July 13, 2024 • 35 mins
Nowadays U.S. grocery shoppers can be reasonably certain that the foods they purchase are safe (if not healthy). Yet this wasn't always the case. In today's episode, we explore the story of one extremely driven, imperfect man, on a mission to clean up America's food industry. Harvey Wiley didn't think it was enough to conduct conventional safety studies, either -- he jumped straight to human experimentation. Join the guys as they delve into the strange story of Harvey Wiley and the Poison Squad in this weekend's Classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fillow ridiculous in stories. Welcome to our classic episode. You know,
nowadays in the United States, if you go to the
grocery store, you can be reasonably certain that the stuff
you're buying is going to be safe, if not super healthy.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Well, and you know, if it's not, it probably has
a giant skull and crossbones on the back or a
big warning. And so you know, it's sort of like
buyer beware. If you're gonna drink draino, that's on you.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
And how did we get to this? I mean, it's
normalized now, but it wasn't always the case. So how
did we get to this really cool era of food safety?
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Oh? Man, I mean it's it's I don't really even
want to spoil it, but it does remind me of
just like a time before something like the FDA existed
and it was just a wild West out there, you know,
in terms of what ingredients might be in food and
medicine and things that people were consuming on a regular basis.
It goes into like ideas of snake oil, you know,
(01:00):
sham remedies and all of that, and of course poison
in the food. Ah.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
And what an excellent setup for our protagonist of the story.
We can't wait for you to meet him, A guy
named Harvey Wiley who didn't think that conventional safety studies
were enough. Wiley went straight to human experimentation.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
No boy Wiley and his poison Squad, which also could
be a good hip hop crew name. Or maybe it's
like a poison fan club. I don't know. Let's roll
the tape. Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
On Prussic Acid. We break our fast, we lunch on
a morphine stew, We dine with a match head, consume
and drink carbolic acid brew. That is an excerpt from
a song that will become increasingly relevant over the course
of this episode. Hi, I'm Ben.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
I want to kiss you about your lips aft full
of boras, I mean your food. My name's Nol And
this is Ridiculous History and we're talking about poisoned food today.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Yes, yes, we're talking about poison food. But don't worry, folks,
this will not be a downer of an episode. It's
actually pretty inspiring. As always. We'd like to introduce you
to our super producer, Casey Pegrim.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
He's not suffering anymore apparently.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
No, no, he's not suffering anymore. He has been through
the fire. So let's hop in the time machine. Nol,
what do you say?
Speaker 2 (03:00):
I am down for some time travel, Casey, can we
get our time travel? Sound? Que perfect?
Speaker 1 (03:09):
All right, Noel, here we are. We're in the eighteen hundreds,
the late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Is that what we put into the time machine dial?
We just typed in general? Late eighteen hundreds. Yeah, it's
a preset button. Okay, cool, it's right next to popcorn.
Just trying to make sure I understand the intricacies of
this device, right.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Well, it's a good thing that they had that button
pre set, because it helped us get here for today's episode.
In the late eighteen hundreds, you see, food in the
US was bananas in a slang way. It wasn't all bananas,
that's right. There was no way to really tell what
was in your food. We take for granted that today
(03:51):
we can take down a packet of crisps off of
the shelf in our local grocery and we can see,
you know, listed sequentially, what poisonous materials are in it
that will clog our arteries and slowly kill us. Back then,
it was a mystery, right exactly, It is true that
more people in the United States at least tended to
(04:12):
grow their own food, right, or the chicken they consumed,
for instance, would be chicken raised on their property. But
you are absolutely right about the grocery store, especially processed food,
something made in a factory with little to no oversight,
something maybe roughly along the lines of, hey, try not
to put any fingers in the beef stew.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, and you know pig parts, take your pick, right,
And things were adulterated, right.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
They could be polluted purposely to save cost. Sure, right,
they could also be accidentally contaminated because there weren't very
high health standards at the time.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Absolutely not. I mean, we know how important it is
to wash our hands when handling raw chicken, because Gordon
Ramsay told us so. But in our home there's no
oversight as to whether or not we did that. So
if we get a food born illness, it is on
our heads. But at least today we can hopefully depend
that the people working in chicken processing plants or any
food processing plants are operating under safety guidelines that keep
(05:18):
us from getting contaminants in our food, and they're tested
to make sure said contaminants do not make it through
the process in today where we are, because we're in
the late eighteen hundreds. Not the case. No, do you
happen to see that hot headed man looking increasingly aggravated
and perturbed here on our random late eighteen hundred street.
