Part One: The Food And Drug Administration

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Oh, Behind the Fasterds is the podcast you're listening to
right now. I'm Robert Evans, the host. We we talked
about bad People tell you all about him, and today
my guest Matt leeb who is a comedian and also
mind Leebling. Yes, yeah, yeah, that's that's that's cute. Your

(00:26):
name is Matt Lee Mine Leebling kind of yeah. Leeb
Is is German for love, you know. So it's like,
you know, some people call me Maddie loved love yeah,
big Papa l Like these are all like I would
like people to know one's actually done it yet. But
if you want to call me Maddie Love, big Papa

(00:47):
l um, you know, the love Maddie, whatever you want,
just you know, fucking call me nice names. Uh yeah,
that's what this podcast is. This is the show where
I say nice things about a random guest. Yeah. If
you want the show where I say cruel things about
a random guest, just just stick around for another half

(01:08):
hour and I'm gonna make Gilbert Godfried cry. Um. You
know I love Gilbert. Anyone who has the courage to
get up on stage the day after nine eleven until
James about nine eleven is a hero. He wasn't the
true hero of nine eleven. Gilbert Godfried Firefighters and Gilbert

(01:32):
Godfrey freed again, Matt before we get into it, because
the topic today is just gonna blow people away. You
want to you want to plug anything right now? Oh yeah,
well I do a the only Sopranos podcast. It's a
rewatch podcast of the Sopranos called Pod Yourself a Gun. Um,
so yeah you should. You should check that out if

(01:53):
you like the Sopranos. Even if you don't like the Sopranos,
you know, it's just it's just a good time. And
the Pod Yourself a Gun is legally the only Sopranos podcast.
If you hear another one called the a t F.
They regulate that and they'll go shoot those people's dogs. Yeah, no,
that's a that's what does I know. I don't like

(02:14):
that vibe. I know it's not cool that that's their job,
but it is. It is their job. Yeah, yeah, no,
there's some people think there's this other sopros podcast, but
that's a that's like a deep fake. So don't funk
with that. That's the deep state trying to trick you exactly.
That's a PSI op to get you to uh to like,
you know, the wire instead. But yeah, it's really just

(02:36):
a stealth the Wire podcast exactly, and that show this
is about the shit. Yeah hell yeah. Also I do
a movie podcast called the Film Drunk Podcast. Both of
those are with Vince Mancini, who is my co host
and pod life partners. Now is he at all related
to Boom Boom Mancini? He I doubt it, um, but

(02:57):
it's it's possible. So about Boom Boom Mancini killed the
guy all. Vince Mancini is also the name of Sonny
cor Leoni's bastard son in Godfather Part three, So that's
very fun. A lot of mafia tians with this, Uh
speaking of mafia's you know what else is an unaccountable

(03:17):
group of dangerous criminals matt um the police. Well, yes,
this is a long time coming back, but but but
this is even worse than the police met today. We're
talking about the archbastard of them all, the f d A.
Oh ship, Yeah, that's right, motherfucker, the Food and Drug Administration.

(03:38):
That's right, that's who we're We got two parts on
the f d A this week. You know, that's literally
this is I did not know I was coming in
here expecting. Listen, We've talked about Nazis, we talked about Nazis,
We've talked about dr Oz, We've talked about people who uh,

(03:59):
you know, created the boy Scouts and touched all amateurs,
all amateurs right heart hydra and got ship on the
food and drug Okay, I might be going a little far.
I'm excited. Yeah, we we we. We make a lot
of fun of the f d A. And I've always
found like goating them into violence funny because they're kind
of like the most milk toast three letter agency the

(04:21):
government has. Right The FBI is like terrifying, the a
t F is this big drunken, bloodthirsty frat boy. The
CIA kills entire governments, And meanwhile, the FDA can't even
like ban people from drinking bleach in a timely manner,
Like it takes years to be like we probably shouldn't
let people give their kids bleach water. They just do.
Press conferences were like stop, yeah, gys, this is bad

(04:44):
for you. Just schoolmarm. But the reality is that that
kind of like amiable toothlessness is a front that hides
an agency as corrupt and deadly as any part of
the U. S. Government in fact, probably has greater society
a harm in a lot of ways than most. Our
friends at the FDA may have a have a body
count that might might shock you. But before we get

(05:07):
into that, we should spend some time talking about the
world before the FDA, because this is not just as
simple as story as like government agency does bad things.
It's actually like it's like an Anakin Skywalker story of
this great hero who rises up and then crumbles. The
f d A is the Anakin Skywalker of three letter
Agencies ship. So we're today we're gonna like lead up

(05:28):
to them becoming a Jedi, and the next episode they
wind up falling in the lava planet oh ship A
man that's great and and well, well we'll try to
figure out throughout this who the Obi wan Kenobi of
the f d A s, because that's actually I think
I may have but well, I'm getting ahead of myself. Family. Well, yeah,

(05:52):
once upon a time, people foraged, trapped, and hunted for food,
generally in that order of like amount of calories gained. Right, Uh,
we developed methods of preservation over time. Um, you know,
stuff like you'd salt your meat, and you could make
like a jerky. You could even like even if you're
a hunter gather, you could do that in a cave
or something. Um, you would smoke certain things, you know.
And as as as time went on, more foods we

(06:15):
got better at preserving stuff, and we also got better
at like trading, and so more foods began to travel
greater and greater distances. But the extent to which most
foods could actually go geographically was very limited, right. You
couldn't You couldn't take mangoes from one place to a
place like a thousand miles away, you know, eight hundred
nine hundred years ago. Very well, you could take like
the seeds, maybe you could grow them, but like mangoes

(06:35):
don't last all that long fast. So a lot of
stuff like that's why some of this stuff became like
surprized because if you could manage to get it to
like the emperor or something, it was a gift that
was really valuable. Because you couldn't get stuff to travel
nearly as far as you can today, which meant that
like back for most of human civilization, people ate pretty
locally by default. Right, there was trade and like spices

(06:56):
and stuff that keeps well. But like most food was
grown or whatever, hunted, trapped whatever, pretty close to where
you lived. Now. When the Napoleonic Wars kicked off in
the early eighteen hundreds, our boy Nappy offered a bounty
to any inventor who could figure out a cheap, quick
and effective way to preserve food and quantity, right, because
you still have this problem in the eighteen hundreds of

(07:17):
like we can kind of salt meat, we can bake
these like shitty really hard biscuits, hard tack and stuff
that like will keep for a while, but like most
stuff doesn't keep well, and like scurvy's a problem. Vitamin
deficiencies are a problem because if you're like on the march,
or if you're usually not on the march, but like
you're posted up and fortified in like the winter, it's like, well,
how do you get everyone? Maybe you don't have a
lot of food available in the winter, so either you're

(07:38):
gonna be like foraging from the local area or stealing
from people, or you have a lot of famines cause
because an army will camp out suddenly and they'll take
all the food in the surrounding area. Um So Napoleon's like,
I have a lot of war I want to do,
and I don't want to be limited by the fact
that we're shipped at preserving food. So somebody figure out
a way to do this. Napoleon does this with a
bunch of stuff. He's a very like forward thinking he's

(08:00):
real pretty smart dude. Um and this this bears fruit
very quickly. In eighteen o nine, a French brewer named
Nicholas Appert realized that food cooked inside a glass jar
and sealed didn't spoil. If you put whatever kind of
food or something in a glass jarry stick and some
salt or some spices, you cook it at for a while,
it'll stay good for I mean really for years in

(08:20):
some cases, and on think they were that good at them.
But it'll stay good at hell of a lot longer
to invented pickles. Not quite. But this is the guy
who started the process of inventing canning. Um. And the
French state was unable to master the art of canning
and quantity right. They figure out that this works, but
it's like figuring out how to make the seals right
and how to get like it's a process. We're not

