Food Prices & Politics

A brief history of price gouging, inflation, price control, and corporate consolidation

Hello dear readers! I finally have an extra few days off where I don’t have to spend them doing the 8 million tasks that usually take up my “free” time these days, so I thought I’d catch up on some writing with a lot of things that have been percolating in my head for months now.

It’s also the day before the US presidential election, and I wanted to address something I think the media is not covering well: grocery prices.

Top Democrat and presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris has promised to go after price gouging on groceries. The media has largely scoffed. But laws about price gouging and struggles with high food prices during global emergencies are nothing new. Most states in the US (but not all) have price gouging laws on the books. There is no federal law on price gouging, although there is at least one bill currently in Congress.

But what is price gouging? Price gouging is when a purveyor artificially and excessively inflates prices in times of emergency or economic disruption, generally on essential goods. Unscrupulous people can take advantage of disruptions and need to make enormous profits. Think people who bought up pallets of hand sanitizer to resell at a huge profit early in the pandemic.

There are, however, federal laws against price fixing, which is when two or more companies collude to fix prices at a certain level, usually to corner the market and artificially increase profits. This is a violation of anti-trust legislation and can lead to investigation and criminal prosecution.

Most media outlets have blamed price increases on inflation, which has a variety of factors, not limited to increased demand for limited supply, supply chain cost increases, increased wages leading to increased prices, etc. But that is not the whole answer.

Price gouging and inflation are nothing new. Food prices skyrocketed during the Civil War, especially in the South. Food prices also rose significantly during the first decades of the 20^th century, thanks to industrial depressions and World War I. The “high cost of living” bedeviled millions of Americans. During the First World War, the U.S. Food Administration was eventually given wartime powers to regulate the entire food chain, although Food Administrator Herbert Hoover was careful to avoid both mandatory rationing and over price controls. Instead, the United States became the largest purchaser on the market, and set prices that way. Newspapers also published price lists of what regulators considered fair market prices for a variety of essential goods. Consumers were warned that anyone pricing in excess of published prices was price gouging.

"Prices charged in this store will not exceed those indicated in the most recent list of Fair Prices applicable to this locality and issued under the authority and direction of The United States Food Administration signature.", ca. 1917 - ca. 1919. National Archives.

During the war, entire industries, including the meat packing and dairy industries, were investigated by Congress for price gouging and price fixing. Business leaders were called before Federal boards of inquiry and to testify in Congress, opening their books to inspection and explaining everything from staff salaries to production costs. In both instances, little evidence was found, although there were real concerns about corporate consolidation of meat packing. Post-war, dairy cooperatives were again taken to task, this time prosecuted under anti-trust legislation for cooperatives and accused of price fixing and collusion. The lack of evidence resulted in a new law exempting agricultural cooperatives from being prosecuted under anti-trust legislation.

During the Second World War, the US Office of Price Administration oversaw rationing and set price controls on everything from foodstuffs to rent. It was immensely popular with everyone except business leaders, who first weakened it and then forced it to shut down shortly after the war.

Does any of this sound familiar? Today, we also have anti-trust issues with food production and retail – a problem that long predates the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve often said that the food history trend of the 20^th century is corporate consolidation. And indeed, the variety of choice on our supermarket shelves seems to belie that, including some very old food company names. But while the number of food companies in the late 19^th century exploded, by the mid-20^th century, so many of them had been bought up by competitors that they had been consolidated from hundreds of local and regional brands into just a few national brands. Today, that number is even smaller. Just a few corporations – Mondelez International, Unilever, Kraft-Heinz, and the world’s biggest – Nestle – own the majority of food brands across the world. A single company can even own brands that seem to be in competition with each other – but the profits all go to the same company. In the U.S., meatpacking is dominated by just four companies – Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef - who control 85% of the market. McDonald’s just sued all four of them for price fixing.

There certainly have been extenuating circumstances in the last five years – supply chain disruptions were real, demand shifted enormously as restaurants and theatres were closed, and peoples’ purchasing habits changed. But the majority of the media coverage doesn’t seem to want to admit that real price gouging took place. For instance, in September, 2024, NPR took a deep dive into companies’ accounts and showed around 1% increasing in profits. But nowhere in the article did they address the issue of stock buybacks.

According to the Harvard Business Review, stock buybacks are when companies take profits (or sometimes go into debt) to purchase their own stock on the open market. Why? Generally, best practices with profit are to raise wages to reward productivity, invest research & development, and/or expand the company. Instead, stock buybacks reward senior executives with increased stock prices (since stock is often part of their compensation packages), and reward shareholders with increased dividends. Stock buybacks took a brief hit in 2020, but have exceeded pre-pandemic levels nearly every year since.  

Companies also haven’t been trying to hide their new economic strategy. According to Forbes in February, 2024, companies are flat out admitting that as demand declines, their plan it to simply raise prices as high as they can to make up the difference.

Food production has always had limits. After all, unless the population increases, food consumption levels are going to stay relatively flat. But creative companies found ways to make money. First, companies profited by adding value through processing (i.e. canned goods, candy and soda, breakfast cereals, pickles). Then, companies took advantage of government policies and technology to lower their costs (i.e. price floors on commodity crops that allow companies to buy crops for less than they cost to produce, and then transform them into ultra-processed foods). Then, companies increased sales by increasing demand for food items like fast food, snacks, soda, and other ultra-processed foods by making them deliciously addictive. But people can only consume so many foods, and health-conscious consumers are starting to turn away from ultra-processed foods like chips, candy, soda, and cereal.

Companies got used to very high profit margins and are increasing prices to maintain those margins. However, ultra-processed foods were previously among the less expensive, so the poorest Americans are the hardest-hit by price increases.

There are other disruptions at play besides corporate greed. The war in Ukraine made international agricultural additives prices skyrocket. Climate change is hitting a variety of crops hard. Wildfires, hurricanes, drought, excessive heat, excessive rain, early or late frosts, and flooding are all negatively impacting crops around the world, including blueberries, oats, olives (and therefore olive oil), chocolate, and tree fruits like cherries, oranges, almonds, and more. Even though our globalized food supply should in theory help us weather these… well, weather events, the consolidation of production into monocropping in concentrated areas has meant that one hurricane or flood can wipe out the majority of a crop. And when multiple natural disasters across the world hit? An entire food chain can be disrupted.

At the heart of all of this disruption, however, is still corporate greed. Even when supply changes and wages increase, no corporation is willing to reduce profits by even a little bit. So instead of taking a hit, they pass on every price increase on to the consumer. And instead of rewarding employees with higher wages for increased productivity, they use the profits to buy back their own stock to artificially increase the price (by creating demand where there otherwise is none) and inflate their compensation packages and keep their shareholders happy.

The quieter story is that the 2017 Trump Administration corporate tax cuts weren’t invested in wages or research & development or decreasing consumer prices either – they were almost exclusively used in stock buybacks.

