The triumph of the egg

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 50, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 400-423

  Freidberg, Susanne E ^a  

^a DARTMOUTH COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AGRICULTURAL TRADE; POULTRY;

EID: 42349088529     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: 14752999     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417508000182     Document Type: Article

References (167)

1. "Women Solve Problem of High Living Cost," Los Angeles Times, 12 Dec. 1912.
2. "War of Housewives for Cheaper Eggs," New York Times, 16 Dec. 1912
3. "Club Women and Cheap Egg Sale," Chicago Tribune, 16 Dec. 1912
4. "Women Start Egg Embargo," Boston Daily Globe, 11 Dec. 1913.
5. The paper draws on a review of archival materials, trade journals, newspapers, and secondary sources conducted between July 2004 and December 2006. The bulk of the research was conducted at the Bibliotheque National de France, Baker Library at the Harvard Business School, and the libraries at the University of California-Berkeley. Among the trade journals consulted were Ice and Refrigeration, Le Froid, American Egg and Poultry Review, Leghorn World, and The Hen Coop.
6. Clearly this is a huge literature, but see, for example: William Crossgrove et al., "Colonialism, International Trade and the Nation-State," in, L. Newman, ed., Hunger in History: Food Shortages, Poverty and Deprivation (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 215-41
7. Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
8. Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (Berkeley: University of California, 2003)
9. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986)
10. Sue Shepard, Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000)
11. Simon Naylor, "Spacing the Can: Empire, Modernity and the Globalization of Food," Environment and Planning A 32 (2000): 1625-39
12. John Barnett, Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day (London: Nelson, 1966).
13. For a useful history of refrigeration inventions, see Barry Donaldson and Bernard Nagengast, Heat and Cold: Mastering the Great Indoors (Atlanta: American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, 1994).
14. Alfred Massé, Le Troupeau Français et la Guerre: Viande Indigène, Viande Importée (Paris: Librairie Agricole de la Maison Rustique, 1915)
15. Mark Finlay, "Early Marketing of the Theory of Nutrition: The Science and Culture of Leibig's Extract of Meat," in, H. Kamminga and A. Cunningham, eds., The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840-1940 (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995), 48-76.
16. G. Le Roy, La Mort de Charles Tellier: Ses Obseques (Paris: Association Francaise du Froid, 1913)
17. Robert Lesage, Charles Tellier, Le Pere Du Froid (Paris: A. Giraudon, 1928).
18. Charles Tellier, Communication aux Actionnaires de la Societé Fondatrice pour la Conservation de la Viande Fraiche par le Froid (Paris: E. Donnaud, 1877)
19. and Histoire dune Invention Moderne: Le Frigorifique (Paris: C. Delagrave, 1910).
20. "La Crise Alimentaire et l'Industrie Frigorifique," Journal du Syndicat de la Boucherie de Paris 17 Mar. (1912): 1
21. James Critchell and Joseph Raymond, A History of the Frozen Meat Trade (London: Constable and Company, 1912)
22. Kyri Claflin, "Culture, Politics and Modernization in Paris Provisioning, 1880-1920," Ph.D. diss., History, Boston University, 2006.
23. Guy Chemla, Les Ventres de Paris: Les Halles, la Villette, Rungis: l'Histoire do Plus Grand Marché do Monde (Grenoble: Glenat, 1994), 213, n. 146.
24. "Refrigeration Abroad," Ice and Refrigeration 26 (1904): 244.
25. Richard Osborn Cummings, The American Ice Harvests: A Historical Study in Technology, 1800-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949).
26. Shepard, Pickled, Potted, and Canned, C. Anne Wilson, Waste Not, Want Not: Food Preservation from Early Times to the Present Day (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991).
27. Although early refrigeration endangered food safety when it malfunctioned or was improperly operated, it appears the more common "turning points" came before and after food went into refrigeration. Food that went into cold storage was often already past its prime, and then when it came out neither retailers nor their customers had any place to keep it cool. Oscar Anderson, Refrigeration in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), 31-32.
28. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).
29. Mobile "fresh" snacks account for one of the fastest growing segments of the contemporary food industry. Jon Mooallem, "Twelve Easy Pieces," New York Times Magazine, 12 Feb. 2006.
30. The archaeological and anthropological literature on feasting suggests that meat, fish, and some tubers count among the perishable foods most central to celebratory meals, but Lévi-Strauss also discusses the significance of serving salad at wedding ceremonies in some parts of rural France. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le Cuit (Paris: Plon 1964), 340-42.
