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A Failure to Prohibit: New York City's Underground Bob Veal Trade1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2013

Joshua Specht
Joshua Specht*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
*
jspecht@fas.harvard.edu; joshspecht@gmail.com
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Abstract

During the Progressive Era, bob veal, the meat of calves slaughtered at younger than four weeks of age, was incorrectly believed to be poisonous, and its sale was prohibited in areas across the United States. Yet a thriving underground trade persisted. This article studies bob veal's prohibition in Progressive Era New York City to understand where the meat was coming from, how it reached diners' tables, and who was eating it. I argue that bob veal's consumers, many of whom were recent immigrants and the urban poor, recognized the meat was benign. In examining the prohibition's failure, this article studies the politics of regulation and policing. For the ban's advocates, the language and assumptions of the broader pure food and public health movements were simultaneously empowering and constraining, giving reformers a political language to build institutional support for the prohibition and helping journalists sell newspapers even as this language required effacing the complexity of the bob veal trade. From the perspective of bob veal's many producers, smugglers, and consumers, this article highlights how a diffuse social power—a politics on the ground—can trump formal authority.

Information

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , October 2013, pp. 475 - 501
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2013 

On July 6, 1901, food poisoning “prostrated” the Gross family of Paterson, New Jersey.Footnote 2 The culprit was “bob veal,” the meat from calves slaughtered at less than four weeks of age. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this meat, known today for being flavorless and bland, was considered a public health menace. In 1886, ground bob veal masquerading as chicken salad allegedly poisoned a third of the undergraduates at Haverford College.Footnote 3 Nearly thirty years later, a “tempting chicken salad” poisoned sixty-five doctors at Bellevue hospital. Once again, bob veal was to blame.Footnote 4

In none of these cases was the veal described as spoiled or diseased. Rather, bob veal was believed to be inherently harmful. An 1872 newspaper article explained that “eminent physicians everywhere are agreed that [bob veal] is positively unwholesome and detrimental to the human system.” According to a French doctor, “in every pound of veal one week old there is enough poison to kill a child of four years.”Footnote 5

Despite journalists' claims, the view that bob veal was “positively unwholesome and detrimental” was more common wisdom than established medical fact. Before the 1880s, doctors, the French physician notwithstanding, appeared to have paid little attention to the issue. Rather, the belief had its roots in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the meat's association with poverty—Irish peasants in England and impoverished immigrants in the United States—as well as the meat sometimes being taken from sickly or miscarried calves, led to a popular view that the meat was harmful.Footnote 6 This assumption only became more pervasive once the meat was prohibited, because the fact that it was often smuggled in unsanitary conditions increased the likelihood the meat was contaminated or spoiled.

Stoked by protectionist butchers, this widespread belief caused the meat to be explicitly banned in many U.S. cities by the 1850s. Though the exact date it was made illegal in New York City is unclear, nineteenth-century food writer Thomas De Voe references a case from the 1850s in which a New York butcher was prosecuted for selling the meat.Footnote 7 Similar cases, presented matter-of-factly, appeared in both the New York Times and New York Tribune. Footnote 8 Yet these incidents appear unremarkable at the time, as mid-century meat markets in New York were chaotic and rife with sanitary violations as a consequence of the relaxation of older rules that had tightly regulated entry into butchering.Footnote 9 In the mid-nineteenth century, the bob veal traffic was a marginal issue.

It was not until the 1870s that the bob veal trade became a pressing issue, most visibly in New York, then the country's most populous city and largest consumer market. The New York Metropolitan Board of Health, created in 1866 and later renamed the Department of Health, began conducting large-scale raids on bob veal smuggling operations, and the New York Times and New York Tribune began running stories sensationalizing the trade and its opponents.Footnote 10 To build support for expanded authority, the leadership of both the Board of Health and its later incarnation began pursuing political goals by engaging directly with the public.Footnote 11 By the 1880s, newspaper editorials lamented the bob veal trade, and city health inspectors tallied their meat seized in the tens of thousands of pounds.

Despite increased policing and new state and federal restrictions, the bob veal trade flourished. Smugglers continued to bring tens of thousands of pounds of bob veal into the city each year. Who was forcing this illicit meat on the general public, and why were people buying it? In other words, why was prohibition ineffective?

In reality, this meat was not being forced on an unsuspecting public. New York's poorer residents knew that they were buying bob veal and, despite the claims of sanitary experts and the press, recognized the meat was harmless. This recognition, coupled with the profitability of the bob veal trade, underpinned a commitment on the part of the meat's producers, smugglers, and consumers to subvert or ignore the prohibition. Furthermore, the ban failed not because of poor enforcement or insufficient funding, as advocates at the time argued, but rather because the prohibition was embedded in a broader set of contradictory and ambiguous commercial regulations, social practices, and legal interpretations.

These reasons for the prohibition's failure will be developed in each of this article's three sections. Part one examines the relationship between structural changes in New York's dairy industry and the rise of the traffic in bob veal, a byproduct of dairy farming. During the late nineteenth century, as changes favoring large milk distributors as well as pressure from city purchasers to keep milk prices low squeezed small dairy farmers financially, the sale of bob veal became increasingly vital to milk producers. Though this factor is largely ignored in the literature on dairy production, the legitimate sale of milk in New York City and the survival of milk's producers was interconnected with the bob veal traffic.Footnote 12 Next, in examining bob veal smugglers' tactics and health inspectors' failed enforcement strategies, this essay highlights the legal difficulties of enforcing the ban. Finally, the justifications of the crusade against bob veal and its perceived (and actual) consumers—a fight that continued even after doctors concluded that bob veal was not in fact poisonous—will be studied to highlight how the prohibition related to contemporary views about the urban poor and sanitary reform. Each section will examine the limits of formal political power, revealing how inspectors' and reformers' legislative authority and control of public discourse crumbled in the face of the diffuse customary and social power of bob veal's producers, smugglers, and consumers.

The conclusion will probe the broader implications of the bob veal prohibition's failure to accommodate the social politics of regulation, by which I mean the institutional and ideological networks of reformers and bureaucrats as well as the conflicts over their ideas' implementation that characterized the Progressive Era.Footnote 13 Bob veal was never as visible an issue as the fight for pure milk or oleomargarine regulation, but its relationship to these products meant that these conflicts and their fallout affected the course of the bob veal ban. It is precisely because the struggle over bob veal's prohibition did not fit neatly with more visible political or regulatory issues that its story is important for understanding the history of regulation. For the ban's supporters, these related issues and movements were simultaneously empowering and constraining. The language of the pure food movement as well as the belief that government has a responsibility to protect the public health enabled the passage of a ban on the sale of bob veal and secured funding for food inspectors, but these claims also obligated inspectors to attempt a task they likely understood was impossible—limiting the flow of bob veal into New York.

The Expansion of the American Dairy Industry

Where there are dairy farms, there are veal calves. Dairy cows are impregnated yearly to keep milk output high. On birth, their calves are separated by sex. While heifers often enter the dairy herd, bull calves are usually extraneous. Though not good for maturing into beef cattle, these offspring make suitable veal.

