by Bee Wilson
Nader directly compared his work to that of Upton Sinclair. “We’re Still in the Jungle” was the title of an essay from 1967. Like Sinclair, he ruthlessly exposed the fact that the meatpacking industry remained—sixty years on—inadequately policed, leading to gross malpractice. History was repeating itself:
About 15 percent of the commercially slaughtered animals (19 million head) and 25 percent of commercially processed meat products in the U.S.—enough meat for 30 million people a year—are not covered by adequate inspection laws. According to the Department of Agriculture, significant portions of this meat are diseased and are processed in grossly unsanitary conditions, and its true condition is masked by the latest preservatives, additives and colouring agents.137
That is to say, the same, sorry old swindles went on, despite decades of federal food law and despite the apparent plenty of postwar America. Hams were still pumped with water to boost the weight. Tainted and rancid meat was still offered for sale—in one year, twenty-two million pounds of it were seized. Old meat was still freshened up to look as good as new. Nader exposed “hamburger embalmed with sulfite, a federally banned additive that gives old meat a deceptively bright pink colour.” He claimed that a New York state survey found sulfite in twenty-six out of thirty hamburger samples.138 (In Britain, a similar practice went on without breaking the law. Processed meats could be dosed with Ronoxan D20, an antioxidant that prevented “undesirable effects such as white spot in sausages.” A trade advertisement for Ronoxan showed a butcher’s display of raw sausages, boasting, “They’ll look as fresh tomorrow as they did today.”)
It was the same old story, but worse. Nader argued that advances in food technology enabled swindling to take place on a far greater scale than in Sinclair’s day. At least the foul practices of Packingtown had been limited by the crude tools available. It “took some doing to cover up meat from tubercular cows, lump-jawed steers and scabby pigs.” Now, however, “the wonders of chemistry and quick-freezing techniques provide the cosmetics of camouflaging the product and deceiving the eyes, the nostrils and taste buds of the consumer. It takes specialists to detect the deception. What is more, these chemicals themselves introduce new and complicated hazards unheard of 60 years ago.”139
Together with his groups of eager student helpers, who became known as Nader’s Raiders, Nader railed against the “chemical feast” of the average American diet. He took on everything from unclean poultry plants to fatty hotdogs.140 Fighting bad food, for Nader, was a mission central to democracy. “What we need is a much healthier citizenship if the government is going to be preserved,” he announced.141 Pulling the wool over consumers’ eyes was a fundamentally undemocratic activity. Nader wanted to empower ordinary shoppers to take back control of what they ate.
In his crusade against bad food, Nader did not cut an entirely sympathetic figure. Like Hassall and Wiley before him, he sometimes let his single-minded fight for purity get out of hand. Charles McCarry, a biographer who followed him around in the early 1970s, recorded his behaviour towards those who served him impure foods:
Nader is not a gallant customer. With stewardesses and waitresses he is relentless: to offer him a soft drink is to invite a detailed analysis of the harm done to the human body by a drink filled with sugar and caffeine. The suspicion he feels for American food transfers to those who serve it; he glowers at the sore-footed women in restaurants and at the jaunty miniskirted girls in the aisles of jet airplanes as if they are, all of them, unwitting Borgias. “The only thing you should be proud to serve on this whole airplane,” he says to one puzzled stewardess, “is the little bags of nuts. And you should take the salt off the nuts.”142
Nader’s justification of this churlish behaviour would be that, in complaining so relentlessly about the evils of modern food, he was benefiting everyone, even the poor saps who had to serve it.