(05:40):
I think he has gout. I don't doubt he has gout.
I just said that because it rhymed. I am all
about the lack of doubt that he has gout.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Give me a shout if you can finish the stanza
for us. Hey, but who are we talking about?
Speaker 2 (05:56):
I'm so glad we pose this question.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
The fellow we see there getting increasingly irritated is a
guy named Harvey Washington.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Wiley, Oh, he doesn't have gout. He's a very health
conscious guy. No, No, yeah, yeah, he's he's talking about
the angry guy next to him. Yeah, there's a line
of angry people here. But Harvey was angry for a
pretty specific reason, right Ben, Yes, absolutely. He looked around
at the state of food and said, looks you mean
he's doing it right now? Sure? Sure, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
He looks around and he says, what on earth is
going on here? What is actually going into people's food?
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Wiley?
Speaker 1 (06:34):
You see is a man on a mission. He is
a Civil War vet who, after fighting for the Union side,
returned to the Academy capital A to continue his studies.
After he graduated, he started teaching in a public school,
(06:55):
and then he became He went back and became a doctor.
He has bonafides, is what I'm saying here.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
That's right, Ben. He got his undergrad in eighteen sixty
seven from Hanover College and then proceeded to get an
MD from Indiana Medical College in eighteen seventy one. He
also studied for a year at the Lawrence Scientific School
of Harvard University, and afterwards he became a professor.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
This is all backstory for this guy next to the
guy with gout, for everyone who's keeping track of our
time travel. In eighteen seventy four, he took a position
as a professor of chemistry at Purdue University. And you
will find we found in the course of our research
that he did leave Purdue. But I heard an interesting
anecdote about him that I thought you might enjoy. Apparently
(07:45):
he left with a bit of a scandal.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
A scandal.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
It's a very different time, dish okay. So apparently he
left because he was riding a bicycle around campus, and
this was seen as unbecoming of a professor.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Well, yeah, what is he some kind of common riff
raff writing a bicycle two wheels? Absurd malarkey, one would say,
what was he doing at Purdue? He was studying sugar
and sorghum cultures, and throughout this process he started discover
that the sugar that was available, I'm sorry, is available
in the time that we're still occupying in our travels
(08:22):
was adulterated. It had extra stuff in it that did
not belong in there, like filler right ben right.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And his fascination with the dark side of sweet things
didn't stop there. He published his first paper on food
adulteration connected to the use of glucose, specifically in honey.
This was his mission. What are you eating?
Speaker 2 (08:43):
He keeps saying to people, is that when a food
cheets on its spouse.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Well, I guess it depends on the relationship the food
has with the spouse.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Do you think foods have to only like foods can
commune or banana commune, you know, with a piece of bread.
I don't know. This is conversation for another time. Let's
leave it. But he found this stuff, this filler in
the sugar, in the honey, and it made him go, huh,
maybe I haven't reached the bottom of this problem yet.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Right, how deep does this culinary rabbit hole go? So
his interests began to expand beyond the academy, right, beginning
in eighteen eighty. Oh look, now we're back in present tense.
Now we're done with his backstory. Here's what's happening to him.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Right.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
He is protesting against the practice of adulteration in food
and in fertilizers, but primarily narrowing his focus to food
as time goes on. In eighteen eighty one, he was
appointed state chemist of Indiana to analyze the contents of this.
So his passion became his job. Yeah, and he was
even elected to something called the German Chemical Society, which
(09:52):
sounds very fancy. And he worked in Germany at a
lab called the Imperial Food Laboratory, which was in Bismarck.
