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

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 )

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)

Bee Wilson is an award-winning food writer and historian. For five years she was the food critic for the New Statesman; since 2003 she has written a weekly food column for the Sunday Telegraph ('the Kitchen Thinker' in Stella). For several years she was a research fellow at St John's College, Cambridge, where she worked on the history of ideas. Her first book, The Hive, was published by John Murray in 2004. She is married with two children.

(20041128)