Swindled

by Bee Wilson

  An advertisement for Bird’s Custard, which openly contrasts the reliability of packaged food with the risks and bother of making a real egg custard.

  His final and most ambitious food project was set up in 1881. By this time, he observed, gross adulteration was far less common, and people therefore wanted more than food that was merely not adulterated. They wanted “to secure the absolute purity of our food, especially of that required by invalids.”120 What if a company could guarantee the purity of all the articles it manufactured? Wouldn’t this prove to be a “great success” (and of course a source of profit to Hassall himself)? Hassall persuaded a gentleman he knew to provide the start-up costs, and “The Pure Food Company” established its headquarters at 4 Princes Street, London, Hassall being assisted by a friend, Otto Hehner, who worked free of charge. All the ingredients used were “of the best quality.” The water was “softened and purified.” All the meat was bought daily from Smithfield. The company would focus on making “solidified or concentrated beef tea, the same with the albumen of the meat, the same with arrowroot, pure beef jelly or essence, albumenous or fibrinous meat lozenges, milk food for infants, the same for children and invalids, pulsella [presumably some kind of lentil or pulse], cooked and in part pre-digested; extract of coffee, prepared by a special process and preserving the full aroma of the berry.” Finally, there would be extract of coffee and chicory, but scrupulously labelled as such, so that no coffee lover would be deceived. Hassall and Hehner threw themselves into the project. The company made a prospectus of its products “stating truthfully the facts without exaggeration.” Yet the sales were never sufficient to cover costs and, as Hassall put it, “this well intentioned venture came to an end.” Hassall headed off to a frugal retirement in San Remo, where the climate agreed with his poor nervous constitution.

  Never one to take a disappointment well, Hassall knew exactly what conclusions to draw from the failure of the Pure Food Company, blaming the ingratitude of his public and the hopelessness of competing with commercial puffery: “So much for the discernment and appreciation of the public, who are ever crying out for, and writing about, the purity and quality of food. Had the prospectus contained extravagant and exaggerated statements and assertions and had a fortune been spent in advertisements, then the result might have been different.”121 It is possible, though, to take a different moral from Hassall’s ill-fated Pure Food Company. “Fibrinous meat lozenges,” “flour of meat.” “pre-digested pulsella”; these may all have been purer than pure, but none of them are recognizable foods. In his frantic search for purity, Hassall had lost sight of the reason why adulteration mattered in the first place; unlike Accum, with his instinctive zest for life, Hassall became so obsessed with deception that he had forgotten the need for good food.

  The case of Hassall shows how easily the fight against swindling can turn into a futile quest for purity, which ultimately does little to aid the cause of the individual consumer. History shows that adulteration flourishes most when people no longer trust their senses; when they lack a firsthand knowledge of what is good. Science ought to be a complement to this intimate knowledge, not a substitute for it. Hassall succeeded in achieving the shift from “buyer beware” to “seller beware.” But the latter code has its dangers too. If the seller assumes responsibility for the integrity of food, it can mean that buyers no longer feel they need to keep their eyes open; that they can trust in the superior knowledge of food technicians. Hassall’s Pure Food Company was asking people to forget their own senses and put their faith only in the science of his sanitized products—the same siren call that industrial packaged goods have offered to consumers ever since, the promise of clean food whose purity is guaranteed by the brand. This story was to be played out most dramatically in the United States, where the quest for purity and the drive of the free market were to do battle, and occasionally to join forces, well into the twentieth century.

  4

  PINK MARGARINE AND PURE KETCHUP

  Mary had a little lamb,

  And when she saw it sicken,

  She shipped it off to Packingtown,

  And now it’s labelled chicken.

  —New York Evening Post (1906)

  To be cheated, fooled, bamboozled, cajoled, deceived, pettifogged, demagogued, hypnotized, manicured and chiropodized are privileges dear to us all . . . Americans like to be humbugged.

  —Harvey Washington Wiley (1894)

  At the time when Britons were waxing most desperate about the falsification of their food and drink, in the 1850s, they would sometimes look more than a little enviously across the Atlantic at conditions in America, where many people still raised most of what they ate and had little need of protection from the nefarious ways of the adulterators.1 Americans too could reflect with some complacency that for all the disdain with which their manners, politics, and culture were treated by old Europeans, their food production was the envy of the world. Yet in the decades after the Civil War (1861–65), all that changed.

