Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee—The Dark History of the Food Cheats

by Bee Wilson

Salmonella ...toxins ...additives ...food scares ...Have you ever wondered how our food has become so untrustworthy? Have we ever been able to trust what we eat? Via a fascinating mix of food politics, history and culinary detective work, Bee Wilson uncovers the many methods by which swindlers have tampered with our food throughout history. From the leaded wine of ancient Rome to the food piracy of the twenty-first century, we see the extraordinary ways food has been padded, poisoned, spiked, coloured, substituted, faked and mislabelled everywhere it has been sold. Bee Wilson reveals the strong historical currents which enable the fraudsters to flourish; the battle of the science of deception against the science of detection; the struggle to establish reliable standards. She also suggests some small ways in which we can all protect ourselves from swindles and learn to trust what we eat again.

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, History, Food History, Science, Food and Drink, Food Writing

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Beatrice Dorothy "Bee" Wilson is a British food writer and historian. Wilson is married to the political scientist David Runciman and lives in Cambridge. The daughter of A.N. Wilson and the Shakespearean scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones, her sister is Emily Wilson, a Classicist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is nothing new here. So many quotes that I've heard before. This just seems to be recycled material told in an entertaining way. And that's about it, more entertainment than information. But it made me think....

Are we any less swindled now? Isn't counterfeit anything the name of the game? What relationship do Twinkies bear to sponge cake filled with cream other than how they look? How do we know the long term effects of all the non-food and heavily modified food items they contain?

Kraft Easy Cheese is made from fillers, oil and emulsifiers. They call it "processed cheese", and it is cheese, heavily adulterated with much cheaper ingredients, although the product isn't cheap itself.

Sweet means cheaper high-fructose corn syrup and not sugar. Vanilla means the chemical vanillin. There is a 99% chance in the US that the wasabi on your plate, even in a Japanese restaurant, is horseradish dyed green. The fat that was demonised as just about a poison to the system, trans fat, has been renamed partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil so we won't know. No chewing gum these days has ever been the chicle, the natural sap, no these days it's plastics, synthetic rubbers and a selection of artificial sweeteners.

It's actually worse than in times past when those who faked food products with inferior ones or poisoned you in an effort to produce something cheap and tasty could be brought to justice by law. Now it is the law through various bodies like the FDA that sanctions all these ersatz products. And still most of the additives and ingredients are new and testing them on mice, overfeeding them with E numbers and saying well only 1% got sick and died, doesn't mean they are going to be safe for us in the long run.

The book wasn't very good, but it did make me think plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Except not quite. It's getting worse.

[Sesana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Food fraud has a long, still ongoing history. Bee Wilson tries to cover it, but there's only so much one can do. She ends up mostly covering the 19th and 20th centuries, which is fine by me. There's a lot to talk about here, from the early reformers who discovered that it was impossible to buy actual mustard in London to the modern version of food fraud. Wilson sees the modern tendency to overload everything with artificial flavors as a form of food fraud, and I tend to agree, after reading this. People are being trained to believe that raspberries taste like raspberry flavor (they don't, they taste much better) and become unable to understand what a real raspberry actually tastes like. The most sensational information is, of course, in the first few chapters, where we learn that red candy was once colored with the highly poisonous red lead. The candy makers knew they were poison, but the candies had to be red, didn't they? Highly absorbing, but not to be read around mealtimes.

[Wealhtheow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wilson has written a comprehensive guide to adulterations, alterations, and substitutions made to our food, ranging from Romans sweetening wine with lead to GMO crops in the modern day. Fascinating! (My status updates contain the examples that most struck me.) Wilson's theory is that there will always be attempts to save money or effort by cheating or changing how food is made. Particularly, swindles like making fake eggs out of chemicals or fake tea by carefully coloring and curling tree leaves will happen when the costs of raw materials are high and human labor is cheap. The most effective ways to prevent these counterfeits are: make people aware of what quality food tastes like, so they are aware of when they're lied to. Someone who knows what real milk tastes like is a lot less likely to pay money for whitened water, for instance. Put regulations in place to protect consumers, as in the medieval guild systems or through the government. Regulators have to test constantly and stay on the forefront of science, and these regulations have to have serious consequences. It seems relatively simple, but Wilson documents how time and time again, just agreeing on regulations is hardly done, and even then, enforcement starts strong and rapidly becomes lax or outmoded.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite a four-star book, I'm afraid. I really wanted to like this more than I did, and it is hard to figure out why it was not a more enjoyable read.

