“I heard you won’t touch anything raw,” a goat farmer from Utah said, looking at me pityingly. In a small seating area, Stewart arranged tangerines, carob pods, and Satsuma mandarins on platters. Along one wall was a giant freezer filled with raw-milk ice cream: cherry from the Dairy Fairy, and chocolate and vanilla that Sharma-Wilson and the woman who loved dirty eggs had made in their hotel room that afternoon. “I sniffed every egg,” the woman said, meaning to reassure.
• • •
The romance of the small farmer is a powerful thing in the American food marketplace. The reality can be jarring. Sharon Palmer, who had taken up farming after a career in business, sought to connect Healthy Family Farms to this story, describing it as a “sustainable, pasture-based farm,” where all the animals—chickens, ducks, Cornish game hens, lambs, cows, milk-fed pigs—are raised from birth and harvested by hand. When she was arrested in August 2011, she again positioned herself as part of a larger narrative, telling the Ventura County Star, “It’s not just about me. It’s happening all over the country. I am very, very hopeful that this will become apparent that this is government abuse.”
But just because a farm is small does not mean that the farmer always makes good decisions about how he raises the food you eat. A community that resists labeling and inspection as government intrusion puts itself at the mercy of its suppliers. (One longtime customer complained to me of buying rancid pork from Rawesome in an undated package, but he also used the occasion to brag that his gut microflora were strong enough to handle it.) Although Rawesome is held up by those who mourn it as a paradigm of intimate, enlightened consumership, its members may have known less about the origins of their food than they thought. A few years ago, a splinter group led by Aajonus Vonderplanitz began to question the integrity of Healthy Family Farms, claiming that the chicken and the eggs were outsourced and contained high levels of mercury and sodium. (Palmer and Stewart admitted to briefly selling eggs from another farm, but dispute the lab tests.) The former USDA employee who worked at Rawesome said that she was furious to discover that the chickens she believed to be exclusively pasture-fed were in fact finished on corn. “There’s no such thing as non-GMO corn feed!” she said.
From the Dairy Fairy, I bought a pound of sacred butter and some milk in a plain, lightly sweating plastic gallon jug—no date, no label. It was yellowish, with a thick mantle of cream. I was tempted, but I didn’t dare. It came all the way from Pennsylvania, and, visions of Amish country notwithstanding, I had no clue what that farm looked like. I poured my husband a glass. “It coats your mouth, almost like drinking half-and-half,” he said, pronouncing it delicious. Five minutes later, he said the taste was still with him: a gamey, sweet-hay-manure flavor that intensified when he stepped outside.
The butter stayed in the fridge until I got word of a Primal Diet potluck hosted by Vonderplanitz at a condominium in Marina del Rey. Etiquette required that I bring something from Vonderplanitz’s recipe book—“Nuts over Meat” (raw lamb on a pile of zucchini, covered in fresh nut butter), say, or a flask of “Power Drink” (raw liver, thyroid, testis or ovary, lung, brain, adrenal gland; raw milk; red onions). I took the butter instead, placing it on the counter in the kitchen, next to room-temperature oysters, raw chicken chunks, strips of raw red bison, cut fruit bobbing in cream, and a few open jars of raw milk. The whole room stank: warm, bilious, inescapably animal, like a nursery full of neglected babies surrounded by panting carnivores.
Vonderplanitz sat on a deep couch, among leopard-print pillows and faux-fur throws, surrounded by three young acolytes. Double-height windows looked out on the beach. He told me about his clients who thrived on raw food during their pregnancies. “It’s so good for your baby,” he said, and invited me to eat. “You have to pick it up by your hand, real primitive, cannibal-like,” he said, widening his pale blue eyes and smiling to show his strong teeth. “Thank you,” I said, but didn’t move from the couch. He introduced me to his friends, two heavy-browed bodybuilding brothers in their twenties and the nineteen-year-old girlfriend of one of them, who was a personal trainer. They told me that, on Vonderplanitz’s recommendation, they had started eating rotting meat, though it was sometimes hard to do. “When the beef is green, you’re like, ‘Uhhhhhh,’” the young woman said. “My dad was pissed, like, ‘What are you doing? You’re going to be sick.’”
