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

Wilson, Bee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691138206 ISBN 13: 9780691138206

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Bad food has a history. Swindled tells it. Through a fascinating mixture of cultural and scientific history, food politics, and culinary detective work, Bee Wilson uncovers the many ways swindlers have cheapened, falsified, and even poisoned our food throughout history. In the hands of people and corporations who have prized profits above the health of consumers, food and drink have been tampered with in often horrifying ways--padded, diluted, contaminated, substituted, mislabeled, misnamed, or otherwise faked. Swindled gives a panoramic view of this history, from the leaded wine of the ancient Romans to today's food frauds--such as fake organics and the scandal of Chinese babies being fed bogus milk powder.


Wilson pays special attention to nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and England and their roles in developing both industrial-scale food adulteration and the scientific ability to combat it. As Swindled reveals, modern science has both helped and hindered food fraudsters--increasing the sophistication of scams but also the means to detect them. The big breakthrough came in Victorian England when a scientist first put food under the microscope and found that much of what was sold as "genuine coffee" was anything but--and that you couldn't buy pure mustard in all of London.


Arguing that industrialization, laissez-faire politics, and globalization have all hurt the quality of food, but also that food swindlers have always been helped by consumer ignorance, Swindled ultimately calls for both governments and individuals to be more vigilant. In fact, Wilson suggests, one of our best protections is simply to reeducate ourselves about the joys of food and cooking.

About this title

About the Author

Bee Wilson is the author of The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us. She writes a weekly food column for London's Sunday Telegraph and is a former food critic for the New Statesman. She has been named Food Journalist of the Year by the Guild of Food Writers and Food Writer of the Year by BBC Radio 4.

From the Back Cover

"Bee Wilson is a terrific writer who tells great stories, and her book could not be more timely given what's going on in the Chinese food industry today."--Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics and What to Eat

"No other book tells the history of food adulteration in this way. Swindled is ambitious in its coverage and extremely well written."--Andrew F. Smith, editor of the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink

From the Inside Flap

"Bee Wilson is a terrific writer who tells great stories, and her book could not be more timely given what's going on in the Chinese food industry today."--Marion Nestle, author ofFood Politics and What to Eat

"No other book tells the history of food adulteration in this way. Swindled is ambitious in its coverage and extremely well written."--Andrew F. Smith, editor of theOxford Companion to American Food and Drink

Reviews

Starred Review. Columnist and food writer Wilson takes readers to the beginning of the 19th century to document the history of food adulteration--at heart "two very simple principles: poisoning and cheating." concentrating on Britain and the U.S. (other countries, especially France, navigated food supply industrialization with wiser government policy), Wilson finds the first food crusader in Frederick Accum, a German immigrant who used chemistry to expose the dishonesty of London food purveyors in his treatise on adulterations of food and culinary poisons; she finds the first ineffective government response in Parliament's commitment to laissez faire economic policies over citizen safety. In the U.S., New York's 1850s "swill milk" epidemic and Chicago's meat packing industry would eventually lead to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug act--which probably wouldn't have passed without the popularity of Upton Sinclair's meat packing expose The Jungle, and couldn't stop the most nefarious and prevalent of food frauds, the development of fake foods: margarine, baby formula and thousands more. Wilson follows the economic, cultural and political threads skillfully, reporting on developments as recent as the China baby formula scandal. Prescribing more awareness and regulation, Wilson contends that consumers and governments must recognize the continuous pressure on companies to make money by substituting nutritious, genuine ingredients with adulterants. Timely, witty and purposeful, this thorough history should open a lot of eyes, and close some mouths.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

With the revelations in recent months of tainted food�salmonella-infected jalape�os, melamine-laced milk�Wilson�s latest treatise, on contaminated, adulterated, and fake foods in the modern era, feels almost prophetic. If there�s a whiff of pedantry to the enterprise, Wilson overwhelms it with sheer detail: the flavor of lead salts, so delicious that they were used to sweeten wine; the fad for mock food in wartime Britain (mock chops made of flour, potato, and onion); the fact that Campbell�s concealed marbles in the soup photographed for advertisements, to make it look thicker; Donald Rumsfeld�s role as a champion of aspartame. No government intervention can solve the problem, Wilson concludes, without consumer re�ducation in how real food tastes. �Buy food fresh, in whole form,� she writes. �Cook it yourself and familiarize yourself with the ingredients that go into proper food, so that when you are served a fake you will know the difference, and have the confidence to complain.�
Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691138206
• ISBN 13: 9780691138206
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400