Vitamins, Pesticides, and Fertilizers

At the beginning of the 1900s, new scientific research changed the ways we understood, produced, and consumed food.

In the century’s first decades, biochemist Elmer McCollum used rats to test how the foods the animals ate (or didn’t) impacted their growth and wellbeing. Through such investigations, McCollum and his peers identified multiple critical nutrients they named “vitamines”—a mix of the Latin word for “life,” vita, and the “amine” chemical compounds thought to be associated with nutrients (the “e” was later dropped). This knowledge led to the promotion of particular vitamin-rich foods such as milk and citrus.

The discovery of vitamins also contributed to contemporary understandings of diet-related illness and death. The germ theory of disease of the late 1800s had identified microorganisms as critical sources of illness. But scientists in the first decades of the 1900s started linking some diseases not to the presence of a germ, but to the absence of vitamins. Named “Famine Fighter” by the July 1942 edition of Real Life Comics (below), Dr. Joseph Goldberger argued that the disease pellagra raging across the U.S. South in the 1920s and ’30s was not an infectious disease but instead a deficiency in a key nutrient (later identified as niacin, or vitamin B3). Other diseases attributed to the absence of key nutrients in a diet include scurvy, rickets, and beriberi.

Building on public and private investments into agricultural research in the late 1800s, such as the establishment of the United States Department of Agriculture in 1862, farmers were planting new seeds, boosting soil with new fertilizers, killing pests with new pesticides, and using more and more mechanical machines to increase their production of plants and animals for food. One of the most significant developments was the Haber-Bosch Process. Developed by German chemist Fritz Haber and engineer Carl Bosch in 1905, it increased the amount of nitrogen fertilizers available to farmers. By the time the Great Depression struck in 1929, U.S. farm yields had increased 13 percent over the prior decade.

This growth in agricultural productivity, however, became a problem during the Great Depression. Farmers were producing more fruits, vegetables, and animal meat than they could sell, threating the prices of those goods. To assist farmers, the U.S. government began buying these surplus goods and distributing them for free to schools and other sites. It was the federal government’s first support for school lunches. It would continue this support through the Great Depression and World War II. The government not only provided food, but it also provided money to support both the construction of school cafeterias and kitchens, and the labor who worked there. But limits on how the funds could be spent meant schools without kitchens or cooking staff struggled to participate. And some states distributed the funds unequally across their schools, especially in the South, where schools were racially segregated.