(08:42):
as good at glass then as we are now, so
like having glass that can stand because you have to,
like I do a lot of canning now. A good
friend of mine taught me how. And it's you have
to like basically boils a can with food in it
for like minutes, you know. So like the glass, it
takes a while to make glass that can reliably stand
up to that even the day some of it's gonna break. Um,

(09:04):
So it's a Processingly, I totally relate to that every
time I try to can Yeah, you know, I just can't.
I'm as as a fellow canner. I uh, you know,
it's just I get it, dude. Hard, It's hard. It's hard.
It's hard to do if you're like trying to make
an army's worth of food and preserve it. So they
figure out that this works, um, but it doesn't really

(09:25):
get the French government doesn't get good at it in
time for Napoleon to to stop to to like not
lose his wars, right, um, and it would have helped
like the whole Russian campaign, having like good canned and
tin food might have really helped out. You know, I
really would have liked that could have been it could
have been a game changer. It could have been a
game changer, man. But you know, but obviously, like now

(09:47):
that the basic idea is understood, the process gets more
and more developed over kind of the early to mid
eight hundreds, and it spreads all throughout Europe. As soon
as other nations realized this as possible, a lot of
resources get developed into like canning and then hinting food.
The Portuguese are like the best at tending effectively. If
you'll wind up in like Lisbon, ever, which is a
beautiful city, Um, the airport has like these stores that

(10:08):
are just hundreds of different kinds of weird canned foods,
like stuff you've never seen canned. Because that's like Portugal's
motherfucking thing is canning, particularly like seafood, out of just
we're canning different fucking weird. This is just yeah, we
just put some dirt in a can. Nobody can stop

(10:28):
us anything in a candy yeah. And these are this this,
these developments and canning and tending are a huge part
of why the last huge because the biggest wave of
European colonization is the eighteen hundreds, right, that's like the
when stuff really starts to go huge. Um, outside of
like you know, North and in Central America and um,

(10:50):
like the scramble for Africa and stuff, and a lot
of like the colonialism and in in Asia starts happening
in this period. UM. And canned in tin food is
a big part of what makes that possible. It's a
big part of like why these guys we've talked about
on the show, these explorers in Africa and whatnot, for
like Leopold are able to do what they're able to
do because they're able to take, you know, a lot
of what they need with them and keep it in
the jungle heat. So cans aided like global colonialism. Oh absolutely, Yeah,

(11:15):
it's hugely important. UM, being able to like reliably have
the nutrition you need and take it for a significant
period of time. That's a that's very important. I never
even considered that. Yeah. Yeah, So Nicholas Appert had stumbled
upon canning, but he didn't really know at the time
what he was doing. And today we call the process
that he kind of helped to discover pasteurization. UM. And

(11:36):
this is again heating a liquid to one forty degrees
for about twenty minutes pasteur and the guide that the
pasteurization comes from actually like figured out what pasteurization was
and like, scientifically what was going on, And he did
this in the eighteen fifties. Well, he was actually trying
to preserve wine. Uh So, eighteen fifties past year discovers

(11:57):
pasteurization um, which people already kind of knew about. But
he's like the guy who figures out scientifically what's going
on and slapped his fucking name on it. That's right,
but he's just trying to preserve wine. It takes another
twenty years before a German chemist figures out that the
same process could work on milk, which at the time
was filled with salmonella and tuberculosis. We will talk a

(12:18):
lot about how fucked up milk was in the that's
like half of this episode. Milk was a fucking nightmare
back in the day. Like I don't give a ship, Like,
however much you like Lovecraft cosmic horror, nothing is scarier
than milk. In the eighteen seventies, it was like, that's
a great question, Matt, because it sounds like a nightmare.

(12:40):
Everything was just so gross back then. Yeah, yeah, they're like, listen,
one out of four of these main courses is going
to kill you. Anyways, might as well, add some milk
to it. Yeah, So the Germans figure out that you
can pasteurized milk, and like the eighteen seventies, and obviously
milks not the only thing you can past yourized, but
that that's when that gets figured out. But pasteurized milk
doesn't really hit the US in quantity until the thirties,

(13:01):
So there's like a sixty year period where we can
but we aren't. And this is the story of why.
So in eight nine, Harvard microbiologist Theobald Smith discovered salmonella,
which obviously had existed for a long time and been
killing people for a long time. But he figures out
like why people are dying from milk? Um, and he
suggests like, hey, we should pasteurize this stuff. The Germans

(13:22):
have figured it out. It's very easy. You just have
to heat this ship up for a while. Um. And
there's this immediate panic by the American Pediatric Society who
as soon as this guy is like, we should be
pasteurizing our milk, they're like, pasture heated milk will give
baby scurvy, it robs it of nutrients. Don't do it.

(13:43):
Was there like a reason like why would they give
a ship or are they just in the pocket of
big raw milk. You hear it a bunch like that,
Like cooking vegetables, steaming vegetables. You lose some I'm sure
you do lose some nutrients. I don't think it's enough
to have any meaningful impact on diet. And I think
it's that kind of we're like, yeah, it's fine, Like
maybe there's a little less nutrition, but there's also no salmonella.

(14:05):
That's probably a bigger problem for the baby. That's the
best trade off. Babies are notoriously vulnerable to dying. Um,
that's what everybody says about. They're so easy to kill.
Oh my god, don't you every time? I like, easy, dude, easy,
If I wanted to, I could kill like many babies

(14:26):
in a row. Absolutely, I'm not, but I could do it.
But it's good to know. It's good to know, you know.
Sometimes I just like walk past the park and go
like I could take you all if I needed, if
I needed to, you know, if I needed to, if
the chips were down anyway. So there's this immediate like
backlash against pasteurization, which is mainly due to like the expense,

(14:49):
it's going to cost money to do this they're gonna
have to retool the milk producers. You'd have to retool
your whole production line to allow for pasteurization. Um. Now,
obviously pasteurization would also allow milk to last a lot longer.
You can keep it good for a shipload longer if
you pasteurize it. So a logical person might say like, hey, yeah,
you're gonna spend more money retooling your production lines, but

(15:09):
you'll get to keep your milk for longer and it'll
all work out in the end. Um. But the milk
companies are just like, no, it's gonna cost us money, Like,
fuck that ship. We don't want to stop having our
cow juice dumped into a bottle that a guy then
sneezes a mouthful of chewing tobacco into before half acidly
ceiling and leaving a the hots son. So they resisted pasteurization,

(15:30):
but they were really open to better at ways to
preserve milk. They just wanted it to be cheaper than
pasteurization was going to be. In eighteen nine six, Dr
John Herdie, a former professor from Purdue, formally endorsed the
use of use of formaldehyde as a good food preservative.
Now that sounds like we're gonna say something like quack
doctor ship. It's actually not that fucked up. A whole

(15:51):
lot of foods you eat every day contained formaldehyde. There's
formaldehyde and pairs and apples and like all crustacean uh
that all crustaceans that we eat in mushrooms, they've all
got some amount of formal behyde in them. It's it's fine.
It exists in because it preserves things like generally, when
you're looking at like fruits that last longer on the shelf,
it's because there's some formaldehyde in them. We're not shooting

(16:12):
them into that. It's just like a thing that occurs
in nature. Um. So Dr Herdie realizes this and he's like, well, clearly,
even though like this stuff can be toxic, and quantity
tiny amounts of it can be fine. And so he
proposed using a very small amount two drops of formal
lyne and formal line is like formaldehyde six water. So
just two drops of very deluded formaldehyde per pint of milk.

