Debates about “natural food” have long stood in for broader confrontations about science, health, and power. These persistent tensions in American society can be illuminated by exploring the origins of a beloved consumer product: breakfast cereal.
Fresh from the Factory shows that American consumption habits and beliefs about nature developed together. Cereal manufacturers gained influence by appealing to a widespread desire among a largely female consumer base for cleanliness, purity, and simplicity in feeding their families. These companies took advantage of and helped promote new ways of making, advertising, selling, and distributing food—and did so in the name of the unadulterated goodness of nature. In an era of little public health regulation, hazy ideas about scientific authority, and public uncertainty about whom to trust, cereal producers promised to deliver the divine powers of nature straight from the factory floor.
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Edited with Benjamin R. Cohen and Anna Zeide
“Food culture is too often limited by an obsessive focus on the new and now. The essays in this excellent, rigorous collection are a pointed reminder that the past is very much the present, and the future, too.”
Helen Rosner, staff writer, The New Yorker
“An endlessly fascinating collection of stories about the invention and popularization of modern food. A constant thread traces the idea of nutritional reform through science and its sinister relationship with scientific racism, as well as efforts to challenge white supremacy in the global food system.”
Paul Freedman, Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Yale University
“These lively, wide-ranging essays about the surprising forces that shaped American eating habits make a stellar contribution to food scholarship.”
Laura Shapiro, author of Perfection Salad
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