british constable, 1757: parliament says to stop putting chalk in the bread
modern CEO, transported back in time, trying to disrupt bread industry: what if i pay a contractor to put the chalk in the bread
constable: you cannot add chalk
CEO: what if i deliver the chalk bread to your house
Before Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, meat packing plants in almost wholly unregulated meat packing plants in Chicago were mixing corded rope with meat which got stuck in people's guts and killed them. It was just hard to prove which hellhole to hold responsible so it didn't happen.
In the Roman era there was such a big issue with adulterated bread that all loaves had to be stamped with the baker’s mark for accountability and bread forgery was a Major Crime. This policy went on on-and-off into the Middle Ages.
Still legal in the US. Labelled as cellulose, and doesn't have any nutritional benefit/hindrance. Provides some amount of fibre.
I don't think it's done much, since food-grade wood isn't cheap.
Did hear of a baker in germany who sold sawdust biscuits (advertised as such) and had to stop though.
It took the fuckin' Italian Amerivan Mafia to end milk adulteration in the US. No joke! "youse fuck witha th' milk, you sleepa with the fishes" fixed the milk industry in a real hurry
There was that brand of orange drink (contained no orange juice) that amongst other things had so much carrot extract in it turned people who drank it orange.
If you do any reading into Victorian food adulteration, you wonder how anyone survived.A lot of weird things in Victorian novels start to make sense once you realize that pretty much everyone in the city had low-grade lead poisoning plus whatever was in the smog and arsenic wallpaper was fashionable