(16:36):
So that's his suggestion. If we do, if we put
in a tiny amount, it will make the milk keep
a lot longer and it won't be toxic. Um, they'll
still have well, will it still have salmonella though? I mean,
uh yeah, I mean potentially yes, that does. It does
not clear the salmonella part. Now, that said like, the
longer you leave it out, the more risk of a
lot of bad things happen. So it does make it
a lot safer. Um. But so he's like, hey, a

(16:57):
tiny amount of formaldehyde can help your milk last longer
on the shelf. The milk producers big businesses. All they
hear is, oh, there's a way to make our product
lasts longer. Uh, and we should just pour as much
of the ship in there as we possibly can. Right.
And to talk about how this went, I'm going to
quote Deborah Bloom, who was like the fucking expert on

(17:18):
specifically this ship, writing for Smithsonian magazine. Quote, So, dairymen
began increasing the dosa fermaldehyde, seeking to keep their product
fresh for as long as possible. Chemical companies came up
with new formaldehyde mixtures with an ocuous names such as
ice lean or preserve a Lean for milk died. The
latter was said to keep a pint of milk fresh

(17:39):
for up to ten days, and as the dairy industry
increased the amount of preservatives, the milk became more and
more toxic. Heard. He was alarmed enough that by eight
he was urging that formaldehyde used to be stopped, citing
increasing knowledge that the compound could be dangerous even in
small doses, especially to children, but the industry did not
heed the warning. In the summer of nineteen hundred, the
Indianapolis News reported the deaths of three infants in the

(18:01):
city's orphanage due to formaldehyde poisoning. A further investigation indicated
that at least thirty children had died two years prior
due to the use of the preservative, and in nineteen
o one, Hurdy himself referenced the death of deaths of
more than four hundred children due to a combination of
formaldehyde dirt in bacteria in the milk. Another analysis calculated
that there was so much raw ship in milk that

(18:22):
the citizens of Indianapolis consumed and estimated two thousand pounds
of poop per year. What the so it's not just
the formaldehyde, but they go hog wild, They're just dumping
it in there. Um, it's very funny. Two thousand pounds
of ship per year by the city of Indianapolis. I mean,
just like straight there's they're just they're the dudo is

(18:44):
in the milk. The ship in the milk. Now too,
Oh there's always been ship in the milk, buddy, man. Well,
I don't know if you've ever had like livestock, but
they're not they get ship gets everywhere they poop and
they're not. They don't like it's like you've seen that
pig poop balls image, like, oh yeah, my favorite animals
that get poop on them and they don't really care
about it that much. And sometimes that means poop's going

(19:06):
to get in the milk, especially if you're keeping them
in like a really dirty, horrific feed lot where like
the ship piles up to their ankles. Um. And we'll
talk about the conditions these cows are kept in because
oh boy, Matt, are you going to enjoy that organic?
Do do? Bath? Let's hear about it, dude, I'm excited now.
So this guy Hurti, who had been like, yeah, a

(19:27):
little bit of for amalde hyde might help and then
was like immediately horrified by what the food industry was doing. Um.
He becomes an advocate for reform within the legal system
to stop this stuff, and as a result of his lobbying,
Indiana passes a pure food law in eight which should
have made the adulteration that, as we already said, went
on well passed eighteen nine very illegal. But this keeps

(19:49):
going on because the law was kind of it was
more of an aspirational law than a real law, because
they were like, this isn't allowed. But they were also like,
we're going to spend zero dollars to stop this, Like
we we're not gonna you will not enforce this, like
we don't have the resources to stop the formaldehyde milk
from spreading, but we just want to let you know

(20:09):
not cold. It is kind of my ideal situation for drugs,
where we keep them illegal, but we also make it
like fire all of the police in in d e
A Agents so that nobody can prosecute you for it,
and then you can still feel cool when you do drugs. Right, Yeah,
that's that's the ideal. That's the sea. Yeah. You convince
children not to do heroin until you turn a certain age,

(20:31):
and you know, and exactly, yeah, that's the age of yeah,
a certain amount, right, yeah, you know, yeah, a little bit,
a little bit goes a long way. It's like that,
and that's why they used to give babies medicinal children's
medicinal heroin, good times. That's why our grandparents were all healthy. Yeah,

(20:52):
so chill about everything. That's why they spent their whole
lives withdrawing love our grandparents. Yeah so uh. The year
after that log gets passed in in Indiana, Herdi's lab
analyzes a pint bottle of milk that was handed to
them by a family, and the family like buys some
milk for their baby, and they noticed that as they

(21:14):
describe it, the milk appears to be wriggling. Oh fuck
you like this one, man, So I don't even have
to do like a chemical analysis. I'm like a big
milk drinker, so this is gonna fuck me up. Like
I just I enjoy a glass of milk and a banana.
It's my one of my favorite little snacks. It turns

(21:34):
out that what happened was that the dairyman had cut
his milk because he wanted to make it go longer
like heroin, and he cuts it with stagnant water, and
there there was a worm colony in the stagnant water,
and so many larva breed in the milk that it's
just like a kind of soggy, massive, writhing larga larva
they find for their baby. It's got extra protein called

(22:00):
moving milk. Milk. Oh you got some of that still
milk up, still milk. I happen to love my child.
I want them to get the extra nutrients real babies have.
It's like we call it a milkshake. This is the
origin of the milkshake. Some poor motherfucker was eating cereal

(22:21):
when this episode started. Oh so Indiana. Obviously we've been
focusing on because Dr Herdi was there and he gave
a shit about this. This is happening every state in
the Union, right, This is everywhere everywhere that there's a city.
At least. I think people who live in rural areas
probably have access to healthier milk because they're getting it

(22:44):
directly from the cow. They're probably better conditions for the cow.
Um they're not, you know, buying it from somebody who's
gonna mix in pond water filled with the ship it's
the city milk that's just and thus the milk that
the most people are drinking is fucking poison milk. Now,
in the eighties, one group of researchers had analyzed, like

(23:06):
this is happening all over the U. S. And in
New Jersey there's a case from the eighteen eighties where
these researchers analyzed random samples of milk um and they
just they found what they described as liquefying colonies of
bacteria and numbers so great that they gave up counting.
Like it's just like this isn't even where that like
a lot. This isn't this is just just bacteria. This

(23:28):
is pure bacteria. Yeah, they have eaten all the milk.
There's none left for the babies. Yeah. And in all
of these cases, this again happening everywhere. And the reason
everywhere is that there's there's no such thing as health standards. Really.
A couple of states, like in the and have tried
to pass laws, there's usually no enforcement and in most
places there's just no laws about what you can do um.

(23:51):
And Yeah, a lot of like where the adulter ins
and like the poisonous stuff gets in is when the
milk dealers cut their ship with very chemicals. Now, uh,
and it's kind of like you know drug dealers today,
I'll cut like cocaine with a little bit of baby
powder or yeah, and the Finnel answer for milk usually well,
the baby I'll say the baby powder. Like the least

(24:13):
harmful way generally to cut it was that they would
add water. Um, and the standard ratio was one pint
of water for every quart of milk. Now, they also
skimmed the cream off the top of the milk, right,
because they're trying to make as much money as possible,
so they don't want you getting extra cream. They're going
to use that to like make something else and sell
it to you. But when you skim the cream off
your milk and then water it down by like half,

(24:34):
there what it looks. It's it doesn't look like milk.
It's this kind of like pale blue, weird looking beverage
because it's not really milk anymore. Um, So dairy milk continue,
they call it skim milk. Yeah, yes, yeah, I mean
that's that. Yeah, that is like that. That is literally
why they call it skim milk. And I guess you
could call this the origin of skim milk, but they're

(24:55):
not saying it is. They're hiding it. So they have
to in order to hide it, they have to alterate
it so it looks right. So for the color, because
it's this kind of pale blue color, they pour in
plaster of Paris and chalk um. So that's good. Let's
listen on this podcast. I was expecting they poured in
pure com Oh wait, it gets worse because that just

(25:18):
fixes the color, Matt. They haven't. They've skimmed the cream off, right.
You don't want people to know you've skimmed the cree off.
So you have to fake a layer of cream on top.
And what's what looks most like cream? No, calm, straight
colmb No, no liquefied cow brains. Oh bro, there's other
things that look like cream. There's other things pouring cow