So while food prices are incredibly complicated, and there are lots of factors at play - corporate greed is still a major concern. And when it comes to essential goods like food, that’s just wrong. The past 10 years have seen increased wealth transfer from the working and middle classes to the highest echelons of wealthy – through tax breaks, stock buybacks, market consolidation, and yes even price fixing and price gouging.

I don’t think any one person – or the government – can fully control the markets. Nor do I think they should. But consumers need protection from predatory business practices. And I know which party is going to support more consumer protections and which party wants to remove all the guardrails for corporations and the ultra-wealthy (and, according to experts, tank the economy) at the expense of working people. Do you?

Tomorrow I’m voting for a saner, more stable future where ordinary Americans’ needs are put above record corporate profits. I hope you’ll vote, too.

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Want more food history, historical recipes, book reviews, and more? Visit my website: TheFoodHistorian.com.

American Autumn and the Tyranny of New England

Or, Why We Celebrate A Very Specific Idea of Fall

Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

In the United States, the months of September, October, and November are dominated by “fall” and “autumn.” Those words call to mind deciduous trees with color-changing leaves, harvest time and fall hunting season, autumnal foods like pumpkins, apples, and cranberries, waning daylight, chilly weather, migrating birds, and coming frosts. It means Halloween and Thanksgiving, sweater weather, wool socks, the last hurrah of seasonal ice cream and seafood shacks. These are the things we associate with “fall” across the United States.

But for most of the U.S., the third quarter of the year rarely reflects all that. In more southerly states, fall comes late, if at all, and 90-degree weather in October isn’t uncommon. Cranberries and most varieties of apples won’t grow at all, and pumpkins aren’t particularly well-suited to tropical climes either. Some very southerly areas are where northern migrating birds migrate to. In agricultural states with two harvest seasons, fall can be planting time.

In the more northerly states, “fall” may last as little as two weeks – sandwiched between the heat of late summer and the onset of winter snows. Some of this is due to climate change. Summers are longer and hotter, and cold weather sets in later and less often. Some of it is due to location or elevation. Growing up in North Dakota, it wasn’t uncommon to get snow on or before Halloween.

So why then does “fall” always mean New England’s version in our culture?

If you guessed “racism,” you’re at least partially right.

Becoming America

The development of “American” culture really began in the first half of the 19^th century. The disparate colonies of what would become the United States were not particularly united at the time. Even among English colonists, varying cultural practices developed around foodways, usually due to limitations of local and seasonal availability of produce and game. But once the states became United, White elites like President George Washington were interested in creating a new culture to match the experimental democratic republic they had founded. But while the Federalist style of architecture and furniture spread across the country, there was no real “American” style of food or cooking. Foodways remained seriously regional, although the development of canals in the Northeast helped start the trajectory toward homogenization.

The first half of the 19^th century also saw a rise in interest in American history. Writers starting in the 1820s began recording histories of 17^th century colonies, old family genealogies, and the American Revolution. The peaceful years following the War of 1812 allowed industrial development, the rise of public education, and an interest in looking back as folks were looking forward.

New England, in particular was developing a more robust regional foodway centered on Indigenous foods like corn, pumpkin and squash, cranberries, turkey, shellfish, and potatoes alongside traditional English ingredients like wheat, dairy, beef, onions, turnips, beets, cabbage, and apples. Many of the most populous cities – Philadelphia, New York, and Boston – were located in the Northeast, although only Boston would be considered truly part of New England. A majority of the White American population lived in those states, although Virginia was among the most populous of the original thirteen colonies.

People like Lydia Maria Child helped define New England cuisine. A staunch defender of Indigenous rights and an abolitionist, Child published an iconic cookbook – The Frugal American Housewife – and the poem that later became known to generations of children as “Over the River and Through the Woods,” but whose original title was “A New England Boy’s Song of Thanksgiving.” Although pumpkin pie, cornbread, and cranberry sauce with turkey had been featured decades earlier in Amelia Simmons’ American Cook, they gained more widespread use thanks to books like Child’s. But although other cookbooks published at this time period also emphasized regional foodways like The Virginia Housewife, Kentucky Housewife, and the Carolina Housewife, only the New Englanders like Child and Simmons claimed “American” in their titles, or made no reference to their states or regions at all.

The Civil War

The Civil War proved a turning point. White Southern planters argued for their own supremacy – in Congress, in society, in culture – and in their right to impose their cruel, racist, and extremely lucrative system of exploitation on the rest of the country, whether they liked it or not. In the North and West, things were more complicated. Lydia Maria Child, who lost her job as a magazine editor in the years leading up to the war once her abolitionist beliefs became clear, was more the exception than the rule, even among New Englanders. Most Americans in the North opposed secession, but not necessarily slavery, and certainly the idea that men and women of African descent were the equal of their White counterparts was laughable to most of society’s powerful White elites, regardless of the state they lived in.

During the war, Union soldiers from all over the North were brought together in close quarters, largely eating the same food. Men who’d never left their home counties found themselves relating to others from thousands of miles away. The spread of railroads and the development of canned foods for the military helped homogenize American diets, to a point.

In popular culture in the North, the idea of bringing a nation of disparate states together in unity became increasingly important. Sarah Josepha Hale (who tried unsuccessfully to save the periodical Child had been forced to resign from as editor) had been badgering politicians for nearly two decades to implement a national holiday of thanksgiving. In the fall of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln finally acquiesced. But the resolution only applied to the Union states, as the Confederate states had their own rebel government. Thanksgiving traditions elsewhere began to be superseded by New England foodways. About the only things to survive were minor variations in stuffing and pie.

The emphasis on a union of states also led to an increased interest in American history, notably that of the colonial and Revolutionary War period. American history books had begun to be published as early as the 1820s, as the United States proved itself on the world stage in the War of 1812. But during the Civil War, the idea of a single nation, with a single identity, became even more important.

Postwar, Reconstruction promised a new era for a country torn apart by White planter arrogance and racism. But White elites in the North were eager to sweep the past under the rug and heal a nation torn apart by war. As former Confederates were allowed to vote and run for office again, Reconstruction was undone, and the rise of Jim Crow set the rights of African Americans back by decades. Northerners wanted a united “American” identity – one that could stand up to the supremacist ideas of Europeans, who they saw as both inspiration and rivals. So they hearkened back to the earliest days of what became the United States as they knew them – the 17^th century colonies of New England. Claiming that the ideals outlined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights reflected the “religious-freedom-seeking” Puritans who braved the harsh climes of the Massachusetts colony to establish their “shining city on a hill” was much more convenient than admitting to the spoiled and indolent second sons of Virginia’s early history, the complications of Dutch and Spanish colonies, the extreme violence of settler colonialism, and the prevalence of slavery in all of the thirteen colonies, including New England. That messy and complicated history just didn’t fit the American ideal White elites were trying to concoct.

By the second half of the 19^th century, Americans had their own dictionary, their own diverse religions (although mainline Protestantism was preferred by elites), massive industrial accomplishments, artistic movements, music, etc. But while some foods were becoming known as American overseas (notably steak, corn, and cocktails), the majority of U.S. residents still ate based on regional foodways, especially in the more established parts of the country.

