444Chapter 23chased their food in markets, unscrupulous merchants
exploited the unregulated economy to sell adulterated
food. A parliamentary commission found that bread of-
ten contained chalk, plaster of Paris, sand, or lime.
Powdered clay was mixed with cocoa, ground nut shells
with pepper. Sulfuric acid was added to gin, producing
a drink with a memorable bite. Sugar was debased with
a dried residue from soap boilers. Parliament concluded
that 62 percent of all food sold in London was cor-
rupted. The problem was not limited to British cities,
and many countries debated pure food laws versus pure
capitalism before accepting the government regulation
of food, drink, and drugs. The Dutch pioneered such
legislation in 1829, and regulations against adulterated
food soon followed in France, Belgium, Prussia, and
Spain. British merchants continued to insist upon an
unregulated market until scandals forced pure food leg-
islation in 1860 and 1872.
The adulteration of food made people initially
skeptical of altered or synthetic foods, which began to
appear in the nineteenth century. Only after large ad-
vertising campaigns did people begin to accept pasteur-
ized milk in which microbes had been killed by
sterilization. Two American chemists synthesized a
compound in 1879 and accidentally discovered that it
was extremely sweet tasting; their “saccharin” was an ef-
fective sugar substitute, but people who knew about the
corruption of sugar with soap wastes were reluctant to
accept a sugar containing no sugar. One of the first suc-
cessful substitute foods—often called by the German
term Ersatzessen—was a flour made from potatoes in-
stead of grains. Margarine, the most widely used ersatz
food, was invented in a French laboratory in 1869, in
response to a contest sponsored by Napoleon III to dis-
cover an affordable substitute for butter. The prize-
winning recipe was a mixture of beef fat and ground
cow’s udders. This may seem a scant improvement on
the outlawed adulteration, but it was just a short step to
the use of vegetable oil instead of rendered beef fat, to
create the commercially successful margarines sold to
the urban working class.
Drink and Drugs in the Nineteenth Century
The nineteenth century was an age of high consump-
tion of alcohol—compared with the late twentieth cen-
tury, but not with the eighteenth century—plus
consumption of opium and cocaine, both of which were
legally available. The ravages caused to the human body
by excessive alcohol or drugs were poorly understood,
and physicians regularly prescribed narcotics aspainkillers; some even recommended heavy alcohol
consumption. Governments did little to control alcohol
or opium sales in 1800. Laissez-faire capitalism, which
opposed government restrictions on the market, perpet-
uated that situation. Furthermore, alcohol taxes kept
most governments in business. In 1870 Britain had
virtually no income tax but raised 35 percent of its total
revenue on alcohol taxes. In Ireland, 54 percent of all
government revenue was raised by taxes on alcohol.
End-of-the-century Russia raised even more income
through a government monopoly on vodka.
Heavy drinking was socially acceptable. William
Pitt the Younger frequently addressed Parliament while
drunk; on important occasions, he stepped behind the
speaker’s chair and induced vomiting before making a
critical speech. Even the more puritanical Gladstone
drank a sherry mixture in Parliament, to ease his way
through three-hour speeches. Another prime minister
made himself light-headed with ether before speaking,
and a fourth took a jolt of opium dissolved in alcohol. If
the rich and powerful behaved that way, it is hardly sur-
prising that people who lived in a world of epidemic
disease, short life expectancy, seventy-to-eighty-hour
workweeks, no welfare legislation or retirement, and
minimal diets found solace and sociability in cafes, pubs,
and beer halls.
A variety of records reveal the extent of nineteenth-
century drinking. The Antwerp study found that beer
consumption in the 1820s averaged two bottles per day
(twenty-three ounces) for every man, woman, and child
in the population, plus approximately one bottle of wine
and one bottle of gin each per month; by the 1850s
nearly 10 percent of all calories consumed in the city
came from alcohol. A similar survey of France in 1900
found a per capita annual consumption rate of 180 liters
of wine (240 standard bottles), 27 liters of beer (more
than three cases of 12-ounce bottles), and 4.7 liters of
distilled spirits (more than 5 bottles of alcohol). Those
averages include the entire population. If one excludes
children below the age of fourteen (more than 30 per-
cent of the population in 1900), every adult in France
had to consume 325 bottles of wine per year; clearly, a
significant portion of the population drank more than a
bottle per day, all year long, much of it distilled to make
a rough brandy. A study of Russia found that spending
on vodka exceeded total spending for education, books,
oil, gifts, priests, the poor, weddings, and funerals,
which may explain why the government chose to tax
vodka instead of books.
Such drinking led to efforts to control sales of alco-
holic beverages. The first European temperance society
was organized in Ireland in 1818, and such groups