And it was at this time that he started getting
really comfy with a new fangled device called the polariscope
that allowed him to do that deep research of food
(10:12):
stuffs and off air. We were talking about this, Nol.
You mentioned that he didn't just stay with Indiana and Germany.
Eventually he goes federal correct.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
He did, in fact get a job, was appointed indeed
at the US Department of Agriculture in their Chemical division.
This was in eighteen eighty three.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
And this is where he goes big time Noel, because
now he has a budget and he has the wherewithal,
the latitude, the agency to figure out how to tackle
what he sees is the systemic contamination of food in
the United States.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
I think his budget was in the neighborhood of five k.
You want to plug that into your handy dandy inflation calculator. Yes,
five grand, five large in eighteen eighty three is equal
to about one hundred and fifteen thousand, seven hundred dollars
in today's today's cash. So not a blockbuster budget, but
(11:13):
not exactly meager either. But most importantly he had that budget,
he also got himself some test subjects.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Yes, twelve eager young men in their twenties who were
described as clerks that had passed the Civil Service exam
and had insatiable appetites.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
There's actually a letter from one of them to Harvey
asking to be a part of this study. That really
relied on the ability to have kind of an iron gut.
And this fellow really thought he fit the bill. He says,
dear sir, I read in the paper of your experiments
on diet. I have a stomach can stand anything. I
(11:51):
have a stomach that will surprise you. I am afflicted
with seven And then he spells out seven diseases. Never
went to a for fifteen years. They told me fifteen
years ago that I could not live eight months. What
do you think of it? My stomach can hold anything.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
That's the kind of guy that Harvey is looking for,
because you see, he is planning to poison these twelve
hungry men, and he's you know, he's played to poison
them with their consent. I think that's important to note some.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Kind of fetish thing. What are we talking about here.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
It's sort of like in the Middle Ages they would
have the trope of the royal taste tester, who who
would check food for the aristocracy to make sure, you know,
their jellied eels weren't poisoned.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
You think that guy volunteered though, I feel like he
was just some schmuck that just sort of got stuck
with that job.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Yeah, I don't know, I bet it's one of those
jobs that you sort of fall into. It doesn't seem
like you go to school for that. You're just in
the right place at the right time, or the wrong
place at the wrong time.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
But this is in.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Many ways a modern analog. He was turning these test
subjects into sort of the taste testers for the United States.
What he did was to first have them consent and
sign a waiver, essentially removing all liability from him or
the USDA, and then they would agree to eat all
(13:20):
of their meals three meals a day from his test kitchen.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, not like America's test kitchen. This was a much
more disturbing version of that. And it had the very
tidy name of Hygienic Table Trials. But the Washington Post
gave it a much sexier name, didn't they.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yes, they called it Casey. We might need some dramatic
music for this.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
The Poison Squad, Yeah, I mean, that's that's a great
name for almost anything. The Poison Squad rolls deep. My
friend off Air Ben and I were talking about how
our new hip hop duo would maybe be called the
Port Squad.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
It's either that or start a fan group for the
rock band poison, which I think we went the right
direction with hip hop.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
I'm feeling it. So here's here's what he did. Here's
the kind of stuff he put in these poor guys food, borax,
copper sulfate, salicilic acid, and formaldehyde even and they would
they would just eat this food. Now, he didn't tell them.
This is important.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
He didn't tell them what item would have been poisoned.
The whole meal wouldn't necessarily have some kind of contaminant
in it. But the early trials gave him some I guess,
added insight into human behavior. Because imagine you have, let's say,
just for example, roast chicken, potatoes, the coal slaw.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
What else you got like four or five maybe some
asparagus here we go, a nice side, perhaps some mac
and cheese. I don't know, I'm editorializing here.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
I think that's a delicious meal, and they probably did too.
But what Wile he found is that when someone was
eating something, they could detect a contaminant in the food
and they would just, you know, stop eating that mac
and cheese dish, or stop eating those potatoes.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
So he realized he would.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Have to change his testing method, and he started putting
in the contaminates in these gelatin capsules.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah, because they were complaining about they could actually taste
it in the food. They say the milk tastes metallic,
or the soup tastes like it's gone bad. But ben,
was it really important that it maintained that sense of
they didn't know which one they were eating. I guess
it didn't really matter because what they're eating the capsules.
