Transforming Pig’s Wash into Health Food: The Construction of Skimmed Milk Protein Powders

ABSTRACT

In the late 1890s, chemists devised industrial processes to manufacture milk protein powders, now a major fitness food category. These peculiar and flavorless inventions were made from skimmed milk waste from modernised dairies. This paper explores why manufacturers made them and why the British ate them, by examining what commentators and eaters wrote and read about them. The two leading brands were near-identical materially, but became understood differently. Purportedly, Plasmon was a scientifically-advanced proteinaceous muscularizing product while Sanatogen was a phosphorated nerve supplement which imbued intellect and willpower. Their positionings were shaped by the myth-making power of advertising, amplified by the power of celebrity testimonies and the authority of scientific experts, and tempered by press and consumer’ reactions. Scientific knowledge was used reductively, and was shaped by cultural values. Consumers were complicit in this framing: the technification of these white powders provided mechanisms for self-improvement. Consumers simply needed to swallow.

KEYWORDS:

• Skimmed milk
• protein
• phosphorus
• nutrition
• fin-de-siècle
• Plasmon
• Sanatogen
• Eustace Miles

Introduction

Protein powders have become ubiquitous health foods with rapidly growing annual global sales of around $20 billion.¹ We would be hard-pressed to work out which natural foods these industrially made products are made from by sniffing, licking, or looking at them. Nevertheless, they have become associated with the muscular, athletic body types that are, in the twenty-first century, culturally positioned as most desirable. However, it was not obvious, when their first incarnations were devised in the 1890s, that these would become body-building health foods. Businessmen framed them in different ways at the start of the twentieth century, using arguments backed up by different but largely uncontested nuggets of scientific knowledge, to position them as suitable foods for particular types of people with particular topical problems.

This paper focuses on the introduction of powders manufactured from skimmed milk, the almost free waste by-product of dairy automation. The invention of new manufacturing processes to exploit this surplus were consequences of a wider reconfiguration and industrialization of global food supply chains which changed the very nature of raw foodstuffs and subjected them to industrial processes that preserved and reconfigured them in different ways. Global trade figures demonstrate that they were driven largely, Chris Otter argues, by the economic and political appetite in Britain for feeding a growing population with imported food.² Accordingly, although the powders were sold in various countries, and the processes and machines used to make them were invented elsewhere, it seems appropriate that this paper should examine and compare their introduction in Britain, where they were hugely successful.

The manufacture of these powders was one aspect of a lucrative industrial practice which Bartow Elmore characterizes as “scavenger capitalism,” where the waste of one industry was transformed into a commodity in another.³ This was not unique. As Carolyn Cobbold has explored, food colorings synthesized from coal tar waste had quietly been making industrially manufactured foods seem more attractive since the 1860s.⁴ Such technologies were changing the shape of food supply chains and the very nature of food itself, but they did not make their unpalatable ingredients obvious to their consumers.

Instead, modern food manufacturing was supported by equally modern advertising geared to generating a high volume of sales for low-priced mass-produced items. Before 1900, some advertisers in Britain were deploying sophisticated strategies to persuade consumers to purchase unfamiliar products, as Roy Church and, more recently, Stefan Schwarzkopf have highlighted.⁵ Accordingly, advertisements and the branded products that they promoted became cultural reference points, generating responses from commentators and consumers that remain visible in the printed record. These collectively suggest how such products were understood and why they were purchased, so provide sources for this study.

Advertising was expensive.⁶ The extensive advertising up to and through the Great War for the two most advertised brands of protein powder, Plasmon and Sanatogen, indicates that they were widely consumed.⁷ They are therefore the focus of this study. Scholars have previously examined Sanatogen’s positioning in Russia and China as tonic and medicine respectively, and Plasmon’s in Britain, from the perspective of the physical culture movement.⁸ This paper breaks new ground by contrasting these powders, taking as the starting point their material and chemical similarity rather than their manufacturers’ very different claims, and seeks out perspectives other than just the promoters’. We also consider dried skimmed milk powder. Skimmed milk powder was not designated a protein powder as it also contains milk sugars. But it is nutritionally and materially similar, and was invented at the same time to exploit the same waste product. Such milk powder was not widely advertised to consumers (other than the whole milk version, as infant formula) and has largely been unexplored in the milk historiography, although this cheap commodity was rapidly adopted extensively in food manufacture.⁹

Thanks to the persuasive power of advertising, Plasmon, Sanatogen, and generic dried skimmed milk were three completely different things in the eyes of the public. Accordingly, it was possible for Sanatogen to sell for around twice the price of Plasmon, which sold for roughly five times the retail price of dried skimmed milk.¹⁰ People consumed them for different reasons, in different places and in different formats. Dried skimmed milk became omnipresent in canteen catering and in industrial foods such as biscuits, bread, chocolate, and branded infant food mixtures, but people rarely consumed it knowingly or deliberately.¹¹ In contrast, people willingly chose to eat protein powders for their purported effects of protecting bodies from physical and nervous degeneration, two distinct matters of cultural and political concern.¹² Plasmon became perceived as a cheap strengthening health food. It was promoted for its protein content and was incorporated into normal meals by some nutritionally well-informed people. Sanatogen’s makers chose instead to promote it for its phosphorus content, as a medicinal supplement for nervous weakness.

By revealing the stark differences between the perceptions of these materially near-identical products, this approach demonstrates the extraordinary malleability of the public understanding of the science of food and provides new insights into the vexed question of what motivates people to change their eating habits. It reveals the extent to which the framing of these products in the public sphere was constructed culturally using scientific facts which, though uncontested, were deployed reductively and selectively to fit manufacturers’ particular agendas. Readers will be able to think of parallels in present-day food discourse; this paper’s historical insights remain relevant to our complex food and nutritional advice landscape today. It begins by exploring the cultural positioning of skimmed milk which rendered it a waste product despite its nutritional value, and which accordingly encouraged the creation of technologies to turn it into portable, long-lasting powders. Subsequent sections examine the presentation and perceptions of Plasmon and Sanatogen in turn. The conclusion seeks to explain how these differences in perceptions came about.

Commodifying Skimmed Milk Waste

Today in Britain we pay the same for milk irrespective of whether it is full fat or skimmed, milk with its cream removed, but it has not always been this way. At the fin-de-siècle, milk as it came from the cow was often described as “nature’s perfect food” because the new experts in the chemistry of nutrition had established that it contained a perfect balance of all the known components of food, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, plus the minerals including phosphorus that were needed in tiny quantities.¹³ However, it was milk’s cream that represented its cultural essence and two thirds of its economic value.¹⁴ For public analysts, the enforcers of food legislation, milk with less than 3 percent cream was not milk at all. This attitude not only suffused contemporary discourse, but has also meant that skimmed milk is largely invisible in the extensive milk historiography, despite its ubiquity.¹⁵

Skimmed milk was considered to be unpleasant, as was reflected in its designation as “pig’s wash,” a euphemism also for vomit and work-house tea.¹⁶ This attitude was also reflected in the idioms used by a Victorian diarist who reported that “if we jostled with the cream of society at Goodwood racecourse, here at Brighton, we found little more than the skimmed milk.”¹⁷ These words reflect the historic experience of “skim,” the sour residue from dairies where open bowls of milk were left overnight for the cream to rise. Some of this skim had been made into cheese, a little was eaten by poor agricultural workers, and much was fed to pigs kept beside the dairy, a longstanding and hyperlocal alternative to scavenger capitalism.¹⁸ But, even after skimmed milk was improved materially following the widespread mechanization of dairies with the introduction from the 1880s of centrifuges to separate out the cream from fresh wholesome milk, skimmed milk remained virtually worthless.¹⁹ Although this sweet skimmed milk could be sold for a quarter of the price of whole milk, and was bought in bulk to feed poor schoolchildren and workhouse inmates, philanthropists often found that they could not even give it away to poor urban housewives.²⁰ It remained unfamiliar and undesirable, a waste product that reeked of poverty.²¹ Some was condensed, sweetened and tinned, but thousands of gallons were unaccounted for according to the dairy expert, Primrose McConnell, who suggested that much of it was used to adulterate whole milk.²² The popular health writer and tennis champion Eustace Miles bemoaned that much of it was poured down city drains.²³ This distressed him because he recognized the nutritional value of skimmed milk as part of a mixed diet, against the received wisdom of the crowd. He and its other advocates explained that it was a cheap source of protein, the most important kind of food whose insufficiency caused weakness and even death.²⁴