It was largely thanks to the lobbying of Nader’s Health Research Group that MSG (another substance that had been innocently sitting on the GRAS list) was removed from baby foods. Nader’s Raiders also inspired other liberals to set up consumer groups. The lawyer Dr. John Banzhaf had his own group of lobbyists, nicknamed Banzhaf’s Bandits, law students at George Washington University in Washington, DC, who fought against the deception of food advertising. In its posters, the Campbell Soup Company had concealed marbles in the photographed bowls of soup to make the liquid appear thicker and creamier than it really was. Banzhaf’s Bandits succeeded in getting the company to discontinue this practice, though it could not persuade Campbell to print a correction, apologizing for having used the marbles in the past.143
Another campaigner against the lies of the food industry was Dr. Robert Choate, a wealthy civil engineer with a startling physical resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. Choate financed his own campaign against hunger and “nutritional suicide.” In 1970, he told a Senate subcommittee that many of the best-selling American breakfast cereals were virtually worthless from a nutritional standpoint.144 Choate complained that these cereals were “huckstered” to children with commercials on Saturday morning television. An example was Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes, which was sold with the slogan “Eat . . . and you’ll be a tiger in no time.” Thanks to Choate’s efforts, the majority of cereal recipes were improved somewhat.145
These small consumer triumphs were not to be discounted. Too often, however, lobbyists would campaign against one swindle or poison, only for another to spring up. In February 1976, under pressure from Nader’s Health Research Group, the FDA banned Red Dye no. 2, or amaranth (E123),from the food supply. Until that point, Red Dye no. 2 had been the most widely used of all food colourings, present in “almost every processed food we eat,” lending its purplered glow to ketchups and condiments, candies and jellos, sausages and chocolate cake.146 Some 4.5 million dollars’ worth was produced every year, colouring 10 billion dollars’ worth of food: this despite the fact that doubts had been cast on the safety of Red Dye no. 2 for twenty years. It was first named as a suspected carcinogen at a conference in Rome in 1956. It was banned in the USSR in the 1960s after Soviet scientists linked it to cancer. In a good piece of Cold War politics, the FDA dismissed this Soviet study as “inconclusive,” only to backtrack in 1976 and declare that it was a potential carcinogen, after all. The ban on Red Dye no. 2 is often cited as one of Nader’s great successes in the realm of food.
Whether the ban reduced the chemical load of the average consumer is unlikely. After the ban came into effect in 1976, there was a huge increase in the production of another red food dye, Red no. 40 (Allura Red or E129). Nearly two million pounds of Red no. 40 were certified for use that year. Though more orangey in colour, like Red Dye no. 2, Red no. 40 could be used in almost every processed food, from the coating for fried chicken to lurid red soft drinks. Yet, in the opinion of some, it was actually more harmful than Red Dye no. 2. Like Red Dye no. 2, Red no. 40 is an “azo dye,” made from double-bonded nitrogen. In December 1976, a consumer group headed by Michael Jacobsen argued that Red no. 40 “should never have been admitted into our food supply,” citing studies involving mice who developed malignant lymphomas after eating the dye.147 Jacobsen pointed out that Red no. 40 was banned in many European countries. (Today it is still banned in Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, and Norway.) His words fell on deaf ears. Red no. 40 was too valuable to the food industry. Consumer confidence had already been shaken by the Red Dye no. 2 affair, which had led to many mothers picking the red ones out of packets of multicoloured candies. Where would it all end? The federal government chose not to act against Red no. 40.
As a result, Red no. 40 is still present in countless foods in America. It has been largely cleared of the charge of being a carcinogen, but it is known to produce skin allergies in some people. Several scientific studies have also confirmed that consuming Red no. 40 has a bad effect on the behaviour of children suffering from attention deficit disorder.148 More informally, many parents have given accounts of the a
lmost immediate tantrums that can ensue in some children after just one portion of food coloured with Red no. 40.149
The affair of Red Dye no. 2 versus Red no. 40 showed the problem of fighting additives in the food supply one by one. This approach was all very well in the days of Accum, when the chemicals of deception were much fewer in number, and much more obvious in the ways they did harm. By the late 1970s, though, the danger was everywhere. At that time, a California expert on allergies, Dr. Ben Feingold, noticed some startling results when “difficult” children who had hitherto been drugged with tranquillizers and sedatives were able to function normally without drugs on a diet that completely eliminated all colourings, flavourings, and salicylates. This became known as the Feingold Diet. Its approach of near-total abstinence from additives addressed the fact that in real life, additives are seldom eaten one at a time. Safety tests for additives were generally carried out on isolated substances. In practice, though, the average consumer of processed food would eat an unpredictable cocktail of chemicals, which might react with each other in unforeseen ways.150 In 1985, it was calculated that the average British Christmas dinner might contain as many as 170 different additives, all in a single meal.151 Some campaigners in both the United States and Britain were starting to see that the real battle was not so much between this or that additive, as between a diet laced with ersatz everything and a life of eating real food.
