Adulteration

What happened to Britain?

I am delighted to post a brilliant essay by Michael Northcott, Professor Emeritus of Ethics and Theology at The University of Edinburgh and Adjunct Professor at the Indonesian Consortium of Religious Studies, Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia. Michael recently visited the UK after a long period of absence and was struck by the changes which had taken place, particularly the oppression of the law-abiding British citizen coupled with lawlessness in the corporate domain. You can (and should) follow him on Michael Northcott.

After living and working abroad, mainly in Indonesia, since 2019, in 2025 I spent some months in the country of my birth, namely England, and found it subtly and not so subtly altered.

The most obvious change on an infrastructure level are the many volume house builder estates completed or being built close to dual carriageways on the edges of towns in Southern England, many with supermarkets located close by. Meanwhile the centre of most English towns - the ‘high street’ - is increasingly hollowed out with chain cafes, charity shops, and nail bars.

Another obvious change is the cameras and 5G towers everywhere. If you want to live life on camera England is a good choice as it has more CCTV than any other Western democracy. Much of the surveillance infrastructure is privately run. I visited with friends a classic Cotswold village, and having found a parking spot behind a pub that turned out to have no availability, we found another that did. But a few days later a parking and surveillance company - ‘Parking Eye’ - charged me £60 for 4 hours of parking behind the first pub where we hadn’t managed to obtain food or drink. Winnie the Pooh was conceived in Ashdown Forest where A A Milne spent much of his childhood. But if you go there for a walk now you will find empty parking areas festooned with QR codes and cameras enforcing substantial hourly sums for the privilege of walking where Pooh and Tigger were first imagined.

Rural as well as urban England has essentially been adulterated. There are remnants of English culture still to be found - churches and pubs most visibly. The landscape of counties like Dorset and Somerset remains stunningly beautiful. But the heavy regulation, the eye-watering prices for a gallon of petrol or a pint of beer, and the cameras mar even these more rural counties. ‘Old England’ is more in the mind now than in the real experience of being IN England. England has been adulterated by creeping totalitarian control freakery pushed by local authorities across the whole country, and by the thousands of government ‘agencies’, and private licensees, set up or contracted by civil servants with zero business acumen to ‘manage’ everything from car parks and forests to motorways, sewers and trains.

What all of these control freak agencies have in common is the proliferation of rules about what citizens may do or not do, and the proliferation of charges and fines for intended, and even unintended, usage of what was once infrastructure that belonged to the people. A camera spots a tyre of a vehicle that merely touches the white line of a bus lane on a public road and somewhere a local authority server spits out an automated £100 fine for bus lane infringement, sent with the help of the Digital-ID promoting Drivers and Vehicle Licensing Agency, to the address of the ‘vehicle keeper’.

To add insult to injury, all this public/private, high fee charging, and higher fine charging, infrastructure is in a country in which the majority of citizens’ incomes is already claimed by the State in taxes. Income is taxed at a minimum of 30% and most goods and services attract a further 20% in sales taxes. Along with all the fees and fines for going about daily life, and the highest energy prices in the world to pay for government ‘net zero’ targets, this means governments, local and national, in England are creaming off at least 60% of the income of its citizens. When the State becomes the majority procurer of goods and services, it is communist in all but name. Neoliberal China is a lower tax regime than England and a less heavily regulated place to do business. It is forbidden in China to get involved in politics except via the Communist Party. But even here England is rapidly out-doing China with hundreds of thousands of police investigations of social media posts, and the incarceration annually of over 2000 non-violent citizens whose ‘crimes’ are merely to say things that criticise government policies or cause offence.

Another parallel of contemporary England and communist regimes - such as those of Eastern Europe until 1989 - is that while the surveillance of citizens and destruction of private property via taxes and regulations are rampant, the infrastructure is in terminal decline. In England pot holes and uneven pavements remain un-repaired. In many places the roads are so bad it is impossible to drive even close to the speed limit. Yet local authorities spend huge sums on further slowing traffic with artificial chicanes, speed bumps, new sets of traffic lights, and ‘Low Traffic Zones’ which trap urban residents in streets they can no longer easily drive out of, and which destroy small neighbourhood businesses. If one tires of petrol prices, potholes and parking apps, English train tickets are the highest priced per mile in the world although the dozens of private companies leasing trains and track from government agencies are all heavily subsidised by the tax payer.