The importance of dietary protein had become newsworthy. Data-gathering reformers including Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree had shown that protein was woefully lacking in the diets of the poorest thirty percent of the population, who ate less than half the amount that nutrition experts largely agreed was essential.²⁵ Statist measurements of mortality, morbidity, and fertility confirmed observations that the British population was weakening.²⁶ The effects of decline were brought to the fore by concerns over the nation’s economic decline compared to Germany and the U.S. and a sequence of uncharacteristic ignominious defeats of the British army in conflicts in Africa and elsewhere during the nineteenth century’s closing decades, culminating in the Boer War.²⁷ A more nutritious diet was one of various political, popular, and commercial responses to the ensuing crisis in confidence advocated by reformers.²⁸ Cheap proteinaceous skimmed milk formed part of a potential solution.

The large-scale commodification of liquid skimmed milk was impractical. However, during the closing years of the nineteenth century, several chemists and engineers began to invent and patent ways of transforming this hyperlocal waste product into global commodities. There were two categories of powder made from skimmed milk. Both appeared to be palatable, long-lasting, and easily transportable with enormous nutritional value and vast commercial potential.

The first category, dried milk could be made with machines such as the Just-Hatmaker and Ekenberg apparatus, by spraying liquid milk over hot steam-driven rotating rollers which evaporated the water rapidly. The machines had blades which scraped off the white powder which condensed on the sides. Both skimmed and whole milk were processed in this way.²⁹ These machines were a vast improvement on the slow condensing dried milk technologies of the nineteenth century, which produced powders that were used largely only premixed with other foods.³⁰ The new dried skimmed milk retained a milky flavor, could be reconstituted back into something resembling milk, and was known to contain roughly equal proportions of milk sugars and protein plus minerals including phosphorus. Dairies began to buy and install these machines from early in the new century but competitors’ products were largely indistinguishable because they all used similar machinery. While dried whole milk became positioned as a sterile infant food amid fears about germ-ridden liquid milk, dried skimmed milk became a cheap generic commodity where manufacturers competed on price. Profit margins were insufficient to allow extensive branding or advertising.³¹ Dried skimmed milk became and remains a common industrial food ingredient.

Chemists, many of them in Germany, also attempted to create products of value from skimmed milk waste. They devised processes that transformed skimmed milk waste into paints, glues, and plastics used to make costume jewelry, buttons, and combs; they also invented ways of manufacturing edible protein powders, a second category of food made from pig’s wash. Various chemists devised and patented different processes involving subjecting it to acids, alkalis, and gases, to isolate the protein. The resulting compounds were dried and ground into odorless and flavorless long-lasting powders that were almost entirely composed of this vital substance. Initially, these were envisaged as invalid foods, but soon several inventors tried to market them as health foods for all. Objectively, the protein powders were near-identical materially and chemically, and therefore nutritionally and dietetically, consisting mostly of protein with minerals including phosphorus. Physicians conducting medical trials regarded them as largely interchangeable, however their manufacturers used their patents to differentiate and brand them each as unique things.³²

Plasmon: Muscle-maker or Futuristic Fad?

Plasmon’s inventor, the chemist Siebold, framed his odorless, flavorless, insubstantial white powder as a strengthening, easily-transportable, and inexpensive protein food suitable for invalids, the military, and for ordinary people.³³ He recruited eminent German physiologists to test and endorse it, garnering praise and a military supply contract.³⁴ His Berlin company sold it as a plain powder and also packaged blended with foods, primarily cocoa, porridge oats, and biscuits but also other staples, making it easy to incorporate Plasmon into the diet almost imperceptibly.³⁵

In 1899, Siebold licensed the product rights outside Germany and Austria to a syndicate of London-based investors including a fan of the product, Mark Twain.³⁶ They exchanged these rights for shares in another new London company, International Plasmon, led by the experienced and technologically savvy food industrialist Sir Edward Montague Nelson.³⁷ He had long-standing family interests in gelatin manufacture and was “one of the pioneers of the New Zealand meat exporting Industry,” an earlier adopter of refrigeration technologies, who imported German machinery so Plasmon could be manufactured in rural Buckinghamshire.³⁸ International Plasmon in turn licensed it on but a Paris company failed quickly and, in the U.S., two well-capitalized businesses failed in succession.³⁹ In Italy, the joint venture Sindacato italiano del Plasmon soon became independent, focused on the cultural importance of milk for infant feeding, and specialized in invalid and infant foods. This company is now owned by Kraft-Heinz.⁴⁰ Their famous Biscotti Plasmon, baby rusks, have “Plasmon” listed among the ingredients though the powder itself is not for sale.⁴¹ In Britain, International Plasmon established several partnerships and new companies to incorporate Plasmon into bread, tea, and other foodstuffs, but they soon disappeared.⁴² Only the primary company that sold plain Plasmon and its German-style value-added blends survived into the 1950s.⁴³

International Plasmon’s advertising framed it as a nutritious protein food, justified by the latest scientific knowledge and endorsed by British experts who associated dietary protein with muscularity. Eating Plasmon was thus a strategy to combat fears of physical degeneration which came to a head during the Boer War, just as Plasmon was being launched.⁴⁴ It formed part of the discourse around the celebration of the fit body as a machine for work, a central pillar of fin-de-siècle masculinity.⁴⁵ Accordingly, the manufacturer emphasized Plasmon’s muscularizing effects with testimonials from famous and popular physical culturists and sportsmen including Eugen Sandow and C.B. Fry, and encouraged housewives to incorporate it into meals to improve their household’s nutrition, as Heffernan observes.⁴⁶

In his examination of Plasmon’s introduction as a sports supplement, Heffernan has focused on the company’s few elaborate large illustrated advertisements which appeared only exceptionally outside the high-end press. However, the vast majority of advertisements that appeared in the wider popular press imitated the German manufacturer’s and provided direct explanations of Plasmon’s scientific credentials in a simple monochrome style dominated by text, black shapes, and white space (Figures 1 and 2).⁴⁷ Additionally, they sometimes incorporated the emotional symbolism of the German stonemason trademark, representing craft skill, strength, and manual work. These advertisements primarily used simple scientific language, numbers, and graphs, and endorsements from British scientific journals and popular science writers, a technique that had previously been deployed by Cadbury’s and Bovril to communicate these foods’ proteinaceousness.⁴⁸ These superficially objective tools elevated Plasmon to the status of a scientifically-justified food. Though Plasmon’s milk source was sometimes acknowledged, there was no mention that it was skimmed. To some housewives, the scientific facts may have already been familiar from the exhortations to “scientific motherhood” that infant formula manufacturers had deployed since the 1870s, though Plasmon extended its appeal to older children and adults.⁴⁹ Overall, the message was that Plasmon was a rational functional food backed up by serious science, and that those that ate it were nutritionally and economically savvy.

Figure 1. A typical rational factual Plasmon advertisement reproducing the German Plasmon trademark. From author’s collection. Another typical Plasmon advertisement. Similar ones appeared right across the popular press. From author’s collection.

Figure 2. The Daily Express ridicules the very idea of Plasmon. Reproduced by permission of Daily Express/Reach Licensing.

