How Victorians Knowingly Poisoned Their Food | Hidden Killers | Absolute History

if you're in a workhouse and you're a three-year-old you're going to start off with constipation you're then going to have irregular bowel movements and then that will lead to diarrhea and if you are a three-year-old in a workhouse and you've got chronic diarrhea that will lead to death between 1800 and 1900 the urban population in Britain increased tenfold London became the biggest industrial city in the Western world city dwellers and houses like this were creating an unprecedented demand for more cons as well as life's necessities they were becoming mass consumers at the end of a production line supplying the household with basic foods in the newly expanded cities of up to 3 million people was a strategic challenge but thankfully by the late 19th century the staples of bread and milk had become cheaply available to cater for the new demands the Victorians pioneered new food processing techniques this left the consumer at the mercy of the unscrupulous merchants responsible for each part of the food chain one thing the Victorians loved above all was profit and the way to make profit of course is to use the cheapest ingredients and charge a high price for them so adulteration became very popular throughout the Victorian period some merchants would substitute real ingredients with cheap alternatives that would add weight and increased profit margins food adulteration had always gone on but the new manufacturing process meant it was now big business the food shops themselves change as well so you used to have a system whereby for example with bread the Miller was the same as the Baker was the same as the retailer now the Miller Mills the flour passes it to the Baker the baker bakes and the retailer sells so you've got divorcing all the way along with chain that depersonalized is the food chain people don't have the personal relationship with their customers therefore they think they can get away with it anything that is made manufactured or passes through the hands of somebody who can adulterate it by the mid Victorian period the chances are it will be adulterated these additions were astounding chalk iron sulfate and even plaster of Paris but for many buying processed foods release them from the drudgery of baking was time-saving and above all was affordable bread was particularly susceptible to tampering as many things could be disguised in it the biggest adulterants at the time was alum and that's been used since the 18th century it's a whitener what it does is it enables you to take seconds or middlings all the lower grades of flour make them look whiter alum is an aluminium based compound often found today in detergent but when hidden in bread it not only makes it whiter but retains water so the bread feels more substantial in theory the amounts used were quite small and in theory they were not particularly dangerous to health but when you've got both the Miller adding alum and then you've got the Baker adding alum as well then you start to build up the dose to levels where it really will affect your bowel system food historian Annie gray has prepared three loaves for me to illustrate the choice I would have had as a Victorian housewife whilst one loaf is pure two of them have plaster-of-paris alum and other undesirables added to them which is which wellyou're the Victorian housewife so I would say you're in the Baker's and you're presented with these leaves which one would you pick well they all look very attractive which is slightly worrying it's really quite dense though isn't it's quite heavy listen to that this one's still quite dense but again looks nice and smells really like rubber or something very odd smells fine this is lighter it smells more like bread that I'm familiar with so my guess is that that this one is fine yes it is although it's interesting the way perception plays a role part of the reason that you're preferring that one I suspect is because we are predisposed now to like granary breads and things that look healthy whether with your Victorian hats on you should be looking for the bread that is whitest and therefore will impress your dinner guests so I would probably be looking not to go for something wholemeal that looks healthy okay but something like this yes in the Victorian period people really want white bread it's in the current obsession with wholemeal granary beautiful artisanal lows nothing you want white bread so alum is a whitener that's put in and what which is which in terms of these two which is the one what's got what this one is the alum based one and this one is the one with plaster of Paris and bean flour from a Baker's point of view this one is brilliant because the third of the dry solids in this are not pure flour so you're making a reasonable saving on even the sort of low-grade flour that you're using but this housewives choice had dire consequences for the consumer if you were a worker eating two pounds of bread a day and not much else when you consider that a third of what you're eating just won't benefit you at all you can see why chronic malnutrition is such an issue and when you're adulterants are things like plaster of Paris and alum you can also see why chronic gastritis is a problem in late Victorian England if you're in a workhouse and you're a three year old you're going to start off with constipation you're then going to have irregular bowel movements and then that will lead to diarrhea and if you are a three year old in a workhouse and you've got chronic diarrhea that will lead to death [Music] another reason for adulteration was a desire to make food more attractive and appealing color was a key component and so there were things like colorants you might have something like lead chromate which is a very vivid yellow color in fact it's the yellow that's using the paint of American school buses it's that really bright yellow and that was put in things like mustard to give it a authentic mustard color without having to actually include too much of the real ingredient which is expensive tea is adulterated with everything from iron filings to dust to use tea leaves and then black LED to make it look black green tea has Prussian blue in it I mean they're pretty lethal Sir Arthur Hill hassel a london-based physician identified adulteration in 2,500 products and published his results in The Lancet this led to the first wave of legislation in 1868 the food adulteration laws were not very strong when they were initially put in and they were not particularly effective either people simply continued because it was very difficult to police it was very difficult to prove and even after it is known about even after a command hassle start to publicize the food adulteration people just simply don't know what adulterated food looks like versus non adulterated food so you might know that your bread is probably adulterated but either you don't have a choice or you just assume blithely that it happens to other people bread adulteration might ultimately kill you because of malnutrition but there was a greater more immediate danger that was part of every child's diet for the