Yankee Foodways Go National

That started to change with the advent of two important 19^th century innovations: cookbook publishing and nutrition science. The explosion of cookbook publishing following the Civil War meant that Americans had more access to printed recipes than ever before. A proliferation of periodicals, notably women’s magazines and rural and agricultural publications with women’s sections, as well as newspapers with women’s sections, meant that recipes were shared widely across the country. Fashionable recipes like lemon pie and lobster Newburgh made their way into community cookbooks across the country, regardless of the local availability of lemons and lobster, because both could be easily acquired if you lived anywhere near a rail line.

Most cookbook publishers were located in the Northeast and so were their authors. Some of the most popular and prolific cookbook authors and teachers of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries were from New England and neighboring states: Amelia Simmons (unknown, but likely Connecticut or New York), Eliza Leslie (Philadelphia), Lydia Maria Child (Massachusetts), Catharine Beecher (New York), Juliet Corson (Boston), Maria Parloa (Massachusetts), Mary J. Lincoln (Massachusetts), Sarah Tyson Rorer (Philadelphia), Fannie Merrit Farmer (Boston), Janet McKenzie Hill (Massachusetts), and Ida Bailey Allen (Connecticut). And they tailored their cookbooks to both their individual experiences and their audiences. Rarely were locales featured in commercially published cookbooks anymore (aside from Lost Cause cookbooks glorifying the pre-Civil War South), but their flavors were distinctly New England, even if the titles didn’t say it.

At the same time, nutrition science as in its infancy by the end of the century, and the majority (though not all) of its research was centered in New England. The calorie was applied to food at Wesleyan College in Connecticut. Mother of Home Economics Ellen H. Richards studied at Vassar College in New York and MIT before founding the Journal of Home Economics in upstate New York and doing research and writing in Boston. The term “home economics” was coined at Lake Placid, NY at a conference hosted by New York librarian (and staunch racist) Melville Dewey and his wife Annie and attended by Ellen H. Richards, Maria Parloa, and others.  

None of this evidence is meant to reinforce the perceived supremacy of New England foodways – merely to outline how dominant it was in the culture of this time period and how influential in the minds of the people who were making the biggest impact on American food at the time – cookbook authors and scientists.

These authors and scientists were also deeply steeped in the so-called “science” of race. American interest in scientific endeavor was focused on improvement. Improvement of machines, improvement of agricultural crops and livestock, improvement of people. Nutrition science was part of that, as were motion studies, sociology, psychology, and even researching into raising human offspring. “Better baby” contests were held (segregated, of course), childhood nutrition, education, exercise, and more were examined. It wasn’t called the Progressive Era for nothing – people were interested in progress. “The betterment of the race,” was a huge part of the conversation for White elites, everyone from college students to President Theodore Roosevelt.

A few weeks ago, Anjali Prasertong wrote this article for Well + Good, with the help of some wonderful food historians and researchers. It illustrates how closely tied nutrition science was to racist ideas like eugenics. But it also misses the bigger story: that “American” food is deeply tied to the idea that New England (read: White Yankee) foodways are superior to others.

Let’s look at some anecdotes.

In 1876, Juliet Corson opened the New York Cooking School. Like the Boston Cooking School, it was largely designed to train lower class women to be housekeepers and cooks. Although she had to ultimately close the school due to poor health, she went on to become a regular columnist for New York City newspapers, including the New York Times, where she worked for the rest of her career. Corson believed keenly in the power of good, economical cooking, and her Puritan background no doubt had a huge influence on her ideas and ideals. She famously published a number of cookbooks for the poor, including Fifteen Cent Dinners for Families of Six. According to her New York Times obituary, she published an edition of 50,000 copies specifically to give away during the height of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Her books were immensely popular, their promise of healthful meals for little money was an important one in a time of robber barons and tenements. Interestingly, although she promoted the basic understanding of nutrition at the time (carbohydrates, protein, and fats), she offered a substitute for the cow’s milk so highly prized by nutritionists at the time – broth, which she encountered on her travels in France. But the remainder of her recipes in this booklet are stolidly New England – boiled meats, root vegetables and cabbage, beans, cooked cereals like cornmeal mush, dairy products like milk, cheese, and butter, and bread. No leafy greens or green vegetables, tomatoes, or fruits feature in her menus, except apples. A few dried herbs and spices and flavoring tinctures to be made at home (lemon, orange, vanilla). She even notes that dried or preserved fruits are for holidays only, and nuts are difficult to digest and so “they do not come under the head of the necessities of life.”

In 1890, Ellen H. Richards, with assistance from Mary Hinman Abel, debuted The New England Kitchen of Boston. Designed to serve Boston’s poor immigrant population with ready-made meals and teach them economical and nourishing cookery, the Kitchen was well-funded and with the benefit of medical professionals, scientists, and equipment manufacturers to assist Richards and Abel and conduct research.

“After a long series of studies, the following foods were placed on sale by weight or measure: beef broth, vegetable soup, pea soup, corn meal mush, boiled hominy, oatmeal mush, pressed beef, beef stew, fish chowder, tomato soup, Indian pudding, rice pudding, and oatmeal cakes.” Clearly, its proponents were certain that these typically New England foods were the most nutritious and best options. However, the local immigrant population in Boston was less convinced. According to The Life of Ellen H. Richards published in 1912, just one year after her death, the Kitchen, like many others, ultimately failed to convince “the poor” that the food on offer was both cheap and good. “’Their death knell was sounded,’ to quote Mrs. Richards, ‘by the woman who said, ‘I don’t want to eat what’s good for me; I’d ruther eat what I’d ruther’.’ The man, too, from Southern Europe who defiantly said, ‘You needn’t try to make a Yankee of me by making me eat that,’ pointing to baked Indian pudding, may have helped ring the knell.”

Like Corson, Richards and Abel were attempting to get poor and immigrant families to eat for survival, not pleasure. Both argued against alcohol, and while Corson embraced a more French style of eating for her middle-class cookbooks, salad vinaigrette was clearly out of the purview of the urban poor.

And therein lay the problem. Immigrants of all backgrounds did not want to be divorced from one of the few connections to their homelands they still had: food. And, as many people have argued before and since, English foodways aren’t always the height of culinary achievement, especially not when produced “economically.” But for these Progressive Era reformers, immigrant foodways were inferior. Messy, smelly, complicated, and probably causing all kinds of indigestion (the horror of meat- and white-bread-obsessed White elites everywhere). Mixed foods not only represented racial and ethnic mixing, they were also made calculating calories and nutrition components much harder to determine. The ”best” foods were simple, lightly seasoned, and served separately – hallmarks of many New England style foods. “Meat and three” if you will. And “Americanizing” immigrants didn’t mean teaching them about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It meant assimilating them to the dominant culture of the time, which was largely White, Protestant, and based in New England.

