During the 19th century, much of the food consumed by the working classes is adulterated by foreign substances, contaminated by chemicals or fouled by animal and human excrement. By the 1840s, the practice of home-baking bread has died out among the rural poor; in the small tenements of the urban masses, which have no ovens, it has never existed. In 1872, Dr Arthur Hill Hassall (1817-94), the pioneer investigator into food adulteration, demonstrates that half of the commercially made bread he examines is full of alum, which inhibits digestion.
The list of poisonous additives includes:
? strychnine in rum and beer
? sulphate of copper in pickles, bottled fruit, wine and preserves
? lead chromate in mustard and snuff
? sulphate of iron in tea and beer
? ferric ferrocyanide and lime sulphate in Chinese tea
? copper carbonate, lead sulphate, bisulphate of mercury and Venetian lead in sugar confectionery and chocolate
? lead in wine and cider.
The Privy Council estimates in 1862 that one-fifth of butcher's meat in Britain comes from animals that are 'considerably diseased' or have died of pleuro-pneumonia or other diseases.
As late as 1877, the Local Government Board finds that about a quarter of the milk it examines contains excessive water, or chalk, and 10% of butter, 8% of bread and 50% of gin contains copper to heighten the colour. Red lead gives Gloucester cheese its 'healthy' red hue. In the long run, these additives result in chronic gastritis and, often, fatal food poisoning.
Even the rich are not safe. For example, the London county medical officer discovers the following in ice cream: cotton fibre, lice, bed bugs, bug's legs, fleas, straw, human hairs and cat and dog hairs. Such contamination can (and does) cause diphtheria, scarlet fever, diarrhoea and enteric fever.
