Heinz Ketchup and Rational Self-Interest

Ian Millhiser provides a brief history of Heinz Ketchup, and Henry Heinz' early embrace of a pure foods law in order to make his refusal to trick his customers into a market advantage.

Heinz' competitors had their own market advantage, and that is their willingness to use tomatoes that should have been thrown out in their manufacturing processes. That's turning a write-off into pure profit. They could undercut the better quality Heinz brand and still be making money.

Though Millhiser's main point, and it's an important one, is that libertarians are dumb consumers who only have price to go on as a measuring stick will often choose it and therefore the market alone cannot ensure product safety:

... My point is simply to indicate that, despite Heinz’ belief that “pure food . . . is good business,” the truth is that thousands of American consumers bought rancid ketchup for decades, even though they had the option to choose Heniz’ (sic) safer product. Market forces left thousands of Americans sick from tomato mold. It wasn’t until the federal government got involved that rotten tomato ketchup left the shelves of local groceries.

How can this have happened? Let's explore that ...

First, how would a pre-1906 (when the Pure Food and Drug Act passed and the agency that became the FDA was founded) consumer have known whose ketchup to trust? Sure, Heinz claimed that his ketchup didn't have rotten tomatoes in it and other brands did, but he was in it for a buck just like everyone else. It would only have been rational to be a little skeptical.

Would consumers have gotten sick every time they had his competitors' products? Almost certainly not. Looking at recent events, the Peanut Corporation of America was manufacturing in the skeeviest of conditions for years before there was a problem big enough to trace back to them - which still only harmed a very tiny fraction of those who had eaten their contaminated products.

What makes one person sick, especially if that person is elderly, sickly or a child, may not noticeably harm another person.

Then even today, with refrigeration widespread, most foodborne illness comes from improper food handling at home. What do you think that was like before refrigeration?

Or consider the difficulty, if you get sick from your food, of figuring out what it was that actually made you sick. Ketchup is a condiment that would never constitute a large portion of a meal, so the odds of fingering it seem minimal.

If you buy a hot dog with all the fixings from a street vendor and feel sick a couple hours later, isn't the hot dog itself your first suspicion?

It can also take hours for foodborne illness, especially a mild one, to make you sick. You might have eaten a full other meal since then. This is similar to the way a food intolerance works. I think I'd probably still be on daily migraine medications if a nutritionist hadn't suggested an elimination diet to see if food was causing those headaches. I never suspected the wheat that was in most of the meals I ate, but also seemed not to make me equally sick every time I had it.

What if those headaches, or some other illness, had been coming from a contaminated condiment? We don't call ourselves omnivores for nothing, humans eat many types of food, making it potentially difficult to identify problems with any specific one.

Also, as I've said before and will again, the typical person can't afford the time and expense of having even a small minority of the food they eat tested for pathogens. The idea is absurd.

While I'm every bit as invested as Jill Richardson in having a food system where we know where our food comes from, and even some of the people who grow it, most of our food is going to continue to come from strangers. Which is why both of us, and everyone we know in the sustainable food movement, want strict monitoring of industrial food. The market advantages from cheating are just too great to take manufacturers' claims at face value.

Human nature hasn't changed in the last 100 years, and certainly not enough that enlightenment ideals of rational self-interest will prevent unscrupulous creeps from selling trash as food.