The problem, I think, is the book tries to be both journalism and scholarship (it's published by a university press), and fails to effectively be either one. I'd have to know more about this topic than I do to understand fully what falls short. On the journalism side, the stories about various food crusaders are, apart from Frederick Accum, just not very interesting. The book has a large number of quotations, generally from contemporary popular sources like newspapers, but they are rarely interesting and I found myself skipping them. Wilson just is not Michael Pollan in readability. I also had the sense that there was a fair amount of padding and repetition. Some anecdotes appear more than once, for instance.

On the scholarly side, there seems to be ample footnoting, but all are just one line and a page number. Scholarly works usually have interesting details in the footnotes, rather than just a list of sources.

Why four stars, then? There is a lot of good information in the book and one does get a clear sense of two hundred years of governmental wrestling (when it finally did) with food regulation.

Wilson's book does dovetail nicely when it gets to the present day with the "too big to fail" question. Agribusiness is simply too big and too powerful to regulate effectively. The consumer solutions at the end don't fill me with optimism -- buy organic (Wilson herself points out that there is a lot of fraud in organic food), know what the real thing should taste like (How does one do this? How can I get a sample of Basmati rice that I know is pure?). She points out that labeling has improved, and I like the suggestion of others (Pollan, I think) that one simply avoid foods with a lot of science textbook-sounding additives).

[Marti · Rating 4 out of 5]

It would appear that in addition to just plain old greed, food swindlers require three things: Laissez Faire attitudes toward regulation; a poverty stricken populace that has forgotten what real food tastes like and industrialization and urbanization which leads to a long supply line making blame hard to assign (wars don't hurt either forcing rationing and the invention of "ersatz" or fake foods).

Bee Wilson's case study focuses on London and New York in the 19th century, both of which represent the high water mark for poisoned and disgusting food. Milk was largely swill, and anything green or red was colored with copper or lead. The reason it was worse in the UK and U.S. than anywhere else in Europe was that countries like France retained vestiges of the Medieval Guild system which was a lot better at policing the food supply. Eventually, real progress was made by shaming the perpetrators (especially by muckrakers like Upton Sinclair).

While there has been improvement in the West, the author claims that most adulteration is in the form of pesticides; preservatives; artificial chemical flavors that have none of the ingredients implied on the label and genetic modification of the food itself. This is a different problem than simply masking the appearance of rotten food (which was at least clearly morally wrong). However, a nostalgic taste of the 19th Century can now be found in places like China and Bangladesh which has all the necessary attributes of a food swindler's paradise.

This should be required reading for those people who think that the Chicken Nuggets in American schools should be sourced in China.

[Buffy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ditto to what the other reviewers have to say about this book. Some of the items that stick in my mind are learning about famine foods that have been created during especially hard times though before people would resort to eating leather, tree bark and twigs. Russian peasants were particularly ingenious manufacturers of famine "breads" featuring "straw, birch and elm bark, buckwheat husks, pigweed, acorns" etc. I also learned of all the ersatz foods popularized in Germany around the First World War, in particular the experiments attempting to create ersatz fats from rats, mice, hamsters, crowns and even cockroaches. Plus the modern medical condition of orthorixia, a fixation with righteous eating. Even though this book gave me bad dreams, it was highly engrossing.

[Bob Schnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever since Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle", consumer advocates have been trying to educate the public about what they eat and prosecute those who would tamper with our food for profit's sake. Bee Wilson's book "Swindled" traces the history of food adulteration from ancient times right up to the Chinese fake infant formula scandal of 2008. It is truly amazing to read about the lengths swindlers will go in order to increase profits, even to the point of endangering the public health. If you aren't already reading the nutritional labels on packaged food or eating farm-to-table, this book will definitely get you to consider doing so. Informative, entertaining and a real eye opener.

[Nicholas Ball · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superbly researched and thorough book. I had a similar feeling reading it that I get when reading Bill Bryson books whereby every few pages I see something interesting and can't wait to tell someone about it.

Bee has a great conversational tone and litters historic events with insights into the mores of the time as well.

