Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee

 Looking from the perspective of the 1976 amendments to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, it's strange to see that the original 1906 law focused on adulteration and fraud. With a historical perspective, as shown in Bee Wilson's Swindled, it makes sense. At the time the risks (to drugs as well as food) weren't lack of efficacy or danger due to unknown effects. It was literal poisoning - arsenic based dyes in candy and pickles, bulking out flour with husks - or gypsum, sausages that were truly mystery meats, "swill milk" from diseased cows fed the by-product of whiskey production. Wilson traces the history of food adulteration from the early years when food fraud was deadly to the current era where world trade makes fraud easier (such as labeling rice from other areas as Basmati and charging a premium) even if deadly events, such as a formula scandal in China, have become less common.

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

 I prefer baking to cooking (probably a side effect of being single - I have no one to share ideas, admire my work, or help clean up) which is probably why I'm not much of a kitchen gadget person. Still, as a 21st Century person with a microwave and KitchenAid mixer (Mom bought me one the first Christmas I had my own house so I wouldn't "borrow" Big Yellow, which Daddy bought her for Christmas 1979), I'm far ahead of early humans who had a pot, a knife, and a spoon. Food writer Bee Wilson tracks the evolution of cooking and utensils from pre-history to the bread maker and Oxo Good Grips. 

She starts with a wooden spoon - everyone has one (and in the hands of Lisa Scottoline's South Philly matrons, it's a threatening symbol of power). It's simple, useful, heat resistant, and hard to improve. Even the stick end is useful for stirring oatmeal. So simple that we don't think about how central is is to cooking. She then moves to pots (for much of history, cooked meals were soup/stew/pottage - throw ingredients into the pot with some fluid and cook until it's time to eat) and knives. This is where specialization begins. No pot is perfect for every use (if it's a good conductor, it won't heat quickly; sautéing in a stock pot or making spaghetti sauce in a frying pan is difficult-to-impossible), and while there are some multi-purpose knives, the ideal blade size and shape depends on the job. As she expands into the idea of cooking, the use of ice and eventually refrigeration, and the kitchen itself she explains how gadgets may come and go, but the basics stay. They may be refined (as the late appearing fork moved from a skewer to the two prongs still used to stabilize meat for carving and eventually to the 3 or 4 pronged utensil we use every day) or combined (the spork and it's relatives, which she lists in a footnote), but at their core they're identifiable through the centuries.