Even farmers, perhaps especially farmers, are not immune from the death pall of regulatory, rent and tax overload that is killing so many small and medium sized enterprises in the towns. I am writing this while staying at a friary which runs an estate of forest, rivers, ponds, and grazing land. It derives energy for wood chip boilers from the forest, and meat for its freezers from the grazing land. But when I asked why there are no chickens and ducks - which are the cheapest and easiest way for farmers and smallholders to generate protein from their land - I was told they aren’t allowed to keep them because of ‘bird flu’ regulations.

The keeping of chickens in England was subjected to government license during the alleged ‘COVID’ pandemic. But the licensing has not been lifted, This forces more and more people - and even farmers and smallholders - to buy eggs and chicken from mass-producing factory farms in supermarkets where infection control and welfare standards are far lower than on small and traditional mixed farms. Reducing access to home grown protein also reduces the resilience of the populace to supply-chain shocks of the kind that occurred in the COVID years.

The proliferation of licensing and regulation of food growers has been accompanied by an increasingly liberal approach to food sellers. Packaged foods in England are now widely adulterated with undeclared ingredients. Food regulations allow the purveyors of margarine in plastic tubs to label it ‘butter’ if it is made of vegetable oils with cows milk; the purveyors of ‘honey’ sell products that are mostly sugar which they are not required to declare on the label; and the purveyors of ‘beer’ - including long established companies such as Guinness which trade on their brewing heritage - sell beer that is made with high fructose corn syrup, and artificial flavourings. Among the most toxic ingredients in English food are the pesticides and herbicides - and especially gut and nerve corroding glyphosate - that are liberally sprayed on fresh produce, and also found in flour and processed foods, and which supermarkets are not required to declare.

Adulteration was a term widely used in Victorian England with reference to food and drink. Many food and drink items in markets and shops were adulterated with toxic ingredients which increased the quantity of what was being sold for lower cost than the genuine article. Britain’s population exploded from 9 million in 1801 to 37 million by 1901 during the industrial revolution, and given the poverty wages received by most industrial workers, demand for cheap provisions outstripped supply, fostering a marketplace rife with fraud. Bakers laced bread with alum and bone meal to stretch flour; brewers dosed beer with arsenic for froth; milkmen diluted cow’s milk with water, chalk, or even formaldehyde to mask spoilage. These practices exacted a huge public health toll, contributing to infant mortality rates as high as 150 per 1,000 live births in industrial cities like Manchester in the nineteenth century.

A crusade against food adulteration began in the early nineteenth century, fuelled by Enlightenment-era faith in science, and moral outrage over ‘invisible poisons’. The leading critic was German chemist Friedrich Accum, whose Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons sold thousands of copies (1820). Accum exposed the grotesque ingenuity of adulterers: red lead in cayenne pepper for colour, copper sulphate in pickles for vivid green, even ground glass in spices to add bulk. His methods—simple chemical tests—democratised detection, empowering consumers to test their own larders.

Accum’s work was revolutionary not just for its revelations but for framing adulteration as a moral failing of the mercantile class, analogous to usury or slavery. His work stirred public campaigns and parliamentary probes. But it also attracted fierce resistance from food producers. Accum was often reviled, and even accused of stealing books from the Royal Institution in London where he had compiled his index of adulterated foods. The view that prevailed was laissez-faire ideology championed by economists like Jeremy Bentham which prioritised ‘free trade’ over government regulation. Adulteration was seen as a market failure which consumer choice in the marketplace would eventually correct.

Food adulteration also featured in imperial ‘free trade’ after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. This led to a flood of imported adulterated foods from China and India. The most widespread imported toxin was lead chromate in tea, which sickened consumers on a large scale and undermined the alleged benefits to England of the mass poverty and slavery to which England subjected colonial territories.