Then why do they even have to eat the meal?
Why don't you eat the capsules? Why what does the
food even play into the research anymore? At that point? Right?
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Part of it is to replicate the experience of the
American household eating right, like how much how much borax
do you have to have in potatoes before you get
taste it?
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Right? Just to bashtacks lightly these guys, and they had
to be guys because Wiley was a well renowned misogynist.
He said that women were quote savages and that they
(16:14):
were bereft of the brain capacity that men were blessed with.
So kind of a jerk. Yeah, not necessarily a good guy.
He did do some good work here, But you know,
it's that same discussion, I guess about separating the art
from the artist or the research from the researcher. But
there was a lot that went into this process. There
(16:35):
were a lot of measurements that had to be taken.
These subjects had to be weighed. They had to have
their poop checked, and their urine and their hair and
all kinds of bodily fluids collected, and he tested, you know,
the prevalence of these materials that would come out, and
he would check them before and after and then compare
the results.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Right, and building on Wiley's terrible opinions of women, he
did have subjectivity when he came to selecting these young men.
He wanted them to have what he described as high
moral character, which is not really something you can effectively measure.
It kind of boils down to do I like them?
(17:17):
And so when he was meticulously measuring these folks, or
him and his team, I should say, you were absolutely right.
They were getting there urine and their feces analyzed, being waved,
their hair was being checked. They were also getting sick.
This did happen. It wasn't something that they just stopped.
(17:39):
They continued and as a result, these test subjects got sick.
They learned the hard way how much borax or a
fmaldehyde is you know.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Too much and as part of their qualifications, they had
these iron guts because it just made them willing to
do the thing, I guess more than anything, to willingly
be poisoned. I'm not sure if it was were they
getting paid. I guess they had to have been getting
paid something, right, surely a stipend, I would hope. So.
Oh no, Ben, I'm sorry, I just found they weren't paid.
(18:09):
Their pay was there's three squares a day? Oh wow? Yeah,
so it was kind of like prison rules, different time. Indeed,
I guess so.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
But they also, one could argue, were paid in public
renown because this project was a watershed moment for food
regulation in the United States, and this Poison Squad was
lionized by the press, not just the Washington Post, but
people were writing songs about them. They were writing to
(18:38):
their legislators and demanding food regulation because they were getting
stomach aches, they were vomiting, they had nausea, and the
public was aware of this. The song we opened the
show with, or the excerpt we opened the show with,
is from a song called the Song of the Poison
Squad by S. W. Gillilan. These were like public figures.
(18:59):
So I think, you know, the question is what price
could you put on fame? Would you exchange some stomach
aches and vomiting to, you know, be a national food hero.
We should also mention all that Harvey Wiley. I know,
we're making him sound like a little bit of a
mad scientist. But in his defense, he did also eat
(19:21):
some of these meals with his poison squad boys.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Maybe that was, you know, as a result of his
war experience. He felt like if he was going to
ask these boys to take a bullet, he had to
be willing to take one two, which.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Is, you know, a great point to make. This guy
is increasingly complex.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
He is quite complex, but again a total jerk when
it came to his treatment of women. As it turns out,
in addition to the slurs that I mentioned that he
said earlier, the program had a chef by the name
of Chef Perry, and at one point, according to an
article from Esquire called The Poisons An Incredible History by
(20:01):
Bruce Watson, Chef Perry was replaced by a female and
you know his poison squad, wile he's poison squad, they
were kind of his bros. And I guess maybe one
of the weird qualifications might have been misogyny as well,
because one of them was quoted as saying, a woman
a tut tut, why the very idea a woman can
(20:22):
potter around a domestic hearth, But when it comes to
frying eggs in a scientific mode and putting from maldehyde
in the soup, never, that was kind of my Like
the doctor the professor from Futurama, kind of came out
of nowhere, this sort of a professor Farnsworth, that's the guy.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
And despite this rampant, cartoonish, supervillain level misogyny, this guy
was lauded in the in the public sphere, in magazines
like Good Housekeeping, which called him the watch dog of
the kitchen. According to an article by the Science History
(20:59):
in Institute, he was garnering public support. Who's garnering governmental support,
and in this specific case, public support from the same
people that he thought so little of, was instrumental enforcing
large businesses and food manufacturers to actually, you know, stop
(21:20):
putting formaldehyde and sodium benzoweight and stuff.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
But there was another super villain in this story, wasn't there?
