TERRIBLE HISTORY OF FOODS SWINDLES

Famine Foods

As we have seen, the bread sold by bakers before the industrial revolution was relatively pure. There were always rumours of bread mixed with ashes or sand—and genuine cases of gritty flour, if it had been badly milled—as well as the odd case of bakers pulverizing stale bread and kneading it into fresh dough; but generally speaking, in good times, bakers’ bread could be relied upon to be nothing but flour, leaven (whether yeast or sourdough fermentation), salt, and water. At various times in history, however, when food was short, rather than being adulterated by the seller, bread might be adulterated by the consumer for his or her own consumption. Such bread is known as famine bread or surrogate bread.

Since ancient times, famine has led to the desperate consumption of unfamiliar foods. The pattern was generally as follows. First, peasants would eat livestock that were not ordinarily meant to be slaughtered—asses, donkeys, and so on. Then, they would move on to damaged or poor-quality cereals (such as sprouting or rotten grain, the sort of thing that induces nausea). If the famine continued, they would be reduced to chewing on animal food, such as acorns or vetch. Then came the last resort—the last resort, that is, before cannibalism: the consumption of natural products that were not really foods at all, such as leather, tree bark, twigs, inedible leaves. Galen writes of the countryfolk of Asia Minor being forced to eat “twigs and shoots of trees and bushes and bulbs and roots of indigestible plants.”

In times of less extreme hardship, the peasantry of Britain were forced to create “breads” from all kinds of substances that would not usually have been put in a dough, such as peas and beans, rice and millet. In 1596, Sir Hugh Platt brought out a book of advice entitled "Sundries New and Artificiall Remedies  against Famine". The first remedy, insisted Sir Hugh, was prayer. But if that failed—and evidently, it often did—there were all kinds of little tricks to stave off hunger.

Sir Hugh recommends making a cheap and savoury bread of pompions (pumpkins) and fashioning sweet cakes out of parsnips. Licorice could be chewed to “satisfy thirst and hunger.” He also mentioned various ancient techniques, including a weird-sounding bread made of the powdered leaves of pear trees.

For the starving, there is a constant cost–benefit analysis going on in the brain. How low will you stoop to fill the gnawing hole in your stomach? How do you weigh hunger against disgust? How many inedible ingredients do you have to combine before it stops being “bread”? How much strange fodder can you eat before you stop being human and revert to the condition of an animal? Sometimes, eating famine foods led to total loss of mind. Piero Camporesi has written of the “collective stupefaction” among medieval Italian peasants resulting from eating famine foods, a kind of “narcosis induced by adulterated bread.” The wild herbs used to pad out grain sometimes had drugging effects. Bread made from darnel, for example, induced a strange drunkenness in those who ate it, a dazed state in which people became either intoxicated or desperate, banging their heads against walls.

Famine “breads” have been made, and still are made, wherever in the world there is famine; Russian peasants were particularly ingenious manufacturers. Because Russia remained an agrarian country for longer than other European countries, the use of surrogate breads in times of food shortages continued well into the twentieth century. A study done at the University of Kazan in the 1890s found evidence of all these “breads”: straw, birch and elm bark, buckwheat husks, pigweed, acorns, malt grains, bran, potatoes, potato leaves, lentils, lime leaves, cow parsley. Also added sometimes were chaff, straw, and clay. Usually, they were combined with whatever ordinary flour was left , but as shortages got worse, the percentage of the additions crept up, oft en as high as 50 percent. Sometimes, things got so bad that these “foods” would actually be bought as well as gathered: pigweed might retail for twenty to seventy kopeks a pound.

There are accounts of the vile effects of these “breads” on the human body. Take pigweed bread, for example. Pigweed, or amaranth, is a common weed, growing oft en in vegetable patches. It is still sometimes eaten as a green vegetable by wild-food enthusiasts, and its taste in this form has been described as “mild.” As a bread, though, it was said to be unpleasantly insipid. According to the Russian peasants, pigweed bread gave them a terrible thirst: barely nourishing, it caused pain in the arms and legs, leaving them too weak to do their usual amount of field work. Yet still they ate it, since the alternative was death.