As I said before the book is thorough, and the entire history (ancient Greeks through to millennial problems) all get their due. If I had been asked beforehand if I had an interest in this subject I would not have thought so (having not worked in the industry), but it was an engrossing (though long) read and I am glad I have read it

[Kathleen Hulser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alum in bread, lead in double gloucester, arsenic in candy, warehouse sweepings in pepper -- these are the adulterants of yesteryear, sneaked into the product by the slimy precursors to today's scientific adulterers. Brit Bee Wilson offers a fresh historical account of the early role of chemists in disclosing the sort of substance abuse practiced for profit in laissez-faire England. Her transnational base of analysis is fascinating as an antidote to the American obsession with FDA and Dept. of Agriculture. She also notes how "purity" becomes an advertising slogan and a piece of the branding phenomenon in the late 19th. Her recommendations offer opinions from the cooking, in-person shopping and tasting side of food, rather than focusing only on the health/sin/contamination routines familiar to our food-scare culture. Wilson suggests that slow food and home-cooking will train consumers back to a reliance on their sense of taste, rather than pinning our hopes on more extensive labeling. In the age of additives and flavor industries, even the most indefatigable reader will scarcely care to persist through the label ingredient lists.

[David Ressel · Rating 3 out of 5]

oy. i am so behind on these reviews. SO, and it really isn't fair. i get lots of good reviews from the books of others. and in fact, i feel a bit outshined by all the great books that i see others are reading.. and so many too. and such breadth.

so now it is a competition. if i can't keep up, well I will do what I can. plus now i want to read all these books, and where do people get all the time to read! and they all have jobs and lives and ....well it shouldn't be a competition at all, but my whole life seems to be a zero-sum game.

well anyhoo, i read this on for my background on my long-term food/animal/food/water history/development work. some fun background here and as ever, i am big fan of foundation.. Nestle's works and Fast food nation, and so much today, are put in context by this.
really not a book for all. but a decent read for an overlooked historical subject.

Best fun fact. It stretches a point a bit, but at one point in the 19th century England all most all bread was made with urine (via the alum).. there is a QI question in there somewhere. ...not for everyone but cultural history books... pretty good.

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

In an attempt to get this into this years reading numbers, I sat down and just hammered out the last 125 pages of this book. This book falls into my "I'd rather listen to a 60 min podcast about this topic than read this book category." Though the individual stories are interesting, the writing is pretty dry and I was only averaging about 11 pages in a sitting before falling asleep.

I think a part is that in the last decade since this book came out, a lot has changed in consumers and their desire to get back to natural foods, and removing additives and sugars, etc. And what I think I wanted were the authors thoughts on this current movement and how it relates to previous ones, and whether we truly are moving into a more positive direction.

[jeff 🍓🍓🍓 · Rating 1 out of 5]

condescending to the point of insult when it comes to the food traditions of the working class—this book is tolerant only of the culinary practices of the wealthy, who can afford the purity it so pines for, recalling as it does with fondness some imaginary day of yore when all food was wholesome and rich. my god the section on mock turtle soup made me black out from rage, momentarily possessed as i was by generations of working class ancestors. never mentioned is the extremely high cost, both monetary and in terms of labor, that goes into eating the way this book supposes we should; when should i proof my daily loaf of crusty french bread (made of course with organic, locally-grown whole wheat flour and garnished with fresh butter from my free-ranging dairy cow), before or after i get home from my full-time, low-wage job?

capitalism, which is the driving force behind every single food adulteration scandal this book mentions, is never meaningfully criticized beyond a couple of anemic paragraphs here and there. that isn’t even to mention the flimsy scientific justifications this book presents for its arguments. do not even get me started on the aspartame section.

anyway. 0/10: L + ratio + eating a single hot cheeto would reduce this author to dust instantly

[Nicole C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the author's other book, Consider the Fork, some years ago, so I thought this would also be entertaining . . .as well as a bit disgusting.

Having read a few other books on the subject, I was familiar with Harvey Wiley and the creation of the Pure Food & Drug Act in the US, but the book also focuses on some pioneers in the same field in the UK, as well.

[Henna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The cover of this book caught my eye in the library and the subject was so interesting I just had to loan it. I was not familiar at all with history of food cheats and deceit so much of the information in the book came as a shock to me. It is unbelievable to what lengths people can go to because of greed or desperation.