As a result, the expansion of the bob veal trade was a direct outgrowth of the post-Civil War increase in dairy production. Improved farming techniques and the expansion of the national railroad infrastructure increased the scale of agricultural production and meant that rapidly growing urban markets could be linked with increasingly distant farms. Whereas a relatively small area around New York met all of the city's antebellum dairy needs, by the eve of World War I more than 30,000 farms in six states and Canada supplied the growing city's demand for dairy products.Footnote 14

This structural shift triggered changes in the size and organization of farms. While farmers in isolated areas kept hybrid dairy/beef cattle, dairy farms in the hinterlands of major cities became highly specialized. Dairy breeds like the Holstein-Friesian became increasingly common.Footnote 15 The number of registered purebred cows in the United States increased from 90,000 in 1885 to 273,000 in 1895. By the end of World War I, there were more than 900,000 purebred dairy cattle nationwide.Footnote 16 This proliferation caused an increase in veal calves, because male offspring could not gain weight as rapidly or develop the same desired fat to muscle ratio present in increasingly specialized beef cattle breeds.

A restructuring of the dairy industry supply chain accompanied these changes in dairy farming. Before 1880 the process of moving milk from producer to consumer was decentralized; farmers sold to small dealers who aggregated the milk from local farms and sold it in the city. Between 1880 and 1916, however, a few large dealers emerged who could exercise “a significant degree of control in the pricing of milk.”Footnote 17 This was in part a result of an improved transportation infrastructure that allowed dealers to work with more farmers, but it was also an outgrowth of new sanitary requirements that made milk processing prohibitively expensive for smaller dealers.

Consequently, farmers struggled despite rapidly increasing dairy consumption. Though there are two opposing explanations for dairy farmers' financial troubles between 1880 and 1916, both emphasize distribution changes. John J. Dillon, a former dairy farmer and activist, believed it was the fault of middlemen who had “gained control of the instruments of distribution. This gave [them] power to usurp producers' inherent rights and to fix the price farmers receive and the price consumers pay.”Footnote 18 Another possibility, however, was that farmer troubles were the result of consumer demands. In a review of historical milk prices, the New York State Legislative Commission on Dairy Industry Development explained that milk prices had remained relatively stable due to the efforts of city officials, who feared political fallout if prices increased. City officials found it easier to negotiate stable prices when a few large distributors controlled the city's milk supply than during the earlier, decentralized period. According to this account, efforts to supply New York with cheap milk marginalized dairy farmers who faced rising costs and flat milk prices.Footnote 19

The same factors that squeezed milk producers encouraged them to sell their calves at early ages. Because calves consumed milk that would otherwise be sold, it was unprofitable to raise veal to the legal age of four weeks unless milk prices were unusually low. In the 1940s, economist Aubrey Brown argued that “the price relationships between milk, in any of its forms, and veal calves becomes an important consideration in the use of veal calves as a ‘market outlet’ for milk.” Generally, however, “the monetary value of a veal calf is far outweighed by the value of the annual milk production of a cow.”Footnote 20 When farmers could not afford to raise their veal calves they would typically either slaughter the calf, selling its hide and using the carcass for fertilizer, or sell the calf to a bob veal distributor. Because “the animal sold for food is worth more than its pelt,” the New York Times explained that selling the calf for bob veal was “the most natural thing for a dairyman to do.”Footnote 21

Over the Rails and across the River: Bob Veal Smuggling

Farmers sold calves directly to “unscrupulous county butchers and others,” who traveled from farm to farm during “calving season [buying] for little or nothing … newly born animals, which they butcher on the spot and ship to Buffalo, New York, and other eastern markets.”Footnote 22 Yet the exact process varied by dealer, location, and the specifics of city or state policing. Close analysis of the interplay between policing methods and bob veal smuggling tactics highlights the ambiguous relationship between policing and sanitary law. There was no single law on the books that health inspectors were merely failing to enforce. Rather there was a set of overlapping, sometimes contradictory, provisions dictating what activities were illegal, what intent was necessary to constitute an infraction, and in what circumstances inspectors could conduct searches or seize carcasses. Smugglers and health inspectors alike manipulated this patchwork to advance their interests.

The extent of the bob veal trade can only be glimpsed, as it was by nature clandestine. Bob veal sellers did not document their illegal activities, and farmers preferred not to talk about illicit veal.Footnote 23 The extent to which inspectors could accurately document bob veal smuggling is unclear, as the most successful dealers may have evaded detection entirely. Similarly, determining exactly how much bob veal entered New York City is impossible. Evidence from seizures does suggest that large quantities of bob veal moved through the city. In the winter of 1884, for example, raids yielded “between 8000 and 9000 pounds” in one week.Footnote 24 On a single spring night that same year, city sanitary inspectors “watched all the ferries leaving from New Jersey … and seized about two tons of bob veal.”Footnote 25 A similar ferry raid in 1885 yielded 4,600 pounds.Footnote 26 These numbers continued throughout the rest of the decade, with individual raids seizing thousands of pounds of illegal veal. Furthermore, the size of seizures only grew into the 1890s and early twentieth century. In a series of massive raids in June of 1898 that seized more than three million pounds of “bad food,” city health inspectors claimed to have seized more than 100,000 pounds of bob veal in a one-week period.Footnote 27 Yet health inspectors continued to complain about the thriving bob veal trade. Even if newspapers and city officials embellished accounts of bob veal seizures, the overall picture is clear: bob veal was abundant.Footnote 28

Behind health inspectors' efforts to prohibit the sale of bob veal lay a lengthy legislative history. New York City first banned the meat's sale during the mid-nineteenth century. Soon, however, it became clear that urban enforcement alone was ineffective. The producers of bob veal as well as the majority of the bob veal traders' networks operated outside city health inspectors' jurisdiction. For this reason, representatives in the New York State Assembly began pushing an amendment to the state's agricultural law to ban the sale of bob veal. First passed in 1897, the ban was strengthened in 1898.Footnote 29 The law stated that “veal which is not four weeks old at the time the calf is killed shall not be sold” and authorized “[inspectors] to confiscate all veal found in violation of [these] provisions, and provides for the collection of penalties from violators.”Footnote 30 Yet this regulation did little to stop smuggling. Bob veal traders changed tactics, rerouting much of their veal through Jersey City, New Jersey, in order to evade New York state inspectors. As a result, state and city officials began working with inspectors in New Jersey as well as federal inspectors to coordinate enforcement strategies. But for reasons that will be discussed, dealers remained a step ahead.

This legislative history of the bob veal prohibition is closely related to the broader history of late nineteenth-century food regulation. The period was pivotal in regulatory history, with measures against adulterated food appearing across the country and the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act just over the horizon.Footnote 31 Though bob veal's prohibition was slightly different than the items covered by these measures because the meat was considered inherently dangerous, not merely when adulterated, its control reflected the increasingly pervasive belief that government had a responsibility for public health.

The bob veal prohibition is best explained by a blend of several competing explanations for the pure food laws that emerged during the period. One argument holds that pure food laws were protectionist measures promoted by large manufacturers and distributors to enhance their own control.Footnote 32 This account, which emphasizes regulatory capture, has seemingly replaced the older story that accepted the progressive narrative of regulation as a victory of government over special interest in the name of the public good.Footnote 33 Yet this account is not entirely myth. As economists Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode argued about the regulation of tubercular cattle, regulations can grow out of “genuine health concerns” and protecting the public.Footnote 34

The bob veal story reflects elements of both accounts. The oldest bob veal prohibition did, at least in part, grow out of the popular belief that bob veal threatened public health.Footnote 35 Simultaneously, however, higher-end merchants and butchers pushed for expanded policing, presumably because they believed it would increase their legal veal sales and eliminate lower-end competitors. In 1880, for example, “merchants in veal” had requested that the city Board of Health “adopt measures to put a stop to the sale of ‘bob’ veal.”Footnote 36

Ultimately this desire to protect the public collided with the reality of enforcement. By 1880 officials had already adopted measures to prohibit bob veal. The problem was that they were inadequate. Effective regulation depended on effective enforcement, and a number of factors undermined health inspectors' efforts. Furthermore, smugglers could adapt quickly, radically changing their smuggling tactics in response to specific enforcement strategies.

