The discovery of horsemeat in ‘beef’ ready meals has shaken consumer confidence in the food industry – but to one Open University historian it all sounds strangely familiar.
Dr Rosalind Crone has studied food adulteration in the nineteenth century, and finds some interesting parallels with today.
In Victorian times, adding dodgy ingredients to all sorts of foodstuffs, from pies to children’s sweets, was routine, she says.
“The 1840s and the 1850s was the peak moment for food adulteration in British history. It was rife.
“One reason was that many of the local regulations, formerly administered by parishes, had been dispensed with in the new laissez-faire, free-market, minimal regulation environment – and this extended to the production and selling of food.”
Deregulation and rising prices
Then, as now, the people most at risk from food fakers were people at the lower end of society, as biggest consumers of cheap, pre-prepared meals.
The population was exploding and people flooding into the towns to find work were often lodged in rooms which had minimal cooking facilities – generally just an open fire.
To cater for them there sprang up an army of street vendors offering quick snacks and ready meals – hot coffee, muffins, crumpets, ham sandwiches, hot pea soup, fried fish (no chips at this period) pies and eels were all popular. They were snapped up by hungry workers with little time or scope to cook meals from scratch.
Plaster-of-paris sweeties
To make food cheaper, and more appetising in appearance, all sorts of substances were added, some inedible. Alum and chalk were used to whiten bread, as well as potato to bulk out the quantity of flour. Children’s sweets came with added plaster-of-paris, among other nasties.
Tea and coffee were widely substituted with inferior ingredients. “There were stories of sellers going round houses and persuading the servants to give them used tea leaves, which they dried out and re-sold as fresh tea,” says Rosalind Crone. Some ‘tea’ on sale actually contained no tea at all, merely dust.
'The working classes became so accustomed to adulterated products it was difficult to change their tastes'
Coffee was so commonly adulterated with chicory that in 1851 a machine was patented to press chicory leaves into the shape of coffee beans. The practice was perfectly legal.
Beer was another common victim, thanks to the de-regulation of the beer industry in the 1830s which allowed anyone to set up a beerhouse in their backyard. As well as watering it down, brewers added iron of sulphate and other chemicals to boost head and flavour.
“Most of the adulterants were not dangerous as a one-off, but taken over time they impacted on health by lowering nutritional standards,” says Rosalind Crone.
But there were instances of people dying. “In one case children at a pauper institution – and pauper institutions were always looking for the cheapest supplier – became sick and died through eating oatmeal adulterated with poor-quality barley meal. The coarseness of the ingredients caused the children terrible diarrhoea.”
Customer pies horror
From the 1820s, stories about nasty surprises in food began to surface in the media and entered the popular imagination, reaching their apex with Sweeney Todd in the 1840s. The Todd stories, featuring the demon barber who turns his murdered customers into meat pies, played on popular fears.
“It was the adulteration of meat products that always caused most offence – which is still true today,” says Rosalind Crone. “The working classes were concerned about meat, but not very bothered about other forms of adulteration.
“In fact they had become so accustomed to the look and taste of adulterated products that it was difficult to change their tastes. When the co-operative movement was launched – partly to provide people with pure and unadulterated food – people complained that their bread was too brown, and their green tea was not bright green enough.”
Growing awareness of the scale of adulteration led eventually to public anger, and the 1860s saw the first modern food standards legislation, which became stronger and more effective as the century progressed.
Today again food prices are on the rise, and the nagging question of how to feed a burgeoning population is now a burning global debate.
During the nineteenth century a couple of newspaper articles suggested that one way to increase the food supply was to introduce the working classes to new sources of meat in their diet – one suggestion was horsemeat. The idea never caught on.
Time for bug burgers?
But perhaps, Rosalind Crone suggests, its time has now come. More than one hundred years on from the penny pie, are British consumer ready to break with tradition? Bug burger, anyone?
“Population is a much bigger concern now than it was in the nineteenth century. If we are to feed everyone we have to start looking at alternative sources of food, instead of getting our protein from the select few meats we are used to eating.
“In a globalised world we may be more open than we were to trying new things. Insects are a particularly good source of protein. Why not pitch to people the idea of sitting down to an insect banquet?”
See her on BBC 2’s Great British Bake Off in July, talking about the history of the muffin man.
Top image shows a penny pieman selling to a coster boy and girl. From Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, originally published in 1861.
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