This book concentrated mostly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and England. I did not find any part of the book boring, but I would have liked even more on more recent food swindles and in other countries besides America and England. Still it was fascinating to read how food swindles have changed through time from shamelessly obvious cheats ( so obvious that often consumers knew they were being swindled but had no choice but to buy the product) to so subtle and clever that it takes scientist an all kinds of test to detect them ( DNA testing of basmati rice for example).

I would recommend this book to anyone as long as they don't have very weak stomach. I myself will definitely be reading more about this subject!

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

excellent. just one of the great things to learn from this book: bread used to be simple and pure; wine used to be severely adulterated. that's been switched now: wine is much purer and waht we recognize as bread would confuse the hell out of folks even just a hundred years ago. she charts the change in how/ what foods used to be adulterated to the current landscape of packaged foods etc. with remarkable aplomb. the story of adulteration is a story of the repeated failure of modern politics to value interests above those of the market.

[Johanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, sometimes gets too buried in detail and the focus is UK/USA with minimal attention elsewhere - a commercial decision I'm sure but one that feels uneasy being neither truly global or specifically local. Also suffers from the delusion that in our overcrowded world a bit of home gardening and organic veg is the answer when sadly the economics and numbers do not stack up

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

#Binge Reviewing My Previous Reads #Culinary History

Bee Wilson’s Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee—The Dark History of the Food Cheats is one of those books that makes you peer suspiciously into your morning tea, tilt your head at the biscuit packet on your shelf, and silently mutter—how much of what we eat has been, and still is, a grand confidence trick? This is not the romantic culinary history of exotic spices or Mediterranean feasts, but a forensic, almost detective-like excavation of fraud, adulteration, and deception in the global food economy. Wilson, who is part culinary historian, part essayist, and part cultural sleuth, opens up a gallery of rogues: unscrupulous merchants, chemists with more ambition than ethics, regulators who arrive too late, and ordinary people left to consume, sometimes literally, death in their daily bread.

What makes Swindled bite so hard is its historical sweep. Wilson reminds us that food adulteration is as old as commerce itself—Romans padding their wine with questionable additives, mediaeval bakers mixing chalk into flour, or the Victorians creating dazzlingly coloured sweets using arsenic. Food fraud, she insists, has always been about more than greed; it’s about the structures of capitalism, the invisibility of ingredients, and the vulnerability of consumers who cannot know what lies behind the glossy surface of their meals.

Reading her chapters is like flipping through a series of forensic case studies—cheap beer stretched with opiates to give it “kick”, tea leaves reused and dyed, ground coffee bulked out with roasted peas or even dirt, and milk so diluted and chemically doctored that it became a slow poison for infants.

Wilson is at her sharpest when she connects the past to the present. This isn’t a history that can be tidily contained in the nineteenth century, ending triumphantly with food regulation acts. Instead, Swindled insists that the structures that enabled adulteration remain embedded in our supply chains.

The global outsourcing of food production, the endless demand for cheaper and faster options, and the opacity between grower, manufacturer, and consumer create conditions where fraud thrives. From melamine in baby formula to counterfeit olive oil, Wilson shows that the ghost of the Victorian sweet-maker still lingers.

What sets this book apart from the usual moralising accounts of “bad food” is Wilson’s prose style—lithe, precise, witty, and occasionally ironic. She doesn’t sermonise but narrates, letting the horror emerge from the sheer absurdity of human ingenuity applied to cheating. There’s almost a grotesque admiration in the way she details the inventiveness of food adulterers.

The very things that make us marvel at culinary creativity—the ability to transform, to disguise, and to play with textures and colours—become sinister when applied to fraud. Wilson knows how to make the reader both chuckle at the sheer audacity and shudder at the implications.

At the same time, there is a political urgency running underneath. Wilson makes us aware that food fraud is never just about the product; it’s about the people who pay the price. The poor, who had no choice but to buy cheap bread or diluted milk, were historically the ones who suffered most, and the pattern repeats today in developing economies where regulatory mechanisms are weak. She pushes us to see adulteration as a mirror of inequality: those who produce and sell stand to profit, those who regulate remain compromised, and those who consume remain voiceless.

