26 Jan. 2024 — 12:00 noon — GAR 1.102

Xaq Frohlich (Auburn University)

Book Talk: From Label to Table

This talk draws from my book, From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age (UC Press, 2023), which is a history of the emergence of the Information Age in food and diet markets. By following the history of policy debates about food labels at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), from the 1930s to 1990s, I’ll describe evolving popular preoccupations of diet and personal responsibility for health, and the consequences of packaged food economy for food retailing and marketing. In particular, I discuss the FDA’s transition from an earlier philosophy of regulating markets through “standards of identity,” which were codified traditional recipes, to a new philosophy, still governing today, that relies on informative food labels, such as ingredient panels and the Nutrition Facts label. I’ll conclude the talk by discussing ways historians can critically engage policymakers using history, in this case drawing lessons from past food labeling debates to challenge key assumptions that underly many policies in U.S. food governance today.

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Xaq Frohlich is an associate professor of history of technology at Auburn University. He earned his BA in History at UT and his PhD in STS at MIT and was a visiting research fellow of UT’s Institute for Historical Studies in 2016–2017. His research focuses on the intersection of science, law, and markets, and how the three have shaped modern, everyday understandings of food, risk, and responsibility.

 

 

17 Nov. 2023 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Diana Heredia

“Imperfect Reds, or How Wild Cochineal Became a Commercial and Natural Category in Early Modern Hispanic Commerce”

The dried and crushed bodies of the parasitic insect Dactylopius coccus were one of the most coveted substances for textile dyeing in the world for roughly three centuries. Known as grana fina or fine cochineal, this red-bearing dye insect has long been acknowledged as one of the most valuable agricultural exports of the Spanish Empire, reaching its production peak towards the mid-eighteenth century in New Spain. Yet when cochineal began to be commodified in the sixteenth century, there was no “wild” counterpart to fine cochineal. The distinction of fine and wild cochineal only began to emerge in the seventeenth century when royal officials, bureaucrats and traders reflected on the viability of geographical expansion of cochineal cultivation. This paper investigates how wild and fine cochineal became commercial and agricultural categories in the early modern Hispanic world and superseded earlier geographical markers such as grana, panuco, tascala or grana misteca. The dyad of fine and wild cochineal was purposefully employed to fend off projects of expansion and preserve a standardized fine cochineal from a single area, in this case the Mixteca region in present-day Oaxaca. By exploring the commercial vocabulary used in merchants’ reports and viceregal correspondence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New Spain, this paper shows how wild cochineal captured a century-long process of testing commercially profitable nature, agricultural methods, and colonial economic systems. It thus offers a reflection of how wild species and varieties became visible as a result of the interplay between commerce and descriptions of the natural world.

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Diana Heredia is a doctoral candidate in the University of Texas History Department. Originally trained as a biologist, she has worked on the history of science and colonialism since 2012. Her current work focuses on dye cultivation and commerce as a way to explore early modern Hispanic extractive practices, knowledge production, and material culture.