The most ubiquitous contaminant was not imperial but domestic, in the form of arsenic added to many household items as well as foodstuffs. Use of arsenic in the dying of wallpapers, and in sweets and candies, led to a huge increase in infant mortality which culminated in what became known as the ‘Arsenic Green’ crisis of 1850.

In 1852 Arthur Hill Hassall was appointed chief medical officer to the General Board of Health. In that capacity Hassall published, in The Lancet, the results of microscopic examinations of thousands of samples of English foods in which he found that 60% of milk was watered, 40% of coffee chicoried, mustard bulked with lead, and gin adulterated with blindness-causing industrial alcohol. Hassall’s work, summarised in his Food and Its Adulterations (1955) led to Parliamentary action in the form of the Adulteration of Food and Drugs Act 1860 which criminalised selling adulterated goods ‘not of the nature, substance, and quality demanded’.

Efforts to eradicate food adulteration still faced fierce opposition from grocers’ guilds, who decried them as ‘trade interference.’ Enforcement of the adulteration of food and drugs act was therefore weak with only 1,000 convictions by 1870. Furthermore the Act only focused on town markets and shops which allowed rural purveyors to evade scrutiny.

The subsequent Sale of Food and Drugs Act 1875, provided a more comprehensive approach and harsher penalties, and Whorton describes it as the ‘Magna Carta of food law’ in his The Arsenic Century (2010). Under this new regime, prosecutions rose to over 5,000 annually by 1890 with margarine sold as butter being a prominent target. But meat and milk adulteration endured. In 1900 U.S. imports of beef were halted since it was found to be widely contaminated with formaldehyde. Milk adulteration remained extensive until the Milk and Dairy Act 1915 mandated random unannounced on-farm inspections.

In 1939 the government set up a Ministry of Food in Whitehall. Its staff analysed 1.5 million food samples annually by 1943, curbing enduring adulteration such as sawdust-laced flour. Postwar, the Food and Drugs Act 1955 extended the reach of adulteration regulation to include synthetic chemical preservatives as well as colourants. By the 1960s, routine inspections by local authority officers were around 200,000 annually. In the 1970s these inspections were extended to include pesticides in vegetables, antibiotics in meat, and lead in canned goods.

In the 1980s, the neoliberal government of Margaret Thatcher reoriented food production toward industry self-regulation. This led to the 1996 Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy crisis. Thatcher’s government deregulated the production of cattle feed which resulted in the mass poisoning of cattle with prions from sheep brains in cattle feed cooked at too low a temperature. But despite the role of deregulation in the BSE crisis, the government set up a new food regulation regime in 1997 under the aegis of a new Food Standards Agency. The FSA was mainly staffed by food industry insiders, and it shifted the food quality regime from regulatory enforcement through food inspections to industry ‘self-regulation’. Local authority food inspections declined from 100,000 in 2000 to under 20,000 by 2020 (FSA Annual Reports, 1998-2020).

Lang and Heasman (Food Wars, 2004) argue the new light-touch approach allowed the revival of ‘adulteration by stealth’. Pesticide and herbicide levels in fresh foods have risen since inspectors stopped regular tests for these. At the same time ‘traditional’ foods are now laced with industrially producer fats and fillers, with enforcement reliant on consumer complaints rather than proactive raids. The prime example, which led me to investigate this issue, is the large array of plastic tubs labelled ‘butter’ in all British supermarkets that are actually margarine mixed with cow milk fat to allow the fraudulent ‘butter’ label. 70 years after it was stopped by the Edwardians as food adulteration, margarine is once again being sold as butter in every English supermarket.

Margarine was invented in Napoleonic France as a substitute for butter since butter turned rancid on long military campaigns. Margarine today is composed primarily of industrially produced seed oils. Seed oils are industrial compounds extracted from seeds with heat and toxic solvents. These industrial fats are novel to the evolved human body and cause mitochondrial damage. They are the most significant factor in the large rises in obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and neurological conditions in industrial countries since the 1970s, as comprehensively documented by N. Teicholz in The Big Fat Surprise (2014). Seed oils are also oestrogenic, and overload the body with Omega 6 which crowds out the important Omega 3, and this can lead to neurological disease. Human bodies cannot also not easily process industrial fats and so they tend to get deposited on the human physique. Photographs of North Americans, or English, on beaches in the sixties show almost universally that people were of normal body size and shape. What changed in the 1970s was the widespread introduction of seed oils into human foods, often marketed as ‘healthy fats’ by the food industry.

