by Bee Wilson
It seems a little harsh to place all the responsibility for preserving ketchup on the harmless consumer. And what if you didn’t have an ice box?
An anonymous critic of Wiley’s wrote in the Food Law Bulletin that it was unfair of Wiley to rule against the use of benzoate-enhanced ketchup until he had informed manufacturers “how to put it up” without the preservatives.178 Wiley, never one to refuse a challenge, announced that he would indeed be working to discover a method to make a safe, scientific, benzoate-free ketchup. He set two researchers on to the job, Avril and Katherine Bitting, who spent the summer of 1907 visiting more than twenty ketchup factories and stirring up countless batches of experimental nonpreservative ketchup at Loudon’s ketchup factory in Terre Haute, using only the ripest, reddest tomatoes (since it was one of Wiley’s convictions that benzoates were often used to disguise inferior tomatoes) and paying scrupulous attention to hygiene. They found that if they upped the amount of vinegar and sugar in the ketchup mix, it was possible to make delicious unbenzoated ketchup. Avril Bitting published their findings in 1909 in an article snappily entitled “Experiments on the Spoilage of Tomato Ketchup.”
By the time the article appeared, however, the argument was becoming academic. No one could doubt that it was possible to make commercial ketchup without benzoates, because Henry J. Heinz of Pittsburgh had been doing exactly that since 1905. Before Wiley set to work on benzoates, Heinz ketchup had been no more nor less polluted than any ketchup. At various points, Heinz ketchup was coloured with coal-tar derivatives and preserved with either salicylic or benzoic acid. The manager of Heinz’s research lab, G. F. Mason, insisted that there was no satisfactory way of making benzoate-free ketchup—consumers would always prefer the “nice, clean looking preserves” made with benzoates to the unreliable, mucky, easily fermented kind made without.179 Mason didn’t see that there was anything wrong with this, in any case, since benzoate of soda was not, in his view, a poison. A Heinz executive Sebastian Mueller defended his company’s use of artificial preservatives at a Pure Food Congress in St. Louis in September 1904. The use of such preservatives, Mueller pointed out, was “recognized and permitted in all civilized countries.” In less than a year, Mueller completely changed his mind about this and suddenly converted to the notion that if Heinz could make all their foods without preservatives, it would “revolutionize” the manufacturing process.180 During 1905, the Heinz company managed to make half of all their ketchup—a hefty 1.8 million bottles— without preservatives. After the Pure Food Act was passed in June 1906, all preservatives were removed from the company’s ketchup (even though the new law did not actually ban benzoates), and the Heinz company never looked back.
The reasons for this rapid change of heart have been debated. Was it the result of a discovery about the best way to manufacture ketchup, or was it a discovery about the best way to reassure worried consumers and get them to open their wallets? The answer was probably both. Official histories of Heinz argue that the great Henry J. Heinz had always been devoted to pure foods, ever since he watched his mother bottle up her own fresh horseradish as a child, and that his antibenzoate stand was high-minded and honourable.181 It is true that he became one of the most influential supporters of the “pure food” movement, particularly once he saw how well the new product was selling. It was said that Heinz “never really liked chemists,” and that removing benzoates from his ketchup came as second nature—which does not fully explain why he allowed his factories to put the benzoates there in the first place.182 Heinz’s conversion to pure food around the time that government legislation was beginning to bite looks just a little too convenient. Some have even wondered whether Wiley and Heinz were in cahoots, since they were undoubtedly friends, and Heinz bolstered Wiley’s career by using his endorsement in a new advertising campaign for his improved benzoate-free ketchup.183
An early Heinz Ketchup advertisement, boasting that the ketchup is free from benzoates.