Caroline Walker and Legalized Consumer Fraud
In the early 1980s, a young nutritionist named Caroline Walker tried to awaken the British public to the poisonous tricks of the food industry. Walker, who, from surviving photographs, had a wide, open smile, was educated at the genteel Cheltenham Ladies College (where she took A levels in biology, chemistry, and art). From an early age, though, Walker shunned gentility to become a political radical. She soon decided that the biggest scandal in Britain was the falsified state of the nation’s food. She called it, straightforwardly enough, The Food Scandal in her book of 1984 (coauthored with Geoffrey Cannon), which became a number one bestseller. Having trained as a nutritionist, Walker took every opportunity she could to lecture, write, broadcast, and complain about the “counterfeit” state of British food. “Lemonade contains no lemon,” she opined, “cheese and tomato snack no cheese. In 1978 23,000 tonnes of cheese went into manufacturing. In 1983, the quantity was almost halved to 13,700 tonnes. Why? Cheese analogues, that’s why.”152 It made her sick.
Like George Orwell, Walker saw ersatz food everywhere; but even Orwell never imagined anything quite as “unfoodlike” as the additive-laden junk exposed by Walker. “Consumers are beginning to learn that what they’re eating isn’t food, but chemistry sets,” she said, only half joking.153 In the 1970s and 1980s, British food regulation had followed the American pattern. Gone was the old emphasis on recipe-based food standards, with the exception of a few “traditional” foods such as butter and corned beef. In 1973, Britain had entered the European Economic Community, which meant more trade with its European neighbours. In this new commercial paradise, too many food standards could be a drag; they would slow down the wheels of commerce. The Food Standards Committee advised that so long as “foods are labelled, advertised and promoted for what they are, as required by law, there can be no objection to their sale.”154 Walker complained that decisions such as these were generally made—in an undemocratic state of secrecy—by “middle-class, middle-aged men” in Whitehall, “who don’t cook and who don’t go shopping.”155 Many of these men, in her view, had no idea how bad the food in the shops really was.
Thus far, the story of swindling has been mainly a story of men; of the men who swindled and of the men who tried to expose them. The bulk of those being swindled, however, were women, since they were generally the ones who bought the household’s food. Most of the food advertising of the 1960s and 1970s was aimed at “Mrs. Average Housewife,” a figure “whose only kitchen tools are a pair of scissors for cutting polythene and foil wrappings, and a tin opener.” As Derek Cooper remarked in 1967, advertisers worked hard to convince Mrs. Average Housewife that she “is far too busy compulsively forcing grey out and white in to her husband’s shirts to spend more than a few minutes a day at the cooker.”156 The entire edifice of postwar processed food depended on seducing Mrs. Average Housewife into thinking that ease and cheapness mattered more than quality. A trade advertisement from 1975 showed a beautiful blonde woman with a buttercup under her chin. The tagline was “She’ll like margarine too if it’s coloured with betacarotene.”157 The thinking behind such marketing was that Mrs. Average Housewife was so empty-headed you could convince her of just about anything.
