by Bee Wilson
Caroline Walker hoped to effect a major political change in what was done to police this deception. Sadly, she never got the chance. She died in 1988, aged just thirty-eight. She had been suffering from colon cancer. The irony was not lost on her. She told Derek Cooper, presenter of the BBC Food Programme, that the doctors couldn’t believe it at first, thinking, “Here’s this young woman, a nutritionist of all things, stuffing herself with wholemeal bread and she goes and gets her guts ruined!” She continued in her conviction that most cancers were diet-related, though. She speculated that hers had been caused by her seven years at Cheltenham Ladies College, where there was a “lack of fresh food, lack of whole food—sticky buns, sweets, white bread and margarine.”164
If she failed to demolish the system of ‘legalized consumer fraud,” Walker did at least leave behind some advice on the best way that individuals could protect themselves against it. The “Caroline Walker Nutritional Guidelines” are still generally reckoned to be the best measure for testing the nutritional content of school meals in Britain, and they underpinned Jamie Oliver’s recent battle to improve school food. Like Accum, 160 years earlier, Walker saw that the best weapon against adulteration was a knowledge and enjoyment of good food. Like him, she saw “good quality wholemeal bread” as the cornerstone of a happy life. She advised people to avoid processed fake sugars and replace them with the sugar in real fruit; to avoid fake hydrogenated fats and replace them with real sunflower, olive, and walnut oils; to shun soft drinks and colas and drink real juice instead; to eat fewer highly processed salty foods, but more flavourful herbs and spices; to eat mackerel and sardines instead of fatty meats and pies. Her entire message was crystallized in four simple words: “eat whole, fresh food.”165
6
BASMATI RICE AND BABY MILK
We have traded away quality for a false sense of safety.
—Real Milk Campaign (2006)
Adulteration, mercifully, is a thing of the past. Such, at any rate, is the consensus in much of the secondary literature on the subject. Modern societies should be grateful not to have the problems of those wretched Victorians, with their watered-down milk and their alum bread. An academic research paper on Victorian adulteration concludes that we should be “very glad” not to be eating Victorian food.1 A British educational website about food for secondary school children informs us that “In the past, people found lots of sneaky ways to make extra money, by adding dodgy ingredients to food and then making them look like the real thing.” Now, though, we have food laws to “protect your health and stop you being cheated.”2 Thank goodness for that.
Much of this is wishful thinking. Food fraud is no more a relic of history than greed and deceit are. “Adulteration is hardly mentioned today,” commented a historian of spice in 1993.3 Maybe so, but only because talk of “adulteration”—such an unwieldy word, too close to adultery—has been replaced with endless discussion of food piracy, food scams, food fakes, food fiddles. As we saw in chapter 1, food swindlers thrive whenever there is a long chain between consumer and producers; now that chain is longer than ever, with food being freighted across the globe and back by vast anonymous distributors. Every week seems to bring a new headline reminding us that our food is only as trustworthy as the people who make it and sell it. “Hazard reported in apple chemicals”;4 “Chilean grape scare”;5 “Cooking oil scandal hurts Spain”;6 “Pet food sold for human use”;7 “More food contaminated with dye”;8 “Indian clampdown on adulterated milk”;9 “Free-range scandal dupes consumers.”10 Food scares have become so ubiquitous, we no longer know what to make of them. The alarm is sounded; the offending food is withdrawn; those guilty of selling it apologize; and then we all go about our business again until the next food scandal breaks.