These ideas were carried forward into the 20^th century. They remained the backbone of nutrition advice in World War I, World War II, and the postwar boom, even as scientific advancements made clear the importance of vegetables and that immigrant and African American foodways were not nutritionally inferior to White Yankee foodways. Old ideas and habits died hard, encouraged by the continued prevalence of White supremacy in American culture. It was not until the 1960s and ‘70s that the idea that other foodways might have value trickled down to the mainstream, although even then it was often in highly Americanized form, either created by American immigrants themselves, or by home economists working in corporate test kitchens.

So how does this all relate to fall? New England foodways weren’t the only things to dominate our national culture. When American thought leaders and elites were inventing what it meant to be “American,” they lifted almost wholesale the culture of New England, including Protestant work ethic, Puritanical ideas about pleasure, and yes, even its distinct seasons. So when you see stuff about “what’s in season” for each month, they’re usually not talking about what’s in season in California, or Oklahoma, or Florida. They’re talking about the Northeast.

What About the South?

The South has just as long and distinct a food culture as New England. So why wasn’t it the chosen one? Well for one, although the South had its rebrand post-Reconstruction, largely courtesy the Daughters of the Confederacy and their Lost Cause Movement, treasonous secession wasn’t exactly the ideal the White elites of the more populous Northeast wanted to emphasize (comparisons to the American Revolution aside). Besides which, the food culture of the South was much more diverse. In addition, part of the revival of the racist Ol’ South was an emphasis on the role of genial Black cooks and “servants” in the magic of Southern food and hospitality. African foodways were much more in evidence in Southern food, and the still-racist North valued White supremacy just as much as it did New England supremacy.

African-Americans, however, existed and continue to exist in large numbers in the North, some of whom can trace their family lineages back to the earliest days of the colonies. Throughout the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, they were relegated primarily to service jobs, even after legal slavery ended in the North. They were the ones cooking for taverns, hotels, and spas, and on board steamboats and railroads. Many Northern families employed people of color as household servants as well, although by the end of the 19^th century White German or Scandinavian servants were preferred. In addition, Black Americans were far more populous in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania than in Massachusetts and other traditionally New England states. They just did not fit into the “shining city on a hill” narrative White Progressives wanted to embrace.

The large Black population in the South didn’t help either. Southern food did enjoy a late 19^th and early 20^th century revival, thanks in part to the Lost Cause movement, which sponsored not only Confederate statues and textbooks, but also helped Southern cookbooks proliferate. Not all of them exploited their African American contributors, but most did, and nearly all reinforced negative stereotypes about uneducated, “magical negroes” who were happy to serve their White masters.

While Lost Cause cookery did encourage a positive view of the South, it also helped other it. Slow Southern recovery following the Civil War, its reliance on agriculture (particularly sharecropping), its reluctance to industrialize, and its highly stratified Jim Crow society all helped brand the South as “other” – that is, part of America, but not really American. Southern food was a novelty in the North and West – not an everyday staple. This is a dichotomy that persists even today. For instance, we have many Southern restaurants, but few New England restaurants. Most of New England’s foodways are simply presented as “American.”

As American as New England

Colonial revivals in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s all helped reinforce New England foodways as “American,” even as cognizance of the decline of other regional foodways helped spur attempted revivals in the 1930s and 1970s-90s. By the time of the Second World War, “American” food had become pretty firmly entrenched, and it was largely derived from New England foodways. Roast beef and pot roast, roasted turkey and chicken pot pie, mashed potatoes and gravy, mashed turnips, creamed onions, baked beans and succotash, Harvard Beets, cranberry anything, apple and pumpkin pie, gingerbread cake and molasses cookies, Boston brown bread and Parker House rolls – these foods all have their roots in New England Yankee foodways.

Today, the popularity of many of these foods has waned. But the New England influence lingers on in pumpkin spice lattes and plaid scarves in 90-degree weather, in pumpkin patches and U-pick apple orchards across the country, and in Halloween and Thanksgiving traditions totally divorced from local food conditions.

Someday I hope we’ll be more realistic about both local conditions and the White supremacy behind a lot of these “traditions.” The United States is an incredibly diverse place. And while “American” food is starting to change, we’re not quite there yet. I look forward to seeing where it goes next.

Bibliography & Further Reading

“Eugenicists Shaped the Pathologized Way Many Americans Think About Nutrition Today” by Anjali Prastertong for Well + Good, 2023.

“Are Nutrition Science and Nutritional Guidelines Racist?” by Sarah Wassberg Johnson, The Food Historian blog, 2023.

“Institutional Racism and New England’s Food” by Meg Muckenhoupt, NYU Press Blog, 2020.

Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture by Megan J. Elias (2017).

Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century by Helen Zoe Veit (2015)

How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working Class Meals at the Turn of the Century by Katherine Leonard Turner (2014).

Linoleum, Better Babies, and the Modern Farm Woman, 1890-1930 by Marilyn Irvin Holt (2006).

97 Orchard Street, New York: Stories of Immigrant Life by Linda Granfield (2001).

Note: Friends, if I’ve seemed quiet lately it's because once again I've been having issues with posting articles to Substack. This has sat in drafts for weeks, frozen. I'm now scheduling it from my phone (the only way to access it), and minus most of the links I'd hoped to include. So I hope you'll accept my apologies! If anyone has a contact for Substack please let me know. This issue has been persisting across machines, browsers, and IP addresses. Thank you and hope you enjoyed the read!

Ice Cream From Crude Oil?

Misadventures in industrial food history

I've been getting lots of interview requests to talk about ice cream lately, which has sent me down some rabbit holes. I've been tracking down ice cream's ancient origins, presidential ice cream history, inventors, and more.

I did a talk last year on ice cream history for Archaeology Now which you can watch here if you want the whole overview of my research thus far.

But in trying to track down details about Augustus Jackson (the "father of ice cream") and Sallie Shadd (the "mother of ice cream") here in the US, I stumbled across this horror on JSTOR: "Ice Cream From Crude Oil," by Edwin E. Slosson, published in Science News-Letter October 2, 1926.

The front page of “Science News-Letter,” October 2, 1926, featuring the headline article “Ice Cream from Crude Oil.” Courtesy JSTOR.

Here's the text (I’ve bolded a few choice passages):

The chemists of America recently celebrated the semi-centennial of their organization with a meeting at Philadelphia. Dr. Edwin E. Slosson, author of "Creative Chemistry," etc., in this article tells of some of the achievements and hopes of modern chemistry as revealed in the sessions.

Ice cream made from crude oil is one of the many marvels forecast by Prof. James F. Norris, president of the American Chemical Society. Edible fats, the same as those in vegetable and animal foods, and other fats equally nutritious but not found in nature, can be obtained by breaking up the molecules of mineral oil and rearranging the atoms to form new compounds.

