Swindled
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What of the other charges against the bakers? The author of Poison Detected had claimed that mealmen and millers added chalk and lime “in very considerable quantities” to augment the weight of the flour they grind, a charge echoed by Dr. Manning in The Nature of Bread.83 Yet this was highly unlikely, as the chemist Henry Jackson wrote in 1758, in a level-headed work defending the bakers and millers (An Essay on Bread). Jackson evidently deplored the scaremongering of Poison Detected, rebuking the author as “he who alarms the populace with idle systems and conceits of poisons existing in bread.” Jackson observed that if chalk and lime were used in order to increase weight, it would have to be in such huge quantities that “the bread would turn out so gritty that the very dogs would spurn it”: the grittiness would be immediately discernible in the mouth. “The baker’s profits would not be increased by such ridiculous substitutes,” noted Jackson, plausibly enough.84
To make doubly sure, though, he conducted a series of experiments, trying to add chalk and lime to bread dough. He found that such dough was almost impossible to knead. Jackson’s findings were confirmed by a twentieth-century historian of adulteration, Dr. Frederick Filby. Filby made three loaves of bread. One contained nothing but flour (10 oz), water (6 1/4 oz), yeast (1/2 oz), and salt (1/4 oz). “It was baked to perfection in 30 minutes and was later eaten with relish.”85 To the next loaf, Filby replaced 2 oz of flour with 2 oz of slaked lime. He found that the dough took twice as long to prove, was sticky and yellowish, and had a “loathsome” smell. It took twice as long to bake as the proper loaf and came out of the oven of short weight—an ounce lighter than the genuine loaf—and resembling “a flat crab” with “a shell of hard cement.” A third loaf baked with 1 oz of chalk was also revolting, though not to the same degree. In other words, it just did not make sense that bakers should have used these ineffectual substitutes. Manning had claimed that the bad bread of 1756 must have contained such things as bone ash and lime because the crumb was so brown, crumbly, heavy, and brittle. Those who know about baking, however, have pointed out that these faults can occur without the presence of adulterating agents. Brownness could come from too much bran or poor yeast. Crumbliness and heaviness might be signs of too much or too little fermentation, or of using water that is too hot. A brittle crust may be a sign of soft flour.
The great bread scare of 1757, like so many food scares since, was one in which wild accusations were hurled around by interested parties, with scant regard for whether they were true or not, or where the stories might have originated. The belief that bakers used human bones in their bread continued for many decades, despite there being no evidence for it. Filby suggests that the insinuation may have arisen from bone ash being discovered on a miller’s or baker’s premises at various times. “It was undoubtedly used, not in flour at all, but to stop up cracks and holes in mill stones.”86
This still leaves the question of alum. Even the bakers’ defenders admitted that some of them did use alum, though they also pointed out that it was not quite so “disgustful” an ingredient as Poison Detected had asserted. It certainly never contained “human excrement.” This mistake must have arisen because the manufacture of alum did sometimes involve human urine. In volcanic regions, alum can form naturally as alunite crystal. In the less than volcanic British landscape, though, alum was made from aluminium sulphate mined from shale—a type of sedimentary rock—at giant quarries. In order to get this aluminium sulphate to crystallize into alum, an alkali was needed. Stale urine is an alkaline solution and contains ammonium sulphate, and—crucially—it is universally available, so it fitted the bill. Local households would keep their urine especially to sell to the alum manufacturer’s agents. Huge vats of urine were kept in alumproducing towns such as Whitby in Yorkshire, staling to an ammoniac stench. It is true that this may not be an appetizing thing to think about when considering bread, but it is not in itself a reason to reject out of hand the use of alum. Some people have consumed small amounts of urine without harm throughout history: rich Romans rubbed urine in their mouths to whiten their teeth; and “urine therapy,” the drinking of your own, or someone else’s urine, has long been considered normal in some parts of India and China.
