AIC Monthly Report September 2009

Those who garden or who shop at farmers' markets are busy processing fresh garden produce by freezing it or drying it for winter consumption. Many of us include in our diets food items like frozen peas and corn and dried tomatoes and apricots throughout the year. The principles behind successful food dehydration and freezing were scientifically explored in the 1940s in Canada by food researcher Dr. Mary MacArthur, who in 1952 was the first woman to be named as Fellow of the Agricultural Institute of Canada (FAIC). [See the 1967 article on Women: Their Status in Professional Agriculture from the Agricultural Institute Review which identifies Dr. MacArthur as the only woman to be a FAIC at that time.]

Dr. MacArthur's early speciality was in plant histology and cytology. She demonstrated leadership in Canadian work on dehydration by having a dehydration tunnel built in Ottawa in 1942. Her fundamental research was on methods for determining the inactivation of enzymes in plant tissues prior to dehydration. She published a paper on the freezing of commercially packaged asparagus before the end of the Second World War. Dr. MacArthur assisted Malcolm Bancroft Davis, chief of Division of Horticulture for the Dominion Department of Agriculture until 1955, who conducted research on the preservation of fruits and vegetables by freezing and gas storage of apples.

Dale Ells, member of the Nova Scotia Institute of Agrologists, writes that, "on pages 330 and 331 in "One Hundred Harvests" by T. H. Ansty and published by the Research Branch of Agriculture Canada, Historical Series No. 27, 1986, there is a brief discussion of her research in dehydration. She is credited with identifying that vegetables needed blanching to inactivate enzymes before dehydration. She worked jointly with scientists at Kentville, Nova Scotia who provided her with the dehydrated vegetables for further analysis in Ottawa. This was an important activity during the war years as many fruits and vegetables had to be dehydrated and shipped for the war effort." Dale Ells recalls hearing about the plant in Aylsford, N.S. where turnips were dehydrated during the Second World War.

Mary MacArthur was born in Glasgow, Scotland and came to Canada as a child. The family settled in Pugwash on the Northumberland Strait shore of Nova Scotia. Mary indicates that she became interested in botany at an early age. "I can remember when I was only so high noticing the plants in the woods and how they were very different from the ones on the seashore," she says in a 1954 newspaper interview with the Kitchener-Waterloo Record.

In 1949, Mary and her two sisters (both nurses in Boston) purchased a cottage in Pugwash that was 100 years old at the time and began fixing it up. She also enjoyed reading mystery stories and articles on archaeology.

She attended Acadia University, in Wolfville, Nova Scotia where she graduated with a BSc in 1933. She completed her PhD at Radcliffe College, affiliated with Harvard University, in 1937. She started employment as Assistant Professor of Botany at a women's college in Elmira, New York, 1937-38, but did not want to stay in the USA and chose to return to Canada. She then became Agricultural Scientist, Horticulture Division, Experimental Farms Service, Dominion Department of Agriculture, Central Experimental Farm, Ottawa, Canada in 1938.

The FAIC awarded in 1952 recognized her work in the fruit products laboratory.

Dinah Ceplis
AIC International Program Gender Equality Officer

Sources:
"Essays on the early history of plant pathology and mycology in Canada" by Ralph Howard Estey, 1994.
"Woman Plant Scientist Delights in Whodunits", Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Sept. 24, 1954.
E-mail communication with Dale Ells, member of Nova Scotia Institute of Agrologists, June 2009