The War on Bugs - 9781933392462

In the nineteenth century, as immigration greatly expanded the American population, demands on crop output increased. Seizing an opportunity to play upon fears of food shortages, chemical companies declared war on bugs and declining soil fertility, the archenemies of the American farmer. By the 1860s, pesticide and fertilizer manufacturers developed highly sophisticated media campaigns. Bugs were touted as a mortal threat to American farms, and quacks promoted miracle cures culled from industrial waste such as whale oil, arsenic, mercury, sulfuric acid, and lead in the form of dusts, granules, and liquid sprays. New fertilizer products also came from industrial waste piles, including potash, sulfur, and sodium nitrate.
From the start, farmers and consumers opposed the marketers' noxious shill. But more than a century of collusion among advertisers, editors, scientists, large-scale farmers, government agencies - and even Dr. Seuss - convinced most farmers to use deadly chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, and, more recently, genetically modified organisms.
Akin to seminal works on the topic like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Arthur Kallet and F. J. Schlink's 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, The War on Bugs - richly illustrated with dozens of original advertisements and promotions - details both the chemical industry's relentless efforts and the recurring waves of resistance by generations of consumers, farmers, and activists against toxic food, a struggle that continues today but with deep roots in the long rise of industrial agriculture.