Vonderplanitz specifies using the highest-quality meat, and the young folk complained of the expense. The older brother said that when he couldn’t afford gourmet meat, he ate spoiled meat from the regular supermarket. I let that sink in for a second: these middle-class kids were deliberately eating like the survivors of an apocalypse. It seemed to me they’d cherry-picked a losing combination, though—the modern convenience of cheap conventional beef with the caveman’s limitation of eating it raw.
“What could be healthier than eating something completely unprocessed?” the older brother said.
“Like the cavemen did,” the young woman said.
“Animals don’t cook their food. They can survive anything. Humans on a cooked diet are weaker.”
Vonderplanitz turned to me. He was bothered by the fact that I hadn’t helped myself to the buffet. “Are you in any way connected with any government agency?” he asked. I reassured him, breathing through my mouth, that I was not, and got out of there before I embarrassed myself by throwing up all over the faux fur.
• • •
Not long after that, I had a dream the egg lady asked me how much grocery-store yogurt I was eating and I lied. I was sick of people telling me what to eat and what not to eat; I had come to my own conclusion about it and wanted to be left alone. In my irritation, I began to appreciate how maddening it must be for someone who believes that raw milk is saving her own or her child’s life to be told she can’t have it. Imagine if the annoying people interfering with the very private decision of what I ought to eat to stay healthy represented the federal government. No wonder the raw-milkers took refuge in the suffocating, self-enclosed world of the like-minded. It felt safe to them.
In the end, the Rawesome Three never went to trial for their alleged milk crimes. Stewart, who had spent time in jail on a related matter after failing to make bail, pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors, for processing raw goat milk at Healthy Family Farms and for operating a food facility—the Rawesome lot—without a permit; he was sentenced to 253 days in county jail, but credited for time served. In a separate case, he also pleaded guilty to two counts of felony tax evasion, and was given a suspended sentence of sixteen months in jail, and required to pay some $325,000 in restitution to the Franchise Tax Board. Palmer pleaded to a single misdemeanor, for having her dairy in an “insanitary condition” on the day of the raid. She had to pay a fine and perform forty hours of community service. Bloch, who took a misdemeanor for improperly labeling food, paid a hundred-dollar fine. All the rest of the charges were dismissed.
You can buy raw meat at the grocery store and feed it to your kids and no one can stop you. But milk has exceptional emotional power. Be it human or cow, it is the first food to which we are exposed, making it unlike other products, both for consumers, who associate it with basic nourishment, and for regulators, who see its oversight as a grave responsibility. Michele Jay-Russell, of the Western Institute for Food Safety & Security at U.C. Davis, told me, “From a public-health perspective, milk has fallen into the category of water. Providing a clean milk and water supply is fundamental to what the government sees as its job.” But she acknowledges the frustration of consumers who can’t get a product that they feel they need. “The crux of the conundrum is: Why shouldn’t it be their choice?”
Five
DOUBLE DARE
The Food and Drug Administration was the great achievement of the pure-food movement, and a centerpiece of Progressive Era reform. Harvey W. Wiley, known in bureaucratic history as the Father of the FDA, started his career in Washington in 1883, as chief che
mist at the Department of Agriculture, which at that time was tasked not with meat inspection but with boosting the country’s agricultural output. His office was founded to verify the uniqueness of fertilizer formulas for those seeking patents. Six feet tall, and more than two hundred pounds, with, a biographer noted, “only a suggestion of a paunch to testify to his fondness for the pleasures of the table,” Wiley was an outspoken and controversial crusader for unadulterated, properly labeled food.
Unlike today, when diners seek adventure, eating in the nineteenth century, especially for the poor, was an act of inadvertent daring. Rapid urbanization had cut people off from the sources of their food; mass production was changing that food’s very character. Refrigeration was limited. Chicanery and fraud were common. Unscrupulous and ignorant producers, trying to stretch shelf life or save on ingredients, put ashes in bread and formaldehyde in milk; chemical preservatives like borax, a laundry booster, were routinely added to perishable foods to mask or defer spoilage.