Another revolting Russian “surrogate” bread was husk bread (pushchnoi), common in the Smolensk province in the 1880s. A contemporary observer, A. N. Engl’gardt, who lived in Smolensk, reported:

"Husk bread is made from unwinnowed rye, in other words, a mixture of rye and chaff is milled directly into flour and bread is made from this in the usual way. This bread is heavy and doughy and full of tiny needles of chaff . Its taste is not bad—about like ordinary bread. But its nutritional value is, of course, less. But the main drawback is that it is hard to swallow, and if you are not used to it you will simply find it impossible to swallow, or if you do swallow it, it leaves an unpleasant sensation in the throat, and makes you cough".

If you were in any way frail, you would not be able to digest this turgid food. Compared to this, a sturdy loaf of baker’s bread made from real grain, whether short weight or full weight, must have seemed like manna from heaven. But food can provoke many different kinds of hysteria, and the thought of what could happen to bread during shortages was capable of provoking all sorts of unease, even when the shortages were mild and the bread still good. Sometimes the panic was based on objective concerns and needs. Fear would have been an entirely rational response, for example, to the problem of leaded wine; if anything, consumers did not panic enough about this.

Often, however, legitimate concerns about the food supply mutate into a kind of collective madness, creating an environment where the wildest accusation becomes suddenly plausible. The legitimate concerns vanish beneath the frenzied alarm. It has been said that true “food scares” are the preserve of the last twenty years, being the histrionic indulgence of  “the healthy, wealthy, comfortable middle classes” whose world is so free of plague and war that they have to fabricate imaginary problems for themselves.This is not true. It may have taken longer for these fears to travel in the time before newspapers, but they existed nevertheless, even in communities that were well acquainted with real hunger. In Britain, there were periodic outcries that bakers’ bread was not pure, which came to a head in the events of 1757.

The Great Bread Scandal of 1757–58

The year 1756 was a bad one for British wheat. Too much violent rain just before harvest was said to have levelled the wheat to the ground. The crop was smaller than usual and of much worse quality than the previous year. People complained that this soggy wheat wouldn’t grind well, and the flour produced wouldn’t bake well. In response to the shortage, Parliament authorized a “Standard” bread to be made, stamped with a capital letter S. This was made with more bran than was customary, to extract more nourishment per penny, and it baked up darker than the standard loaves customers were used to. It sold cheaper too. To modern tastes, this bread sounds wholesome and good, if a little worthy. But it wasn’t popular then. People associated bran-rich bread with poverty. They wanted bread that was whiter than white. As Hogarth wrote in 1753, “They eat no Bread of Wheat and Rye, but... as white as any Curd.”

The rage for white bread was silly enough at the best of times, but in times of bad harvest, as in 1756, it was unrealistic in the extreme. The only way bakers could make curd-white bread from poor flour was by adding alum to the flour. This particular year, some bakers seem to have overdone the alum, which provoked an unprecedented series of attacks on their trade.

Alum — the name given to a group of double sulphates that join aluminium sulphate with another sulphate (potassium or sodium or ammonium) — is an astringent, styptic and emetic with countless uses. From medieval times, it was a vital ingredient in the textile industry, as a “mordant,” fixing dyes to fabrics. It has also been used externally as a deodorant and to staunch bleeding, especially from shaving. The old-fashioned gentleman’s toiletries firm Geo. F. Trumper still sells a “block of alum” for closing nicks and cuts. Alum has also had many culinary uses. It has been used as a preservative, as a firming agent to create extra-crisp pickles and maraschino cherries, to harden gelatine, and as a flour improver and bleach. Bakers have used it in this last capacity since Renaissance times, though only to a significant degree since the eighteenth century.

The use of alum in bread makes sense only if we take into account the prestige of white bread. For a long time, the poor had aspired to eat the fine white manchet of the rich. White bread was seen as gentlemanly, whereas brown bread was yeoman’s bread, marking one out as socially inferior. For this reason, those who had most reason to resent their social inferiority were the most demanding about their bread. Several observers in the seventeenth century describe the poorest classes travelling to market to seek out bread made from the finest white wheat flour, spurning rye bread as beneath them. Almost no one wanted to be the sort of person who ate brown bread.

