Most kinds of food fraud were perfectly legal in England during the early 1800s. Very few food swindles were banned, and those laws were rarely enforced. For example, it was technically illegal to adulterate coffee, but most coffee was heavily blended with cheaper chicory (a roasted root). Government officials said it wasn’t worth the trouble to enforce that old law. Coffee fraud was too hard to prove. They argued that it was best to ignore food fraud unless it cheated the government out of tax money.
This added up to one of the biggest and boldest social experiments of all time. What happens when there are so few rules that sellers can do just about anything they want to the food supply? England was about to find out.
Life During the Industrial Revolution