176 New Technology for American Corn

This week in my tour of Preserved Americana, I'm once again veering off the straight and narrow of just the National Park Service and inviting you into a story of a place that is NPS adjacent. The Brucemore estate just outside of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is centered around a Queen Anne style mansion built in 1886 by Carolyn Souter Sinclair, the widow of Thomas M. Sinclair. This

His Gilded Age Mansion and estate ties neatly into the period we are in as the Sinclair Company made its money in the manner of businesses that were popping up all over the United States and were coming up with ways to use the new technology to solve old food problems. And in Iowa, this meant initially pigs.

The Thomas Sinclair and later TM Sinclair Company used ice harvesting, railroads, mechanical conveyor belt steam ovens and other wonders of the later 19th century to make pig slaughter, meat packing, and then the delivery of said meat, products, something that could happen around the world.

By taking over and combining the disparate elements of the pork industry and creating a whole vertical stack of the elements required, Sinclair and later his sons were delivering bacon, sausage, and ham to English factory workers from the middle of North America.

become a largely domestic company as Denmark took over the Northern European pork markets, not my area. But the meat hungry belly of the United States was happy to eat up the offerings from the Sinclair Company and their companions in the market as we moved away from our farms and

started shopping for meat, not at markets and butcher shops, but in stores. The Brucemore Estate in Iowa, the state's only national historic trust site, is owned and Run by Bruce Moore Incorporated with a focus on historical preservation of the buildings and the land.

Over time they have dug into the people who actually made the estate run, the servants and other employees outside and below stairs, and the people working in the various enterprises that created this great wealth. The Sinclairs, the descendant families, and the subsequent owners of the property

made the location one of curiosity and splendor. Bruce Moore and the Sinclair industrial legacy are all tied up in this week's episode as they are members of the group that helped drive the mechanization that led to much of what 20th century American food became.

They had a pork processing empire. They harvested ice for year-round meat shipping. They used steamships to make the plenty of America a regular feature on plates around the world.

Later occupants of Brucemore would go on to add to 20th century food mechanization with a corn starch factory, a natural second offshoot of Iowa's corn after pork packing. And then the halls would manufacture steel beams and quarry stone, two elements that would drive the switch to steel beam construction

that are essential in both the large factory manufacturing settings used in modern packaged food and helped create the warehouse spaces we needed to make for moving and storing food all over the country, including all those refrigerated warehouses. It's a gorgeous place and constructed to

work for a household that required servants. The fact that it spanned the time from gas lights in a fireplace in every room to 1981 where it had an array of refrigerators and freezers, central heating, and was cleaned with electric vacuum cleaners, no robots yet, makes it a fascinating place to see the rapid

pace of technology in America and its products over the last 150 years or so. So when your travels or interests take you to places where the mythos of American plenty comes from. Stop by the Bruce Morris State just on the edge of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Episode 175 New Technology for American Corn Hello, and welcome to the history of American food. This week, I'll be looking at the new roles corn starts playing in and around American food in the latter half of the century.

This is the age when corn stops having one job as a whole grain to be made into food and starts to be broken apart into the various pieces which will make it ubiquitous in American food moving forward. To learn all about the beginning of something new, pull up to your place at the table and

let's dig in. The first thing you need to know, oh, okay, you've probably already picked up on this, but this is as much a Food Technology podcast as it is a Food History podcast. Because American food development seems to absolutely track side by side with the

march of technology. I mean, I did start the whole series with iron. This is important now because the late 19th century is when corn stops just being a food product and begun to become a part of the larger chemical technology system that is

an essential part of how modern American food works. At the beginning of America, and even before that, the food production in North America was keenly aware that making enough food to survive takes an enormous amount of human effort, and the American food system has long emphasized that it would be nice if we didn't

have to work so hard to make food, or at least that some people didn't have to work so hard to get enough to eat. The American food system has also rotated around the idea that food could be a business to make money.

I mean, the beginning of the entire Colonize America project leaned heavily on the idea that this, what colonizer saw as empty land, could be taken over and high value crops could be grown on it and the results could be exported for profits. The major early foods in this category were all brought from the old world.

Asia, Europe, and Africa, and as a result the earliest crops were sugar, coffee, and rice. The fish, especially cod, supplies were so prodigious that cod was also an export crop of sorts.

And all of these export crop schemes leaned hard on enslaved workers. They were the engine and cogs that made the machine that turned out this food possible. And in places where it wasn't technically slavery, say the cod producers, the wheat growers and such living in dire, marginal conditions, they had many of the same results.