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  Swindled

  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.

  eISBN: 978-0-691-21408-5

  2. Food industry and trade—History. I. Title.

  TX531.W688 2008

  363.19'26—dc22 2008009688

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  press.princeton.edu

  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 365

  Index 367

  Preface

  None of us likes being swindled, particularly when all we were trying 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 conjunction with ten thousand times the recommended dose of vitamin A; he died as a result.1 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 (often, 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 because a cheap food had been substituted for an expensive one.2 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 a
nd 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.

  Swindled

  1

  GERMAN HAM AND ENGLISH PICKLES

  With Bentham bewilder, with Buonaparte frighten,

  With Accum astonish . . .

  —James Smith, Milk and Honey (1840)

  In 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 additions 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 finally 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, pineapples, quinces, and plums, or, when ripe, from delicious orange apricots.1 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 truffled 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 difficult,” 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 be procured genuine.”2 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 eating a custard.”3 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 exhilarate, usually cheap tartareous acid modified for the occasion.4

  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 adulterating food and drink.5 Accum describes children’s custards poisoned with laurel leaves, tea falsified with sloe leaves, lozenges made from pipe clay, pepper mixed with floor sweepings, pickles coloured green with copper and sweets dyed red with lead. “Good heavens!” exclaimed one reader. “Is there no end to these infamous doings? Does nothing pure or unpoisoned come to our tables?” In truth, there was almost no end to the scandals Accum uncovered. His book was greeted with shock and consternation. It has been said that no chemistry book was ever so widely discussed.

  This shocked reaction was exactly what Accum had sought. “THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT,” read a motto in large letters on the side of an urn on the title page. In case anyone missed the point, the urn was draped in a shroud, with a gruesome skull set above it, and two serpents slithering around. Accum repeated the theme in his text. “We may exclaim with the sons of the prophet,” he wrote, “There is death in the pot,” reminding his readers of the line’s biblical origins (in II Kings 4:40). The slogan “Death in the pot” would become a rallying cry for food safety campaigners of the nineteenth century, but it was never employed with such biting moral outrage as by Accum. “Feelings of regret and disgust” were, for him, an entirely appropriate response to adulteration. The “nefarious practice,” he complained, was applied not just to “the luxuries of life” but to basic necessities, such as bread, which was commonly mixed with alum to give it a spurious appearance of whiteness. The motive behind adulteration was “the eager and insatiable thirst for gain,” a greed so overwhelmi
ng that “the possible sacrifice of a fellow creature’s life is a secondary consideration.”6 “It may be justly observed,” Accum sorrowfully remarked, just in case any of his readers might have failed to get the message, “that ‘in the midst of life we are in death.’ ”7

  “Death in the Pot”: a detail from the frontispiece of Accum’s Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Drink (1822 edition).

  What made Accum’s Treatise so compelling? It was not that people had been entirely unaware of adulteration in food before 1820. He himself said, in his preface, that “every person” was aware that bread, beer, wine, and “other substances” were frequently adulterated.8 Complaints about watered-down or doctored wine go all the way back to the ancient Romans, as the next chapter will discuss in more detail. More recently, in the eighteenth century, there had been countless rumours and satires on the contamination of food. The subject of adulteration found wonderful expression in the writing of the novelist Tobias Smollett, who described in his novel Humphry Clinker the foul and debased foods of London, compared to the bucolic simplicity of the country where the chickens are free, the game are fresh from the moors, and the vegetables, herbs, and salads are picked straight from the garden. As Smollett describes it, London is a place where strawberries are washed in spit, where vegetables are cooked with brass to make them green, and where milk carried in open pails through the streets is contaminated with the “spewings of infants,” “spittle, snot and tobacco-quids from foot passengers,” “spatterings from coach wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by rogueish boys for the joke’s sake,” and even “frothed with bruised snails.” The bread in London is “a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone-ashes; insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.” The wine is a “vile, unpalatable and pernicious sophistication, balderdashed with cider, corn-spirit and the juice of sloes.”9