31. Pauline Wilson Wiessner and Wulf Schiefenhèovel, Food and the Status Quest: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996).
32. Such customs frustrated the late-nineteenth-century American ice industry's efforts to drum up business in southern Europe. In 1892, the industry's main trade journal, Ice and Refrigeration, surveyed American consuls about the food preservation habits in their host cities. One reported from the south of France, "in the great cities of Marseilles and Bordeaux butchering is done every day in winter and twice a day in summer, and the meat is cooked within a few hours after killing.... The mass of the population use no ice, but purchase their supplies of food twice a day, consuming the total purchase at once, making no effort to preserve anything." And from Genoa: "Economy is practiced here to such an extent that fully ninety-seven families out of every one hundred purchase only sufficient food for daily wants. Nothing remains over for the morrow - not even bread or vegetables" ("Ice in Europe," Ice and Refrigeration 3 (1892): 359-62).
33. Gracia Clark, Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)
34. Sidney Mintz, "Men, Women and Trade," Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (1971): 247-69
35. Michelle De la Pradelle, Market Day in Provence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)
36. Nancy Horn, Cultivating Customers: Marketwomen in Harare, Zimbabwe (Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 1994)
37. R. J. Bromley, "Marketplace Trade in Latin America," Latin American Research Review 9 (1974): 3-38.
38. M. A. Jull et al., "The Poultry Industry," in, United States Department of Agriculture, Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1925), 377-456.
39. E. J. T. Collins, "Food Adulteration and Food Safety in Britain in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries," Food Policy (1993): 95-109
40. Frederick Filby, A History of Food Adulteration and Analysis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934)
41. Arthur Hassall, Adulterations Detected; or, Plain Instructions for the Discovery of Frauds in Food and Medicine (London: Longman Brown Green Longmans and Roberts, 1857).
42. Jean-Paul Aron, Essai sur la Sensibilité Alimentaire à Paris an 19e Siècle (Paris: Librairie A. Colin, 1967)
43. John Burnett, Plenty and Want.
44. E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy Reviewed," in, E. P. Thompson, ed., Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991), 259-352.
45. On the meatpackers' use of refrigeration in the conquest of national and then international markets, see William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991)
46. S. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Norton, 1969)
47. Mary Yeager Kujovich, "The Refrigerator Car and the Growth of the American Dressed Beef Industry," Business History Review 46 (1970): 460-82
48. Alfred Dupont Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). Autobiographical and biographical sources include: J. Ogden Armour, The Packers, the Private Car Lines and the People (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1906)
49. and Louis Franklin Swift, The Yankee of the Yards: The Biography of Gustavus Franklin Swift (Chicago: A. W. Shaw, 1927).
50. Kajovich, The Refrigerator Car; Armour, The Packer; Helen B. Lamb, "Industrial Relations in the Western Lettuce Industry," Ph.D. diss. Harvard University, 1942.
51. Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
52. Charles Edward Russell, The Greatest Trust in the World (New York: Ridgway-Thayer, 1905).
53. Lorine Swainston Goodwin, The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 1879-1914 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999)
54. J. H. Young, Pure Food: Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
55. Daniel J. Browne, The American Poultry Yard (New York: C. M. Saxton, 1850). The silver and golden Hamburghs were among the "everlasting layers."
56. Page Smith and Charles Daniel, The Chicken Book (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1975), 176.
57. January receipts accounted for.25 percent of the annual total, whereas May receipts accounted for 18 percent. M. A. Jull et al., "The Poultry Industry," 377-456, quote pp. 385-86.
58. Even in the 1920s, prices varied dramatically between seasons. New York City wholesale prices for a dozen white eggs ranged from $.36 in April to $.83 in November (ibid., 404).
59. William V. Cruess, Home and Farm Food Preservation (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 149
60. Dora Morrell Hughes, Thrift in the Household (Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1918), 82-86.
61. Alvin Wood Chase, Dr. Chase's Receipt Book (Detroit: F. B. Dickerson Company, 1891).
62. See also Harry R. Lewis, Productive Farm Poultry (Philadelphia: J. B. Lipincott, 1919), 441.
63. The search for techniques to keep eggs "as good as" fresh was not limited to the United States. For example, "Assurez La Conservation Parfaite Des Oeufs," Vie à la Campagne 12 (1911): 283.
