When George Orwell, a child during the First World War, looked back on his
early life, he confessed that his chief memory was not of all the deaths,
but of all the margarine. The butter shortages caused by the Great War meant
that margarine switched from being the food of the poor to being a
universally used substitute – even for privileged pupils at Eton, such as
Orwell.
Orwell, in his clear-eyed way, saw how food was increasingly being reduced to
a kind of “unfood”. He abhorred this “century of mechanisation” that had
more or less eliminated the “taste for decent food”. In his novel Coming
Up for Air, the hero George Bowling (who is reduced to eating fake
foodstuffs such as fish frankfurters or artificial marmalade) complains:
“Everything comes out of a carton or a tin, or it’s hauled out of a
refrigerator or squirted out of a tap or squeezed out of a tube.”
Orwell wrote these words in 1939. About this, as about so much else, he was
prophetic. The world of synthetic food that he described so potently was
only just beginning. The 20th century would be the century in which fake
foods became the norm, and while these fakes started off as shabby
substitutes (the reviled margarine of the Great War) they soon became seen
by many as superior alternatives to real food.
Nutritionally speaking, the British ate better during the Second World War
than ever before or since: more wholemeal bread and vegetables, fewer
sweets, small but regular amounts of meat and fish. Nevertheless, the
postwar attitude to substitute foods in Britain remained confused.
On the one hand, there was a yearning to escape the stifling yoke of the
Ministry of Food and enjoy once again the joy of choosing real foods for
oneself, especially if they were exotic or imported – cream, bananas, fresh
tomatoes. On the other hand, the years of rationing had acclimatised many
housewives to using substitutes that they would once have considered shoddy.
Instead of turning away from processed and substitute foods after the war,
the British public began to eat more and more of them, for they offered the
illusion of freedom at a low cost. In the 1960s, a sign was spotted outside
a village shop selling fresh fruit: “Lovely Ripe Pears – Good as Tinned!”
Brave new world of synthetic flavourings
By the late 1960s the old pejorative category of “imitation foods” no longer
seemed appropriate for many of the processed foods around. It had been easy
for Fredrick Accum, the 18th-century German chemist who first raised
awareness of food fraud, to complain about “lemonade” that was really water
mixed with tartaric acid, when everyone knew it should have been made with
fresh lemons. It was much harder to say what Tab, the new diet drink
introduced in 1963, was an imitation of. It might as well have appeared from
space, so little resemblance did it have to any traditional beverage. Like
so many of the new foods and drinks, it was a novel creation, sui
generis.
In the 1970s, a brave new world of synthetic flavourings emerged. There was a
mood of excitement among scientists who chose the career of commercial
“flavourist”. Gone was the furtive shame of the flavour adjusters of the
19th century who used chilli to spice up ginger or citric acid in the place
of lemon. These new flavourists saw themselves as artists, operating with
the blessing of the Government, Willy Wonkas who could fashion entire meals
out of nothing.
In his book on Synthetic Food (1970), Magnus Pyke compared the
incredible new tastes coming out of the flavour labs to the inventiveness of
great composers: “After all, a Beethoven symphony is an artificial mixture
of noises unknown to nature, but, in many people’s opinion, better than any
natural sound. The taste of Coca-Cola is also unknown to nature.”
The new music of flavour came in many different forms. At the more traditional
end were single-note essences such as lime, hazelnut or coffee. Also common
were “oleoresins”, concentrated solvent extractions from natural ingredients
such as paprika, cloves, black pepper, celery. More exciting to the
flavourists were “sea-slics” or liquid savoury flavourings, which
represented “total flavourings” for such products as pâté and sausage.
Powdered flavour mixes gave the new snack foods their moreish qualities.
One additive led to another. Flavourings often needed “flavour adjuncts”
before they could be added to food. “Extenders” – such as cellulose – could
“carry” or “extend” a feeble flavour to make it seem richer and longer in
the mouth. With “tomato extenders”, manufacturers could drastically cut down
on the amount of real tomatoes they needed to use.
Spray-dried emulsified oils gave “mouthfeel” to soups and sauces, deluding you
into thinking that there was more to them than powder and water. Flavour
enhancers, such as monosodium glutamate and flavour suppressors, such as
sucrose, could mask unpleasant flavours and magnify desirable ones.
The flavourists took pride in the thought that they were creating an entirely
new sensory landscape. In 1966, a tolerable artificial flavouring for
pineapple consisted of no fewer than ten chemical compounds mixed with seven
natural oils. Now, the figure would be much higher.
In Fast Food Nation, in 2001, Eric Schlosser listed the flavour
ingredients that go into a typical artificial strawberry flavour, like the
kind found in many milkshakes. To a cook, this list of 49 ingredients is
disturbing and alien.