(25:39):
brains on that ship. It is extremely funny. That is
no longer coach your milk. Of course, sometimes they'll they'll
put because it gives it has a little bit of
a yellow color. They'll put a little bit of lead
in there too, just to make it look quite you know,
right deepen. Yeah, of course you can put a little
bit of lead in there makes a sweeter too, a

(26:00):
little bit of anti freeze. You know, they put lead in.
That doesn't even count as bad because let they put
they're putting lead in everything was just part of it. It
It was like you have your salt shaker and with
vitamin le and then vitamin le lead shaker. So milk
was not alone or exceptional in its tendency to be

(26:21):
adulterated among foods of the day. It's kind of the
most shocking example a lot of the time. But food sellers,
grocery stores, like food manfacturers, they're doing it with everything.
And to make that point, I'm going to quote from
Deborah Bloom again, this time writing in her wonderful book
The Poison Squad. Quote. Fakery and adulteration ran rampant in
other American products as well. Honey often proved to be

(26:43):
thickened colored corn syrup and vanilla extract a mixture of
alcohol and brown food coloring. Strawberry jam could be sweetened
paste made from mashed apple peelings, laced with grass seeds
and dyed. Red coffee might be largely sawdust or wheat, beans, beats, peas,
and dandelion seeds, scorched black and ground to resemble the
genuine article. Containers of pepper, cinnamon, or nutmeg were frequently

(27:07):
laced with a cheaper filler material, such as pulverized coconut shells,
charred rope, or occasionally floor sweepings. Flour routinely contained crushed
stone or gypsum. Or gypsum as a cheap extender. Ground
insects could be mixed into brown sugar, often without detection.
They're used linked to an unpleasant condition known as grocer's itch.

(27:27):
We've all had a little bit of grocer had grocer's
atch cookies, and now I got grocers atch. European governments,
especially those of Germany and Great Britain, had been far
quicker than the US government to recognize and addressed problems
of food adulteration. In eighteen twenty, a pioneering book by

(27:47):
chemist Frederick Accumb titled A Treatise on Adulterations of Food
and Culinary Poisons, had aroused widespread public outrage when it
was published in London. Acume minced no words. Are pickles
are made green by copper? Are vene rendered sharp by
sulfuric acid. Are cream composed of rice, powder or arrow
root and bad milk? Are comfees mixed of sugar, starch
and clay, and colored with preparations of copper and lead.

(28:10):
Are ketchup? Often formed of the dregs of distilled vinegar
with a decoction of the outer green husk of walnuts,
and seasoned with all spice. He wrote, they had all
spice back then. Oh yeah, they conquered the world for
all spice. They did three or four genocides just to
get their hands on all sp That's not an exaggeration, um,

(28:33):
And it gets worse. With the candy industry, confectioners often
turned to poisonous metallic elements and compounds. Green came from
arsenic or copper, yellow from lead chromate, cheerful rose, and
pink tones from red lead. In eighteen thirty and editorial
in The Lancet the British Medical General complained that millions
of children are the daily dosed with lethal substances, but

(28:54):
the practices continued, largely due to business pressures on would
be government regulators. By mid century, though, casual teas were
starting to mount in Britain. In eighteen forty seven, three
English children fell seriously ill after eating birthday cake descorated
with arsenic tinted green leaves. Five years later, two London
brothers died after eating a cake who's frosting contained both
arsenic and copper. In an eighteen fifty four report, London

(29:16):
physician Arthur hasseltracked forty cases of child poisoning caused by
penny candies. Three years later, twenty one people in Bradford, Yorkshire,
died after consuming candy accidentally laced with deadly arsenic trioxide,
accidentally because the confectioner meant to mix in plaster of
Paris instead. Although he had noticed his workers falling ill
while mixing up the stuff, the business owner had put

(29:37):
the candy on sale anyway. He was arrested and jailed,
as was the pharmacist who had mistakenly sold him the
poison in place of plaster, but they could not even
be convicted of any crime. Britain had no law against
making unsafe or even lethal food products. Jesus Christ looking insane,
insane pouring arsenic into candy Kidder, Diane left it when

(29:57):
it's green? What screen? Um? Something more poisonous, Get some
more poison in there. That's too bland in color. I
just love. They killed twity one people with bad candy,
and then the cops are like, it's not illegal. You
can put as much poison in candy as you want.
It's not actually in the UK, there's nothing in the

(30:18):
rules that says candy can't be arsenic. Listen, if you
write a law that says I can't poison children for profit,
I'll gladly abide by it. And in England's credit, again,
this is like the eighteen thirties forties, like England, Jerremany,
a lot of europe Like bands, a lot of this ship.
But everything we've talked about keeps going. In the US,

(30:39):
they're throwing arsenic and lead and candy. They don't give
a fuck in the United States, right, this is the
lane and the goddamn free. We can do whatever we want.
I'm sing like one of the amendments should be my
right to eat arsenic damn right, Matt. That's why I'm
starting a new bakery. These cakes will kill your children.

(31:00):
These cakes will in fact kill your children, but they'll
die free. You know, they won't die Cocked by the
medical establishment. He says children can't handle arsenic five year
olds just saluting on a cot in the I see you.
You know who else likes to salute five year olds
while they're dying in the I see you? The sponsors.

(31:22):
That's right, that's right, Matt Leap. That's why they do it.
That's why they sell all these products. They have time
for their real passion, saluting dying children who are poisoned
by lead cake. All right, here we go, we're back back.

(31:43):
So in the United States, for basically the whole eighteen hundreds,
every attempt to impose any kind of like national food
safety standards is there. All these attempts are opposed vigorously
by the big businesses who made a lot of money
selling lead candy and formaldehyde milk, for example. Bowl Massachusetts
lawyer George Thorndyke Angle gave a big speech in eighteen

(32:04):
seventy nine to the American Social Science Public Health Association
where he read through a list of commercially sold foods
that had been found to include parasites and brands of
butter and cheese that had been found to be nothing
but processed animal fat. Angle accused food producers of being
a threat to both rich and poor, and compared them
to pirates, robbing people of their good health. Angle mailed
copies of a speech to newspapers around the country, which

(32:26):
forced American Grocer, a major trade publication, to take aim
at him as a sensationalist doing a disservice to consumers,
although they did concede that it was bad when milk
and candy killed children. So like, look, it's bad that
kids keep dying, but this guy is this guy is
not like out, this guy's out of his mind. This
guy is biased, alright, and listen, yeah, I have grocer's

(32:48):
itch who doesn't. Okay, look, we all wish kids would
stop dying, but at what cost? That's what we the
people putting lead in your children's food ask Listen, you
can either have a crying baby or a baby with
a one in five chance of dying from this lollipop.
Which would you prefer? Yeah, what do you want? You

(33:08):
want milk that kills your kids? You want milk that's
three cents cheaper. Huh? How much of those kids worth
for you? Anyway? It's supplying to man here, buddy. Angles argument, though,
was convincing to Congressman Richard Beale from Virginia. He put
forward legislation federally to ban all interstate commerce and chemically
altered foods. And it's wild to think about how different

(33:30):
that like it would have gotten appealed at some point, right,
because you just couldn't have a society like ours with
that law on the books. But it never it never
gets made, It dies in committee. I'm not even saying
like at the time certainly would have been a good thing.
There's that would have wouldn't have aged well, but it
doesn't even get off the ground floor. Um. And of
course that bill was not the only thing that died
in committee. Shiploads of kids were still being offed by

(33:52):
poisonous foods. It all got bad enough that the United
States Congress decided to take a break from edging the
tip of the national cock into over these colonialism, and
in nineteen o two they funded the very first controlled
trials of human food toxicity. These tests would be carried
out by the U. S Department of Agricultures Chemistry Squad,
which was headed by a guy named Harvey Washington Wiley. Now,

