8 Unexpected Consequences
expectations changed. Consumers turned their attention toward ready
availability and affordability. Food providers, at least some of them, saw
an opening to make more money by adulterating the food they were
selling.
Cottonseed oil was added to butter and lard. Sawdust, coconut shells,
rice bran, and other foreign substances were mixed into spices. Metal-
lic additives and poisonous colorings were blended into candies. Cane
syrup and glucose were put into honey. Brick, sand, copper, and gypsum
dust showed up in tea. And poisonous preservatives were added to meats
and meat products, including “embalmed meat” sent to soldiers during
the Spanish–American War.
In the 8 0 s, a “pure-food” movement of consumers and scientists
petitioned Congress to pass laws requiring that all ingredients be dis-
closed. When well-connected food manufacturers convinced Congress
to ignore the outcry, the movement organized an exhibition of over two
thousand adulterated products collected from every state, each with a
label listing their contents as verified by independent chemists. Unfazed,
food manufacturers argued that the questionable additives were actually
preservatives and should remain outside the government’s purview.
Ridding the modern food system of adulterants was not the only
challenge. The “Beef Trust” (the cartel of meat processors that pooled
their stocks into trusts and acted as a single business) had built an empire
that extended well beyond meat packinghouses to include thousands of
refrigerated railcars, warehouses, and fruit and vegetable canneries. If
growers wanted to ship fresh produce from California to the East Coast,
they needed to do business with the Beef Trust. Meanwhile, just as food
prices were going up, industrial magnates were raising the prices of other
essentials like energy and steel. Taken together, such business practices
stoked social unrest and provoked calls for reform.
At the same time, knowledge of “germ theory”—microscopic or-
ganisms too small to see but capable of invading humans and causing
disease—was itself spreading across America. Articles in the press seized
on germ theory to suggest that unprincipled practices by large companies
were fomenting illness and death. Attention zeroed in on the unsanitary
conditions inside Chicago’s meatpacking plants. But two government-
sponsored investigations and articles in The Lancet, the respected British
medical journal, went nowhere. Not until Upton Sinclair’s novel The