‘A Cult of Cactus Eaters’: To Live and Diet in L.E. Landone’s Los Angeles

Americans in the first decade of the twentieth century lived in a state of perpetual dietary crisis. Public scandals over food adulteration and conditions in meatpacking plants led to the creation of new regulatory agencies with signicant powers. A rapidly urbanizing population experienced new forms of abundance – thanks to new technologies of production and preservation – and new forms of dislocation – thanks to the profound social and demographic shifts of the Progressive Era. This article looks at the case of a young schoolteacher, born in obscurity in the American Midwest who was able to reinvent himself as Doctor Leon Elbert Landone, an expert in dietetics with metaphysical leanings. At every stage of his career, he published in New Thought journals, on topics ranging from telepathy to efficiency to immortality while becoming famous for his promotion of a food fad based on spineless cacti.