Yogurt, of course, made a much more spectacular comeback. During the 1920s and 1930s, the idea that yogurt-eating rustics in the Balkans were exceptionally long-lived never quite disappeared. In a 1926 book called
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Outwitt ing Middle Age, an American doctor hauled out the Bulgarian peasants once again, saying that “out of 7,000,000 people no less than 3,700 are over a hundred and are still going strong. Why? They drink yo-gurt.” However, since it was not available fresh in the United States, he could only recommend buying it as tablets in drugstores.⁴⁶ When Wil-liam Hay, the popular reducing diet guru of the late 1930s, recommended yogurt to combat the dangerous bacteria in the digestive system, it was also in the form of pills.⁴⁷ His competitor Gayelord Hauser also advised eating fresh yogurt but had to provide a time-consuming recipe for mak-ing it at home.
Then, in 1942 Daniel Carasso, a refugee from France, set up a branch of Danone, his family’s fresh yogurt business, in Brooklyn, New York, taking on a Swiss-born Spanish Jewish immigrant, Joe Metzger, as a part-ner. Carasso’s father, Isaac, a Sephardic Jew who had moved to Spain from Greece in 1919, had begun producing yogurt in Barcelona from cultures imported from Metchnikoff ’s old lab at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He then developed a method for producing it on a large scale, and in 1929 his son Daniel, aft er whom the fi rm was named, took this method back to Paris, where he set up a yogurt-making facility. The company did quite well, but the Nazi conquest of France in 1941 forced Daniel to fl ee to the United States.
The Carasso-Metzger venture was hardly an instant success. Ameri-cans had litt le taste for yogurt, and it was diffi cult to set up a distribution network for a fresh product that needed refrigeration. They tried Ameri-canizing the name, changing it to Dannon, but until 1947 their market was restricted to a few outlets in the New York City area where the custom-ers were mainly immigrants and a sprinkling of what Metzger’s son Juan called “health food fanatics.” Then Juan Metzger had the bright idea of appealing to the American sweet tooth by putt ing a layer of stewed straw-berries on the bott om and changing the company slogan from “Doctors recommend it” to “A wonderful snack . . . a delicious dessert.”⁴⁸
This boosted sales enormously, but it was the health guru Gayelord Hauser who revived yogurt’s reputation as a health food. Tall, handsome, beautifully coiff ed, and immaculately dressed, Hauser’s charm and good looks were irresistible to women of a certain age. His Road to Damascus story had him dying of “tuberculosis of the hip” at age eighteen, soon aft er he immigrated to America from Germany.⁴⁹ He returned to Europe in search of a cure and encountered an aged practitioner (one version had him as a naturopath in Dresden, another as an old monk in Switzer-land, and a third said he was an Austrian immunologist) who cured him
41 : Autointoxication and Its Discontents
by having him drink prodigious amounts of lemon juice and liquefi ed vegetables. He was soon back in Chicago, promoting herbal potions, the most successful of which was the laxative Swiss Kriss. In 1927 he moved to Hollywood, where he quickly charmed his way into the lives of a num-ber of female stars, including Greta Garbo, by developing special diets to combat sagging skin and aging.⁵⁰ Among his recommendations was yogurt, which he said “has long been the staple food of the Bulgarians [who] are noted for their vigor and longevity.”
