Grog to Grits

This is the second part of a series on the history of celiac disease in America, based on Emily Abel’s article “The Rise and Fall of Celiac Disease in the United States,” which was published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences in January 2010.  The first part of the series is here.

In the 1920s, a doctor named Sidney Haas came up with a diet for celiac disease sufferers that worked, and it had a novel twist: along with milk products and meat, the patient ate bananas.  A lot of bananas.  Four to six bananas a day, or up to sixteen bananas in 24 hours’ time.

Haas had been influenced by the United Fruit Company, the dominant importer of bananas in America.  In the early 20th century the company based much of its advertising on the idea that bananas were healthy and nutritious.  Haas’s new diet became popular, both because it worked and because United Fruit Company promoted it like crazy (look at how healthy bananas are!  Here’s a disease where people are kept alive almost solely by bananas!).  In doing so, the company also promoted awareness of celiac disease—between the 1920s and the 1950s, it was a relatively well-known disease among Americans.  During World War II, for example, when many imported foods were almost impossible to find, the United Fruit Company’s PR department cranked out news stories about frantic mothers searching in vain for bananas for their celiac children, who were then helped by local police (who searched grocery stores) or friendly airlines (who flew shipments of bananas to celiac sufferers).

The ability for banana producers to profit from the disease was limited, though.  In 1951 Dutch researchers published an article showing that gluten was the culprit behind celiac disease, and the only real treatment was a gluten-free diet.  Sufferers were free to eat whatever they wanted so long as it didn’t contain gluten, which meant that, in this new context, bananas were not particularly special—no fruits contain gluten.  Haas, though, had staked his professional reputation on his banana diet, and more than a decade later was still promoting it.  Gluten might be a cause, he admitted, but he knew the banana diet worked, so why change?

And here a strange thing happened: celiac disease began to fade away in America.  It was still routinely diagnosed in Europe and Australia (by 1970 one in 890 people was diagnosed with it in Switzerland), but it seemed to disappear from America.  In her article, Emily Abel points out that this could have been because American researchers had never done much research on the disease, and therefore it was probably not talked about much among doctors.  It’s not that not many people had the disease, but it’s more likely that it just wasn’t diagnosed as often as it should because doctors didn’t know how to read the symptoms.

Today, though, the disease (and other food allergies) are becoming well known again.  Wheat is commonly listed on labels in foods that contain it (that is, it’s specifically listed as something people are potentially allergic to at the bottom of food labels).  There are web sites that discuss celiac disease, and doctors are routinely diagnosing it.  And, in a parallel to the fruit companies’ promotion of celiac disease in the middle of the 20th century, food companies are essentially promoting awareness of it by producing products that are specifically labeled as gluten free.  Hopefully, this time awareness of the problem will continue rather than just fade away.

Last year I was diagnosed with a food allergy.  The condition is celiac disease, which is an intolerance to anything containing gluten (which is anything made from wheat). Celiac disease is one of a number of food allergies that seem to be causing more and more people problems.   Food producers are responding to the issue, and one of the grocery stores I shop at now has several shelves devoted to gluten-free products.

Because I’m only just now seeing lots of gluten-free products I assumed that celiac disease is a relatively new phenomenon.  However, as Emily Abel points out in her article “The Rise and Fall of Celiac Disease in the United States” (in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, January 2010), the condition received lots of press back in the early to mid-20th century, with help from (of all people) banana companies.  It then fell into obscurity to the point where European doctors were asking why there were so few cases in America.  All of the information in this article is from Abel’s article.

