by Bee Wilson
Then there were all the sneaky ways in which unscrupulous grocers contrived to sell their customers short. One grocer’s apprentice who had learned his job in Berkshire remembered how his master, a strict Methodist but no less a swindler for that, taught him the tricks of the trade.5 The key principle was to con the customer out of as much as you could get away with. “You must make the ounces pay” was the master’s mantra, especially when it came to items such as bacon, which the grocer needed to sell cheap to keep his customers, in the same way that modern supermarkets sell “known value items” such as milk and bread at rock-bottom prices to lure people into the store. The idea was to estimate how much swindling the customer would put up with and then add an extra ounce or two to every purchase. If a customer bought a hock of bacon weighing 6lb 7oz, at 4 1/2 pence per lb, they would be charged for 6lb 9oz at 5 pence a pound. Result: 2 1/2 pence extra profit for the grocer. When sugar was weighed, this apprentice recalled, “some was always spilt loose on the scale opposite the weight, which remains in the scale, so that every pound or so is a quarter of an ounce short.” It was the same with cheese and butter. “On the cheesemongery side we were always blamed if we didn’t keep the scale well wetted, so as to make it heavier on one side than the other—I mean the side of the scale where the butter was put—that was filled, or partly filled with water, under pretence of preventing the butter sticking, and so the customer was wronged half an ounce in every purchase.”6
Needless to say, not every grocer was dishonest. There were honourable grocers too, who sold fair weight and did their best not to add to the impurity of what they sold. It must have been very distressing for them that the goings-on of their swindling counterparts gave the whole profession a bad name. After he left his apprenticeship in Berkshire, the grocer mentioned above got a job at another grocer’s shop, this time in Yorkshire, an honest one, and “had to learn my business over again, so as to carry it on fairly.”7 In London, moreover, if you had money, you could go to one of the society grocers, either Fortnum’s in Piccadilly or Crosse & Blackwell in Soho Square.8 For the rich, this was the first golden era of the English shop, when the gaslight that Accum had fought to legalize shone on fantastical window displays of luxury goods in exquisite containers. As well as every sort of basic grocery, Fortnum & Mason sold picnic hampers of cold duck and lobster salad, truffled birds and champagne. Queen Victoria bought concentrated beef tea from Fortnum’s, and it also supplied many of the gentlemen’s clubs of the West End: the Garrick, the Athenaeum, Brooks’s, the Carlton. Meanwhile, from Crosse & Blackwell you could buy pâtés and pasta, crystallized fruits and chocolates, jams, syrups and essences, oils and vinegars, twenty-five different pickles, and forty different sauces. As Friedrich Engels (one German immigrant to England who did not become a Frederick) wrote in 1844, “In the great towns of England everything may be had of the best, but it costs money.”9 Not everything sold at these grand shops was strictly unadulterated—of which more later—but the overall quality was infinitely better than at the average London grocer. The sad truth was that food swindling was something that disproportionately affected the poor.
Poverty and Adulteration
If you are a reasonably affluent First World citizen and you care about what you eat, you can create for yourself a fairly rich and pure diet. You can buy swags of fresh green Swiss chard from a farmer’s market, straight from the farmer who grew it; you can steam it and drizzle it with unfiltered olive oil and scatter it with flakes of the cleanest sea salt; you can source chickens that have led a carefree organic existence; you can pay £4 for a loaf of the best nonbleached natural levain bread; you can drink pesticidefree, locally produced apple juice. It is different if you are poor and living in the same First World city. Unless you are unusually lucky or unusually persistent, your food is liable to be more corrupted than the food of the rich. Your meat is more likely to come pumped with hormones and water. Your bread is more likely to be bleached and enzymed and generally depleted. Your fat is more likely to be hydrogenated. Juice is too expensive, so your children drink squash laced with colourings and sweetener. This situation is unfair, though there are ways out for the lucky or the very determined. Perhaps you live near a good food co-op, or grow your own vegetables on an allotment, or take the time to buy big bags of healthy lentils and rice from an Asian grocer. But the disparity is still there. The rich can eat unadulterated food without much bother, whereas for most of the poor, it is a constant effort.