Journalists did not describe Plasmon in these terms. Instead, despite the dependence of newspapers on advertising revenue, many of them expressed reservations about the acceptability of a food that was so alien, the risibility of celebrities who endorsed it, and its associations with frugality, vegetarianism, and a suspect kind of masculinity.⁵⁰ This unease remains visible in numerous commentaries following one of Plasmon’s earliest British press relations events, in July 1900.⁵¹ It was reported in the Daily Mail with the headline “A Magic Food. ‘One Pound of Beef in a Biscuit.’”⁵² The correspondent enthused that a chef had transformed Plasmon into whipped cream, and that a cupful provided as much nourishment as a quarter-pound of beef, the most esteemed kind of food in Britain.⁵³ He repeated the company’s mantra that Plasmon’s “tastelessness” was an advantage because you could “flavour [sic] it with anything you like,” and that it “solved the problem of feeding armies in the field [and the] starving-school-children question.”⁵⁴ However, he chillingly referred to Plasmon’s clever chemists as “nutrient necromancers.”⁵⁵

Other journalists were more overtly skeptical, highlighting the tension between natural food and its scientistic commodification in unappetizing concentrated formats. The Daily Express resorted to doggerel to question whether this “scientific diet” would lead to strife rather than satisfy the social and cultural expectations of foods as markers of commensality and sociability (Figure 2).⁵⁶ While the application of science and the banishment of indigestion were welcome, an end to the amity of eating together which Plasmon represented was not. Punch, a magazine known for reflecting popular tensions through cartoons and sketches, as Richard Noakes has explored, questioned whether this was even food, using the figure of H.G. Wells as a foil.⁵⁷ This scientifically educated writer was an apposite choice. His widely-read fiction often used the symbolism of food and patent medicines as part of a critique of contemporary society, in the context of profiteering business practices, degeneration, and modernity generally, and the unanticipated dangers that they presented.⁵⁸ On one occasion, Punch portrayed Wells as an “adjutant of [an] aëromobilist battalion […] munching on a stick of Plasmon chocolate.”⁵⁹ On another, they represented him flying (the Wright brothers were preparing for their first powered flight) amid a universe of new materials, wearing a “celluloid [another plastic material used for excitingly novel motion pictures] cloak studded with plasmon [sic] buttons,” and subsisting on a “tabloid dietary” of concentrated food.⁶⁰ The futuristic and risible nature of Plasmon also drew edgy jokes in elite circles. The barrister Sir Edward Clarke, speaking at a dinner in honor of an absent Guglielmo Marconi, similarly associated Plasmon with alarming modern advances and the strengthening of the race. He joked that Marconi had sent a subliminal message that “The Minister of War [was] arranging for a corps of infantry, equipped with radium crookes and fed on Plasmon biscuits (to be called the corps of the 4th dimension).”⁶¹ Plasmon was well-known but perceived as somewhat ridiculous in its scientistic claims.

The Daily Express’s doggerel highlights another reason for this distain. When they referred to Plasmon as the “Food of the Future,” they were deploying the propagandist use of this phrase by vegetarians to designate their modern approach to diet.⁶² Plasmon was putatively an ideal vegetarian food because of the challenge of obtaining sufficient protein from a vegetable diet, and accordingly it appeared in vegetarian cookery books.⁶³ Vegetarianism had been a particular butt of Punch’s satire since the practice’s rebirth in the mid-century.⁶⁴ Plasmon therefore provided them with the perfect foil in a parody of a new vegetarian cookbook, which suggested that “To make nettle-tea pick all the nettles you can find (or, better, get someone else to do so), add a pinch of Plasmon and simmer for a fortnight.”⁶⁵ The “someone else” suggests that this association served also to fuel the magazine’s appetite for lampooning both as middle class affectations. Punch thus explicitly positioned Plasmon as a high-brow proposition, as did a widely-read fictional memoir written by a supposed down-at-heel aristocrat which, according to a BMJ reviewer, “[hit] at most subjects of social interest” with “a delicate vein of humorous sarcasm.”⁶⁶ The aristocrat moaned

Once let the subject of Health take firm possession of the mind, and no other occupation is necessary or even possible. […] Systems of drainage and rules of diet […] occupy our waking hours. […] A hop pillow, a cup of consommé, and a teaspoonful of bromide minister to our nightly needs, “till the flood of morning rays Wakes us to” cocoa nibs and plasmon biscuit.⁶⁷

For middle-class advocates, Plasmon had become the new devotional, replacing the “song of praise” in the popular evening hymn quoted by the author.⁶⁸ The implication was that, for the middle classes, scientific Plasmon satisfied fin-de-siècle aspirations for moral and physical self-improvement through modern methods of consumption. Its flavorless practicality resonated, for a select minority, with the notion of the body as a machine, to be enhanced by scientific methods.⁶⁹

Plasmon’s positioning as a sports supplement was also tempered by its associations with vegetarianism. Although the impressively muscular and incredibly popular Sandow was persuaded to provide a glowing testimonial, the product was more closely associated with a much gentler kind of masculinity embodied by Miles. He became well known from the start of the twentieth century, just when Plasmon was being introduced, and for two related reasons. One was his sportsmanship, with many successive triumphs in amateur English and US “world” tennis, racquets, and squash championships held between 1898 and 1911.⁷⁰ The other was his relentless advocacy of his ascetic and “lacto-vegetarian” dietary and lifestyle regime to which he attributed his athletic success.⁷¹ Although his nutritional views were based on conventional nutritional science, he also crafted a distinct dietary and ethical framework which underpinned his particular spin on vegetarianism (vegetable foods plus milk) and his business activities. He acquired public prominence especially in respect of diet through regular columns and reports in the new popular tabloids (the Daily Mirror, Mail, Express) and elsewhere, and an astonishing number of books and pamphlets published over the two decades from 1897.⁷²

Everything that Miles did was about proselytizing about the rational austere lifestyle that he advocated, and at the heart of this was diet and especially protein whose sufficiency, he reminded readers, was paramount. Plasmon’s simplicity, cheapness, and functionality as a protein source made it the ideal food for him. It also brought together various topical themes that were important to him and people more widely, the need to apply scientific knowledge, the virtue of work and self-help, and importance of maintaining one’s physical fitness and strength.⁷³ He said that Plasmon had “never yet failed [him] on a single occasion, either in [his] athletic work, in [his] teaching work, or in [his] literary work.”⁷⁴ He celebrated Plasmon in his writing from 1901 for about five years, to an extent that even he admitted verged on faddism.⁷⁵ The lack of sensual pleasure in eating Plasmon was not a problem for him. While he appreciated that flavor was important to others, adding a “dash of sauce” to his lentil and bean sandwich recipe, his enthusiastic discourse positioned it as unlikely that anyone well-informed might object to his austere approach to diet; the premise underpinning Plasmon was of course the same, it was all about duty and protein.⁷⁶

Although Miles stopped advocating Plasmon in 1906, replacing it with his Emprote health food brand made with his own “Secret Powder” (containing milk powder and potato and wheat flour), his books stayed on bookshelves and in readers’ memories for much longer, cementing the association between Plasmon and Miles’s values; the two remained intertwined in a Punch poem lampooning food fads in 1913.⁷⁷ The inescapable and enduring conclusion drawn by his many readers must have been that his advocacy was more than just a commercial transaction with Plasmon’s maker, and that he truly believed in the food. As such, his endorsement carried influence but also drew wider attention.

Miles explained that Plasmon was also cheap: it could make nine in ten people “better in health and richer in wealth.”⁷⁸ Accordingly, it addressed the virtue of frugality and the plight of the poor and undernourished for whom he ran a soup kitchen on the Thames embankment.⁷⁹ One of his many articles about economy appeared in his column in the Daily Mail where he gave examples of tasty proteinaceous recipes that he had used to maintain his energy in his preparations for the year’s Racquets Championship. By the judicious use of products such as Plasmon, one could eat healthily for less than three pence a day.⁸⁰ A month later, Plasmon’s Managing Director Mr. Melville-Bergheim similarly explained that Plasmon was a suitably nutritious and cheap diet for the “distressed out-of-works” in a Review of Reviews magazine advertorial.⁸¹ This reported his explanation that “four teaspoonfuls of Plasmon, which cost very little more than a penny, will supply your hungry man with as much nutriment as […] a pound of beefsteak, for which he would have to pay a shilling.”⁸² The company followed up these claims with a series of advertisements reiterating Miles’s three-pence a day claim (Figure 3).⁸³

Figure 3. Plasmon provides nourishment for just 3d. a day. Reproduced by permission of Daily Express/Reach Licensing.