Although public knowledge of celiac disease dates to an 1888 paper written by an Englishman named Samuel Gee (who termed it “coeliac affliction,”), that paper was not popularized in America until after an American doctor named Christian Herter began investigating the disease.  In 1908 Herter published a book that explored the disease in babies, On Infantilism from Chronic Intestinal Infection.  Celiac disease was first noticed by pediatricians because at the time most infant deaths resulted from digestive problems, so researchers paid particular attention to those sorts of problems in babies, and because development of children with the disease lagged far behind other children, making it quite apparent something was wrong with those children.  Herter was instrumental in opening a hospital that specialized in treating celiac disease, among other illnesses, but Herter died only two months after the hospital opened and treating celiac disease rapidly faded from the hospital’s attention.

In those days, though, “treatment” of celiac disease was quite a primitive thing.  It was obvious that children with the disease had a problem—they were often physically smaller than other children that age, and malnourished.  However, the cause was a complete mystery, mainly because gluten hadn’t yet been discovered as a part of food.  By 1900, researchers were aware that food could be divided into proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, and they knew that food contained energy that could be measured as calories, but beyond that they were groping in the dark.  Gluten is in wheat products, which means it’s usually in carbohydrates, so by the early 20th century researchers concluded that celiac disease was really carbohydrate intolerance.

By the 1920s doctors recommended a diet with three distinct stages.  In the first stage, the patient ate what was essentially curds and whey, the stuff that eventually becomes cheese.  The second stage had the patient switch to an all-meat diet, heavy on eggs.  The third stage reintroduced all other foods, including (unfortunately for the patient) foods including wheat.  The third stage was notorious for not working well.

Soon afterwards, though, an American doctor came along with what he thought was the perfect diet to help people with celiac disease.  It was helpful, and very popular, but it was also very, very boring.  I’ll write more about that diet on Friday, and I’ll talk about how banana companies helped make celiac disease a fairly well-known problem by the 1950s.  Check back then.

Concentration Camp Cookbooks

After a while it got so that you had to be a little cautious about talking about good food because guys were getting on edge.  They’d bust you if you mentioned something [about food]….Food was the biggest thing.(1)

Without a doubt, the smallest genre of cookbooks has to be those written in World War II concentration camps.  As far as I know, only two have been published: Recipes Out of Bilibid, collected by Col. Halstead C. Fowler while he was in a POW camp in the Pacific, and In Memory’s Kitchen, collected by Mina Pächter while she was in a German concentration camp near Prague.  The introduction to In Memory’s Kitchen mentions several unpublished books in Israel, and Art and Lee Beltrone’s A Wartime Log lists a few recipes created by POWs in Europe.

That cookbooks were written in the midst of hunger and need may at first be surprising, but it shouldn’t be: food was already on everyone’s minds, and remembering recipes and dishes was a way to bring back the days before the war.  As Dorothy Wagner writes in the introduction to Recipes out of Bilibid, talking about food “strengthened their resolution to survive, if only because it made more vivid, not what they sought to escape from, but what they were resolved to return to.  It brought close to them the homes waiting faithfully for them, homes in which the primal need to nourish the body was recognized as a perpetually renewed adventure, a challenge to the imagination, an invitation to cheerful sociability.”(2)

Looking through these books one can see that there are two kinds of recipes.  The first kind, which makes up the entirety of Recipes Out of Bilibid, is recipes which are unchanged from the outside world.  They call for ingredients like clams, crab meat, Parmesan cheese and cherry brandy, things which are unlikely to turn up in a POW camp.  The recipes in this book were contributed by men who were away from their families, men for whom cooking  was usually not a daily task.  They were recreating the dishes from home as faithfully in their minds as they could, knowing that they would never be able to make things like pickled anchovies or brandy pottage in the camp.

The second type of recipe is those dishes adapted to wartime life, and many of the recipes of In Memory’s Kitchen are normal recipes with adapted ingredients.  This book was made with contributions from the Jewish women in the camp, women who did the daily cooking for their families before the war and who still made some dishes in the camp.  For example, the recipe for “Torte (Very Good)” may make a dish similar to a regular torte but it uses uses four large potatoes or carrots for the bulk of the dish and includes coffee substitute as an ingredient.  There is also a recipe for “War Dessert” that, again, uses potatoes as its main ingredient, along with only two spoonfuls of flour and a handful of other items.  On the other hand, there are also recipes that would have been impossible to make in a concentration camp, like “Rich Chocolate Cake,” which is mostly butter, sugar, eggs, and cream.

