Swindled

by Bee Wilson

  The Food Police: Conners, Pepperers, and Grocers

  In France, there was a peculiar subgroup of officials known as the langueyeurs de porc. Their job—a specialized one even by the standards of the day—was to examine pigs’ tongues to see if they showed any signs of leprosy, to protect the consumer from diseased meat.109 Other testers had a much broader remit. For example, the quality of British ale in the late medieval period was superintended by a class of men known as “conners.” The first ale conner was appointed in London in 1377. His duties were to taste the ale of “any brewer or brewster” and pronounce on its quality. If it tasted “less good than it used to be,” the ale conner was entitled to lower its price. Brewers must have often felt tempted to bribe the ale conner to give a better rating of the ale than was justified, though such corruption was expressly forbidden. Ale conners were banned from changing their opinion “for gift, promise, knowledge, hate, or other cause whatsoever.” If the ale was mouldy, or too thin, or somehow unwholesome, the ale conner was expected to say so.110 Equally, if an ale was fine and well made, he must speak up, even if he personally disliked the brewer who made it. We no longer have ale conners. Now this role is filled, insofar as it is filled at all, by health and safety inspectors, on the one hand, and food and wine critics, on the other. The wine critic Robert Parker may lay claim to being the true inheritor of the ale conners, a man who can, by his incorruptible palate alone, ruin or enhance the business of a vineyard.

  Then there were the antifraud brigades: guilds of measurers and verifiers throughout Europe, charged with the responsibility of preventing frauds of weights and measures. In France, these operated as the guild of mesureurs, who verified the capacity of barrels, jars, and so on, checking that they were as big as they said they were. In Britain, their place was taken by mysterious bodies known variously as pepperers and spicers, garblers and grocers.

  The first record of the guild of pepperers—the Gilda Piperarorium or “mistery of pepperers”—dates from 1180.111 These men were not just pepper merchants (they dealt in all manner of dried goods or “spicery,” such as sugar, dried fruits, and alum, in addition to pepper). Pepperers were a group singled out by the king for special honours and obligations. Out of all the food guilds, it was the pepperers who were granted the custody of the king’s weights, and later the office of sifting through commodities to check for adulteration. Why the pepperers? Because of all the traded foods, pepper was the most prestigious, and it needed to be weighed in large amounts. It was not just something fiery to grind over food. Pepper was used to pay taxes, rents, and dowries. The price of pepper was a barometer for the state of business in general. “Pepper was always more involved in trade than any other spice.”112 And unlike salt, which was relatively pure, pepper had always been prey to swindling. Pliny writes of pepper adulterated with Alexandrian mustard and juniper berries as early as the first century A.D.

  Pepperers and spicers appear in the record books as the king’s weighers as far back as 1285, in the reign of Edward I, when it was decreed that “The king shall have his weights in a certain place, or in two, three or four places within the City” and that all merchandise weighing more than twenty-five pounds shall be weighed by the king’s weights by weighers who had been sworn in by the king. The king had different weights for weighing in bulk and weighing in smaller amounts. “Spicers” based in Cheapside dealing in small amounts of cinnamon, ginger, and so on—les sotils choses or “small things”—were entrusted with the Small Beam of the City (peso sotil), which weighed things in light twelve-ounce pounds. The Great Beam of the City—the Gros Beam—was given to the pepperers of Soper’s Lane, who used heavier weights than the spicers—the peso grosso or avoirdupois weights that correspond to our modern pound. Because of this, the community of pepperers came to be known as the Grossarii, the custodians of the Gros Beam.113 In 1345, they joined forces with the spicers to form the Fraternity of St Anthony, named after a church on the junction of Soper’s Lane.114 In 1373, this powerful brotherhood renamed itself the mestres de la Compagnie de Gr’ssers—the Grocers’ Company.

  It wasn’t long before the Grocers’ Company was granted the office of garbling or cleansing all spices before they were sold to the public. These “garblers” have been described as “the first guardians of the public food and health.”115 The word “garbler” comes from the Arab gharbala, to sift or select, and this is exactly what the garblers did, using a series of gradated sieves to filter “pepper, ginger, cinnamon, etc.” to detect impurities such as gravel, leaves, twigs, and other dross, and using their senses and expertise to check that the spice was genuine.116 It was illegal to mix old spice with new, or to moisten saffron, cloves, or ginger to increase the weight. Every drug and spice that landed at the London docks had to be checked by a garbler and verified before it could be sold. A document of 1380 states that it was strictly forbidden to sell “merchandise of grocery” in an “uncleansed state” until it had been “garbled by a man appointed for the purpose by the said grocers.”117

  Like the ale conners, garblers had to take an oath to their integrity:

  You shall swear that you shall well and honestly behave yourself in the office of garbelling, within the City of London, without stealing, embeazelling, or unlawfully or unhonestly conveying away any part of such spices as are left to your charges in any merchants house or elsewhere. You shall, as much as in you shall lie, garbell and cleanse all manner of spices, drugs and merchandise, justlie, trulie and indifferently according to your skilled judgement without respect of any person or persons whatsoever.118

  Garblers had a self-image as sentinels against swindles. In the early seventeenth century, their office came under attack from the East India Company, the main importer of spices, which sought to exempt itself from having its goods garbled. The garblers, however, protested that without them “the consumers of garbleable commodities . . . and all other consumers of spices and drugs, are those who will be unavoidably injured, and ruined both in their persons and estates by abuses and frauds.”119 They had been preventing “frauds and abuses,” they alleged, for three hundred years; it was wrong for the East India Company to seek indemnity from being garbled. This clash was a taste of things to come. Big corporations such as the East India Company would eventually sap the power of the guilds from which the garblers came. And the garblers were right. It does seem that spices were far more systematically adulterated by the late eighteenth century than they had been when the garblers were in charge.