The more pertinent question is whether alum, however produced, was dangerous to consume in the quantities in which it was used in bread. Dr. Manning had noted that in August and September 1756 there had been “a kind of universal distemper,” a “habitual diarrhoea.” As a doctor, he said that he had never seen “so many disorders among the robust and strong” as he had within the previous seven months.87 Could this have been caused by the “concealed poison” of alum in bread? Even Henry Jackson, who denied that alum was quite as noxious as Poison Detected had said, admitted that it could be a purgative for some children and thought it “greatly to be wished” that alum in bread should be abolished altogether.88
Modern evidence suggests that swallowing alum can be hazardous. The International Labour Organization, which issues guidance on the toxicity of chemicals in the workplace, states that alum ingestion can cause “abdominal pain, burning sensation, nausea, vomiting,” and its inhalation can result in “cough, shortness of breath, sore throat.”89 Taken straight, 30 grams of alum has been enough to kill an adult. In the case of bread, though, it was not taken straight, but in very dilute form. Dr. Peter Markham, the probable author of Poison Detected, calculated in 1758 that alum was added to bread in the proportions of eight ounces for every five bushels of flour, which was the standard weight of a sack of flour. There were 240 pounds to every sack, which, once water and salt and yeast were kneaded in, would have baked up to make around 350–360 pounds of bread. A standard daily ration of bread in the eighteenth century would have been one or two pounds, depending on what else was eaten with it. Based on these figures, an adult eating alum-adulterated bread might have consumed between 0.6 and 1.2 grams of alum per day—a fairly modest amount.
Whether it was still dangerous in these quantities is a moot point; the evidence of 1756 is that increasing the percentage of alum from this low level hugely increased its toxicity. As always with poison, some people must have been worse affected by alum than others, and children were likely to be worse affected than adults, poor children worst of all because bread made up such a large percentage of their calories. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to say that people used to country bread—which was less likely to contain alum—suffered from wrenching dyspepsia when they ate whiter-than-white city bread. Accum noted that some doctors attributed many “diseases incidental to children” to eating adulterated bread while other doctors considered it “absolutely harmless.”90
In 1758, the British government banned the use of alum in bread. If anything, though, the bakers’ dependence on the substance seems to have escalated (as it did in the United States, too; an opposition to alum was partly what made Sylvester Graham urge his followers to bake their own wholemeal bread in the 1840s and 1850s). In 1851, Arthur Hassall examined various loaves purchased at random in different parts of London and found that they were all, without exception, doctored with alum, even one that was advertised as of “perfect purity, being warranted free from alum.”91 By 1857, a French friend could write to Eliza Acton that British bread was “noted both at home and abroad for its want of genuineness, and the faulty mode of its preparation.”92 How and why had British bread become so contaminated? There were undoubtedly economic causes; the periodic shortages of wheat and the constant pressure on “corn” prices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries put pressure on bakers to cut corners. Bakers, however, could only sell what they could get away with selling. The major factor contributing to the erosion of standards in bread making was the failure of British bread eaters—unlike their Parisian counter parts—to demand properly made bread. While they worried about fictitious bones in their bread, the real scandal was that they no longer knew good bread when they saw it.