It was not until aft er the war, though, when Dannon made yogurt widely available commercially, that Hauser, now “Dr. Hauser,” made it central to his diets.⁵¹ He deemed it one of the fi ve “wonder foods” in his 1950 best-seller, Look Younger, Live Longer, and he proceeded to extol it in a slew of books, newspaper columns, daily radio shows, and weekly television programs.⁵² Yogurt sales climbed, as did producers’ claims for its healing qualities. Finally, in 1962 the Food and Drug Administration stepped in and issued an order prohibiting them from making health claims for it.⁵³
Three years earlier, the conglomerate Beatrice Foods had bought Dan-non and began producing and distributing fresh yogurt throughout the nation. The FDA order hardly fazed it, for its marketers had already de-cided that it was much more profi table to sell it as a sweet snack than as a health food. In 1963 a company spokesman said, “We don’t want people to think of yogurt as a product that’s good for them. We want them to think of it as something to enjoy eating.”⁵⁴ The creation of low-fat ver-sions positioned it perfectly for the fat-phobic 1980s, and sales rose impressively. From 1993 to 2004, Americans almost doubled their con-sumption of fresh yogurt, 85 percent of which was sweetened. Indeed, in 1992 Dannon, which was again in French hands, introduced a yogurt for children so full of sweetened fruit, sugar, and pieces of candy that nutri-tionists denounced it as a junk food.⁵⁵
Yet despite its sweetness, yogurt still retained a residual reputation for healthfulness.⁵⁶ In 2004 the organic yogurt producer Stonyfi eld Farm listed many of the benefi ts associated with yogurt. It admitt ed that these were “folklore,” in the sense that they were “widely held beliefs, not proven true,” but some of them (it did not say which) “were understood to be quite accurate and accepted.” There followed a long list of claims ranging from combating diarrhea to curing colitis, Crohn’s disease, and vaginal infections, as well as lowering cholesterol levels.⁵⁷
At fi rst, it seemed that this apparent posthumous triumph for Metch-nikoff was a limited one. Despite all the talk about destroying bacteria
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in the intestines, no one dared claim that yogurt was “life-prolonging.”
Indeed, even aft er the government began allowing health claims for pro-cessed foods in the late 1990s, most large producers continued to mar-ket it as a diet food rather than as a health food. However, in the early 2000s food producers discovered “probiotics.” These were varieties of lactobacillus that, although diff erent from Metchnikoff ’s Bacillus bulga-ricus, were said to have essentially the same eff ect: that is, promoting the proliferation of “good bacteria” that killed the bad ones in the colon.⁵⁸ Yoplait yogurt now claimed that “Yoptimal immun+” yogurt would
“strengthen your immune system with a unique combination of: 2 ac-tive probiotic cultures [and] Antioxidants (polyphenols).”⁵⁹ Dannon de-veloped two probiotic yogurt drinks whose lactobacilli were said to have opposite eff ects: Activia combated constipation while DanActive helped cure diarrhea by providing “a positive eff ect on the balance of the intes-tinal bacteria.”⁶⁰
Probiotics did receive a setback in September 2009, when Dannon was forced to sett le a class-action lawsuit for having deceived consumers about their eff ectiveness. It agreed to reimburse consumers $35 million and modify its claims, although it still said they had scientifi c backing.
But few scientists found these claims convincing. The only claim a panel of scientists that included ones with industry ties could substantiate was that probiotics were eff ective in combating the kind of diarrhea caused by antibiotics. The claims that came closest to those of Metchnikoff —that probiotics strengthen the immune system—remained unproven. More-over, although pills seemed to be an eff ective way of delivering probiot-ics to the gut, there was no evidence that fresh yogurt was. In September 2009, a review of the claims for yogurt’s health benefi ts by the University of California School of Public Health concluded, “Don’t eat yogurt for its health benefi ts.”⁶¹ The next month the European Food Safety Board concluded that not one of the hundreds of “probiotic” strains of bacteria it studied was shown to improve gut health or immunity, and ordered Danone and other yogurt companies to stop claiming that they did.⁶² Danone reiterated its confi dence that further research would prove their eff ectiveness, but for the moment, at least, Metchnikoff still awaited vin-dication. Meanwhile, some months before, in May 2009, Daniel Car-asso had died in Paris, at age 103. Unfortunately for the company, unlike Metchnikoff , he never publicly att ributed his longevity to yogurt.
That bacteria were everywhere was frightening; that milk could make you sick was disheartening; but charges that bacteria could make eating beef deadly were potentially the most upsett ing of all. Thanks in large part to the persistence of the British culinary heritage, beef was by far the pre-ferred meat of nineteen-century Americans, even though they actually consumed much more pork. As a mid-nineteenth-century newspaper proudly proclaimed, “We are essentially a hungry beef-eating people.”¹ The American food that Mark Twain missed most during his European tour in 1867 was “a mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputt ering from the griddle.”² Twenty years later, the common refrain of new cookbooks was that middle-class cooking was mired in a rut of roast beef, porterhouse steak, and potatoes.³ It was this iconic status that would help protect beef from some of the next century’s most spectacular food scares.