  Garblers were not just acting from the goodness of their hearts, though. They were well remunerated for their services. At seventeenth-century prices, they charged two shillings a bag for garbling pepper, three shillings and six pence per hundred pounds of nutmegs, two pence a pound for cloves, eight pence per hundredweight for bay berries, cumin, coriander, caraway, almonds, and rice, and twelve pence per hundredweight for ginger and pimento.120 The fact that garbling was compulsory, and a monopoly, could give rise to corruption. King James I (1566–1625) received numerous complaints against the garblers. Petitioners complained that in many cases, garblers would set their seal on casks without properly checking through the goods. Spices coming in from Holland were known to have come ready garbled, yet the garblers would still charge for their services on Dutch spices.

  In 1613–14, a number of petitions to the king argued that the garblers were no longer up to the job. Traditionally, garblers had been responsible for policing drugs as well as spice—there was no clear distinction between the two. But now they seemed ill-equipped to judge the purity of drugs. Corruption in the sale of drugs was becoming rife, and detecting the subtle adulteration of essential oils—with oil of turpentine, say, or expressed oil or spirits of wine—required the skills of a chemist, not a garbler. In 1617, the Apothecaries’ Charter was granted and, little by little, the influence of the grocer-garblers as policers of swindling waned. The control of drugs passed to the apothecaries or pharmacists, and the control of food and drink was lef
t with no special body to oversee it.

  The state would continue to intervene to prevent food and drink fraud, but its main interest was in safeguarding the Exchequer rather than the stomachs of its citizens. With the wane of the garblers, there was no one to protect the interests of the consumer of food against the swindlers until the issue of adulteration came before Parliament in the 1850s, when the state was finally persuaded to start taking the risk to public health from adulterated food seriously. By contrast, over the same period, the reputation of grocers moved from being that of guardians against food fraud to being the worst perpetrators of it. In the nineteenth century, no group of sellers was so mistrusted. The story of the battle against food adulteration was to become the story of the battle against the duplicitous grocer.

  3

  GOVERNMENT MUSTARD

  We ask for bread, and we receive a stone; for coffee, and we receive

  chicory; for chicory, and we receive burnt carrots and powder of

  dried horses’ liver; for oil of almonds, and we receive prussic acid,

  to heighten the enjoyment of the dessert by adding a little risk to it.

  —The Times, 3 March 1856

  One of the besetting questions about adulteration is: why do people tolerate it? In 1868, George Eliot revived one of her characters, the idealistic Felix Holt (from her novel of that name), to pose this question. It was the year after the Second Reform Act, which had given one and a half million working men the vote. There had been heated debate among the Whitehall establishment as to whether the working classes were intelligent enough, or good enough, to have the franchise. To Felix Holt, though he wanted democratic reform, it was clear that the majority was “neither very wise nor very virtuous.” If they had been so, they would not have put up with the swindling they suffered:

  Any nation that had within it a majority of men—and we are the majority—possessed of much wisdom and virtue, would not tolerate the bad practices, the commercial lying and swindling, the poisonous adulteration of goods, the retail cheating, and the political bribery, which are carried on boldly in the midst of us. A majority has the power of creating public opinion. We could groan and hiss before we had the franchise: if we had groaned and hissed in the right place, if we had discerned better between good and evil, if the multitude of us artisans, and factory hands, and miners, and labourers of all sorts, had been skilful, faithful, well-judging, industrious, sober—and I don’t see how there can be wisdom and virtue anywhere without these qualities— we should have made an audience that would have shamed the other classes out of their share in the national vices.1

  Holt is telling his audience of working men to make full use of the opportunity they have been given. But his (or George Eliot’s) words show just how difficult it was for the bulk of the population to do anything about adulteration—even to groan and hiss—when it did not have the franchise. Before they had the vote, working men and women (the latter did not get the vote until 1928) had to swallow many things they did not like, and not just bad food.

  Despite an increasing awareness that adulteration was as prevalent as Accum had alleged, there was no popular crusade against it in the decades after 1820. The commercial defence of adulteration as something almost respectable, which Accum had so deplored, continued as if he had never written. French social critics at this time often accused the English—perfidious inhabitants of perfidious Albion—of hypocrisy. Judging from the attitude of the British government concerning the safety of what people ate, the French had a point. As far as politics went, the working classes were not deemed responsible enough to vote, but kept in a state of childlike dependence. Yet in matters of commerce, they were treated as responsible enough to make sophisticated judgements about the safety of the food they bought. It was a “buyer beware” culture, which foisted huge responsibility onto a populace that lacked even basic democratic rights.

