Dr Rosalind Crone (Lecturer, History), author of Violent Victorians, explored the history of the adulteration of food with food critic and presenter Giles Coren.
Food: A Scandalous Historytakes a trip back to the days of Victorian food scandals, when adulteration of food was endemic and the ghoulish newspapers of the day played on people’s fears about eating horse and cat.
“In 2013 we have witnessed the explosion of a public panic about the presence of horse meat in supermarket ready meals and mass catering establishments. These scandals have raised a number of important questions about the traceability of our food, our reliance on industrial processes in food production for mass catering and the extent to which the consumer in this process is a victim or really ‘should know better’.
This programme asks whether it might be useful to look back at similar scandals in the past in order to contextualise our fears about ‘horse-meat lasagne’.”
Catch the programme on BBC iplayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01sm712