The Wardman Wire

The book “Swindled” about Foods and Food Adulteration by has been read on Radio 4 this week, and it has been brilliant. Here are the details:

Monday 31 December- Friday 4 January

Swindled: From Poisoned Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee

By Bee Wilson, abridged by Polly Coles

A history of food adulteration over the centuries.

A Treatise on Adulteration of Food and Culinary Poisons by Frederick Accum was published in 1820. It became a best-seller that shook English society with its revelations of the extremes to which food retailers and manufacturers would go to sell their products.

Producer Clive Brill.

There are some very vivid examples, and the whole thing shows the importance of “regulation” in a regulated free market.

I’m not going to post the whole thing - which is five 15-minutes episodes - but here are two short extracts. You can listen to all the programmes from the Book of the Week homepage for the next 7 days.

You might not want to listen over lunch.

1 - Food, Glorious Food - or Not

This segment is from the first programme. It sets the scene, and describes some adulteration techniques used in Victorian industrial food production.

2 - All food is contaminated, but what is the problem?

This second segment - from this morning - is about the USA “acceptable contamination in food allowances”, and describes modern definitions of harmless contamination.

Acceptable allowances include one rodent pellet per pint of white flour, or up to 30 insect fragments and one rodent hair allowed per 100g of peanut butter.

We shudder, but these will do us no harm - while we ignore high levels of pesticides and chemical residues concentrated in the bodies of fish. This is the same kind of naive self-deception that makes us want to put slaughterhouses out of mind behind high walls, and then shudder when we imagine that our nice leg of lamb came from a living version of cute claymation character Shaun the Sheep.

What we actually need is a sense of judgement to discern acceptable “contamination” - which is far more useful than an inchoate sense of outrage.

Wrapping-Up

Roll on realism, and the day when more people buy their carrots with mud and the occasonal beetle on from a trestle table at the farm gate.

Personally, if I know that my steak came from a cow called “Buttercup” who lived next door, and who I meet when I walk across the field - then I am far happier eating her than if I did not know the source. It is time for us to dump the habit of separating the living, breathing animal from the food on our plate - the two are opposite sides of the same, delicious, coin.

After all, making milk, steak and legs of lamb or mutton are what cows and sheep are for - no matter what the people from PETA (better known as PITA) say.