Pondering Food

by Maxine Friedman, Chief Curator

As I sit at my dining room table, typing away on my Chromebook, I take a moment to feel grateful that I have a refrigerator full of food to tide me over during the coming weeks of life at home. My mind wanders to research that I did for our “Bringing Up Baby” exhibition, which explores how parents raised and cared for their children in earlier times, and more specifically to the issue of food safety. Today we generally take a safe food supply for granted, and while there’s still room for improvement, we should also consider how far we’ve come. This point was brought home to me while studying which foods were considered safe and nutritious for children in the 1800s.

The most striking example that jumped out at me was milk. Today we don’t give a second thought to its safety; instead we debate whether to select skim, reduced-fat, whole, organic, lactose-free, or plant-based. For parents in the 1800s, however, it wasn’t quite that simple. Particularly for parents in urban areas, milk had to travel, without refrigeration, from the country to the city, and then from the shopkeeper to home. Pasteurization didn’t come into widespread use until the late 1910s. For parents who chose to feed milk to their children, they had very legitimate concerns about bacterial contamination; in fact, doctors often advised parents to boil milk before serving it.

Of course, this being the land of inventors and entrepreneurs, manufacturers tackled the problem and offered various solutions. Advertising materials in Historic Richmond Town’s ephemera collection speak to this issue. For example, most of us think of condensed milk as an ingredient for baking, but an 1887 trade card for Eagle Brand Condensed Milk promoted it as an ideal food for infants, citing its purity. An 1890 booklet titled “Baby is King” offered testimonials for two products, Lacto-Preparata and Carnrick’s Soluble Food. The company stated “Lacto-Preparata and Carnrick’s Soluble Food are sterilized, which means that all the germs that produce cholera infantum and many other diseases are destroyed during the process of manufacture...Both Lacto-Preparata and Carnrick’s Soluble Food are put up in hermetically sealed cans and no moisture or germs can reach them.”

These ads, and others like them, certainly spoke to deeply felt parental concerns. Our worries over food issues are different today, but the desire of parents to keep their children safe and healthy hasn’t changed a bit.