  Rapidly, American food suffered the same deterioration in quality that British food had suffered in the early nineteenth century, and the reasons in each case were very much the same. America was finally making the shift from a predominantly agricultural society to an industrial nation. With big industry came new technologies— new ways of tampering with food, and new and powerful markets for selling it in. In the 1870s, big manufacturers began employing industrial chemists to invent new aids to deception—deodorants, dyes, flavours, crispers for flabby foods, and softeners for hard foods—which left consumers thoroughly confused about what they were eating.2 By the 1880s, “the whole system of food supply was assuming a different appearance,” with an increasingly urbanized population calling for cheap new processed foods.3 Things had got so bad that by 1892 a U.S. senator, Algernon S. Paddock, could complain that “the devil has got hold of the food supply of this country.”4

  This epidemic of adulteration, occurring later, played out differently from the British experience a generation earlier. Everything was on a grander scale, and the battles between the swindlers and the purifiers were bigger too. Whereas the English fight had been one of science against science—and often seemed like gentlemen against gentlemen—in America, it was a fight of commerce against commerce. The Big Boys of the Beef Trust and the whiskey rectifiers were keen to label anti-adulteration campaigners as cranks and social misfits. But other, shrewder business minds, such as the grocer James Thurber and the manufacturer Henry J. Heinz, spotted the benefits of allying themselves with the cause of pure food. They discovered that there was serious money to be made out of cleaning up their act, yet the suspicion often remained that it was still just an act, and that the new “pure food” labels were just as misleading as the old dyes and pomades.

  The nature of the political debate on swindling was different, too. In Britain, the central political question had been how far the government should intervene in the market. But in the United States, this was complicated by the fact that there was more than one kind of government—state government and federal government. It was impossible to discuss whether there should be better laws to protect the nation’s food without coming up against the old chestnut of states’ rights versus federal power, the perennial squabble that had affected every political question in America since the Constitution was ratified in 1787.

  On the antifederalist side were those like Congressman Adams of New York, who commented in 1884 that food regulation was “a local matter belonging to the states”—which meant that some states were ahead of their time but many others lagged behind.5 On the federalist side were those like Harvey Washington Wiley, the pure-food crusader, who insisted that the quality of food eaten by the average consumer could not be guaranteed unless there were federal laws to regulate the trade in food between states. The eventual triumph of the federalist point of view—in the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906—showed how crucial food was in fashioning modern America, one nation under God, commerce, and fed
eral government.

  Another difference was the tone in which food swindling was discussed. The mood of the Lancet and of Hassall was sceptical, understated, reasonable, sometimes infuriatingly so. By contrast, discussions of food in the United States were often infused with messianic zeal, much of it derived from the Temperance movement. Eating and drinking the wrong things became bound up with the idea of sin. Whereas Hassall worried about the purity of the mustard and coffee freely on sale in London, for many of the American anti-adulteration campaigners coffee and mustard were ipso facto impure, evil stimulants, even if sold in unadulterated form. They didn’t just want their food to be reliable; they wanted it to be pristine.

  Milk and Alcohol

  The Pure Food movement proper did not really take off in the United State until the 1870s; but it was preceded by two decades of periodic food scares in which the newspaper-reading public of the big cities was alarmed with reports of “vile mixtures” and frauds. By far the most prominent of these scandals was the swill milk affair of the 1850s, which began in New York City. Yet New York was seen by many people, including many of its own inhabitants, as a case apart. The result was that public horror was not matched by meaningful political action. As with many public health scandals, the first instinct among the politicians was to try to get everything back in proportion—simply to calm people down—so that decisive action was a long time coming. In the meantime, some of the old faith in the purity of the American way of life began to erode. If you couldn’t trust milk, what could you trust?

  Milk has always played a troubling role in the American psyche: it is an American staple, but one that is capable of provoking deep unease.6 The mainstream image of milk remains very positive to this day, linked to the childhood innocence of “milk and cookies,” the belief in milk as a kind of white nectar, wholesome, calcium-rich, and pure (an image heavily promoted by the National Dairy Council). Yet this has been offset by periodic bouts of anxiety about whether milk is all it seems. There have been frequent backlashes against the apparent inviolability of milk’s place in the American diet, with sceptics arguing that milk is neither the best nor the only source of calcium, and that milk consumption is linked to a number of serious diseases. Sometimes, the tone is distinctly alarmist, if not downright apocalyptic. Milk: The Deadly Poison was the title of Robert Cohen’s antimilk tract of 1997.

  There was a comparable divide in 1850s’ New York. Milk retained a reputation as potentially the most perfect of foods, but one that had sunk in the wicked den of the city to a thoroughly debased state. In truth, during the period after the birth of the modern city but before the advent of pasteurization and the refrigerator, milk could be a lethal substance. In his Essay On Milk from 1842, Robert Hartley had warned that milk’s purity could be catastrophically tainted if the milk were produced under the wrong conditions, yet these taints could prove very hard to spot. The warning proved to be eerily prophetic.

  In the first half of the nineteenth century, when urban populations were not so dense, city milk was generally supplied by cows pastured on grass in the city itself. But as houses crowded in, pasture space shrank, and New York had to find new ways of procuring milk. From 1842 onwards, the year of Hartley’s essay, some fresh milk was brought to the city each day via rail, from rural areas such as Orange County. Most of the city’s milk, however, was so-called swill milk or slop milk—milk from cows kept in dairies attached to breweries and distilleries. These cows were kept in vast, darkened cowsheds and fed the hot grain mash left over from distilling. By 1854, it was estimated that there were thirteen thousand cows fed on swill “and living a life of appalling misery,” while producing a milk that was blamed for the deaths of thousands of children every year.7 Slop milk was thinner and more watery than country milk—its fat content was too low for it to be made into butter or cheese—yet by 1850 the majority of New York milk was produced in this way. It also bore the distinct taint of alcohol. In a society where temperance meetings were becoming common, swill milk started to attract strong moral disapproval. “With swill milk for children and swill liquor for men, no wonder that we are so healthy and hearty a race,” wrote one sarcastic commentator, appalled by the tide of physical and moral turpitude he foresaw sweeping the nation.8 But others saw things in even starker terms: swill milk wasn’t debauched; it was deadly.