64. Lewis Wright, The Book of Poultry (London: Cassell and Co, 1902), 46.
65. Smith and Daniel, The Chicken Book, 35; Jull et al., "The Poultry Industry," 268.
66. J. H. Barber, general manager, Poultry Producers ofCentral California, quoted in Donald Bell, "Forces that Have Helped Shape the US Egg Industry," Poultry Tribune, Sept. (1995): 30-43, quote p. 3 1.
67. Petaluma Chamber of Commerce, Petaluma, Sonoma County, California: The Largest Poultry Center in the World (Petaluma: City of Petaluma, 1916), 11
68. Harry R. Lewis, Productive Poultry Husbandry (Philadelphia: J. B. Lipincott, 1919), 11
69. Kenneth Kahn, Comrades and Chicken Farmers: The Story ofa California Jewish Community (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell, 1993).
70. Smith and Daniel, The Chicken Book, 252-53.
71. Anderson, Refrigeration in America, 46-47
72. Mary Pennington, "Fifty Years of Refrigeration in the Egg and Poultry Industry," Ice and Refrigeration 101 (1941): 43-48.
73. "Advertising Cold Storage," Ice and Refrigeration 73 (1927): 347-49.
74. "Ice in Europe."
75. L. Houllevigue, "Causerie scientifique: Le congrès du froid," Journal do Syndicat de la Baucherie de Paris (1912): 2.
76. Radio address, quoted in W. M. O'Keefe, "Cold Storage Division A.W.A.," Ice and Refrigeration 78 (1930): 513-15.
77. Gavin Weightman, The Frozen Water Trade (New York: Hyperion, 2003), 12.
78. Anderson, Refrigeration in America, 70.
79. "Eggs Have Fruity Flavor: Forty Thousand in Boston Found to Have a Novel Taste," New York Times, 31 Aug. 1900: 1.
80. No title, Ice and Refrigeration 6 (1894): 112; "Refrigeration Abroad."
81. "Danger of Eating Cold Storage Food" (letter), New York Times, 4 Aug. 1906.
82. "Cold Storage Meats Good Three Months," New York Times, 30 Jan. 1907.
83. Quoted in anon., "Cold Storage Prejudice Declining," Ice and Refrigeration 43 (1912): 56-57.
84. Massachusetts Commission on Cold Storage of Food, Report of the Commission to Investigate the Subject ofthe Cold Storage of Food and of Food Products Kept in Cold Storage (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1912).
85. As the name implies, candling simply means holding an egg up to a bright light, in order to detect the volume and viscosity of its contents. The less fresh the egg, the more watery the white is, and the larger the airspace.
86. I. C. Franklin, "The Service of Cold Storage in the Conservation of Foodstuffs," in, United States Department of Agriculture, Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture 1917, 363-69, quote p. 366.
87. Anon., "Cold Storage Legislation," Ice and Refrigeration 39 (1910): 51-53.
88. "The Senate Committee Hearings," Ice and Refrigeration 38 (1910): 385-87.
89. Miriam Dexter, "The Housekeeping Club," Good Housekeeping n.v. (1910): 263-67.
90. See, for example, Mary Pennington, "Better Food for the Masses," Ice and Refrigeration 75 (1928): 33-35. Egg production did increase from approximately 450 million dozen in 1880 to 1.9 billion in 1907.
91. S. S. Van deer Vaart, "Growth and Present Status of the Refrigerating Industry in the United States," In, R. J. de Loverdo, ed., Premier Congrès International du Froid, vol. 3 (Paris: Secrétariat Général de l'Association Internationale du Froid, 1908), 299-327, quote p. 341.
92. "Got'em in the Ice Box," Los Angeles Times, 23 Apr. 1902: 5
93. "Ruined by Trust," Boston Daily Globe, 24 Apr. 1902: 1
94. "Corner in Eggs," Hartford Courant, 19 Apr. 1902: 1
95. "Food Combine May Come," New York Times, 18 Apr. 1902: 1.
96. "The Hen as a Trust Buster," Los Angeles Times, 7 May 1905: 114.
97. "Hens Happy," Boston Daily Globe, 20 Jan. 1906: 1.
