Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture by Goodyear Dana

Author:Goodyear, Dana [Goodyear, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Five

DOUBLE DARE

The Food and Drug Administration was the great achievement of the pure-food movement, and a centerpiece of Progressive Era reform. Harvey W. Wiley, known in bureaucratic history as the Father of the FDA, started his career in Washington in 1883, as chief chemist at the Department of Agriculture, which at that time was tasked not with meat inspection but with boosting the country’s agricultural output. His office was founded to verify the uniqueness of fertilizer formulas for those seeking patents. Six feet tall, and more than two hundred pounds, with, a biographer noted, “only a suggestion of a paunch to testify to his fondness for the pleasures of the table,” Wiley was an outspoken and controversial crusader for unadulterated, properly labeled food.

Unlike today, when diners seek adventure, eating in the nineteenth century, especially for the poor, was an act of inadvertent daring. Rapid urbanization had cut people off from the sources of their food; mass production was changing that food’s very character. Refrigeration was limited. Chicanery and fraud were common. Unscrupulous and ignorant producers, trying to stretch shelf life or save on ingredients, put ashes in bread and formaldehyde in milk; chemical preservatives like borax, a laundry booster, were routinely added to perishable foods to mask or defer spoilage.

Born in a log cabin in Indiana to a family that grew almost all their own food and traded milk and butter for whatever they could not make themselves, Wiley lamented the industrialization of the food system. “In the good old days preceding and immediately following the War between the States, there was little need of protection of the people from impure, adulterated and misbranded foods and drugs,” he wrote in a memoir. “The great bulk of the people raised most of what they ate.” Processed foods appalled him; he advocated a “natural” diet composed mainly of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables.

In Wiley’s time, the food avant-garde was made up of reformers calling on the federal government, which did not yet have a significant role in regulating the food supply, to establish a safe, standardized American diet. In 1902, at the beginning of Theodore Roosevelt’s first term, Wiley asked Congress for $5,000 to conduct experiments on commonly used chemical preservatives. With the money, he built a kitchen and a dining hall in the basement of the Bureau of Chemistry, an imposing brick building on what is now Independence Avenue. Then he recruited from the Department of Agriculture a small band of men, choice specimens aged eighteen to twenty-nine, including a sprinter from Yale and former captain of a high-school cadet regiment, who were willing to test his belief that preservatives were harmful to human health.

Three times a day, Wiley’s “boys” assembled to eat food prepared for them by Perry, a civil service cook previously employed by the queen of Bavaria. The menu was designed by Wiley, who, the press noted, “has some original ideas about feeding human beings.” The food was administered in precise doses, weighed out by chemists in lab

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