There would always be the odd voice of wisdom in favour of wholemeal bread. A nonconformist vegetarian, Thomas Tryon, in 1683 spoke up for wholemeal bread as a natural food, good for digestion. He attacked the taste for white bread as “inimical to Health, and contrary to both Nature and Reason". No one much listened. The taste for white bread continued, and with it the use of alum. White bread was always more expensive than brown bread, because the bran was wasted and because the bread had to be made from wheat rather than the cheaper barley and rye.

The only way to make white bread cheaper was to make it from inferior flour. But in this case, the bread would come out greyish and heavy rather than white, which ruined its potential as a status object. Hence, the use of alum, which could turn second-rate white flour into a light, white, porous loaf, at a low price. By the eighteenth century, the use of alum seems to have become more prevalent, apparently reaching a peak in 1756–57. Given the poor, sour grain, bakers used more alum than usual, which resulted in a “harsh” crumb and acrid taste. “The smell is raw and disagreeable and the taste has nothing of sweetness,” said one unhappy customer. Faced with this bad bread, especially in the cities, disgruntled consumers came to see British bread as profoundly adulterated. So unpleasant was it, they thought, it must surely contain all kinds of shocking ingredients in addition to alum.

Published in 1757, "Poison Detected or Frightful Truths" was the first, anonymous, baker-bashing tract (probably written by a Dr. Peter Markham, who went on to publish several other attacks on bread). The author claimed that “our bread, the universal basis of the food of all ranks and ages of people, is mixed with the most noxious and morbiferous matter.” He petitioned William Pitt, the prime minister, to prevent the “once venerated men of England” from being poisoned by bad bread. The wickedness of bakers, in his view, caused more harm than the worst natural disasters: “Run over the gloomy roll of horrors; earthquakes, inundations, tempests, famine, lightning, fiery eruptions, venomous or savage animals, and deleterious plants; they will be found less baneful to human existence than... the secret craft of impetuous avidity.”

Alum, he argued, was a seriously hazardous substance whose frequent use “closes up the mouths of the small alimentary ducts and by its corrosive concretions, seals up the lacteals, indurates every mass it is mixed with upon the stomach, makes it hard of digestion, and consolidates the faeces in the intestines, so as to bind up the passages.” In addition, alum caused heartburn. But what could you expect from a substance that the author of Poison Detected declared was actually “an extract from human excrement”? “Even the most stertorian stomach fastidiates the nastiness of a food made up with such a disgustful mixture.” This was not all. The author also insisted that bread was poisoned with chalk and lime, which gave its crumb a “putrid alkalescence” on top of the “acrid acrimony” it received from the alum.

The worst was yet to come. “There is another ingredient, which is more shocking to the heart and if possible more hurtful to the health of mankind”—sacks of old ground bones,” raked from charnel houses. In other words, bakers were creeping around at the dead of night stealing dead men’s bones. “Thus the charnel houses of the dead are raked to add filthiness to the food of the living.” Another attack on bread of 1757—"The Nature of Bread Honestly and Dishonestly Made" — by a Dr. Manning also accused bakers of using bones, in the form of bone ash, to increase the weight of their flour, though he claimed that bones were stolen from dunghills rather than charnel houses.
Needless to say, this last charge against the bakers was not allowed to pass uncontested. In 1758, a Bristol writer called Emmanuel Collins published a book called "Lying Detected", dismissing the notion that bakers indulged in these cannibalistic practices. “At this rate,” he wrote, “a man may happen to eat the bone of his own father’s nose in a buttered muffin for breakfast.” These were fairy tales, and Collins cited the chant of the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk:

"Fe, Fa, Fum
I smell the blood of an English Man,
Be he alive or be he dead,
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread".