This cracking process has been applied to petroleum for many years to obtain a larger yield of the gasoline distillate, but the investigations recently carried out by the Petroleum Institute have shown that it is possible to attach oxygen to the cracked molecules and so produce alcohols and acids of all sorts. Aromatics, flower perfumes, fruit flavors, drugs and dyes in infinite variety may be made by such methods. This suggests that petroleum which has hitherto been used for fuel and lubricating may be found in the future to be even more valuable as a source of substances for which man has hitherto been dependent upon the chance bounty of nature. Glycerin, which is not obtained from the decomposition of soap fats, can be produced from petroleum, and transformed into nitroglycerin for dynamite. Synthetic plastics like rubber and bakelite may also be manufactured from the same raw material. It is unfortunate that we should come to realize the possibilities of petroleum only now, when the Government Oil Commission announces that the known oil reserves of the United States will last only six years at the present rate of consumption.

But Dr. Norris has his answer to that objection, for he foresees the utilization of the limitless stores of energy confined within the atom, as manifest in radium.

“When I saw not long ago in the laboratory of Dr. S. C. Lind a tiny drop of colorless oil that had been formed from methane - the chief constituent of natural gas - as a result of the action of this form of energy upon it, I felt a new era in chemistry had dawned,” Dr. Norris said. “That droplet meant a supply of combustible liquid to run our automobiles where petroleum is exhausted. We can make methane from carbon and hydrogen when the supply of natural gas fails us. The sun will always be able to convert carbon dioxide into a form from which we can get back carbon.”

Dr. E. J. Esselen demurs to the suggestion of synthetic ice cream and expressed a preference for the old-fashioned method of feeding the cellulose to a cow. But in his own field Dr. Esselen was quite as radical in his prophecies as Dr. Norris. He goes so far as to surmise that the synthesis of cellulose may some day be accomplished in the factor as it is now in the field from the free raw materials of air and water.

Cellulose, which is the woody stuff of trees and other plants, now requires months or years to grow, but if the chemist once learns how to make it he may turn out a purer product in a few days or hours. Already the first steps toward this achievement have been taken. It has been found possible to make glucose artificially by the action of ultraviolet rays on water and carbon dioxide, that is, on “soda-water.” It is easy to convert cellulose into glucose, and if only we knew how to reverse this reaction synthetic cellulose would be possible, though whether it would be profitable or not remains to be seen.

Wow. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Petroleum products would go on to dominate our everyday lives. Not just with plastics, but also with food additives, notably artificial flavors, colors, and preservatives. And while we have certainly expanded our oil reserves globally since the 1920s, peak oil is still an as-yet undealt-with issue, alongside climate change. But the article illustrates both the benefits and dangers of this kind of science.

Someone pointed out yesterday that Soylent Green was set in 2022, and quipped that they would not be consuming any fake meat anytime soon. I laughed, but knowing how some fake meat like Impossible burgers are made (with artificial, not human blood), I had to sympathize.

We’ve already been eating petroleum for a while. The other day I revisited an article I wrote last year on French Dressing, and recalled that the whole reason the FDA was regulating the standard of identity for salad dressings in 1950 was because mineral oil was an increasingly popular substitute for vegetable oils in salad dressing. Odorless, colorless, and flavorless, mineral oil is not digestible by the human body (and therefore is often prescribed as a laxative). For dieters, this seemed ideal! Have delicious salad dressings to perk up your sad raw vegetable diet without the calories! The infamous artificial fat Olestra (a.k.a. Olean) had similar effects, which is why you rarely find it today.

Petroleum products still make it into foods. Petroleum wax is a main ingredient in chewing gum, and edible paraffin wax is often found as a coating for cheese, fresh fruits and vegetables, and is even an ingredient in chicken nuggets. You can also see it (along with mineral oil) as an ingredient in some older candy recipes, usually combined with chocolate for dipped candies. Lipstick, toothpaste, and even over the counter pain medications like aspirin also contain petroleum products.

Petroleum is a carbon-based substance, so it’s not beyond the realm of comprehension that we could eat it. But humans generally can’t metabolize foods made from petroleum, which is why that headline about ice cream was such a shock to me. I can only imagine the effects of eating such a product, no matter how it tasted.

About a week ago the Washington Post published a story about ultra-processed foods and their impact on human health. In particular, they looked at how the breakdown of molecules in foods that underwent high-pressure, high-heat environments (like those that make, for instance, cheese puffs) and how the body metabolized them. Because these broken-chain molecules are essentially pre-digested, they can be absorbed by the body right from the stomach into the blood stream - skipping the microbiome in the gut.

Some researchers posit that these ultra-processed foods might be the smoking gun of the so-called “obesity epidemic.” Others remain less convinced. I personally think that, like climate change, obesity is the result of a multitude of issues with modern life, including but not limited to, epigenetic changes, exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals, the twin stresses of poverty and racism, a disinvestment in pedestrian-friendly architecture, a national chronic lack of sleep (including in children), changes in gut bacteria, changes in the nutritive values of crops through soil depletion and over-irrigating, AND the prevalence and cheapness of ultra-processed foods.

In speaking about ice cream in preparation for a podcast interview today, I talked about the changes in agriculture, technology, and public policy over the course of the 20th century that made our industrial food system today possible. That 1926 article just brought home both the naïve optimism of the past, and also how divorced Western science was (and often still is) from the natural world.

I don’t have any particular message today, other than to share this tidbit of history that I stumbled across and all of the connections to the modern day it made me think about. Here’s more reading if you’re interested in any of the topics I mentioned today:

Alicia Kennedy has written a new book coming out next month called No Meat Required, in which she examines the history of plant-based eating, particularly meat substitutes. She includes a deep-dive into the history behind folks like Beyond Meat and the Impossible Burger. She also wrote this week on the corporatization of American food.

My globe-trotting friend Tereneh Idia has written about pedestrian-friendly (and un-friendly) architecture across the world.

I’m always interested in reading more from folks who like to take deep dives into complicated topics, so drop your Substack recommendations in the comments!

Until next time, friends.

Food & Labor

Children, Agriculture, and Human Rights

The thing about writing timely pieces a week in advance is that sometimes you get scooped! I wrote this on Monday, which I didn't realize was World Day Against Child Labor until the estimable Heather Cox Richardson wrote about this same topic on Wednesday. Oh well! My take is far less succinct, but more focused on food. Here you go:

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For most of human history, putting children to work was not uncommon. Family and village units were organized around the pursuit of food. Children learned trades and farming by helping their parents, much like they also learn household chores. Tasks were generally tailored to the child’s abilities, and it was understood that children were learning; while mistakes were frowned upon, were part of the learning process. In Western culture, from the Medieval period on, children were generally regarded as smaller, more malleable adults. People matured quickly as death was a constant threat. Although life expectancies rose significantly in the Western world as it recovered from the Black Death, malnutrition and overwork were still generally an issue among the lower classes. But because families suffered equally, not much though was given to children as a group separate from their parents.

With the advent of formal education for the working classes, which really did not take off until the late 19th century, ideas about children’s lives began to change. For upper- and middle-class families, a whole culture of child-rearing and education developed as early as the 18th century. By the time the Victorian period arrived, we had child rearing experts and a whole separate culture of books, periodicals, clothing, education, and play.

