From Publishers Weekly
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., N (more…)
Consider a coffee makers for your loved ones for Christmas 2009.
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Candy, Coffee, Counterfeit, Dark, Food, Fraud, From, History, Poisoned, Swindled
July 29th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
5.0 out of 5 stars
The cyclical nature of greed
This excellent book provides both an historical perspective of “the processing” of foods and an insight into the relationship of profit with greed.
July 29th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
The first time I went to the grocery store after finishing this book, I found myself unable to buy formerly favorite products. The documentation of the way food is altered, adjusted, shaped, and — yes — adulterated is both convincing and habit-changing.
Bee Wilson takes a subject that could easily be dull and turns it into a fascinating history of the industrialization of the food supply. She also describes how food detectives in both England and the United States worked to clean up the food supply and how legislatures in both countries, enamored with laissez-faire economic policies, repeatedly refused to pass laws to protect the public from unscrupulous food vendors.
What’s amazing is that the history she documents for Britain and the US in the 19th century is exactly what is happening right now in China. In fact the publication of this book coincided with the latest scandal of food contamination in China — the addition of melamine to milk products that caused the deaths of at least 6 children in China and severe kidney disease in thousands of other children. Contaminated milk products from China have even been imported to the Japan and the US, despite these countries’ regulatory structures.
EVERYONE WHO EATS should read this book and use the information Ms. Wilson provides to improve their personal food supply. The only way we can ensure that our food is healthful and not contaminated is to “vote with our dollars” and only buy food that we know is safe. It’s hard to do, but not impossible. I now read labels of everything I buy and reject foods processed or imported from countries such as China which do not have strong protective laws. I have also written letters opposing the plan to have chickens grown in the US processed in China and reimported to the US. This is insane! But until enough consumers actively choose healthful products and refuse to buy fake crap, food manufacturers will not change.
Yes, it costs more money. I now buy almost all my food from my local organic co-op market. I’m lucky in that I have a large co-op where I live. Even chains such as Whole Foods are not necessarily safe vendors — we found frozen broccoli at Whole Foods that was labeled as coming from China. We did NOT buy it. Given the fraud that exists in Chinese food labeling, that would be a dangerous purchase. Pesticide residues on vegetables in China are known to be very high.
The end lesson: Read labels, know what you’re buying and buy carefully. And yes, spend the extra money on locally-grown organic. Find out what real food tastes like.
July 29th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
It sounds like a page ripped from today’s headlines: Chinese babies dying from fraudulent baby milk.
However, British food journalist Bee Wilson’s “Swindled” isn’t quite that up to the minute. Her chapter on dying Chinese babies is not about today’s cow’s milk tainted with melamine but 2004’s scandal about fake formula.
But the recurrence nicely illustrates her thesis that food fraud has always been and will always be with us. And, she says, people in advanced countries with well-established regulatory agencies should not be so confident they are, indeed, what they think they eat.
From plutocrats being palmed off with sevruga caviar at beluga prices (but who cares?), to mislabeled Chilean sea bass to (although she doesn’t mention this one) Starbucks’ selling cheap Central American java for genuine Kona, there are recent frauds aplenty.
Wilson is, no contest, the best stylist writing about food for newspapers in English (in the Sunday Telegraph), and her chapters on the early history of food fraud are strong stuff.
She makes the point that the longer the chain from producer to eater, the more opportunities for chicanery, and the more difficult it becomes to detect the fraud.
Scientific aids begin with Frederick Accum in 1820, one of several odd ducks Wilson profiles in the history of food safety; but scientific frauds have more than kept pace with detection methods.
In her later chapters, Wilson displays a bee in her bonnet about GMOs (although she has little to say about this); and a touching but misplaced faith in the superiority of organic food, however defined.
Her complaint that people cannot recognize good food because they have never tasted it is at least partly valid. However, her favorite target — white bread — is not as good an example as she thinks.
Europeans have long preferred soft white bread to a “crusty, malty loaf,” but this was not solely a matter of social pretentiousness, as Wilson thinks. Considering the prevalence of abscesses in our ancestors’ teeth, eating hard bread was torture.
July 29th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well done, not Rare
If you think greed only lays in politics and Wall Street, think again! Swindled chronicles an amazingly long history of food fraud from 19th century Great Britain to 20th century…