In the 19th Century, food shopping was a gamble. Tins, packets and containers tended to lack ingredient labels, let alone nutrition information. With

How to decode a food label - BBC Future

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2021-06-24 13:00:05

In the 19th Century, food shopping was a gamble. Tins, packets and containers tended to lack ingredient labels, let alone nutrition information. With no obligation to tell people what was in their products or what it meant for their health, manufacturers inserted all sorts of unpleasant substances.

As the journalist Deborah Blum writes in her book The Poison Squad, milk sellers in the US once added chalk, plaster dust, or dye to make their watered-down, bacteria-ridden batches look more palatable. Other food-makers sprinkled copper sulphate – a garden pesticide that can burn the skin – into tinned vegetables to make them appear greener. To extend shelf life, some manufacturers even added formaldehyde or borax – a laundry detergent – to meat and dairy products. Meanwhile in England, arsenic was used to colour green sugary sweets, while lead was added to red or yellow ones, as well as for colouring cheese.

To force more stringent labelling regulations on a reluctant food industry, it took decades of lobbying and research. To bolster the case, one US scientist even staged a controlled experiment to feed meals of contaminated food to a group of willing young men – Blum's "poison squad" – to demonstrate that it could harm their health. Many of the squad's healthy volunteers fell ill, a consequence that US lawmakers could no longer ignore.

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