To Collins, the charnel house accusation was also culinarily implausible. If bakers really added bone flour to bread, “you might look into the oven and see it boil instead of bake; and your composition would come out broth instead of bread.” Modern historians have agreed with Collins that the charge of using human bones in bread was wholly fantastical. Yet thanks to the antibread tracts, “a shocked public firmly believed that their flour was mixed with dead men’s bones and that the millers and bakers were a set of rascals.” What of the other charges against the bakers? The author of "Poison Detected" had claimed that mealmen and millers added chalk and lime “in very considerable quantities” to augment the weight of the flour they grind, a charge echoed by Dr. Manning in "The Nature of Bread".

Yet this was highly unlikely, as the chemist Henry Jackson wrote in 1758, in a level-headed work defending the bakers and millers ("An Essay on Bread"). Jackson evidently deplored the scaremongering of "Poison Detected", rebuking the author as “he who alarms the populace with idle systems and conceits of poisons existing in bread.” Jackson observed that if chalk and lime were used in order to increase weight, it would have to be in such huge quantities that “the bread would turn out so gritty that the very dogs would spurn it”: the grittiness would be immediately discernible in the mouth. “The baker’s profits would not be increased by such ridiculous substitutes,” noted Jackson, plausibly enough.

To make doubly sure, though, he conducted a series of experiments, trying to add chalk and lime to bread dough. He found that such dough was almost impossible to knead. Jackson’s findings were confirmed by a twentieth-century historian of adulteration, Dr. Frederick Filby. Filby made three loaves of bread. One contained nothing but flour (10 oz), water (6 1/4 oz), yeast (1/2 oz), and salt (1/4 oz). “It was baked to perfection in 30 minutes and was later eaten with relish.” To the next loaf, Filby replaced 2 oz of flour with 2 oz of slaked lime. He found that the dough took twice as long to prove, was sticky and yellowish, and had a “loathsome” smell. It took twice as long to bake as the proper loaf and came out of the oven of short weight—an ounce lighter than the genuine loaf—and resembling “a flat crab” with “a shell of hard cement.” A third loaf baked with 1 oz of chalk was also revolting, though not to the same degree.

In other words, it just did not make sense that bakers should have used these ineff ectual substitutes. Manning had claimed that the bad bread of 1756 must have contained such things as bone ash and lime because the crumb was so brown, crumbly, heavy, and brittle. Those who know about baking, however, have pointed out that these faults can occur without the presence of adulterating agents. Brownness could come from too much bran or poor yeast. Crumbliness and heaviness might be signs of too much or too little fermentation, or of using water that is too hot. A brittle crust may be a sign of soft flour.

The great bread scare of 1757, like so many food scares since, was one in which wild accusations were hurled around by interested parties, with scant regard for whether they were true or not, or where the stories might have originated. The belief that bakers used human bones in their bread continued for many decades, despite there being no evidence for it. Filby suggests that the insinuation may have arisen from bone ash being discovered on a miller’s or baker’s premises at various times. “It was undoubtedly used, not in flour at all, but to stop up cracks and holes in mill stones.” This still leaves the question of alum. Even the bakers’ defenders admitted that some of them did use alum, though they also pointed out that it was not quite so “disgustful” an ingredient as "Poison Detected" had asserted. It certainly never contained “human excrement.”

This mistake must have arisen because the manufacture of alum did sometimes involve human urine. In volcanic regions, alum can form naturally as alunite crystal. In the less than volcanic British landscape, though, alum was made from aluminium sulphate mined from shale—a type of sedimentary rock—at giant quarries. In order to get this aluminium sulphate to crystallize into alum, an alkali was needed. Stale urine is an alkaline solution and contains ammonium sulphate, and—crucially—it is universally available, so it fitted the bill. Local households would keep their urine especially to sell to the alum manufacturer’s agents. Huge vats of urine were kept in alum-producing towns such as Whitby in Yorkshire, staling to an ammoniac stench.

It is true that this may not be an appetizing thing to think about when considering bread, but it is not in itself a reason to reject out of hand the use of alum. Some people have consumed small amounts of urine without harm throughout history: rich Romans rubbed urine in their mouths to whiten their teeth; and “urine therapy,” the drinking of your own, or someone else’s urine, has long been considered normal in some parts of India and China. The more pertinent question is whether alum, however produced, was dangerous to consume in the quantities in which it was used in bread. Dr. Manning had noted that in August and September 1756 there had been “a kind of universal distemper,” a “habitual diarrhoea.”