However, the unemployed stevedores who featured in the advertorial were probably unreceptive to the suggestions that they should eat this cheap characterless food, irrespective of its work-enabling properties.⁸⁴ Deliberate vegetarianism remained a middle-class practice despite the efforts of philanthropists who had for decades tried to persuade the British poor that a vegetable-based diet was both cheaper and healthier. The historian James Gregory explains that vegetarians perceived this to be political maneuver to pay lower wages while depriving them of desirable meat.⁸⁵ Punch’s riposte was a parody of Miles’s column. It was entitled “Life on Nothing a Day” and was written by the fictitious “Ex-Amateur Ping-Pong Champion of All Surbiton,” the pseudonymous Felix Knotts.⁸⁶ This may have more accurately captured popular attitudes to vegetarianism, Plasmon, and their middle-class connotations. The author, whose all-vegetarian menus included “Mangold à la Missile” made from the ridiculous despised vegetable mangold wurzel (more usually reserved for livestock), wore a “Panama hat trimmed with Plasmon,” and accordingly drew fire from schoolboys armed with pea-shooters; he supposedly harvested the peas, which provided him with free meals.⁸⁷ Plasmon as a cheap source of concentrated protein was an attractive enough concept to some middle-class people who were earnest about the healthiness of their diet, but it required a change in foodways and lacked the appropriate symbolism which would have enabled eaters generally to feel good about their food choices and themselves. Miles’s earnest and austere diet and lifestyle meant that his associations with Plasmon came with disadvantages for the brand’s image. Though Plasmon provided a means to recover from modernity’s degenerative effects on the body and morals, it came in the shape of vegetarian Miles, not meaty Sandow.

What was Miles’s shape? His body, always shown covered up, was slight. Unlike Sandow’s often near-naked and admired muscular frame which many ordinary men sought to emulate, Miles boasted that he never carried things except on the rare occasions when he went “shopping with ladies,” because weight-lifting “tends to slowness and stiffness.”⁸⁸ His sportsmanship was value-laden, the subject of satire alongside his vegetarianism. Unlike Sandow’s physical culture or increasingly popular football (used by health food advertisers including Cadbury’s, Bovril, and Oxo), tennis was not accessible to the common man. It placed Miles as resolutely upper middle class; this was an elite amateur game played on expensive courts accessible only to the wealthy; his rival, Jay Gould, was the millionaire grandson of the American railroad tycoon.⁸⁹ Even to those unfamiliar with Miles’s biography as a Cambridge Classics scholar and tutor, he was not like them. There was also the question of gender. Tennis was played also by (and often together with) women. Accordingly, the “game” of tennis was not as manly as cricket and football, “sports” which built masculine virtues of physical strength and resilience, moral values, and the British sense of fair play.⁹⁰ Worse still, it was played alongside recently-invented spiropole (swing-ball), the game of polite garden parties.⁹¹ These affectations were used to lampoon Miles alongside vegetarianism and Plasmon by, among others including Punch, a young P.G. Wodehouse, and a Globe columnist, who moaned that writers such as the “indefatigable athlete” Miles who,

flinging down his spiropole racket […] entreats us to cut down our breakfast to a split lentil, our lunch to two peas and a gooseberry, and to make a really solid supper off two thirds of a special kind [Plasmon] of biscuit which as the most tremendous effect on the muscles and the constitution [then] makes us feel guilty every time we murmur to the waiter our preference for a chump chop.⁹²

Plasmon may have been beyond scientific reproach, but its associations with vegetarianism, the slight body of Miles, and middle-class preoccupations meant that it was ridiculed.

This critical coverage of Plasmon in the press does not necessarily mean that consumers also perceived it to be ridiculous and unnatural. However, there are few traces of ordinary people’s reactions to Plasmon. Unlike popular health foods such as Bovril, I have found no reports of catch-phrases, songs, or pantomime heroes called Plasmon or stonemason fancy-dress costumes.⁹³ A prize-winning stud collie was named “Edgbaston Plasmon,” but this was because a dog living there had been nursed back to health with the product, rather than denoting anything special about the dog so fed.⁹⁴

The Financial Times positioned Plasmon as an invalid food, a framing that the company’s chairman tried to dispel in his address to shareholders in 1903.⁹⁵ However, consumers appear to have had the same view. One area where consumers had a voice, albeit chosen and edited by the manufacturer, was in testimonials. These provided a very different narrative. The company published a testimonials book incorporating letters from over fifty ordinary people who had written in praise of Plasmon, largely in the context of illness. Many related anecdotes about Plasmon foods’ effectiveness in building up previously ailing bodies. Mrs. Haymes from Liverpool was grateful that Plasmon had “put a new inside in [her] son,” the doctor having “informed [her] that there was no hope for him as he had no inside.”⁹⁶ Another, whose doctor had said her daughter “could not possibly live through the night” said “We owe our child’s life to Plasmon.”⁹⁷ A correspondent from Paignton in Cornwall tried it after two years of illness, but now, after eating Plasmon for a year, was “quite strong and able to work” and thought it their “duty [to] write and tell you how [they had] got on.”⁹⁸ A phthisis sufferer from Walthamstow had “been taking it three times a day” and, as a result of “the nourishment Plasmon [had] given [him]” was “much stronger,” so he was writing “to give credit where credit is due.”⁹⁹ Like many other health foods, Plasmon also cured people’s indigestion, an ailment causing widespread discomfort as Ian Miller has explored.¹⁰⁰ Only one testimonial mentioned flavor, and then only in passing. Plasmon appears to have been widely positioned as a food technology with a particular function in the context of recovery from illness, and not as a general-purpose health food suitable for ordinary people.

Without company records, quantifying Plasmon’s popularity has been impossible. Plasmon Cocoa and the Oats continued to be advertised extensively well into the 1920s, suggesting sustained consumption of these nutritionally supplemented foods. However, the company advertised plain Plasmon much less frequently after the early 1910s.¹⁰¹ The flavorless white powder never became a mainstream health food. Consumers seem to have been unwilling to change their foodways to incorporate it. However, the enduring consumption of some mixtures, which cost much the same as premium brands of cocoa and oats, suggest that scientifically-endorsed strengthening foods that required the eater only to change their brand of staples were appealing. In contrast, Sanatogen, whose advertising emphasized its benefits in fighting the other aspect of degeneration, nervous rather than physical weakness, was more enduring in the marketplace.

Sanatogen: Elite Nerve Tonic

It is unlikely that consumers could have told Sanatogen and Plasmon apart based on their appearance, flavor, or bodily effects though they are unlikely to have thought to try: Sanatogen’s manufacturers, Bauer & Cie., positioned it as a different kind of product entirely.¹⁰² Sanatogen’s story began, like Plasmon’s, in Berlin. Its manufacturers Bauer & Cie., established its own subsidiaries in Britain (and elsewhere) to manufacture and sell Sanatogen to local markets, using the same arguments in each place, albeit adapted to local cultural values.¹⁰³ It therefore reached Britain a few years later than Plasmon. Unique among the newly invented milk protein powders, they framed Sanatogen as a therapeutic substance for those suffering from the debilitating degenerative effects of modern life on the nerves and brain; its protein was secondary and instead the manufacturer relied on its phosphates, a mineral common to all milk powders. They achieved this by intertwining three separate strands of scientific knowledge to differentiate their product and substantiate their claims about its effects on nervous and overall health.

