Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee

294 Pages·2008·6.23 MB·English

by  Bee Wilson

Cover
Swindled: THE DARK HISTORY OF FOOD FRAUD, FROM POISONED CANDY TO
COUNTERFEIT COFFEE
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Preface
1. German Ham and English Pickles
2. A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread
3. Government Mustard
4. Pink Margarine and Pure Ketchup
5. Mock Goslings and Pear-nanas
6. Basmati Rice and Baby Milk
Epilogue: Adulteration in the Twenty-first Century
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments

Swindled
THE DARK HISTORY OF FOOD FRAUD, FROM POISONED CANDY TO
COUNTERFEIT COFFEE
Bee Wilson
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS • PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press (??) Requests for permission to
reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by
Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wilson, Bee.
Swindled : the dark history of food fraud, from poisoned candy to counterfeit coffee / Bee Wilson.
p. cm. Previously published: London : John Murray, 2008. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-13820-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Food contamination—History.
2. Food industry and trade—History. I. Title. TX531.W688 2008 363.1926—dc22
2008009688
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Minion Pro
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
press.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For David, Tom, and Natasha
Do we recognize the dishonesty of our tradesmen with their advertisements, their
pretended credit, their adulterations and false cheapness? . . . —It is not of
swindlers and liars that we have need to lie in fear, but of the fact that swindling
and lying are gradually becoming not abhorrent to our minds.
—Anthony Trollope, The New Zealander, 1856
Contents
Preface xi
1
German Ham and English Pickles 1
2
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread 46
3
Government Mustard 94
4
Pink Margarine and Pure Ketchup 152
5
Mock Goslings and Pear-nanas 213
6
Basmati Rice and Baby Milk 272
Epilogue: Adulteration in the
Twenty-first Century 322
Notes 329
Bibliography 351
Acknowledgments 363
Picture Credits 000
Index 000
Preface
N one of us likes being swindled, particularly when all
we were try
ing to do was buy something nice to eat. The feeling—of
mortification mingled with fury—is wholly disagreeable, but it is also very
familiar. Being cheated over food is one of the universal human experiences. We
have all been overcharged for a quart of milk; or shortchanged on a pound of
strawberries; or sold an additive-laden loaf of bread that pretended to be
“natural”; or served a “home-made” soup in a diner that came from a can; or
eaten bacon that turned to water in the pan. Sometimes we gaze, bitterly, at the
shoddy or overpriced food on our plate and wonder if there were older, simpler
times, when honesty reigned and both food and its sellers had real integrity.
Having researched the question for this book, I can only say that these idylls, if
they existed at all, were very infrequent and short-lived. Food fraud has a long
history, and it is mixed up with all the other forces—scientific, economic,
political—that went together, for better and worse, to create the world we live in.
In many ways, the history of food fraud is the history of the modern world.
Food has always had the power to kill as well as cure. “All things are poisons; nothing is without poison;
only the dose permits something not to be poisonous,” said the alchemist Paracelsus in the sixteenth
century. Perhaps; but some foods are much more poisonous than others. If you drink enough carrot juice,
you can make yourself ill; in 1974, a health nut called Basil Brown drank ten gallons of carrot juice in
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conjunction with ten thousand times the recommended dose of vitamin A; he died as a result. But the
really dangerous poisons are those whose dose is a normal portion. There are
plenty of these in this story: children’s candies dyed with copper and mercury;
diseased meats dosed with chemicals to look fresh; wine sweetened with lead.
Not all poisons in food are swindles: some are entirely accidental. But what makes adulteration
(deliberately tampering with food) worse than contamination is the element of intent. Behind every
poisonous swindle is another human being (oft en, a whole team of them), who was prepared to damage
your health if it meant a quick buck for them.
Adulteration is an ungainly word, and it can seem hard to pin down at times. What counts as tampering?