(34:15):
while he's pretty dope, he maybe the obi Wan of
our story. Um. He'd gotten his start in food science
in eighteen eighty one when the Indiana State Board of
Health asked him to look into honey, maple syrup and
other sweeteners, and his findings were that, in short, like
a lot of the people buying these things are not,
in fact buying these things on most of the like
a lot of the maple syrup and honey in the markets,
just like corn syrup. It would sometimes even make like

(34:37):
a fake wax honeycomb and dip it in the corn
syrups that it looked like you were getting real honey. Um.
And and realizing that like, oh wow, like people going
to the grocery store have no fucking clue what they're getting,
Like they don't have a goddamn idea what they're actually
buying because there's no requirement that they tell people what
they're buying and actually deliver it on it um. And

(34:58):
this kind of radicalizes widely, and he'd like like spends
the rest of his career trying to stop this. Now
Nature right up I found in Nature magazine describes his
new job at the U. S d A. Quote widely
recruited young healthy men as guinea pigs, starting with civil servants.
They signed liability waivers and agreed to take part in
hygienic table trials, eating free but strictly prescribed meals in

(35:19):
an experimental kitchen in the U. S d A's basement
in Washington, d C. An excitable press dubbed them the
poison Squad, and they're trying to figure out like what
things are bad for people. They're also trying to just
like gain a real understanding of like nutrition and like
what works, what preserves food. No one had really this
hadn't been done. Pieces of this had been done in
an organized way, but like this is the first time

(35:39):
that our government's like we should really like figure out
what this stuff does to people, like in a controlled setting.
Gives some people some lead and just know and you
don't know at that point, right, Like it is like
we laugh about it, but like the Romans put lead
and funking everything because they didn't realize it, like it
was bad for him. Um, so you have and at
this point that we're starting to get some understanding of that.

(36:00):
But like a big part of it is this, and
there's a lot of very brave people who are like, yeah,
try ship on me. We should know if this is
killing people, so give it, give it a shot. Put
it in me. Um thanks due, Yeah you really you
took one for the team here. You're like, I'll eat
pretty much anything. So just like hook it up, dude,
throw it in me. Who gives a ship? Yeah, I'm drunk. Yeah,

(36:23):
I ain't gonna live that long anyway. Is the eight nineties.
I made it into twenty. You know, I'm an old man.
I am dead inside. Already, feed me some of them.
My earliest memory is Sherman's March to the Sea. I'm done.
So that brings us back to milk. Now. Under President

(36:43):
Grover Cleveland, Whiley's Chemistry division started digging into the dirty
world of big dairy, there was a lot of money
in dairy, particularly since milk was seen is like the
best thing to feed small children. The milk industry had
been happy to cut corners for profits for quite some time.
And I want to talk a little bit about swill,
which is the kind of milk that most people in
cities are drinking through. Like most of the mid to

(37:04):
late eighteen hundreds, even some of the early nineteen was
its branded swill. No, that's just what everyone called it,
and we'll explain why in a second. So Deborah Bloom
describes this swill as quote like making swill as quote
the practice wherein distillers liquor distillers housed dairy cows in
stinking urban warehouses where each animal was tethered immobile and

(37:24):
fed on the spin mash or swill from the fermentation
process used in making whiskey. So you have all these
grains and ship for like whiskey, even for beer too.
I'm sure they do it with that where you're like
boiling all this grain for forever in order to like
make the thing that you then ferment. Right. Um. And
once you boil anything for a while, like like all
this grain and stuff, it doesn't have any real nutrition

(37:45):
anymore because you've like boiled it to get all of
that out. That all goes into the thing that you're making.
That's why it's flavored and ship um. So the cows
that are fed on this stuff are like dying their
entire lives. They're horribly malnourished, their bones are very soft,
um because the swol they're eating isn't food anymore. So,
like all of these animals, by the time their adults
have all of their teeth wrought out, um, they live

(38:06):
very short lives. Their malnourished bodies only produce milk for
a short period of time, and the milk they make,
which is what all these poor kids are drinking, doesn't
really have any nutritional value because again the cows aren't
eating anything with nutritional value, so there's just like making
colored water in a lot of cases. One pediatrition at
the time wrote, I have every year grown more suspicious

(38:28):
of distillery milk wherever I have seen a child presenting
a sickly appearance, loose, flabby flesh, weak joints, capricious appetite,
frequent wretchings, and occasional vomitage, irregular bowels with the tendency
to diarrhea and fetid breath. So like people are aware
of this. Also, the fact that it's called distillery milk
should key you and I don't want to go to

(38:50):
the same place from my bourbon and my milk. Yeah, exactly.
It's like, oh we sell cocaine. Oh we also sell
fair trade coffee. It's like, I don't think it's fair trade.
I mean, I'm sure it was a fair trade for somebody.
Someone got a good end of the deal for sure. Yeah,
our sponsors, the scene of low cartel folk pretty good

(39:10):
about that trade. So the swill milk industry was eventually reformed,
but that industry just yielded to the formalde hyde doping
that we've already covered By nineteen oh four, doping had
formalde hyde milk had spread to New Jersey, where one
doctor blamed a surge in child deaths on the substance.
In New York City, twenty thousand deaths of children under

(39:33):
two per year were blamed on poisoned milk. Formaldehyde wasn't
even twenty kids a year in New York City dying
from bad milk. Yeah, Like that's fucking wild. That is
so many dead children, that is an insane amount of
It's like at some point you have to go like,
wouldn't this like like like would kill less? I mean

(39:55):
it just leads me to believe that this was the time.
It's like, oh yeah, a lot a lot of drewn dyes.
Some of its milk poisoning. Some of it is from
the slide that's made of razor blades, and we have
at every park like this is were you were strapping
kids to the street cars to act as mirrors. Like
we have all sorts and we're just like using their

(40:18):
bodies as chimney sweets. I mean they die, They for
sure die. They're very easy to do. Um. So yeah,
uh And and formaldehyde was not even necessarily the biggest threat,
and milk most of the deaths due to poison milk
in New York, particularly in like nineteen o two, are
probably as the result of a typhus epidemic that could

(40:39):
spread through tainted milk, because that's a big cause of
typhus outbreaks, is like milk um. Now, whiley and Hurley
were among the learned advocates who urged the government to
take action, everywhere they looked Americans were being tricked into
consuming things that weren't food, and of course a shipload
of babies were dying. Regulations keep being proposed, and they
are fought tooth and nail every time by food manufacturers.

(41:01):
So by the time the early nine hundred run roll around,
a handful of journalists set themselves to the task of
like exposing what's happening here, often with the direct help
of guys from the chemical Division. So like, these reporters
are kind of working with Wiley and his men. And
one of these journalists is Henry Irving Dodge, who adopted
poison milk as his cause in nineteen o four Debora
Bloom rights. Dodge had learned from a friend in the U. S.

