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This article was originally published in the April 2025 print edition of Byline Times
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We’ve been poisoning ourselves with lead for at least the last 2,000 years.
Lead is easy to extract from its various ores, easy to work, melts at a low temperature (which makes it perfect for solder), and doesn’t corrode in air or water.
As a result, from Ancient Rome until the 20th Century, we’ve used it to store and move liquids and foods, turning it into pipes, pans, cisterns, roofs, and cans.
It’s also very bad for us – and can be lethal once levels get over 150 micrograms per ml of blood. Lead attacks us at a cellular level, mimicking the essential role played by calcium, iron, and zinc in key enzyme-driven processes. At high concentrations, this causes serious damage to blood formation, kidney function, our nervous system, and slows down the growth and proper function of the neurons in our brains.
The problem is that building up to this dangerous level can take years, even decades, so the poisoning may not be noticed for a long time. Mild symptoms include abdominal pains, headaches, constipation, anaemia, depression, insomnia, and a general lack of energy – much the same as what we now call ‘stress’. More serious symptoms are delusions, convulsions, paralysis, blindness, and eventually death.
The Romans had a particular love for lead.
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It is estimated that, in 500 years, they mined 20 million tons of the metal, much of it in Britain. Every plumber, builder, cook, vintner, coin-maker, and undertaker fell over themselves to find new uses for it. Roman dentists even used lead as fillings for teeth.
The Romans not only kept their food and drink in lead vessels, they ate it too.
The most popular sweetener in Ancient Rome (sugar cane hadn’t been discovered yet) was called sapa. It was made from boiling old wine in lead pans. What was left were white crystals of lead acetate that looked and tasted just like sugar (sometimes known as ‘sugar of lead’). It was deliciously sweet and helped preserve wine, so the Romans added it to everything. In the famous 5th Century CE cookbook usually attributed to Apicius, sapa appears in a quarter of the 450 recipes.
The average Roman aristocrat was ingesting 250 micrograms of lead per day – five times what we ingest on average today. Some historians have even linked the increasingly bizarre and erratic behaviour of Roman emperors, and the low birthrate among the Roman nobility, to lead poisoning.
Using lead in the kitchen wasn’t confined to the Romans.
For centuries, the standard European drinking vessels were glazed mugs or goblets – with as much as 60% of the glaze being made from lead oxide. As they aged and became more pitted and cracked, more lead leached into the drinks they held.
One of the rare examples of lead poisoning being correctly identified occurred in 18th Century Devon. The so-called Devon Colic was first recorded in 1703 and was finally attributed to the effects of lead in 1767.
Thousands of Devonians had fallen victim to the mystery illness, some of them had suffered blindness, fits of madness, paralysis, and several had died, before George Barker, the Queen’s physician, declared that it was lead poisoning caused by the local cider.
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Barker tested the cider and found that it contained, on average 5 ppm of lead, enough to build up in a regular drinker’s system and cause symptoms of the colic. The culprit turned out to be the lead linings in the apple presses used to make the drink, and the lead pipes that carried the acid juice to the fermentation vat. Some village cider presses used considerably more lead than others, hence the variability in the symptoms reported.
This made Barker very unpopular – he was even denounced from the pulpit of Exeter cathedral as “a faithless son of Devon”. But he pressed on regardless and, gradually, the lead was removed from the presses. By 1818, almost no cases of the colic were being reported.
One of the correspondents who encouraged Barker to go public with his findings was Benjamin Franklin, who recalled a similar outbreak of colic when he was a boy which had been linked back to the rum from New England and the lead used in the stills. He wrote to a friend in 1786: “You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally receiv’d and practis’d on.”
Even so, lead wasn’t banned in pottery glaze in the UK until 1948. Lead in paint took until 1992. And lead in petrol until 1996. In 2021, the WHO recorded 1.5 million deaths as being due to exposure to lead.
It’s hard not to see in the Devon Colic, a regrettable human tendency to persist in our folly – despite the clear scientific evidence – until it is too late.
Sound familiar?