Food Adulteration and Its Detection. Jesse P. Battershall

      FOOD ADULTERATION.

INTRODUCTION.

       Table of Contents

      Of the various branches cognate to chemical research which excite public attention, that of food adulteration doubtless possesses the greatest interest. To the dealer in alimentary substances, the significance of their sophistication is frequently merely one of profit or loss, and even this comparatively unimportant consideration does not always attach. But to the general community, the subject appeals to interests more vital than a desire to avoid pecuniary damage, and involving, as it necessarily does, the question of health, it has engendered a feeling of uneasiness, accompanied by an earnest desire for trustworthy information and data. The most usual excuses advanced by dishonest traders, when a case of adulteration has been successfully brought home to them—guilty knowledge being also established—are, that they are compelled to resort to the misdeed by the public demand for cheap commodities, that the addition is harmless, or actually constitutes an improvement, as is asserted to be the case when chicory is added to coffee, or that it serves as a preservative, as was formerly alleged to be the fact when vinegar was fortified with sulphuric acid. Pretexts of this sort are almost invariably fallacious. The claim that manufacturers are often forced into adulteration by the necessities of unfair trade competition possesses more weight—an honest dealer cannot as a rule successfully compete with a dishonest one—and has undoubtedly influenced many of the better class to co-operate in attempts to prevent the practice. The general feeling of uncertainty which exists in the public mind concerning the actual extent and importance of food adulteration is probably to be ascribed to two causes. In the first place, most of the literature generally accessible relating to the subject has been limited to sensational newspaper articles, reciting some startling instance of food-poisoning, often unauthenticated and bearing upon its face evidences of exaggeration. By reason of such publications, periodical panics have been created in our large cities which, however, as a rule quickly subside, and the community relapses into the customary feeling of doubtful security, until aroused from its apathy by the next exposé. The fact that the only reliable results of food investigation have, until recently, been confined to purely scientific journals, and therefore not prominently brought to public notice, is another explanation of the lack of creditable information which generally prevails concerning this species of sophistication.

      The adulteration of alimentary substances was practised in the civilised countries of Europe at a very remote date, and the early history of the art, mainly collated by Prof. Blyth in his valuable work on food,[1] is replete with interest. Bread certainly received due attention at the hands of the ancient sophisticator. Pliny makes several references to the adulteration of this food. In England, as early as the reign of King John, the sale of the commodity was controlled by the “Assize of Bread,” which, although originally designed to regulate the price and size of the loaf, was subsequently amplified so as to include penalties for falsification, usually consisting of corporal punishment and exposure in the pillory. In France, in 1382, ordinances were promulgated specifying the proper mode of bread-making, the punishment for infringement being similar in character to those inflicted in Great Britain. It is related that in the year 1525, a guilty baker “was condemned by the court to be taken from the Châtelet prison to the cross before the Église des Carmes, and thence to the gate of Notre Dame and to other public places in Paris, in his shirt, having his head and feet bare, with small loaves hung from his neck, and holding a large wax candle, lighted, and in each of the places enumerated he was to make amende honorable, and ask mercy and pardon of God, the king, and of justice for his fault.” In Germany, during the fifteenth century, the bread adulterator, while not subjected to a religious penance, did not escape from a sufficiently practical rebuke, as it was the frequent custom to put him in a basket attached to a long pole, and purge him of his misdeeds by repeated immersions in a pool of water.

      Wine would also appear to have been exposed to fraudulent admixture in former times. Pliny mentions that in Rome considerable difficulty was experienced, even by the wealthy, in securing the pure article, and in Athens a public inspector was early appointed to prevent its adulteration. In England, during the reign of Edward the Confessor, punishment for brewing bad beer was publicly enforced, and, in 1529, official “ale tasters” flourished, without whose approval the beverage was not to be sold. In later years, Addison, referring to the manipulators of wine of his time, writes: “These subtle philosophers are daily employed in the transmutation of liquors, and, by the power of magical drugs and incantations, raise under the streets of London the choicest products of the hills and valleys of France; they squeeze Bordeaux out of the sloe and draw champagne from an apple.”[2] In the fifteenth century, at Biebrich on the Rhine, a wine sophisticator was forced to drink six quarts of his own stock, and it is recorded with due gravity that