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

Praise for Bee Wilson's The Hive: 'Richly informative and beautifully written' -- The Times 'Entertaining and thoroughly worthwhile' -- Sunday Times 20040905 'Can hardly be bettered' -- Guardian 20040918 'Fascinating, careful, witty and intelligent ... Almost any paragraph chosen at random is entertaining' -- Prue Leith, New Statesman 20040918 'Fascinating' -- Humphrey Carpenter, Sunday Times 20041128 'Buzzes with info and has the prettiest dust-jacket of the third millennium' -- Barry Humphries, Sunday Telegraph 20041128 'Erudite, informative, accurate and a delight to read.' -- Times Literary Supplement 20050304 'There are delights and surprises on virtually every page of this gem of a book' -- Sunday Telegraph 20050911 'Wilson's sprightly hymn to the honeybee ... conveys ... the marvel, complexity and ultimate unknowability that has made the beehive such a fascination' -- Independent 20050911 'A brilliant examination of a natural phenomenon we all take for granted' -- Sunday Express 20050911 'Wilson brings a humorous touch to the history of swindlers who have tampered with our food' -- Oxford Times 20050911

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.