So you are worried about aspartame or a little Red #3 in your food? You know what you would have to worry about back in the early years of the 19th聽century? A little strychnine in the beer.聽聽A touch of mercuric sulfide in the candy.聽聽A sprinkling of red lead in the cayenne pepper!聽聽聽
Frederick Accum didn鈥檛 like this type of food adulteration one bit.聽聽Children were being poisoned by colorants in candies, their mothers were being duped into buying bread whitened with aluminum sulfate, and their fathers were drinking beer rendered bitter with strychnine instead of hops.聽聽It was time to blow the whistle!聽聽And Accum was the man to do it.聽聽After all, he was an accomplished chemist who had opened up the first commercial chemistry laboratory in London, and had made quite a name for himself offering courses to the public on what he called 鈥減ractical chemistry.鈥澛犅犅�
In the back room of Accum鈥檚 shop students learned that a black precipitate formed when a solution was treated with hydrogen sulfide confirmed the presence of lead and that copper as a contaminant could be detected by the tell tale blue color that resulted from the addition of ammonium hydroxide.聽聽Accum even catered to people who preferred to experiment with chemicals at home.聽聽He produced 鈥淐hests for Chemical Amusements,鈥� the forerunners of modern chemistry sets.聽聽I suspect there may have been the odd client who was less than amused, since safety was not one of Accum鈥檚 strong points.聽聽When talking about the glow-in-the-dark property of the yellow phosphorus included in the Chest, he explained that 鈥渋f rubbed on the face, taking care to shut the yes, the appearance is most hideously frightful.鈥澛犅營ndeed.聽聽Possibly permanently frightful.聽聽Yellow phosphorus is flammable and highly toxic.聽
Accum鈥檚 clients included some wealthy socialites who were concerned about what they were eating, and the chemist confirmed many of the fears.聽聽Pickles were found to be 鈥済reened鈥� with copper compounds, candies colored with red lead oxide, and the taste of vinegar sharpened with sulfuric acid.聽聽Something had to be done, Accum decided.聽聽So in 1820 he published his classic book, 鈥淎 Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons,鈥� charmingly subtitled 鈥淒eath in the Pot.鈥澛犅營t was the first expose ever written of the repulsive practices employed by some food producers, and the first systematic attempt to raise the public鈥檚 consciousness about the safety of the food supply.聽聽聽
The chemist didn鈥檛 pull any punches.聽聽Not only did Accum describe the abhorrent practices, he named the culprits!聽聽Woe to the merchant who colored his confectionary with copper arsenite, 鈥渆xtended鈥� his powdered tea with a mix of ferric ferrocyanide, copper acetate and sheep鈥檚 dung, or enticed children with jams dyed with salts of lead.聽聽Bakers who added plaster of Paris to flour to increase the weight of their loaves also felt Accum鈥檚 wrath, but it was the beer fraud artists who were particularly singled out for skewering.聽聽Adding ferrous sulfate, alum and salt to give beer a good 鈥渃auliflower head鈥� was common at the time.聽聽As was the use of an extract of Southeast Asian fishberries to impart a bitter flavor.聽聽After all, it was cheaper than using hops.聽聽Of course the fact that it might kill an imbiber was of no concern.聽聽Fishberries derived their name from their use by Southeast Asian natives to stun fish.聽聽Picrotoxin, a compound similar to curare, paralyzes the nervous system, making it easy to pick fish out of the water.聽聽
These practices were of course illegal, but as Accum pointed out, the law was not hard to skirt.聽聽He described how the prohibited ingredients were stored off site, only to appear in the oversize pockets of the special coats worn by beer makers on brewing days.聽聽While Accum attacked food adulterers mercilessly, he was also scornful of the authorities who allowed the public鈥檚 welfare to be compromised in this fashion.聽聽鈥淭he man who robs a fellow subject of a few shillings on the highway is sentenced to death, but he who distributes a slow poison to the whole community escapes unpunished,鈥� he declared.聽聽As one might expect, Accum made many enemies in the food business who sought revenge.聽聽And one day, when a librarian at the famed Royal Institute, where Accum had once been Sir Humphrey Davy鈥檚 assistant, apparently saw him tear pages out of a book instead of taking notes, the enemies got their chance.聽聽The matter was brought to the attention of the police, Accum was charged with robbery and released on bail.聽聽Disgraced, he fled England to his native Germany and the food criminals went back to adding chalk to milk and substituting burnt carrots, scorched black peas and chicory powder for coffee.
