TIPO DE DENTICIÓN
DERECHA DE LA POBLACIÓN ESTUDIADA.
Gaston Bachelard, ruminating on the conditions of scientific knowledge, observed “there are no simple phenomena; every phenomenon is a fabric of relations,” produced by and embedded within practices, machines, ideologies. While proper scientific objects must be wrest from the context of ordinary sensual life and reconstituted by laboratory labor, their return to the world lays bare the special conditions of the scientific mode of knowing. “Application is complication.”22
This history of flavor science is fundamentally about applied knowledge. It thus intersects with, and illuminates, the development of an American system of food
production that resulted in an abundance of cheap calories.23 The sciences of flavor were
22 Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, [1934], 147-8.
23 Some of the most compelling work in this area has come from historians of technology
and of business, who situate consumers, producers, and resources in dynamic
technosocial systems of food production and distribution. For studies that consider the design of sensory qualities of food in industrial food systems, see, especially, Gabriella M. Petrick, “The Arbiters of Taste: Producers, Consumers, and the Industrialization of Taste in America, 1900-1960,” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2006); and Ai Hisano, “Eye Appeal is Buy Appeal: Business Creates the Color of Foods, 1870-1970,” (PhD. Diss, University of Delaware, 2016). Shane Hamilton, Suzanne Friedberg, Anna Zeide, Anne Vileisis, Paul Josephson, and Amy Bentley, among others, take as case
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ultimately applied sciences, intended to produce not abstract knowledge, but actual things — commercial products — that yielded intended (perceptual) effects. As such, workers in this field often found themselves grappling with the complications of application. The scenarios in which they cultivated the sciences of flavor — industry, progressive
government agencies, military research — framed problems of flavor in the same way as other problems of production: as technoscientific problems, with technoscientific
solutions. In these contexts, certain types of solutions were pursued in preference to others. For instance, although some agricultural research was devoted to developing “better tasting” varieties of fruits, vegetables, and meats, most agricultural science was
studies specific technologies of production (refrigeration, freezing, canning) or food products (the tomato, the fish stick, baby food), illuminating the web of technosocial relations that shape systems, goods, and consumers in twentieth century economies. See: Shane Hamilton, “Cold Capitalism: The Political Ecology of Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice,” Agricultural History 77, no. 4 (Autumn 2003): 557–581 and “The Economies and Conveniences of Modern-Day Living: Frozen Foods and Mass
Marketing, 1945-1965,” The Business History Review 77, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 33–60; Susanne Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009); Anna Zeide, “In Cans We Trust: Food, Consumers, and Expertise in Twentieth-Century America,” (PhD Diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2014); Ann Vileisis, "Are Tomatoes Natural?" in Martin Reuss, Stephen H. Cutliffe, eds., The Illusory Boundary:
Environment and Technology in History, UVA Press, 2010; Paul Josephson, "The
Ocean's Hot Dog: The Development of the Fish Stick," Technology and Culture 49.1 (January 2008): 41-61; and Amy Bentley, Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014). For more general accounts of the food system and food production informed by history of technology, see: Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History,
(Oakland: University of California Press, 2013); Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz, eds. Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart, (Philadelphia: UPenn Press, 2009); Nancy F. Koehn, “Henry Heinz and Brand Creation in the Late Nineteenth Century: Making Markets for Processed Food,” The Business History Review 73, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 349-393; and Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton, eds. Food Nations: Selling
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oriented toward increasing yields and efficiency.24 Solutions to the flavor deficiencies of
industrial food were generally sought at the level of manufacturing and distribution: in the development and deployment of new chemical additives, or improvements to processing, packaging, quality control, and transportation technologies.
Many historians and other commentators have correctly drawn attention to the negative consequences of this abundance: the inequitable distribution of its rewards, its sham choices and false promises, its detrimental effects on the health and well-being of certain populations, its effects on environments, economies, and traditional ways of life.25
These narratives are elaborations upon what Harvey Levenstein has called “the paradox of plenty”: the political, social, and cultural anxieties about food consumption that accompanied the proliferation of food calories.26 The argument made in many of these
accounts is that the industrial food system achieves its apparent cheapness and abundance at great cost, to human health and lives, as well as planetary well-being.