Health inspectors' primary enforcement method was seizing bob veal carcasses. Inspectors would arrive at a known smuggling point and begin searching crates. These raids, however, usually occurred during the day, which most smugglers recognized. An 1885 letter to the Times complained that “a comparatively small portion of this ‘bob veal’ is seized, owing to the fact that most of it arrives in the city as early as 6 o'clock in the morning and is disposed of to the various commission merchants before the officers arrive.”Footnote 37 An older story criticized a city inspector who “came down one or two mornings here at 7 o'clock,” arguing “that's too late by an hour to catch the bob-veal men, because they get rid of their stock between 3 and 5 o'clock.”Footnote 38

When inspectors did conduct early morning raids, they were often very successful.Footnote 39 One story reported that “to say that drivers and dealers were astounded at the presence of the Clerk at that hour of the night would but feebly express their astonishment.”Footnote 40 Yet the effectiveness of such raids depended on their infrequency. Early morning and late night raids were only successful because they were unexpected. These seizures were merely isolated operations, allowing inspectors to show short-term results.

Seizures of bob veal were also ineffective because they rarely led to arrests. Reports of raids invariably mention that for smugglers, “the penalty is both fine and imprisonment”; arrests were few and far between. As one typical account explained, the bob veal dealers “considered themselves lucky to escape arrest.”Footnote 41 Dealers probably recognized that their likelihood of arrest was low. Although it is unclear why so few arrests were made, the number of seizures without them suggests that prosecuting bob veal dealers was more difficult than merely seizing the meat.

One enforcement problem arose from the difficulty of judging the age of dressed meat. As a New York State Department of Agriculture report explained, “There is much difficulty in positively recognizing certain carcasses as bob veal. The normal variation in calves is such that in some instances it is impossible to separate the lawful from the illegal.”Footnote 42 Consequently, dealers successfully defended themselves with the claim that they did not realize the meat was underage.Footnote 43 Without serious criminal penalties, dealers merely absorbed the costs of the raids as a business expense.

Making policing even more difficult was a debate over whether inspectors could be held individually liable for accidental seizures. This question was at issue in the New York State Supreme Court case Williams v. Rivenburg (1911).Footnote 44 On April 27, 1908, Edward Williams had shipped a number of calves to New York City's Union Stockyards. Mervin Rivenburg, in his capacity as a Commissioner of Agriculture agent, seized and slaughtered several of Williams's calves, which Rivenburg alleged were underage. Williams claimed that Rivenburg was mistaken and sued the agent for compensation. For several of the calves, Rivenburg was assuredly correct, but for three of the calves, the only evidence as to their age was their appearance. The court conceded that Rivenburg's assessment was probably correct but that this was only based on observation and the statute does not explicitly authorize one to “determine the age from the appearance of the animal.”Footnote 45 After Williams provided a statement from a farmer that asserted that the calves he sold to Williams were four weeks old, the court decided it could not start from the assumption that the calf was underage. Rather, the justices would assume that the calves had been of adequate age and then assess whether Williams could hold Rivenburg personally liable or if he would have to instead sue the New York Commissioner of Agriculture. Though the court noted “a wide divergence” on opinions of personal liability, Justice Alfred Spring ruled that despite support for not holding government officers liable for “errors of judgment,” “the weight of authority, however, seems to be the other way.” Consequently, he ruled that “the defendant exceeded his authority and is individually liable for the value thereof.”Footnote 46 The other justices concurred, with the exception of Justice Peter McLennan, who knew that the ruling would mean that “we may not expect such inspector to take the chances of such a litigation against him, but he will allow the citizens of New York City to continue to eat bob veal.”Footnote 47

Corruption also hindered enforcement efforts. News stories from the 1870s linked the bob veal trade to Tammany Hall officials, although whether this was overstated as part of a larger case against the Tammany political machine is unclear. One New York Times article claimed that the health inspector positions were filled by political friends rather than competent bureaucrats.Footnote 48 Similarly, a Times article later that year reported that “the introduction of bob veal into the markets has been winked at.”Footnote 49 Two years later, a journalist cited the “bribery of policemen” as a factor in bob veal's widespread availability.Footnote 50

The raids, though ineffective, did force dealers to respond with increasingly complex concealment methods. Their work likely involved collusion with railroads, which profited off the trade.Footnote 51 An 1887 Times article explained that bob veal was packed into crates and smuggled in train cars

attached to milk or way trains that reach Jersey City late at night. Just before the train reaches the company's freight house at that point the meat car is switched off on a side track, and here the city dealers' wagons are waiting to pounce upon the unlawful commodity and smuggle it across the river to its destination.Footnote 52

Another smuggling trick involved using federal law against city and state inspectors. This strategy exploited interstate commerce law by shipping bob veal from upstate New York to Jersey City, New Jersey, and then into New York City. According to federal law, New York inspectors who saw the veal headed to Jersey City could not stop the interstate shipment, even if they suspected it would be routed back into the state.Footnote 53 While veal from distant parts of New York state would have to be smuggled a long way if shipped directly to the city, if first sent to New Jersey, it could be moved completely safely all the way to Jersey City, just across the river from New York City. In 1904, a New York inspector complained to the Times about an incident in which he saw ninety bob veal carcasses loaded onto a train in New York state and “had they been consigned to New York dealers he could have seized them, but they were tagged Jersey City, and he could not interfere with ‘inter-state commerce.’” It was the inspector's belief that “New York dealers have receiving stations in Jersey City where they store their ‘bobs’ until a safe time comes for running them across the river.”Footnote 54

Another approach was moving underage calves alive. Inspectors were only empowered to confiscate carcasses, because they could not be certain the calves were to be sold as bob veal. Though this strategy was identified as early as 1883, state officials first reported it in 1898. In 1899, several different New York State Department of Agriculture inspectors noted that “those who formerly shipped the calves to the larger cities hog-dressed are now sending them alive.”Footnote 55 One inspector claimed the new methods were a direct result of increased enforcement: “When the shippers realized that you were enforcing the law they stopped shipping dressed ‘bobs,’ and sent them alive, consigned to butchers in Jersey City; the law not prohibiting the shipping of live ‘bobs.’”Footnote 56 Another official reached the same conclusion when he observed that “the butcher seems to evade the law either by sending them (bob calves) direct to New York alive, to be slaughtered there instead of sending them dressed, as before.”Footnote 57 The calves were shipped in cramped conditions and, according to critics, were rarely fed or given water en route because dealers planned to slaughter the calves within hours.Footnote 58

After health inspectors concluded that it was “impossible to check the business except by interfering with it at its source,” they moved their policing efforts to dairy districts, where they met a whole new set of problems.Footnote 59 This became especially clear during the late 1880s, when the state board of health issued a mandate that local offices “seize and destroy” bob veal. The order met with little support. A Times article explained that the mandate “has as yet borne no fruit … nor is it likely to bear any. The forbidden traffic is profitable to the milk producers … as a consequence public opinion in the dairy district tolerates the traffic, the local boards of health are lax and indifferent, and the prohibitory laws against it fail to prohibit.”Footnote 60 An 1888 article agreed that “public opinion in the country tolerates the unlawful traffic.”Footnote 61

Lack of public support, however, was not the only problem. Farmers distanced themselves from the illegal aspect of the bob veal trade. Selling a calf less than four weeks old was legal, and legitimate transactions were frequent. It was difficult for inspectors to prove that farmers had knowingly sold to a bob veal dealer. Furthermore, if the dealer did not kill the calves until they were out of the area, local inspectors had little recourse. This strategy of separating themselves from the illegal trade allowed farmers to feign compliance with health inspectors' efforts. A state agriculture report explained that enforcement “was looked upon by the farmers and dealers with great disfavor, but as its provisions became better understood their opinions were greatly changed, and finally it was hailed as one of the best laws on the statute books.”Footnote 62 Farmers may have claimed to support enforcement of the law, but the ongoing bob veal trade suggests they continued selling their newborn calves to country dealers.