Elizabeth David, the food writer, asked why British bread in 1977
was so poor and concluded that “scientists and their technological achievements have combined with commercial interests, compliant governments and the public’s own indifference to give us the factory bread we now have. No doubt we deserve it. We certainly asked for it, and the milling-baking combines gave it to us.”93 Something of the same was true in the years following that disastrous harvest of 1756. Smollett in Humphry Clinker wrote that “The good people are not ignorant” of the adulteration of bread with alum, “but they prefer it to wholesome bread because it is whiter than the meal of corn. Thus they sacrifice their taste and their health . . . and the miller or the baker is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his profession.”94 Many commentators observed that the buyer was “equally culpable” with the baker on the matter of alum.95 If bakers did not meet the demand of their customers for white bread, they could go out of business. It did not help that the same assize that banned the use of alum in 1758 also made it much more profitable for bakers to bake white bread than brown. “In fact, the latter could only be made and sold at a loss and the bakers naturally did what they could to encourage the sale of white bread, even, according to one critic, by making the brown loaves so unpalatable that no one would buy them.”96
Little by little, adulterated white bread became the norm for baker’s bread, just as factory bread is the norm now. Some people, then as now, opted out of buying bread altogether, preferring to bake their own, either buying flour from a reputable dealer or grinding their own using a hand mill. The only person you could trust completely to make wholesome bread was yourself because there were no longer any enforceable compositional standards set by law. Over the years, the assize of bread had been altered many times, and it would eventually be abolished in 1822. The author of Poison Detected criticized the government for not making “severer laws” on bread. If only bread could be baked in one communal oven, as it supposedly was in the city of Genoa!97 In 1819, another anonymous critic made a similar point. “Much and proper precaution is used to secure to the publick the just weight of the loaf; but why should not competent persons be equally authorized to analyse its composition? The expense would be insignificant, the benefit of the highest importance to the community.”98
The truth was there had once been such people analysing the quality of foodstuffs in Britain, but they belonged to a different preindustrial era—the feudal world of trade guilds. The example of bread shows that food laws by themselves are not enough, unless backed up by experts who know how to enforce them. Just as the rise of modern wine was partly caused by new levels of expertise in the matter of wine quality, the decline of British bread was linked to a terrible decline in Cyrus Redding’s “perfect acquaintance with that which is good.” The sad thing was that, unlike with wine, such expertise had once existed in Britain. It had been passed down by the craft organizations that governed trade in medieval Europe.
Guilds and the Guarantee of Good Food
In Capital, Karl Marx argued that:
The adulteration of bread and the formation of a class of bakers that sells the bread below the full price, date from the beginning of the eighteenth century, from the time when the corporate character of the trade was lost, and the capitalist in the form of the miller or flourfactor, rises behind the nominal master baker.
Marx was wrong to suppose that adulteration was new. “For they poison the people secretly and often,” wrote William Langland in Piers Plowman, as long ago as the fourteenth century.99 Human greed is a constant. But Marx was right that competition between bakers to undercut each other exacerbated adulteration, whereas the old guild system had done much to prevent swindling. From 1307 to 1509, there was a company of white bakers and a company of brown bakers in London. Each saw it as their corporate mission to ensure that the quality of their respective breads remained high. If an individual baker should bake a loaf of bread that was of poor quality or tampered with in some way, it reflected badly not just on that individual but on the entire company. Joining a guild was usually an expensive and burdensome business, offering a status that you would not want to throw away for the sake of cheating some customer out of a few farthings. This created serious disincentives to swindling.
Guilds governed much of the trade of the cities of Europe from the eleventh century onwards. The various specialized guilds were, by definition, each jealous of the reputation of their particular trade. It has been said that “the guild prided itself on letting nothing leave its shops but finished products, perfect of their kind . . . Not only fraud, but the very suspicion of fraud was rigorously excluded.”100 Guilds laid down very stringent rules on goods for sale, to preserve the honour of the craft . For example, all goods were to be sold under exact names. The oil of Puglia should not be mixed with the oil of the Marche, because this might make people think that all oil merchants were slapdash.101 Fishmongers should not use seaweed to “freshen” old fish, lest customers draw the conclusion that such deception was common to all fishmongers. It was “strictly forbidden, under penalty of a fine or expulsion, to sell damaged meat, bad fish, rotten eggs, or pigs which had been fed by a barber-surgeon who might have fattened them on the blood of sick people.”102
In some ways, guilds had a stifling effect. They were intensely hierarchical and gave rise to ever greater specialization and endless squabbling over exactly who had a right to which area of trade. The bakers squabbled with the confectioners, “the cooks with the mustard makers . . . the dealers in geese with the poulterers etc.”103 Those who think that progress is the most desirable thing in food might argue that one of the effects of the guilds was to dampen creativity. In the eighteenth century it took a long time for the restaurant to become established in France, partly because of interminable squabbles between the guild of hot broth sellers and the guild of cooked sheeps’ trotters. Because guilds usually held a monopoly on their trade in that particular town, there was little incentive for improving and innovating.