The first strand was Sanatogen’s legitimacy as a therapeutic agent. Physicians and surgeons had been impressed by various milk protein powders, which they tested alongside medical therapies. These powders represented a leap forward in invalid feeding, providing something that could be snuck unnoticeably into other foods, was digestible, and offered a concentrated source of protein. They were an advance on traditional invalid foods which offered little in the form of conventional nutrition. Accordingly, physicians wrote up their experiences in medical journals, reporting that “plasmon,” “sanatogen,” and similar substances were useful, their non-capitalization designating them as legitimate therapeutic substances of great utility in the sick-room.¹⁰⁴ The research reports do not suggest that physicians thought any one of them to be superior to the rest, and only Sanatogen made extensive use of them.¹⁰⁵

The second strand of knowledge related to the rising preoccupation with what we might today contextualize as stress, but which, at the fin-de-siècle, was positioned as nervous weakness.¹⁰⁶ This remains most familiar in the historiography in the context of neurasthenia, the so-called “disease of civilization,” which physicians said could be acquired simply thanks to the fast pace of modern life and by engaging too intensively in intellectual activity. Its symptoms included fatigue, nervous breakdown, and shell-shock (a matter of great import during the Great War), but it also could have physical effects, especially on the digestion. Equally, physical disorders could lead to nervousness.¹⁰⁷ The manufacturer positioned Sanatogen as a counterforce to this topical concern. It formed part of a diverse market for products to prevent and treat the condition which, as Michael Neve has observed, demonstrates that consumers were concerned about their nervous health; Sanatogen addressed their fears.¹⁰⁸

The third strand was the resurgence of the trope of “Nervennahrung,” the nerve nutrition upon which the health and wellbeing of the whole body depended. As Frank Stahnisch explains, this had been (and remains) a longstanding cultural construct at least since the early modern period, especially in Sanatogen’s native Germany where it had a place in wider enquiries about the functions and workings of the nervous system. According to this framing, a food might solve the intractable problem of nervous weakness. This school of enquiry was, however, quite separate from the dominant proteins and motor energy model of nutrition which largely ignored various candidates for Nervennahrung. These ranged from electrical impulses to supplementary phosphates, which addressed a putative physiological deficiency of this essential component of nerve tissues. Nutrition experts recognized that it was an essential mineral that could be connected with brain health, but they also knew it was abundant in normal foods and did not need to be supplemented: although there was no consensus over how much was required, deficiency was thought to be rarely an issue.¹⁰⁹ This recourse to phosphates, however, was not unique to Sanatogen. Several patent and orthodox medicines for nervousness were already premised on their phosphorus and the notion of a physiological deficiency in the nervous system, some of them (Phosferine, for example) very overtly.¹¹⁰ Other protein powder manufacturers including Plasmon would later incorporate phosphorus and nerves as part of their persuasive strategy.¹¹¹

The company responded to the commercial opportunities presented by the fear of nervous weakness and the necessity for supplementary phosphates by reframing the results of the therapeutic trials so as to position Sanatogen as a medically-endorsed therapeutic food for respectable hard-working people who were subject to the nerve-taxing trials of modernity which threatened their all-important productivity. Specifically, they presented the product as a specific treatment for the disorders that had featured in the trials, particularly in a series of disease-specific “Handy Booklets” containing reports by medical men.¹¹² These provided simplified medical information and advice about the condition, followed by recommended “doses” of Sanatogen and testimonials, largely from Eastern European physicians where the etiquette of using doctors’ statements for commercial gain was more liberal than Britain’s.¹¹³ While the earliest booklets addressed topics, such as digestive and lung problems, consumption, anemia and chlorosis, diseases that had been treated in trials, and the needs of delicate women or sick children, the publications increasingly addressed nervous illness. They illustrate the wider framing that the manufacturer used in all of its advertising to position Sanatogen as a curative medicinal substance for just about any disease, predicated on weak nerves and modernity.

One of these booklets, with the portentous title The Will to Do (1907), encapsulates Sanatogen’s promises of nerve strength particularly effectively and captures timely concerns about a decline in British masculinity.¹¹⁴ It drew attention to a failed will, an aspect of nervous degeneration that has been contextualized by Tracey Loughran. The nervous system was perceived by contemporaries as a hierarchy of layered functions that had been built through evolutionary processes. Basic animalistic emotions were at the base, and human volition or “will” was at the apex. The will allowed a man to control his emotions, drawing on his reserves of self-worth and patriotism in times of danger rather than succumbing to the emotion of fear. It was “will” which distinguished him from “brutes,” lesser races, and from animals. Willpower was central to British ideas of national character, the ability to carry on regardless. A strong will was therefore the marker of the most civilized of men.¹¹⁵ Sanatogen purportedly stemmed the risk that weak nerves posed to the will, and therefore to the nation.

This booklet was written by Caleb Saleeby, at this point best known as a popular science writer. He had qualified but decided not to practice as a physician, instead working as a writer and devoting himself to the cause of eugenics, the improvement of the race by scientific means, for which he was becoming a leading activist. Grant Rodwell suggests that Saleeby “had sufficient inherited income to support his lifestyle”; we might therefore view his endorsement of Sanatogen not simply as financially-driven puffery (the framing later presented to one of the committees considering the U.S. Food and Drugs Act), but as a sincere belief in the food’s value for racial improvement.¹¹⁶ The solution that Saleeby proposed here to this problem was not the selective breeding which suffuses the majority of the eugenics scholarship, but instead as something that people could act on to ameliorate their own condition: diet.¹¹⁷ Rodwell argues that Saleeby became particularly interested in dietary improvement as a means to advance racial progress more generally, advising the Board of Trade during the Great War (when they also enforced the sale of Sanatogen’s British subsidiary to British businessmen, of which more later). Promoting Sanatogen, Saleeby explained that

The really wise man will […] choose his food […] not as most of us do by exclusive reference to its taste, but by reference to its worth for the tissues of his brain. The worshippers of muscle may choose otherwise. [… In the past] the struggle for existence was a struggle as to who had the sharpest claws, the strongest teeth, the biggest muscles – and the weakest went to the wall. One of the great facts of progress has been the gradual discarding of the tooth test, the claw test and the like, and the substitution of the nerve test.¹¹⁸

Flavorless modern Sanatogen represented intelligent medically approved nutrition, and a way to maintain nerve and avoid neurasthenic degeneration.

Saleeby imbued scientific authority but he, like other non-practicing physicians including the popular science writer Andrew Wilson, emphasized his personal experience with the product.¹¹⁹ They thereby provided a bridge between the German physicians who had “proven” its effectiveness with patients, and the ordinary eaters being induced to buy it. Sanatogen also enrolled over one hundred similarly elite and hugely respected advocates who similarly spoke of their own personal experiences of its benefits. These included ten M.P.s, ten senior clergymen, around twenty writers, eight sportsmen, around a dozen theater performers, and a similar number of Lords, Ladies, and Sirs. Facsimiles of some of their letters were tucked into the back of some editions of The Will to Do, while advertisements included excerpts of the stories they told of their wonderful personal experiences of recovery from neuritis, influenza, and severe weakness, or of revitalization and “fresh vigour [sic] to the overworked body and mind.”¹²⁰ While celebrity endorsements were already a relatively commonplace way of enhancing the traditional power of testimonials, Sanatogen stood out for the sheer number and, especially, the eliteness of its testimonial-givers.¹²¹ These were persuasive, firstly because their authenticity was not in doubt (a point rammed home by the widespread reproduction of their signatures and portraits alongside their words) and because their authors were respected and their views therefore carried weight.¹²²

Sanatogen’s advertisers also harnessed the growing capacity of the popular press to print a wide variety of illustrated advertisements depicting allegorical narratives of the redemption of suffering humanity to repeat the same evolutionary message. They used elaborate imagery commissioned from some of Britain’s most noted illustrators including E.F. Skinner, Edmund J. Sullivan, Harold Nelson, and Fred Pegram, and also the German Hans Anker.¹²³ The advertisement in Figure 4 is typical of the genre, in depicting suffering and despairing men and women struggling wearily, their anguish evident in their posture and facial expressions. Invariably, they follow or reach toward a graceful figure, a fabric-draped young and graceful female, often offering a chalice of Sanatogen to those in need. In other such images, they are in pastoral or classical dress, and she is often depicted as the Greek “goddess of health.” After supping the healing elixir, they emerge from the shadows into the light, often descending staircases, smiling, with revived strong bodies proud and uplifted.¹²⁴

Figure 4. A “goddess” dispenses a chalice of Sanatogen to uplift the suffering people. From author’s collection.