Health inspectors failed to eradicate the bob veal trade for a variety of overlapping reasons. Beyond smugglers' ever-evolving tactics, the wording of the prohibition itself—which failed to recognize the difficulty of judging the age of a piece of meat—as well as a broader legal context that limited inspectors' power, hobbled policing efforts. Finally, the fact that most of the actors involved in the bob veal trade knew the meat was harmless meant that they ignored the prohibition and quietly resisted inspectors' efforts.

Though the broader social and legal context nearly assured that prohibition would fail, this was not necessarily a problem for health inspectors if they could provide their own account of why the bob veal trade persisted. Inspectors likely understood the complexities of enforcing the prohibition but instead argued the measure's failure was the result of insufficient funding. Sanitary Inspector Cyrus Edson took this approach in an 1884 complaint to the press in which he argued the trade continued because his Health Department division had only two inspectors to police the city's 1,500 butcher shops. He went on to lament his inspectors' low salaries.Footnote 63 As long as he could persuade the public that this simplistic narrative of the prohibition's failure was accurate, Edson could justify inspectors' jobs, despite the fact that their methods had no likelihood of ending the trade.

Meanwhile, journalists embraced a similar account of the bob veal trade's persistence. A nuanced analysis of jurisdictional difficulties and the legal complexities inherent in policing the trade did not provide the same excitement as stories of crafty smugglers, daring inspectors, and unexpected early-morning raids. Even when criticizing inspectors for conducting raids an hour too late or accusing corrupt officials of winking at smugglers, newspaper coverage reinforced the same underlying idea that health inspectors promoted: that enough personnel doing quality police work would enable inspectors to seize every carcass and, in the process. end the bob veal menace.

These accounts of the prohibition constituted a popular form of the “gap analysis” of policing. Such arguments emphasize, to use Hendrik Hartog's words, “a separation between the legal norm as articulated … and the social fact of human (and animal) behavior.”Footnote 64 In this reading, the persistence of practices prohibited by law, such as the sale of bob veal, was due to a distance between a monolithic law on the books and what was happening in the world, or between a law and the arrangements and resources needed to enforce it.Footnote 65 While Hartog's analysis is a historiographic critique, inspectors at the time promoted a popular version of the “gap” view that Hartog criticizes. Inspectors argued that they lacked sufficient funding to close the gap between the law on the books and what was happening on the street. Whatever historians and criminologists have come to think of such explanations, law enforcement and public health officials regularly resorted to them, even though such perspectives often led to increased enforcement and limited results.

The Market For Bob Veal

If large amounts of bob veal evaded health officials, the important question then becomes, what happened to it? Again, the evidence is speculative, but the broad contours of bob veal's consumption are apparent. The meat was occasionally concealed as older veal or a different product, but much more commonly it was sought out for what it was: cheap veal. Dissecting its sale as veal is critical because it appears that a significant number of consumers knew that they were buying bob veal and many of them—despite the warnings of health inspectors and journalists—desired it. This legitimate market for bob veal undermines rhetoric that suggested the meat needed a disguise to reach New Yorkers' tables.

Reporters and health inspectors believed that bob veal was concealed in a variety of products. It is difficult, if not impossible, to know how true these claims were, but by examining them we can draw conclusions about what people thought about bob veal and perhaps gain some insight into how it was used. Though journalists conceded that “the ultimate use to which ‘bob veal’ is put is shrouded in mystery,” it rarely stopped them from speculating.Footnote 66 A number of articles cited health inspectors' claims that bologna and bologna pudding was “one of the delectable dishes in which immature veal plays a conspicuous part.”Footnote 67 Another belief was that “bob veal is extensively packed and sold as canned chicken, and is largely used in making sausages.”Footnote 68 Cyrus Edson offered the sanitary inspector's view: “I do not believe that ‘bob’ veal is ever canned and sold as chicken. We have made careful examinations for such canned chickens, but have failed to find any. It is, however, frequently used by sausage makers and I have several times arrested them for using it.”Footnote 69 Edson's explanation could be misleading, however, since bob veal's widespread use in canned chicken would have undermined his credibility as protector of the public health.

These claims were mostly speculative because the seizures cited in newspapers and reported by city health officials were of unprocessed veal carcasses. There is little evidence that inspectors knew what happened to bob veal after it left the city's meat markets. Though it seems that the extent to which bob veal was concealed as another product was exaggerated, there was at least a kernel of truth in those fears. It is plausible that bob veal was packaged as chicken or sausage, because misleading consumers about the source of meat products was not unusual in the late nineteenth century. In fact, it was not until 1906 that the federal government prohibited misleading labeling of canned products. The article “Food Label Tricks Barred by New Rules” had a surprised tone, reporting that “even the picture of a chicken on canned veal must go.”Footnote 70

Though its frequency was wildly exaggerated, the claim that bob veal was disguised on unsuspecting diners' plates proved enormously effective in building support for the prohibition. The literature on the pure food movement stresses the decisive influence of these types of claims in spurring legislative action. As historian Marc Law and Gary Libecap have argued, journalists could make food contamination “emotionally salient,” thereby uniting consumers.Footnote 71 Perhaps the most obvious example is the widespread support the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act gained after the publication of The Jungle, with its stomach-turning descriptions of food contamination in Chicago's packinghouses. In the case of The Jungle, this aspect was so powerful that it blinded readers to Sinclair's socialist agenda.Footnote 72 In terms of bob veal, what it shows is that this language that could hit readers in the stomach—as Sinclair said he did with The Jungle—could obscure the reality that bob veal's consumers knew what they were getting.

Another common claim was that bob veal was widely used in “cheap restaurants,” “saloons,” or “in the lowest class of restaurants.”Footnote 73 The New York Tribune railed that “most people who eat ‘bob’ veal in this city are imposed upon by the butchers or the keepers of restaurants.”Footnote 74 Similarly, the struggling boardinghouse woman “would like to do better by her boarders, but there is rent and gas and wear and tear of all sorts, and she buys bob veal and stale fish and rotten vegetables and alum bread, trying to make the ends meet.”Footnote 75 But was bob veal actually being forced on people? Although this claim may have been an effective way of mobilizing support for expanded policing, it was exaggerated. Saloonkeepers, restauranteurs, and low-end butchers were more likely responding to legitimate demand for bob veal from New York City's poor and immigrant communities.