In contrast, for lower-class families, children were treated the same or sometimes worse as before. As families were squeezed out of farming, more and more went to urban areas where food was much harder to come by. Rural people could garden, own a chicken or two, forage for wild plants, and hunt or fish. Urban people had to exchange cash or labor for food. People went where jobs were, and factory towns that had initially attracted men capitalized on first young unmarried girls (think 1830s Lowell, Massachusetts), and later women and children as sources of cheap labor. For any task that did not require great upper body strength, factory owners preferred women and children. At this time, the prevailing idea of nutrition was that women and children needed significantly less food than adult men, and that children could essentially survive on cooked cereals and some occasional milk. Wages were wages, no matter who earned them, and one benefit of a large family was that children could be sent out to earn wages as soon as they were old enough.

This did happen with rural families as well, especially poor ones. Children as young as 10 would be sent as hired help to more prosperous neighbors. Boys would assist with agricultural labor, girls with household labor. And of course, in the centuries of slavery in the United States, enslaved children as young as six would be removed from their parents and put to work, often with little care for their personal safety.

Public schooling started to change that, but people forget that public school in the United States was largely funded by local families until the 20th century. Someone would donate land for the school, others would donate money to build the school. Families pooled their resources to pay the schoolmaster, who often rotated boarding with individual families, especially in the first half of the 19th century. Families who couldn’t afford to pay or board the teacher, or who lived in areas without enough children and political will to have a school, went without, especially if their children were already earning wages.

Child labor became the secret shame of the United States by the end of the 19th century. Children worked in appalling conditions, famously in textile mills and as newsies. But food processing and harvesting was also a huge employer of children.

You may be familiar with the work of Lewis Hine, a sociologist and photographer who set out to force middle- and upper-class Americans to understand the hardships of labor, especially child labor, through photography. In his work for the National Child Labor Committee in the early 1900s and 1910s, he faced violence and harassment from everyone from local foreman to powerful business owners alike as he strove to reveal the horrific conditions that children routinely worked in.

You have probably seen some of his work. Much of it focuses on coal mines and textile factories. But food processing was a big part of it, too.

Rosy, an eight-year-old oyster shucker who works steady all day from about 3:00 A.M. to about 5 P.M. in Dunbar Cannery. The baby will shuck as soon as she can handle the knife. Location: Dunbar, Louisiana. Lewis Hine, March, 1911. Library of Congress.

Oyster shucking was (and is) a terribly dangerous business, especially when you’re going as quickly as you can. Like many jobs where you were paid by the piece or the pound (in this case, the pot), children were a major part of the workforce. Although they were often less efficient or strong than adults, they were far, far cheaper to employ. They also tended to be more docile and accepting of whatever was given to them. Canned oysters were major business in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and like other fish and seafood canneries, underpaid, overworked children (and women) wielding sharp knives on assembly lines were a huge part of the profit margins. According to Hine, children started work as early as 3:30 AM (when the oystermen started delivering pots) and only stopped at 5 or 5:30 PM.

Hine’s work in exposing the horrors of child labor eventually helped pass labor laws banning it. A law passed in 1916 was overturned by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1918. In 1924 a Child Labor Amendment to the Constitution was proposed, but it failed to ratify. Franklin Delano Roosevelt supported the amendment, but like many other child labor laws, it did not survive the courts. It took until the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, passed under the FDR Administration as part of the New Deal, which not only set a minimum wage, but also severely regulated the employment of minor children.

With one exception: agriculture.

Americans, especially White Americans, tend to see agriculture with rose colored glasses. Yeoman farmers working independently as “pioneers” to “tame” the American West are a huge part of our cultural consciousness. Agricultural writer and crop scientist Sarah Taber has challenged the idea that family farms are the ideal vehicle for agricultural production, and the more I learn about agricultural history the more I tend to agree with her. A better solution remains elusive, however. Our modern system, in which a very few labor to produce truly epic amounts of food very cheaply has allowed our cities to proliferate and grow, allowed the majority of Americans to spend just a fraction of their days in food acquisition, preparation, and consumption and pretty much no time at all on food preservation - tasks that dominated everyday life for thousands of years. But there have been costs. Environmental costs, and human costs as well. Not the least of which is children’s labor.

We tend to think of child labor as a thing of the past. But as recent studies have shown, it very much isn’t.

In mid-April, thanks to an expose by the New York Times, we learned that unaccompanied minors - the migrant children fleeing violence in their home countries in Central and South America via the U.S./Mexico border - had not been well-tracked by the federal government. In fact, thousands of children had been “lost” - most to sponsors who agreed to take care of them. The rapid placement of these children was an attempt by the Biden administration to end the whole children in cages thing, but it had some nasty repercussions. Not the least of which was that a huge number of these migrant children were pushed into the workforce.

“One person explicitly said they planned to employ three underage boys at a construction company, and another said they could take in two children who would then have to work off the cost of their travel.”

That quote sounds like something from the 19th century - going to the poor house to “adopt” children or give them “apprenticeships” that in practice end up being abusive homes with labor practices akin to slavery. But it’s a direct quote from “unvetted sponsors” of minor migrant children. In order to pay back “expenses” of travel, housing, clothing, food, etc., children as young as 12 were sent to work by their “sponsors” in restaurants, construction, packing plants, factories, even meat packing.

In February, the Department of Labor sued a food sanitation company for employing over 100 minor children in cleaning and sanitizing meatpacking factories. Children between the ages of 13 and 17 did things like use hazardous chemicals and clean hazardous machinery, including meat saws. Can you imagine the trauma of just working as a cleaner in a meat packing factory, much less doing it as a child? The DOL sued the company for about $15,000 per child - the maximum allowable penalty. The company paid about $1.5 million overall. Packers Sanitation Services, the company that was sued, made $460 million in 2022 alone. Their fine was not even 1% of their annual revenue. They probably saw it as a cost of doing business.

Reading some of the comments on these articles, you’ll see the same arguments people made in the 19th century - that work is “good” for children, that it is job training, that it helps them earn money and be less of a burden on their families and society. This rhetoric, which generally is spouted by those who also think poor people are in poverty through their own fault, or are “lazy,” infuriates me. They often compare summer agricultural jobs they did as teenagers (back when you could pay for a year of college on 3 months of full-time minimum wage work) as equivalent to children working full-time overnight shifts at age 13. But an 18-year-old picking stones out of a field, while backbreaking, is not the same as a 14-year-old working nights in a meatpacking plant while they’re trying to also go to school.

Of course, meat packing isn’t the only source of illegal child labor. According to the DOL, illegal child labor increased 69% since 2018. Notably, restaurants also engage in illegal child labor regularly. We’re not talking teenagers answering phones or packing takeout orders in their family restaurants after school. We’re talking about multi-national corporations like McDonald’s employing children as young as 10.