(41:24):
Senate that manufacturers were prepared to spend more than two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars to defeat any regulations, and
had already made major contributions to the campaigns of senators
considered friendly to the cause. No wonder the proposed food
legislation was going nowhere, he wrote. The Senate does not
indulge in bawling opposition to the bill. Oh no, its
weapons are much more effective and more deadly. It lets

(41:44):
the bill die. The American government, he concluded, would rather
protect wealthy business interests than protect the American people. That's
the thing people today would understand. No, no, no, no, no,
thank god that's changed. I mean we can all be
grateful for that. But no, I mean like two thousand dollars,
which is like four or five billion dollars exactly, like

(42:06):
to fight the just just boil the milk. Yeah, just
boil the goddam It's not hard. You're putting so much
money into not boiling the milk. Yes, that's ridiculous. It's
not like we're asking a lot. It's really the least
you could do with the milk. Hey, maybe we don't
need to have twenty babies a year die in New
York City to keep fire away from my milk. It's

(42:31):
faking amazing. So obviously this is an outrage and should
really piss people off. But the American people, as is
often the case, had a lot going on right around
this time. And while there were isolated eruptions of outrage,
when like a tainted meat can ten would kill some soldiers.
This happens around the time of the Spanish American War,
a bunch of soldiers get sick from like bad meat

(42:53):
or like whenever spoiled milk batch would kill a whole
kindergarten worth of kids. There's like all there's outrage in
bursts and hurts, but it's very decentralized and scattered. And
because of this, the massive meat packing in dairy industry,
these huge corporations and like conglomerates that have formed around
this stuff are able to bribe and bully their way
out of any kind of real regulations. One of the

(43:13):
things that leads that actually changes this, that like really
is a huge factor is a book called The Jungle
by Upton Sinclair, which I'm sure most people are at
least broadly familiar with. Um Upton went undercover for months
in a Chicago meat packing neighborhood, and his vivid recollections
of what he saw there were first published in serial
form via a socialist magazine named Appeal to Reason. When

(43:36):
it was republished as a book in nineteen o six,
huge numbers of Americans were confronted with scenes like this,
And I'm gonna read from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. There
were cattle which had been fed on whiskey malt the
refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men
called steerly, which means covered in boils. It was a
nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife

(43:56):
into them, they would burst and splatter foul smelling stuff
onto your face. And when a man's sleeves were smeared
with blood, his hands steeped in it, how was he
ever to wipe his face or to clear his eyes
so that he could see Jesus Christ, they're just sucking
blood pinatas. Yeah, they're like boil and puss and blood
and it's all getting over the meat, right because you
can't see, and it's all over your hands, it's all

(44:17):
over your knife, and you're like, you're processing this if
you're we slaughter and process animals semi regularly, where I live.
And if you're doing that, like one of the key
you don't even want like the hair of the animal
when you skin it, to touch the meat because it
can spoil you. You want to be very careful otherwise
it makes it nasty. And they're they're just like puss
is just like you're marinating and man, get it in there.

(44:39):
Just more nutrients. It's more nutrients. Don't worry about the smell.
It's got a lot of vitamin P. That's good stuff.
So Sinclair had meant to reveal to people that the
work in stockyards and meatpacking facilities was unconscionably inhumane. Both
are the humans working there and the animals. Right, he was,
he was upset about like the treatment of all of

(45:01):
the living things in this nightmare system. That's not what
America really cares about. The real impact that the Jungle
has on public opinion is that it scares people about
how fucking filthy their food is. Sinclair later said, quote,
I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident, I
hid it in the stomach. Honestly, I'd like to pretend

(45:22):
like I'm any better, but no, I'm not. Like fucking
I didn't stop eating chicken nuggets until someone showed me
the green the pink goo that it's made out of.
And I lasted a year and then I was like, nah,
I could eat the goo. And then I went back
to chicken nuggets. So someone figured out how I can

(45:42):
just get the raw goo. I'd like to just have
that as a shake in the morning, stuck down some
pink goo. Yeah, get out in the sun a little
bit so it gets good in night. What so yeah
pink And you know what I think if I just
mixed that fifty fifty with bourbon, that all the nutrients
I need. That's like, that's that's my soilet. That's that's

(46:08):
a performance beverage. So exactly in the morning you throw
a couple of shots of espresso in there too. You're
good to go. I'm doing. And then you branded it
and I went out. That's how you get that keto body.
That's true. The brand immediately makes it fun. Yeah, I'll
eat it. That's that's gonna be my new soilet. So
if you figure out find find us a sponsor who

(46:30):
will make my meat coffee bourbon shakes it self them
as a performance beverage. You know who? These are good
vorous truckers, and we'll get you the right amount of
drunk away convomiting to really do those long haul drives. Yeah,
you can get it all done in one go, literally,
one math movement and out immediately. And look, school's waste

(46:50):
a lot of time cooking food, my meat, slurry, bourbon, beverage. Everything.
A child needs to both be neutrified and to keep
quiet because there's a lot of there's a lot of bourbon.
Their little bodies can't handle that much. You know, we
call it sleeping time, shake meat. It's very good. Yeah,
just keep him quiet. You know what, you're just warehousing.

(47:11):
I'm really that's what all we're doing anymore. It's called
five loco. It's even more local than the previous. They
barely breathe on it, so it's pandemic safe. So it's
worth noting that when The Jungle was published as a
proper book, like outside of like a magazine thing, when
it finds its publisher, the publisher insisted on sending a

(47:33):
copy of the manuscript to the Chicago Tribune and they're like, hey,
here's the book we're publishing. It's making some pretty shocking claims.
You guys are journalists, Why don't you investigate these claims
and like render an opinionist whether or not it's accurate, right, which,
if journalism exists, is a responsible thing for a publisher
to do. Here's the thing it is. Nineteen o six.

(47:54):
Upton Sinclair is the first person who's ever done a
journalism in the United States. So I'm gonna quote again
from the Poison Squad by dead Point. Journalism is just
for going to war. Yeah, that's that's when it was
invited to get people agreed to a war with Spain.
This book isn't about Spain at all. Quote. Tribune editors

(48:20):
responded with a two dozen page rebuttal of the packing
house descriptions. Alarmed Page and Double Day. His publishers called
Sinclair to their offices, but Sinclair promptly began picking apart
the Tribunes critique. For instance, the paper had denied that
the tuberculosis bacterium could survive on walls or floors of
the packing rooms. Sinclair pointed out that the germ could
indeed survive on those surfaces and couldn't transfer to anything

(48:41):
that touched them. He brought medical studies to prove it,
as well as other evidence to back up his story.
He further noted that the papers owners were obviously friendly
with the meat packers and sided with them. In fact,
it would turn out that the newspapers management had not
assigned a reporter to study Sinclair's claims, but instead passed
the task onto a publicist who worked for the meat packer. Nice. Yeah,

(49:02):
the newspaper goes right to the people that he's investigating.
It's like, is this you guys want to write a
thing for us about this? It's like, um, so I
need you guys to write something that says not And
just every time he says, yeah, huh, you just got
it right now, I would write it. But you would
not believe the amount of war with Spain we got.
We got a lot of war with Spain. There's so

(49:24):
much Spain left and we had to nip that ship
right in the button. Also, I'm a little bit busy
because all of my children are in the hospital for
milk poisoning. You know that, you know, babies, babies and
handle their milk. The New York Times goes on to

(49:45):
note quote about a month after the Jungle was published,
the White House started receiving a hundred letters a day
demanding a federal cleanup of the meat industry. Roosevelt invited
Sinclair to the White House, then ordered a federal investigation.
Sinclair took every opportunity to harangue the beef truck as
the meat trap packing industry was known, and sent a
stream of telegrams to the White House demanding reform. Roosevelt

(50:06):
seemed tired of Sinclair's outspokenness. In a note to the
author's publisher, the President wrote, tell Sinclair to go home
and let me run the country for a while. Oh, Teddy,
I love it. What a but but they do this
actually gets some ship done from from Teddy's credit, he's
part of ships starting to get done here. Um, the

(50:28):
Pure Food and Drug Act is past well, it's introduced
into Congress in nineteen o five, the same year that
Sinclair puts out the first version of the Jungle, And
but in early nineteen o six when the book version
comes out, the the Act is stalled. Um. And it's
so stalled that Harvey White Wiley, who's the main impetus
behind the book, starts trolling people out of like hopelessness. Right,

(50:50):
and he is he kind of is the first guy
to use Twitter. He said, he settles into a strategy
of writing protest letters to newspapers and magazines about the
ads they had for different snake oil medicines and tainted foods.
He wrote this to the Washington Star. I have read,
with your regret and your issue of Monday, January twenty nine,
of the probably fatal illness of buck Ewing, the celebrated catcher. Ewing,

(51:12):
a former star player and manager for the New York Giants,
was diagnosed with Bright's disease, which is a blood vessel
inflammation and the kidneys um and it killed people pretty
fast in those days. Wiley noted that like, Hey, you're
talking about how sad this is, but you've previously published
an article about Dr Kilmer swamp root and claim that
it clears bright disease. And He's like, I keep a