But this mutually rewarding friendship need not be seen as sinister, so much as inevitable: both men recognized something of themselves in the other, not least a willingness to compromise in order to get what they wanted. As with so many manufacturers before and since who have taken a stand on the purity of their food, Heinz’s motives were mixed, as were Wiley’s. Robert C. Alberts, author of a biography of Heinz, called it “noble purpose compounded with self-interest”—the story of much of human progress.184 Indeed, Henry J. Heinz proved that noble purpose could serve self-interest much better than a grubby attachment to preservatives. “He knew in the long run it would be for the good of the Food Business,” recalled a colleague.185
The new, benzoate-free Heinz ketchup was, however, far more expensive than the old variety had been. As the historian of ketchup Andrew Smith writes:
When other nationally produced benzoated ketchups retailed for ten to twelve cents, Heinz’s ketchup retailed at twenty-five to thirty cents. Obviously, Heinz paid more for fresh, ripe, tomatoes, but the cost did not exceed 15 percent of the total retail price. The other costs— additional raw materials (spices, sugar, vinegar), labour, packaging (glass bottles, labels, wrapping paper, bags, and packing material), overheads and freight—were presumably similar to those of other manufacturers. Heinz’s major new expense was the need to convince consumers to purchase higher costing preservative-free ketchup as opposed to the less expensive benzoated ketchup. Previously Heinz had expended almost no money on advertising ketchup. After the passage of the national pure food law, Heinz’s ketchup advertisements in magazines and newspapers exceeded all other manufacturers’ combined.186
“Preservatives must Go!” read one of Heinz’s ads. “What Every Woman Should Know About Benzoate of Soda in Foods!” read another. The Heinz campaign was ingenious, if a little unvarnished by today’s standards. It appealed simultaneously to housewives frightened that they were poisoning their children and to grocers frightened that they might find themselves on the wrong side of the law. “SHALL YOUR FOODS BE DRUGGED OR NOT? asked one headline.187 “Dr Wiley Condemns Preservatives,” warned an ad in the American Grocer in 1909. “When the order prohibiting their sale comes, how will you be prepared for it?”188 Actually, the order did not come prohibiting it; after a protracted battle, manufacturers won the legal right to continue using benzoate of soda as a preservative. By this point, though, most manufacturers had followed Heinz in removing preservatives. Curtice brothers, whose “Blue Label Tomato Ketchup” continued to use benzoate, went into decline.189
There are considerable ironies in the way that Heinz ketchup built its empire on its status as “pure food.” As Heinz’s competitors observed at the time, the only way to take the benzoate out of tomato ketchup was by creating concoctions “overdosed with sugar and vinegar.”190 There was some truth in this. The new formula for Heinz ketchup contained twice as much sugar and vinegar as before, and also more salt. Those in the probenzoate lobby insisted that benzoate was needed to “retain the full and natural flavour of the tomato.”191 Without the benzoate, tomato ketchup became something thicker, sweeter, and, to some tastes, more cloying.
Heinz tried to insist that much of the new sweetness came from using ripe red tomatoes instead of unripe fruit or tomato waste. Harvey Wiley had asked: “Why should the poor man pay approximately the same price for a bottle of catsup made from the sweepings of a tomato factory when he could get a great deal more catsup for the same price in a pure state?” But in fact, as we have seen, the price was not the same. What is more surprising is that Wiley—so relentless in his pursuit of detail in other respects—did not seem to pay much attention to the fact that the food value of the new ketchup was not the same either, since it was so much more sugary than the old preservative-laced ketchups.
Wiley couldn’t have foreseen the exponential rise in sugar consumption that would contribute to the vast rise in obesity in the West by the end of the twentieth century; but already in his lifetime, doctors were warning of the dangers of diabetes associated with
too much sugar, and health experts were decrying the sugar addiction of America’s children. In the end, Wiley had too much faith in “purity” as a catch-all solution to the problems of safe food. Just because benzoated ketchup was a less than perfect product, did that mean that nonbenzoated but sugary Heinz ketchup should qualify as a health-giving product? The same dilemmas have dogged the question of “pure food” ever since.
