Author: Lorine Swainston Goodwin Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 1476608245 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 361
Book Description
Under a likeness of President Theodore Roosevelt in the Library of Congress, a plaque lists the Pure Food and Drink Law of 1906 as one of the three landmark achievements of his administration. Few authorities would disagree. Designed to ensure the safety of foods, drinks and drugs, the law was one of the first pieces of social legislation enacted in the United States. Among the most enthusiastic and persistent crusaders for the bill's passage were a wide array of women's groups, many politically active for the first time. Based in large part on primary sources, this work examines the many groups involved in the passage of the Pure Food and Drink Law and how their work affected American society. Part One examines the origins of the movement and why women became so involved. Part Two focuses on the primary groups involved in the law's passage, such as the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the General Federation of Women's Clubs. How it was that such diverse groups rallied around this issue is also explored. The industrial and political opposition to the law and how the crusaders overcame it is covered in Part Three, along with details on how the law's proponents were able to pressure the U.S. Congress into passing it and how they worked to see it fully implemented.
Author: Ronald Hamowy Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing ISBN: 1847204252 Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 539
Book Description
How involved should the government be in American healthcare? Ronald Hamowy argues that to answer this pressing question, we must understand the genesis of the five main federal agencies charged with responsibility for our health: the Public Health Service, the Food and Drug Administration, the Veterans Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and Medicare. In examining these, he traces the growth of federal influence from its tentative beginnings in 1798 through the ambitious infrastructures of today and offers startling insights on the current debate. The author contends that until the twentieth century, governmental involvement in health care policy was nominal. With the sweeping food and drug reforms of 1906 and the Medicare amendments to Social Security in 1965, a whole new system of health care was brought to the American public. A careful analysis of the various programs generated by this legislation, however, shows a different picture of pet projects, budgetary lobbying, competitive bureaucracy and discord between the agencies and their opposition. Government and Public Health in America provides an illuminating look at the complicated forces that created these institutions and provokes discussion about their usefulness in the future. Hamowy s thoroughly researched analysis fills a substantial gap in the history of health policy. Economists, political scientists, historians, sociologists and health professionals concerned with the interface between government and health care will find much to recommend in this highly readable account of a fascinating topic.
Author: Andrew F. Smith Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231511752 Category : Cooking Languages : en Pages : 392
Book Description
Food expert and celebrated food historian Andrew F. Smith recounts in delicious detail the creation of contemporary American cuisine. The diet of the modern American wasn't always as corporate, conglomerated, and corn-rich as it is today, and the style of American cooking, along with the ingredients that compose it, has never been fixed. With a cast of characters including bold inventors, savvy restaurateurs, ruthless advertisers, mad scientists, adventurous entrepreneurs, celebrity chefs, and relentless health nuts, Smith pins down the truly crackerjack history behind the way America eats. Smith's story opens with early America, an agriculturally independent nation where most citizens grew and consumed their own food. Over the next two hundred years, however, Americans would cultivate an entirely different approach to crops and consumption. Advances in food processing, transportation, regulation, nutrition, and science introduced highly complex and mechanized methods of production. The proliferation of cookbooks, cooking shows, and professionally designed kitchens made meals more commercially, politically, and culturally potent. To better understand these trends, Smith delves deeply and humorously into their creation. Ultimately he shows how, by revisiting this history, we can reclaim the independent, locally sustainable roots of American food.
Author: Jeffrey M. Pilcher Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134385811 Category : Cooking Languages : en Pages : 143
Book Description
Providing a comparative and comprehensive study of culinary cultures and consumption throughout the world from ancient times to present day, this book examines the globalization of food and explores the political, social and environmental implications of our changing relationship with food. Including numerous case studies from diverse societies and periods, Food in World History examines and focuses on: how food was used to forge national identities in Latin America the influence of Italian and Chinese Diaspora on the US and Latin America food culture how food was fractured along class lines in the French bourgeois restaurant culture and working class cafes the results of state intervention in food production how the impact of genetic modification and food crises has affected the relationship between consumer and product. This concise and readable survey not only presents a simple history of food and its consumption, but also provides a unique examination of world history itself.