As a doctor, he said that he had never seen “so many disorders among the robust and strong” as he had within the previous seven months. Could this have been caused by the “concealed poison” of alum in bread? Even Henry Jackson, who denied that alum was quite as noxious as "Poison Detected" had said, admitted that it could be a purgative for some children and thought it “greatly to be wished” that alum in bread should be abolished altogether. Modern evidence suggests that swallowing alum can be hazardous. The "International Labour Organization", which issues guidance on the toxicity of chemicals in the workplace, states that alum ingestion can cause “abdominal pain, burning sensation, nausea, vomiting,” and its inhalation can result in “cough, shortness of breath, sore throat.” Taken straight, 30 grams of alum has been enough to kill an adult.

In the case of bread, though, it was not taken straight, but in very dilute form. Dr. Peter Markham, the probable author of "Poison Detected", calculated in 1758 that alum was added to bread in the proportions of eight ounces for every five bushels of flour, which was the standard weight of a sack of flour. There were 240 pounds to every sack, which, once water and salt and yeast were kneaded in, would have baked up to make around 350–360 pounds of bread. A standard daily ration of bread in the eighteenth century would have been one or two pounds, depending on what else was eaten with it. Based on these figures, an adult eating alum-adulterated bread might have consumed between 0.6 and 1.2 grams of alum per day—a fairly modest amount.

Whether it was still dangerous in these quantities is a moot point; the evidence of 1756 is that increasing the percentage of alum from this low level hugely increased its toxicity. As always with poison, some people must have been worse aff ected by alum than others, and children were likely to be worse aff ected than adults, poor children worst of all because bread made up such a large percentage of their calories. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to say that people used to country bread—which was less likely to contain alum—suffered from wrenching dyspepsia when they ate whiter-than-white city bread. Accum noted that some doctors attributed many “diseases incidental to children” to eating adulterated bread while other doctors considered it “absolutely harmless.”

In 1758, the British government banned the use of alum in bread. If anything, though, the bakers’ dependence on the substance seems to have escalated (as it did in the United States, too; an opposition to alum was partly what made Sylvester Graham urge his followers to bake their own wholemeal bread in the 1840s and 1850s). In 1851, Arthur Hassall examined various loaves purchased at random in different parts of London and found that they were all, without exception, doctored with alum, even one that was advertised as of  “perfect purity, being warranted free from alum.” By 1857, a French friend could write to Eliza Acton that British bread was “noted both at home and abroad for its want of genuineness, and the faulty mode of its preparation.” How and why had British bread become so contaminated?

There were undoubtedly economic causes; the periodic shortages of wheat and the constant pressure on “corn” prices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries put pressure on bakers to cut corners. Bakers, however, could only sell what they could get away with selling. The major factor contributing to the erosion of standards in bread making was the failure of British bread eaters—unlike their Parisian counter parts—to demand properly made bread. While they worried about fictitious bones in their bread, the real scandal was that they no longer knew good bread when they saw it.

Elizabeth David, the food writer, asked why British bread in 1977 was so poor and concluded that “scientists and their technological achievements have combined with commercial interests, compliant governments and the public’s own indifference to give us the factory bread we now have. No doubt we deserve it. We certainly asked for it, and the milling-baking combines gave it to us.” Something of the same was true in the years following that disastrous harvest of 1756.

Smollett in "Humphry Clinker" wrote that “The good people are not ignorant” of the adulteration of bread with alum, “but they prefer it to wholesome bread because it is whiter than the meal of corn. Thus they sacrifice their taste and their health... and the miller or the baker is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his profession.” Many commentators observed that the buyer was “equally culpable” with the baker on the matter of alum.If bakers did not meet the demand of their customers for white bread, they could go out of business. It did not help that the same assize that banned the use of alum in 1758 also made it much more profitable for bakers to bake white bread than brown. “In fact, the latter could only be made and sold at a loss and the bakers naturally did what they could to encourage the sale of white bread, even, according to one critic, by making the brown loaves so unpalatable that no one would buy them.”