“Am I adulterating a cake recipe when I add some extra vanilla to it?” someone asked me recently. “No,
you are cooking,” I replied. It is true, though, that ideas of adulteration have changed radically over time. In
the 1850s, salt was listed as an “adulterant” of butter (partly because it was used to disguise butter that was
going rancid). Now, salty butter is sold to those who enjoy it without any intention to deceive. By the same
token, hops are now considered an essential ingredient in beer. But when first introduced, hops were viewed
with deep suspicion as a rogue element in a true Englishman’s ale. It took a century for hops to cease being
an adulterant and become an innocent ingredient. The opposite pattern prevails now, as many ingredients
once seen as harmless—saccharine, food colourings, trans fats (the hydrogenated fats that, until recently,
were a routine ingredient in biscuits, cakes, and breakfast cereals)—come to be redefined as adulterants.
Yet for all these fluctuations, adulteration can be reduced to two very simple principles: poisoning and
cheating. In the old common law, it was an offence to sell food that was “not wholesome for man’s body,”
assuming that the seller knew what they were doing. Common law also made it an offence to sell food as
something other than what it actually was—whether because it was of short weight, or padded or diluted, or
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because a cheap food had been substituted for an expensive one. Although the laws against
adulteration have varied widely at different times and places, they have always
had these two basic ideas at their core: Thou shalt not poison and Thou shalt not
cheat.
These are not just personal matters, between a buyer and a seller; they affect an entire society. Adulteration
is one of the longest-standing concerns of law and government, not only for its own sake but because it
impinges on so many other matters of grave importance. It is a question of public health, but also of
economics. From the earliest times, governments have seen swindling as a threat to economic order and to
their own authority. In addition to the more immediate victims of the crime, food cheats damage the
exchequer, since they avoid paying the full taxes they would have been liable to pay on the real food or
drink. Adulteration is a threat to civilized politics, too. Governments have sought to police food fraud
because to permit it to carry on unpunished is a sign of anarchy. A society in which swindling is rife is one
in which fundamental trust between citizens has broken down. It is therefore a vital concern of politics to
stop it.
Even so, for the past two hundred years many governments have allowed swindlers to get away with
outrageous crimes. This is a story of turpitude and greed, of the vile indifference with which some human
beings will treat the health of others if it means making money. But it is also a story of a failure of politics;
of the deep reluctance of postindustrial governments to interfere with the markets in food and drink—
something earlier governments were happy to do—even when those markets have become dishonest and
dangerous. The heroes of the story are not for the most part politicians, but scientists—detectives of the
kitchen—who have dared to use every tool at their disposal to expose the manifold ways in which food is
tampered with, padded, dyed, faked, diluted, substituted, poisoned, mislabelled, misnamed, and otherwise
falsified.
Before the story begins, I should say two things about its scope as presented here. The first is that I do not
write about drugs, only about food and drink, even though almost all food legislation on adulteration has
also dealt with the adulteration of drugs. We are all familiar with current stories of the hair-raising trade in
pirated and fake drugs, much of it in the developing world. We also know about the perils of the black
market in illegal drugs in our own society. Like food adulteration, drug adulteration has a long history.
Much of the traffic in falsified drugs parallels the commerce of fake food; the adulteration of illegal
substances has echoes of earlier adulterations of alcoholic beverages. But to do justice to the history would
take a whole other book (which has already been written, admirably, by Ernst Stieb, in 1966: Drug
Adulteration).
One other thing: it will be seen that I write a disproportionate amount about the faked food of Britain and
America. This is not just because I am British, and therefore more intimately acquainted with the bad food
of these islands than of anywhere else. There is a historical reason, too. Adulteration on an endemic scale is
a disease of industrialized cities, coupled with a relatively noninterventionist state. Britain was the first to
acquire these two conditions at the same time, which goes some way toward explaining why we British
have—over the past two centuries—endured a more debased diet than other nations in Europe. The United
States soon followed suit— with the horrors of the New York swill milk scandal in the 1850s and the
gruesome jungle of Upton Sinclair’s Packingtown in the early 1900s. This pattern of early endemic
adulteration explains something of America’s predicament with food, up to the present day.
For these reasons, the book starts in Britain, in 1820, with a German scientist who had the vision and
courage to point out just how bad the swindling had become.
