Deborah Blum

Flour was routinely laced with gypsum, which we use in wallboard.

Spices were sometimes 80 to 90% adulterated.

Brick dust was used in cinnamon.

Floor sweepings were used in pepper.

Ground bone was used in some of the other ground spices.

Most food historians will tell you that food was one of the top ten causes of death in the United States in the 19th century.

And medical historians sometimes call it the century of the great American stomachache.

Coffee was sometimes 100% adulterated.

Literally, sometimes people would grind up coconut shells.

They would use lead-infused dyes to color them.

If people got wary of their ground coffee, they would buy coffee beans.

So there were fake coffee beans.

They were usually made of dirt and wax.

At one point in the 1890s, there was a congressional hearing about some of this, and a manufacturer of strawberry jam testified that their strawberry jam contained no strawberries.

It was corn syrup, grass seed, and aniline coal tar dyes.

And he said that they had to do that in order to keep their prices competitive with other manufacturers who were often doing even worse things.

So there's just bacteria growing in food in all kinds of ways, milk being a classic example of that.

In some ways, it's like a perfect profile of everything that's wrong with the 19th century food supply, right?

Dairies were filthy.

They were absolutely filthy, and dairymen would bring milk to farmers' markets, and the dairyman would dip it out of a big container.