Little by little, adulterated white bread became the norm for baker’s bread, just as factory bread is the norm now. Some people, then as now, opted out of buying bread altogether, preferring to bake their own, either buying flour from a reputable dealer or grinding their own using a hand mill. The only person you could trust completely to make wholesome bread was yourself because there were no longer any enforceable compositional standards set by law. Over the years, the assize of bread had been altered many times, and it would eventually be abolished in 1822. The author of "Poison Detected" criticized the government for not making “severer laws” on bread. If only bread could be baked in one communal oven, as it supposedly was in the city of Genoa! In 1819, another anonymous critic made a similar point.

“Much and proper precaution is used to secure to the publick the just weight of the loaf; but why should not competent persons be equally authorized to analyse its composition? The expense would be insignificant, the benefit of the highest importance to the community.”  The truth was there had once been such people analysing the quality of foodstuff s in Britain, but they belonged to a diff erent pre-industrial era—the feudal world of trade guilds.

The example of bread shows that food laws by themselves are not enough, unless backed up by experts who know how to enforce them. Just as the rise of modern wine was partly caused by new levels of expertise in the matter of wine quality, the decline of British bread was linked to a terrible decline in Cyrus Redding’s “perfect acquaintance with that which is good.” The sad thing was that, unlike with wine, such expertise had once existed in Britain. It had been passed down by the craft organizations that governed trade in medieval Europe.

Guilds and the Guarantee of Good Food

In Capital, Karl Marx argued that: "The adulteration of bread and the formation of a class of bakers that sells the bread below the full price, date from the beginning of the eighteenth century, from the time when the corporate character of the trade was lost, and the capitalist in the form of the miller or flourfactor, rises behind the nominal master baker".

Marx was wrong to suppose that adulteration was new. “For they poison the people secretly and often,” wrote William Langland in "Piers Plowman", as long ago as the fourteenth century. Human greed is a constant. But Marx was right that competition between bakers to undercut each other exacerbated adulteration, whereas the old guild system had done much to prevent swindling. From 1307 to 1509, there was a company of white bakers and a company of brown bakers in London.
Each saw it as their corporate mission to ensure that the quality of their respective breads remained high. If an individual baker should bake a loaf of bread that was of poor quality or tampered with in some way, it reflected badly not just on that individual but on the entire company. Joining a guild was usually an expensive and burdensome business, off ering a status that you would not want to throw away for the sake of cheating some customer out of a few farthings. This created serious disincentives to swindling.

Guilds governed much of the trade of the cities of Europe from the eleventh century onwards. The various specialized guilds were, by definition, each jealous of the reputation of their particular trade. It has been said that “the guild prided itself on letting nothing leave its shops but finished products, perfect of their kind... Not only fraud, but the very suspicion of fraud was rigorously excluded.” Guilds laid down very stringent rules on goods for sale, to preserve the honour of the craft. For example, all goods were to be sold under exact names. The oil of Puglia should not be mixed with the oil of the Marche, because this might make people think that all oil merchants were slapdash. Fishmongers should not use seaweed to “freshen” old fish, lest customers draw the conclusion that such deception was common to all fishmongers.

It was “strictly forbidden, under penalty of a fine or expulsion, to sell damaged meat, bad fish, rotten eggs, or pigs which had been fed by a barber-surgeon who might have fattened them on the blood of sick people.” In some ways, guilds had a stifling effect. They were intensely hierarchical and gave rise to ever greater specialization and endless squabbling over exactly who had a right to which area of trade. The bakers squabbled with the confectioners, “the cooks with the mustard makers...the dealers in geese with the poulterers etc.” Those who think that progress is the most desirable thing in food might argue that one of the eff ects of the guilds was to dampen creativity.

In the eighteenth century it took a long time for the restaurant to become established in France, partly because of interminable squabbles between the guild of hot broth sellers and the guild of cooked sheeps’ trotters. Because guilds usually held a monopoly on their trade in that particular town, there was little incentive for improving and innovating.

