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), 544Google Scholar.

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), 319Google Scholar. 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), 421Google Scholar.

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. 1071–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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), 620Google Scholar. 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)Google Scholar, makes almost no mention of veal. Similarly, DuPuis, E. Melanie, Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink (New York, 2002)Google Scholar, 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)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Jennings, Irwin G., Study of the New York City Milk Problem (New York, 1919), 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. 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), 183Google Scholar.

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): 937CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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–xiiGoogle Scholar.

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): 1103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² Ibid.

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

³⁴ 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 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 Ibid. (Spring).

⁴⁶ Ibid. (Spring).

⁴⁷ 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 Ibid., 244.

⁵⁷ 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): 924Google Scholar.

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 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): 467Google ScholarPubMed.

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), 227Google Scholar.

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), 45Google Scholar: “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), 88–89Google Scholar.

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), 123Google Scholar, 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), 20Google Scholar.

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), 468Google Scholar.

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): 206CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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

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

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

⁹⁶ 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 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)Google Scholar, 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)Google Scholar.