'Quality Tobacco': The Making of the Concept and the Crop

Time: 12:00pm

Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation

What does “quality” mean for an addictive, cancer-causing product? As the cigarette faced medical scrutiny in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, farmers, domestic cigarette manufacturers, and USDA officials argued over this very question. To define quality, each group invoked its own notions of expertise. Cigarette companies cited the results of “taste panels” conducted by “expert smokers”; agriculture officials pointed to chemical analyses performed at land grant colleges; and farmers defended the quality of their crop by pointing to their historical reputation as skilled producers and impugning the motives of their detractors. Ultimately, debates over quality were scuttled by the need for the entire tobacco trade to maintain a unified front against antismoking activists. Sarah Milov’s talk will highlight the constructed, chimerical notion of “quality,” suggesting that taste cannot be divorced from the political and institutional context of the cigarette’s descent from a luxury good into an economic bad.

Sarah Milov is a doctoral candidate in the history department at Princeton University. Her dissertation is entitled “Little Tobacco: The Business and Bureaucracy of Tobacco Farming in North Carolina, 1920–1980.” In it, she places farmers at the center of the history of the cigarette, arguing that farmers produced not only tobacco but also new systems of marketing, interest-group organizations, and discourse. At Princeton her work has been supported by the Program in American Studies and the Society of Woodrow Wilson Scholars. She will defend in 2013.