On the other hand, guilds were, on the whole, excellent at maintaining quality and tradition in food. In the town of Maine in France, a butcher was not allowed to display a piece of beef on his stall unless two witnesses could testify that they had seen the animal brought in alive. At Poitiers, butchers had to undergo a physical and moral examination to ensure that they were not scrofulous, or suffering from scurvy or bad breath, nor morally unsound. The guilds of British cities developed similar rules. Anyone who broke these rules could be expelled from the guild. This is not to say that guild members never sold bad food. Court records from London in the seventeenth century show that members of the "Worshipful Company of Fishmongers" were occasionally indicted for selling “stinking sturgeon” and “unsweet cod.” But at least the guild rules meant that there were robust standards for food, even if these were not always met.

Not everyone producing food and drink belonged to a guild. Many people acted as their own butchers and bakers, killing their own pigs at home and making them into sausages, bacon, and pork. There were those too, who sold nonessential foodstuff s—such as the “cheesers” and “fruiters”—whose trade seems to have been less organized or else less well documented than that of the butchers and the bakers. In addition, there were those who drift ed informally in and out of food production, indistinct groups of sauce-makers or cooks who escaped the control of the guild; glaziers’ wives who had a sideline in brewing or cordwainers who made a few extra shillings from selling fish.Sometimes they were clamped down on.

A York ordinance of 1424 specifies that “the wives of any other artisan shall not bake, boil or roast fowl in public shops, for sale, unless they are competent to do so.” In other words, artisans’ wives must not try to moonlight by selling food unless they knew how to cook. Doubtless, the guilds had a selfish interest in keeping such unlicensed provisioners out of the trade; but they also had an interest in making their own food as wholesome as possible.

In the Middle Ages, both the guilds and the law treated food production as not merely a profession but a duty. If you were in one of the victualling trades, part of your job was guaranteeing that everyone had access to high-quality food, and enough of it. Hence, there were local laws not just to prevent bad food from being sold, but to ensure that good food was sold and available to those who needed it. Bakers were sometimes penalized for failing to bake, as happened in York in 1485. In some cities, the victualling guilds were taken over by the government, to make sure that the poor wouldn’t starve in hard times. The commune of Florence had a monopoly on salt; Rome had a monopoly on the city’s fisheries. There were various restrictions on professional victuallers to prevent them from stockpiling or “engrossing” food for themselves—for example, a York ordinance of 1497 forbade bakers from buying corn in the market before midday, to make sure they did not monopolize the grain supply.

These laws were made in the interests of the consumer, but generally the interests of the guild coincided with those of customers. The consumer wanted guarantees of quality, and the guild wanted the high reputation that came with providing these guarantees. A guild structure more or less guaranteed sales to those who had achieved membership. Modern food manufacturers are engaged in a constant struggle to undercut their rivals and to reposition their brand with new products. Guilds were very diff erent. Their job, rather, was discovering the secrets of making their particular product as well as they could—whether it was meat pies or gold rings—and then jealously guarding these secrets against the world.

In today’s commercial world, attempts by government to improve the food supply can be interpreted negatively by the many food producers, as an infringement on their freedom to trade as they see fit. In the feudal world of guilds, however, government and trade mostly worked to a common purpose. Indeed, subgroups of guild members took on an official character, assuming the role of policing food and drink in order to guard against malpractice. Some of the decline in British food quality, including that of bread, is tied to the fact that the guild system eroded so early; it was already waning in the age of Shakespeare.

In France, by contrast, the self-policing role of guilds continued right up to the revolution of 1789. Although the French despair periodically about their bread, something of the guild mentality survives in France to this day—the communal pride in a great loaf, the notion that, as the abbé Galiani once said, “bread belongs to the police [meaning government] and not to commerce.” British food has belonged to commerce for centuries now. The self-policing guilds gave way to the unregulated trade of the grocer’s shop, and from there it was a short leap to the twentieth-century supermarket. The irony was that, once upon a time, the “grocers” were the people whose job it was to prevent swindling.

By Bee Wilson in the book "Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee", Published by Princeton University Press, New Jersey, U.S.A, 2008, excerpts pp. 74-89. Digitized,adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.