ISSUE 77, BEGINNINGS, Part 5: Beginning the Quest for Food Purity
Beginning the Quest for Food Purity
He should know. Fredrick Accum constructed the first factory for the production of coal gas, the first fuel to be used in large scale public illumination projects. A German chemist, Accum had prospered in London as a practical chemist, laboratory experimentalist, and instructor in chemistry. His colleague Fredrich Winsor formed a company and soon London Bridge (1813) and Westiminster (1814) were illuminated by gaslight. Accum oversaw the difficult process of rendering gas from coal. It was difficult because it generated noxious by-products such as tar and Sulphur. After Accum in 1815 published "Description of the Process of Manufacturing Coal-Gas" other manufacturers mushroomed over England, and they proceeded to dump the noxious by products into local estuaries. These same estuaries supplied the water used by food processors to dilute milk (chalk also added to maintain a white color), or mix with vinegar and copper for green pickles. Accum, bruised by his role in imperiling the consuming public, began seriously studying the chemical compositions of foods sold to the British public. His 1820 A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons ignited public suspicion about factory made food.
There is something sensational about suggesting profiteers are poisoning the public to line their own pockets. Yet the problem was less cut and dried. He dealt with fundamentals first—the quack manufacture of bogus medicines, then the impurity of English water sources. The pollutants he found were those of the nascent industrial age-metallic poisons; just as water in the 21st century is troubled by medical waste and diluted drugs. He spent chapters detailing the adulteration of beer, with particularly pointed remarks on Porter. Spirits, too, came under his scrutiny. Only when he turned his attention to those products that were the homely pleasures of English families did the readers’ surprise turn to dismay: prepared mustard, cucumber pickles, pepper corns. When readers discovered grocers flogged pepper corns made of balls of red clay with a shake of cayenne in them, or that mustard contained sawdust or soot, satisfaction and innocence vanished in a brutal cascade of revelations.
Accum knew how to poke the reptilian stem brain of his reader. His literary style was abrupt, plain spoken, and relentless. His chapter titles announced a parade of horrors: “Poisonous Confectionery,” “Poisonous Catsup,” “Poisonous Olive Oil,” “Poisonous Anchovy Sauce.” There was a matter-of-factness about his listing of adulterants and his description of how processors went about their tainting of food. He sometime provided tests by which consumers could detect whether the product they had purchased was pure or polluted. Finally, in a baldly righteous audacity, he named the perpetrators and brands that were poisonous.
A taste of Accum’s prose: “Genuine mustard, either in powder, or in the state of a paste ready for use, is perhaps rarely to be met with in the shops. The article sold under the name of patent mustard, is usually a mixture of mustard and common wheaten flour, with a portion of Cayenne pepper, and a large quantity of bay salt, made with water into a paste, ready for use. Some manufacturers adultery their mustart with radish seed and pease flour.” Fortunately these ingredients would not do you in.
Being the disenchanter is a dangerous role in a culture. When powerful commercial forces are called to task and experience a loss of public trust, they do what they can to quash their afflicter. On trumped up charges in the Royal Society, the law went after Accum, forcing him to flee to Berlin. But Pandora’s box had been opened. Distrust would dog food manufacturers for decades to come.
In the United States the matter of trust caused the government in 1887 to define foods with a kind of code, and also describe the commonest adulterants that despoiled pure foods. The USDA’s Division of Chemistry published in five volumes Foods and Food Adulterants. The volumes were devoted to I. Dairy 2. Spices and Condiments 3. Fermented Alcoholic Beverages 4. Lard and Lard Adulterants and 5. Baking Powders. The first three took up the concerns announced by Accum. The final two volumes treated developments in food chemistry that took place during the the 19th century. What were consumers to make of David Wesson’s lard substitute: hydrogenated cotton seed oil (Cottonlene, later Crisco)? And what acids and base chemicals can produce the quick rise in baked goods in the oven without generating noxious gas?
The twentieth century would bring meat-packing into public view as the next great problem of food purity. Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle was as much a shock to readers as Accum’s book 86 years previously.