  The food culture we now live in is the opposite of this. The rule now is, for the most part, not buyer beware but seller beware. Around the turn of the new millennium, a strange new trend emerged in restaurants in both America and Britain. If you ordered a steak or a burger and asked for it to be done rare or medium rare, you might find yourself with a piece of paper thrust on your place setting. Unless you were prepared to sign a legal disclaimer accepting that the restaurant could take “no responsibility” for the safety of meat cooked in this manner, you couldn’t have your burger pink in the middle. These burger disclaimers, which annoyed numerous impatient diners, were an attempt to redress an imbalance. They were getting at the question of who is responsible for the food that consumers put in their mouths. Restaurateurs—who often feel burdened with responsibility from all sides, from environmental health officers, from fussy customers, from government red tape—were trying to shift a little of it back on to the individual. In our seller-beware food culture, the government, the press, advertising standards agencies, and consumers all exert pressure on food-sellers to stick to their promises and to be clear about what those promises are.

  It was very different in mid-Victorian Britain. The collapse of the guild system had left a vacuum. Who would take responsibility for preventing swindling? Not the government: except for intervening to seize badly tainted meat, and for policing heavily taxed items such as tea and coffee, successive Victorian governments were reluctant to intervene in the case of food. Nor the press: though it publicized bad cases of adulteration after they had happened, it did little to provide the consumer with information that could protect against buying falsified food. Nor the sellers themselves: one contemporary observed that when accused of adulterating food, the shopkeeper “endeavours to shelter himself, and to excuse his dishonest practices, under the assertion that the public ‘likes it’ and ‘will have it.’ ”2 So who was responsible for preventing swindling? The individual consumer, it seems: the person least equipped to do anything about it. In the “buyer beware” culture, the buyer had a great deal to beware of.

  Demon Grocers

  In the decades after Accum, sellers of food in England acquired an increasingly bad name, and none more so than grocers. The days when the grocers—through their association with garbling—could pride themselves as guardians of public health were long gone. Now their reputation was that of sinister crooks, conspiring in private to defraud their clientele. In 1851, Punch magazine wrote of “The Grocer-Imp, who enriches his chocolate with brick dust; and government mustard with a morning draught conveys the materials of a vault.”3 Punch also carried cartoons attacking grocers. “The Great Lozenge-Maker” was one, a picture of a scary skeleton mixing up arsenic and plaster of Paris and turning the deadly mixture into “bon-bons for juvenile parties.” When G. K. Chesterton published his “Song Against Grocers” in 1914, he was crystallizing a view of the profession that had been commonplace for most of the nineteenth century.

  A British grocer’s shop, 1866.

  God made the wicked Grocer

  For a mystery and a sign,

  That men might shun the awful shops

  And go to inns to dine . . .

  He sells us sands of Araby

  As sugar for cash down;

  He sweeps his shop and sells the dust

  The purest salt in town,

  He crams with cans of poisoned meat

  Poor subjects of the King,

  And when they die by thousands

  Why he laughs like anything.

  A cartoon depicting the common belief that grocers routinely added sand to sugar. In fact, Hassall showed that this was one swindle that grocers were not guilty of.

  Yet by the time this poem appeared, the view it presented of the demon grocer was already out of date. In the early years of the twentieth century, there was clear evidence that sugar was not bulked out with sand, except in the popular imagination. Even in the worst grocer’s shop of the late Victorian age, salt had invariably been discovered to be just salt and not sweepings. In fact, by the time Chesterton was writing, English food w
as much less adulterated than it had been for a large part of the nineteenth century. This chapter will explain how the change occurred, and how much it owed to the tireless efforts of one strange and unhappy man.

  The true heyday of the demon grocers was from the 1810s to the 1850s, when all the staples of the English grocer shop were routinely falsified and padded and sold under weight, and although their customers suspected as much (and although Accum had confirmed many of their suspicions), there was little or nothing they could do about it. As well as the pepper traded by their medieval counterparts, the main products sold by a grocer or general shop were flours, sugar, and spices; cheese, butter, bacon, and salt fish; and, above all, tea and coffee. The precious powders on the grocer’s scales were often mired in double or even triple adulterations. Ground coffee was almost universally thinned with chicory powder, the chicory itself cheapened with one or several of the following: roasted wheat and rye flours, burnt beans, acorns, mangelwurzel, sawdust, or a powder made from roasted dried carrots and parsnips. To disguise the adulteration, it needed to be darkened with burnt sugar. When making coffee, “never be tempted to try the deadly mixture sold at the grocers,” advised one Victorian cookery writer.4 Ginger was bulked with ground rice and sago, then, to make up for the lost pungency, doctored with cayenne; cayenne itself was often padded with further ground rice, or mustard husks, or dead sawdust, before being brightened in colour with turmeric if you were lucky or red lead if you were unlucky. No wonder the Victorians were so suspicious of spicy food.