1
German Ham and English Pickles
With Bentham bewilder, with Buonaparte frighten, With Accum astonish . . . —
James Smith, Milk and Honey (1840)
I n the history of food adulteration, there are two stages:
before 1820 and after 1820; before Accum and after
Accum. It was only after 1820 that any sort of concerted
fight against poisonous or superfluous ad
ditions to food in the
modern Western world began, a fact that is entirely due to the appearance that
year (in both Britain and the United States) of a single small book entitled A
Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons, written by the
expatriate German chemist Frederick Accum (1769–1838). It would be an
exaggeration to say that this book changed everything; after it was published, the
swindlers carried on swindling, and more often than not they still got away with
it; no food laws were changed on account of Accum; and Accum himself, though
initially feted, later suffered a total personal disgrace. But his treatise fi nally
opened people’s eyes to the fact that almost everything sold as food and drink in
modern industrial cities was not what it seemed; and by being not what it
seemed, it could kill them.
A Westphalian by birth (his real name was Friedrich), though a Londoner by choice, Frederick Accum was
a man who loved his food. He was robustly fond of good healthy bread (wholemeal, not white), smoked
ham, aromatic black coffee, and properly made jams and conserves, simmered from peaches, cherries,
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pineapples, quinces, and plums, or, when ripe, from delicious orange apricots. Accum’s attitude
toward food was not that of a French gastronome, who looks down his nose at
anyone who fails to yelp with delight at the sight of a truffl ed partridge. His
appetites were less pretentious and more Germanic than this. A malty pint of
beer; a bowl of sauerkraut made from white winter cabbages and caraway seeds;
a crunchy pickled cucumber seasoned with pimento; a “light, flaky pie-crust”—
these were a few of his favourite things. Yet there was nothing cavalier about
Accum’s approach to eating. He insisted that you could be as exact and
particular about boiling potatoes as you might be about dressing fancy steaks;
and only snobs would pretend otherwise. For Accum, this was not simply a
question of taste; it was also a question of science. Cooks, he held, were
chemists, and the kitchen was a “chemical laboratory.” This was something
Accum was well placed to judge, since, at the height of his career, in 1820, he
himself was perhaps the most distinguished and certainly the most famous
chemist in London, at a time when chemistry was at its zenith, and chemists
were true celebrities.
As both a lover of food and a chemist, Accum believed in “precision in mixing ingredients.” And, as both a
lover of food and a chemist, he shuddered with moral indignation at those “respectable” criminals who
tampered with food for the sake of profit. Fortunately, Accum did not keep his indignation to himself but
wrote it up in his treatise, showing that countless foodstuffs were routinely falsified in ways that were at
best dishonest and at worst poisonous. “It would be diffi cult,” he wrote, “to mention a single article of food
which is not to be met with in an adulterated state; and there are some substances which are scarcely ever to
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be procured genuine.” The work in which these words first appeared sold a thousand
copies in a month (a substantial figure for the time) and went on to sell countless
thousands more.
To read the reviews of Accum’s treatise is to get a sense of a sudden collective sickening at the thought of
how basic foods were falsified. “Since we read [Accum’s] book,” wrote a reviewer in Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine, “our appetite has visibly decreased . . . yesterday . . . we turned pale in the act of
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eating a custard.” Another reviewer, in the Literary Gazette, complained that “It is
so horribly pleasant to reflect how we are in this way be-swindled, be-trayed, be-
drugged and be-devilled, that we are almost angry with Mr Accum for the great
service he has done the community by opening our eyes, at the risk of shutting
our mouths forever.” The reviewer went on to lament:
Our pickles are made green by copper; our vinegar rendered sharp by sulphuric
acid; our cream composed of rice powder or arrow root in bad milk; our comfits
mixed of sugar, starch and clay, and coloured with preparations of copper and
lead; our catsup often formed of the dregs of distilled vinegar with a decoction of
the outer green husk of the walnuts, and seasoned with all-spice, Cayenne,
pimento, onions and common salt—or, if founded on mushrooms, done with
those in a putrefactive state remaining unsold at market; our mustard a
compound of mustard, wheaten flour, Cayenne, bay salt, radish seed, turmeric
and pease flour; and our citric acid, our lemonade, and our punch, to refresh or
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exhilarate, usually cheap tartareous acid modified for the occasion.
This is a fair summary of Accum’s book, which called for “all classes of the
community to cooperate” to abolish the “nefarious traffic and deception” of