Newspapers identified immigrant groups—especially Germans—as particularly fond of bob veal. Cincinnati was “a city of veal eaters,” allegedly because of its large German population.Footnote 76 According to another report, “Germans esteem [bob veal] a delicacy.”Footnote 77 But Germans were not the only bob veal consumers.Footnote 78 According to the New York Tribune, “The Italians … only get meat once a year and that is ‘bob’ veal.” Similarly, “the Hebrew colony in the vicinity of Hester and Ludlow [streets] are great buyers of it.”Footnote 79

If true, the conclusion to draw from this observation would be that bob veal was not inherently poisonous. Yet the fact or belief that immigrants willingly consumed bob veal coexisted alongside the view that it was harmful. In fact, bob veal consumption seems to have been a sign of immigrants' cultural and perhaps even biological difference. The same article that identified Cincinnati as a city of veal eaters explained that Germans “do not hesitate to buy veal that is so young it would sicken other people.”Footnote 80 A particularly scornful New York Tribune article described Germans as so desperate for bob veal tender enough to be “sucked through a quill” that “when they cannot obtain it from butchers they buy it from farmers, taking care to have it sent to them by express.” The report stressed immigrants' foreignness by explaining that “some stomachs can stand such delicacies, taken along with Limburger cheese and washed down with Rhine wine, but ‘bob’ veal will make children sick in short order.”Footnote 81

Similarly, bob veal consumption revealed tensions between rural and urban communities. The New York Times criticized a journalist who, seeing that rural residents enjoyed bob veal, questioned the city ban. The Times's response painted a picture of bloodthirsty rural farmers: “The chief dish served should be a meat pie made of immature veal, and … the hostess should tell her visitor that the pie would have been even better than it was if the calf that supplied its chief constituent had not managed to get one drink of milk before the knife brought his career to a close.” The article then attacks the rival journalist: “The Sun's correspondent thinks that this story proves that ‘bob veal’ is not only good to eat, but that the bobber it is, the better.” The Times, however, disagreed, seeing the eating of bob veal as proof that “even the first gleams of sanitary science and medical knowledge have not dawned upon that particular part of Chenango County, and that at least one New Yorker is [as] densely and criminally ignorant as his country friends.”Footnote 82 Yet the reporter never acknowledges the obvious reply that sanitary science is not needed to determine whether bob veal is poisonous. If rural diners ate bob veal with any frequency, their continued appetite for it would prove that the veal is benign.

Newspaper warnings also indirectly reveal the possibility that many consumers knew what they were buying. In their shops, butchers could not identify bob veal as such, but they could subtly identify it with lower prices. One article, for example, warned “housekeepers … not to buy veal that is sold at much lower prices than are asked by trustworthy butchers.”Footnote 83 But this caution reflected certain class assumptions. Trustworthy butchers, presumably, are those who sell legal veal, which could cost up to twice as much as bob veal.Footnote 84 For those who could not afford this meat, “dishonest butchers” offered lower prices.Footnote 85 Because these butchers probably needed repeat customers to stay in business, they could not have consistently offered a product that would sicken customers. Reports that cite large amounts of bob veal “which buyers are deceived into buying as prime meat at low prices” seem to assume naïve shoppers.Footnote 86 Available evidence suggests that the quantity of bob veal sold each week was so high that it could not have been exclusively sold to ignorant customers. Those familiar with the general market cost of prime meat, especially when shopping in large markets where prevailing prices could be quickly identified, would have understood that low prices meant bob veal.

Buyers' desire to eat bob veal, whether for its taste or because it was a cheaper option, suggests that the meat was not solely brought into the city to be concealed inside apparently safe food. In fact, legitimate demand for bob veal suggests that rhetoric about veal masquerading as chicken or sausage, while partly true, primarily reflected anxiety about veal consumption. The tone of the discussion of immigrant and rural veal consumption suggests the view that a taste for bob veal was an impediment to Americanization or progress.

The apparent demand for bob veal suggests that health inspectors and the media either ignored or lacked knowledge about the people they were trying to protect. The designation of bob veal as harmful was rooted in an abstract understanding of its adverse health effects rather than actual knowledge of who was eating it and why. As a result, journalists and inspectors who claimed to be attacking bob veal dealers in order to protect the public interest were actually trying to eliminate a cheap source of protein from poor New Yorkers' diets.

Panic about the bob veal threat dissipated after 1900. Although the reasons for this waning concern are unclear, it was at least in part the result of an emerging medical consensus that bob veal was harmless. By the 1920s, discussion of bob veal as a threat to public health seems to have disappeared from New York's papers. By 1947, a cooking article mentioned bob veal only to caution that it had “weak flavor.”Footnote 87

As early as 1887, the Medical Record: A Weekly Journal of Medicine and Surgery argued that “it is perfectly true that bob-veal is neither poisonous nor innutritious … bob-veal ought not to be sold for good veal; but under its own name, and at a low price, it might be admitted as an article of food.”Footnote 88 At the time, however, this was far from a general consensus, and bob veal policing continued full pace. In 1907, the New York Times was still describing bob veal as “one of the worst dangers to health.”Footnote 89 Earlier that year the state had taken the unusual move of prosecuting nine butchers caught selling the meat.Footnote 90 In 1912, the New York Department of Health was still reporting collaboration with federal inspectors to keep bob veal out of New York City.Footnote 91

A year later, however, the American Journal of Public Health condemned newspaper zeal about bob veal. The author explained that

the inspection of foods has little relation to the public health though it is a subject which yields many startling news items and lurid editorials. One of the most absurd activities is the fight against ‘bob’ veal … there is no good reason for forbidding the use of immature veal for food. It may at times cause sickness but so do strawberries and lobsters and mince pie.Footnote 92

This argument became increasingly common after World War I. In “What We Eat and What Happens to It,” doctors concluded that in their tests “there was in no case any sign of veal poisoning.” Once again, Germans were cited as bob veal eaters: “In Germany before the war, calves from three to five days of age were frequently slaughtered for food … the meat of such young animals is a perfectly satisfactory food.”Footnote 93 Similarly, in 1921, Preventive Medicine and Hygiene explained that “the prejudice against ‘bob veal’ is illogical.”Footnote 94

In criticizing the fight against bob veal, these physicians were fighting their own political battle. As the historian of public medicine John Duffy has argued, tensions between physicians who sought authority over public health on scientific grounds and the politicians and laypeople who had originally headed the Department of Health escalated during the late nineteenth century as scientists pursued institutional control.Footnote 95 In calling the fight against bob veal “absurd,” these doctors could implicitly make the case that public health departments should be headed by medical professionals.Footnote 96

Despite doctors' efforts, the prohibition of immature veal remained on the books. It was not until 1933 that the State of New York repealed the prohibition.Footnote 97 In its place was added a provision that bob veal be clearly tagged as such in shops and that if served in a restaurant or hotel, the menu contain the warning, “Baby veal served here.”Footnote 98 It is unclear whether the tagging requirement was intended to stigmatize lower-end establishments, but it is likely these restaurants continued their business as usual, with the addition of one minor disclaimer to their menus.

In Atlantic Crossings, Daniel Rodgers writes that reformers of the period “swam in an abundance of solutions.” Consequently, Rodgers emphasizes studying the networks of academics, bureaucrats, and activists behind the political movements of the Progressive Era.Footnote 99 In the case of bob veal, broader movements fit imperfectly. Bob veal opponents used the scare tactics of the Pure Food movement and shared the same underlying assumption—that government should protect the public health—but pushed prohibition of a product that was not only benign, but potentially an important source of protein for New York's poorer residents. In examining the fight over prohibition, then, we see how the ability of these progressives to propose solutions sometimes required creating problems.