Food swindling is a more diversified business than it was in the past. It assumes many more different forms. Fear pulses around food like a constant background noise. This fear can lead in turn to a paranoia about food that opens up new markets in swindling, ones that prey on people’s anxieties. These are the omnipresent tricks of the “legalized consumer fraud” exposed by Caroline Walker, which have taken a disturbing new turn with the falsification of agriculture itself, as intensive modern farming changes the basic nutrient properties of foods. But there are still plenty of illegal swindles going on too. Because the science is so sophisticated now, these can appear complex and hi-tech compared to the deceptions of the past. In the case of Basmati rice (which we will come to), the fraud can be detected only at the minute level of DNA. In essence, though, the crime itself still consists of nothing more than substituting a less valuable rice for a valuable one. There is still a market for the age-old tricks of watering down, colouring up, or bulking out the expensive with the cheap, as well as straight substitution and mislabelling. This goes on far more than is generally acknowledged, often in the highest reaches of the food business.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. Everything was supposed to be different, in this era of “transparency” and “traceability.” In the 1990s, with the birth of the “Knowledge Age,” Western governments put their faith in the power of the label finally to solve all the problems in the food supply. Those alive and eating food today have more information about it at their disposal than Accum, Hassall, and Wiley would ever have thought possible. Whether their diets have been saved by it is another matter. It turns out that not all information about food is equally useful.
The Perfect Label
In 1990, Dr. David Kessler, a young and clever man with degrees both in law and medicine, became the latest in a long line of FDA commissioners, stretching back to Harvey Wiley in 1906, who came in to office determined to sort out food fraud once and for all. Kessler was sworn to the post on the same day that the new Nutrition Labelling and Education Act was signed. He made it his mission to protect consumers from misleading information about food—and he was going to do it through labelling.
In July 1991, Time magazine applauded the optimistic Kessler for his “utterly novel vision that consumers should be able to tell what they are ingesting by reading what is written on food labels.”11 It was a bit much to call it “novel” when Harvey Wiley had had the same idea almost a hundred years earlier. On the other hand, Kessler, unlike Wiley, had succeeded in putting his idea into practice, despite energetic counterlobbying from the food industry. Thanks to Kessler, 1993 saw a radical new system of food labelling in the United States, which required all food packages to list “Nutrition Facts,” in a form that consumers could understand. Kessler called it a “public health opportunity of enormous magnitude,” that “Americans will be able to pick up a food and see that one serving contains, for example, twenty-eight per cent of a daily intake of fat, or sodium, or fibre or cholesterol.”12 For Kessler, this was a “revolutionary” development.
He had a point. By 1990, food labelling—in the United States as in Europe—was in chaos. A third of packaged goods had no nutrient information at all; a third, mainly fortified foods, were required to list nutrient content; and a further third included some nutritional information voluntarily. Dr. Louis Sullivan, secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services, described the situation before 1993 as a “Tower of Babel,” with consumers needing to be “linguists, scientists and mind readers to understand the many labels they see.”13 By contrast, the new labels of 1993 presented the content of food in terms that regular folks could relate to: calories, calories from fat, cholesterol, sodium, total carbohydrate, etc. Another triumph was the fact that Kessler’s FDA managed to secure more or less universal compliance from manufacturers, even though most had complained about what they considered an abominable restriction. Kessler announced that by December 1994, more than 99 percent of packaged goods carried the necessary labelling.14 Even more importantly, what information there was seems to have been largely accurate. The FDA randomly tested three hundred products and found that 87 percent had entirely accurate information, while 93 percent gave accurate statistics for calories.
Kessler told the New York Times that the new system deserved “an A-plus.”
“Nutrition Facts”: David Kessler’s radical overhaul of the American food labelling system in 1993 was supposed to protect the consumer.
The new labelling law was undoubtedly a victory of openness over the old secrecy that food manufacturers had got away with for so long. A scientific article on labelling from 1993 refers to “the age of the enlightened and discriminating consumer” and looks forward to an era of “truth in advertising as well as truth in labelling,” which had been the dream of food campaigners since Hassall’s time.15 The 1993 U.S. law was followed by a comprehensive new food labelling law in Britain in 1996, with robust clauses against “misleading descriptions” and new requirements to display nutritional information.16 This was a welcome contrast to the 1980s, when an atmosphere of official secrecy prevailed in relation to food, as if the ingredients in a Cornish pasty were a matter of state security. In 1998, an amendment improved the British law still further by adding requirements for Quantitative Ingredient Declarations (QUIDs). These meant that if someone sold a steak and kidney pie, for example, they needed to state how much steak and how much kidney was in it; if a pie contained only measly amounts of steak, the customer could see for themselves and choose not to buy it (though in 1998, the last year of the BSE crisis in Britain, many consumers preferred to eat pies that contained no steak at all).
