Benjamin R. Cohen uses the pure food crusades at the turn of the twentieth century to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods in the United States. In the latter nineteenth century, extraordinary changes in food and agriculture gave rise to new tensions in the ways people understood, obtained, trusted, and ate their food. This was the Era of Adulteration, and its concerns have carried forward to today: How could you tell the food you bought was the food you thought you bought? Could something manufactured still be pure? Is it okay to manipulate nature far enough to produce new foods but not so far that you question its safety and health? How do you know where the line is? And who decides? In Pure Adulteration, Benjamin R. Cohen uses the pure food crusades to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods and the perceived problems they wrought. Cohen follows farmers, manufacturers, grocers, hucksters, housewives, politicians, and scientific analysts as they struggled to demarcate and patrol the ever-contingent, always contested border between purity and adulteration, and as, at the end of the nineteenth century, the very notion of a pure food changed. In the end, there is (and was) no natural, prehuman distinction between pure and adulterated to uncover and enforce; we have to decide. Today’s world is different from that of our nineteenth-century forebears in many ways, but the challenge of policing the difference between acceptable and unacceptable practices remains central to daily decisions about the foods we eat, how we produce them, and what choices we make when buying them.

What do we really know about the food we eat? A firestorm of recent food-fraud cases, from the US honey-laundering scandal to the forty-year-old frozen “zombie” meat smuggled into China, to horse-meat episodes in the United Kingdom, suggests fraudulent and intentional acts of food adulteration are on the rise. While often harmless, some incidents have resulted in serious public health consequences. At the heart of these dubious practices are everyone from large food processors to small-time criminals, while many consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about this malfeasance. In this book, Jonathan Rees examines the complex causes and surprising effects of adulteration and fraud across the global food chain. Covering comestibles of all kinds from around the globe, Rees describes the different types of contamination, the role and effectiveness of government regulation, and our willingness to ignore deception if the groceries we purchase are cheap or convenient. Pithy, punchy, and cogent, Food Adulteration and Food Fraud offers important insight into this vital problem of human consumption.