This emphasis on political factors as drivers of public health regulation, rather than the emergence or intensification of objective health threats, helps explain the enormous variation in bob veal's treatment across the United States. Though there was elite urban consensus in the nineteenth century that the meat was harmful, the timing of prohibitions, the methods of enforcement, and the inches of newsprint devoted to the problem were different in each city and state. Veterinary physiologist Pierre Fish highlighted this variation when he observed in 1913 that a Pennsylvania calf is legal and safe for food at three weeks, “but if it is brought across an imaginary line into New York state it is wholly unfit and unwholesome for eating purposes until it is a week older.”Footnote 100 In emphasizing the absurdity of this situation and subsequently advocating a scientific approach—for which his expertise was perfectly suited—Dr. Fish reveals the extent to which politics is often more integral to the creation of a social problem than an objective health threat. Across the country, bob veal only became a problem when presenting it as such served a political end for journalists, health inspectors, or local butchers.Footnote 101

This reality is particularly apparent in the statements of sanitary inspectors like Cyrus Edson. These men found their success in the “natural alliance” that Marc Law and Gary Libecap have identified between the press, looking to sell papers with sensational stories of prostrated families, and entrepreneurial bureaucrats seeking legitimacy.Footnote 102 Although it is likely the inspectors believed bob veal was indeed harmful, it is equally likely they knew their policing methods were inadequate. Yet even as men like Edson, in their communications with the press and published annual reports, helped constitute a health problem that made their jobs vital, these inspectors were also bound by an obligation to fruitlessly follow through on their claims.

Nevertheless, the prohibition's public failure was not necessarily a problem for New York's health inspectors. Even if officials knew they were fighting a losing battle, the fact that they were waging it enabled them to reassert the underlying logic that the government not only had a responsibility to the public health, but that bureaucrats should have the funding to protect it. The bob veal traffic was a particularly good target, because the meat was not only believed to be harmful, but unlike the fights over local inspection of Chicago dressed beef during the period, there were no powerful interests defending the bob veal trade. Bob veal's producers were struggling dairy farmers with little political clout, and the meat's consumers were generally poor immigrants.

From the perspective of bob veal's consumers, smugglers, and producers, the failure of the prohibition reveals the limits of formal authority. Supporters of the ban may have been able to dominate legislative channels as well as the control the public discourse, as the flood of bob veal articles and dairy farmers' almost total silence on the subject suggests. Even so, they ultimately failed to stop the trade because of the informal power of the people buying and selling bob veal to resist, ignore, and subvert policing attempts. It is in looking at these kinds of conflicts, where the desires of the regulator and regulated collide, that one gains a fuller picture of the regulatory movements of the period. If we ignore the preferences and values of the regulated, we risk making the same mistake that nineteenth-century legislatures around the country made in enacting the bob veal prohibitions in the first place: not understanding the people being protected. In this sense, the almost two decades in which there was both a medical consensus that bob veal was safe and an ongoing prohibition effort only highlights the ban's absurdity to modern readers. A new medical consensus likely had little effect on the meat's primary consumers, who already knew it was safe.

Health inspectors never eradicated bob veal trafficking. The problem only disappeared when it stopped being identified as a problem. The failure to prohibit bob veal was not merely an enforcement problem. Not only was there a ready supply of bob veal—driven by increasing demand for milk and by dairy farmers' economic troubles—but there was also a correspondingly large demand for it. Bob veal legislation was founded on false assumptions about the public it was intended to protect. With the support of journalists looking to sell newspapers, health inspectors presented a narrative of the prohibition's failure that blamed a lack of funding and thereby secured increased government support. Nevertheless, these health inspectors did seem to genuinely believe the meat was harmful. In ignoring the ability of people to identify what foods they did or did not want to purchase and eat, inspectors and journalists overlooked the best piece of evidence that bob veal was harmless: New Yorkers' ongoing desire to eat it.

Footnotes

1

The author would like to thank Rebecca Chang, Joyce Chaplin, Abigail Fine, Philippa Hetherington, John Huffman, Walter Johnson, Jill Lepore, Scott Nelson, Emma Rothschild, Josh Segal, Sarah Shortall, Benjamin Siegel, Jeremy Zallen, and the Center for History and Economics Graduate Workshop for comments and support. Thanks also to JGAPE's anonymous readers, whose insights dramatically transformed the piece.

2 “Bob Veal Poisons a Family,” New York Times, July 6, 1901.

3 Haverford College Alumni Association, A History of Haverford College for the First Sixty Years of its Existence (Philadelphia, 1892), 544.

4 “65 Doctors Made Sick,” New York Times, Mar. 18, 1913.

5 “Foul Food,” New York Tribune, Apr. 18, 1872. More than scientific belief may have motivated the doctor. He could have been a supporter of France's powerful veal industry, which opposed the sale of young veal.

6 References to bob veal's low quality and association with poverty stretch back into the eighteenth century. “Staggering bob,” an older English term for the meat, appears in the eighteenth century. For more details, see “staggering bob, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, www.oed.com. These references become more common in the nineteenth century in literature on Irish poverty. See, for example, Binns, Jonathan, The Miseries and Beauties of Ireland (London, 1837), 319. However, these references emphasize the meat's poor taste and low quality, rather than warning about its health effects. The emphasis on the meat as inherently poisonous emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, when the term “bob veal” appears in the United States. Newspapers from the period refer to bob veal as poisonous and introduce its name with quotation marks, suggesting the term is slang and somewhat new. An article on lower-class eating habits, for example, features a butcher explaining the meat: “Butchers call this ‘bob veal’; I have been a butcher for 40 years; I consider this meat very unwholesome.” “What Some Folks Eat,” Alexandria Gazette, Apr. 12, 1855. References to the meat in the 1870s and 1880s increasingly drop the quotation marks around bob veal, suggesting the term was becoming more widespread.

7 Mid-1850s cases discussed in Farrington De Voe, Thomas, The Market Assistant (New York, 1867), 421.

8 During the 1850s, the New York Times and New York Tribune occasionally reported on butchers arrested for selling underage “poisonous veal,” and one article even suggested it was a feature of urban food markets rather than an isolated issue. Nevertheless, the tone of the reporting was much more matter-of-fact than the coverage starting in the 1870s. For examples of coverage in the 1850s, see “Poisonous Veal,” New York Daily Times, Mar. 17, 1857, and “Brooklyn City—Selling Unhealthy Meat,” New York Daily Times, Apr. 7, 1854.

9 For details of New York's meat markets during the period, see Horowitz, Roger, Pilcher, Jeffrey M., and Watts, Sydney, “Meat for the Multitudes: Market Culture in Paris, New York City, and Mexico over the Long Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 109 (Oct. 2004): 1055–83, esp. 1071–73.

10 Based on research with the historical New York Times and New York Tribune, it appears that bob veal was a minor media issue before 1870. In both the Times and Tribune, coverage of the issue rose in the 1870s, peaked in the 1880s, and endured into the early twentieth century. Although it would never attract as much coverage as milk purity, the bob veal problem appears to have been a regular topic for journalists reporting on the city's meat markets.

11 Duffy, John, History of Public Health in New York City, vol. 2 (New York, 1974), 620. Duffy makes the appeal to the public a theme of the first chapter, “The Metropolitan Board of Health.”

12 Despite this relationship, veal is not emphasized in histories of dairy production. Two recent books are good examples. Valenze, Deborah, Milk: A Local and Global History (New Haven, 2011), makes almost no mention of veal. Similarly, DuPuis, E. Melanie, Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink (New York, 2002), barely discusses the subject. This omission is understandable as both books begin with the final product (milk) and move backwards along the supply chain. This is most obvious in DuPuis's book, which covers consumption in part one and production in part two. In both works, the hidden story of veal is not adequately addressed, even though it would strengthen their arguments. DuPuis for example, dissects two myths about milk: the perfect story of milk as a product and the perfect story of dairy production. An analysis of the veal industry's close relationship to dairying would further highlight the ambiguities in public views of dairy production. Similarly discussion of veal would help Valenze better analyze the transition to industrial milk production, because the emergence of veal as a byproduct is itself a historical process born of the bifurcation of cattle into beef and dairy cattle.

