The Sawdust in Your Spice Cabinet
A Seattle newspaper exposé from 1888 reveals that the city's food supply was being systemically poisoned by greed, with sawdust in spices and grease in butter.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Investigation by the agricultural department found that in Washington Territory and elsewhere, spices and condiments in the open market were heavily adulterated. 40 percent of allspice, 30 percent of cassia, 40 percent of cloves, 60 percent of cinnamon or ginger, 70 percent of pepper, and all of the mustard had been tampered with. The average adulteration was found to be more than 60 percent. These were 'cheap stuffs' added to deceive the public, consisting of mustard husks, hulls, flour, cornmeal, terra alba, charred sawdust, sand, oil cake, and bean meal.
We look at the milkman who waters his milk, the grocer who sells oleomargarine that looks like butter, and think they are impure. Yet it is the demand for 'cheap' goods that forces the analyst to find sawdust and tallow. It does seem a little cruel to awaken the public from their dream by telling the head of the house that he has bought tallow, lard, and cow’s udder mixed instead of butter, and the good matron that her spice bottles contained about two-thirds sawdust and sand. And yet this very thing is done daily by the merchants of Seattle and every city and town in Washington Territory.
“Here we are, eating tons of sawdust and calling it spices, tons of grease and calling it butter; drinking hogshead after hogshead of water and calling it milk.”
Today's concerns about 'ultra-processed foods' and transparency in labeling have deep roots. The 1888 cry for 'cheap' food mirrors modern anxieties about the true costs of affordable, mass-produced groceries and the hidden compromises in our supply chain.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.