  “Death in the Jug” was the headline in a New York Times report on swill milk from 1853, borrowing Accum’s phrase. A campaigner named John Mullaly had just brought out a pamphlet, The Milk Trade in New York and Vicinity, anatomizing the horrors and swindles of the city’s milk, pointing out that much of the milk sold as “country milk” was swill milk in disguise. The New York Times writer linked the state of milk—“abuses that poison the very springs, of life”—with the poisonous quality of city life in general. This was an era of filth and chaos. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 had made New York the economic heart of the nation, but the city had yet to develop a civic politics to regulate the new economy. There were distinct echoes of Accum’s London of 1820—in both cities industry had galloped forward without either the social responsibility or the political institutions to rein in the mess. “Our streets are never cleaned. Our police force is inefficient, and our thoroughfares are obstructed by a thousand disagreeable obstacles. We walk in mire, sleep in fear and run the risk of being trampled to death by infuriated oxen in our principal highways.”9 And to top it all, the substance sold in Brooklyn and Manhattan as “pure milk” was anything but. The New York Times attributed the deaths of up to eight thousand children a year to this foul fluid.10

  This was an overstatement; but it is true that there was a direct connection between high infant mortality and the disgusting conditions in which milk was produced. It was unfortunate that breastfeeding of children under one year of age declined at just the point in history when cow’s milk was least safe to drink. The economic need to work soon after confinement compelled many women to give up nursing their own babies. But where in the past they might have used a wet nurse, increasingly they turned to substitute milks. The practice of wet-nursing had begun to decline by the start of the nineteenth century.11 By the 1860s, “artificial feeding” of babies was on the rise, boosted by the invention of feeding teats made from India rubber, and promoted by many physicians as the modern, hygienic thing to do. In 1869, the German chemist Justus von Liebig (1803–73) marketed a soluble breast milk substitute, made from wheat flour, dried cow’s milk, malt, and some bicarbonate of potash to make it less acidic.12 Those who could not afford it often fed their babies on cow’s milk, sometimes mixed with water and sugar. When the milk in question was swill milk, the consequences could be devastating.

  Cartoons from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1858, exposing the scandal of swill milk in New York City.

  The swill milk affair was part of the wider social disgrace of high infant mortality. From 1870 to 1900, one out of every three deaths in the United States was of a child under five. Between 38 and 51 percent of infant deaths were from infectious diseases, and of these, half were diarrhoeal infections, which were especially connected with the consumption of bad milk.13 Death from diarrhoea peaked in July and August when bacteria in the—often already filthy—milk multiplied more rapidly. Many theories have been suggested for the high rate of infant death: poverty, lack of education, overcrowding, bad sewerage. In 1909, one doctor suggested that “dirty pacifiers, overdressing or pickles” might be to blame.14 It was bad milk, however, that was the critical factor: it was not poverty per se that caused babies to die, so much as the fact that poor mothers were more likely to be duped into buying cheap, poor-quality milk. When the infant mortality rate finally dropped, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, it was in direct response to the fact that the milk supply had at last been cleaned up.

  Not only in America was milk a problem at this time. Throughout western Europe, city milk was a dangerous substance. In Paris, during the siege of 1870, infant mortality fell
by 40 percent, because mothers were forced to suckle their children instead of relying on cow’s milk.15 London milk was no better. In David Copperfield, Dickens has the character of Mr. Littimer complain about the cocoa he is given in prison. “If I might take the liberty of saying so, sir, I don’t think the milk which is boiled with it is quite genuine; but I am aware, sir, that there is a great adulteration of milk in London and that the article in a pure state is difficult to be obtained.”16

  As much as half or even three quarters of London milk was adulterated in the mid-nineteenth century. First, it was watered down (often with contaminated water). Then, to compensate for the bluish colour, it was thickened with flour, sweetened with carrot juice, and coloured with yellow dye. Trade dyes were sold under names such as “Silver Churn” or “Cowslip Colouring.”17 It was often dosed with chemicals, with such names as “Preservitas” and “Arcticanus,” especially in the summer months, to stop it souring so quickly. These chemicals were especially dangerous, because rather than stopping the decomposition of the milk, they merely masked it, fooling you into thinking that you were drinking something reasonably fresh. “Four day old milk with an overdose of chemicals was hardly the ideal infant food,” comments one historian. No wonder some consumers asked for the cow to be brought to the doorstep, and milked in front of them, something that still happens in some South Asian cities.18 But even the horrors of Victorian London paled next to the scandal of New York swill milk.