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Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee - The Dark History of the Food Cheats
 
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Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee - The Dark History of the Food Cheats (Hardcover)

by Bee Wilson (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 370 pages
  • Publisher: John Murray (24 Jan 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0719567858
  • ISBN-13: 978-0719567858
  • Product Dimensions: 22 x 13.2 x 4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 93,066 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

Praise for Bee Wilson’s The Hive:


‘Richly informative and beautifully written’

(The Times 20050911)

'Entertaining and thoroughly worthwhile' (Sunday Times )

'Can hardly be bettered' (Guardian )

‘Fascinating, careful, witty and intelligent ... Almost any paragraph chosen at random is entertaining’ (Prue Leith, New Statesman )

'Fascinating' (Humphrey Carpenter, Sunday Times )

'Buzzes with info and has the prettiest dust-jacket of the third millennium' (Barry Humphries, Sunday Telegraph )

'Erudite, informative, accurate and a delight to read.' (Times Literary Supplement )

‘There are delights and surprises on virtually every page of this gem of a book’

(Sunday Telegraph )

‘Wilson’s sprightly hymn to the honeybee ... conveys ... the marvel, complexity and ultimate unknowability that has made the beehive such a fascination’

(Independent )

‘A brilliant examination of a natural phenomenon we all take for granted’

(Sunday Express )

‘Wilson brings a humorous touch to the history of swindlers who have tampered with our food’

(Oxford Times )

Product Description

Salmonella . . . toxins . . . additives . . . food scares . . . Have you ever wondered how our food has become so untrustworthy? Have we ever been able to trust what we eat?



Via a fascinating mix of food politics, history and culinary detective work, Bee Wilson uncovers the many methods by which swindlers have tampered with our food throughout history. 


 


From the leaded wine of ancient Rome to the food piracy of the twenty-first century we see the extraordinary ways food has been padded, poisoned, spiked, coloured, substituted, faked and mislabelled everywhere it has been sold. 


 


Bee Wilson reveals the strong historical currents which enable the fraudsters to flourish; the battle of the science of deception against the science of detection; the struggle to establish reliable standards. She also suggests some small ways in which we can all protect ourselves from swindles and learn to trust what we eat again.

(20040918)

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Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee - The Dark History of the Food Cheats 4.0 out of 5 stars (4)
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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
5 star:
 (2)
4 star:    (0)
3 star:
 (2)
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Gripping story of food, greed and corruption, 22 Feb 2008
This is a fantastic book. If you have enjoyed reading any of hte various other recent accounts of what has gone wrong with food in the course of the past hundred years -- such as Michael Pollan's In Praise of Food -- then this will be a mnst-buy. But Iw ould recommend reading Wilson over Pollan and the others. Wilson lacks Pollan's smugness, and writes more wittily., and takes a much longer (and betteer-informed) historical view She reminds us that attempts to "taint" food with false ingredients are almost as old as human history: there have always been greed and avarice, and food sellers have always been out for a quick buck. This historical and sociological awareness allows her to put her finger on precisely what is distinctive about modern food scares and modern junk food. Wilson makes a convincing case that we in the west, perhaps especially in Britain (for distinctive historical reasons), have lost even a concept of what real food should be: what, for instance, are the proper ingredients of a loaf of bread. A particularly illuminating chapter reminds us that for most ofhuman history, wine has been adulterated (to hide the fact that it was usually very bad), but bread wa usually pure -- when people put sand in hte bread, it was an obvious adulterante. Now, things are the other way around We hardly know what it would mean to purchase "pure" bread; all supermarket loaves are full of mysterious e-numbers. If you have any interest in what you eat, you have to read this book; buying a loaf of bread will never be the same. I am not a foodie or a food history buff, but I found this book totally gripping, both as an account of food, and also as a study in human nature. It reads like a detective story: the kind where you know that everybody is out to cheat everybody else, but there is some guiding and charming intelligence, in this case Wilson's, which will make it all make sense; , and even turns a story of corruption into something like comfort reading. Wilson is both earnedly serious about social and ethical evils, and also very funny. Swindling is one of the great comic subjects of all time, maybe because it's so horrid to get swindled. I couldn't put this book down till I finished it. An easy five stars!
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars My BOOK OF THE YEAR?, 6 May 2008
By G. Bowtell "G. Bowtell" (London) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This could quite easily become my BOOK OF THE YEAR.

We are all familiar with the frequent reports of food crises which are the bread and butter of journalists from both tabloids and broadsheets, and many of us can remember the Salmonella in eggs scare that Edwina Currie was involved in, and John Gummer feeding his child beef during the BSE crises - the sensationalism of the media and the way in which the stories were covered sold a lot of newspapers.

There is however not one whiff of sensationalism in this rather splendid book by Bee Wilson which, despite some considerable delving into the politics and industrial games involved in food production, is an absolute page turner.

I think the average reader will finish reading this book having learnt a great deal more than he or she expected, and no doubt feeling more alert to his or her environment.

Despite the nastiness of some of the swindles and the unsavoury qualities of some of the adulterants that Bee Wilson writes about, this book does not leave a bad taste in the mouth, on the contrary I rather feel happier about going out to buy my food.

I cannot recommend this book enough.
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2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Sweets for the sweet, 15 Jul 2008
By Dr. Cath L. Murphy "drcath" (Norway) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Remember Love Hearts? Those pastel tablets of sherbert with a message printed on each one, like a British version of the fortune cookie? I expected Swindled to be about the brain rotting consequences of the hideous chemicals used in delicacies just like these. I settled down, full of delightful anticipation of statistics proving that consuming Jammie Dodgers makes other people's children (not mine of course) uncontrollable psychopaths.

I was disappointed. Not Swindled (the title is a tempting target, but just too easy), because the book is about food counterfeiting, but not the kind I was expecting to read about. Instead I got an account of the attempts of some early chemists to find out what was actually happening to the food that people were sold during Victorian times and a cautionary tale of how laissez faire politics allows the unscrupulous to prosper. It was, nevertheless, illuminating to discover that in France, where the government maintained strict food standards (no French person, whatever their political beliefs, can countenance interference with la baguette) additions of bone meal, sawdust and potato to the daily staple were unheard of, although commonplace across La Manche during the same period. The parallels between the Thatcher years with their multiple food crises (BSE and salmonella anyone?) are easy to draw.

Still, it's a well researched and clearly written read and there are of some modern day examples towards the end, including the wonderful, but sadly apocryphal tale of the mass manufacture of fake eggs in China. Complete with fake wax shell. These wily foreigners...
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3.0 out of 5 stars Swindled
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