Labelling became the great panacea of food safety during the 1990s, and it seemed there wasn’t a problem it couldn’t solve. Labels could signal to coeliacs that a sauce contained traces of gluten, tell vegans that a pudding had beef gelatine in it, and warn allergy sufferers that a bagel had been made in a factory that also used nuts. The age of information would answer everything. This has continued in the twenty-first century, with the new “traffic light system” of labelling in Britain, where consumers can see at a glance through a system of different-coloured stickers whether a food is healthy or not.
So why have the results in terms of food quality and consumer awareness been so underwhelming? There is no question that we have far more information about the food we eat available to us than any previous generation. Compared to Arthur Hassall in the 1850s, who had to put food under the microscope to find out its ingredients, we are immeasurably lucky. Yet labelling has not done away with swindling. Much of what passes for information in food is really an assemblage of meaningless statistics. Information assumes an audience capable of being informed by it; and the indications are that most consumers are not. For all its virtues, a reliance on food labelling to combat adulteration has at least four major drawbacks.
“Supplement Facts”—rigorous labelling was also brought in for vitamins and mineral supplements.
First, while the labelling regulations of the 1990s put a stop to many of the old deceptions of concealment in food, they gave encouragement to a new kind of deception, the technically true statement that can nonetheless mislead. Now that they had been forced by law to include so much data on their labels, manufacturers fought back by adding some more of their own. “Low in fat” read the label on countless boxes of cereal. This was no lie—this was no chicory labelled as “coffee.” Yet there was something not quite right about it. For what cereal is high in fat? There has been a similar trickery in much of the labelling that adorns the food we eat: “reduced salt,” boasts a packet of crisps, without indicating, needles to say, that it is still high in salt compared to other foods. Other packets sell themselves with little logos of hearts or brains or pregnant bellies, to indicate some wonderful medicinal property, which is invariably far from unique to the food in question. “Disease-specific” marketing of food is closely policed by the authorities, but the big food producers have their marketing people constantly thinking up ways around it; ways to use the label as a tool of advertising rather than education.
This proliferation of printed words and symbols on the side of food has led to a second drawback. Such is the information overload now that many consumers are more often baffled than enlightened by labels. As a senior official at the Food Standards Agency told me: “There’s a problem that a lot of consumers don’t understand the information they are getting on the label. They don’t like numbers and percentages.”17 The more baffled consumers are, the less they will bother to read labels at all, never mind act on them. Many will simply give up. From 1993 to the present day, during the same period that Kessler’s shiny new nutrition labels have been in effect telling the public what portions to eat, obesity in the United States has risen from 23 percent of the population to more than 30 percent. At its worst, the information age has meant reinforcing people’s capacity to be cheated, rather than their right to good food.
The third drawback of labels in the information age is that they can lead us to overlook all the information that is not on the label. Some of this information remains secret thanks to legal loopholes. As we will see later in this chapter, a bread label in Britain must include all the “ingredients” but is not required to list processing aids such as enzymes, despite mounting evidence that these leave lasting traces. An apple pie may state the fact that it contains apples, but not whether those apples contained pesticide residues. A can of tomatoes may say “packed in Italy,” without admitting that the true country of origin was China. A tin of “pitted black olives in brine” may not fully explain on the label that the only reason the olives inside are black is that they have undergone an oxidation process that colours them prematurely; in every other respect, they are essentially green olives. The vast majority of “black” olives sold are of this kind; yet they are still allowed to call themselves “black olives” on the label.
Finally, an obsession with labelling can lead us to forget how much food is altogether unlabelled. This includes the most honest food, as well as some of the most dishonest. You don’t need a label to tell you of the excellence of the lamb chops you buy from a reputable butcher; or the quiveringly ripe melon you pick out from your favourite market stall in June; or the tangy unpasteurized Cheddar you choose from an old-fashioned dairy. You need only your senses, and a knowledge of the person you are buying from. This is a much more meaningful kind of knowledge than any label can supply.
