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37 2 EATING CATS AND DOGS TO FEED THE WORLD The Progressive Quest for Rational Food To be a good animal is the first duty of the citizen. —Harvey Wiley, 1915 Herbert Popenoe had to go to police court after neighbors complained to the city of Washington, D.C., that he was killing and eating all the stray cats he could get his hands on. The judge dropped the charges, however, when he was unable to find any law against cat-eating. During the winter of 1918, Popenoe not only ate any number of cats himself—ranging from alley cats to a purebred Angora—but he served them to unsuspecting friends at a series of five dinner parties he gave that winter. At these “cat feasts,” as Popenoe called them, he would bring out steaming plates of meat that he had cooked himself, telling his guests it was rabbit or beaver. “Most of them seemed to enjoy it,” Popenoe told a reporter, “and after we had pushed back our chairs and lighted our after-dinner cigars, I told them. Some of them said it was as good as rabbit, while others began to get sick.”1 The revulsion of Popenoe’s friends did not deter him. Neither did his day in court or a subsequent attempt by the same neighbors to commit him to a mental institution. Popenoe simply dismissed detractors as “less intelligent” and “unscientific,” and he said he hoped to continue his experiments on dogs, horses, mules, canaries, and buzzards.2 Although he might sound like a crotchety local eccentric, Herbert Popenoe was in fact something of a wunderkind. He was a bright and 38 / The Progressive Quest for Rational Food well-educated eighteen-year-old who was then working as the acting editor of the Journal of Heredity, the country’s leading publication on eugenics and plant and animal breeding.3 But if Popenoe was not an elderly eccentric, neither was he a teenage prankster. In fact, Popenoe styled his cat feasts as a vital contribution to winning the Great War, and that is how the national media interpreted them, too. Moreover, Popenoe was joined in his efforts to expand Americans’ culinary imaginations by the most eminent food safety authority in the country, Dr. Harvey Wiley. Wiley had spearheaded the fight for pure-food legislation earlier in the century, resulting in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, and in the late 1910s he was still a household name whose writings on food and health appeared regularly in national newspapers and magazines.4 When young Herbert Popenoe said Americans should try eating cats, his advice was provocative but dismissible. When Dr. Harvey Wiley said in his wartime speeches, “Cat and dog meat is good eating. Eat up your surplus stock of cats and dogs,” he said it as national celebrity and a distinguished expert on nutrition and food safety.5 In a nation filled with abundant food resources and populated with petlovers , how can we explain this flicker of interest in dog- and cat-eating? Suggestions that Americans should eat cats, dogs, and a range of other seemingly bizarre foods were part of wide-ranging efforts in the first two decades of the twentieth century to establish rational justifications for the foods Americans ate, whether in the interest of health, economy, or patriotism, or—more nebulously but no less powerfully—in the interest of self-control as a moral virtue in its own right. Arguments for rational eating had circulated for decades, ranging from nineteenth-century health crazes to turn-of-the-century fad diets to long-standing attempts to get poor people to spend their food budgets more wisely to efforts to apply science to both agricultural production and industrial food processing. But the Progressive quest for rational food went further still. The earlytwentieth -century revolution in nutrition science gave unprecedented strength to arguments for rational eating, and by the late 1910s, the war’s urgency helped to crystallize such feelings and give them broad popular appeal. By 1918, when Popenoe lashed out at critics of his cat-eating by calling them “less intelligent” and “unscientific,” he was invoking what had become a Progressive truism: that science, not pleasure, was the best arbiter of wise food choices. In a time of international war, with beef and pork needed for export to Europe, he saw his own willingness to eat cat meat as a mark of his detachment from the...

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