From laboratory expertise to litigation: the municipal laboratory of Paris and the Inland Revenue laboratory in London, 1870-1914. A comparative analysis

Open Access

Abstract

During the second half of the 19th century increasing attention was devoted to food adulteration in several European countries and in the USA. National and local rules were adopted and their enforcement raised several problems. To start with, who was most qualified to lead with expertise on food and drink: scientists or food professionals? And which kind of expertise was superior: organoleptic or standardised "scientific" analysis? In turn these questions are related to the institutional framework in which the laboratories acted. Administrative, police expertise was quite different from judicial expertise, and there were fundamental tensions between local (municipal) and central authorities. In order to explore these questions we will compare the situation of laboratories in Paris and London. Common issues will be identified, mostly based on the increasing use of scientific arguments and tools in public debate. In France, the creation of municipal laboratories in the first years of the Third Republic was a major step in allotting responsibility for the sanitary management of food markets. Through a study of unexplored archives, the birth and activity of these laboratories is revealed, in particular of the Paris laboratory, which was the first (1878) and, without any doubt, the most important and controversial. We ask whether this institution was primarily intended to serve traders (for example, wine retail merchants who were suspicious of the composition of the product they bought from wholesalers), consumers (complaining about retailers), or local authorities (the prefecture, the municipality in their campaign against adulterated products)? We also question whether it was supposed to protect public health (and thus the consumer) or to regulate competition (and, thus, the relationship between traders)? In England and Wales the official government laboratory was in London, operated by the Inland Revenue in Somerset House, and designated by the 1875 Sale of Food and Drugs Act. It acted as a chemical Court of Appeal and sat in judgment on the efforts of local authority analysts. Like in France, there was fierce contestation about methods and standards but there was a difference here in that the expertise of the government scientists was regularly called into question by the Society of Public Analysts and by the press. The editor of Food and Sanitation, for instance, praised the approach adopted in Paris but was bitterly critical of Somerset House. In 1894 he spoke of the "wretched, ignorant, and utterly untrustworthy system of food analysis at Somerset House". It was a "poor, bungling department struggling to perform work for which it has not got the skill or knowledge". In his opinion, "scientifically the Somerset House chemists are dead, and there exists no shadow of an excuse for their remaining unburied." In order to provide a basis for comparison, we will address three points. First, we explore the designation of experts, the nature of their methods, and the imprimatur of their pronouncements. On the one hand, traders considered themselves as the best qualified people to judge product quality; for example, wine merchants in France stressed that only they had the required know-how to conclude that a wine has been falsified or not. In contrast, the municipal administration and a part of public opinion were rather favourable to a recourse to scientists, whose methods were presented as "objective". As such, the organoleptic analysis of traders stood against scientific chemical expertise. Second, to these conflicts between traders and scientists, we must add the question of disputes between the State and the municipalities. Because different municipal laboratories used different methods of analysis, the question arose of how to prevent meat that had, for instance, been rejected in Lyon or Liverpool being accepted in Paris or Portsmouth. The French response was to establish an official list of the methods of analysis valid for all municipal laboratories. This was first tried in the 1880s by establishing a national committee of control. However, the results were extremely poor. In 1907, after twenty years of debate, a National Service of Fraud Repression was started. By the authority of the Ministry of Agriculture, a municipal laboratory could act as an adjunct but only by special permission of the Minister. Such strong centralization reversed previous policies: municipalities lost any control over the quality of food products. This was accompanied by a standardization of the methods of analysis. Several decrees fixed in detail the methods and the instruments of analysis. In Britain the system remained devolved and it was a combination of vigorous scientific communication about methodologies and a series of court cases that provided the basis for greater standardization. Third, we will argue that laboratory organization was important. The most extreme example is the investment in commercial laboratories undertaken by the large dairy companies that emerged in the late nineteenth century and completely overshadowed the efforts of the central and local state on milk analysis. It was these 'industrial' laboratories who led the debate on compositional standards, particularly in Britain, and their scientific expertise held such weight that it influenced government policy and helped define what were to be considered 'natural' percentages of fat in milk. Overall, our paper indicates that comparative histories of laboratory expertise are valuable in understanding the evolution of food standards, with important additional perspectives on the development or organic chemistry and of the application of the law to issues concerning the 'natural'.