Surveys show that one of the biggest worries people have is about the safety of our food supply. When asked what they are concerned about, they mention pesticide residues, additives, genetic modification, food irradiation, bacterial contamination and lack of nutrients due to depleted soil. While there are some issues with these, the fact is that it is possible to eat better today than at anytime in history. You just have to know how to make the right choices. Harkening back to the good old days, when food was pure and wholesome, is nothing more than misguided and romanticized nonsense. There were no good old days. Bacterial contamination was rampant, fruits in winter nonexistent and food adulteration commonplace. And we are not talking about the middle ages. As recently as the nineteenth century, taking a bite of many foods or a slurp of beverages could be a life threatening event. Cayenne pepper, for example was an expensive spice. But lead tetroxide, also known as red lead, was cheap. So why not mix in some red lead with the cayenne pepper and increase profits? Why not indeed? The practice was quite common and undoubtedly resulted in much misery. Lead atoms combine with sulfur atoms in cysteine, an amino acid that is part of many enzymes. By disrupting so-called disulfide bridges between an enzyme’s protein chains, lead leads to the malfunctioning of the enzyme with possible catastrophic consequences. And if you think this only happened in the lawless 1800s, you’re wrong.
In 1994, much to the Hungarian government’s chagrin, paprika, the pride of Hungarian kitchens, was adulterated with red lead. People died. Of course not all food adulterations have so tragic consequences. Cream was prized in English cooking; the thicker the better and the more desirable. If it was nice and rich, it meant it contained more butterfat and tasted better. But unscrupulous merchants had a trick up their sleeves. Milk could masquerade as cream through the addition of rice flour or ground up arrowroot. These adulterers, though, had an enemy in the person of Friedrich Accum, a London chemist who made a career of unmasking the frauds. In fact he was propably the first consumer advocate. Accum offered a simple process to test for fake cream. Since both rice flour and arrowroot are basically made of starch, an iodine test would readily detect their presence. Iodine reacts with starch to form a dark blue color. So, if a few drops added to a sample of cream caused a blue discoloration, it was clear the cream had been monkeyed around with. Another trick was to add copper salts to blackthorn leaves and pass these off as green tea. This had interesting consequences if a bit of ammonia was added to the “tea,” as was sometimes done with the belief that ammonia helps circulation and relieves headaches. The tea would turn a lively blue color, the classic giveaway of a copper-ammonia complex. In one instance a customer tried to return the tea to the grocer who refused to take it back, saying that there was no contamination. The customer took a sample to Accum, who added some potassium nitrate as an oxidizing agent and burned the leaves in a crucible, clearly demonstrating that when the organic matter had burned away, toxic copper remained. Those were "the good old days!"