Victorians milk was a cheap an important source of calcium a healthy food it was thought however in 1882 20,000 milk samples were tested and revealed that one-fifth had been adulterated a clue as to what was going on came from the domestic goddess of her day mrs. Beeton the Victorians sought advice on all manner of things and when it came to food mrs. Beeton was their guru according to the 1888 edition of her book of household management milk she said could be purified by preparations of which the principal constituent is boracic acid and she adds it is said that most of the milk that comes to London is treated in this way she concludes fortunately for the consumer it is a quite harmless addition but was it as harmless as mrs. Beeton believed microbiologist Matthew a verson has devised an experiment that tests mrs. Beaton's advice muriatic acid was a component of a product called borax an alkali which was used during the Victorian period to prolong the life of milk this milk doesn't taste very nice so you would throw it away the Victorian to say that's a waste so let's do something to it that removes the sour taste and what they would have done is added alkalis when fresh milk has a neutral pH measurement of around seven but over time as it's ours or spoils and becomes contaminated with bacteria it becomes more acidic and its pH measurement drops so the Victorians worked out probably by trial and error that if you add alkali to this it would neutralize the acid then I've calculated that that will neutralize the acid in this milk so just give it a little bit of a shake and then we'll show hopefully that it gives a pH closer to neutral so you can see this has gone back to six point six which is approximately neutral its neutralized the acid it's now made this milk palatable again this new Wonder alkali sold in the shops as borax was so popular it became a staple of the Victorian larder but alarmingly borax wasn't only used to treat milk it was also marketed as a wonderfully versatile product as I found when I read the journals of the time I'm just looking at these ads in the sketch from 1893 and this is absolutely extraordinary one page and Californian household treasure it says it's absolutely pure and absolutely safe it possesses qualities that are exceptional and unknown to any other substance and it purifies water destroys bhakti it promises everything in fact borax promised too much as well as purifying milk it was brilliant at cleaning your bath and your loom so what happened when borax ended up in the body borax or sodium borate if inhaled or ingested can cause severe irritation so if it's swallowed it can cause abdominal pain nausea vomiting diarrhea if you have a large amount of it it will start to affect other organs like the brain and the kidneys and if you have enough it come through fatal but just how much borax is harmful I've added a small amount of borax to neutralize the acid in this milk but of course if you had a pint of milk you need more borax so I calculated that you need this much borax to neutralize a pint of milk that's gone sour this is five grams and according to some people five grams is sufficient to potentially kill a small child so the addition of borax was not as harmless as mrs. Beeton suggested another vit could kill but by reducing the acid in the spoiled milk and disguising the sour taste borax was concealing another deadly threat the real problem is it doesn't get rid of the bacteria the underlying cause of the acid and those bacteria could still kill people bacteria like Brucella which causes undulating fevers and nasty fever that can go on for weeks at a time that's not particularly lethal but what would be lethal would be TB the bovine TB bacterium is present in cow's milk and this was what was able to flourish undetected in the milk with devastating effects bovine TB it's not the same TV that would cause the coughing symptoms that we associate with TB but what's called non pulmonary TB it spreads out into the extremities includes damage to internal organs damaged the burns and particularly problematic in children what other effects could drinking milk contaminated with the bovine TB bacterium have bovine TB could also cause damage to the bones and the spine for example it could cause an abscess in the bones of the spinal column which would soften the bone which would then collapse to form a wedge shape and if several of these vertebra collapsed at once it could cause massive deformity of the spine this woman was actually particularly lucky because her TB damaged only the bones of the spine and not the spinal cord itself if the abscess had tract and bursts backwards into the spinal column it would have compressed the spinal cord and caused paralysis at best or death at worst effectively purifying this according to the standards of mrs. Beeton is like removing the biohazard tape and now it's basically pot look as to whether we have something that's contaminated and could kill us or something that's not contaminated and is safe to drink adding borax to milk allowed bovine TB bacteria to grow undetected exposing a generation to a lethal infectious disease it's estimated that virtually all children were exposed to bovine TB at some time during their upbringing and it's known that many of those children succumbed to that infection so you're saying that hundreds of thousands of people mostly perhaps children died as a result of that there are many studies one of which for example was a series of post mortems done in London in the 1890s and they did post mortems on 1300 children who had died 30 percent of those children died as a result of TB non-pulmonary TB almost certainly that came from milk now if we extrapolate that up it's considered likely that half a million children died of TB from milk during the Victorian era [Music] despite these horrendous deaths the purification of milk with alkali was not banned by legislation in the Victorian period and the problem of adulterated food continued until gradually consumer pressure led manufacturers to advertise their wares as pure and unadulterated you

Channel: Absolute History

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Keywords: history history documentary funny history fun history school, timeline, absolute history, history documentary, suzannah lipscomb, hidden killers of the victorian home, suzannah lipscomb hidden killers, victorian documentaries, victorian documentary bbc, victorian documentary youtube, victorian era, victorian cooking, victorian food documentary, victorian food recipes, victorian food poor, dr suzannah lipscomb, suzannah lipscomb documentary

Id: bkQ0RFTHvIo

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/the320x200]

I wonder if our current processed foods will be considered "adulterated" in the future. One could argue they're not so literally filled with poisons, but knowing what we know about the health impacts, they're often really not safe ingredients either...

[u/the-etched-city]

I don't understand this Absolute History channel. It just shows chopped-up chunks of BBC TV documentaries, not even the whole thing?

[u/GodOfDucks]

Suzannah Lipscomb + Kate Williams = Must Watch TV!