In the end, cookbooks like these served two purposes.  They functioned like normal cookbooks, listing dishes it was possible to make in camp.  They also served as physical reminders of what life was like before the war.  If the prisoners couldn’t have the food itself, they could reconstruct it in their minds from the basic ingredients.  Food means far more to us than just nutrition, and the more I study food history the more amazed I am at just how complex  our relationship to it is.  In the midst of extreme hunger these prisoners didn’t just talk about what foods they wanted to eat, they argued over the best way to prepare that food.  In doing so, they argued over just how to define normalcy and how to define home.

(1)Quote from an American soldier held in a German POW camp during W.W.II, in A Wartime Log, by Art and Lee Beltrone (Charlottesville, VA: Howell Press, 1994), page 124.

(2)From the introduction to Recipes Out of Bilibid, compiled by Dorothy Wagner (New York: George W. Stewart, 1946), page ix.

Review: Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, by Laura Shapiro (New York: North Point Press, 1986)

Perfection Salad is a classic food history book that looks at a major shift in ideas about food that took place in the few decades before and after 1900.  Before the shift, cooking was unpredictable, messy, and thoroughly organic; after the shift, cooking was predictable, bland, and rule-bound.  The people responsible for the shift were home economists, and Perfection Salad is, at heart, a history of the home ec movement in America (at least as it applies to food).

The book is organized chronologically, and so starts with an overview of attitudes toward housework and women in the home before the home ec movement began in the late 19th century.  Although a woman’s place then was in the home, her work there was seen to be extremely important as that work supported everyone else in the family.

The home economics movement came out of that sort of attitude.  The goal of home economists was fairly simple: to professionalize the job of a homemaker in the same way others had professionalized the work men did.  As Shapiro writes, the general idea was that “If the home were made a more businesslike place, if husbands were fed and children raised according to scientific principles, if purity and fresh air reached every corner of the house–then, at last, the nation’s homes would be adequate to nurture its greatness.” (page 4)

A homemaker, then, needed to be a chemist (to know how foods interacted with each other), a biologist (for foods that used yeast), an efficiency expert (to get jobs done quickly), and many other things as well.  The problem with cooking was that it was haphazard and slipshod, and home economists went to work to make it more streamlined and foolproof.  They did this by, for example, standardizing recipe ingredient lists.  Instead of calling for a walnut-sized lump of butter, the new recipes called for four tablespoons of butter (and all tablespoons were standardized to the same size).

Shapiro follows a number of different threads in her history.  One was the popularity of cooking schools, especially the Boston Cooking School, run for a time by Fannie Farmer.  These cooking schools appealed to young middle- and upper-class women during a time when more and more of them were having to make due without a hired cook, and so needed to learn how to cook.  Shapiro also follows the growth of home economics in colleges and universities across America, and then as approved subject matter in high schools.

Shapiro is ultimately critical of the home ec movement for at least three different reasons.  First, it not only standardized how recipes looked, it also helped to standardize what American food was.  The food the movement promoted to cooks across America was a cuisine based on foods popular in the northeastern United States.  Ethnic and regional foods were largely ignored in favor of baked beans, salads, and sweets.  Second, since standardization is essentially another form of “dumbing down,” and because home economists wanted their subject to be considered as a science and not as a craft or art, home economists effectively reduced cooking to a series of artless, mundane, routine steps on a checklist.  By the 1950s, in fact, one reason why people accept men as professional chefs instead of women is that men’s approach to cooking is seen as being creative while women need a recipe to be able to figure out how to cook something.  That comes from the early home economists’ insistence that following recipes is the only way a woman should cook.

