Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee—The Dark History of the Food Cheats by Bee Wilson

 

SWINDLED is a great book, especially if you're interested in ingredient transparency and food adulteration. As someone with food allergies, accuracy of food labeling is very important to my health. I have gotten very sick when people lied to me about what was in the food (either maliciously or simply negligently). One of the banes of my existence is GRAS, or generally regarded as safe, ingredients, which are sometimes excluded from ingredient lists. This is why sometimes you will just see "spice" or "spice blend" on an ingredient label, as well as "natural vegetable coloring." GRAS allows corporations to have proprietary ingredient blends that don't usually cause health problems and aren't top allergens. Sucks if you happen to have that allergy, though. BYEEE.

I found it fascinating how fraught with food cheats history is/was. But I guess it makes sense. Without regulations in place to penalize fraudsters, there's only conscience standing in the way of unscrupulous people making a quick buck. The horror stories of Victorian/early Industrial age food manufacturing were quite chilling. I learned that people boiled vegetables with brass or copper to make them green, and that lead and mercury were used to dye candy. Even more gross: how people would try to sell spoiled meat and cheese by either layering fresh meat or cheese around the spoiled bits, or pumping the meat with chemicals and basically "cauterizing" the rotten bits at the bone with white-hot iron rods. But lest you think that this sort of behavior was a product of the past, Wilson offers modern examples: the Chinese baby milk scandal where people were selling sugar and starch instead of actual formula, and the counterfeiting of specialty products like Corsican ham and Basmati rice.

You'll need a strong stomach to get through parts of this book and at times it can be a little dull, but this is one of the most informative, relevant, and interesting nonfiction books I've read in a while and I would honestly recommend it to anyone as an example of why it's so important to know what's in your food, where it comes from, and how it was really made.

3.5 out of 5 stars