24 See, for instance: William Boyd, "Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American
Poultry Production," Technology and Culture 42. 4 (October 2001): 631-664; Deborah Fitzgerald, “Deskilling Farmers: Hybrid Corn and Farmers’ Work,” Technology and Culture 34.2 (April 1993): 324-43.
25 For a recent bibliography of food history that emphasizes social and cultural history,
see Marion Nestle and W. Alex McIntosh, “Writing the Food Studies Movement,” Food,
Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 13, no. 2
(2010): 159–179. A comparable resource for works on the anthropology of food can be found at Sidney W. Mintz and Christine M. Du Bois, “The Anthropology of Food and Eating,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 99–119; Warren J. Belasco and Philip Scranton, eds., Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies, Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2002), provides a solid, international set of examples about how cultural and social food habits are susceptible and resistant to change.
26 Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America,
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Food studies scholars and critics, documenting the industrialization of the food system, have often ignored or dismissed the sensual aspects of these changing
technologies of food production. Many commentators have taken the position that flavor did not matter to manufacturers, nor to the scientific workers (such as nutritionists and food technologists) who, with their expert labor, supported the industrialization of the food system; or, alternately, that flavor played second fiddle to other concerns, such as nutrition, safety, and profit.27 In response to these claims, I argue the following. The
evidence that flavor was a primary concern of food manufacturers and the industrializing food system is plentiful. So why has its role been overlooked? Discussions and
technological interventions aimed at shaping, controlling, and improving the sensory qualities of food in the food industry and its technosciences often do not coincide with lay notions of how flavor ought to be talked about. Although its outcomes may not be congruent with prevailing ideas about “good flavor,” when one looks for the evidence of how flavor mattered to the food manufacturers and the industrializing food system, one finds it plentifully in evidence.
In this dissertation, I consider flavor additives as technologies — as deliberately designed artifacts that operate within the context of a broader food system. This system
27 For some commentators, this has resulted in an extreme skepticism that approaches a
disavowal of food science and food technology as such. Take for instance, this statement from Michael Pollan in a recent interview with Lucky Peach’s Rachel Khong:“I
sometimes find myself wondering whether we can post or imagine a food science that is actually improving food in the way that cooking for most of its history succeeded in doing…. We’ve had food science and food technology now for a hundred and fifty years, and so far, not so good. So far we haven’t done anything useful. But we understand a lot more, and we should be able to improve on things, not just make money and entertain people.” Rachel Khong Interviews Michael Pollan, “The End of the World as We Know it,” Lucky Peach, (September 10, 2014).
