3 RESULTADOS Y DISCUSIÓN
3.1 Descripción del método de caracterización
The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act became the law of the land in an era of growing public concern over the hidden dangers lurking in the nation’s food supply. Decades of media coverage about food adulteration, especially in women’s magazines, muckraking exposés about “swill milk” and filthy meatpacking plants, and well-
publicized deaths from “ptomaine” poisoning built political will for the law’s substantial expansion of the federal government’s regulatory powers. For the lawmakers and the business coalition whose support for the law was essential in securing its passage, rooting out commercial fraud was as pressing an issue as preserving public health.7 Testimony
about commercial fraud comprised the majority of evidence presented in Congressional hearings in support of the bill, as well as in the reports of state regulatory agencies and the Bureau of Chemistry.8 “What we want is that the farmer may get an honest market
and the consumer may get what he thinks he is buying,” explained Harvey Wiley, the
7 Donna J. Wood, “The Strategic Use of Public Policy: Business Support for the 1906
Food and Drug Act,” Business History Review 59 (Autumn 1985): 403-32.
85
chemist who, as head of the USDA’s Bureau of Chemistry, was one of the law’s chief architects and most ardent champions.9
Wiley’s summary of the bill’s intent connected a fair market for farmers with a transparent market for consumers, but left out manufacturers, who transformed raw agricultural and chemical materials into an expanding range of commercial goods, and were responsible for an ever-growing share of both the food supply and the national economy.10 For many reformers, manufacturers were at the root of the problem; their
quest for profits coupled with the increasing distance between consumers and producers introduced new opportunities for fraud.11 Unscrupulous manufacturers had a willing
accomplice: chemical science. “The development of bacteriological and chemical science contributed to the upsurge of food, drink, and drug adulteration,” writes historian Lorine Swainston Goodwin. “Large firms began to employ industrial chemists to develop deodorants for rotten eggs and rancid butter, dyes to enhance color, agents to alter flavor… and ways to keep pickles crisp.” For many reformers, she explains, these products of the chemical laboratory were de facto evidence of fraudulence, allowing
9Harvey Wiley, address to the 1898 National Pure Food and Drug Congress, quoted in
Young 1989: 128.
10 By 1900, a fifth of all goods manufactured in the United states were food products.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, an ever-increasing share of foods were produced by large corporations, such as Heinz, Campbell’s, and Nabisco. Harvey Levenstein,
Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford
UP, 1986): 30-43; 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): 44.
86
profit-hungry manufacturers to produce and sell low-quality goods while consumers remained unsuspecting.12
Advances in chemistry were responsible not only for a growing number of synthetic preservatives, flavorings, and other food additives, but also entirely novel food products, such as oleomargarine from the meatpacker’s scraps and “glucose” from corn starch — products whose economic legitimacy was questioned by rival agricultural industrial interests, but whose safety was rarely seriously disputed. There was widespread evidence of the use of chemical additives and substitute substances, but also little
evidence that these were harmful, except to the bottom line of established manufacturers of butter, honey, and other products perceived to be in competition.13 Most advocates for
reform, however, did not intend to outlaw the use of all chemical additives or synthetic products in the food supply. By and large, reformers, legislators, and pro-regulation manufacturers agreed that there was a place in the market for low-quality and substitute foods, and that poor consumers should have access to cheaper, albeit inferior, food items. Meanwhile, for manufacturers who used preservatives, flavorings, and other additives, the presence of these substances was not evidence of fraudulence, but represented attempts to improve the eating quality of their products by technical means.
“Transparency” was a fraught question for these new kinds of products. Canned vegetables and meats, boxes of biscuits, condiments in glass jars, candy in tins, soda in bottles: processed foods were packaged foods, and interposed a layer of opacity between
12 Goodwin 1999: 49.
87
the consumer and the thing to be consumed, foreclosing the possibility of direct sensory examination. Furthermore, the proof of the pudding was less and less likely to be found in the eating. In a market of sealed containers, distant producers, and unfamiliar additives and processes, how could consumers know not only what their food was, but what it was worth?
For turn-of-the-century consumers, the food market was shot through with
uncertainty and risk. Economic and business historians have described the Pure Food and Drug Act as an effort to reduce this risk, and resolve informational asymmetries in order to increase market efficiency.14 According to these scholars, chemists and other technical
and scientific experts were authorized to make official determinations about a food’s identity and contents — and thus, by implication, its value — determinations that consumers were no longer equipped to make. In other words, when consumers cannot detect whether they are being “cheated,” official chemists must step in to make the determination on a material, rather than a sensory, level. It has thus been argued that regulations were necessary to restore consumer confidence in fundamental food quality, even as the consumers’ susceptibility to the sensible aspects of these distinctions
eroded.15
This line of reasoning presumes that judgments about quality are made against pre-existing norms, that differences in quality are determinable by experts using agreed-
14 See, for instance, Wood 1985; Marc T. Law, “How do Regulators Regulate?
Enforcement of the Pure Food and Drugs Act, 1907-1938,” Journal of Law, Economics,
and Organization 22.2 (2005): 460-86. Marc T. Law, “The Origins of State Pure Food
Regulation,” Journal of Economic History 63 (December 2003): 1103-1130.
88
upon methods, and that the meaning of these differences is self-evident. Recently scholars have begun to push back against these assumptions, historicizing not only the meanings of quality but also modes of negotiating and adjudicating disputes about the quality of foods.16 As Alessandro Stanzioni has observed in his study of the origins of
French food regulation, “quality is not an objective, ahistorical category,” it is a contested category, whose meaning not only changes over time, but also reflects different regional, political, social, and economic beliefs and interests.17 Whether a chemical additive
constituted an “adulteration” or an “improvement” — whether it was an “imitation” or an “innovation” — was anything but self-evident, especially at a time of rapid changes in food production, distribution, and consumption. Nor was the meaning of “pure” or “natural” simple to determine. In the case of milk and other dairy products, for instance, some physicians and other reformers opposed pasteurization, on the grounds that it would stall efforts to improve the sanitation of dairies. “Pasteurization, they emphatically
repeated, could make milk safe, but it could not make dirty milk clean.”18 The craving for
the “purity” was not necessarily a demand for nature’s raw materials, unaltered.
Furthermore, the authority of scientific experts to adjudicate these disputes was not a given. Scientific authority had to be laboriously and contentiously established, a task often complicated by the ambiguous and indeterminate results produced by
16 Jerome Bourdieu, Martin Breugel, Peter Atkins, "'That Elusive Feature of Food
Consumption:' Historical Perspectives on Food Quality, a Review and Some Proposals," Food & History 5, no 2 (2007): 247-266.
17 Alessandro Stanziani, “Negotiating Innovation in a Market Economy: Foodstuffs and
Beverage Adulteration in Nineteenth-Century France,” Enterprise and Society 8 (June 2007): 375-412.
18 Kendra Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History Since 1900,
89
analysis.19 As Benjamin Cohen has pointed out, when it came to enforcing regulations —
for instance, distinguishing what could call itself butter from what could legally not use that name — the context and consequences were both social and scientific. Analytic chemists were “not just detectors of chemical impurities; they were participants in a vital cultural arbitration” that sought to disentangle the authentic from the imitation, the deceptive surface from the genuine interior.20
As governments took a more active and interventionist role in regulating the food and drug supply, the stakes in the debates over how these distinctions were to be made grew more significant.