What made this all the stranger was that it was not as if Wiley was unaware that eating too much sugar was a bad thing. In one of his books on nutrition, Wiley tells the following story, which is more revealing than he can have intended:
Avoid the possibility of forming the “sugar-habit.” I was proud, only yesterday, at a gathering of grown people and children, where cake was served, to have my three-year-old son come running to me when the cake was brought out, crying out in great joy, DADDY, I WON’T EAT THAT CAKE; IT ISN’T GOOD FOR ME.” Only a few days before this, his mother, hearing the noise of a battle in the front yard, ran to the window and saw the young dietician astride the prostrate form of Dickey, his even-aged playmate, administering an assorted variety of Jess Willard “knockout drops.” “What are you doing, Harvey?” she cried. “Dickey will eat candy, and it isn’t good for him” was the response.192
In the years after 1906, Wiley came to resemble his own three-year-old son, grappling an unwilling nation to the ground to administer his medicine, so fixated on poisons that he had begun to miss the bigger picture.
Saccharine and Caffeine: The Aftermath of 1906
Following the passage of the Pure Food Act, Wiley’s power at the Bureau of Chemistry waned. Professor F. L. Dunlap was appointed acting chief in Wiley’s absence, which Wiley saw as a way of undermining his authority.193 By 1908, newspaper articles were calling him a “hated man,” who had been deemed “guilty of insubordination” by his bosses at the Department of Agriculture, especially Secretary Wilson, with whom he had never got on (“a consummate hypocrite” was what Wilson called him in private).194 Things came to a head earlier that year when Wilson invited a delegate of food manufacturers to the White House representing the benzoate of soda and saccharine industries. Wiley came too. The meeting started off well, from Wiley’s point of view. He convinced Roosevelt of the dangers of benzoate of soda, at which the president thumped the table with his fist and told the manufacturers: “You shall not put this substance in foods!”195
The trouble began when conversation turned to saccharine, a substance that portly Roosevelt regularly took for purposes of slimming. A fruit packer stood up to defend saccharine, telling the president that his firm saved four thousand dollars the previous year by using saccharine in canned sweet corn instead of sugar. Wiley interjected at this point:
“Yes, Mr. President . . . and everybody who ate that corn thought they were eating sugar, whereas they were eating a substance which was highly injurious to health.”
When I said this, President Roosevelt turned upon me, purple with anger and with clenched fists, hissing through his teeth, and said, “You say saccharine is injurious to health? Why, Dr. Rixey gives it to me every day. Anybody who says saccharine is injurious to health is an idiot.”196
This was the final straw for Wiley’s already shaky relationship with Roosevelt, and his influence in Washington never recovered.
It did not help that Wiley’s own instincts on pure food were deserting him. Where once he had managed to bridge the gulf between commerce and the cranks, now he was looking distinctly crankish himself. In 1911, he brought a suit against the Coca-Cola company. It is possible to imagine many grounds on which he might have attacked the drink, but the one he chose was that it was mislabelled, since it contained no cocaine and very little cola.197 What it did contain was caffeine, a substance that was not mentioned on the label and which he considered “objectionable,” by implication as objectionable as cocaine. “In England,” he insisted, “I have seen women who, if they were denied their tea at four o’clock, would become almost wild.” Wiley analysed Coca-Cola and found it “habit-forming and nerve-racking.”198 His case against the company began in March 1911, while Wiley was on honeymoon (he had married late in life a woman thirty years his junior).199 He lost, and he retired from government service a year later. The rest of his career was spent at Good Housekeeping magazine, where he established the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, continuing to give frequent lectures praising public health as “our greatest national asset.”200
For Wiley’s eightieth birthday in 1924, a special menu was produced. It read:
Alum pickle, coppered.
Borated Baked Bluefish.
Roosevelt Asparagus, Saccharine Dressing.
Renovated Cream Butter.
All food colours used guaranteed to be
non-certified coal-tar products.201
Wiley had been a man ahead of his time, but the joke at his eightieth birthday party suggests that he was by now a creature of the past. These were the obsessions of an earlier age. The remainder of the twentieth century would show that, for all his heroic work, Wiley’s stand for preservative-free and accurately labelled food was just the beginning.
5
MOCK GOSLINGS AND PEAR-NANAS
Today we don’t have anything so crude as adulterants; we have additives and improvers and nutrients.