The food lobby, the dreaded food lobby who looked at
Wiley as persona non grata, and they fought him and
his findings tooth and nail and did everything in their
power to discredit him. But despite that adversity, he managed
to continue to turn public opinion to the point where
(21:47):
a law passed that led to the foundation of a
pretty important organization.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Yes, at last, at last, nineteen o six, the Pure
Food and Drugs Act passes. And this is at this
point in Wiley's life he has been an unceasing advocate
of some sort of regulation. He also, we should mention,
expanded later into the field of contamination in drugs. But
(22:15):
the Pure Food and Drugs Act of nineteen oh six
AKA one of the biggest reasons you're not going to
vomit when you eat a bag of chips, hopefully in
theory crisps, Yes, crisp chips, freeze, dried asparagus, cashew milk,
pretty much, any.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Any nut milk really, any nut milk really.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
This Act passes with a backing of President Theodore Roosevelt,
and it specifically prohibits adulteration and misbranding of food and drugs.
At this point, it was the most comprehensive legislation of
its kind in the United States. It paved the way
for the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
And to make a long story short, foundation of the
Food and Drug Administration led to the nutrition and ingredient
labels that we see today in our local hole foods.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
And this is something that continues in the modern day.
We are back in the present, right, But we've taken
the long way around.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Yeah, it was a slog. It was a slog. We
should have just hopped back in the time machine. Spoiler alert,
there's no time machine. Well you know this figurative, I guess.
I mean, we're all time travelers, aren't. We were just
moving at a rate of one second. It's all about imagination.
There we go, There we go. And when you and
(23:37):
I were looking into this, I don't know about you, Nol,
but I was surprised to find that some food legislation
was far more recent than one would have supposed. I
am surprised to hear that, Ben tell me more. I'm
so glad, I'm so glad you're into this. In nineteen ninety,
the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act passes. This requires all
(24:00):
packaged food to bear nutrition labeling and all health claims
for food to be consistent with current regulations. There's a
really interesting and strange ongoing conflict between food advertisers and
the US government and probably the government in which you
live if it's not the US. Like all, have you
(24:20):
ever gone grocery shopping and you see a cereal that says,
maybe it's all natural or wholesome? How do you define wholesome? Yeah,
that's sort of vague. Language is a thing all across manufacturing,
and like I guess a good example is like a
bottle of water where it as it contains up to
ten percent recycled material, and that up to could mean zero, yeah,
(24:44):
it could be up to zero zero, zero, zero, zero,
one percent. Yeah, and you see that with food packaging.
Of course, these regulations are hugely important. But with any regulation,
you're going to find a loophole, right, and manufacturers are
doing that all over the place.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
We found in the course of poking around in this
food war between advertisers in the government, we found that
contamination of foods or counterfeiting of foods still occurs today,
and this is kind of surprising. One of the anecdotes
that I heard unconfirmed was that there was a calamari
(25:22):
counterfeiting problem is.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
That the ones that's made of pig buttoles.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Yes, yeah, no, ch Chitlin's fried with some sort of
adulterants who make them taste more seafood y.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Is this true? This is true? I always heard that
was urban myth. Is it really true? Ben?
