Not since Eve ~ mother of all things ~ threw away the core of her forbidden fruit, have we so unfavourably considered plants it seems. We seem to consider Nature our ugly stepmother, and so distrustful are we of her produce that we bleach her flour, colour her oranges, and treat her potatoes so they will not reproduce and show their ugly eyes to us.
       Even before our food falls into the hands of those additive addicts the processors, the growers themselves ~ those 'guardians of the soil' ~ attack it with dicamba, bromoxynil, mecoprop, dichlorprop, and such chemicals as are hidden in the strange formulae as 2,4- D amine, 2,4-D ester, MCPA, Banvel D, or Ductril M, which are recommended to farmers by the various departments of agriculture.
       In processing, additives by the thousands are poured into our foods: preventives of mold and staleness; preservatives and bleaches; artificial flavouring, sweetener and dyes; emulsifiers, fumigators, anti-foaming, anti-sprouting agents, and parafin sprays. Packaging with its use of waxed papers and cartons, adds contaminants through lacquers, enamels, and plastics.
       Yet it appears that business throughout the ages have assured that they would 'maximize profit'. Will Durant (in his volumous The Story of Civilization) noted that the pamphlet literature of sixteenth century Europe "groaned with denunciations of wholesale adulteration of food and other products." Pepper apparently always had been mixed with mustard husks, pea flour, juniper berries, and sweepings off the store-room floor. The Diet of Innsbruck (1518) complained that importers "add brick dust to ginger, and mix unhealthy stuff with their pepper."
       Tea was mixed, according to Reay Tannahill in Food in History, with 'smouch' which was made especially for the purpose from leaves of the ash tree, "dried and curled on copper plates". Dried thorn leaves, poisonously coloured with verdigris, served the same purpose. Commercial bakeries in the eighteenth century whitened their products with alum, lead gave cheese its appealing colour, cocoa powder was complemented with large amounts of brick dust, and the hearty foam on the beer of that time was owed to green vitriol or sulphate of iron.
       Bon appetit.