The neoliberal food adulteration regime has led to a public health crisis in England with more than 64% of the English estimated by the National Health Service to be overweight in 2023, and an estimated 29% of that percentage obese. Given the zeal English parliamentarians, and civil servants, exhibited in response to a coronavirus in 2020-21 which was no more fatal than normal influenza outbreaks (the Infection Fatality Rate of COVID19 was 0.015% and the average age of English ‘COVID’ attributed deaths was 82, which is the average age of death) it is mystifying that England is now so lax on the adulteration of food and drink, and neglects their impacts on the health of its citizens.

The neoliberal argument that food quality regulation is a restriction on trade wears thin given the huge range of government regulation on every kind of economic activity in England. Tens of thousands of small and medium sized enterprises were closed down, never to reopen, as a result of the totalitarian restrictions of the COVID years. And now COVID is over, there is no shortage of local authority inspectors when it comes to innocuous activities such as parking a car, building an extension, or walking in a forest. Similarly there is no shortage of police for investigations into the newly invented crimes of ‘hate speech’ or ‘unlicensed broadcasting’ on social media of views that disagree with the involvement of the English State in the Ukraine War or genocide in Gaza.

Mass poisoning via the systematic adulteration of food and drink by supermarkets and industrial food processors is apparently no longer a Public Health priority in England. Instead the government and NHS devote most Public Health campaigns to promoting mass vaccinations. Historically vaccines hardly figure in the systematic decline in serious illness and death from infectious diseases. These declined to near zero in the 1950s, before mass childhood vaccinations began. This is because of the wiser Public Health interventions of the State in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on food adulteration, and subsequently on water quality, and air quality (Illich, Medical Nemesis, 1975).

In the COVID years the people most at risk of mortality from the coronavirus, other than the very elderly, were those whom the food industry had majorly contributed to making obese. It is predicted that the English NHS will eventually be overwhelmed by treating the huge toll of chronic diseases which sadly plague the overweight and are the consequence of large scale food adulteration by industrial food processors. And yet food inspections in supermarkets continue their downward decline, even as cameras in supermarket car parks are all primed to fine supermarket customers who overstay their permitted two hours of free parking.

England, whose nobles penned Magna Carta after the defeat of the Crown at the Battle of Lewes (1264), was once proud to be the birthplace of ‘freedom’ - of private property rights free from the capricious edicts, and thefts, of barons and monarchs. But a few centuries later, the majority of the English lost their property rights in Enclosures enabled by Parliament. Propertyless wage labourers were subjected to death-dealing poverty and adulterated food throughout the Industrial Revolution. Victorian Reformers sought to address this at the origins of what is now called Public Health. But in England today freedom from capricious government assaults on private property, and proper regulation of food adulteration, are both gone. Adulterated foods line the shelves of supermarkets that dot the new housing areas spreading over the urban outlands, as well as inner urban areas. Far from protecting citizens from criminality on this scale, the English government protects corporations - many of them foreign-owned - from the ideals of fair play and mutual trust that were once beloved of the English. The English are now a harried, poisoned and submissive race; over-taxed and over-surveilled; reduced to endless form-filling and phone apps in order to avoid fines and penalties for attempting to start a business, keep chickens, heat a new house, or park a car. Freedom is gone, and food adulteration is fashionable once again.

Michael Northcott is Professor Emeritus of Ethics and Theology at The University of Edinburgh and Adjunct Professor at the Indonesian Consortium of Religious Studies, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He is the author of many books and articles on environmental ethics and religion, the most recent of which is God and Gaia: Science, Religion and Ethics on a Living Planet (Routledge 2023). You can find him on Michael Northcott