Canadian Food Purity 1910

I’ve written a lot about the PURE FOOD Movement in the US in the first decade of the 20th century, and how virtually every new food or household product claimed, in its advertisements, to be pure, Ivory Soap being just one of these many products.
And I’ve written about a Dr. Wiley and his fight in the US against the patent medicine people, many of whom ran off to Canada to keep in business.

An article from Macleans in 1912 about Food Standards quotes Wiley as saying `he will continue to work until the whole family of preservatives and colorants are in the boneyard.`

So Dr. Wiley was well known even in Canada even if his laws did not much matter in this country, except with respect to exports.

This Maclean’s article claims we have our own Dr. Wiley, a Dr. A. McGill of the Food Standards branch of Inland Revenue.

Like Dr. Wiley, McGill is concerned with patent medicines, their more dangerous ingredients as well as their outlandish claims. And like Dr. Wiley, McGill is concerned about soft drinks, but not so much the additives, but the fact some are spiked with alcohol. But he’s not a temperance type: he is also concerned that alcoholic beverages are often watered down. And he is concerned with milk, not so much with respect to contamination, which is a huge problem in Montreal. He is concerned with quality control. Milk in Canada, he says, must contain at least 3 and a quarter percent milk fat (it was rich back then).

This 1912 article mentions some canned goods that are diluted, not dangerous, just a waste of money, and suggests if housewives were as diligent as they once had been, few of them would be cheated out. Apparently, canned goods didn`t exist until the 1890′s.

Dr. Wiley in the US, who got the 1908 Pure Food Act pushed through was a crusader. Our Dr. McGill appears to be the diligent civil servant.

Wiley ended up on the wrong side of history with respect to the preservative business: preservatives and colourants became huge business in the middle of the century as we all well know. Only lately have preservatives in food re-emerged as a potential health issue. So we now have “natural foods” and “organic foods” etc.

If Dr. Wiley of the US was aiming to stop the new preservative industry in its tracks, Canada’s Dr. McGill was more circumspect. Salt, sugar, vinegar, he said, were old-fashioned time-tested preservatives that were also dangerous if over indulged in, so why condemn the new chemical preservatives. (This is a rather prescient remark, considering the huge amounts of sugar and salt in fast foods and convenience foods and the impact they are having on our health.)

Ivory Soap, like some other iconic 20th century brands, also succeeded in the 20th century due to advertising that was more visual than verbal, life-style oriented, aimed at making housewives feel better about their lives and their homes. This style was created at J. Walter Thompson.

I think Macleans has an article about the new and influential profession of advertising. I’ll write about that next.

Lady Problems and their Solutions

Advertisement from Ladies’ World Magazine 1898 for Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Tonic, which contained 15 percent alcohol.

The reason why I liked exploring the 1910 Era is because by doing so I learn so much about this day and age and about human nature, by acquiring a better understanding of what things change about it and what things stay the same.

Take this advertisment for Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Tonic, a huge bestseller in Victorian times until the 20′s. The ad above is from 1898, when Edith Nicholson, of my novel in progress, Flo in the City based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ would have been 14. This ad was aimed at mothers with their young daughters in mind: it says that these young girls can avoid embarrassing, painful, humiliating (my words) gynecological exams by taking the tonic.

I also have a brochure for the same product from the 20′s. There it is described as a beauty aid with this advice to women: get plenty of fresh air, and exercise and rest, drink lots of clean water, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, coarse bread, and take Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable tonic. Who can argue with that advice?

Now, just this morning I read an article from the New York Times,Healthy Aging with Nary a Supplement
aimed at aging Boomers, like me, claiming that there is little science to back the many exuberant claims of the supplements and nutrition industry; that in order to age healthily it is probably good to stay active and eat a Meditteranean style diet, with olive oil, fruits and veggies, fish and precious little meat. Oh, it is a good idea to take a calcium pill and vitamin D. Remember, everyone up North took cod liver oil in the winter. (And stay away from buzz words like anti-oxidant.)

Think about it! Think about all the advances in science in the past 100 years! Think about all the advances in science that happened in the last 100 seconds! To think we have come full circle with respect to COMMON SENSE about health and longevity.

A few years ago I visited Brockville, Ontario to participate in a Canadian Antiques Road Show practice sesssion. The event was held in one of those gracious old homes on the water. As I waited for the show to get on the road, so to speak, I learned that many of the huge homes on the water there were erected by men in the ‘pseudo pharma’ industry. As I understand it, the laws for selling medicinal products were tighter in the US, so the men worked out of Canada, but lived right across the water from the US for easy access. Hmm.

Now, I tend to eat a Mediterranean diet (and I PROMISE to start my exercise program THIS AFTERNOON!) but I also buy fish oil, and those super expensive de-tox greens that I drink, sometimes with Bentonite, believing the BS, because it suits me to believe it. (Then I hear that singing in a choir is excellent for your health. SINGING. Maybe that’s all we have to do to be healthy. Edith, a smoker who lived to 92, attended church all her life. People in the old days sang a lot.)

I know detoxing by eating greens and taking salt baths is probably a useless thing to do. Or the common sense meter in my brain knows it is a useless thing to do. But I also have a part of me that likes to believe in magic. (Don’t scoff. I know plenty of people with science training and they are no different. When it comes to diet, which is tied into self-esteem, even scientists cherry pick the facts, the only difference being they can defend their actions with ‘facts’. )

Ps. I just saw an advert for a new product: water with all the nutritional benefit of fruit and no calories. Are we all idiots?? Except the marketers of course. They know what they are doing. That NYT article claims that the goodness of fruit comes form the eating the entire ovary, so to speak, that the myriad health benefits are a by-product of some kind of synergy, not entirely understood.

Now, I eat tonnes of veggies, much more than I ate as a child and a wider variety of them, but the fruits for sale most of the year all taste SO BAD, I can hardly stomach them anymore. Frankenfruit. When I was a little girl, my parents had to lie to me to keep me from eating all the pears or apples or oranges. They said “You’ll get sick.” I never did. And those peaches, in season, I would eat them by the basketfuls.

(Actually, I recall one month when I was 14 when I stayed with a family friend in the Laurentians north of Montreal, away from my stressed out and unhappy parents, and I gorged on hamburgers (cooked super-rare) and peaches and spent the rest of the time outside in the woods playing with a boy a bit younger than me and we got along like soulmates (we were too young to be awkward or obnoxious ) and I NEVER felt better.
The recipe for health, one simple ingredient: happiness.

A mediterranean diet is terrific, but it’s better on the Mediterrean, I suspect. I’m going to Greece this year. For sure. Mamma Mia.