David F Smith, H Lesley Diack, T Hugh Pennington and Elizabeth M Russell, Food poisoning, policy and politics: corned beef and typhoid in Britain in the 1960s, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2005, pp. xiv, 334, illus., £50.00, $90.00 (hardback 1-84383-138-4).

Abstract

This handsome book—admirably including bottom-of-the-page footnotes rather than chapter endnotes—is the major published outcome of a Wellcome Trust-funded project on the Aberdeen typhoid outbreak of 1964. This last significant typhoid episode to date in Britain was caused by an ineffectively sealed can of corned beef from Rosario in Argentina, contaminated by the sewage-ridden river water in which it was cooled. In an Aberdeen supermarket the Rosario corned beef passed through a slicer and so infected many other cooked meats. More than 500 people were diagnosed with typhoid, although only three elderly or already very sick patients died. In examining the antecedents and immediate origins of this episode, along with the outbreak itself and some of its consequences, this book makes an important contribution to debates about evolving approaches to food safety. The method involves a close reading of policy on corned beef and other cooked meats in the 1960s, with meticulous archival work in the PRO and the National Archives of Scotland leavened intermittently by oral testimonies of civil servants, medical practitioners, traders, journalists and patients. Various issues and interests are outlined, each contributing to the Aberdeen outbreak: professional rivalries between veterinary inspectors and medical practitioners; government departmental rivalries, principally between MAFF and the Ministry of Health; territorial differences between Whitehall ministries and the Scottish Office; privileging of commercial and economic imperatives over safety concerns, particularly the importance of maintaining supply at stable prices, and the worry that British manufacturing exports could be lost if additional controls on South American meat imports were adopted. The principal follies identified are the secrecy of policy making, and the extremely slow and partial response to three smaller typhoid outbreaks in 1963, affecting Harlow, South Shields and Bedford, which clearly highlighted the dangerous use of contaminated water in the cooling of canned Argentine meat. Regulatory shortcomings are additionally explained by the “atomic meat” factor, with civil servants protecting the public integrity of the government's large stockpile of corned beef kept in the event of nuclear warfare. This was being released onto the market in rolling instalments as it aged, so civil servants were also protecting the government's commercial interest when downplaying its tangible connections with the plants implicated in the 1963 and 1964 outbreaks. Meanwhile civil servants in all departments, including the Scottish Office, deflected criticism of central government by encouraging the scapegoating of the Aberdeen medical authorities, and especially the medical officer of health, Ian MacQueen, whose conduct was criticized—unfairly, it is convincingly argued here—by the Milne inquiry that investigated the episode. There are perhaps three ways in which the book's analysis might have been developed. First, typhoid and the 1960s might have been positioned more strongly within the longer history of regulatory prevarication over food, with the submission to business interests and privileging of supply and price questions over safety and quality, a well established feature of the approach of MAFF, the Ministry of Health and even the short-lived Ministry of Food in the 1940s and 1950s. Second, the focus on the permanent governors, the civil servants, tends to obscure changing political priorities. In the conclusion, the propinquity of the Aberdeen outbreak to the 1964 election is noted. Given the parallels with the 1996 Lanarkshire E. coli tragedy, more might have been made of a fading Tory regime confronting a major social and political problem, harried by a Labour opposition that gained electoral capital but may have exaggerated the crisis in doing so. Third, the oral reminiscences could have been used more extensively, allowing a stronger juxtaposition of the outbreak's dramatic social and human dimensions with the low-key official manipulation of its origins and meaning. Yet overall this thoroughly researched and carefully written book helpfully extends our understanding of food policy, and raises the historical profile of an episode that remains a strong feature of the collective memory of north-east Scotland.