Most kinds of food fraud were perfectly legal in England during
the early 1800s. Very few food swindles were banned, and
those laws were rarely enforced. For example, it was techni-
cally illegal to adulterate cofee, but mostcofee was heavily
blended with cheaper chicory (a roasted root). Government
oicials said it wasn’t worth the trouble to enforce that old
law. Cofee fraud was too hard to prove. They argued that it
was best to ignore food fraud unless it cheated the govern-
ment out of tax money.
This added up to one of the biggest and boldest social
experiments of all time. What happens when there are so few
rules that sellers can do just about anything they want to the
food supply? England was about to find out.Life During the Industrial Revolution
A lot of things seemed to be going great when 1820
rolled around. England was glowing with wealth and power.
Advances in science and technology had brought about an
“Industrial Revolution” that transformed society. Machines
powered by waterwheels or steam could make cloth and
other goods faster and cheaper than ever before. Thousands
of new factories made England an economic powerhouse.
Canals, steam ships, and railways made transportation faster.
English scientists constantly announced amazing discoveries,
such as the fossilized remains of giant reptiles. (See JUNIOR
SKEPTIC#73.) It was a glorious time to be alive—if you were
rich.
However, life was absolutely awful for the working poor.
Working conditions were harsh, filthy, and unsafe. Adults and
even small children toiled day and night in factories and
mines. They were paid barely enough to survive. If they quit
or got fired, they might literally starve.
Worse, workers were powerless to change things. They
weren’t allowed to vote in elections. Instead, rich landowners
elected other rich people who passed laws that benefited the
rich. They made it a crime for workers to form unions, go on
strike, or join together to negotiate for better wages or work-
ing conditions. Workers could go to jail just for attending a
meeting to talk about the problems. Larger protests were
violently crushed by police or the army.
This trapped millions in misery. Let’s not dwell on the
poverty they endured, the slums they lived in, the choking
coal smoke, the backbreaking labor, or the constant threat of
hunger, crime, and disease. Instead, let’s imagine, just for a
moment, some lighter moments of nourishment or pleasure.
Imagine a mother as she buys milk for her baby, or splurges
on some mustard to liven her family’s meager supper. An
exhausted steelworker stops for a pint of beer after his 14-
hour shift. A woman drinks tea or cofee to stay alert around
dangerous factory machines. A young boy savors a rare treatof candy on the way down to work in a candlelit coal mine.
The grim reality was that almost all of those people would
have been cheated when they bought their food and drink.
Some may also have been poisoned.Exposing the Corrupt Food System
The food supply in English cities had become so thor-
oughly corrupted with fraud that it was nearly impossible to
buy food that wasn’tadulterated. Practically everyone got
ripped of every day. People on the edge of hunger were
routinely robbed of the nourishment they needed to survive.
Food fraud sickened many people, and killed others.
The food swindling plague had been festering in the shad-
ows for decades, secretly spreading to every store and dinner
table. Few people realized how bad things had gotten—until
one scientist decided to find out for himself.
Frederick Accum was a well-known chemist, and bit of
a “foodie.” He loved wholesome cooking so much that he
developed chemistry tests to detect common kinds of food
adulteration. He tested countless food samples from all
around London.
The results filled him with “regret and disgust.” Foods
were so often faked that “it would be diicult to mention a
single article of food which is not to be met with in an adul-
terated state; and there are some substances which are
scarcely ever to be procured genuine.”
He decided to expose the whole rotten mess. His 1820
book A Treatise on Adulteration of Food and Culinary Poisons
was the first major scientific study of food fraud.
Accum revealed that countless foods were “very gener-
ally” fraudulent, including “tea, cofee, bread, beer, wine,
spirituous liquors, salad oil, pepper, vinegar, mustard,
cream” as well as candy, milk, pickles, lemonade, and catsup.
If that was not bad enough, Accum’s tests also
proved that many foods were “contami-
nated with poisonous ingredients” such
as copper and lead. Worse still, these
deadly toxins were “disguised...in such a
form that their real nature cannot possi-
bly be detected by the unwary.”
Science itself was part of the problem.
Crooked chemists cooked up food scams
that the public could never detect on
their own. People had no way
to protect themselves from
poisons they couldn’t see,
smell, or taste. Accum
thought the only
solution was to fight
science with
science.Plague of Deception
67Frederick AccumImage: Wellcome Collection
JUNIOR SKEPTIC No. 54 (3232)