13 This reading of progressivism as a kind of social politics draws upon Rodgers, Daniel, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998).

14 Jennings, Irwin G., Study of the New York City Milk Problem (New York, 1919), 8. Valenze and DuPuis also identify the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as pivotal moments in the history of dairying, the inauguration of a trend away from smaller dairy operations and toward centralization.

15 Schlebecker, John, Whereby We Thrive: A History of American Farming 1607–1972 (Ames, IA, 1976), 183.

16 Olmstead, Alan L. and Rhode, Paul W., “The ‘Tuberculous Cattle Trust’: Disease Contagion in an Era of Regulatory Uncertainty,” Journal of Economic History 64 (Dec. 2004): 937.

17 New York State Legislative Commission on Dairy Industry Development, Review of Dairy Regulation (Albany, 1988), 2.

18 Dillon, John J., Seven Decades of Milk: A History of New York's Dairy Industry (New York, 1941), xi–xii.

19 Dillon, Seven Decades of Milk, 7, claims milk prices dropped from 1870 to 1895. Review of Dairy Regulation, 4, claims milk prices increased only 1 cent per quart over thirty years, even as overhead costs increased sharply.

20 Aubrey J. Brown, “Economic Study of Veal Calves” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1946).

21 “Calves Too Young for Food,” New York Times, Mar. 15, 1883.

22 New York State Board of Health, Annual Report (1898), 269.

23 The claim about agricultural journals' silence regarding bob veal is based on my sampling of major agricultural journals from the period with the help of Proquest's American Periodical Series. Colman's Rural World (1865–1916), for example, makes no mention of bob veal or immature veal except for a 1913 article about the absurdity of the ban. There are, however, several hundred articles on legitimate veal, its market price, and rearing methods. Similarly, Michigan Farmer (1843–1908) makes no mention of bob veal or immature veal but has more than a thousand articles on legitimate veal prices. The American Farmer (1874–97) makes almost no mention of veal, legitimate or otherwise. The Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture (1842–1906) has the most extensive coverage of the issue but mostly includes perfunctory statements of bob veal seizures in New York and Boston. Notably, it includes a reprint of an 1887 New York Tribune article, “Bob veal—is it so bad?” The author, Professor L.B. Arnold, states that he does not like the taste of the meat and that he finds the idea of a calf slaughtered shortly after birth repugnant but rejects the idea that it's inherently harmful. Arnold describes the belief as a mysterious one that he took as common wisdom from a very young age. The records for nineteenth-century journals specifically about dairy farming are extremely limited, but the few articles from dairy journals that I have been able to track down make little mention of the issue. Furthermore, the journals above have extensive discussion of dairy farming, so their coverage of the industry should be comprehensive.

24 “‘Bob Veal’ Not Plentiful,” New York Times, Jan. 27, 1884.

25 “City and Suburban News,” New York Times, Apr. 12, 1884.

26 “City and Suburban News,” New York Times, Mar. 18, 1885.

27 “Big Seizures of Bad Food,” New York Times, June 21, 1898.

28 In an editorial, the New York Times, Apr. 20, 1887, remarked, “It is said that for every pound captured and destroyed five pounds come into the city and are consumed as food.” There are three factors influencing my belief that there was a thriving market: (a) abundant supply of unwanted calves; (b) decades of policing that suggest that the trade was ongoing and could not be eradicated, so the seizures must not have been an overwhelming majority of the veal, or smuggling would not remain profitable, especially given the comparatively low profit margins on bob veal, which had to be extremely low-priced to compete with the already low price of legal veal; and lastly, (c) strong evidence of consumer demand.

29 “Westchester Bill Passed,” New York Times, Feb. 2, 1897; “New York Legislature,” New York Times, Feb. 19, 1897; “New York Legislature,” New York Times, Mar. 3, 1898.

30 “To Stop Sale of Bob Veal,” New York Times, Mar. 8, 1899.

31 Law, Marc T., “The Origins of State Pure Food Regulation,” Journal of Economic History 63 (Dec. 2003): 1103.

32 Footnote Ibid.

33 Olmstead and Rhode, “Tuberculous Cattle Trust,” 931.

34 Footnote Ibid., 932.

35 “Foul Food,” New York Tribune, Apr. 18, 1872.

36 “City and Suburban News,” New York Times, Mar. 24, 1880.

37 Letter to the editor, New York Times, Mar. 27, 1885.

38 “Washington Market,” New York Times, Aug. 19, 1877.

39 See, for example, “Thousands of Pounds of ‘Bob Veal,’” New York Times, Mar. 21, 1885.

40 “Large Seizure of Bob Veal,” New York Times, Feb. 27, 1881.

41 Footnote Ibid.

42 New York Department of Agriculture, Annual Report (1899), 394. This was a common complaint in court cases of the time and also underpinned moves to expand police powers to track veal along the supply chain. For example, in People v. Bishopp, 44 Misc. 12, 89 N.Y.S. 709 (1905), the court described the burden of correctly identifying the age of veal from observation as “practically impossible,” explaining that this difficulty was why a veal tagging law was passed. For the tagging requirement, see New York Agricultural Law, L. 1902, ch. 30, section 70f.

43 This was an effective tactic, though the law was extremely murky on this point and varied from state to state. In Connecticut, it appears that intent was critical, as violation of the law hinged on whether the defendant “willfully” offered underage veal for sale. Consequently, it had to be proven that the defendant knew the age of the veal. See State v. Nussenholtz, 76 Conn. 92, 55 A. 589 (1903). In Massachusetts, the statute indicated that it was “punishable to kill a calf less than four weeks old ‘for the purpose of sale,’” independent of whether the slaughterer knew the age of the calf. Yet this applied to slaughterers and not sellers of veal, who had to have “knowledge” the veal was underage. See Commonwealth v. Raymond, 97 Mass. 567, 1867 WL 5675 (Mass.) (1867).

44 Williams v. Rivenburg, 145 A.D. 93, 129 N.Y.S. 473 (1911).

45 Footnote Ibid. (Spring).

46 Footnote Ibid. (Spring).

47 Footnote Ibid. (McLennan dissenting).

48 “The Washington Market Clerk,” New York Times, June 17, 1878.

49 “Tammany's Bad Methods,” New York Times, Oct. 11, 1878.

50 “Something About Bob Veal,” New York Times, Mar. 21, 1880.

51 For claims of railroad complicity: “An Unlawful Traffic,” New York Times, Apr. 1, 1888. Railroads were likely able to maintain deniability by looking the other way on veal shipments.

52 “The Trade in ‘Bob Veal,’” New York Times, Mar. 9, 1887. Also, “An Unlawful Traffic,” Times, Apr. 1, 1888.

53 “The Sale of Bob Veal,” New York Times, June 16, 1901. The clash between the interstate commerce clause and the state's police powers was a common theme in court cases and stories about bob veal. When the state of New York added the aforementioned law requiring veal to be tagged in 1902, defendants claimed that the law violated interstate commerce provisions. Though the courts ultimately rejected that claim in People v. Bishopp, 44 Misc. 12, 89 N.Y.S. 709 (1905), subsequent difficulties suggest that the tagging requirement failed to stop the tactic of shipping to Jersey City.

54 “‘Bob Veal’ Trade Continues,” New York Times, Jan. 31, 1904.