With acid wit, Caroline Walker cut through these deceptions. Like Mrs. Average Housewife, she knew her way round a supermarket aisle. Unlike her, she was not seduced. One of Walker’s most powerful strategies, when giving a public lecture, was simply to bring along sackfuls of processed food and then reveal the ingredients. Often, at the end of a lecture, a man—one of those “middleclass middle-aged men”—would come up to Walker and say, “It’s fascinating. Where did you get this stuff?” to which she would reply, “Where do you think I got it? In the shops!”158 In 1986, she was speaking at a conference on chemical additives at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Her audience consisted of industry representatives, nutritionists, and journalists. She dramatically produced from her bag a “disgusting drink,” a laser-beam blue concoction called Mixed Fruit Tropic Ora, and asked if anyone would care to try a sip. Not a single food industry rep took up the challenge, despite the fact that they were responsible for producing this drink, or others like it. Finally, she “embarrassed” the food writer Paul Levy into tasting the blue liquid, which he pronounced “the nastiest thing I have ever tasted.”159
Walker had a strong sense of history. She often voiced her admiration for the work of Frederick Accum and Arthur Hill Hassall. Like Accum, she saw adulteration as a consequence of industrialization, coupled with an excessively laissez-faire political class. She saw an important difference, though, between their campaigns in the nineteenth century and hers in the twentieth. Accum and Hassall had exposed illegal food fraud, whereas Walker’s mission was to criticize swindles against consumers that broke no laws: she called it “legalized consumer fraud.” It was perfectly legal, for example, to sell a “Raspberry Flavour Trifle” that contained no hint of real raspberries (under the absurd legal sophistry that if it had been called “raspberry flavoured trifle” rather than “raspberry flavour trifle” it would have been required to have some raspberries, while “raspberry trifle” would have had more raspberries still). Walker listed the ingredients in one such raspberryless trifle:
Raspberry flavour jelly crystals: sugar, gelling agents (E140, E407, E340, potassium chloride), adipic acid, acidity regulator (E366), flavourings, stabilizer (E466), artificial sweetener (sodium saccharin), colour (E123)
Raspberry flavour custard powder: starch, salt, flavourings, colours (E124, E122)
Sponge: with preservative (E202), colours (E102, E110)
Decorations: with colours (E119, E132, E123, E127)
Trifle topping mix: hydrogenated vegetable oil, whey powder, sugar, emulsifiers (E477, E322), modified starch, lactose, caseinate, stabilizer (E466), flavourings, colours (E102, E110, E160 (a)), antioxidant (E320)
Disgusting, I hear you say. I never eat those things. Well, someone does.160
Walker knew that the Ministry of Agriculture was happy to defend such aberrations on the grounds that “food is part and parcel of the enjoyment of life,” and that the occasional fake raspberry trifle never did anyone any harm. Walker disagreed. The point about such monstrosities was that they rapidly came to be seen as “normal” food. Manufacturers preferred them to real food because they were so much cheaper. Soon, she noted, “the raspberryless trifle becomes the rule rather than the exception.”161 Once that happens, it becomes harder and harder for a more scrupulous manufacturer to make a real raspberry trifle, from real raspberries, real cus
tard, and real sponge. The standards for raspberry trifle become debased. Trifle itself becomes reduced, from an occasional splendid treat to an everyday occurrence, no more special than packet blancmange or packet jelly, yet another daily injection of chemicals, sugar, and fat to add to the mix swirling in your stomach.
Walker, who was nobody’s fool, was fond of remarking that whenever people like her—middle-class women with an axe to grind— criticized the additives industry, they would be met with two replies from arrogant food scientists: “potatoes and preservatives.”
At conferences on food safety and quality, you know what you’re in for when the lecture on additives starts like this. Food scientist strides confidently on to platform. Demands first slide. Up comes picture of potato, whereby lecturer delivers brisk commentary on poisonous chemical—solanine—naturally occurring in humble spud (potatoes are a real favourite for natural poisons). Nervous titters from the audience. Second slide: picture of a miserable slave in Ancient Egypt dipping meat into vat of preserving salts.162
The potato argument was that since some poisons occurred in nature, food has never been totally safe, therefore modern additives were nothing new. “Preposterous,” said Walker. “If food does contain natural poisons, that is no reason for adding more.” The preservatives argument was that “additives” have been used ever since ancient times, and, without them “we would all be keeling over with food poisoning.” Another piece of specious logic, in Walker’s view, since “arguments in support of preservatives are of no relevance to any other additive.” In the mid-1980s, preservatives actually accounted for less than one percent of all additives used. “All the rest are flavours, colours and processing aids, which are of greater benefit by far to the manufacturers than to the consumers. . . . Why should manufacturers be allowed to hoodwink the public in this way?”163