Food has symbolic value within society and culture: it expresses social movements, power structures and patterns of living. Stephen Mennell argues that ‘changing structures of social interdependence and changing balances of power within society have been reflected in one particular cultural domain, that of food’. What Mennell's statement overlooks, however, is the way food not only symbolically reflects these structures, but has also been actively enlisted as a means of creating and disrupting them. In understanding the 1820s, a decade marked by unevenness and change, food can be a powerful tool for gaining insight into the different ways people attempted to both manifest and interpret that change. As such, this chapter turns to two texts that address food in the 1820s from markedly different perspectives. Friedrich Accum's A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons: exhibiting the fraudulent sophistications of bread, beer, wine, spirituous liquors, tea, oil, pickles, and other articles employed in domestic economy, and methods of detecting them was published in London in January 1820. It revealed and condemned the food adulteration undertaken in Britain, and particularly in London, by bakers, brewers and other food manufacturers. William Cobbett's Cottage Economy was published as a series of pamphlets in 1821 and 1822, and in book form in 1822. It was a rural management guide which aimed to radicalise food production by advocating the return to subsistence farming and self-sufficiency in response to increasing taxes and dependency on mass-produced goods. By paying attention to the adulteration and radicalisation of food within these texts, I demonstrate that both authors use morally charged language and dichotomies to elevate food's significance, playing with notions of nostalgia, sensation and fear to explore and construct contemporary anxieties surrounding surveillance. Even something as vital to daily life as food could become a locus for the doubt that has been seen as the characteristic mood of the decade.

In the years leading up to the 1820s, food systems were unstable. Poor harvests in the 1790s meant wheat prices soared, leading to the extended bread riots of 1795 and 1796. During the Napoleonic Wars, the market economy and Napoleon's blockades on trading imported grains meant prices continued to climb.