Green Barbarians, Outtakes and Snarks

Into every manuscript the editing knife must fall. Here are some tasty morsels that landed on the editing room floor, but I couldn't bear to throw out: OUTTAKE #! A History of Unsavory Foods There also has never been such a thing as a purely free, unregulated market that did not pose a real danger to its customers, and there is no reason to assume that there ever will be. In staid, respectable Victorian England, poisonous chemicals were commonly added to commercially prepared foodstuffs. For example, Victorian consumers could purchase beer that had been enhanced with strychnine; pickles, canned fruit and preserves and wine that were preserved with copper sulphate; mustard and snuff that were flavored with lead chromate; and candies and chocolates that contained lead sulphate, bisulphate of mercury, or Venetian lead. These chemical additives were not listed on the product labels, perhaps they were considered “proprietary information.” Victorian food products were also none-too-clean; the list of organic contaminants discovered in ice cream included bacteria; cotton fibers; straw; human hair; cat and dog hair; lice; bed bugs; insect legs, and fleas. When compared to Victorian food-manufacturing practices, the modern Chinese practice of augmenting the apparent protein content of foodstuffs by adding melamine appears almost restrained.