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In the past, people found lots of sneaky ways to make extra money, by adding dodgy ingredients to food and then making them look like the real thing. It's called "food adulteration". Some real-life historical examples are shown on this page.
People used to put white powder in bread
There have to be laws about what goes into bread because it forms such a big part of everyone's diets. In Victorian times, many bread makers made extra profit by replacing expensive flour with a cheap white powder called alum. Alum is not poisonous, but it contains none of the goodness of flour, and some people got ill as a result. (Alum is still used for making paper and treating leather.) These days,
when food cheats get caught, they are fined or sent to prison. Food laws
help protect your health and stop you being cheated. Fancy a dusty cup of tea?
Some tea manufacturers have been discovered putting all kinds of leaves into packets, or sweeping up the tea dust from the factory floor to fill up the teabags. That way they make more profit. Food law helps
to protect you from being sold dust. Tests are carried out to check if
the leaves in bags really are from tea plants. Food cheats watered down milk
This Victorian cartoon shows that people were worried about cheats adding water to milk. If you drank milk that was watered down, you miss out on lots of good things, like calcium and vitamins. That's why
there are laws to stop people adding water to nutritious foods. These
days, food law officers can test milk to find out if water has been added,
or other ingredients that make watery milk look more thick and creamy. Are those real pips in your raspberry jam?
In the past,
some very dodgy things were put into jam. Instead of expensive raspberries
and strawberries, some jam-makers put sugary water into the jars, and
added starch to make it seem gooey. The jam-makers added colouring and
flavouring,
and some even put bits of wood as fake pips, to make it seem like real
fruit! People used to put chemicals in beer
In
Victorian times, customers got angry with pub owners for adding water
or other liquids (like bitter-tasting Vitriol) to their beer. This Victorian
cartoon shows what people suspected pub owners might be getting up to.
The cartoon appeared in an old newspaper. Not so long ago... a story about spices
People producing spices and herbs are sometimes tempted to make extra money by adding cheaper ingredients to their products. The makers of the Worcester sauce didn't know that dodgy ingredients had been added to the spice in their product and were horrified. But by then it was too late - hundreds of customers had already bought contaminated food. It cost millions of pounds to clear up the problem.
You could end up eating rotten meat!
Condemned meat has to be thrown away or put into pet food. The picture shows chickens that were condemned for being covered in 'faecal matter' (chicken poo), flies and feathers. In the year 2000, some men in Rotherham were sent to prison for putting dirty chicken like this back into people's food after it had been condemned. The inspectors said the chicken was smelly and badly bruised and would be a health risk to anyone eating it. The men were criminals. They conned people out of millions of pounds by selling 1,300 tonnes of dodgy chicken to butchers, restaurants and caterers, and they put thousands of people's health at risk. But don't worry. It couldn't happen now.... Or could it? People will always be tempted to make extra money by cheating with our food. That's why it's so important to have inspectors and laws, to help protect us from food cheats.
Click here to download activity sheets on the subject of factory food
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There's
a lot of money to be made in selling bread. In the UK, we eat about 9
million loaves of bread every day.
If
you were packing tea into bags to sell to a supermarket, you might be
tempted to cut back on expensive tea leaves and sneakily add cheaper leaves
instead.
If
you're a cheat, an easy way to make money is to add water to food - because
water is very cheap. The trick is: the cheats still charge the same price
as for proper food!
Jam
recipes are controlled by some of the strictest food laws in the world.
But why does the government bother? It's only jam!
Imagine
that you run a pub and stand behind the bar every day watching people
drink your beer. If you were bored or greedy, you might start calculating
how much extra money you could make if you just thinned down the beer
by adding a cheaper liquid to the barrel.
In
2005, a massive food problem was uncovered. Someone had added a colouring
to spice to make it look more red. But the colouring, called Sudan I,
was toxic. The spice was then used to flavour Worcester sauce. In turn,
the sauce was added as an ingredient to hundreds of foods, which had to
be withdrawn from sale. 
When
animals are killed, the meat has to be treated carefully to make sure
that it isn't contaminated with dirt or disease. If inspectors spot problems
they condemn the meat.
