Pure Adulteration

By Benjamin R. Cohen,

Book cover of Pure Adulteration

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Pure Adulteration as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

"Pure Adulteration" uses the lens of food production to investigate how the manipulation of food products shaped US Gilded Age and Progressive ideas about nature, health, and purity. If you are what you eat, we're all at least a little artificial, and Cohen shows how 150-year-old ideas shape what and how we eat in the present.

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