As a food, milk has been revered and ignored, respected and feared. In the face of its 'material resistance', attempts were made to purify it of dirt and disease, and to standardize its fat content. This is a history of the struggle to bring milk under control, to manipulate its naturally variable composition and, as a result, to redraw the boundaries between nature and society. Peter Atkins follows two centuries of dynamic and intriguing food history, shedding light on the resistance of natural products to the ordering of science. After this look at the stuff in foodstuffs, it is impossible to see the modern diet in the same way again.

As a food, milk has been revered and ignored, respected and feared. In the face of its 'material resistance', attempts were made to purify it of dirt and disease, and to standardize its fat content. This is a history of the struggle to bring milk under control, to manipulate its naturally variable composition and, as a result, to redraw the boundaries between nature and society. Peter Atkins follows two centuries of dynamic and intriguing food history, shedding light on the resistance of natural products to the ordering of science. After this look at the stuff in foodstuffs, it is impossible to see the modern diet in the same way again.

Designers are becoming more directly involved in the fabrication process from the earliest stages of design. This book showcases the design and research work by some of the leading designers, makers and thinkers today. This highly illustrated text brings together a wealth of information and numerous examples from practice which will appeal to both students and practitioners.

As a food, milk has been revered and ignored, respected and feared. In the face of its 'material resistance', attempts were made to purify it of dirt and disease, and to standardize its fat content. This is a history of the struggle to bring milk under control, to manipulate its naturally variable composition and, as a result, to redraw the boundaries between nature and society. Peter Atkins follows two centuries of dynamic and intriguing food history, shedding light on the resistance of natural products to the ordering of science. After this look at the stuff in foodstuffs, it is impossible to see the modern diet in the same way again.

There is little dispute that photography is a material practice, and that the photograph itself is ineluctably material. And yet “matter,” “material,” and “materiality” have proven to be remarkably elusive terms of inquiry, frequently producing studies that are disparate in scope, sharing seemingly little common ground. Although the wide methodological range of materialist study can be dizzying, it is this book’s contention that that multiplicity is also the field’s greatest asset, keeping materialist inquiry enduringly vibrant—provided that varying methods are in close enough proximity to converse. Photography’s Materialities orchestrates one such conversation. Juxtaposing the insights of theorists like Lacan, Benjamin, and Latour beside close studies of crime, spirit, and composite photography, among others, this collection aims for a productive synergy, one capacious enough to span transatlantic spaces over the long nineteenth century. Contributors: Kris Belden-Adams (University of Mississippi), Maura Coughlin (Bryant University), David LaRocca (independent scholar), Jacob W. Lewis (University of Rochester), Mary Marchand (Goucher College), Zachary Tavlin (Art Institute of Chicago), Christa Holm Vogelius (University of Copenhagen)

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.