University of Toronto Research Seminar: Lisa Haushofer

This chapter will follow the emergence of yeast as a health food, and re-evaluate the factors

which contributed to its enormous popularity. By closely examining the place of Hawk’s

“commissioned” research in the campaign, it will propose a more nuanced account of the interplay

between the product and science, specifically between product marketing strategies and nutritional

research, which developed during this period. I will revisit the role of vitamins in the Fleischmann’s

Yeast story, and place them in the context of the history of nutritional theories and commercial

nutritional products developed in the previous chapters. By doing so, I will suggest a new

interpretation of the role of vitamins, not only in the making of Fleischmann’s Yeast, but in the

history of nutrition and medicine more broadly. In order to do this, I will take seriously the

marketing strategies developed by the Fleischmann company, the J. Walter Thompson agency, and

the advertising community of the 1910s and 1920s. But rather than regard them alone responsible

for the achievement of turning an unattractive lump of fungus into a desired consumer item, I will

consider their interplay with scientific theories and concepts of health. These new marketing

techniques were developed at a time when a medical scientific orthodoxy had largely consolidated

their authority, and gained considerable sway over the makers of proprietary medicines through the

1906 Food and Drug Act and the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Medical

Association. While it might be tempting to place Fleischmann’s Yeast into the same analytical

category as late nineteenth and early twentieth-century patent medicines, doing so obscures the

subtle ways by which, through the interplay of marketing strategies and scientific theory, a different

space was carefully carved out, one that simultaneously brought together, and set itself apart from,

the realms of food and medicine. The marketing category of a health food, complete with an

extended and increasingly abstract conception of health, and a health food consumer market,

materialized more concretely than ever.

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