It was the same, only worse, in the 1840s, when the poor were so much poorer and faced the intolerable bind of being swindled for cheap food that they couldn’t really afford even at the low prices at which it was sold. In the late 1840s, the journalist Henry Mayhew went onto the streets of London to observe at first hand the working lives of the London poor. He wrote up his observations in a series of reports for the Morning Chronicle, later published as London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Some of his most shocking reports concerned the dreadful state of the food of the poor. “When we think of the short weights and measures,” Mayhew wrote, “and the quality of the articles supplied, we shall readily perceive how cruelly the poor are defrauded, and that if they are underpaid for what they do, they are at the same time fearfully overcharged for all they buy.”10
If the middle classes bought food from markets and bakers and butchers and grocers, the labouring poor were often forced to patronize street hucksters, hawkers, and costermongers, whose prices were lower but whose swindling was even greater. Where grocers stole an ounce here and an ounce there, hucksters were far more blatant in their thieving. Mayhew discovered that the pound weight used by hucksters was usually four ounces short, and sometimes even as much as eight or ten ounces, meaning that for the poor, a “pound” of food could be in reality less than half that, and what seemed cheap was merely dishonest. The street pint was at least a third short. Mayhew noted that “as a body, the costermongers,” who took their name from a type of apple but who actually sold an eclectic range of provisions, “rank high amongst the criminals of the country.”11 Based on prison records, there was one criminal in every 247 for butchers, but one in 86 for costermongers and hucksters.
Reading Mayhew, you see that swindling was a normal part of their trade, not something limited to a few crooks. Not everything the “costers” sold was bad; Mayhew was impressed with the “excellence” and variety of home-grown fruits and vegetables during the summer months at “the green markets of the metropolis,” the bunches of watercress, the pink radishes, the asparagus and broccoli and plums; the gooseberries and strawberries, raspberries and currants. These delicious things were then sold on by costermongers. But even good food was often sold fraudulently by the time it reached the poor. Costermongers sold plums in a quart container with a false bottom. Cherries might be sold at the knock-down price of a penny a pound, the catch being that “a pound” really meant five ounces. Poor customers had to put up with this swindling because, first, they probably did not own any weights of their own, so they had no way of testing for sure that they had been “had,” and second, because there was nowhere else to go. No one sold things cheaper than the costermongers.
Their working hours made the poor even more prey to swindling. As Engels angrily wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England, it was common practice for a workman to receive his weekly wages only on a Saturday afternoon. As a result, he might not manage to get to market to buy food until five or seven o’clock in the evening. Thus, what Engels called the “property-holding class” got the “first choice” of food in the morning “when the market teems with the best of everything.” “But when the workers reach it, the best has vanished, and, if it was still there, they would probably not be able to buy it. The potatoes which the workers buy are usually poor, the vegetables wilted, the cheese old and of poor quality, the bacon rancid, the meat tough, taken from old, often diseased cattle, or such as have died a natural death, and not fresh even then, half decayed.”12
The bu
siness of Saturday night shopping increased the likelihood of buying inedible food. In the dark, it was hard to gauge the quality of what was on sale, and hawkers exploited this. Fish-sellers would save “rough” fish to sell on a Saturday night, using candlelight to make a darkened, smelly old mackerel look fresh and new.13 In the north of England, some street-sellers even used a little red paint to touch up the fish’s gills, since red gills were a sign of freshness.14 This trick worked better in fading light than in the full glow of day, when the fishy makeup must have been all too obvious. For diseased meat and cheese, a devious technique known as “polishing” went on, whereby a putrid surface was covered with something fresh. Old meat was “polished” with a layer of fresh fat, and the cut surface of old cheese with a layer of fresh cheese. Similarly, old salted butter was covered with a layer of fresh sweet butter. Some Saturday night tricks were even more ingenious. In Manchester, factory workers might sometimes buy a coconut for a great weekend treat. Most customers would not spend money on such an extravagance without first shaking the coconut, to check that it was full of milk and therefore fresh. But devious sellers got around this by taking old, rancid, milkless coconuts, piercing them, filling them with water, and sealing them with a blackened cork, to match the brown of the coconut shell. Another wicked dodge was boiling oranges to make them weighty and shiny. By the time people got them home and found that the segments fell apart in their hands in disappointing cooked lumps, it was too late.
