BOOK REVIEW

Reviewed
Sheridan Griswold | Friday October 26, 2007 00:00

The Vitamin Murders is a riveting historical mystery told in two parts: first, the decline and fall of healthy eating; second, the murder of Jack Drummond and his family. By tracing the life of Drummond, Fergusson brings out the devastating downhill march of diets and the connection between the agrochemical industry, drugs, food and what has happened to the human body in the last 60 years. The beauty of it is the way - almost in the manner of John le Carr, (for example, The Constant Gardener see Mmegi 11 July 2003) - except that it isn't a novel - Fergusson brings in to his story the whole history of the relationship between France and Britain in the process. He got started on his investigations because of the birth of his first child and the discovery that his wife's breast milk was polluted and his body contained over 300 man-made chemicals that he would not have ingested if he had been born earlier (he's a 1980s man).Jack Drummond, born in 1891, was reared by an aunt and eventually, in 1944, became a fellow of the prestigious Royal Society. He was instrumental in changing the wartime diet of Britons through promoting cooking, gardening and feeding children in schools healthier foods. His research assistant at University College London, where Drummond was professor of biochemistry, was Ann Wilbraham, later his wife - she was murdered with him and their children in 1952 in France. 

In 1939 Drummond published The Englishman's Food: A History of Five Centuries of English Diet, which brought him to Lord Woolton's attention, the then Minister of Food.

His plan for distributing food based on sound nutritional principles caused Woolton to appoint him chief scientific advisor to the Ministry of Food. Lord Woolton said: 'I was more fortunate than any man deserved to be in finding him.' Rationing was introduced at the beginning of World War Two, not the end. During the Nazi U-boat blockade the health of Britons actually improved. After the war the American Public Health Association cited Drummond for a Lasker Award: 'The rates of infantile, neo-natal and maternal mortality and still births all reached the lowest levels in the history of the country. The incidence of anaemia and dental caries declined, the rate of growth of schoolchildren improved, progress was made in the control of tuberculosis, and the general state of nutrition of the population as a whole was up to or an improvement upon pre-war standard.' There are recipes galore from the experimental kitchen that are still valuable.

And many are the testimonies from those who worked under him: 'The bureaucracy was shot through with a strong streak of Blitz Spirit - a cheery, roll-your-sleeves-up amateurism that Drummond both promoted and personified.'Herrings and porridge, originally the typical English breakfast, had turned into bacon and eggs, but the former had the ideal combination of essential fatty acids - much better than the new breakfast cereals, consumption of which grew at pace with the sugar industry. The incidence of bone fractures rose among boys when margarine replaced butter in 1917 and fell when in 1922 it was restored. Learning how to cook was temporarily given attention in those days, though now it has been eliminated from the curriculum by successive Departments of Education. By 1918 Drummond had already become a nutrition expert - he had studied malnutrition in poor urban communities in the winter of 1916. In 1922 he was appointed to UCL's newly created Chair of Biochemistry, a department he developed and which influenced this new field immensely. Drummond saved thousands of lives in Holland in May 1945, travelling secretly through collapsing enemy lines to the western parts where they were subsisting on sugar beet and fried tulip bulbs. Some 30,000 people had already starved to death during the 'Hongerwinter' of 1944.

Negotiations with the German occupiers led to Operation Manna in which RAF (Royal Air Force) Lancasters swapped their bouncing bombs for K-rations and air-dropped 7,000 tons of food in a single week. Audrey Hepburn was one of those saved by these actions.

Easily digested porridge, the 'Drummond mixture', was also used for recently freed Bergen-Belsen inmates. He published Nutrition and Relief Work: A Manual, in 1945. The Dutch made him a Commander of the Order of Orange Nassau. James Fergusson keeps us up-to-date through his own family life. He got started on this research on nutrition when his wife got pregnant. He discovered that he and his wife had quite a load of toxins in their bodies. They are not one of the 'fatties' they see around them in the street and stores.

'The rate of obesity in the American heartlands was running 30 percent - about double what it had been on my last visit in the 1980s'. 'The size of portions [served at meals] bore no resemblance to anything found in Western Europe ... Melissa and I soon learned to order for one and then share'. The fizzy drinks amazed them. 'Our European eyes were dazzled by the choice on display. We counted at least 50 brands for sale, their very names seemed marvelous to us.' There was not even any water for sale.

The most commonly used sweetener was High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS is six time sweeter than cane sugar) and their palate found it too sweet. The human liver is unable to break fructose down in the normal way, instead converts it straight into fat. But Coke and Pepsi switched to 100 percent HFCS in 1984. Then Fergusson discovered that the obesity levels in Britain were rising faster than anywhere else in the world. Because Melissa was pregnant they became obsessed with 'the monster of dietary ignorance' which Drummond had sought to slay in the 1940s! Melissa embarked on a sacred mission to purify her body. James teased her about becoming an 'orthorexic', an eating disorder identified in 1997 by Stephen Bratman, a nutritionist from Colorado. Symptomatic of a deepening crisis were the many food scares, for instance about cranberries producing cancer of the thyroid due to the weed-killer Aminotriazole; and the eating of beef in 1996 causing Mad Cow or Creuzfeldt - Jacob Disease.

All this led eventually to the Fergussons realising that Britain had been lavishly spraying farmers' fields with chemicals that blew into their yard and that were affecting most of their fresh fruits and vegetables on sale. They had themselves tested in a biolab and found to have quite large doses of Lindane, which bio-concentrates in the food chain, in the fatty tissues of fish, for instance. Lindane is also known as HCH, a triple compound of chlorine, carbon and hydrogen which was dubbed '666' shortening its chemical formula and its true toxicity lay only in its gamma isomer. It is practically tasteless, though it tended to make food taste musty, but they never tested for anything but taste and seemed not to care what effects it had on humans. HCH was especially effective against mosquitoes and was the magic bullet for weevil and wireworm, enemies of potatoes and wheat, the most important home crops of Britain during the war. The Fergussons began to order organic vegetables and eliminated farmed salmon from their diet, due to the 14 chemical substances in the mash fed to the salmon.

A new syndrome was discovered: 'food scare fatigue' and of course the farmed variety was cheaper by far and made to look pink to fool the public into thinking it was wild salmon.

The second part of this book, on the murder of the Drummonds, you'll need to read yourself and decide whether it was part of a great international conspiracy? Fergusson believes that this was not a random murder. Why was Drummond in southern France spying on a factory that made Lindane? Fergusson now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. His first book is Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds (2005
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