#161 Food in the Era of Adulteration w/ Benjamin Cohen
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2020
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When it comes to food, knowing what you're getting can be tricky. On the surface, words such as "pure" and "natural" seem straightforward, yet defining them in the modern world has required experts, laws, and administrative structures. In this episode, Bob & Ben speak with Lafayette College's Benjamin Cohen about the pure food crusades of the late nineteenth century, the origins of the Pure Food Act of 1906 and the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), and the lessons this era offers us as we seek to make decisions about food policy in the 21st century.
Dr. Benjamin R. Cohen is Associate Professor of Engineering Studies and Environmental Studies at Lafayette College and the author of Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Learn more about his work at his personal website or by following him on twitter at @BRCohen95.
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.
Join Bob & Ben for a live podcast recording! Click here for dates and ticket links.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, what's up? This is Mike Fanoia, host of Amigos podcast here on the Osiris Network. What is |
| 0:15.4 | Amigos podcast? Well, I am a stand-up comedian, writer for true TVs and practical |
| 0:20.6 | jokers, and a music freak. |
| 0:23.2 | So I invite my pals to come talk music, comedy, and everything in between. |
| 0:27.9 | So if you want to come hang, we'd love to have you. |
| 0:31.0 | Thank you. I'm Bob Crawford, and this is The Road to Now. Ben Sawyer is on assignment. |
| 0:47.9 | I bet you do this once a day. I pretty much do. You get home, you go to the pantry, you get a loaf of bread. |
| 0:57.0 | You open up the plastic wrapper it traveled in, get a couple slices out, go back to the |
| 1:02.0 | refrigerator, and you get some turkey slices, maybe some ham slices that you had sliced at the |
| 1:09.0 | local grocery store, delii counter go back to the |
| 1:13.6 | refrigerator get a jar of mustard probably a plastic jar maybe you want some |
| 1:18.9 | pickles on your sandwich I know I like pickles on my sandwich they're normally in a |
| 1:23.2 | glass jar and you make a sandwich and you eat it But do you really know where your food came from? |
| 1:31.2 | Do you really understand how it was packaged? How was produced in the first place? Well, this week on |
| 1:37.0 | the road to now, we speak with Ben Cohen. He's an associate professor at Lafayette College. He's the |
| 1:43.7 | author of Pure Adulteration, Cheating on |
| 1:46.7 | Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food. Really great book. Fascinating. This is the stuff I love |
| 1:54.5 | talking about. I love learning about. How did it come to be that our food was packaged the |
| 2:00.4 | way it is, manufactured the way it is? |
| 2:03.6 | And once the distance our food traveled to get to us got to be further than our own town |
| 2:12.1 | or the next town over, how could we prove that it was safe? How did we know it was safe? How could we trust that? Well, you're going to learn that that opened up a whole new avenue of science and research to verify what was claimed to be in food actually was in the food. So I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. Ben and I are still so |
| 2:37.9 | excited about our last two Road to Nell lives from a couple weekends ago. We were in Charlotte, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Benjamin Sawyer, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Benjamin Sawyer and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.