All of these were classic adulterating tricks, with sellers pulling the wool over the eyes of innocent buyers. But there were also cases where the Saturday night buyers must have known in their heart of hearts that what they were buying was likely to be no good. Engels observed that many workers chose to buy their family’s food as late as ten o’clock or midnight because they knew they would get the cheapest food of all; but they must surely have realized that the price of this cheap food was its rottenness.
As nothing can be sold on Sunday, and all shops must be closed at twelve o’clock on Saturday night, such things as would not keep until Monday are sold at any price between ten o’clock and midnight. But nine-tenths of what is sold at ten o’clock is past using by Sunday morning, yet these are precisely the provisions which make up the Sunday dinner of the poorest class. The meat which the workers buy is very often past using; but having bought it, they must eat it.15
Periodically, meat inspectors would seize tainted meat being openly offered for sale. Engels cites a case of sixty-four stuffed Christmas geese “which had proved unsaleable at Liverpool and had been forwarded to Manchester, where they were brought to market foul and rotten.”16 In fact, the selling of diseased meat was one of the few areas of British food that was policed by the law. Mayhew describes meat inspectors patrolling the markets to check for diseased and tainted meat. If a diseased animal should be found, it was condemned, handed over to the police, and its flesh boiled down under police supervision, to eliminate any chance of someone eating it. In August 1844, twenty-six tainted hams were seized at a dealer’s in Bolton and publicly burnt. The dealer was fined. In January 1844, eleven Manchester meat-sellers were fined for having sold tainted meat. Yet despite the law’s intervention, the selling of bad and putrid meat carried on.
This was partly because the selling of cheap bad food operated as a kind of black market, with buyer and seller colluding together against the law. At a modern street market, when a seller offers you a “designer” perfume for an implausibly low price, you know—if you ponder the matter for an instant—that it must be either stolen or fake. This is a buyer-beware scenario. If you go ahead and buy it anyway, you are complicit with the swindle. Perhaps you tell yourself that the real swindle is the high price of perfume in the official shops. A similar ethos must have operated in the food markets of Victorian England. When an expensive meat such as Christmas goose was sold impossibly cheap, this was a signal that something was wrong. If buyers went ahead and bought it anyway, they ought to have known that the seller was probably not honest. They would also have known that the price of regular, respectable middle-class goose was simply too high. Unlike the illicit perfume, however, which might only make you smell bad, the illegal meat could make you extremely ill.
