Shortlisted for the 2008 André Simon Awards
for excellence in gastronomic literature
(Winner announced March 12 2009)

Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee
- the Dark History of Food Cheats
by Bee Wilson - John Murray - NZ$32.99 (available in NZ Feb.12)

A fascinating mix of food politics, history and culinary detective work, Bee Wilson has uncovered many methods by which swindlers have tampered with food throughout history. From the leaded wine of ancient Rome to the food piracy of the twenty-first century, we see the extraordinary ways food has been padded, poisoned, spiked, coloured, substituted, faked and mislabelled everywhere it has been sold.

Bee Wilson reveals the strong historical currents which enable the fraudsters to flourish; the battle of the science of deception against the science of detection; and the struggle to establish reliable recognisable standards on a global scale.

About the Author
Bee Wilson is an award-winning food writer and historian. For five years she was the food critic for the New Statesman; since 2003 she has written a weekly food column for the Sunday
Telegraph (The Kitchen Thinker in Stella). For several years she was a research fellow at St Johns College, Cambridge, where she worked on the history of ideas.