98. These warehouses were usually privately owned, but open for public use (unlike the meat-packers' stores). Most cold-storage companies were relatively small and their ownership distributed among stockholders. Boston's Quincy Market, for example, had 228 stockholders in 1910. These companies also typically did not own the goods they stored; they belonged to a wide range of wholesalers, some bigger than others. For these reasons, all state and federal investigations into a possible 'cold storage monopoly' concluded that it did not exist. Massachusetts Commission on Cold Storage of Food, Report of the Commission to Investigate the Subject of the Cold Storage of Food and of Food Products Kept in Cold Storage (Boston, 1912), 94-96
99. Anderson, Refrigeration in America, 134.
100. "A Trust in Food?" Washington Post, 11 Dee 1909: 61.
101. Anon., "The Cold Storage Ordinance," Ice and Refrigeration 31 (1906): 8.
102. Anderson, Refrigeration in America, 138.
103. "Got'em in the Ice Box."
104. Frank A. Home, "Legislation Affecting Cold Storage and Cold Stored Products," Ice and Refrigeration 41 (1911): 180-83, quote p. 180.
105. Quoted in anon., "Anti Cold Storage Agitation," Ice and Refrigeration 38 (1910): 104-6.
106. Thomas A. Bird, "The Ice Man as an Advertiser," Ice and Refrigeration 38 (1910): 144-45, quote p. 14.
107. "To Dine on Embalmed Food: Produce Merchants Invite City Officials to Cold Storage Meal," Chicago Daily Tribune, 27 Sept. 1911.
108. "The Senate Committee Hearings," Ice and Refrigeration 38 (1910):385-87
109. "The Hearings on Senate Bill 136," Ice and Refrigeration 41 (1911): 1-11.
110. Hearings 9 June 1910, quoted in "The Hearings on Senate Bill 136."
111. Barbara Heggie, "Ice Woman: Dr. Mary Engle Pennington," New Yorker 17 (1941): 23-24.
112. For further biographical information on Pennington, see Rima Apple, "Science Gendered: Nutrition in the United States, 1840-1940," in, H. Kamminga and A. Cunningham, The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840-1940 (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995), 129-54.
113. Mary Pennington, "Relation of Cold Storage to the Food Supply and the Consumer," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 48 (1913): 154-63, quote pp. 154-55.
114. "Clubwomen and Cheap Egg Sale," Chicago Tribune, 16 Dec. 1912: 3.
115. "War of Housewives for Cheaper Food," New York Times, 16 Dec. 1912: 1.
116. H. A. Haring, "Cold Storage Regulation," Ice and Refrigeration 68 (1925): 419-21.
117. American Warehousemen's Association, Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the American Warehousemen's Association (New York, 1915), 235.
118. O'Keefe, "Cold Storage Division."
119. Dr. M. E. Pennington, "Address to National Convention of the United Master Butchers of America," Ice and Refrigeration 59 (1920): 98.
120. "Doom of Cold-Storage Egg," Business Week, 21 Mar. 1936: 28.
121. William Jasper, "Marketing," in, O. A. Hanke, J. L. Skinner, and J. H. Florea, eds., American Poultry History 1823-1873 (Madison, Wise.: American Poultry Historical Society, 1974), 306-69, quote p. 312.
122. "Getting Fresh with Our Fresh Eggs," Pacific Rural Press, 29 Dec. 1934: 494.
123. Histories of chickens and eggs include: Paul Mandeville, ed., Eggs (Chicago: Progress Publications, 1933); and Smith and Daniel, The Chicken Book.
124. Quoted in Smith and Daniel, The Chicken Book, 29.
125. Lewis, Productive Farm Poultry, 274.
126. Leghorn World, Feb. (1931): 339.
127. Ernest Cobb, The Hen at Work: A Brief Manual of Home Poultry Culture (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1919).
128. E. I. Farrington, "How to Make Sure ofWinter Eggs," Country Life 36 (1919): 82-86
129. Lewis, Productive Poultry Husbandry; Bell, "Forces that Have Helped Shape the US Egg Industry," 36. Other products that claimed to help winter egg production included Exadol, a poultry feed supplement, and The Gizzard Capsule, a de-worming pill (advertised in American Poultry Journal and Leghorn World).
130. Spanish farmers may have made this discovery well before Edison's invention, according to Francisco Dieste's Tratado Economico Dividido en Tres Discursos, first published in 1781. As a 1936 article in Nature noted, the basic assumption in the eighteenth century, as in the twentieth, was that if hens received more light, they would eat more and thus lay more. "The keeper during winter would disturb the hens in their sleep, and make them go to the trough at which there should be lights or torches of wood or other material so that the birds could see the food. The hens grew accustomed within a week to eat at that hour, and 'come running as soon as they saw the light."' John Randal Baker, "Increasing Winter Egg-Production in Spain More than a Hundred Years Ago," Nature 143 (1936): 477
131. Francisco Dieste y Buil, Tratado economico dividido en tres discursos (Madrid: Benito Cano, 1803).
132. Smith and Daniel, The Chicken Book, 264.
133. Frank Platt, "Poultry Keeping: An Art, a Science, an Industry," in, Paul Mandeville, ed., Eggs (Chicago: Progress Publications, 1933), 135-36.