Author: Matthew Hilton Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801461634 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
The history of consumerism is about much more than just shopping. Ever since the eighteenth century, citizen-consumers have protested against the abuses of the market by boycotting products and promoting fair instead of free trade. In recent decades, consumer activism has responded to the challenges of affluence by helping to guide consumers through an increasingly complex and alien marketplace. In doing so, it has challenged the very meaning of consumer society and tackled some of the key economic, social, and political issues associated with the era of globalization.In Prosperity for All, the first international history of consumer activism, Matthew Hilton shows that modern consumer advocacy reached the peak of its influence in the decades after World War II. Growing out of the product-testing activities of Consumer Reports and its international counterparts (including Which? in the United Kingdom, Que Choisir in France, and Test in Germany), consumerism evolved into a truly global social movement. Consumer unions, NGOs, and individual activists like Ralph Nader emerged in countries around the world—including developing countries in Southeast Asia and Latin America—concerned with creating a more equitable marketplace and articulating a politics of consumption that addressed the needs of both individuals and society as a whole.Consumer activists achieved many victories, from making cars safer to highlighting the dangers of using baby formula instead of breast milk in countries with no access to clean water. The 1980s saw a reversal in the consumer movement's fortunes, thanks in large part to the rise of an antiregulatory agenda both in the United States and internationally. In the process, the definition of consumerism changed, focusing more on choice than on access. As Hilton shows, this change reflects more broadly on the dilemmas we all face as consumers: Do we want more stuff and more prosperity for ourselves, or do we want others less fortunate to be able to enjoy the same opportunities and standard of living that we do?Prosperity for All makes clear that by abandoning a more idealistic vision for consumer society we reduce consumers to little more than shoppers, and we deny the vast majority of the world's population the fruits of affluence.
Author: Maureen Ogle Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN: 9780151010127 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 458
Book Description
An epic history of beer brewing in America traces the pivotal contributions of mid-nineteenth-century German immigrants, who over the course of fifty years helped to render beer one of the nation's most popular beverages.
Author: Maureen Ogle Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN: 0151013403 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 387
Book Description
The untold history of how meat made America: a tale of the oversized egos, self-made millionaires, and ruthless magnates; eccentrics, politicians, and pragmatists who shaped us into the greatest eaters and providers of meat in history.
Author: Gwen Kay Publisher: Ohio State University Press ISBN: 0814209904 Category : Health & Fitness Languages : en Pages : 204
Book Description
Tells the story of how cosmetics came to be regulated in early 20th century America. Examines the cosmetics industry in light of the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act.
Author: Anna Zeide Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520964756 Category : Cooking Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
2019 James Beard Foundation Book Award winner: Reference, History, and Scholarship A century and a half ago, when the food industry was first taking root, few consumers trusted packaged foods. Americans had just begun to shift away from eating foods that they grew themselves or purchased from neighbors. With the advent of canning, consumers were introduced to foods produced by unknown hands and packed in corrodible metal that seemed to defy the laws of nature by resisting decay. Since that unpromising beginning, the American food supply has undergone a revolution, moving away from a system based on fresh, locally grown goods to one dominated by packaged foods. How did this come to be? How did we learn to trust that food preserved within an opaque can was safe and desirable to eat? Anna Zeide reveals the answers through the story of the canning industry, taking us on a journey to understand how food industry leaders leveraged the powers of science, marketing, and politics to win over a reluctant public, even as consumers resisted at every turn.
Author: Emily Remus Publisher: ISBN: 0674987276 Category : Chicago (Ill.) Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
How women in turn-of-the-century Chicago used their consumer power to challenge male domination of public spaces and stake their own claim to downtown. Popular culture assumes that women are born to shop and that cities welcome their trade. But for a long time America's downtowns were hardly welcoming to women. Emily Remus turns to Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century to chronicle a largely unheralded revolution in women's rights that took place not at the ballot box but in the streets and stores of the business district. After the city's Great Fire, Chicago's downtown rose like a phoenix to become a center of urban capitalism. Moneyed women explored the newly built department stores, theaters, and restaurants that invited their patronage and encouraged them to indulge their fancies. Yet their presence and purchasing power were not universally appreciated. City officials, clergymen, and influential industrialists condemned these women's conspicuous new habits as they took their place on crowded streets in a business district once dominated by men. A Shoppers' Paradise reveals crucial points of conflict as consuming women accessed the city center: the nature of urban commerce, the place of women, the morality of consumer pleasure. The social, economic, and legal clashes that ensued, and their outcome, reshaped the downtown environment for everyone and established women's new rights to consumption, mobility, and freedom.