On the other hand, guilds were, on the whole, excellent at maintaining quality and tradition in food. In the town of Maine in France, a butcher was not allowed to display a piece of beef on his stall unless two witnesses could testify that they had seen the animal brought in alive.104 At Poitiers, butchers had to undergo a physical and moral examination to ensure that they were not scrofulous, or suffering from scurvy or bad breath, nor morally unsound. The guilds of British cities developed similar rules. Anyone who broke these rules could be expelled from the guild. This is not to say that guild members never sold bad food. Court records from London in the seventeenth century show that members of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers were occasionally indicted for selling “stinking sturgeon” and “unsweet cod.”105 But at least the guild rules meant that there were robust standards for food, even if these were not always met.
Not everyone producing food and drink belonged to a guild. Many people acted as their own butchers and bakers, killing their own pigs at home and making them into sausages, bacon, and pork. There were those too, who sold nonessential foodstuffs—such as the “cheesers” and “fruiters”—whose trade seems to have been less organized or else less well documented than that of the butchers and the bakers. In addition, there were those who drift ed informally in and out of food production, indistinct groups of sauce-makers or cooks who escaped the control of the guild; glaziers’ wives who had a sideline in brewing or cordwainers who made a few extra shillings from selling fish.106 Sometimes they were clamped down on. A York ordinance of 1424 specifies that “the wives of any other artisan shall not bake, boil or roast fowl in public shops, for sale, unless they are competent to do so.”107 In other words, artisans’ wives must not try to moonlight by selling food unless they knew how to cook. Doubtless, the guilds had a selfish interest in keeping such unlicensed provisioners out of the trade; but they also had an interest in making their own food as wholesome as possible.
In the Middle Ages, both the guilds and the law treated food production as not merely a profession
but a duty. If you were in one of the victualling trades, part of your job was guaranteeing that everyone had access to high-quality food, and enough of it. Hence, there were local laws not just to prevent bad food from being sold, but to ensure that good food was sold and available to those who needed it. Bakers were sometimes penalized for failing to bake, as happened in York in 1485. In some cities, the victualling guilds were taken over by the government, to make sure that the poor wouldn’t starve in hard times. The commune of Florence had a monopoly on salt; Rome had a monopoly on the city’s fisheries. There were various restrictions on professional victuallers to prevent them from stockpiling or “engrossing” food for themselves—for example, a York ordinance of 1497 forbade bakers from buying corn in the market before midday, to make sure they did not monopolize the grain supply.
These laws were made in the interests of the consumer, but generally the interests of the guild coincided with those of customers. The consumer wanted guarantees of quality, and the guild wanted the high reputation that came with providing these guarantees. A guild structure more or less guaranteed sales to those who had achieved membership. Modern food manufacturers are engaged in a constant struggle to undercut their rivals and to reposition their brand with new products. Guilds were very different. Their job, rather, was discovering the secrets of making their particular product as well as they could—whether it was meat pies or gold rings—and then jealously guarding these secrets against the world.
In today’s commercial world, attempts by government to improve the food supply can be interpreted negatively by the many food producers, as an infringement on their freedom to trade as they see fit. In the feudal world of guilds, however, government and trade mostly worked to a common purpose. Indeed, subgroups of guild members took on an official character, assuming the role of policing food and drink in order to guard against malpractice. Some of the decline in British food quality, including that of bread, is tied to the fact that the guild system eroded so early; it was already waning in the age of Shakespeare. In France, by contrast, the self-policing role of guilds continued right up to the revolution of 1789. Although the French despair periodically about their bread, something of the guild mentality survives in France to this day—the communal pride in a great loaf, the notion that, as the abbé Galiani once said, “bread belongs to the police [meaning government] and not to commerce.”108 British food has belonged to commerce for centuries now. The self-policing guilds gave way to the unregulated trade of the grocer’s shop, and from there it was a short leap to the twentieth-century supermarket. The irony was that, once upon a time, the “grocers” were the people whose job it was to prevent swindling.