Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee (review)

Bee Wilson's Swindled is a charming and engrossing trip through the rather depressing—and more than a little disgusting—modern history of "food fraud." Such fraud is, in Wilson's telling, a capacious category that includes all manner of adulterations and substitutions, from fakes to fillers to fortification. A lightly (though not dully) analytical book, Wilson's book offers a number of entertaining anecdotes about culinary cons and attempts to thwart them, in service of an effort to recognize the social, political, and economic forces that made those schemes possible in the first place. Wilson asserts on her first page that "the history of food fraud is the history of the modern world" (xii). While that may seem a rather bold claim—and it certainly is—throughout her book, Wilson effectively demonstrates how paying attention to candy, or milk, or margarine, can help us see histories much larger than any individual product: everyday life in industrializing cities, for example, or the rise and fall and resurrection of ideas about the state's role in commerce.

Wilson, an accomplished food journalist, begins her frequently personality-driven and semibiographical tale with a German chemist living in early nineteenth-century England named Frederick Accum, who essentially invented the public, scientific investigation of potentially fraudulent food. His career in 1820s London, uncovering pickles made greener with copper and candies colored with lead and other toxic compounds, effectively introduces one of the key ironies (and there are a few) of her book: that the scientific developments that allowed Accum and his successors to ferret out fraud were precisely those that made many of the most successful frauds feasible at all. After Accum, Wilson makes a brief jaunt to ancient Greece and revolutionary France to compare and contrast the different fates of wine (it gets better) and bread (it gets worse) as technologies of production and preservation industrialize. From there, the rest of the chapters tell a roughly chronological, mostly Anglo-American story running from the mid-nineteenth century to the twenty-first. In the process, Wilson relentlessly highlights the complex interplay of individual personalities (from Arthur Hassall to Teddy Roosevelt to Ralph Nader), state power (from the Margarine Act to the Pure Food and Drugs Act to the Delaney Clause), and advertising ("The finest mock turtle soup can now be enjoyed on your home table!") that have influenced what consumers have found on grocers' shelves.

Much of the rhetorical power of the antiadulteration tracts Wilson examines—and much of the argumentative thrust of Wilson's book itself—depends on the horror of upended expectations: a good value turns out to be a cheat, and what appeared to be wholesome and nourishing ultimately kills. Wilson is well aware of, and adept at communicating, the sheer emotional power of such a turn of events. One of the most interesting, if brief, insights of Wilson's book concerns the differences between British and American responses to food fraud. Where the British reaction was sometimes frantic, especially after the publication of particularly explosive data, it was driven largely by a scientific outlook that was "sceptical, understated, reasonable, sometimes infuriatingly so" (154). By contrast, the movement for pure foods in the U.S. frequently "became bound up with the language of sin and redemption" (166). In the context of the temperance movement, there was more than simply rhetorical slippage between the chemical and religious registers of "purity." Wilson is, along similar lines, sensitive to the roles that emotions like desire, disgust, and delight play in economic matters, and how important rhetoric, argument, and image are for fostering or suppressing them. Thus, the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers published an ad inviting indignation in their customers at the government's daring to tax or ban yellow margarine and thereby deny its "sweet, fresh, natural flavor" to the "youngsters" who love it (173). (In fact...