Imagine going out to buy things like bread, tea, coffee and sugar, and never being sure you were sold the genuine article. That’s the situation our forebears faced in the 19th century before trading standards were introduced. Adulteration was rife and almost accepted as the norm. As a result, every time they shopped for food, people risked digestive problems, malnutrition and even death.

Adulteration was defined as ‘the intentional addition to an article, for purposes of gain or deception, of any substance or substances, the presence of which is not acknowledged in the name under which the article is sold’.

In fact, there were three types of adulteration commonly practised: ingredients were added to increase the bulk or weight of a product; to improve the appearance of food and make it more attractive to customers; or to give it a fictitious strength or other quality.

A fact of life
The poorer classes of society grew so used to the taste of adulterated food and drink that they no longer noticed it. Through adulteration, dishonest shopkeepers could increase their profit margins and charge roughly the same for adulterated foodstuffs as the genuine items. In particular, coffee frequently contained chicory, burnt beans or sugar, acorns and mangel-wurzel, while tea was adulterated with sulphate of iron, black lead, Prussian blue, soapstone, used tea leaves and the leaves of other native plants.

The adulteration of bread was part and parcel of daily life. Potatoes, ground bones, plaster of Paris, lime and pipe clay were often added to it, as was sulphate of copper and alum. Originally used in the dyeing and tanning industry, alum increased the weight of bread and added whiteness. Although it was not poisonous in itself, it could cause severe indigestion and constipation. It’s no wonder remedies for these gastric complaints were so popular!

Beer – the staple of the working classes – was also adulterated. It was diluted and treated with green vitriol, alum and salt, plus cocculus indicus, which could cause convulsions, gastroenteritis and overstimulate the respiratory system.

Food adulteration was so common that the middle-class readers of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) were offered tips to spot the genuine article. For example, they were advised that when pure arrowroot was set into a jelly, it would remain firm for three or four days whereas the adulterated version would ‘become as thin as milk in the course of twelve hours’.

A more serious cumulative side effect of food adulteration was malnutrition. In 1849, when 180 children died from cholera at Mr Drouet’s Establishment for Pauper Children, their deaths were partly attributed to adulterated food. The children were malnourished and more susceptible to the disease because the oatmeal that formed a large part of their diet had been adulterated with far less nutritious barley meal.

Poisonous food
Many foodstuffs were adulterated with extremely dangerous ingredients. For instance, cayenne pepper was treated with red lead to restore the colour when it had passed its best. Pickled fruits and vegetables contained copper while turpentine was added to gin, sulphuric acid to vinegar and starch to cocoa powder.

The most disturbing examples of adulteration were the deadly poisons used to colour sweets and other confectionery. Children were drawn to the bright colours but these sweets were extremely toxic. Chromate of lead created a deep yellow but caused lead poisoning; the more times it was ingested, the more serious it could be. Red sulphuret of mercury (vermilion) produced a bright orange-red hue but was known to be a dangerous poison, and green sweets were usually coloured with verdigris (copper acetate), which was a highly poisonous salt.

Clearly, the potential for fatalities through shopkeepers accidentally using too much of these deadly pigments was very high, and newspapers regularly reported on such tragic poisonings. In 1848, a public dinner was held in Northampton after which 20 people were seriously poisoned and a man named William Corfield died. They had all eaten part of a blancmange, the top of which was coloured with emerald green or arsenite of copper. The confectioner and his apprentice were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.

In 1858, 200 people in Bradford were poisoned and around 20 died after eating sweets bought from a market stall. The sweets had been accidentally adulterated with arsenic instead of plaster of Paris or powdered limestone. In this case, charges against the sweetmaker and the stallholder were withdrawn, and the druggist was acquitted of manslaughter.

Hazardous food was on every street corner too. In Victorian towns and cities, there was a proliferation of street vendors selling a wide variety of food and drink. The problem was the goods they sold were usually made in extremely insanitary conditions and could cause food poisoning. For example, ice cream was probably very tempting on a hot summer’s day. But when it was scientifically examined in 1895, it was found to contain a cocktail of nasty ingredients including ‘bed bugs, bugs’ legs, fleas, straw, human hair, cats’ and dogs’ hairs, coal dust, woollen and linen fibres, [and] tobacco’.

Towards reform
Adulterated food first came to the attention of the public through Frederick Accum, a German chemist working in London. In 1820, he wrote his best-selling book, A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons. It explained how wine, beer, brandy, tea, coffee, pepper, cheese and pickles were all routinely adulterated. Accum’s findings were unpopular with brewers and grocers, and he returned to Germany.

It was to be another 30 years before the issue was looked at again. Thomas Wakley, editor and founder of The Lancet, commissioned Dr Arthur Hill Hassall to superintend an ‘Analytical Sanitary Commission’. Between 1851 and 1854, Hassall wrote weekly reports about adulterated food, examining more than 2,500 food samples microscopically and ‘naming and shaming’ tradesmen and dealers who sold adulterated articles. The reports were published in The Lancet and they made shocking reading. They offered real proof that the ‘demon had been playing his tricks with by far the larger proportion of the samples: watering the milk, red-leading the cayenne, coppering the pickles, poisoning the confectionery, and bedevilling nearly everything’.

At about the same time, John Postgate, an influential surgeon in Birmingham, became a vehement campaigner against food adulteration. He sought the support of politicians so that legislation could be introduced to solve the issue. His idea was to introduce public analysts, backed up by magistrates who would fine anyone convicted of adulteration.

Postgate’s campaigns and Hassall’s reports in The Lancet led the government to set up a select committee of the House of Commons in 1855 to consider the matter. It stated: ‘We cannot avoid the conclusion that adulteration widely prevails. Not only is the public health thus exposed to danger, and pecuniary fraud committed on the whole community, but the public morality is tainted, and the high commercial character of the country seriously lowered, both at home and in the eyes of foreign countries.’

Although the first Act for Preventing the Adulteration of Articles of Food or Drink was passed in 1860, it had very little effect. In 1872, an amended Adulteration of Food, Drink and Drugs Act came into force, which included Hassall’s and Postgate’s recommendation that public analysts be appointed. A second select committee was set up and its findings formed the basis of the Sale of Food and Drugs Act (1875). Under this legislation, inspectors had the power to sample food and drugs, and to test them for adulteration.

From the late 1870s onwards, there was an increasing number of prosecutions for food adulteration, as reported in the local and national newspapers. Many of those who were prosecuted simply pleaded ignorance. For example, in May 1877, the Bradford Daily Telegraph reported on the cases of two Liverpool confectioners who were summoned for selling poisonous sweets. The sweets were ‘imitation oranges, which were coated with chromate of lead to the extent of about a grain to each orange’. The manufacturer appeared as a witness for the defendants stating that he ‘was not aware that the colouring substance was poisonous, and also that it was extensively used in the manufacture of confectionery’. The magistrate remarked that such prosecutions would do great good, and fined each defendant 20 shillings and costs.

There was a further amendment to the Sale of Food and Drugs Act in 1879, followed by the Margarine Act (1887) and finally, the Food Adulteration Act (1899). This was the beginning of trading standards legislation we take for granted today.