Born in a log cabin in Indiana to a family that grew almost all their own food and traded milk and butter for whatever they could not make themselves, Wiley lamented the industrialization of the food system. “In the good old days preceding and immediately following the War between the States, there was little need of protection of the people from impure, adulterated and misbranded foods and drugs,” he wrote in a memoir. “The great bulk of the people raised most of what they ate.” Processed foods appalled him; he advocated a “natural” diet composed mainly of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables.
In Wiley’s time, the food avant-garde was made up of reformers calling on the federal government, which did not yet have a significant role in regulating the food supply, to establish a safe, standardized American diet. In 1902, at the beginning of Theodore Roosevelt’s first term, Wiley asked Congress for $5,000 to conduct experiments on commonly used chemical preservatives. With the money, he built a kitchen and a dining hall in the basement of the Bureau of Chemistry, an imposing brick building on what is now Independence Avenue. Then he recruited from the Department of Agriculture a small band of men, choice specimens aged eighteen to twenty-nine, including a sprinter from Yale and former captain of a high-school cadet regiment, who were willing to test his belief that preservatives were harmful to human health.
Three times a day, Wiley’s “boys” assembled to eat food prepared for them by Perry, a civil service cook previously employed by the queen of Bavaria. The menu was designed by Wiley, who, the press noted, “has some original ideas about feeding human beings.” The food was administered in precise doses, weighed out by chemists in lab coats, lending the enterprise a theatrical aura of science; in spite of occasional pleas of hunger, no more than the exact amount Wiley had calculated would nourish a fit young man was given. More significant, the food was “pure”: fresh roast beef, pork, chicken, and turkey; eggs, milk, and cream from dairies personally inspected by Wiley; seasonal fruits and vegetables, or high-quality canned goods preserved by heat sterilization only.
Into this food, Wiley slipped the suspected toxins. To test the effects of borax, he contaminated the milk and butter with boric acid and borate of soda, two varieties commonly added to meat and dairy products. (Perry asked for a raise: borax was a trickier ingredient than the salt he used to season the queen’s meals.) When the men learned to taste borax and started avoiding the tainted foods, Wiley resorted to giving them the borax in capsule form. In an adjacent laboratory, their “secreta” were analyzed by government chemists.
After a month or so, some of the subjects began to feel nauseous and depressed and to complain of headaches. Two retired from the squad. Wiley had to navigate a delicate matter of public opinion, describing the men’s reactions to borax as unpleasant enough to demonstrate its harmfulness, without making it seem as if he had endangered them. When one of the dropouts died, several years later, of tuberculosis, his mother blamed the Poison Squad, a claim Wiley dismissed as absurd. He did, however, conclude that borax, taken in small doses over a couple of months, or in large doses over a short time, caused many of his subjects to become “ill and unfit for duty.”
The experiments made Wiley famous. “It is getting so bad that people point to me on the street and say, ‘There goes the man that runs Uncle Sam’s cooking school,’” Wiley told The Chicago Daily Tribune. “It’s getting unbearable. The other night, walking down the aisle of a theater on my way to my seat, people nudged one another, pointed me out, and said, ‘There goes Borax.’” (That might have been wishful thinking: most people called him Old Borax.) As the experiments continued, his extreme eaters were likewise turned into figures of fun, captured in songs and skits: “Thus all the ‘deadlies’ we double-dare / to put us beneath the sod; / We’re death-immunes and we’re proud as proud—/ Hooray for the Pizen Squad!” The men contributed to the caricature, divulging all kinds of details to reporters—for a practical joke, one had dosed his squad-mate with quinine found in the lab—and giving themselves the slogan “Only the brave dare eat the fare.” Colleagues began to accuse Wiley of practicing “yellow chemistry.”