Comparatively, if Reay Tannahill’s Food in History is a grand, sweeping fresco of culinary development and Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s Near a Thousand Tables is a philosophical meditation on food as culture, Swindled is the noir thriller of culinary history—gritty, shadowy, and filled with betrayals. Where Jack Turner’s Spice revels in the allure and seduction of flavours, Wilson unearths the darker seductions of profit and deceit. In that sense, Swindled plays an essential counterpoint to the celebratory histories of cuisine: it insists we confront the fact that behind every golden age of gastronomy lurks an underbelly of fraud.

And yet, Wilson is not entirely cynical. She acknowledges that regulation, public outrage, and scientific advances have made a difference. Modern food safety is not a mere illusion—most of us will not be poisoned by arsenic-dyed sweets. But the book ends with a note of vigilance rather than comfort. To eat, Wilson suggests, is to trust, and that trust remains fragile. Each time we pour a glass of milk or sip a cup of coffee, we are entering into an invisible contract with producers and regulators, one that has been breached countless times in history.

Ultimately, Swindled is more than just a history of food cheats; it’s an inquiry into human appetite, ingenuity, and morality. It reveals how food—our most intimate daily act—becomes a battlefield of trust and betrayal.

And in the process, it forces us to rethink culinary history not just as a story of abundance and creativity, but also as a cautionary tale of deceit.

It is a book that lingers long after the last page, leaving you both better informed and more suspicious of what you eat.

[Center For Study Indonesian Food Anthropology · Rating 4 out of 5]

Halo, Kerabat !

Bacaan kali ini tentang tipuan produk perusahaan pangan seperti permen beracun sampai kopi palsu.

Buku ini membahas sejarah panjang penipuan pangan yang terlibat dengan berbagai kekuatan ilmiah, ekonomi, dan politik dalam menciptakan dunia modern. Pengalaman manusia yang universal tentang ditipu dalam hal makanan diceritakan dengan perasaan campuran malu dan kemarahan. Sejak zaman kuno, makanan memiliki kekuatan untuk menyembuhkan dan membunuh. Buku ini mengungkap berbagai racun dan bahaya yang terkandung dalam makanan, termasuk makanan yang beracun dalam porsi normal. Penipuan ini mencakup makanan anak-anak, daging sakit yang diolah dengan bahan kimia, dan anggur yang diberi pemanis timah. Sejarah penipuan pangan sejalan dengan sejarah dunia modern dan memberikan wawasan tentang integritas makanan dan penjualnya.

Dalam sejarah adulterasi makanan, ada dua tahap: sebelum 1820 dan setelah 1820; sebelum Accum dan setelah Accum. Baru setelah tahun 1820, perlawanan terhadap penambahan beracun atau tidak perlu pada makanan di dunia Barat modern dimulai, berkat buku kecil berjudul "A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons" yang ditulis oleh ahli kimia Jerman bernama Frederick Accum (1769-1838). Buku ini membuka mata orang-orang akan fakta bahwa hampir semua makanan dan minuman yang dijual di kota-kota industri modern tidak seperti yang terlihat dan bisa berbahaya bagi kesehatan.

Frederick Accum, yang juga seorang pecinta makanan dan ahli kimia terkemuka di London pada zamannya, menunjukkan bahwa masak-memasak adalah ilmu kimia dan dapur adalah "laboratorium kimia." Dia mengecam orang-orang yang memalsukan makanan demi keuntungan, dan mengungkapkan berbagai makanan yang rutin dipalsukan dengan cara yang tidak jujur atau bahkan beracun.

Buku Accum, yang terjual ribuan kopi, membuka mata banyak orang tentang praktik adulterasi yang merajalela. Meskipun tidak semua penipu berhenti setelah buku tersebut diterbitkan, karya ini berhasil meningkatkan kesadaran tentang pentingnya kejujuran dan keselamatan makanan.

Adulterasi adalah tindakan dengan sengaja memanipulasi atau mencampurkan bahan asing atau berbahaya ke dalam makanan atau minuman dengan tujuan untuk meningkatkan keuntungan atau menipu konsumen.

