Food For Thought: Cutting Corners

When food isn't quite what it seems

I don’t really like having TV in my bedroom.  It’s a treat when I stay in hotel, but more often than not a crutch rather than a benefit when it comes to a comfortable night’s sleep. My current circumstances though don’t allow much space for common media viewing or recreational room, so bedtime TV it is. And occasionally I fail to set a timer to turn it off at a semi-respectable hour, so I sometimes wake up watching something rather different than what I was watching as my eyes closed.

But I will say that the YouTube algorithm knows me pretty darn well because a few weeks ago I woke up to a show called “Victorian Bakers”, a British series that follows four modern bakers as they attempt to re-create recipes from the latter half of the 1800s in period kitchens. Watching them toil and sweat over shovelfuls of coal and the ergonomic nightmare of the mixing trough make for fun reality TV, but to put skilled bakers whose fundamental techniques haven’t changed much in millennia into such an historically immersive setting makes the realities of Victorian England come vividly to life.

One of the issues the bakers confront is adulteration. While the latter part of Victoria’s reign saw increasing prosperity and access to inexpensive wheat, sugar, and other staples through trade and colonial expansion, the mid 18th century saw some grim and grinding poverty England’s industrial cities and towns that were home to more than half the population. And while coal was the main fuel of industrial England, the fuel of the people was bread. Bread made up the vast majority of calories consumed by the ordinary people, the ones whose muscle and sweat turned the great wheels of the Industrial Revolution.

But before the Empire made imported wheat and sugar cheap, there was a period of intense competition and little regulation. The bake houses that made bread for the toiling masses were dirty brutal places with backbreaking work, inhuman hours, and often very questionable ingredients. Flour was by far the most expensive part of the baking process so it was common for bakers to cut flour with other things. Sometimes the “things” were benign (and possibly delicious) like potato, but they could also veer into less edible things like chalk and alum. And what I found particularly interesting is that some of this was driven by the customers themselves: even the poorest preferred white bread, and some the more questionable additives had their origins in producing the whitest of white bread.

But still…. yuck.

And though regulation has improved and consumers are both more informed and more interested in the quality of food than they were in Victorian times, food adulteration and fraud is still a thing, and often more insidious than a loaf of chalky bread.

Horror stories of Chinese milk and baby formula make world-wide headlines when they are unearthed because they tap many of our hot button emotions: fear for our children, fear of corporate excesses and fear of the “foreign” and unknown, topped with a dose the symbolism of milk as a pure and natural food.

But there are plenty of other food products where food fraud is both common and hard for the average person to detect.

There are good arguments for getting your honey from local sources, so unless the jar or bottle has a specific origin there might be other sugars in that jar. Olive oil is one of the most commonly faked products in the world. Labelling fraud is rampant in the seafood industry, with some studies showing nearly half of products not being the specified species. And these are just a few.

But even if you don’t eat fish, don’t really care if your cooking oil is from Italy or Tunisia, and you just want something sweet on your toast, food fraud and adulteration are still important to you. Improper labelling puts us at risk in so many ways: we can be exposed to undisclosed allergens and toxic chemicals with little or no traceability. Fake products undercut high-quality goods on price, putting strain on farmers and producers who find themselves unable to compete. And even if there is nothing unsafe or unseemly about the faked product, it’s a theft from your pocket when you don’t get what you think you paid for.

Blockchain technology holds some promise for improving traceability, but it’s consumers who have the biggest sway and the ultimately responsibility. And that’s hard thing to do sometimes - we’re busy and that cheap bottle on the shelf is awfully tempting when the price of everything is continuing to rise.

But we can take heart that we have the tools available to catch food fraud, at least some of the time, and that we’re not quite as dependent on one staple product as our Victorian ancestors were. Our global food system can put nearly anything in our hands if we’re willing to pay, but there may always be a little chalk in the bread.