Similarly evocative narratives were positioned in other cultural milieux, including ancient Egyptian and back-to-nature narratives, and contemporary middle class scenes where the afflicted were dreaming of Sanatogen-powered redemption. In one, a man sitting at his desk, his telephone representing the relentless pressure of work, dreams of a re-energizing leisure activities (Figure 5). Another shows a nurse supporting an ailing woman at the open window of a well-appointed room. She gazes wistfully, her arms outstretched toward the sunshine, Sanatogen written in lights (reflecting the mysterious power of modern electricity) in the sky (Figure 6). While, for convenience of reproduction, those reproduced here are from the upmarket weekly illustrated press, such advertisements and their simpler derivatives also appeared in popular newspapers.

Figure 5. Sanatogen and visions of escape from the pressures of work. From author’s collection.

Figure 6. Sanatogen and visions of a return to health. From author’s collection.

These advertisements depicted fantasies which drew on contemporary fears and desires which was the norm, as Lori Loeb has observed in her extensive analysis of advertising to women leading up to this period.¹²⁵ However, they were more than representations of simple desires. Their power came from the regular reinforcement of an evolutionary narrative familiar to contemporary readers of popular science writing, and which has been explored by Misia Landau: the fear that civilization’s achievements now represented a grave threat to man himself.¹²⁶ Sanatogen, in this narrative, was simultaneously both a natural food and a great technological advance which, though part of modern civilization, provided protection from its damaging effects. These do not therefore represent religious redemption or the following of religious duty, tropes which R. Marie Griffith observes suffused the teachings of many contemporary North American dietary and health reformers.¹²⁷

Instead, these fantasies represented redemption by the very powers which contemporaries argued were gradually usurping the position of religion in British society: consumerism and science, here both encapsulated by Sanatogen.¹²⁸ Eating Sanatogen was an act of self-care, but this was milder than the U.S. phenomenon that Lears observes, the widespread shift to a “therapeutic ethos” acquired through consumption and self-realization, representing what he terms a “pseudo-religion of health.”¹²⁹ In Britain, good health, acquired through consumption, was a means to acquire self-respect and to fulfill one’s duty. It was not necessary to make pious personal sacrifices in terms of the ridiculed diet epitomized by Miles (and Plasmon). It simply required sensible consumption of scientific products approved of by those held in respect.

Sanatogen’s elite advocates served, above all, to provide moral leadership. Everyone was invited to emulate them. The product’s positioning in a gray area between food and medicine served to remove suggestions of a base search for sensual pleasure or of foolish self-medication with disreputable patent medicines, but it did not imply that the eater was too poor to afford or too ignorant to recognize what constituted a nutritious diet. While Sanatogen’s broad advocate base and imagery may have been accidental, collectively they provided leadership and authority from respected sectors of society and provided a vision of the identity to which they might aspire. The classical cultures and literary references (Shakespeare, Goethe) which Sanatogen deployed in advertisements positioned those that swallowed it as well-informed; adults and children of all classes, including political activists, feminists, and those concerned with self-improvement, were familiar with these cultural tropes, as various essays in Henry Stead and Edith Hall’s collected volume about classical symbolism argue.¹³⁰ Sanatogen’s advertisements therefore addressed the familiar concerns and aspirations of a wide aspirational audience.

Sanatogen received nothing like the ridicule meted out to Plasmon. The apparent ease with which the company accumulated respected advocates instead suggests that it was taken seriously as a legitimate and important remedy; certainly, from around 1910, lookalike products with similar names, advertisements, and claims started to proliferate, an indication of its commercial success.¹³¹ Even its endorsement by M.P.s does not appear to have drawn particular criticism. Indeed, Mr. Charles Bathurst, a leading member of the Pure Food and Health Society and a member of the Select Committee appointed to investigate Patent Medicines in 1913–14, commented (apparently without irony) that their endorsement “shows it must be a very valuable thing.”¹³² After the start of the Great War, the influential British Medical Journal reported uncritically that Sanatogen had been bracketed alongside aspirin, heroin (largely used as a cough suppressant), and salvarsan, the new remedy for syphilis, as valuable German “medicinal substances” whose continued availability needed to be secured in Britain.¹³³ The Board of Trade duly considered but decided against suspending their manufacturers’ patents and trademarks, but was persuaded that Sanatogen’s British subsidiary, including its Penzance factory, should be taken under British ownership, a maneuver that was contextualized as demonstrating the product’s importance to British masculinity. The British enterprise was sold for the knock-down price of £360,000 in 1916 to a group of investors led by the hugely energetic and fiercely patriotic Liberal ex-politician and coal-mining businessman, Lord Rhondda. Rhondda had in 1915 represented Britain in negotiations for the supply of munitions with the U.S. and Canada and would, in 1917, take on the wartime role of Food Controller.¹³⁴ While the general tone of Sanatogen’s advertisements continued largely unchanged with this shift, the impeccable British credentials of the new owner (“Genatosan”) were used to construct a newly jingoistic narrative about Sanatogen. It became positioned as a patriotic part of the war effort. Sanatogen was among the “New British Possessions,” a British triumph illustrated by Skinner with Britannia pointing to Sanatogen (and the company’s germ-killing Formamint), and to African territories that had also been seized from the Germans (Figure 7). Sanatogen continued to be sold in Britain as a nerve nutrient for several decades. It is still available, though now it is positioned as a “Sanatogen High Protein Powder” with a picture of a cyclist on the package.¹³⁵

Figure 7. Jingoistic advertisement for the newly British Sanatogen. From author’s collection.

Conclusion

At the fin-de-siècle, chemists and engineers commodified methods for transforming skimmed milk waste into nutritious edible powders. These, Plasmon, Sanatogen and, to a lesser extent, generic dried skimmed milk, were all similar chemically, and therefore in their putative health effects, according to contemporary knowledge.¹³⁶ Despite their shared properties, this paper has shown that they were positioned as entirely different things. Plasmon was a dull and somewhat risible strengthening food for invalids and the earnest; Sanatogen was a medicinal supplement to strengthen the nerves of well-fed and aspirational people; while if consumers thought about dried skimmed milk at all, it was a dull commodity with no utility in a domestic kitchen.

How did these differences arise? The appetite for Sanatogen and Plasmon versus dried skimmed milk defies the logic of scientific facts, flavor, and cost. Indeed, as Barbara Orland similarly observed in her investigation of the debates over artificial baby food, scientific facts alone were not sufficiently persuasive to swing an argument in the popular sphere.¹³⁷ Sidney Mintz offers a useful perspective, suggesting that people’s reasons for eating new foodstuffs are complex but often boil down to power relations.¹³⁸ The protein powders’ power was inherent in their patented production processes. Because it was possible to make similar protein powders using numerous patentable processes, patents here served less as commercial protection for intellectual property, and more as means whereby these manufacturers laid claim to uniqueness and therefore to scientific authority.¹³⁹ The patents thus provided cultural capital, which could be used to raise economic capital, and which could be deployed to exert the myth-making power of advertising, if the manufacturers chose and had the skills to do so.¹⁴⁰ Plasmon and Sanatogen’s manufacturers did; numerous competitors were less successful.¹⁴¹ Both companies’ advertising communicated the scientific claims premised on largely uncontested nuggets of scientific knowledge about their bodily effects. Different “facts” were chosen by these two manufacturers to reinforce carefully-crafted narratives of regeneration of muscular or nervous strength respectively, positioned in a cultural frame which established distinct images of Plasmon- or Sanatogen-eaters to which consumers could aspire. The makers acquired further power by securing respected personalities as authoritative product advocates with credibility both as people whose views could be relied on, and as ordinary eaters with bodies.¹⁴² They therefore bridged the credibility gap between abstract science and real people. Plasmon and Sanatogen were thus established as health foods, self-help technologies with which consumers could acquire desirable bodily and mental improvements, simply by swallowing.

