Bright pink margarine. “Olive oil” made from cottonseed in Tennessee. A cross-country police chase to arrest a sugar scammer’s widow. In Pure Adulteration, Benjamin Cohen brings us into the corrupt, contaminated, deceptive world of food adulteration in the late 19th century. In this conversation, Cohen, a professor at Lafayette College, explains how the United States arrived at the analytic, standardized, and regulated food system we know today—and why we still face questions about which foods should count as pure and which as impure. And he discusses how his own work crosses boundaries between pure academia and the messier world of public-facing scholarship.
David Schleifer (DS): Pure Adulteration starts by explaining that concerns about food purity and how to regulate food are age old, citing as examples the Kosher laws in the Bible and Plato’s protocols for dealing with food-market “rogueries and adulterations.” You write that someone was actually burned at the stake in 14th-century Nuremberg for selling fake saffron.
Benjamin R. Cohen (BRC): Yes. Harsh.
DS: Well, saffron’s expensive.
BRC: His partner was buried alive.
DS: If food frauds, fakery, and cheating—or adulterations, in general—have been problems for centuries, why focus your book on the 19th-century United States? What was happening then that brought concerns about food purity to the forefront in activism, science, and the law?
BRC: They called it “the pure food crusades” at the time, and much of it had to do with new forms of distance, both in the cultural and physical sense. Increasing geographic distance is the common villain. When there’s more space between producer and consumer, that consumer finds it harder to recognize their food’s source or identity.
It’s that timeless question: Do you know what you’re eating? With physical distance, consumers fear that the people who make food and the companies that sell it have opportunities to deceive you—they can water down milk or cut lard with horse fat or try to pass off corn syrup as honey.
But you could deceive someone face to face, too; it’s not only about physical distance. Take immigration, continental expansion, global settlement, and new modes of urbanization and mobility. Add those up and the United States was in an unprecedented period of redefining norms of interaction. That cultural distance fractured prevailing senses of character and trust with a debate about the breakdown of communities.