Prohibition

Welcome to my last blog. As you remember my topic is on food. One of the biggest food related topic in the 20th century would be Prohibition. Prohibition was the ban of alcohol, that lasted from 1920-1933. For my blog i consulted this link. Prohibition was pushed by religious groups and women, who blamed alcohol for domestic violence. Pressure built for several decades, until alcohol was finally banned by the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act. While prohibition was popular many people decided to partake illegally. Bootleggers produced illegal alcohol while speakeasies served it to discrete customers. This combined with the desire to stimulate the economy during the depression led to the repeal of prohibition with the 21st amendment. I feel that in such a low time it was crazy to place a ban on alcohol because it could produce more jobs and money to float around the economy.

Sinclairs Jungle

As you remember the topic of my blog is food. For this entry i decided to write about Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. This was the famous novel that exposed abuses of the meat packing industry, and inspired the passage of the pure food and drug act. I used this link. It explains Sinclair in terms of muckraking, and traces the project back to a commission from a socialist magazine. He imagined a Lithuanian immigrant in Chicago who works in the meat packing industry. He is shocked by the conditions; for example, one of the workers falls into a vat and drowns. Americans reacted against the unsanitary conditions and demanded reform. Eventually Teddy Roosevelt passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which provided for inspectors. I believe that people should be warned of what they are eating because its wrong to feed people random things.

Food in Antebellum America

You remember my topic is food. Since this blog is on the Antebellum unit, I decided to write about Sylvester Graham. He was a temperance activist and diet reformer. The following link is about his contributions. He invented the Graham cracker which is named after him. But the Graham cracker was only the tip of the iceberg. He developed it as a alternative to white bread, which he considered too processed. Another influence on modern diet came after his death, when his follower John Harvey Kellogg invented cornflakes. Its really cool to see the ideology behind seemingly ordinary food products.