The Moral Landscape Of Adulteration: Cheating On Nature In The Age Of Industrialized Food

<p>This project funded by the Science, Technology & Society Program examines how cultural concepts of 'nature' and 'natural' were challenged with new food-making techniques in the 19th century: how did new agricultural and industrial products confront environmental ideas about the right way to work in non-human nature? It addresses assumptions about 'nature' and 'natural' held by chemists who sought to analyze food properties and what reactions to new products revealed about Americans' prevailing environmental ethic(s). Though previous research has focused on adulteration as a precursor to public health law, it has not described this contingency of concepts of nature in adulteration and artificial food debates.
<br>The project has two central research objectives: (1) examine chemical texts and writings of analysts on adulteration to identify the assumptions about nature brought to that work (here looking to individuals) and (2) examine cultural responses to adulterated and artificial foods as means of policing boundaries around 'natural'. Toward those ends, the research draws from boundary work in STS and moral economy literature as an interpretive framework for the study. The project analyzes data from archives at the National Agricultural Library, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, National Archives, and FDA, along with cultural responses to the issues from legislation, editorials, and images used in food marketing. The project offers new historical insights at the intersection of science, technology, and environmental ethics. It moves beyond prior adulteration studies that used consumer-based, anthropocentric views to propose a stable and distinct 'nature' against which adulteration was defined. Instead it identifies cultural assumptions, beliefs, and values about nature scientists brought to their analytical work. The project also speaks to current public issues, namely continuing adulteration problems in the food chain, genetic modification of crops and animals, and food toxins such as endocrine disruptors. It does so in two ways: by showing that such issues of food safety and environmental challenges to agriculture are part of a longer history; and by characterizing such problems as irreducibly moral, environmental, and scientific.</p>