One of the earliest exposures of food adulteration, written by a German chemist who spent most of his career in England. This sensational popular scientific work exposed established scandalous practices within the food processing industry, antagonizing London food manufacturers. The scandal was particularly sensational since it affected consumers of all economic classes. However, after a lawsuit was brought against him Accum left England, living out the rest of his life as a teacher at an industrial institution in Berlin.

"A thousand copies of A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons were sold within a month of its publication. A second run was printed in the same year, and a German translation was printed in Leipzig two years later. The book's cover shows that Accum was capable of using dramatic imagery to try to draw attention to his scientific knowledge. It featured a rectangular frame supporting a spider's web and surrounded by intertwined snakes. A spider lurks in the middle of the web over its prey, and a skull crowns the entire collection with a caption beneath it, taken from 2 Kings 4:40: 'There is death in the pot' " (Wikipedia article Friedrich Accum, accessed 9-2017).

Digital facsimile of the first edition from the Internet Archive at this link; of the second edition, with different title page, at this link.