Agricultural work has even fewer regulations. Because these labor laws were passed in the 1930s, when a large percentage of Americans still owned or worked on small farms, agricultural labor was exempted from most of the regulations, including child labor laws. Most farming families needed child labor to help care for livestock and get crops in. And since farmers rarely paid themselves, or their families, a wage, they were considered exempt. There were other reasons, too. Urban reformers have long sacrificed agricultural labor in order to maintain lower food prices for urban labor, thereby preventing the expansion of socialism/communism and things like food riots. Child labor on farms was considered an acceptable compromise. They knew most farmers would not be able to afford to hire adult workers for wages. So child labor helped keep food cheap.

One of the smallest negro oyster shuckers that I found on the Atlantic Coast. Usually they do not work the negro children. Varn & Platt Canning Co. Location: Bluffton, South Carolina. Photograph by Lewis Hine, February, 1913. Library of Congress.

And, of course, racism also played a role. Many of the Congresspeople who wanted carveouts for agricultural child labor in the New Deal laws were from the South. Post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws and sharecropping kept millions of Black farmers from making a living wage. Keeping their children working also prevented them from getting an education, and stifled upward mobility. In addition, fewer child agricultural laborers would have meant fewer laborers overall, allowing adults to negotiate better wages. The exemption prevented all that.

After World War II, farming changed. Large farms abandoned sharecropping in favor of mechanization. Smaller family farms started to die off. They couldn’t keep up with the high costs of mechanization and expensive agricultural inputs like chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. In the 1980s, federal agricultural policy to “get big or get out” combined with a recession killed millions of family farms. Those that were left got big; corporate farming expanded dramatically, and so did exploitative contract agriculture. While mechanization helped keep farm labor in the family for some, especially grain and dairy farmers, others relied increasingly on migrant labor.

In 1960, CBS’s Edward R. Murrow narrated an expose on migrant labor called “Harvest of Shame” (you can watch the whole thing on YouTube). It sought to expose the terrible conditions of migrant farm labor in the United States. But by making migrant labor seem unavoidable, and even natural, it inadvertently cemented migrant labor as a facet of agriculture.

In the 19th century, with the exception of huge bonanza farms in the Midwest in the 1870s, most farmers had hired help - adults who often lived on site were given room and board and a small wage to help the adults in the family with the daily tasks of farming. Often they were the young adult children of neighbors who were saving up for their own farms. Sometimes they were landless people who could not afford to do anything other than sell their own labor. They were rarely turned out at the end of the season, especially since most farms in the 19th century were diversified - raising multiple varieties of livestock and different crops - meaning that work changed but did not end.

In the 20th century, agriculture became increasingly specialized. Farmers might keep a cow and a couple of chickens for home use, but their cash crops were their main focus - grain, beef, chickens, pork, orchards and fruit farms, “truck” farming (i.e. vegetables). Farmers were increasingly participating in vertical integration - farming for canneries and food processors. Crops were harvested all at once, processed, and then the need for farm labor subsided until next harvest season. This was the cycle that gave rise to migrant farming in the United States. Migrant farmers were largely Black former sharecroppers, poor landless Whites, and increasingly, former farmers from Mexico and Latin America.

Today, migrants and people of color (especially from Mexico and Central America) make up a huge portion of the agricultural workforce. They by-and-large have Indigenous backgrounds - pushed out of farming in their home countries by economic depressions, violence (including from drug lords), and an inability to compete with American agricultural subsidies (see: my last article on NAFTA and Mexican maize). They are also subject to some of the most egregious labor conditions in the country.

Earlier this year, the Brookings Institution published an article that had this to say about migrant agricultural labor:

U.S. fruits and vegetables for export are harvested by migrants under conditions that violate core labor standards. Migrants work in the aspects of agriculture that are too difficult or too expensive to automate. They are paid wages below the minimum, exposed to pesticides and relentless heat, crowded in housing not fit for humans, and subjected to sexual harassment and violence.

All true. In fact, after the success of groups like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, founded in 1993 to fight modern-day slavery among agricultural workers in the tomato fields of Immokalee, Florida, other migrant groups are also suing for labor violations, including human trafficking, slavery, etc.

But what is often not mentioned in these articles is how often children are doing labor. Because the U.S. has such lax labor laws when it comes to agriculture, for decades children have been working in fields alongside their parents, subject to intense heat, lack of water and sanitation facilities, sexual abuse, violence, and overwork. Most agriculture that cannot be mechanized and relies on humans to harvest it is also backbreaking. And instead of getting paid by the hour, workers are “incentivized” by getting paid by the piece or the pound. Meaning the faster and more efficiently you work, the more you get paid. Of course, this also dramatically increases the risk of on-the-job injury and illness.

The National Center for Farmworker Health outlines some statistics on child labor in agriculture, including that agricultural labor generally allows hazardous work and work during school hours at younger ages than any other labor. It is legal for children as young as 10 to do agricultural work outside school hours. And in practice, many children even younger do work under their parents’ social security numbers.

And of course, this is just in the United States. Globally, child labor in agriculture, including slave labor, is an increasing problem. According to the United Nations, child agricultural labor increased in 2020 for the first time in two decades. Chocolate, coffee, tea, and shrimp are all noted for using child labor globally, including slave labor.

Manuel, the young shrimp-picker, five years old, and a mountain of child-labor oyster shells behind him. He worked last year. Understands not a word of English. Dunbar, Lopez, Dukate Company. Location: Biloxi, Mississippi. Photograph by Lewis Hine, February, 1911. Library of Congress.

What can we do? Well one thing we can remember is that while child labor is still an issue in the United States, it used to be much worse. Political will from the general public forced change via regulation. The regulations aren’t perfect, by any means. Enforcement is sporadic at best. Fines are often so low companies consider violations an acceptable risk, or even a cost of doing business.

Heather Cox Richardson reported on Wednesday that “On Monday, the World Day Against Child Labor, Democrats led by Representatives Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and Raul Ruiz (D-CA) introduced into Congress the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety, or CARE Act. It seeks to raise the minimum age for farm work from 12 to 14, repairing a carveout from the era of the Jim Crow 1930s that permitted children to work on farms at two years younger than in other sectors.”

Although 14 is still too young for most agricultural labor, in my opinion, it is a step forward. We'll see if it passes, but political pressure from constituents does still have an effect sometimes - so call your Congresspeople!

Americans tend to spend less on food overall than other developed countries, in part because our agricultural subsidies make processed foods so cheap, but also because our labor costs are so low. Inflation during the pandemic has started to change retail food prices. My real question is, where is all of that increased profit going? Because it isn’t going to laborers. Of course, that’s a topic for another day…

Until next time, friends,

Sarah

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What I’m Writing

Published a book review, with another on the way.

Working on articles on the history of French toast and Black WWI food demonstrator Portia Smiley - stay tuned on The Food Historian Blog.

What I’m Reading

Too many fun books, not enough history books. On the docket is a re-read of the secondary source material for my in-progress book, and probably some more book reviews. I’ve found they really help me understand the author’s primary arguments as well as provide examples of what to do (and what not to do) in writing history books. At the top of my list is Modern Food, Moral Food by Helen Zoe Veit - one of the only other books written about US domestic food history in World War I, and also where I got my first tantalizing reference to Portia Smiley.

