hen the young
prophet cried out to his master, Elisha, over the pottage of wild
gourds, "There is death in the pot!" It was two thousand six hundred and
seventy years afterward, in 1820, that Accum, the chemist cried out over
again, "There is death in the pot!" in the title page of a book so
named, which gave almost everybody a pain in the stomach, with its
horrid stories of the unhealthful humbugs sold for food and drink. This
excitement has been stirred up more than once since Mr. Accum's time,
with some success; yet nothing is more certain than that a very large
proportion of the food we eat, of the liquid we drink--always excepting
good well-filtered water--and the medicines we take, not to say a word
about the clothes we wear and the miscellaneous merchandise we use, is
more or less adulterated with cheaper materials. Sometimes these are
merely harmless; as flour, starch, annatto, lard, etc.; sometimes they
are vigorous, destructive poisons--as red lead, arsenic, strychnine, oil
of vitriol, potash, etc.

It is not agreeable to find ourselves so thickly beset by humbugs; to
find that we are not merely called on to see them, to hear them, to
believe them, to invest capital in them, but to eat and drink them. Yet
so it is; and, if my short discussion of this kind of humbug shall make
people a little more careful, and help them to preserve their health, I
shall think myself fortunate.

To begin with bread. Alum is very commonly put into it by the bakers, to
make it white. Flour of inferior quality, "runny" flour, and even that
from wormy wheat--ground-up worms, bugs, and all--is often mixed in as
much as the case will bear. Potato flour has been known to be mixed with
wheat; and so, thirty years ago, were plaster-of-Paris, bone-dust, white
clay, etc. But these are little used now, if at all; and the worst thing
in bread, aside from bad flour, which is bad enough, is usually the
alum. It is often put in ready mixed with salt, and it accomplishes two
things, viz., to make the bread white, and to suck up a good deal of
water, and make the bread weigh well. It has been sometimes found that
the alum was put in at the mill instead of the bakery.

Milk is most commonly adulterated with cold water; and many are the
jokes on the milkmen about their best cow being choked etc., by a turnip
in the pump-spout--their "cow with the wooden tail" (_i. e._, the
pump-handle,) and so on. Awful stories are told about the London
milkmen,