55 New York Department of Agriculture, Annual Report (1899), 121.

56 Footnote Ibid., 244.

57 Footnote Ibid., 393.

58 Cruelty claims were common. For example, Thomas Farrington De Voe, The Market Assistant (New York, 1867), 421, asserted that not only is bob veal unwholesome, but that it “had been starved either here, or while it was being brought here.”

59 New York State Board of Health, Annual Report (1898), 269.

60 “The Trade in ‘Bob Veal,’” New York Times, Apr. 27, 1887.

61 “An Unlawful Traffic,” New York Times, Apr. 1, 1888.

62 New York Department of Agriculture, Annual Report (1899), 274.

63 “The Season for “Bob Veal,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 1884. This tactic was also popular elsewhere. When the clerk of New Haven's Board of Public Health faced criticism that peddlers were selling bob veal, he countered that the city needed a full-time inspector of “meat and provisions.” New Haven Board of Health, Annual Report (1875) (New Haven, 1876), 63.

64 Hartog, Hendrik, “Pigs and Positivism,” University of Wisconsin Law Review 4 (1985): 924.

65 As Hartog observes, this idea fell out of favor academically because in many cases it corresponds poorly with reality; there is rarely public agreement (“shared consciousness”) about the nature or meaning of a single legal norm. If there is no intepretive agreement about a legal norm, then laws on the books based on that norm cannot be clearly defined and are often unenforced. Furthermore, gap analysis has gone out of favor because of scholars' increasing dissatisfaction with understanding law as a single, fixed entity that can be separated from real world interactions. Recent scholars generally prefer to understand law as constituted by relationships and interactions between various entities. Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,” fn 93–94.

66 “Seizures of Bob Veal,” New York Times, Mar. 16, 1883.

67 Footnote Ibid.

68 “The Trade in Bob Veal,” New York Times, Mar. 9, 1887.

69 “Bob Veal and Canned Chicken,” New York Times, May 1, 1887.

70 “Food Label Tricks Barred by New Rules,” New York Times, Sept. 21, 1906.

71 According to Marc Law and Gary Libecap, these press accounts of contaminated food were critical for breaking the legislative gridlock that plagued attempts at federal pure food regulation before 1906. Marc Law and Gary Libecap, “The Determinants of Progressive Era Reform: The Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 10984, Dec. 2004 (http://www.nber.org/papers/w10984.pdf), 18.

72 For an overview of the power of images of slaughterhouse filth and unsanitary conditions as well as the political difficulties of sanitary inspection reform, see Young, James Harvey, “The Pig that Fell into the Privy: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and the Meat Inspection Amendments of 1906,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (Winter 1985): 467.

73 “The Trade in ‘Bob Veal,’” New York Times, Mar. 9, 1887. “Seizures of ‘Bob Veal,’” New York Times, Mar. 16, 1883.

74 “The Consumption of Bob Veal,” New York Tribune, June 24, 1885.

75 Campbell, Helen, The Problem of the Poor: A Record of Quiet Work in Unquiet Places (New York, 1882), 227.

76 “A City of Veal Eaters,” New York Times, Nov. 11, 1883.

77 “Seizures of ‘Bob Veal,’” New York Times, Mar. 16, 1883.

78 It was common knowledge that Europeans in general were bob veal consumers. See, for example, Broadhurst, Jane, Home and Community Hygiene: A Text-Book of Personal and Public Health (Philadelphia, 1918), 45: “In Europe bob veal is not looked upon with suspicion.” Also Hawk, Philip Bovier, What We Eat and What Happens To It (New York, 1919), 88–89.

79 “Bob Veal and Impure Milk,” New York Times, Apr. 13, 1885.

80 “A City of Veal Eaters,” New York Times, Nov. 11, 1883. As Gabaccia, Donna, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 123, suggests, this disgust with immigrant consumers of bob veal was part of a broader trend of “fear and loathing of immigrant foodways” that “crescendoed around the turn of the century.”

81 “The Consumption of Bob Veal,” New York Tribune, June 24, 1885. On the “sucked through a quill” comment, this was once a popular way to describe bob veal's tenderness. Cattleman turned Wall Street financier Daniel Drew, who in his youth had been a bob veal dealer, bragged that his veal was tender enough to “be sucked through a quill.” See White, Bouck, The Book of Daniel Drew (New York, 1910), 20.

82 “Editorial,” New York Times, Apr. 29, 1895.

83 “The Markets in April,” New York Times, Apr. 25, 1880.

84 Accurate price information is difficult to ascertain. Anecdotally, it appears that bob veal cost roughly half as much as legal veal, though both prices fluctuated dramatically. See, for example, “Sickening Revelations,” Sunday Mercury, April 7, 1878. The article cites a price for legal veal of seven to eight cents per pound, and for bob veal, roughly three to four cents a pound. Bob veal was thus an unusual example of a smuggled product less expensive than its equivalent, legally traded product. Although enforcement probably did increase the cost of immature veal, mature veal drank up dairy farmers' profits during the month or two the calf took to mature. Farmers, therefore, had to charge correspondingly more to account for their milk investment.

85 “Features of the Markets,” New York Times, May 16, 1880.

86 “The Markets in Easter Week,” New York Times, Apr. 17, 1881.

87 “Veal Now Plentiful and in Good Quality,” New York Times, Apr. 14, 1947.

88 Shrady, George F., ed., The Medical Record: A Weekly Journal of Medicine and Surgery (New York, 1887), 468.

89 “Why New York is One of the Healthiest Cities in the World,” New York Times, Dec. 8, 1907.

90 “Seventy Bob Veal Cases,” New York Tribune, Sept. 20, 1907.

91 Department of Health of the City of New York, Annual Report (1910–1911), (New York, 1912), 39.

92 Chapin, Charles V., “How Shall We Spend the Health Appropriation?” American Journal of Public Health 3 (Mar. 1913): 206.

93 Hawk, Philip, What We Eat and What Happens to It (New York, 1919), 89.

94 Rosenau, Milton J., Preventive Medicine and Hygiene (New York, 1921), 846.

95 Duffy, History of Public Health, 2:94.

96 Footnote Ibid., 2:94–100.

97 Laws of the State of New York: Passed at the One-Hundred Fifty-Sixth Session of the Legislature, 1933, vol. 1, 785–786. Accessed via HeinOnline's New York Legal Research Library, as are later citations of New York law.

98 Footnote Ibid., 786.

99 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 7.

100 Pierre Fish, “The Digestibility and Decomposability of Bob Veal” in Report of the New York State Veterinary College For the Year 1912–1913 (Albany, 1914), 78.

101 This historicization of public health issues shares the approach of Ferreries, Madeleine, Sacred Cow, Mad Cow (New York, 2006), which stresses that the perception of food risk is a more critical factor in explaining public health regulation than actual risk and that it is precisely this reality that opens a space for historians to contribute to debates about food and public health.

102 Regarding the “natural alliance” and an analysis of other factors behind reform, Law and Libecap, “The Determinants of Progressive Era Reform.” The idea of entrepreneurial bureaucrats draws from Carpenter's, Dan work, particularly The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy (Princeton, 2001).

Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
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Ibid
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1 The author would like to thank Rebecca Chang, Joyce Chaplin, Abigail Fine, Philippa Hetherington, John Huffman, Walter Johnson, Jill Lepore, Scott Nelson, Emma Rothschild, Josh Segal, Sarah Shortall, Benjamin Siegel, Jeremy Zallen, and the Center for History and Economics Graduate Workshop for comments and support. Thanks also to JGAPE's anonymous readers, whose insights dramatically transformed the piece.