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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An important, life-changing book, November 20, 2008
This review is from: Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee (Hardcover)
The first time I went to the grocery store after finishing this book, I found myself unable to buy formerly favorite products. The documentation of the way food is altered, adjusted, shaped, and -- yes -- adulterated is both convincing and habit-changing.
Bee Wilson takes a subject that could easily be dull and turns it into a fascinating history of the industrialization of the food supply. She also describes how food detectives in both England and the United States worked to clean up the food supply and how legislatures in both countries, enamored with laissez-faire economic policies, repeatedly refused to pass laws to protect the public from unscrupulous food vendors.
What's amazing is that the history she documents for Britain and the US in the 19th century is exactly what is happening right now in China. In fact the publication of this book coincided with the latest scandal of food contamination in China -- the addition of melamine to milk products that caused the deaths of at least 6 children in China and severe kidney disease in thousands of other children. Contaminated milk products from China have even been imported to the Japan and the US, despite these countries' regulatory structures.
EVERYONE WHO EATS should read this book and use the information Ms. Wilson provides to improve their personal food supply. The only way we can ensure that our food is healthful and not contaminated is to "vote with our dollars" and only buy food that we know is safe. It's hard to do, but not impossible. I now read labels of everything I buy and reject foods processed or imported from countries such as China which do not have strong protective laws. I have also written letters opposing the plan to have chickens grown in the US processed in China and reimported to the US. This is insane! But until enough consumers actively choose healthful products and refuse to buy fake crap, food manufacturers will not change.
Yes, it costs more money. I now buy almost all my food from my local organic co-op market. I'm lucky in that I have a large co-op where I live. Even chains such as Whole Foods are not necessarily safe vendors -- we found frozen broccoli at Whole Foods that was labeled as coming from China. We did NOT buy it. Given the fraud that exists in Chinese food labeling, that would be a dangerous purchase. Pesticide residues on vegetables in China are known to be very high.
The end lesson: Read labels, know what you're buying and buy carefully. And yes, spend the extra money on locally-grown organic. Find out what real food tastes like.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
You are not what you think you eat, November 16, 2008
This review is from: Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee (Hardcover)
It sounds like a page ripped from today's headlines: Chinese babies dying from fraudulent baby milk.
However, British food journalist Bee Wilson's "Swindled" isn't quite that up to the minute. Her chapter on dying Chinese babies is not about today's cow's milk tainted with melamine but 2004's scandal about fake formula.
But the recurrence nicely illustrates her thesis that food fraud has always been and will always be with us. And, she says, people in advanced countries with well-established regulatory agencies should not be so confident they are, indeed, what they think they eat.
From plutocrats being palmed off with sevruga caviar at beluga prices (but who cares?), to mislabeled Chilean sea bass to (although she doesn't mention this one) Starbucks' selling cheap Central American java for genuine Kona, there are recent frauds aplenty.
Wilson is, no contest, the best stylist writing about food for newspapers in English (in the Sunday Telegraph), and her chapters on the early history of food fraud are strong stuff.
She makes the point that the longer the chain from producer to eater, the more opportunities for chicanery, and the more difficult it becomes to detect the fraud.
Scientific aids begin with Frederick Accum in 1820, one of several odd ducks Wilson profiles in the history of food safety; but scientific frauds have more than kept pace with detection methods.
In her later chapters, Wilson displays a bee in her bonnet about GMOs (although she has little to say about this); and a touching but misplaced faith in the superiority of organic food, however defined.
Her complaint that people cannot recognize good food because they have never tasted it is at least partly valid. However, her favorite target -- white bread -- is not as good an example as she thinks.
Europeans have long preferred soft white bread to a "crusty, malty loaf," but this was not solely a matter of social pretentiousness, as Wilson thinks. Considering the prevalence of abscesses in our ancestors' teeth, eating hard bread was torture.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee, December 28, 2011
This review is from: Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee (Hardcover)
Review of Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee by Bee Wilson in 2008 published by Princeton University Press (Princeton & Oxford). Reviewer: Dr W. P. Palmer I very much enjoyed this book, which I purchased to see what it added to the story of Frederick Accum, whose life I was researching at the time. I found that the writing combined genuine scholarship and the telling of fascinating stories of the various people who in different ways have contributed towards the safety of our food. I always fear that books on food may be written by `food cranks' based on their own `crackpot' theories. This book is NOT like that and gives a true and accurate account the very considerable progress that has been made in the safe preparation of common foods which in the early Nineteenth Century could contain poisonous chemicals. The first portion of the book mainly concerns the life of Frederick Accum. Accum was born on March 29th, 1769 in Bückeburg, Germany. He moved to Britain in 1793 and five years later he started his own business as a chemical analyst and vendor of chemical equipment. He had several other chemically related positions, for example as a lecturer, an expert witness, an author and as a researcher. In 1820 he wrote a book, entitled A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisonsin which he described many food staples including cream, confectionary, pepper, tea, coffee, spirituous liquors, milk, meat, vegetables as being deliberately adulterated and he named those responsible. Within a few months, he was forced to return to Germany as he was observed tearing out pages from books he read at the Royal Institution and he was prosecuted for this. He died in Berlin on 28th June 1838 aged 69 years. The story of food safety continued some forty years later with the work of Arthur Hill Hassall, who actually succeeded in persuading the British Government to take some action for the first time. Mention is made of many activists who helped improve food safety including Harvey Washington Wiley and Upton Sinclair (author of The Jungle (Dover Thrift Editions). The story is brought up to date with information about some of the many food scandals that have occurred in developing countries. An excellent book! Well worth your attention! BILL PALMER
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