(51:36):
bottle of it near me all the time because you've
you've ensured me that it works. So why don't you
just tell this guy? You know, Mike, chemists say it's
nothing but alcohol in turpentine with a couple of spices.
But if you're worried about buck Ewing, why don't you
tell him to take this stuff? It should cure his thing.
Right away. In fact, I'll send him a copy of
your paper and let you know what he says. And
he dies like very shortly there after. I love the

(51:57):
idea that someone was just like, all right, we got this,
writes disease. Let's try swamp root that swamps are dark? Right?
What the and knock that right out with some dark
what's darker than a swamp? It's darker than the swamp people,
it's still dying. Well whatever, It's a clever head campaign.
And he does this like there's this malt coffee which

(52:18):
contains no actual coffee, it's pure barley, but it advertises
itself as having real coffee flavor, and he sends a
letter to the newspaper advertising them, being like, how can
you have real coffee flavor with anything? But coffee isn't
the only thing that can have real coffee flavor is
just quote tweeting. It's really just twittering. Uh you know

(52:39):
who else loves Twitter? The products and services that support
this podcast, they are all reply guys for the same
K pop band. And it gets very sexual, actually, with
all of our sponsors, very sexual replies to this k
pop band. Good. If we know one thing, it's the
K pop people. They're very normal online and they love

(53:02):
to be sexualized. That's actually the motto of very normal
online and we love to be a sexual am I
am I? Yeah you should believe that. Oh, here's some ads. Ah,

(53:23):
we're back. So, while he was hectoring sketchy newspaper owners
in print, Whiley and his poison squad had gathered together
the some of their years of study into America's endless
variety of ship foods um. And this is while they're
trying to pass this act, because they put all this
information together to try to like convince Congress we should
do something. Yeah, we gotta stop the eating poison and

(53:45):
po Yeah, we we really got to deal with all
of these dead babies. Yea, so fucking step one of
a society. No more eating the poison pooh yeah, no
more eating the poop milk. Step maybe less war milk,
not none, just less. So. This passage from Deborah Bloom's

(54:05):
book sums up the case that Wiley and his scientists
made to Congress. For every food product the chemistry Division
could point to a trick involved in its manufacture. Doctors
continued to worry over reports of Grocer's itch a side
effect of the deceptive process of grinding up insects and
passing the result office brown sugar. Sometimes live life survived
the process. Beer, which most consumers imagined to be derived

(54:28):
from malted barley and hops, was often made from a
cheaper ferment of rice or even corn grits. So called
aged whiskey was often still routinely rectified, alcohol diluted and
colored brown, as widely had found twenty years earlier at Perdue.
Corn syrup was widely still used as the basis for
fake versions of honey and maple syrup. Many manufacturers argued
that they had to fake products to stay competitive. Detroit

(54:49):
canner Walter Williams of Williams Brothers described the making of
his Highland strawberry preserves. The jam was, he said, forty
five percent sugar, corn syrup, apple juice made from discarded
apple skins, some scraps of apple skin and cores, and
usually one or two pieces of strawberry. The strawberries cost him,
he added, many compare it's costs a lot of money

(55:13):
to get those two strawberries. Two pieces of strawberries are
really putting me at a house at home. Many comparably
priced preserves were just glucose apple juice and red red
dye and timothy seed added to simulate strawberry seeds. If
we could sell pure goods, I would be pleased. Williams insisted,
I believe they should be labeled, showing their ingredients and
showing the quality of the goods. But as there was

(55:35):
no loss settling setting such standards, and as he had
to compete with less scrupulous canners, there was no way
for him to stay in business unless he cut costs
to match. Widely testified that about five percent of all
foods were routinely adulterated, with the number being much higher
up to in categories such as coffee, spices and food
products made for selling to the poor. Of course, if

(55:57):
your food is for poor people, it is not food.
Not food not We just ground up some dirt. Yeah,
this is the salt dust pizza that I've made every
three weeks. We mixed some sawdust in with piss. You
can't tell the difference between that that bread ground, you know,
she doesn't know the difference. The ground is what we

(56:19):
call a natural play. It's pissed from the bars, so
there's lots of barley in it. Well, they're poor bars,
so it's just ground up rice meal. But you know,
sometimes I can shove a bar of soap into the
mouth of a poor to see if they live for
another week. It's nice, clean, and it's delicious. So Whitely
solution to all of this horror is the Pure Food

(56:41):
and Drug Act. And it's hard to see this as
anything unreasonable, but the grocery, meatpacking, and canning companies threatened
by the bill had to find a way to make
it unreasonable, and the time honored tradition of shady rich bastards,
they decided to smear widely. Since his data was impeccable,
they went after him for hating freedom dead. Yeah, baby,
they're how you do it. That's how you do America.

(57:04):
You do it man our freedom to poor people. Saw does.
It's extremely funny. Dudley and Co. Canned Goods used the
Grocery World magazine to publish editorials attacking Whiley as the
nation's janitor, which it's hard to make that seem he
wants to clean things out. Yeah, that's an insult. Is

(57:26):
just like, oh, you know, fucking janitor is always going around.
He's like those guys who stop us from living in
our own ship exactly, so I'm trying to wipe my ass. Mom,
I like it like this. The idea is that he
was a busy body policing the American stomach and again
attacking freedom. During one industry event where Wiley meets with

(57:48):
food company representatives, he's accused in person by the owner
of a Canary for wanting to be dictator of the
food industry. Mr Stalin trying to stop us from putting
sawdust in the bread and piss in the whiskey, fucking
stalling over here. It was just like, I don't like
when children die from poison. Man his mother, But what

(58:11):
does he think he is the tsarre trying to stop
kids from dying from milk? Oh Man? Much of this
this is amazing because like it's just so America. It's
so American. It's American. You can't be more American than
people literally spending like the equivalent of millions of dollars

(58:34):
to just be like, I gotta feed them the poison.
I gotta do it. I don't care that this has
costing me more money than taking the poison out. And
guess what, freedom, I love it. You love to see it.
We love to see it. We've always been the same. Yeah. Now,
whiley was not purely concerned with food here or with
like the raw ingredients that people generally consider food, And

(58:56):
in fact, as this law came closer and closer to passing,
he was in recently getting and getting involved in something
that had become a source of substantial profits for the
biggest players in the industry. Whitely was now obsessed with
the use of new and experimental preservatives on various food stuffs.
Now some of them were like what we've talked about,
based on formaldehyde, like freezing um, but there were a
whole bunch of other different, not all preservatives, new food additives.

(59:19):
This is the period in which people start to adulterate food,
when you can your first processed meats, and these companies
are putting stuff in for flavor and to preserve it,
and there's no regulation for any of this at this point.
And this is really concerning to Wiley. The Poison Squad
describes the birth of this subset of the chemical industry,
and a paragraph that you may recognize some of the
names from. In addition to preservatives, companies developed synthetic compounds

(59:43):
to make food production cheaper. The sweetener saccharine, discovered in
eighteen seventy nine at Johns Hopkins University, cost far less
than sugar and quickly replaced it as it cost saving.
Alternative flavoring agents such as laboratory brood, citric acid, or
peppermint extracts could now be used in drinks and other
products instead of fresh lemon, juice, mint against saving costs
and again crowding the farmer out of the supply chain.

