> Also, patronizing. And quite possibly mistaken.

Perhaps I was unclear. It was my intention to point out two things. First, that the base ingredient grains we eat now are a great deal different from what was regularly consumed in 1914. Second that our sources of grains are more likely to be prepackaged foods containing ingredients that were very uncommon in 1914. This was done as a means of pointing out a significant logical fallacy in the original article.

Seems like we've got some scope mismatch here. I very specifically want to point out that what goes into a loaf of bread now is not the same as what went into a loaf of bread in 1914. Fine white flour (and sugar) were still somewhat dear around the turn of the century. It's no surprise that a dishonest baker would extend it with chalk. The less close you were to the city, the more dear they were or the more likely you were to grow your own or do without. I made the assumption that most people would eat more coarse bread. Just for kicks, I looked up the ingredients of three different brands of bread. The main ingredient was, indeed, flour. Typically followed by HCFS, water, yeast and less than 2% of stuff like barley malt, soybean oil, diglycerides, and guar gum. Thus I am willing to accept "exaggerated" over "wrong" -- while I was writing, my frustration over the afore-mentioned ingredients in DAIRY products was foremost in my mind. If you haven't already read it, I recommend _Food Politics_ by Marion Nestle. http://www.foodpolitics.com/

It just so happens that I've got a stack of very old cookbooks that belonged to my great grandmother. Well, half of it. My mom has the other half. I started baking using recipes from those books around the age of 9. The backs of these books are full of notes written in her spidery handwriting. Notes about substitutions (she lived through two world wars), notes about compensating for ambient conditions, and the recipes from her childhood. Well, longer than that -- she didn't come to the US until she was 30. When my results did not match hers, I assumed her base ingredients were different from mine. This partly responsible for what lead to learning how flour is typed by ash in Europe. It's also how I learned that most of the oats consumed in the US around the time my great grandmother emigrated here would have been imported from Scotland and Canada, and that they would have been steel-cut to increase cooking time. And that rolled oats came into being sometime around 1910. It's also what eventually lead me to read _Day of St Anthony's Fire_, but that's a whole 'nother topic of conversation. From this, I'm making an "educated guess" as to what a cup of flour would have been like in 1914. And you have to admit, it read well.

This would be one of those deals where I have zero credentials to offer other than the claims made in the last paragraph. Or you can ask tptacek... pretty sure he'll provide a glowing reference for my cooking skills. Having no phone, television or computer in my childhood, I turned to the big stack of cookbooks and the abundance of fresh ingredients available on our small farm. Doesn't make me an expert, but I am quite facile at slinging some tasty hash.

As for non-grain foods, jam is, more or less, flavored pectin. Why is there pectin in Stonyfield Farms yogurt? So they have to put less actual yogurt in there. Why is there 'modified food starch' in Breakstones's cottage cheese? "Mouth feel," is what they'll tell you. But I've had hüttenkäse that had much better "mouth feel" with nothing in it but milk, salt and culture (likely due to higher fat content).

And thanks for the links. It amazes me to think that my great grandparents -- the ones I knew, at least -- lived into their late 90s with plaster, alum, strychnine, sawdust and bean flour in their food. Maybe the fact that the latest act cited in the second article was passed in 1899 helped, somehow.