Finally, Shapiro points out that home ec as either a college major or a career choice was a dead end for women.  College presidents jumped at the idea of starting home ec programs at their colleges largely because it was a good way to shunt women away from programs like English or anthropology, where females frequently had much higher grades than males, so that most of the spaces in those programs could be occupied by men.  The problem was that home ec began with the assumption that a woman’s place was in the home, and as the 20th century wore on, and more and more women worked outside the home, home ec became a much less viable college major.

Perfection Salad is highly recommended, and is probably the best book about American cooking in the early 20th century.

Last Monday I took a look at the two versions of the creation of Coca-Cola: the version the Coke company has on their web page, and the much longer version presented in the book A History of the World in Six Glasses.  Today I’m exploring why there’s a difference between the two versions.

The Coca-Cola company is obviously a company that’s concerned with with how they’re perceived by the public.  One way to manage public perception is through the use of history; in this case, with how they present the creation story of Coca-Cola.

As I outlined on Monday, the longer creation story has these elements:

• John Pemberton tried to copy an existing product.
• That product was a kind of patent medicine made with wine, which wasn’t unusual because patent medicines contained things like alcohol, opium, and cocaine.
• Pemberton spent time retooling the product to not contain alcohol.
• Early on, Coke was advertised as both a medicinal cure-all and a non-alcoholic drink.

The version of the story on the Coca-Cola website has these elements:

• Pemberton created Coca-Cola
• it was ‘excellent’ from the beginning, and sold quickly.

The Coca-Cola Company’s version is much shorter and simpler.  It drops elements of the story that could be controversial.  It loses the idea that the inventor of Coke was originally trying to make a type of product that was notoriously dangerous and addictive (patent medicines were so bad that, in a time when the government generally let businesses do whatever they wanted, the government began to take steps to control just what medicines could contain).  It also loses the idea that the product that eventually became Coke was originally supposed to contain wine.  Furthermore, the whole concept of copying an existing product disappears from the story—Coca-Cola is, after all, a well-established company that does not shy from taking legal steps against products that are too similar to its own products.  As an example, Coke spent time in the early 20th century in court with Pepsi, arguing that aspects of Pepsi’s business were too close to Coke’s for comfort.

It’s fairly obvious why a company wouldn’t want anything controversial on their website.  There are two other changes to the story, though, that don’t just ignore parts of the story but actively try to spin it.

First, there’s no mention that John Pemberton did any experimenting with the Coke recipe.  Gone is the time he spent making a copy of the French wine patent medicine, and then the time involved with making a non-alcoholic version.  Instead, he simply creates the formula in a day—May 8, 1886, as the website says.  The second change to the story is the addition of a bunch of people proclaiming the new drink “excellent.”  Not only did Pemberton not experiment with a formula, but he succeeded in making a wonderful drink on the first try.

The intention of the Coke company’s version of the story, then, is to simplify the overall story but also to present the drink as something that was perfect from day one.  Far more than other foods, the makeup of Coke is part of its myth, a formula that’s supposedly so secret that only a few people in the world know it (which seems ridiculous—what if those few people happened to die within a very short span of time?).  Presumably, since Pemberton’s creation was pronounced excellent on delivery, it has been excellent ever since.

The Coca-Cola company is in a strange position.  On the one hand, they have an extremely well-known brand with strong sales, but on the other hand, Coke is nothing more than water with some extra things added that competes with lots of other versions of essentially the same thing sold by other companies.  In order to keep Coke selling strongly they sell a set of ideas rather than a taste (and how do you even describe the taste of Coke?) and one of those ideas focuses on the purity and essence of Coca-Cola.  This idea says that Coke tastes good and always has, even since the day of its creation.  The company manages these ideas mostly through advertising, but also through spinning its creation story on its website.  By leaving out parts of the story and changing what’s there, the company is able to continue selling more and more Coca-Cola.