I also just finished A Modern Cook's Year by Anna Jones, a British cookbook author whose work is chock full of fascinatingly inventive and eminently useful vegetarian and vegan recipes. Check it out!

The Future of Mexican Maize

Agriculture, policy, and the environment

Hello dear readers. COVID has got me again, almost a year to the day from last year. And, sadly, Substack has frozen ANOTHER one of my lovely long article drafts. Totally inaccessible. Thankfully I learned from last time and wrote the bulk of my article in a Word document on my computer, so this is the copy & paste. It will be less polished than the other one, and without links because I don’t have the energy to go find them all again, so I apologize for that.

There will also be no photos, dividers, or buttons in this article, because I have no idea what causes the drafts to freeze.

I am also seriously considering leaving this platform over this issue. This is the second big time investment I’ve put into articles, only to have them disappear. What do you think? I also blog at www.thefoodhistorian.com and I have a Patreon account. I created this Substack because I wanted a place to discuss current events and politics in the context of food history. But the endless glitches are getting to me. If you really want me to stay, please let me know in the comments!

And now, for the article:

Americans love Mexican food. Or at least, what they think is Mexican food. Most of it is Tex-Mex, a flexible combination of Indigenous, European, and adapted American foodways springing up along the borderlands. Real Mexican food is ancient and complex. But the one constant in pretty much everything that’s called Mexican? (besides salsa) Tortillas and tortilla chips. Almost always made from corn.

Americans are most familiar with mass-produced, highly salted, fried tortilla chips. But while fried tortillas have a long heritage in Mexico (tostadas, for example), the first commercially produced ones were introduced in LA in the 1940s as a way to use misshapen tortillas mangled in factory production. The mass-market appeal of sealed plastic bags of tortilla chips is a far cry from the housemade ones at many a favorite Mexican restaurant. Sturdier, less salty, and easier to voraciously consume, they are infinitely better, and yet almost impossible to find in stores.

Corn is indigenous to southern Mexico where Indigenous agriculturalists carefully bred hundreds of varieties from teosinte – a wild grass with large seeds – 10,000 years ago. From there it spread to the South American continent, and north throughout North America – just about everywhere east of the Rockies. It became the dominant starch throughout much of the Americas and a staple both culinarily and culturally. Of course, “corn” is the English word for it – a term applied to all grains. Outside of the United States it is usually called “maize,” which derives from the Taino word for it – mahiz. The Taino people were the first to come in contact with Europeans when Christopher Columbus landed on their shores, bringing death, destruction, and slavery.

I have only been to Mexico once, a quick border crossing on a visit to Arizona as a high school student. I don’t pretend to be an expert in Mexican food or its history. But Mexico and its corn have been on my mind for decades. In a college writing class, we had to do a group project (UGH) on a controversial topic. My classmates were uninspired, and I was interested in sustainable agriculture, so I suggested we do genetically engineered corn and its impact on Mexico.

As the birthplace of corn, Mexico is also its cradle of genetic diversity. Hundreds of varieties, some of them ancient, along with wild teosinte, still grow throughout the country. But that genetic diversity is threatened by genetically engineered corn. Corn is wind-pollinated, meaning that it can be contaminated with genetic material from other varieties.

A few weeks ago, Mexico banned the importation of GE corn in an effort to protect its landrace varieties and support its agriculture. It also plans to phase out the use of GE corn and glyphosate herbicides domestically by 2024. But the Biden Administration is challenging that ban, in large part to protect American agriculture. Both GE corn and glyphosate (like Roundup) are in widespread use in the United States. Mexico is currently one of the largest consumers of US corn exports.

What makes the United States think it can challenge a domestic law in a sovereign country? The North American Free Trade Agreement, also known as NAFTA. Designed to improve trade relations between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, it had some positive effects, but the effect on Mexico’s agricultural economy was devastating. Passed in 1994, the original agreement was supposed to be mutually beneficial. Mexico would open its borders to tariff-free imports of US agricultural products, especially corn, and American manufacturing was supposed to move to Mexico, providing decent jobs and boosting the Mexican economy. Except, for the most part, that didn’t happen. The bulk of American manufacturing moved to Asia. Cheap GE corn from the US flooded Mexican markets and Mexican farmers, despite government attempts to subsidize domestic agriculture, simply couldn’t compete. The price of corn in Mexico plummeted and farmers were forced to abandon their farms. While auto manufacturing did create new jobs in Mexico, it was not nearly enough to stem the tide of unemployment. The overall Mexican GDP may have risen, but local economies tanked. From 1995 to 2011, the number of Mexican migrants in the United States skyrocketed. Meanwhile, Mexico saw a dramatic increase in drug cartel activity, holding impoverished agricultural communities hostage and using the more generous border policy to flood the United States with addictive drugs. Mexican immigration has slowed considerably since 2018.

U.S. corn was (and still is) cheaper than Mexican corn in large part because American agricultural subsidies of corn are based on a price floor – if the “free market” price does not meet that floor, the federal government reimburses farmers for the difference. In practice, this means that most U.S. corn (and soy) is sold for less than it costs to produce. Mexican farmers simply can’t compete.

When it came to corn, NAFTA was a law of unintended consequences. In 2020, the Trump Administration approved the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which essentially just continued NAFTA, with a few updates like improved labor laws in Mexico and opening Canadian dairy markets to US farmers. This is the agreement under which the Biden Administration is considering challenging Mexico’s new law. They argue that Mexico’s new law is not based on scientific research. Mexican officials disagree.

I’ve long been disturbed by U.S. policy on what it considers “commodity” crops – mainly corn, soy, wheat, and sugar. With corn and soy in particular, agricultural subsidies ensure that their prices remain artificially low. And farmers who grow commodity crops are incredibly disincentivized from diversifying, adapting crops to climate change, and growing anything but commodity crops. It makes more economic sense for farmers to plant an entire crop of corn, even though they know it will fail due to drought or weather, because federally subsidized crop insurance will cover their costs.

Subsidized GE corn hasn’t just had a negative impact on Mexican agriculture. It’s also the driving force behind much of America’s proliferation of cheap ultra-processed foods. Fruits and vegetables just can’t compete. Conventionally produced GE corn also requires huge fertilizer inputs, and much of it is grown with heavy applications of glyphosate. Runoff from this agriculture has created an enormous dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, killing wildlife, including valuable fish and shellfish stocks.

Many communities across the United States are trying to challenge the dominance of GE corn. Indigenous communities are preserving and reviving their ancestral varieties. Small scale grain mills are turning heirloom varieties into extraordinarily flavorful grits and cornmeal. And Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans are continuing their longstanding traditions of taking freshly nixtamalized corn and turning it into the most delicious homemade tortillas.

Mexico itself is trying to protect that ancient tradition. Whether or not they’ll be successful remains to be seen. But in my mind, it’s a worthy endeavor. And the United States could stand to kick its conventionally raised GE corn habit. Transitioning to other agriculture won’t be easy, but Mexico, and the environment, would likely thank us.