A shrouded skull flanked by serpents above a tureen inscribed with the words, ‘There is death in the pot’ (2 Kings 4:40), ornaments the title page of A Treatise on the Adulterations of Food by Frederick Accum (1820).
Accum details hair-raising additions to food in the pursuit of profit, not just alum to bread but lead pigments to anchovy sauce and laurel berries to custard (which made three little children in Yorkshire fall insensible for ten hours, and lucky to survive). Alum is a mineral otherwise used as a styptic. Three decades on, Tennyson in Maud wrote: ‘Chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread / And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life.’
In the meantime, poor old Accum (who kept a shop for chemical apparatus in Soho) had been detected, through a spy-hole, tearing pages from library books at the Royal Institution, and had to flee before his trial to his native Germany. If Accum was discredited morally, the campaign against adulterated food was continued by others. When in 1850 Sir Charles Wood, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, declared it impossible to tell whether coffee was adulterated with chicory, the physician Arthur Hassall proved him wrong by the use of a microscope. His series of articles in the Lancet led to the passing of the Food Adulteration Act in 1860. It is familiar territory: chicory for coffee; horse for beef. The terminology seemed settled — substituting something else for the food on sale, whether harmful or not, was adulteration. Yet this is not the term we have heard during the horsemeat scandal. Contamination is preferred.
To me, contamination connotes a harmful element. Poison or agents of disease such as bacteria contaminate food. Chicory in coffee or horse in mince adulterate it. Adultery is falseness to your spouse; adulteration is used only of objects. Adulteration derives from a word of the same form in medieval French meaning ‘turning away from God’, the metaphor being extended to the falsification of medicines, then of other things.
Today we seem more frightened of germs and poisons than of the deadly sin of adultery. When he gets back from his medical conference, I’ll ask my husband.
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