Chemical Additives

Extra ingredients have been added to foods for millennia to make preparation easier, to preserve, to enhance appearance and scents, to thicken, to improve nutritive value, to create intoxicants, and to add apparent social value (such as gold leaf on foods). Many additives have been beneficial or at least harmless, but others have been toxic, like mercuric compounds painted on foods to make them white and pretty and bits of brass added to the cooking water of vegetables to brighten the color. Others have been added inadvertently, such as lead from Roman drinking goblets or American colonial pewter tableware, and have resulted in illness or death.