• • •
In spite of Wiley’s well-publicized experiments and the efforts of numerous women’s groups around the country calling for a federal law, a comprehensive pure-food bill proved elusive. Wiley later wrote that “There seemed to be an understanding between the two Houses that when one passed a bill for the repression of food adulteration the other would see that it suffered a lingering death.” Then, in 1904, Upton Sinclair, a struggling novelist with a toddler and an ailing wife, went to Chicago on assignment for the socialist paper Appeal to Reason. His purpose was to write about the mistreatment of immigrant workers in the stockyards and the abuses of the Beef Trust, the six firms that dominated the American meatpacking trade. Wearing old clothes and carrying a lunch pail, he spent seven weeks wandering around the plants and talking to the men and women who worked there.
Sinclair fictionalized his findings—lightly, he said—and published them serially, taking his readers on a tour through what he called the “spoiled-meat industry.” His allegations were shocking: he told of putrid hams refreshed with chemicals and sausages made from meat that sat on the floor with rat droppings and poison. The processers, he wrote, used “everything about the hog except the squeal”—a culinary boast today, then taken as evidence of corporate avarice—and labeled the scraps under whatever name would sell. Lamb and mutton were actually goat, and the recipe for “potted chicken” called for tripe, pork fat, beef suet, beef hearts, and veal bits. (Speaking to The New York Times later, Sinclair supplied additional ingredients: “the meat of unborn calves and cows’ udders.”) The industry, he said, favored tubercular cows—they fattened efficiently—and when European distributors sent back sausages too moldy to sell, the packers would remake them for the home market, using borax to hide the spoilage.
Sinclair’s central figuration was that just as cattle and swine were chopped up, ground down, and exploited in every conceivable way in the great factories of Packingtown so, too, was the human labor force. His most shocking contention brought the metaphor to life. In the steamy, ill-lit cooking rooms, he wrote, workers sometimes fell into the vats, where, forgotten, they would stew “till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!” A poster for the movie version of his story that appeared several years later showed a cameo of a man falling backward into a vat, wisps of vapor reaching for him like hungry ghosts.
After being turned down by numerous publishers who thought its claims too sensational, The Jungle was accepted by Doubleday, Page—which sent a lawyer to Chicago to assess its validity—and came out in early 1906. That winter and spring, the papers were full of Sinclair’s revelations. Here was an explanation for the tinned meat, so disgusting that a general referred to it as “embalmed beef,” which had sickened many soldiers, including those in Roosevelt’s command, during the Spanish-American War. Defenders o
f the Beef Trust resorted to embarrassingly weak arguments. “In Vats, But Not In Lard” ran the headline of a Chicago Daily Tribune story intended to debunk Sinclair. The deck was less than reassuring: “Bodies of Father and Son Who Lost Their Lives in Tank in 1897 or 1898 Probably Were Pulled Out and Not ‘Canned.’”
Americans, naturally, were repulsed by the notion that they might be at worst unwitting cannibals, and at best rat-eaters. The country was only 130 years old; the Donner Party tragedy, in which a group of Midwesterners seeking a better life in California got trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains and resorted to eating their dead, had happened a mere sixty years before. Appetite was a site of colonial anxiety: Were Americans going to be savages or gentlemen? Would the country’s wilderness make its new citizens wild? Civilization itself seemed to be at stake. “There can be no more important public issue than the wholesomeness of the people’s food,” The New York Times said. Sales of prepared meats dropped steeply—or so said the packers, whose best political leverage lay in claiming vast economic repercussions. President Roosevelt read The Jungle and ordered a special investigation; his agents found no proof of tinned human but issued a report saying they’d seen men climbing over heaps of meat in dirty boots and relieving themselves on the killing beds. “In a word, we saw meat shoveled from filthy wooden floors, piled on tables rarely washed, pushed from room to room in rotten box carts, in all of which processes it was in the way of gathering dirt, splinters, floor filth, and the expectoration of tuberculous and other diseased workers.” According to Roosevelt, the crisis demanded “immediate, thorough-going, and radical enlargement of the powers of the government.”
Anything That Moves Page 12
