Pure Adulteration

Benjamin R. Cohen's well-researched and well-written cultural study of food and “adulteration” begins and ends with a discussion about the meaning of purity. Cohen understands that coming to terms with “manufactured food”—freighted with dense cultural concepts, such as authenticity, nature, trust, and fear—means addressing notions of power and authority, here largely expressed between 1870 and 1930. While admitting that adulterations are nothing new and continue to this day, Cohen argues that it was in this era that Americans first granted legitimacy to “cultural debates over sincerity and trust, globalizing marketplace networks, and the rise of a consumer class separate from and outside of an agricultural producer class” (p. 235). These fears gave rise to a host of competing voices—from storybook-like villains and hucksters such as Alfred Paraf or Edward Nieuwland, to equally fabled Progressive reformers such as Harvey Wiley or Ellen Richards—each vying with or through emerging professional agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, universities, and the various popular and professional journals dedicated to food distribution and safety. Cohen's ability to humanize, contextualize, and analyze these forces is a strength of his book, and mirrors the classical fictions—including the likes of those by Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Upton Sinclair—that crystalized the concerns for millions

Aesthetics · Cheating · Epistemology · Legitimacy · Meaning (existential · Nothing · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sincerity · Sociology · American History and Culture · American Literature and Humor Studies · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology