The material histories of food quality and composition

Peter J. Atkins

Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom

Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 2–3

Abstract

This article argues for material histories of food. In recentdecades food historians have tended to emphasize thecultural factors in consumption, in addition to the al-ready well-established social, political and economicperspectives, but what is still missing is the stuff infoodstuffs. With reference in particular to milk and wine,the suggestion here is that physical and chemical com-position is a major influence in what we might call thebiographies of particular items of food and drink. Prod-uct characteristics are rarely static for long and today’smass-produced bread is different from that of the past,but then so are the flour, the yeast, and the even thebutter that is spread on it. Adulteration was a particu-larly interesting aspect of composition in the nineteenthcentury and was the key to the emergence of twodifferent traditions of understanding and valuing foodquality.

IntroductionThere is a Spanish saying, ‘blanco y en botella, leche’,which roughly translates as ‘it’s obvious’. But does a whiteliquid in a bottle always have to be milk? Is the identifica-tion of the essential qualities of foods in their natural statereally so easy? The answers, as we will see in this paper,are emphatically no. On the contrary, even commoditiesusually consumed raw, such as fruit, or simply processed,such as olive oil and milk, may vary greatly to the organo-leptic senses of sight, taste and smell. It was even more soin the past, before the standardizing machinery of corpo-rate capitalism decreed that we should lose much of thegenetic diversity of our fruits, vegetables and cereal culti-vars. We are presently witnessing an attempt to makeNature itself yield to the imposition of norms; but notwithout resistance because the second lesson of this paperis that the materiality of food is bloody-minded in itsreluctance to be tamed and essentialized. We will see thatthe history of food has really been the history of foods, eachwith a different trajectory.

The paper will first discuss why it was so problematic,particularly in the nineteenth century, to find suitablescientific means for describing and knowing the compo-nents of foods. The history of organic chemistry plays a parthere but so does the need to conquer what was perceived tobe the evil of adulteration. Second, these compositional andquality histories will be further complicated by the story ofthe contingent circumstances of national regulatory and

Corresponding author: Atkins, P.J. (p.j.atkins@durham.ac.uk).Available online 14 September 2011

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legislative contexts. Finding ways to police foodstuffs led insome countries to legal definitions as a basis to excludedeviant foods and prosecute their producers. This is ofgreat significance at the present day because it will beargued that two distinct traditions of food quality – theAnglo-American and the continental European – were bornat this time and continue now to influence our thinking.

Overall, I want to introduce the concept of commodity‘biographies’ as the sum of these developments. At firstsight this may seem like an uncontroversial way of intro-ducing a time dimension to a discussion of food quality. Inpractice it is more than that. Philosophically it amounts toan ontology of becoming. Heraclitus is said to haveremarked that one cannot step into the same river twice,which is the sentiment I invoke here. The bread of twohundred years ago, artisan-made or domestic, was verydifferent from the mass-produced, factory article of thesame name today. But then the consumers are also differ-ent, as is the flour, the yeast, and the even the butter that isspread on it. To make sense of this we need a history ofknowledge-making that amounts to a material history. Inother words, the changing composition of foods is the resultof many stories of human intervention but, in turn, theevolving make-up of those foods has been guided by themateriality of organic and inorganic molecules. Buildingthe knowledge necessary to understand the physical andchemical potential and constraints of foods has been afundamental background to their histories.

Although we will not discuss it in detail in this paper, itis also possible to argue that the materiality of food is amajor factor in how food chains are assembled and howquality is constructed; this certainly deserves more atten-tion from both historians of food and historians of science.The notion of material quality has also been undervaluedin economics, to the extent that Michel Callon calls it an‘under-conceptualised and fragile notion’ [1]. He proposesan ‘economy of qualities’ in which a good is a bundle ofqualities that together help to establish its singularity [2].There is no essence, as such, just hybrid characteristics,which, in a different combination, would make up a differ-ent good or a variant of the same good. These qualities areemergent. The temporal dimension is important for prod-uct characteristics and these change, with the materialplaying a role in the process of becoming, as does theconsumer. These metamorphoses require further invest-ment for what Callon calls qualification–requalification, inorder to stabilize and standardize goods for the market.Just as a popular car model may be redesigned severaltimes, with a new engine, different components, and per-haps variations of body shape, so foods are adjustedthrough time by new methods of production on the farm,

d. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2011.06.003

Figure 1. Creamometer: this instrument was used to identify the amount of cream

in a sample of milk but it was useless for judging the quality of the milk or whether

it had been adulterated. The technologies of food analysis were a matter of dispute

between various ‘experts’.

Source: Richmond, H.D. (1920) Dairy Chemistry, Griffin, (London).

Figure 2. Dr. James Bell, Principal of the Somerset House laboratory. The

government scientific laboratory was a court of chemical appeal under the 1876

Sale of Food and Drugs Act. It was frequently in conflict with analysts employed by

local authorities. These disputes were about the standards that best reflected

genuine and natural foods.

Source: Pilcher, R.B. (1914) The Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and Ireland,

Bradbury (London).

Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 2–3 75

additions or subtractions in processing and manufacture,and innovations in marketing strategies. This may be easyto imagine for branded goods such as can of soup or a fizzydrink but my argument is that even generic staples such asmilk, wine and bread also have careers in which theircomposition is best understood as a history.

Measurement and adulteration: the example of milkThe starting point is what I call the ontopolitics of mea-surement and precision [3]. This concerns the difficultiesencountered in finding a scientific consensus on the bestmethods and equipment to investigate the natural vari-ability of the constituents of say, milk. Simply stated, theseare butterfat, protein, sugar and water and it was wellknown that there were differences in these between mam-mal species and also among the breeds of dairy cattle. Asearly as the 1790s in Paris, Parmentier made experimentalobservations using evaporation and the animal chemistryof the first half of the nineteenth century introducedreagents in order to control or isolate certain componentsof milk. Advanced gravimetric and volumetric chemistryfollowed in the second half of the century but dozens ofdifferent techniques existed and results tended to varyaccording to the method used (Figures 1–4).

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Physics was also pressed into service. There wereexperiments using light but the most frequently employedtechnique, because of its simplicity, was the lactometer.This was an inexpensive instrument that could be massmanufactured and so used in the field by inspectors and bymembers of the dairy trade. It measured the specificgravity of milk and, by implication, whether the samplewas genuine or not. Here we come to a key point in milk’sbiography. It was so frequently adulterated with addedwater that trust was low and a great deal of regulatory andscientific effort was expended in controlling the supply andjudging whether it had been tampered with. On average inLondon in the 1870s milk contained about 25 per cent ofadded water and the consumer was justifiably cynicalabout ever being able to purchase the real thing.

But was the lactometer a way to judge? Not according tothe famous analyst, Alfred Wanklyn, who claimed in 1874that ‘there hardly ever was an instrument which has soutterly failed as the lactometer’ [4]. It seems that thefraudsters had long since realised that when they addedwater the specific gravity fell, but if they then removedsome cream it rose back up to a normal reading. As a result,a more accurate and reliable method was required.

It was not until the 1880s and 1890s that we can saythat dairy science had reached a point where the intrica-cies of milk composition and variability were emerging.Then two developments made it possible. In America the

Figure 4. Poor quality food was a source of malnutrition and disease.

Source: Rosenau, M.J. (1912) The Milk Question, Houghton Mifflin, (Boston).

Figure 3. Laboratory food analysis. Expertise in food analysis was in short supply

throughout the nineteenth century.

Source: Richmond, H.D. (1905) The Laboratory Book of Dairy Analysis, Griffin,

(London).

76 Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 2–3

Babcock method came to the fore, and in Europe the Gerbermethod. Both used acid to dissolve everything in the milkother than the butter fat, which was then separated bycentrifugal force and its amount could be read off inspecially manufactured glass bottles known as butyrom-eters. The second development was the adoption of masstesting by the burgeoning dairy companies of the day. Theywere determined to eliminate any cheating by their sup-pliers and to boost retail sales by making claims of genu-ineness to their customers. Use of the Babcock/Gerbertechnology made this possible at a relatively low unit cost.For the first time, tens of thousands of samples were testedevery year.

This accumulation of knowledge made it possible in the1890s to estimate, for the first time, what could be calledcompositional ‘norms’. The materiality of chemical compo-sition was being revealed here as never before and bothdairy companies and city authorities felt confident enoughto tell their suppliers what thresholds they would use infuture to judge adulteration. There were even some nationsthat followed. In Great Britain, for instance, 3 per centbutterfat and 8.5 per cent solids-not-fat were established in1901 as the limits below which a fraud would be presumedto have taken place. These ‘presumptive’ standardsremained in place until Britain’s regulations were broughtinto line with those of the European Union in 1993. Theyhad survived so long because an uneasy balance of eco-nomic and political forces that prioritised the interests of

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British dairy farmers and the industry that served them.The introduction of the European Single Market in 1993and the abolition of the Milk Marketing Board in 1994introduced a new set of logics that, in theory at least, weresupposed to shift the balance towards the interests ofconsumers. As a result, the composition of British milkhas changed and there have been many changes in theways it is processed and retailed.

Falsification: the example of wineWhat is wine? The thought of having to give a legallybinding definition makes those of us who are not oenolo-gists go weak at the knees. We are aware of the astonishingvariety of wines on sale and we are regularly humbled byour inability to tell one grape from another, let alone awine’s quality. It is reassuring to fall back on reading thelabel and convincing ourselves that a wine’s close associa-tion with its terroir is all we need to know.

But is it? If we look at the material biographies of wineswe can see a much broader and more complex story, whichbegins in France in the late nineteenth century. Therewere similarities with milk because the addition of water towine was a problem at that date, but there was also theaddition of chemicals, and serious regional clashes overquality standards. The watering was common because, tominimise the tax (octroi) charged on goods entering cities,high alcohol wines were brought in and then watereddown. In the 1880s added water accounted for one sixth

Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 2–3 77

of the volume of wine consumed in Paris. Putting plaster inwine was also common, this time among Mediterraneanvignerons, to stabilize it and prevent spoilage in transit [5].Other trade practices included the addition of sugar andthe production of wine from imported dried grapes. To-gether, these may sound like ways to defraud the public of awholesome, natural product, but they were all perfectlylegal until either limited or banned between 1889 and1894.

The new laws did not, as hoped, stabilize the Frenchdomestic wine market. The devastation of phylloxera in the1870s had reduced output and during the recovery periodfierce rivalries opened up between the regions about eachother’s methods of wine-making and the relative qualityand authenticity of their products. The shortages of thelate nineteenth century turned to surplus in the earlytwentieth century and, coupled with the spectre of compe-tition from cheap Algerian imports, this forced everyone inthe industry to think of possible solutions. The first stepscame with attempts to protect place of origin in 1919, andin 1935 the Ministry of Agriculture established the InstitutNational des Appellations d’Origine, which was instrumen-tal in developing definitions of quality in collaboration withthe stakeholders [6]. This helped to build quality and valueout of artificially created scarcity, and from connexion withgeographical locality, or terroir. In addition to the spatiallogic of the Appellation d’Origine Controlee (AOC), thereare clear, strict rules about grape varieties, yields perhectare, the size of lettering on labels, and much more.Rather than the unpredictability of both quantity andquality being a problem for products such as wine, theFrench system uses a classificatory hierarchy that providesthe consumer with the necessary information and, aboveall, it celebrates difference [7].

Arising originally from concerns about composition,adulteration, quality standards and public health, theFrench intellectual response and the resulting system ofregulation have been formidably influential. Their 1905law, in particular, which sought administrative definitionsof products and legally enforceable compositional norms,became a model for many European countries, and in the1990s it was incorporated into the legal framework of theEuropean Union. In effect, it provided a basis for disci-plined market transactions, for instance by controlling theimpact of technological innovation in the food sector. TheFrench reaction to the inconvenience of organic variabilityin their wines has been cleverly to make a virtue out ofnecessity and, in effect, to brand by place and by labelrather than by corporate logo. Much wine snobbery istherefore wide of the mark if no account is taken of thehistorical origins of the AOC.

Contested expertiseIs your judgement of food quality better than mine? I mightbe willing to defer to your expertise if I thought it wassuperior to mine but the lesson of food history is thatcompetitive vested interests tend to lead to continuousstruggle. A good example of this is to be found in the fierydebates about analytical techniques between local author-ity and government scientists in late nineteenth-centuryBritain [8].

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After series of scandals in the 1840s and 1850s aboutpoor food quality and widespread adulteration of basicitems bread, beer and milk, there was a parliamentaryenquiry and a Sale of Food and Drugs Act was passed in1860 that in theory outlawed the various frauds. Thecommercial politics of the day were such, however, thatthere was no means of enforcement, and it was not until1875 that a system of sampling and testing was estab-lished. Local authorities employed chemists to undertakeanalyses on their behalf and the results were used in court.There were no agreed laboratory protocols, however, and itseems that some of the work was unreliable. In the Sale ofFood and Drugs Act (1875) a provision was made foranyone dissatisfied with these local results to send areference sample to the Inland Revenue laboratory inSomerset House, London. Here government scientists pro-vided their own analysis and in many cases they variedfrom the original results, usually giving the benefit of thedoubt to the trader. In the period 1881–1885, for instance,they disagreed on 42 per cent of the milk samples submit-ted to them, to the fury of the local analysts.

The tension between the two centres of expertise waspalpable over two decades until the 1890s. M. Henry, editorof the journal Food and Sanitation, was particularly criti-cal. In 1894 he spoke of ‘the existing wretched, ignorant,and utterly untrustworthy system of food analysis at Som-erset House’. It was a ‘poor, bungling department strug-gling to perform work for which it has not got the skill orknowledge’. In his opinion, ‘scientifically the SomersetHouse chemists are dead, and there exists no shadow ofan excuse for their remaining unburied’ [9].

Although there were personal animosities involved be-tween Somerset House and the public analysts, the sim-plest way to summarise this debate is that it was the resultof disagreements about which laboratory techniques weremost appropriate. There were also arguments about theformal qualifications that were required for an expert to betaken seriously in courts of law. All of this was the result ofthe inchoate nature of organic chemistry and the difficul-ties therefore faced in agreeing on the ‘genuine’ composi-tion of a food. The friction was by no means unique toBritain, although, as Vera Hierholzer shows for Germany,there were other countries where solutions were found thatavoided public contention [10].

In retrospect we can contextualise this type of strugglewithin the fragile nature of expertise, which in turn wasinstitutionally specific. My instinct here is not immediatelyto reach for the item in the historians’ tool kit marked ‘socialconstructionism’. This might be tempting given the obvioussocial, economic and even political interests that contribut-ed to the evolution of food knowledge and expertise. But,rather than drawing solely upon human agency, I preferAndrew Pickering’s approach in his book The Mangle ofPractice, in which he argues for ‘the irreducibility of materialperformances to the social’ [11]. For him the emergence ofscientific knowledge and its technical application is aboutthe inherent resistance and messiness of socio-natures.Some materials, with the organic properties of foodstuffsfor instance, are so difficult to deal with that science oftenmuddles through without achieving the depth of knowledgethat was initially desired. As a result, observations are

78 Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 2–3

partial, contingent and amount to compromises; they mayalso be temporary until more work can be done.

The role of the lawSo far we have found that the materiality of food and drinkhas made difficulties for those who would judge its genuine-ness and set themselves up as authorities on compositionand quality. But if food science proved to be problematic,what about the law? In this section I will propose, modifyingthe words of Graham Burnett, that for historians of food ‘thecourts beckon’ [12]. In other words, it is jurisprudence, thejudge-made law of the King’s or Queen’s Bench in Britain,the Court of Cassation in France and the various SupremeCourts of the American states, that provides some of theanswers we need. Here cases were examined that were rightat the edge of existing rules and thereby threw light uponkey principles and, in some cases, were even responsible forthe creation of new legal understandings. Let us highlightthree strands that illustrate this point.

First, there is the key principle of responsibility. Untilthe middle of nineteenth century this was caveat emptor or‘buyer beware’. In small, organic communities, where faceto face transactions were the norm, this principle was notunreasonable and the seller certainly had an incentive tobehave appropriately because reputation was all. Butpopulation growth, urbanization and the increasing com-plexity of modern industrial economies in the nineteenthcentury meant an increasing distance between producerand consumer and a loss of mutual dependence, familiarityand goodwill. In the case of Britain, this separation wasdeepened by the early development of railways and by anemerging philosophy of free trade, which encouraged rawmaterials to be brought from all over the world. In suchcircumstances it was not only difficult to maintain thequality of perishable items but to decide who was to blamefor any problems. Was it the farmer, the wholesaler or theretailer?

Surprisingly, food historians have not addressed thenotion of ‘system trust’ in depth. We know from modernresearch that public trust in food, food producers andmanufacturers, food retailers, and the institutions sup-posed to guarantee food standards, is quite variable fromcountry to country and that there are high-trust and low-trust societies. In Europe the citizens of northern countriessuch as Finland are both trusting and resilient during foodscares. They trust their public authorities to keep theminformed and protected, whereas in Germany trust isvested more in experts and in consumer organizationsthan in government. By comparison, consumers of formercommunist countries such as Estonia, Lithuania, Polandand Slovakia are less trusting of the state. Least trust inthe various actors in the food system is found in southernEurope, in Greece, Italy and Portugal [13].

Our second legal principle is that system trust can berestored and maintained by the use of warranties, marks,labels and brands. In other words, legally-enforceablecontracts became a solid basis for everyone in the chainto believe the claims of their supplier, or at least to holdthem accountable for any claims that might prove to befalse. Warranties, either on paper or in some mark or symbolon a container or vessel, were particularly important in

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perishable food chains, where freshness, purity, and honestywere crucial lubricants of trade. There is a vast history ofcommon law cases in milk in Europe and North America inwhich struggles over warranty represent attempts to findthe ultimate locus of responsibility for quality. These earlydebates about warranties under the Food and Drugs Acts inBritain were important in the formative period of a newconcept of ‘strict liability’. Rather than having to provecriminal intent, the test for the defence was now to be oneof ‘reasonably foreseeable consequences’ with regard to thecondition of the product.

Third, in the realm of food law there has been a greatdeal of debate about what is ‘natural’. A food such as milk ishighly variable, according to the breed of cow but also whatshe is fed and whether she is healthy. In Britain thesituation was different and the Sale of Milk Regulationsbrought out in 1901 confirmed the expectation that allretail milk would be ‘as it came from the cow’, nothingadded and nothing taken away. This sounds like a reason-able definition of a true, unadulterated product, but con-sider the following cases, both of which were so importantthat they reached the King’s Bench.

� Hunt v. Richardson (1916). The court quashed aconviction for adulteration. The farmer had fed hiscattle on wet pastures and green maize. He had notadded water but the milk was nevertheless very thinand watery. Three judges saw it as unadulterated wholemilk and upheld the appeal. The minority of twodisagreed, suggesting that, being outside the 1901compositional target, the milk was not merchantable.

� Grigg v. Smith (1917) established that there was noneed for milk to be the outcome of an entire oruninterrupted milking. The cow in question had notbeen fully milked, leaving some in the udder for asuckling calf. This meant in effect that the farmer haddelivered the thinner fore-milk to his customers andkept back the richer strippings for his own profit. Themajority of judges agreed that this had been his right.

The point here is that these judgements, and the manyothers under various national jurisdictions, have helpedto define what natural means and to establish securegrounds upon which we can debate food quality andcomposition. As a result, as students of food we have abetter chance to write biographies of our commodities ofinterest in a fresh way. This approach to understandingthe legal contribution is only just beginning but it hasgreat potential.

Conclusion: two traditions of qualityAs we have seen, the Anglo-American vision of food qualitythroughout most of the twentieth century was based uponthe building of scientific knowledge, backed by systems ofcontrol that used sampling and laboratory-based analysis.The common law tradition incorporated scientific testimo-ny as far back as the late eighteenth century but expertisehas never sat comfortably with the adversarial tone of crossexamination and, anyway, how can we judge who are thebest experts to call for the prosecution and for the defence?The uncertainty of the science associated with food in

Feature Endeavour Vol. 35 No. 2–3 79

particular has caused many bitter disputes and these havebeen solved only through the slowly evolving pragmatismof common law jurisprudence. This is different in twoimportant ways from the continental system of codifiedcivil law, centralised administrative structures and refer-ence standards of quality.

First, to return to our examples of milk and wine, it is asif there were different biographies on either side of theChannel. In Britain the only standard for milk from 1901onwards was a presumptive one. The 1901 standards wererather low and allowed for a very wide range of naturalvariations before assuming that any tampering had takenplace. Compositionally milk had to be whole, ‘as it camefrom the cow’, and the only graded liquid products relatedto modes of heating to remove bacteria or the testingof cattle to reduce the risk of diseases such as bovinetuberculosis. In countries such as Denmark and theNetherlands, however, which had important butter indus-tries, extracting part of the butterfat was taken for grantedand was not frowned upon as yielding an ‘unnatural’product. In 1976 the European Community decided thatit would legalise the standardization of milk composition.But this was an alien concept in Britain, where semi-skimmed milk was not even market tested until 1981and where retail fat designations such as ‘0.1’, ‘1.0’, ‘2.0’,and ‘4.0’ per cent fat were not legitimized until the Drink-ing Milk Regulations of 2008.

Second, in Britain regional foods were annihilated ormarginalized by cheap imports from around the world inthe second half of the nineteenth century. But free trade inother European countries was carefully managed by theirgovernments in order to prevent the destruction of domesticagriculture. As a result, ‘quality’ in countries such as Franceand Italy has continued to be associated with the peasantand artisan foods that have long been typical of a region interms of local skills and the comparative advantages derivedfrom soils and micro-climate. Intriguingly these place-basedinterpretations of food quality were enshrined in law of theentire European Union in the 1990s and, ever since, thepower of terroir has grown to the extent that it is now beingretro-fitted as ‘relocalization’ into Anglo-American food cul-ture, where place associations have now entered our regulardiscourse. Without any wish at all to denigrate the wonder-ful foods and wines produced in France and these othercountries, we have a duty as historians to recall that theestablishment of place branding was often at first a measureof ‘defensive localism’, for instance by wine producers hopingto protect their reputations and their trade in the earlytwentieth century [14]. So successful has this been that theorigins of the idea have been forgotten in the enthusiasm of

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the early twenty first century for quality alternatives to themass-produced ready meals and branded processed foods ofthe supermarket age [15].

My overall conclusion to this paper is that what isneeded now is a re-orientation of food history towardsunderstanding the origins of food commodities and theevolution of their composition and qualities. Above all thisdemands the we acknowledge emergent materiality andreject any fixity in the make-up of basic foods such as milk,wine and bread, or indeed their highly processed counter-parts. Such a task requires a major psychological shift forsome historians but it is essential if we are to engage, first,with the stuff of foodstuffs and, second, with the foodscares of yesterday and today, which tend to be aboutscientific/technological uncertainty and the need for betterregulatory and legislative frameworks for dealing withthe instability and unpredictability of the materials thatmake up our foods.

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14 Winter, M. (2003) Embeddedness, the new food economy and defensivelocalism. Journal of Rural Studies 19, pp. 23–32

15 For the fuller discussion that ‘local’ and ‘alternative’ foods deserve, seeFonte, M. and Papadopoulos, A.G., eds (2010) Naming Food afterPlaces: Food Relocalisation and Knowledge Dynamics in RuralDevelopment, Ashgate, (Farnham)