On the other hand, some unlabelled food is more dubious. Much food still evades the stranglehold of the label altogether because it is sold in unpackaged form by restaurants, takeaways, cafés, and kiosks. A label is only as good as the packet it comes attached to. We are encouraged to think of our dependency on packaged food as a bad thing. But whenever we buy anything unpackaged, we are just as dependent as we ever were on the integrity of the people who serve us.
The horror stories are not hard to find. In September 2006, a German meat distributor committed suicide after police impounded 120 tonnes of “putrid” meat, which had been intended for sale as doner kebabs at stalls in Germany. A Munich police officer spoke of a “doner kebab mafia” engineering the fraud, which involved recycling meat well past its sell-by date.18 In 2004, in the so-called Surrey Curry scandal, public analysts found that there were “illegal and potentially dangerous” levels of food colouring in chicken tikka masala purchased from curry houses around Britain.19 (To which the Sun newspaper responded, “Don’t Nikka Our Tikka,” as if it were a terrible piece of busybodying to try to make curries more wholesome.) But it is not just cut in cut-price fast-food joints that such things happen. Routine deception occurs even at some of the world’s most expensive restaurants.
Gourmet Food Fiddles and Protected Foods
In chapter 3, we saw how the poor of Victorian London had an incentive for colluding with the swindlers who defrauded them, because adulterated food was often the only kind they could afford to buy. The rich have different incentives for keeping quiet about those who swindle them, mostly the desire not to look stupid. Mark Leatham is a quality-food merchant, the founder of Britain’s Merchant Gourmet brand, which sells such treats as Puy lentils, garlic-infused oil. and dulce de leche caramel; he
also supplies many restaurants. “This business is full of hoodwinking,” he remarked when I interviewed him in 2006; other food merchants I have spoken to have confirmed this view. Leatham told me of numerous fiddles in the quality food market, which usually go unnoticed, either because people don’t like to complain or because they don’t know the difference between one food and another. Leatham mentioned farmers in Yorkshire who send their sheep off for a “two-week holiday” in Wales; they come back tagged as “Welsh lamb” and appear as such on restaurant menus.
Leatham’s most dramatic example concerned caviar. For a while in the early 1990s, Leatham supplied caviar to various grand establishments. It was a short-lived endeavour, he says, “due to the fraudulent nature of the suppliers (who would sometimes supply the wrong type of roe) and their up-market customers (hotels and casinos whose chefs were invariably on sizeable back-handers).” While he was still involved in the caviar business, Leatham tried to persuade one of the fanciest hotels in London to take his caviar; let’s call it “The Glitz.”
Leatham brought along Beluga (the most expensive caviar, prized for its large sweet roe), Oscietra (the next expensive, whose eggs are smaller and whose colour varies from dark green to golden), and Sevruga (a grey and nutty caviar, at that time the least expensive, though the world caviar shortage has since pushed prices up). The chef of the Glitz immediately said, “Oh we don’t use Oscietra,” in the tone of voice that implied that Oscietra was not quite good enough for his brand of clientele, though actually most gourmets regard it as the most delicious. “We only take Beluga and Sevruga.” (The real reason for this, says Leatham, is that posh hotels liked to offer Beluga for clients who wanted to pay the most, and Sevruga for those who wanted to pay the least; taste hardly came into it.) Leatham and the chef began to taste the different caviars. First, they tried the Sevruga, tasting Leatham’s Sevruga against the one that the Glitz currently used. Both were good. Next, Leatham persuaded the chef to try just a spoonful of the Oscietra. He agreed it was fabulous but regretted that he had no use for it. Finally, they came to the Beluga. The chef opened up his prized tin of Beluga. “Look, that is what you have just eaten, it’s Oscietra!” exclaimed Leatham. The chef, deeply embarrassed, and inwardly furious at his supplier, had to agree that it was. He had been swindled, and was swindling his customers in turn.