134. Anon., "Electric Light and Egg Production," Scientific American 120 (1919): 272.
135. Y. P. Bhosale, "How to Secure More Eggs in Winter," Leghorn World 11 (1926): 53.
136. Anon., "Interest in Forced Egg Production Waning," The Hen Coop 6 (1922): 1.
137. Mrs. George B. Simmons, "Lights for Layers," Leghorn World 14 (1929): 56-59.
138. D. C. Kennard and V. D. Chamberlin, All-Night Lightfor Layers, Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 476 (Wooster, Oh., 1931), 5.
139. Ibid., 8, 11.
140. H. V Tormohlen, "Do Not Shortchange the Pullers," Leghorn World 14 (1930): 42.
141. Ronald C. Tobey, Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
142. Anon., "Use of Winter Lighting," American Egg and Poultry Review 1 (1940): 19
143. L. C. Porter, "Ultraviolet from the Current," American Poultry Journal 63 (1932): 9
144. "Lights - to Use or Not to Use," Pacific Rural Press, 18 Dec. 1937: 668.
145. American Poultry and Egg Review, Apr. (1942): Back cover.
146. Anon., "Rate of Production Mounting," American Egg and Poultry Review, Feb. (1941): 106
147. Anon., "Egg Lay Rate Holds Record High," American Egg and Poultry Review, June (1941): 262.
148. "Doom of Cold-Storage Eggs," Business Week, 21 Mar. (1936): 28.
149. E. B. Heaton, managing director of the American Institute of Poultry Industries, quoted in anon., "Seek Change in Terminology," American Egg and Poultry Review, Apr. (1940): 146-47.
150. R. H. Switzler, "Refrigerated Warehousing over the Years," in, American Warehousemen's Association, Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the American Warehousemen's Association (Washington, D.C., 1941), 62-70, quote p. 69.
151. W. O. Wilson, "Housing," in, O. A. Hanke, J. L. Skinner, and J. H. Florea, eds., American Poultry History 1823-1973 (Madison, Wise.: American Poultry Historical Society, 1974), 218-47.
152. E. Smith Kimball, "Characteristics of U.S. Poultry Statistics," Journal of Farm Economics 22 (1940): 359-66.
153. As an example ofthe giant egg producers that emerged during this era, Sawyer describes the "Egg City" foundedby Julius Goldman in central California. "He took 205 acres of fairly rough, out of the way land and built an automated egg manufacturing plant. On this one location can be found a hatchery, pullet-growing facilities, several batteries of tremendous houses, a feed mill, a U.S.D.A.-inspected egg-packing plant adjacent to an egg-breaking plant. All this from a man who had to flee Hitler's Germany and landed in New York City as late as 1952." Gordon Sawyer, The Agribusiness Poultry Industry (New York: Exposition Press, 1971), 218.
154. Wilson, "Housing"; William Jasper, Poultry Farm Practices and Egg Quality (Washington, D.C.: USDA Production and Marketing Administration, 1952).
155. Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry (Summertown, Tenn.: Book Pub. Co., 1996)
156. Smith and Daniel, The Chicken Book, 268.
157. American Egg Board, Factors that Influence Egg Production, http://wwwaeb.org, accessed 18 Feb. 2006.
158. Bell, "Forces that Have Helped Shape the US Egg Industry," 32-33.
159. "Advocates for Animals Turn Attention to Chickens," New York Times 4 Dec. 2002: 20
160. "Egg Titan's Image is Basket of Contradictions," Omaha World Herald 10 Aug. 2003
161. "Egg Farm Neighbors Say System is Broken," Star-Ledger [New Jersey], 31 Oct. 2004
162. Nicols Fox, Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth about a Food Chain Gone Haywire (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
163. Kujovich. The Refrigerator Car, 470.
164. Susanne Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
165. Helpful overviews of these developments include: Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History ofEating in Modern America (New York: Oxford, 1993)
166. Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont, Eating in America (New York: William Morrow and Co, 1976)
167. Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat (New York: The Free Press, 1986).