Alfred W. McCann

Alfred Watterson McCann (January 9, 1879 – January 19, 1931) was an American muckraking journalist, radio commentator and natural foods campaigner. His views on food were dismissed by historians and medical experts as quackery.

Biography

McCann was born in Pittsburgh. He was educated at University of Chicago and graduated in 1899 from Duquesne University.

McCann hosted the "Pure Food Hour" on the WOR radio station in the 1920s to expose practices of the American food industry. His son Alfred McCann Jr. took over for WOR radio after his death in 1931. His son died in 1972.

McCann died on January 19, 1931, in his apartment at the Park Royal Hotel, New York City. McCann gave an hour long radio broadcast on the dangers of acidosis. After he had gone off air, he died from a heart attack. The book was notable for attacking paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn. McCann argued that there is no evidence for common descent and denounced the "ape-man hoax".

McCann cited an alleged "Triassic shoe sole fossil" which he used as evidence that humans were walking around with shoes in the Triassic period. Science writer Martin Gardner noted that the photograph "shows what is obviously a common type of rock concretion" and geologists do not take McCann's claim seriously. Atheist author Woolsey Teller wrote a rebuttal to McCann. However, Catholic creationist Barry O'Toole criticized McCann for utilizing inaccurate arguments. O'Toole noted that one of McCann's illustrations made the mistake of confusing the skeleton of an orangutan with a chimpanzee.

Natural foods campaigner

McCann has been described as an "anti-white bread crusader", "food faddist" and "pure foods reformer." He campaigned against chemical bleaching and artificial whitening of bread. He linked the consumption of white bread and bleached white flour with disease. He urged people to lower their consumption of meat and avoid white flour and refined sugar which he linked to cancer and heart attacks. For example, McCann commented that unless "the white races of all lands" return to a Godly diet of whole grains they would face "race suicide on a colossal scale". In 1923 after the Globe folded, he became director of the Alfred W. McCann Laboratories in New York City.

Food historian Harvey Levenstein has commented that McCann was a "pure food crusader and unabashed quack." Historian of medicine James C. Whorton has described McCann as "America's most vociferous antagonist of processed foods."

Selected publications

Starving America (1912) Vital Questions and Answers Concerning 15,000,000 Physically Defective Children (1913) Thirty Cent Bread: How to Escape a Higher Cost of Living (1917) The Science of Eating (1919) Pasteur and God (1920) God — or Gorilla (1922) The Science of Keeping Young (1926) Greatest of Men: Washington (1927)