Definition
Food adulteration refers to the practice of adding to or modifying foodstuffs in order to increase saleability and/or profitability. While historians have traced the practice to antiquity, it only gained widespread public and parliamentary attention throughout the Victorian period, and formed a nexus around which disparate social concerns – including race, gender, empire, free trade, and various forms of consumption – coalesced. Throughout the nineteenth century, but particularly from the 1850s onwards, the discourses, imagery, and language of food adulteration circulated in fiction, literary criticism, periodicals and newspapers, scientific journals, and cookbooks and domestic manuals.
Introduction
Victorian food adulterers sought to increase the profitability of their merchandise either by increasing quantity/bulk (“extending” foodstuffs with inexpensive fillers), or by counterfeiting quality or aesthetic appeal in order to artificially raise prices. In her Book of...
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Dennis, A. (2022). Food Adulteration. In: Scholl, L., Morris, E. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78318-1_292
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