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includes, most immediately, the other ingredients that constitute the food, wrapping and packaging materials, the machines and methods that produce the food and make it available to consumers for a fixed price, and, more distantly, the cultural, social, and environmental context within which the food is consumed. The precise form that flavor additives took, as well as the purposes that they were expected to serve, vary over the course of the century or so discussed in this dissertation, reflecting changes to the
methods, institutional arrangements, and technosocial networks of flavor science, as well as changes to the market for food and other consumer goods. At different points in this dissertation, flavor additives are technologies that can efficiently convert commodities into consumer products, confer uniqueness or distinction to branded goods, enforce standard uniformity on items made from variable raw materials, minimize unpleasant or unpalatable sensations, enhance and extend pleasurable and desirable sensations, and deliver precisely calibrated sensory experiences.28
Crucially, flavor is a technology that becomes effective only by acting directly on the body and mind of the consumer. But precisely how the body is believed to be
susceptible to flavor, the terms under which flavor’s effect on the body is theorized and
28 A relevant body of literature here is the history of advertising and consumer culture,
particularly accounts that investigate the social and psychological sciences that inform advertising, marketing, merchandising, and other consumer-oriented business practices. See, for instance: Lawrence R. Samuel, Freud on Madison Avenue: Motivational
Research and Subliminal Advertising in America, (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2011); William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the
Rise of a New American Culture, (New York: Pantheon, 1993); Roland Marchand,
Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985); Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The
Making of the American Mass Market, (New York: Pantheon, 1989); Pamela Walker
Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing
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measured, varies over the course of this history, as does the imagined relationship between flavor sensations and resultant psychic and physiological phenomena, such as perception, appetite, affect, and behavior.29 Of course, these changing understandings of
the sensible body — its appetites, responses, and needs — reflect changing concerns, ideologies, and interests that deeply inform the designs and purposes of flavor
technologies.30
Novel preservation technologies, such as flash freezing; new materials, such as polyethylene plastics, which lined bags and containers; improvements to the cold chain that kept foods chilled from factory to supermarket — in addition to performing other functions in the food system, these should also be considered technologies of flavor. Their consequences for the sensory qualities of food shaped the ultimate forms that these
29 Sarah Tracy’s ongoing research into MSG and the taste modality known as umami has
been an intellectual inspiration to this scholar ever since I heard one of her papers, about umami and the democratization of deliciousness, at a Hagley Library conference on the history of the senses all the way back in 2013. Her exemplary work draws on scholarship in science and technology studies to draw connections between the intimate self and social phenomena, sensual possibilities and biopolitical contexts. Sarah E. Tracy,
“Delicious: A History of Monosodium Glutamate and Umami, the Fifth Taste Sensation,” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2016). See also: Joel Dickau, “Inventing Texture: Edible Science and the Management of Familiarity, 1963-1975,” Global Food History 3 (2017): 1-23.
30 Recent scholarship has used the history of diet and dietetics as a means to sound the
resonating strings that connect histories of the body, histories of medicine and science, and political and social history. See for instance: E. Melanie DuPuis, Dangerous
Digestion: The Politics of American Dietary Advice, (Oakland: University of California
Press, 2015); Helen Zoe Veit, Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the
Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century, (Chapel Hill: UNC
Press, 2013); Jessica Mudry, "The Mindful Measurement of Food: Quantification, the Food Pyramid and Discourses of Taste," Material Culture Review 70 (Fall 2009), 12-22; David Schleifer, "The Perfect Solution: How Trans Fats Became the Health Replacement for Saturated Fats," Technology and Culture 53, no 1 (January 2012): 94-119; and Chin Jou, Controlling Consumption: The Origins of Modern American Ideas about Food,
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technologies took in the world. Taking the long view, one can discern a distinct tendency in the development of food technologies over the course of the twentieth century: towards production, packaging, and distribution methods that preserve foods not only from
spoilage, but also from any chemical changes that could alter the sensory qualities of food. In other words, the users of these technologies aspired toward maximizing their control over the sensible matter of food, between the site of manufacture and the ready mouth of the consumer.
Although this dissertation is primarily concerned with added flavors, the changing material and technological conditions of food production and distribution provide
necessary context for understanding the role that flavor additives played in this system. The contemporary flavorists’ work differs from that of her or his predecessor of fifty years ago, not only because of the expanded palette of flavoring materials and the growing share of knowledge about the chemistry of flavor, but also because different production methods and packaging materials require different performances and properties from flavoring, while also affording distinct sensory possibilities.31
As is the case with other technologies, the uses and meanings of technologies of flavor were never exclusively determined by their creators. I follow the model of social historians of technology, who have emphasized the manifold ways in which artifacts are
31 Gary Cross and Robert Proctor’s study of packaging, which persuasively connects the
changing forms and functionalities of containers to an intensifying attention on the sensual possibilities for the thing contained, is particularly recommended to readers interested in the largely overlooked (but crucial) history of packages and containers. Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor, Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing
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shaped by the technosocial worlds in which they circulate, and the users who determine their meaning and value, and, in this case, incorporate them into their bodies, habits, and social lives.32