During the second half of the nineteenth century, as Americans increasingly moved away from farms and crowded into cities, farm markets and local butchers gave way to large commercial food processors and central meatpacking houses. Those who provided food no longer had to look in the eye those who bought it. The catalog of adulterants and toxic additives grew to be practically endless. Canners added copper sulfate to make gray vegetables green again. They spiked rotting tomatoes with sodium benzoate to prevent further decay. Meatpackers used borax to deodorize stinking hams. Processors sold pulped apple skin and glucose as strawberry jam. Bakers added chalk, clay, and plaster of Paris to bread to save on flour.
If food made people sick, the thousands of patent medicines that had flooded the market since the Civil War could make them even sicker. “Patent” didn’t usually mean that the concoction was actually patented. Rather it indicated that the formula was a proprietary secret. Consumer had no idea what they were swallowing when they took remedies like the Universal Vegetable Pill, Hall’s Catarrh Cure, Wheeler’s Nerve Vitalizer, or Lydia Pinkham’s ever popular Vegetable Compound.
American Heritage reviews the good old days before President Theodore Roosevelt, Harvey Wiley, and passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act.
No comments:
Post a Comment