Abstract
Upsetting Food examines food movement protests during three periods in US history spanning 140 years. This book aims to explain how white middle-class food movements engaged questions of food safety and purity as agriculture and the food industry became larger, more industrial, more corporate, and more politically powerful.
Social movements theory frames the three historical case studies. Haydu demonstrates how social movements emerge from historical contexts, and how they subsequently relate (or don’t) to other ongoing or previous US social movements. The case studies reveal how activists defined food problems and their solutions, and how they linked with other ongoing movements and mobilized for change. This comparative approach highlights the differences and similarities within and across food consumption movements. Feeling unsettled about food raises questions of food safety and adulteration, food purity and contamination, and food’s healthfulness. Narratives from all three eras range along the spectrums of good/bad, natural/un-natural, healthy/unhealthy food, and individual responsibility/social well-being. Middle-class anxieties about healthy food, food safety and purity, and narratives of good/bad and natural/unnatural foods emerge, persist, and change as the American food system globalizes. More recently, problems of social and environmental sustainability and food justice activism are unfolding amid climate change and a global pandemic, as people seek to restructure and transform the ways food is grown, processed, and accessed.
The three periods of American history defined by the Grahamites (1830–1840), the food progressives of 1890–1906, and organic food activism of 1960–1990 provide the case studies. The final chapter outlines the book’s contributions to social movements theory and compares the dynamics and legacies of the three eras of activism with a brief update on US food politics from the 1990s to the present.
A minister, a chemist, and a magazine publisher who is also an organic farming enthusiast are identified key figures in each historical era. Sylvester Graham was a Presbyterian minister and an important health reformer during the 1830s. In A Treatise on Bread, and Bread-making (1837) and A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity (1839), Graham connected diet to morality in 19th-century America. His followers borrowed from models of evangelical reform and the temperance movement to critique food’s commodification as degrading soil fertility as well as degrading human health through “unnatural” commercialized production methods. Graham argued for dietary reform in the face of depraved appetites brought on by manufactured bread. Commercial bread, he argued, did not contain whole grains and was not baked by women inside the home. Unnatural diets, which also included tea, coffee spices, sweets, meats, and alcohol resulted in violence, aggression, and unbridled sexuality. Grahamites advocated for a return to a natural diet of simple and plain food unadorned by seasonings or condiments. The change from eating bad, unnatural food to good food that produced moral Americans was the personal responsibility of the individual. Small businessman, clerks, artisans, and numbers of middle-class women participated in this reform movement. Bad food consumption mapped onto social distinctions of the idle, self-indulgent rich and the ignorant poor, while good food nourished the morally upright white middle class.
As the food system industrialized, processed meat and canned soups, vegetables and fruits, and margarine all made their way to consumer tables as food anxieties about purity and contamination eroded consumer trust in products on offer from the industrial food system. The food progressives (1890–1906) demanded government food standards and regulation, and a restoration of honesty and trust to business practices in the food industry. Harvey Wiley, head of the Bureau of Chemistry in the US Department of Agriculture, focused upon food adulteration and unsafe additives in his research. He called for national regulation to insure food purity and safety standards. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle also raised the issue for meat processing. The result was the adoption of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Meat Inspection Act. Nutrition science influenced the government’s new regulations insuring food’s safety and freedom from contaminants and adulteration. The role of middle-class white women was also important in this era as women were represented as keepers of the home and regenerators of the nation. They were also activists in consumer organizations calling for the regulation of milk purity and food labeling standards.
In the final case, Haydu focuses upon the 1960s and 1970s of the organic food movement and highlights Robert Rodale’s challenge to the conventional food system. Robert Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming advocated organic living and natural lifestyles in the early 1970s and valued healthy soil, pure water, and clean air and a nonmaterialistic rural way of life. Rodale Press published numerous titles about organic farming, gardening, and simpler life styles eschewing processed foods and overconsumption of material goods.
Gardeners and small farmers were a part of this movement as were students and parents with children who were anxious about the adulteration of milk and other foods by hormones and pesticide residues. Echoing the Grahamites’ dedication to good food, organic food activists also brought environmental and social sustainability into the discussions and responses to industrial food systems. There was a push to democratize science to serve people and communities, not just corporations. Growing good food as well as consuming good food became an important part of this movement which encompassed well-being and resisted the globalization of agriculture and food through an alignment with the anti-globalization movement. As in the previous eras, this was largely a white middle-class movement. Questions of agrarian change, class, race, sexism, privilege, inequity, exclusion, and dispossession are raised and examined in food studies research over the last 20 years. These extensions of the politics of food to broader political and social issues moves beyond consumer food politics to questions about capitalist development, colonialism, and neoliberal policy and politics. Haydu makes this point as well in the book’s conclusion, by noting that a focus upon white middle-class food consumption is narrow and vulnerable to co-optation by the conventional agro-food system. More recent national and international food movements have focused upon a plurality of socio-political questions involving equity and justice and ecology, while taking into account questions of hunger, food access, and power.
I recommend this book to readers interested in the history of urban white middle-class food consumption politics in the United States and in understanding the roles of consumer social movements and their relationships in food regimes within American history.