In the poverty-stricken city of the 1840s, food buyers and sellers had a curious relationship—close but based on mistrust. Both buyers and sellers seemed to be victims of a market that was beyond their control. Those selling to the poor were, for the most part, themselves just as poor. The existence of a working-class coffee-seller could be precarious. Having shelled out money to garnish his stall with boiled eggs, watercresses, bread and butter, and fruit cake, the coffee-seller would water down the brew he sold as far as he possibly could with both chicory and water—it was typical to use ten ounces of coffee to make five gallons of the drink (the equivalent of 22.75 litres), which is about four times as dilute as most modern recommendations—but still struggle to make a living from the poor workmen who bought the coffee at around 1 1/2 pence per cup. To make the drink still cheaper, it was said that in the East End a group of “liver bakers” set up shop, selling baked powdered liver to make the coffee go further:
These men take the livers of oxen and horses, bake them, and grind them into a powder, which they sell to the low-priced coffee shop keepers, at from fourpence to sixpence per pound, horses’-liver coffee bearing the highest price. It may be known by allowing the coffee to stand until cold, when a thick pellicle or skin will be found on top.17
If true, this disgusting liver coffee was simply the final economy for the working-class coffee-seller. It was a constant toil to make a profit, given the efforts of rivals and the poverty of the customers. Some sellers saw their customers as the enemy, terrible “screws” who had barely any money to spend and were always trying to beat down prices. One seller told Mayhew that hucksters were often forced to sell food at cost price. “The people haven’t got money to lay out with them—they tell us so; and if they are poor, we must be poor too.”18
From the seller’s viewpoint, in this impoverished economy, a little swindling could seem like personal justice—a way of clawing back a living for themselves and exacting some revenge on their customers. Victorian fishmongers used different weights depending on the personalities of their clientele. If they considered a particular purchaser to be a “scaly cove” (in other words, a tight-fisted buyer), they would be more likely to use short weights and “always take care to have the laugh on their side.”19 More generous or less troublesome customers— “jonnocks”—might be rewarded with accurate weights. Often, though, the undercutting was employed on all customers, without favouritism, because the hucksters knew that, perversely, it was the only way to keep their custom. It was only through undercutting that they could afford to sell cheap; it was only through selling cheap that they could compete with their rivals. One huckster confessed to Mayhew that “We’re all trying . . . to cut one another down, because we all want a livelihood, and unless we did cut one another down we couldn’t get it.”20
However much the sellers shifted the blame onto economic circumstances, however, this undercutting was not a victimless crime. It had a direct effect on the health of the poor. Engels noticed that the “adulterated and indigestible” food of the poor gave them seriously “impaired digestion.”21 Especially cruelly, undercutting foisted adulterated food on the poorest of the poor in the workhouses, prisons, hospitals, and other public institutions. The contract for institutional food was usually offered to the lowest bidder, and it was an economic impossibility to become the lowest bidder without some swindling.22 There was a scandal in 1850 when a large number of orphans in Drouitt’s Institution for pauper children died, as a result of their oatmeal being padded with barleymeal, which was less nutritious and gave the miserable children vomiting and diarrhoea. The same thing happened in 1852 when the London Poor Law Unions requested estimates for being supplied with oatmeal. Numerous estimates were sent, and one came in a full three shillings a load
beneath the next cheapest. How? Because the oatmeal had once again been mixed with inferior barleymeal.
These cases outraged contemporaries. One writer called this barleymeal adulteration “a barefaced and heartless robbery” practised on the poor, adding: “This species of robbing the poor merits the unmitigated abhorrence of every man who possesses the least particle of either honesty or humanity.” But these scandals were just the tip of the iceberg; adulteration was a routine feature of almost all transactions between food-sellers and their impoverished as well as their parsimonious customers. The real mystery was why this incessant robbing of the poor was allowed to continue. Why did England in 1850, in some ways the most industrious and prosperous country in the world, and arguably the most self-satisfied, continue to feed its population so badly?
The Swindlers of England
Both inside and outside Britain, people noticed that adulteration in the country was unusually acute. “There is not a country in the world where commercial roguery is so generally and successfully practised as in Great Britain,” complained an anonymous English critic of adulteration in 1855.23 Several French writers reported the situation in London as worse than that in Continental Europe.24 Eliza Acton complained that a country possessing the “agricultural and commercial advantages” of England ought to have been famous for “the purity and excellence of its bread,” instead of which, it was noted “both at home and abroad, for its want of genuineness and the faulty mode of its preparation.”25 There was a remarkable consensus on the causes of Britain’s problem: the increasing dominance of a laissez-faire mentality, coupled with an absence of adequate laws or proper enforcement regarding the quaity of food.