Adulteration the First
I warned you that there will be a small series of interesting stuff on food adulteration. Over the next two days my special guest blogger is Ian Hemphill, of Herbie’s. He is one of Australia’s leading spice experts and will give you the low-down on five of his favourites and what adulteration means for them. After that, we’ll explore the past a bit and look at ways in which the purity of ingredients has never really been something communities can take for granted. If we’re lucky, there’ll be another guest post along the way.
Before I hand you over to Ian, I thought you might like some contexts.
We assume that what we eat is good and fitting. It’s a rather daring assumption, given human behaviour over time. The apples you buy from the supermarket may have sat in a cold store for half the year, or the strawberries may have been irradiated. Milk might have traces of melamine and fish may have mercury. We have many food laws to help regulate such things but – as recent news has shown – the laws are only as effective as the community that enforces them.
Historically it’s even more interesting. There have been food laws for a very long time and, where there are food laws, there was generally a need for them. Some of them were instituted to make sure that no-one starved, but others were set up to make sure that a loaf was the right weight (that people got what they paid for) or that the pickles were not tinged with copper to make them look green.
In London in the eighteenth century, shoppers had to watch out for different things to buyers in Cairo in the twelfth century, but all of them had to learn the dangers and the possible cheats.
We can’t explore the fullness of history, but we can examine some interesting byways over the next few weeks (in between other things) and we can find out just how our ancestors dealt with adulterated food. First though (tomorrow and the day after), we’ll take a look through a modern seller’s eyes and find out just how to identify quality for our own kitchens.
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