Mind your language | 25 June 2011

Until the rain blew over, I sought refuge in a Pret A Manger and drank some ginger beer. For entertainment I read the label. ‘We do not add any weird chemicals,’ it said. No doubt Pret knows better than to say ‘any chemicals’. Water is a chemical, we are told by the know-alls (of the kind who script QI on the television).

Yet social attitudes to pure food are closely charted by the history of chemical as recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. Chemical retains connotations that it possessed on its earliest use, in the 17th century. Then it often meant ‘a medicine’. A chemical was a substance refined from the coarse material of daily life. By the late 19th century, when the periodic table had been so neatly laid, chemicals, in the popular mind, went with chemistry sets. Sherlock Holmes’s hands ‘were invariably blotted with ink and stained with chemicals’.

So chemicals stained. They also adulterated food. Into his flour, the baker would ‘throw in a large quantity of alum and other chemicals’, wrote a journalist in the 1850s. Adulteration was a word of moral disapprobation. In 1904, Upton Sinclair worked for seven weeks incognito in a Chicago meat-packing plant, writing of bacon coloured ‘by chemicals, and its smoky flavor by more chemicals’. It didn’t matter that real smoke is thick with chemicals, some of them very dangerous. In 1906, America passed the Pure Food and Drug Act. Still the chemicals washed into our daily bread and butter. Jared Diamond, in Collapse (2005) wrote of the destruction of societies by toxins (among other causes) and of ‘wheat and beef raised without pesticides or other chemicals’.

As for my ginger beer, it contained, the label said, no fructose syrup or phosphoric acid.