Food Adulteration Analysis

In her article, Stern claims, “food adulteration was a serious problem in 1859 […] Throughout the 1850s and 1860s the number of people who ate ostensibly nutritious food, only to whither and die in consequence, provoked both governmental and popular alarm” (Stern 482). Stern connects this to Laura, who eats the paradisiac fruit and nearly dies (Stern 482). Furthermore, she writes, “Rossetti’s hungry girl offers us allegory at its most literal: because food is a commodity that one literally consumes, food adulteration makes material the grossest fears about capitalist corruption, and thus justifies the most paranoid attitudes toward market culture in general” (Stern 489). It is easy to see how this could have been a major concern, which Rossetti