Flavourists, not being cooks, would see things differently, saying: of course,
you can make a delicious strawberry milkshake if you have the finest organic
strawberries at your disposal, the creamiest milk, the best cane sugar. The
challenge is to make a convincing strawberry milkshake without using any
strawberries or milk, and perhaps no sugar either. From today’s perspective,
when manufacturers are generally keen to hide their whitecoated food
technicians away, to preserve the illusion that their products are all
“natural”, it is startling to look back on an era when food science was
openly proud of its role in the future, justifying its role because it made
food much cheaper than it would otherwise be. The flavourists’ argument
might be stronger were it not that the economic savings are more to the
benefit of the manufacturer than the consumer. As one advert from 1975,
directed at producers advised, use Ottens artificial bacon flavour and
you’ll “laugh all the way to the bank”.
It’s not food, it’s chemisty
The turning point came in the 1980s when a young nutritionist called Caroline
Walker tried to awaken the British public to the poisonous tricks of the
food industry. Walker took every opportunity she could to lecture, write,
broadcast and complain about the “counterfeit” state of British food.
Like George Orwell, Walker saw ersatz food everywhere, but even Orwell never
imagined anything quite as “unfood-like” 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. Britain was part of a
new commercial paradise, as part of the EEC in the 1970s and 1980s, and too
many food standards could be a drag. 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”.
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”. Many of these men, in
her view, had no idea how bad the food in the shops really was.
As the food writer and broadcaster 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”. 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 advert from 1975
showed a beautiful blonde woman with a buttercup under her chin. The
tag-line was: “She’ll like margarine too if it’s coloured with
beta-carotene.” With acid wit, Walker cut through these deceptions. One of
her most powerful strategies, when giving a public lecture, was simply to
bring along sackfuls of processed food and then reveal the ingredients. 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 laser-beam blue drink 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, even though they were responsible for producing this
drink, or others like it. Finally, the food writer Paul Levy tried it and
pronounced it “the nastiest thing I’ve ever tasted”.
© Bee Wilson 2008. Extracted from Swindled: From Poison Sweets to
Counterfeit Coffee – the Dark History of the Food Cheats. The book
(John Murray, £16.99) will be published on January 24, and is available to
order from Times BooksFirst for £15.29, p&p free: 0870 1608080 or
visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Food and drink fraud through the centuries
1364 A British wine merchant, accused of committing wine fraud, was
forced to “drink a draught” of his own bad wine, and have the remainder
poured over his head.
1726 During the “gin craze” the producers created the spirit from any
grain they could find. There were 6,287 places in London which sold gin,
much of which was laced with sulphuric acid or turpentine.
1810-50 Chicory powder was commonly added to ground coffee to make it
go further. Coffee was also made to stretch with ground acorns, flour,
sawdust or carrot or parsnip powder. Black peppercorns were sometimes made
out of clay and flavoured with cayenne pepper.
1820 The foetuses of young cows were sometimes used to make mock
turtle soup.
1851 Markets in England regularly used red paint to touch up fish
gills, and old meat was “polished” with a layer of fresh fat. Old coconuts
were pierced and filled with water, while oranges were boiled to add weight
and shine.
1860s Napoleon III demanded a cheaper version of butter and a spread
was created from beef suet, chopped-up cattle stomachs and bicarbonate of
soda. In 1869 this was patented as margarine.
1870s France was struck by “vine blight”. To maximise yield, wines
were made from the second, third and fourth presses of the grape, adding
arsenic to give the “illusion of body”.
1881 Much honey at this time was, in fact, glucose, often with added
remnants of bees, wings, legs etc to make the fraud more plausible.
Sometimes paraffin was added to the mixture.
1886 Margarine was dyed yellow to be passed off as butter.
1916-17 Because of First World War food rationing, coffee was made
with turnips, to accompany turnip stew and turnip bread.
1916 Mock food introduced: mock hare (beef and pork), mock crab
(shrimp and herring roe), mock meat pie (beans, bacon, onion).
1940 Powdered, substitute foods were introduced, such as dried egg.
1951 Cyclamate, an artificial, calorie-free sweetener, was approved.
In 1968 it was banned – when injected into hens’ eggs, the chicks were born
with deformities such as wings growing in the wrong places and joints that
rotated.
2002 Scandal over the amount of added water in seafood and meat was
exposed by the Food Standards Authority. Some scallops examined were found
to be half water.
2004 “Surrey curry” scandal. Analysts found that there were illegal
and potentially dangerous levels of food colouring in many curry-house
chicken tikka masalas.
2005 The Sudan 1 affair. Chilli powder was discovered to have been
touched up with a potentially carcinogenic dye called Sudan I, commonly used
in boot polish.
© Bee Wilson 2008. Extracted from Swindled: From Poison Sweets to
Counterfeit Coffee – the Dark History of the Food Cheats