—Elizabeth David, English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977)
George Orwell was a child during the First World War. When he looked back on his early life, he confessed that his chief memory was not of all the deaths, but of all the margarine. The butter shortages caused by the Great War meant that margarine switched from being the food of the poor to being a universally used substitute—even for privileged scholars at Eton, such as Orwell. “By 1917, the war had almost ceased to affect us, except through our stomachs.”1 Orwell, in his clear-eyed way, saw how food was increasingly being reduced to a kind of unfood. He abhorred this “century of mechanization,” which had, he believed, more or less eliminated the “taste for decent food.” Thanks to tinned food, “synthetic flavouring matters, etc., the palate is almost a dead organ.”2 In Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air, the hero George Bowling (who is reduced to eating fake foodstuffs such as fish frankfurters or artificial marmalade) complains: “Everything comes out of a carton or a tin, or it’s hauled out of a refrigerator or squirted out of a tap or squeezed out of a tube.”3 Orwell himself lamented the decline of the English apple:
As you can see by looking at any greengrocer’s shop, what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly coloured cotton wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things, apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice. Or look at the factory-made, foil-wrapped cheeses and blended butter in any grocer’s; look at the hideous rows of tins which usurp more and more of the space in any food shop, even a dairy; look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a twopenny ice-cream; look at the filthy chemical byproduct that people will pour down their throats under the name of beer. Wherever you look you will see some stock machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust.4
Orwell wrote these words in 1937. About this, as about so much else, he was prophetic. The world of synthetic food that he described so potently was only just beginning. Orwell was right that the twentieth century would be the century in which fake foods became the norm. He was also right that while these fakes started off as shabby substitutes—the reviled margarine of the Great War—they soon became seen by many as superior alternatives to the real food they replaced. By the old standards, this squirted, cartonned, squeezed food would have counted as adulterated. But as the century progressed, tastes and norms changed. The “shiny” and the “standardized” came to be prized above the real.
Ersatz Food and Wartime Fakes
Orwell’s experience of the privations of war was the British one: joyless, faintly nauseating, but nothing compared to what happened on the other side. It was Germany that became the laboratory for what fake foods people could stomach. They even came up with a new word for it: the experience of ersatz food became one of the central features of the German experience of the First World War. Soon after war began, the British navy cut off sea supplies to Germany through a blockade, which resulted in widespread hunger on the home front.
With shortages of all basic provisions, Germany was forced to be ingenious in the creation of new foods. Essentially, these were new versions of the age-old famine foods that peasants had used since ancient times to stave off death (see chapter 2). The difference was that they had a veneer of modernity and were bolstered with vigorous propaganda from the German state, which insisted against the instincts of every German diner that potato was really quite as filling as bread; and later, that swede was as nourishing as potato. Exhibitions were held all over the country demonstrating the huge new range of ersatz foods on offer, in an attempt to make a virtue of necessity. There were 837 certified varieties of substitute sausage. An American reporter noted that German shopkeepers, when selling an ersatz food, did not bother to “palm it off on you by telling you that it is just as good. He merely says: ‘It is the only thing of the kind that can be bought in Germany.’ ” In this sense, there was no swindle because “there’s little real anything to be bought in Germany today.”5
A German placard advertising ersatz coffee.
There were “eggs” made from maize and potatoes; ersatz “lamb chop” that was really rice; ersatz “steak” that was made from spinach, potatoes, nuts, and (the final indignity) ersatz egg. Substitute piled upon substitute. Even the glamorous cafés of Berlin served up Ersatzpräparate.6 At the start of the war, coffee (which in any case was usually chicory mixed with sugar beet) became roasted nuts flavoured with coal tar; later, this became too expensive and was replaced with roasted beech nuts and acorns; but later still, during the “turnip winter” of 1916–17, every spare acorn was used to feed pigs, and “coffee” was made from carrots and turnips, to accompany a meal of turnip stew and turnip bread. As one despairing commentator wrote: “It’s bad when surrogates must be used, worse when bad surrogates, rather than good ones must be bought. Ethel Cooper, who lived in Leipzig during the war, commented that she did not mind consuming rat; it was the rat substitute she couldn’t bear.7