by Erika Camplin From the publisher: America seems presently fascinated by prison culture and the inner workings of what happens behind clinked doors. With TV shows creating binge-watchers of us […]
Tag: government program
Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
by Deborah Blum From the publisher: From Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Deborah Blum, the dramatic true story of how food was made safe in the United […]
How Did Food Stamps Begin?
The U.S. government launched a new program of food stamps in Rochester in 1939 to try to solve the triple problems of farm surpluses, weak sales for grocers and hungry […]
Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 full text
An Act for preventing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors, and for regulating traffic therein, and for other […]
New York City guts successful school lunch program in 1919
A few days before Thanksgiving in 1908, the home economist Mabel Hyde Kittredge initiated a school lunch program at an elementary school in Hell’s Kitchen, serving soup and bread to […]
The “Poison Squad” men who tested food additives on themselves
“Poison Squad” was the name contemporary newspapers gave the men at the U.S. Department of Agriculture who volunteered to test on themselves the toxicity of chemicals commonly added to foods […]
Politics of Purity: Harvey Washington Wiley and the Origins of Federal Food Policy
by Clayton A. Coppin and Jack High From the publisher: Spearheaded by Harvey Washington Wiley, the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 launched the federal regulation of food and […]
History of School Lunch programs in the United States
Philadelphia and Boston were the first major cities to actively attempt to implement a school lunch program in the United States. Philadelphia began by serving penny lunches at one school […]
Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives
by Bryant Simon From the publisher: For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial […]
Dangerous Digestion: The Politics of American Dietary Advice
by E. Melanie DuPuis From the publisher: Throughout American history, ingestion (eating) has functioned as a metaphor for interpreting and imagining this society and its political systems. Discussions of American […]