These same opportunities were not available to the manufacturers of generic skimmed milk powder. Dozens, probably hundreds, of makers did not have the economic power to differentiate their identical products with patents, establish consumption myths, or recruit physicians to provide medical authority. There was no single organization which stood to gain enough to offset the costs of intensively promoting the health benefits of this peculiar commodity to uninformed consumers, though the arguments were stronger for whole dried milk for infant feeding, which public health authorities did promote.¹⁴³ Agricultural writers commenting in the popular press framed dried skimmed milk as the industrial food ingredient that it largely became.¹⁴⁴ It was rarely advertised to consumers at all, let alone as a health food, with the makers of Benger’s Food going so far as to advertise that their product did not contain dried milk.¹⁴⁵

Perceptions of the merits of these products were not objective, even when the commentators were scientifically well-informed. Instead, they were strongly influenced by the commentator’s frame of reference. Because Miles was a vegetarian and vegetarians looked for new sources of protein, he advocated the explicitly protein-rich Plasmon rather than the equally proteinaceous Sanatogen which was promoted based rather on its phosphorus. Elite advocates of Sanatogen lost no status from consuming a supplement that would boost their weary brain, but most would not have promoted the food (Plasmon) that implied their diet was lacking in protein because of poverty or crankiness.

More broadly, advocates’ selective use of scientific evidence demonstrates the power inherent in nutritional knowledge when it is combined with sources of political or economic power. As Gyorgy Scrinis has argued, such knowledge has a propensity for being used reductively and ideologically, a phenomenon he terms “nutritionism.”¹⁴⁶ It seems that consumers’ choices were inevitably driven by the interests of economic actors and the compelling narratives that they constructed around scientific “facts” and, because science was complicated, people whom they felt they could trust. The facts they used were not, usually, wrong enough to draw legislative or cultural sanction. However, we should be cautious about positioning manufacturers as villains and consumers uncomplicatedly as victims. Eaters colluded willingly, using these products’ myths as mechanisms for self-definition during this era of cultural upheaval.¹⁴⁷ Clearly, the cultural values promoted by the manufacturers resonated with consumers and provided some comfort beyond the products’ purported physiological benefits, and accordingly they provide insights into the lives and wants of ordinary people and the diverse meanings of good health. These cultural values were temporally specific. Arguably, Sanatogen remained popular for longer than Plasmon because nervous weakness and stress remained, as Mark Jackson has articulated, matters of medical and cultural concern during the inter-war period and beyond.¹⁴⁸

In the absence of food shortages and other such external pressures, this analysis would suggest that people’s food choices cannot necessarily be changed by rational appeals about scientifically-endorsed nutritional value, flavor or cost. However, manufacturers were able to use innovative advertising to reconfigure a waste product as apparently disgusting as skimmed milk by engaging with people’s emotions and their concerns about health that were rooted in cultural values. These ultra-processed powders foreshadow our world of synthetic powders and supplements. This examination provides a historical perspective on a phenomenon that remains hidden in plain sight still today.

Acknowledgments

I would first like to thank Dr. Katrina-Louise Moseley and Dr. Eleanor Barnett for organizing the superb Waste Not, Want Not Conference in Cambridge in 2019, where I presented an early version of this paper, and for inviting me to include this revised version in this collection. I also thank them alongside Dr. Carolyn Cobbold, Dr. Joanna Crosby, Dr. E.C. Spary and the anonymous reviewer for invaluable suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lesley Steinitz

Lesley Steinitz is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Cambridge, where she is preparing to submit her dissertation about the adoption of fin-de-siècle health foods as commercial responses to the threats posed by decline and degeneration. Lesley first became interested in the science and culture of “health foods” while she was completing her MSc in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology at the sadly now defunct London Centre collaboration between Imperial College and UCL. Prior to this, Lesley enjoyed a successful business career serving the healthcare and publishing sectors.

Notes

1. “Protein Supplements Market Size.”

2. Otter, Diet for a Large Planet.

3. Elmore, “Commercial Ecology.”

4. Cobbold, A Rainbow Palate.

5. Church, “Advertising Consumer Goods”; and Schwarzkopf, “What was advertising,” and “Turning Trademarks into Brands.”

6. Nevett, Advertising in Britain.

7. Based on searches in the archival newspaper databases.

8. Huang, “Medical Advertising”; Pawley, “Revolution in Health”; and Heffernan, “Superfood or Superficial?”.

9. Apple, “‘Advertised’”; Davenport-Hines, Glaxo; and Jones, Business of Medicine.

10. Chas. Underhill’s Cash Price List; Hutchison, Food, 141; Sanatogen, “How much?”; and “Dried Milk.”

11. Ekenberg, “Prospectus”; and Lehmann, “Condensed Skimmed Milk.”

12. Pick, Faces of Degeneration.

13. DuPuis, Nature’s Perfect Food; and Hutchison, Food.

14. Atkins, Liquid Materialities; and Bond, Notes on Milk.

15. In addition to works about milk cited specifically, see Orland, “Enlightened Milk”; Orland, “Milky Ways”; and Valenze, Milk. There is a useful bibliography for older material in Vernon, “Milk.”

16. “Fairy Turnspit”; “Northward Ho!”; regarding workhouse tea, see “To Guardians”; and regarding vomit, see Aldis, “On the Treatment of Diarrhœa.”

17. “Bookmakers and Betting.”

18. Burnett, Plenty and Want, 151; “A Day at a London Dairy”; and Elmore, “Commercial Ecology.”

19. Bond, Notes on Milk.

20. Atkins, “The Retail Milk Trade in London”; Bond, Notes on Milk; Long, “Phases of Rural Life”; “Tralee Union”; and “Free Breakfasts at School.”

21. Willoughby, Milk; and Miles, What Foods Feed Us.

22. den Hartog, “The Discovery of Vitamins”; and McConnell, “British Dairy Farming.”

23. Miles, “Wasted Milk.”

24. Miles Muscle, Brain, and Diet; “Skimmed Milk”; and Steinitz, “Making Muscular Machines.”

25. Rowntree, Poverty; Oddy, “Working-Class Diets”; Burnett, “Plenty and Want”; Kamminga and Cunningham, “Introduction”; and Neswald and Smith, “Introduction.”

26. Dwork, “The Milk Option.”

27. Bourke, Dismembering the Male; Chamberlin and Gilman, Degeneration; Heggie, “Lies”; Olson, Science and Scientism; Pick, Faces of Degeneration; and Searle, National Efficiency.

28. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body; and Krätz, “Tropon.”

29. Miyawaki, Condensed Milk, 241–2; Robinson, Modern Dairy Technology; and Scott, Engineering.

30. Lebert, A Treatise on Milk, 22; and Orland, Motherhood.

31. Jones, The Business of Medicine; Davenport-Hines and Slinn, Glaxo; Apple, “Commercial Infant Feeding”; and Otter, Diet for a Large Planet.

32. Scherer, Casein; Tague, Casein; Miyawaki, Condensed Milk; and “Technische Rundschau.”

33. Scherer, Casein; “A New Industry,” Chambers’s Journal; Blumenfeld, “R. D. B.’s Procession,” 83.

34. “A New Industry,” Chambers’s Journal.

35. “Plasmon,” Berliner Tageblatt.

36. “New companies,” October 1899; “International Plasmon,”1903; and Rasmussen, Mark Twain.

37. “New companies,” December 1899; and “International Plasmon,” 1902.

38. “Obituary,”Financial Times; “Obituary,” Leamington Spa Courier; “Local Law Case”; “Late Sir Montague Nelson”; “Fortune from Frozen Meat”; and Leahy, “The Nelsons of Warwick.”

39. “International Plasmon,” 1904; Twain, Mark, Correspondence; Rasmussen, Mark Twain; “Petitions in bankruptcy”; ‘Mark Twain Concern”; and “Mark Twain in Milk Products Co.”

40. “International Plasmon,” 1906; Plasmon (Heinz), “Plasmon dal 1902”; and “Heinz negotiating for foreign units.”

41. Biscotti Plasmon package.

42. “The money market”; and “Analytical Records. Plasmon Biscuits.”

43. “Company news: Plasmon.”

44. Searle, Quest for National Efficiency.

45. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body; and Rabinbach, Human Motor.