Makanan buruk bukanlah isu publik pertama yang diambil oleh Accum. Seorang pria dengan energi tak terbatas, karisma, dan keyakinan yang berani bahwa ia bisa menguasai setiap cabang kimia dan mengubahnya menjadi keuntungan, ia telah mencatat sejarah dengan mengatasi prasangka publik terhadap penerangan gas. Sebagian besar berkat Accum, pada tahun 1815, jalan-jalan di Westminster diterangi oleh lampu gas daripada, seperti sebelumnya, dengan lampu lentera. Selain itu, Accum juga terkenal sebagai pengajar dan penceramah kimia, pemasok peralatan kimia, apoteker kerajaan, popularisasi ide Lavoisier, dan penulis tentang berbagai subjek dari mineralogi analitis hingga kristalografi dan bahan vanila. Ia adalah gambaran revolusi industri dalam miniatur, seorang pria yang menyatukan pengetahuan dan perdagangan, pencerahan dan keuntungan, serta kebanggaan yang luar biasa akan kekayaan dan kekuasaan Britania Raya dalam satu sosok yang tampan dan gelisah. Keberhasilannya dalam penerangan gas menunjukkan bagaimana bakat Accum menyatukan diri untuk mencapai hasil yang spektakuler.

[Eric Copeland · Rating 4 out of 5]

A whole lot of information in this one, but I'll admit that the writing style wasn't very compelling. The content was worthwhile, though -- if you follow me at all, you'll know that in my nonfiction reading (and a little in my fiction reading too), I tend to enjoy history, pop culture, and the macabre. "Swindled" is kind of equal parts of history and the macabre, with a decent amount of pop culture thrown in.

Bee Wilson is U.K.-based, and admits at the beginning of the book that her western background led her to focus mostly on food issues in the First World, but that's not her sole area of attention. Toward the end she delves a little bit into some of the food problems which have occurred in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, India/Pakistan, and the Far East.

But what food problems they are! I found the history of food adulteration to be quite compelling, from medieval guilds that helped to protect both producers and consumers by setting a high standard for food quality, through Victorian times and the Industrial Revolution, when scientific breakthroughs combined with the general public's lack of knowledge to allow hucksters to pass off literally poisoned food to consumers who didn't know any better, and perhaps couldn't have afforded to do anything about it even if they had known better.

In this book, you'll learn far more about food additives than you ever thought you wanted to know. You'll get to know the food crusaders and government officials assigned to protect the public and the food they eat (to varying levels of success), and you'll get a broader picture of periods like the early 2000s, when Basmati rice was big business for swindlers and science stepped in to straighten things out.

I enjoy cooking and eating, but I'm not quite the food purist that Ms. Wilson probably wishes I were. I don't want to eat FAKE food, but I'm not going to lose sleep over a few shortcuts if the end result is enjoyable to me. But several times, she says that the goal is to educate people and make them more aware of their choices and what those choices mean, so I suppose in that way this book is pretty successful.

This book won't be for everyone. There were times when I found it slow going, but if you're intrigued by offbeat history this might be right up your alley.

[Nenia Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

SWINDLED is a great book, especially if you're interested in ingredient transparency and food adulteration. As someone with food allergies, accuracy of food labeling is very important to my health. I have gotten very sick when people lied to me about what was in the food (either maliciously or simply negligently). One of the banes of my existence is GRAS, or generally regarded as safe, ingredients, which are sometimes excluded from ingredient lists. This is why sometimes you will just see "spice" or "spice blend" on an ingredient label, as well as "natural vegetable coloring." GRAS allows corporations to have proprietary ingredient blends that don't usually cause health problems and aren't top allergens. Sucks if you happen to have that allergy, though. BYEEE.

I found it fascinating how fraught with food cheats history is/was. But I guess it makes sense. Without regulations in place to penalize fraudsters, there's only conscience standing in the way of unscrupulous people making a quick buck. The horror stories of Victorian/early Industrial age food manufacturing were quite chilling. I learned that people boiled vegetables with brass or copper to make them green, and that lead and mercury were used to dye candy. Even more gross: how people would try to sell spoiled meat and cheese by either layering fresh meat or cheese around the spoiled bits, or pumping the meat with chemicals and basically "cauterizing" the rotten bits at the bone with white-hot iron rods. But lest you think that this sort of behavior was a product of the past, Wilson offers modern examples: the Chinese baby milk scandal where people were selling sugar and starch instead of actual formula, and the counterfeiting of specialty products like Corsican ham and Basmati rice.

You'll need a strong stomach to get through parts of this book and at times it can be a little dull, but this is one of the most informative, relevant, and interesting nonfiction books I've read in a while and I would honestly recommend it to anyone as an example of why it's so important to know what's in your food, where it comes from, and how it was really made.

