industrial [End Page 642] chemistry, in which the search for new synthetic chemicals quickly out-paced analytic work. The lack of substantial analysis and testing of these new chemicals meant that chemists struggled to understand the physiological effects of their ever-expanding range of products. Here, A Rainbow Palate will prove most interesting and useful to historians of technology. Following the insights of historian Ursula Klein, Cobbold takes seriously the idea that developments in science cannot be separated from their instrumentation; and while the book does not provide a deep dive into the chemist's toolkit, it does tie the materials involved in stains, in vitro experiments, and animal testing into the web of technologies—both material and epistemic—necessary for the socially constructed search for scientific consensus. Unfortunately for nineteenth century chemists, such a scientific consensus was never reached on the toxicity of synthetic dyes in food. The dyes were used in such trace amounts that detecting them and isolating their health impact remained exceedingly difficult and highly dependent on predetermined understandings of toxicity. The lack of experimental standards was compounded by the political motivations of the chemists themselves, with newly appointed public analysts attempting to secure professional status by revealing the toxicity of dyes produced by industrial/academic chemists and peddled by food manufacturers. Cobbold subsequently covers the British, French, German, and American legislation of food dyes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This comparative approach is quite justified given that each nation's story reveals unique social and political commitments in an

Consumption (sociology) · Industrialisation · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Taste · Chemistry · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Food Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law