46. Heffernan, “Superfood or Superficial?”

47. “Plasmon,” Berliner Tageblatt.

48. Steinitz, “Making Muscular Machines” and “The Language of Advertising.”

49. Apple, Perfect Motherhood.

50. Nevett, Advertising.

51. “A Magic Food,” Dundee Evening Post; “A Magic Food,” Aberdeen Press; “One Pound of Beef in a Biscuit.”

52. “A Magic Food,” Daily Mail.

53. Fiddes, Meat; Guerrini, “Health, National Character”; Woods, “The Shape of Meat”; and Burnett, Plenty and Want.

54. “A Magic Food,” Daily Mail.

55. Ibid.

56. Counihan and Van Esterik, “Introduction.”

57. Noakes, “Representing ‘A Century of Inventions.’”

58. Bonea et al., Anxious Times; Kemp, Wells; and Haynes, Wells.

59. Partridge, “Mr. Punch’s Academy.”

60. “Mr. Punch’s Sketchy Interviews.”

61. “Table Talk.”

62. Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians.

63. Earle, A Third Pot-Pourri; Broadbent, Science in the Daily Meal; and Miles, Muscle, Brain and Diet.

64. Counihan and Van Esterik, “Introduction.”

65. “Pooh-Poohri”, a parody of Earle, A Third Pot-Pourri.

66. “Books of the Season.”

67. Russell, Londoner’s Log-Book, 198–9.

68. Anstice, “Father, by thy love,” 71.

69. Rabinbach, Human Motor.

70. Allen, “Miles.”

71. E.g. Miles, Muscle, Brain, and Diet.

72. Brake and Demoor, “Miles, Eustace Hamilton.”

73. Bud, “‘Applied Science’”; Nieto-Galan, Science in the Public Sphere; Rabinbach, Human Motor; and Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body.

74. Miles, cited in “Plasmon Cocoa.”

75. Miles, Better Food for Boys.

76. “Life on 2d. a Day.”

77. “Tennis Champion’s Own Restaurant”; “The Composition of Some Proprietary Food preparations”; Miles, Eustace Miles Restaurant Recipes; and “Lyra Hypochondriaca.”

78. Miles, Better Food for Boys.

79. Letter from Mrs Eustace Miles to The Times.

80. Miles, “Life on Threepence a Day.”

81. “International Plasmon,” 1903.

82. “Plasmon – What is Plasmon?” 210.

83. E.g. Plasmon, “The Cost 3d a Day” and “For 3 Pence a Day.”

84. Plasmon, “Plasmon – What is Plasmon?”

85. “Table Talk.”

86. Knotts, “Mr Punch’s Special Articles.”

87. Ibid.

88. Heffernan, “Body Projects”; and Miles, “An Athlete’s Diet.”

89. Miles, “Tennis and Racquets in America”; and “Mr. Jay Gould Dead.”

90. Hummel and Dyreson, “From Folk Game to Elite Pastime.”

91. Haley, The Healthy Body; Lake, A Social History of Tennis; and Cow and Co., “Spiropole.”

92. “Square Mealers”; “The Danger of Being”; and Wodehouse, “Public-School Food.”

93. Steinitz, “Language of Advertising”; Richards, Commodity Culture.

94. “Ilkeston Agricultural Society”; and Plasmon, Plasmon Foods.

95. “International Plasmon,” 1903.

96. Plasmon, Plasmon Foods, 27.

97. Ibid., 29.

98. Ibid., 28.

99. Ibid.

100. Miller, A Modern History of the Stomach; and Haushofer, “Between Food and Medicine.”

101. See any of the British newspaper archives.

102. Official Catalog of the Collective Exhibition.

103. Huang, “Medical Advertising”; and Pawley, “Revolution in Health.”

104. For example “Therapeutics. (197)”; and “Therapeutics (73). Regarding the commercial practice of using lower-case product names, see Report from the Select Committee on Patent Medicines, paragraph 38.

105. E.g. Sanatogen, Sanatogen in Chlorosis.

106. Jackson, Age of Stress.

107. See Chamberlin and Gilman, “Conclusion”; Salisbury and Shail, Neurology and Modernity ; Gijswijt-Hofstra and Porter, Cultures of Neurasthenia; Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue ; Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves” ; Loughran, Shell-shock; and Ishizuka, “Carlyle’s Nervous Dyspepsia.”

108. Neve, “Public Views.”

109. Kamminga, “Nutrition for the People”; Hutchison, Food; and Montcrieff and Baigent, “Hutchison.”

110. Ueyama, Health in the Marketplace; and Ashton & Parsons, “Nerve Pains”; Stahnisch, “The Emergence of Nervennahrung”; and Holmes, “The Transformation of the Science of Nutrition.”

111. Stahnisch, “The Emergence of Nervennahrung.”

112. Sanatogen, “Sick Made Well!”

113. For example see Sanatogen, The Ailments of Women.

114. Forth, Masculinity.

115. Loughran, Shell-Shock.

116. Rodwell, “Dr. Caleb Williams Saleeby,” 24; and United States Congress, The Pure Food and Drugs Act.

117. Pick, Faces of Degeneration; and Turda, “Biology and Eugenics.”

118. Saleeby, The Will To Do, 3.

119. Wilson, The Uses and Merits of Sanatogen.

120. Re Neuritis, the painter Mr. Frank Spenlove, in Sanatogen, “A thousand times”; Re revitalization, the novelist Mr. A.G. Hales in Sanatogen, “Sanatogen will give you back Health”; and quotation from Sir Gilbert Parker M.P. in Sanatogen, “Thinking of the Holidays?”.

121. Morgan, “The Reward”; Schweitzer and Moskowitz, Testimonial Advertising.

122. E.g. Sanatogen, “The Voice of the People.”

123. Sanatogen Advertisements: Edmund J. Sullivan; E.F. Skinner; Fred Pegram; and Harold Nelson. For Anker, see Figure 6.

124. E.g. Sanatogen, “A Gift from the Goddess of Health”; and Sanatogen, “A New Lease of Health”; Sanatogen, “Sanatogen. A Second Life.” See also the advertisements reproduced in Huang, “Medical Advertising” and Pawley, “Revolution in Health.”

125. Loeb, Consuming Angels.

126. Landau, Narratives of Human Evolution.

127. Griffith, Born Again Bodies; and Hall, Muscular Christianity.

128. Brown, Death of Christian Britain.

129. Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization,” 17.

130. Sanatogen, “‘I have Received a Second Life’” quotes Shakespeare; and Sanatogen, “The Supreme Revitalizer” includes the quotation from Goethe’s Faust, “Look yonder, Hope for the World dawns there!”. There are also advertisements showing scenes from ancient Egypt, e.g. Sanatogen, “Building to Endure.”; Stead and Hall, “Introduction”; Ravenhill-Johnson, “Vulcan – a ‘Working-Class’ God?”; and Goff, “The Greeks of the WEA.”

131. For example Sanagen, “The Cruel Strains.”

132. Report from the Select Committee on Patent Medicines, paragraph 2523.

133. “The Present Position.”

134. John, Turning the Tide; and Morgan, Life of Viscount Rhondda.

135. See contemporary package of “Sanatogen High Protein Powder.”

136. Hutchison, Food.

137. Orland, Motherhood.

138. Mintz, Tasting Food.

139. For a broad discussion of patents, see Biagoli et al., Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property; and Arapostathis and Gooday, Patently Contestable. Also see Church, “Advertising Consumer Goods.”

140. Barthes, “Towards and Psychosociology.”

141. Krätz, “Tropon”; “Technische Rundschau.”

142. Shapin, Never Pure. 

143. “Sheffield’s Dried Milk Scheme.”

144. “East Penwith Agricultural Exchange. Lecture by Mr Jebus Bickle.”

145. Benger’s Advertisement, St. Helen’s Examiner.

146. Scrinis, Nutritionism.

147. Saler, The Fin-de-Siècle World; Ledger and McCracken. “Introduction”; Heffer, Decadence; Stearns,“Modern Patterns in Emotions History.”

148. E.g. Sanatogen, Sanatogen in Chlorosis.