3.5 stars

[Popup-ch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Food has been adulterated for as long as there has been trade in it. And the longer the trade links between producer and consumer, the more adulteration generally takes place.

The less the consumer knows what the food should look like, the easier it is for an unscrupulous middleman to add chicory to the coffee, cassia to the cinnamon and turmeric to the saffron.

There is a very interesting comparison of Bread and Wine. Back in the day, bread was the staff of life, and bread making was controlled by the guild of bakers, who had very strict rules for what could be sold as bread. Anyone caught selling underweight or substandard bread could be fined a fortune or even expelled from the guild. (Which in effect was a life sentence of penury.) (There are even cases in the literature of bakers being thrown into their own ovens after being found to sell a single underweight bread. pour encourager les autres.)

Wine on the other hand was seen as a luxury and was traded in bulk over long distances. At any step it could be watered down, sweetened or coloured (often with poisonous lead). There were reported instances of London vintners who only had one barrel of wine in the cellar, but sold it as either Burgundy, Beaujolais or Baune, depending on what the customer wanted.

Today, though, much British bread is a spongy mixture of starches, which can contain just about anything, whereas on the other hand most wines sold are some kind of AOC, with very strict regulations on the content and procedures involved.

The worst era for food adulteration was probably England in the early 1800's or the US in the later part of the century. There was a strong tradition of laissez-faire laws, coupled with increased distance between the urban working poor and the agricultural hinterland. In the end there was a backlash, with institutions like the FDA given power to investigate 'purity' of food.

The book as such is readable and accessible, if at times a bit preachy.

[Kristi Thielen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Are you eating something as you read this review? Stop. What are the ingredients in this food? How was it made? Do you trust the producer?

Bee Wilson has written a crackerjack book about the history of food fraud of the last two centuries in Great Britain and the United States. It’s a sorry story of coffee, candy, bread, wine, pickle, mustard, rice and baby milk providers who have adulterated their products with everything from arsenic to mercury, from chicory to gypsum.

Because too often those have provided us with that food aren’t on the level. Worried that the meat you are selling is growing rotten? Cover it with a substance that gives it a nice, fresh appearance. The milk in the “fresh” coconut you’re selling has dried up? Drill a hole in it, fill it with something that approximates coconut milk, then plug the hole with an item painted to match the shell.

How did so many food providers get away with this? Because for so many years, regulation was considered an affront to the “free market,” a freedom from control that businessmen – and the upper classes who could afford unadulterated food – took as holy writ. Those who advocated for pure food, free from dangerous chemicals, were considered cranks.

And sadly, despite far more stringent regulations now -throughout the world – those who provide food and the fake food we eat as snacks have merely upped their game to get around regulations. Read labels, yes; but be aware they can be deceptive and some foods sold in casual settings don’t require them.

Read this excellent book. And think more about the foods you are eating and serving to others.

[Susan Olesen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was an oddly compelling read. The history of food adulteration was far more interesting than I thought. Wilson puts no politics in it, doesn't advocate for pure foods or p00h-pooh the drama over consuming additives. She merely tells the history of how foods have been cheated on throughout history - adding alum to bread to make it whiter and more attractive, recycling old hams as new, substituting chicory for coffee, though she doesn't mention - being British - that Connecticut is the Nutmeg state because wooden nutmegs kept turning up among the real ones sold.

While the old history was fascinating - it was the guild system that kept fraud in check, and since Britain did away with guilds before France, tainted and poisoned food was a far bigger problem in London than Paris - it was the modern history that I could really relate to. While "fake" foods such as margarine were looked down on as poor people food, WWII, with extreme food shortages world-wide, made "fake" foods normal and acceptable, and by the 50's, with tons of new chemicals out there, "fake" and processed foods took off, as did health issues, and so we sit today, stuffing ourselves with ever-fresh Twinkies and popping cardiac pills and insulin to deal with it. Coincidence? Probably not, but Wilson won't beat you over the head with it.

Overall, I found it informative and a surprisingly delightful read.

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

History, food, and controversy- all things that make for an entertaining and fascinating read.