(01:00:04):
The pioneering and just industrial chemist Charles Feiser, who had
founded his New York pharmaceutical company in eighteen forty nine,
now also produced borax, boric acid, cream of tartar, and
citric acid for use in food and drink. They loved
putting boax and ship like dozes so high it would
kill people. It was great. Chicago's Joseph Bauer, whose Liquid
Carbonic company produced the pressurized gas used in the fizzing

(01:00:27):
drinks of soda fountains, had become so interested in artificial
sweeteners that in nineteen o one he had invested in
a new business in St. Louis, the Monsanto Chemical Company,
to produce saccer and in large quantities. Saccerin production had
also launched the Hayden Chemical Works of New York City
and nineteen hundred, although that company also branched into the
preservative market, producing salicidic acid, formaldehyde, and sodium benzoate for

(01:00:48):
use in food and drinks. The food and drink market
also attracted Herbert Henry Dow founder at age thirty one,
if the Dow Chemical Company in Midlands, Michigan now would
been a chemistry student at the Case Institute of Technology
in Cleveland, Ohio. Yeah, he so he creates now Chemical
company in Sea. All of these guys this is where
they get their start, like shooting ship into food. And

(01:01:08):
while he's not wanting to, like, you're not saying we
should ban all this. He's not some sort of like
hippie fanatic, but he's like, we shouldn't know what these
Number one, people need to know if these are in
their food, right, Like you should have to tell people.
I'm not gonna say you can't put citric acid or
sony innate and food, but people should know, right Like
that's that we should be doing that. And also we
should figure out if this stuff like the food, the

(01:01:29):
people putting this in food should be showing that it's
not harmful, like they should be funding research to make which,
as we'll talk about, becomes problematic, right, um, but it
is a good idea that like, well, we can't just
start shooting this stuff into food. We should know what
it does right now. The people who are and there's
a lot of scientists who are like not, like we
don't need to be doing this, like the preservative stop

(01:01:52):
the food from spoiling. Do we need to study what else?
They do? We know how bad spoiled meat is. And
they do have a point in this period where it's
like we know it's this ship's so many kids a year,
Like do we care if they get sick forty years later, right,
which is like forty years that's the entire lifespan of
a human, they'll be fine. Yeah, it's like you got
to take the good with the bad here. I I

(01:02:14):
understand a little bit of it. Or they're just like listen,
they're not getting the food born illnesses and you know, yeah,
their skin is like orange now and one of their
lungs fell out, but like like whatever, they're alive. All
these kids them were milk exactly. Harvey Wiley was not
particularly good at the give and take compromise nature of politics.
He was too much of a scientist, and so he's

(01:02:36):
he one of the reasons this law has trouble passing,
a lot of people will argue is that he's not
willing to kind of like give any back. Um. And
he's he's as adamant about like wanting strict laws about
preservatives as he is about like what we should be
pasteurizing milk. Right, And there's a good point to be making,
like no pasteurizing milk is like get that done first, right,
it's more of a priority to do this ship. Um.

(01:02:57):
And so in the end, the pure Food Law only passes,
but because Upton Sinclair's book causes this national outrage which
prompts Teddy Roosevelt to champion the bill personally, and it passes.
The Pure Food Law was the first major victory and
the war to ensure Americans actually knew what the funk
they were eating and cheap food you actually ate food

(01:03:18):
as opposed to pure poison in a sax. It was
followed in night. Yeah, just a completely like self inflicted wound,
like this war that we created on ourselves. Oh good,
it's very funny. Yeah. Now, the pure Food Law was
the first major victory in the war to ensure Americans
actually like yeah again, had any idea what they were eating.

(01:03:38):
It was followed in nineteen thirty eight by the passing
of the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, which established the
Food and Drug Administration for the first time. So that's
when the ninety eight you know six, we get the
Pure Food Law, which lays the groundwork for the f
d A. The FDA comes int into being in thirty eight,
and initially when it started, it's funded entirely by taxpayer money, right,

(01:04:00):
and it is invested with the you might say sacred
authority to protect us consumers from the businesses making their food. Um.
This is a titanic step forward, and it's cementson into
the wildcat era of tainted milk, fake coffee, arsenic and
lead riddled candy. It's a huge deal. Now a lot
of stuff had started to get started to get fixed
in nineteen o six, obviously, Um, but nineteen making the

(01:04:22):
f d A is a huge move forward and a
very good It was absolutely necessary, I want to established
before we tear it down in the next episode. We
had to have something like this, like you could not
it's I don't care how much of a fucking libertarian is.
You can't let that state of affairs go on the market.
We have proved the market cannot correct itself with this.

(01:04:43):
It's just so much cheaper to feed people poison, not
the market would rather spend more money on continuing the
poison trade. People can't stop him. You can't stop him.
You can't stop a guy from all the people he's
feeling good for. You know, the f d A starts

(01:05:03):
as a beautiful, necessary thing. And then in the nineteen eighties,
about a century after Dr Wiley's journey began, the bright
dream of the Food and Drug Administration began to go
terribly wrong. But Matt, we're gonna talk about that in
part two. Oh sure, sure, Uh yeah. The pod Yourself
a Gun in the World's Only Sopranos podcast is out now,

(01:05:26):
and check out the film Drunk Broadcast. Also, I'm on
I'm on Instagram. Uh follow me at Matt leap jokes.
I need more of those. You know, no one gives
a shit about my Twitter anymore, you know, Yeah, follow
him and Matt Leap jokes. Follow him, follow me, people
send him pictures of your milk. Graham, I think people
just care more about the Graham. You know, it just

(01:05:46):
needs a shame because it Beyonce. I don't know if
she's on the Graham. I assume so's the robber must
be right, amateur. Also, like my Twitter, I do not
have a Graham. I used to have a blue checkmark,
but I got it taken away on Twitter, and I
hope to get one your blue check work away Twitter
did because I pretended to be The New York Times. Yeah. Yeah,

(01:06:11):
you're not allowed to do that apparently, but it was
a great post. It was you know, I mean, I
do love that for you, like I love I think
my favorite example of that issue it's the lady from
I Think You Should Leave, who did the the I
Can't get enough wine like that that that's She's been
in a few of them, but she did. It was
like when Oreos did some sort of Pride month think

(01:06:33):
she uh pretended to Benila Wafers using her checkmark and
was like, Nilla Wafers, we don't like bisexual people think
you're not allowed to eat her cookies something like that.
It was very funny and that's why she's not on
Twitter anymore. I love it, Nilla Wafers taken strays from me.

(01:06:55):
I should note people are going to give a ship
every because they do every time we like make jokes
about dying at forty. Obviously, the way lifespans work is
that so many kids died as babies once. If you
made it to an adulthood, you had a pretty good
chance of at least making it to like fifty or sixty.
People made it to their seventies. Yes, it's true. It's
funny to joke about people dying at age like being
old at age thirty back then, because look at a

(01:07:16):
picture of a thirty year old from the eighteen nineties.
They look like your fucking grandpa, like covered in soot.
They're just taking it out. It is permanently embedded soot
in their body all. Its extremely funny how sick and
dying everybody was back in the day. Well, you know,
they just a society that loved poison milk. It was
a whole world of people exactly as healthy as you

(01:07:37):
here Bolson Yaro, just constantly getting their dudoo backed up
and being like, well are you and ship out of
their noses because there's so much poop in the milk. Again,
But first I gotta run by this emu and see
if you'll punch me in the throat. Um boy, um

(01:07:59):
so yeah. Find matt Leeb on Twitter. Also, I have
a fiction novel, my book After the Revolution. You can
find it for free. Is an e book at a
tr book dot com. But it's also available for pre
order through a K Press. If you order now, you
will get a signed copy. So just google a k
Press after the Revolution preorder my book. It will come
out in May and you'll get it signed a k
Press after the Revolution. Um google it and you'll find

(01:08:22):
the pre order page. I'm pre ordering it right now.
And we have a behind the bast livestream. God so
much to plug ship Okay with prop on Anuary seventeen. Okay,
get tickets at momenthouse dot com. Slash it will be
a good episode, probably. I haven't written it yet. There

(01:08:43):
I will, I think, so that's probable. I might even
have an episode written alright,

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Behind the Bastards News

Follow Us On

Host

Robert Evans

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

Death, Sex & Money

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: The Food And Drug Administration