I really want to give this book 3.7 stars: some sections are 2-star reads where I felt like almost giving up on it but many other sections are 4-star reads where I was very glad I didn't.
Some parts are a bit repetitive and this book does not read as fluidly as Bee Wilson's more recent books so you may end up doing a little bit of skimming through a few paragraphs. Still, I learned quite a bit about food adulteration in its many forms throughout history.

I really appreciate that Wilson writes for a mainstream audience and not for food utopians on the fringe. Wilson remains grounded throughout her writing - she accepts that food adulteration will never fully go away - and Wilson does a great job of chronicling its history (albeit from an Anglo-American point of view, which she addresses early on in the book). Any more comprehensive and this subject may begin to bore.

This book isn't quite a call-to-action but an informative prerequisite read for figuring out the next step to improving our quality of food. Along the way, you'll learn about the poisoned sweets and counterfeit coffee... but don't worry - no rotten spoilers have adulterated this review.

[Breige · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first time I’ve read anything by food journalist and writer Bee Wilson. The book explores the history of food fraud, the ways people adulterated foods and those who fought to expose these cheats and make changes for consumers.

First off, how beautiful is this cover?! 😍 From wine being adulterated in 1700s, to poison used to colour sweets in 1800 to margarine being passed off as butter in earlier 1900s, the book goes right up to the early 2000s. I liked how the chapters goes through time, speaking about what was happening then, I felt like it flowed well this way. I read through this book a lot quicker than I thought I would, compared to some other history books I read recently.

Wilson’s writing was humorous, there’s a nice wit that lightened the book and made it more enjoyable; several times I paused to read it out to my husband. I did have to laugh about the report of certain meat products in early 2000s that were examined for inclusion of donkey and horse meat, where no adulteration was found. Given that this book was published in 2008, it was a few years before the horsemeat lasange scandal, proving food fraud isn’t a Victorian era issue but something modern.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, I love a niche history book! I’m looking forward to reading more by Bee Wilson.

[Jeffrey Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sprightly read through recent European history of food adulteration. We certainly give thanks for the FDA and its counterparts in the EU and the UK, and marvel at the ingenious ways of cheating consumers. The author only lightly touches on the likely justifications for adulteration; a small addition of whitener in the flour, then a bit more, then a bit more... In our ever more complex society we must rely on government authorities to protect our food supply -- the recent US Supreme Court decisions that reduce the power of those authorities is quite disheartening. The author's myriad descriptions of counterfeiting and cheating show us the need for those protections; and she alludes to the difficulties of less-developed countries in combating such fraud. This makes me further appreciate the federal (and EU) approach rather than a localized one -- the smaller the entity, the less it can afford the expertise to prevent all kinds of fraud; and food fraud is the most immediate and personal. The book is well-researched and convincing, and written entertainingly to boot.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and appalling at the same time, thoroughly researched as always. Makes orthorexia -almost!- seem like a good lifestyle choice. And then you come back from the grocery store and, mysteriously, there's a bag of Doritos in your house, again. I need a book like this once and a while to remind me that certain foods should be a treat, an indulgence, and not something you eat mindlessly, on a daily basis.
That said, this is my fourth book by Bee Wilson, and at this point, I'd pay to read her shopping list! Excuse me while I go buy the rest of her books I haven't read yet...

[Meg Perin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! This is supposed to be a history of food cheats - done either for profit or due to scarcity of the appropriate ingredients. It certainly does cause one to pause and rethink the weekly shopping list. The sad truth is that with food advancements, the food becomes more fake, full of more preservatives and artificial colors and flavors. It is a great read to see how far the Swindlers (FDA, food giants) have come to producing fake foods. The suggestion for organic gardening is great, but not always practical or attainable.

[Marissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I actually quit this about 50 pages from the end, but being so far over the halfway mark, I'm counting it as read. Wilson strings the events of the history of food fraud together, but it's not quite an academic tome and it's not quit a jaunty non-fiction novel. All in all, while this is an informative work, reading it from cover to cover is clunky at best, and in the end, I just couldn't keep giving it my time.

[Kaja Šmidová · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book about the history of food adulteration, swindling and poisoning. The author has an engaging way of writing that doesn't at all cover their opinion, which makes the book even better. Mostly anglo- and US-centric, which is understandable given the author's origin, and they did get to the rest of the world in the current events section. If you're interested in less discussed parts of history that still had a huge impact on the general populace I can recommend this book.