Speaker 1 (25:37):
I don't want to ruin this for everyone, so I
will say that I have not seen a hard, wide
reaching study on this. But there's a pretty interesting piece
that ran on This American Life about what's marketed as
imitation calamari. So it's not illegal to sell something as imitation, right,
(26:00):
like imitation crab meat or one of our mutual favorites
cheese food flavored product.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah, or even back to our margarine versus Butter episode,
where the reason that margarine was so maligned by the
butter industry is because it was looked at as potentially
being sold as a faux butter. But that all powerful
butter lobby made damn sure that the margarine folks couldn't
even color the stuff yellow. And we got a great
(26:27):
email that think we'll read about die packs in margarine,
that people could dye their own margarines so they could
make it yellow at home.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
That one comes with pictures and we're going to post
those on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter where you can find
us as ridiculous history or some variation thereof. So while
we're in the modern day to sew it up. Another
thing that is often reported as counterfeit would be sushi.
Study by nonprofit group Oceana around twenty sixteen cited that
(26:57):
thirty nine percent of restaurants in New York City are
serving fraudulent fish, a phrase that I am oddly fond of.
It's it's it's like a good insult. You could call
someone a fraudulent fish, faux fish, a faux fish. And
according to these reports, what's happening is that restaurants or
(27:21):
maybe even wholesalers are selling a cheaper alternative to a
certain type of fish a grade.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Maybe right, right, you got a sushi grade tuna, but
maybe they're selling a slightly cheaper cut and calling it
that is that? What is that what you're saying?
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah, that's one. That's one aspect of it, h for sure.
But here's here's one of the really dirty ones. Since
we're talking about tuna.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Dirty, some of the fraudulent fish that would be substituted
for tuna is something called escolar, commonly referred to in
the seafood industry as x lax fish. Does it do
what I think it does?
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yes, it is not an ironic name. This is not
a little job and situation got it. So the problems
continue today, but luckily they were mitigated to a great
and amazing degree by one man who was not perfect,
who made it his mission to clean up the grocery store.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, and today, I think a big thing that we're
still having to deal with is concern about pesticides being
in our food and hormones being injected into livestock and
it kind of leaching into milk and eggs because you know,
back in the day, in the early days we were
talking about livestock was largely being raised by individual families
(28:35):
on family farms. Today, you know, the meatpacking industry is
a whole ginormous conglomerate, and you know there is concern
about that. So hopefully the FDA continues to fulfill its mission.
But you can never be sure, right because I mean,
it is only one organization, and there's so many new
food products coming out all the time. Even recently, the
(28:57):
Sargento company recalled a huge batch of their ultra thin
sliced longhorn Colby six four ounce product, and with this
recall comes the UPC code and all of that because
some adulterants made it through the process. So even with
this organization and the work of our misogynist friend, stuff
(29:19):
still does make it through. That might even give the
most iron gutted of us a run for our money,
no matter how many pre existing diseases you have. For
the runs or the run for our money, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
There we go spot on and we want to hear
from you. What are your encounters with contaminated or adult
orated food? What do you think about the FDA? And
also just out of curiosity, what's the weirdest thing you
ever ate?
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Was it good? Let us know? You know, this makes
me think of there's a Tim and Eric sketch of
songs called all the Food Is Poison. It's just like tacos, poison,
hot dogs. It's poisons. I just rattling off food and
all the food is poison. That's just that's gonna be
in my head for the rest of the day. Now.
(30:09):
If you haven't seen that, check it out. It's it's upsetting.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
And speaking of you, friends and neighbors, follow food fans
or food fiends alike, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Our first listener mail comes from Gordon in Ontario, Canada.
He says Jents. I thoroughly enjoyed the last week's margarine episode.
Of all things, it brought back childhood memories of small
town Ontario and the packaging innovation shown below. We mentioned
this a little while ago. Ontario consumers were restricted by
law from buying yellow margarine and got really tired of
messing up their mixing bowls to color their lily white
(30:45):
edible oil spread. Ben, do you see the impulse there?
Why do we need to trick ourselves? We know it's
not butter. It's very strange because you know again, folks,
you have to see these pictures. It's so it's so weird.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
I was wondering where this motivation would come from, and
I can't help but think maybe there was a cook
somewhere who was buying margarine and wanted it to appear
to be butter at the home dinner table or in
a restaurant. But there was a there's a weird method
to this product.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Well, it really strengthens big butters beef with margarine. That
this coloring was such an important factor. So the message
goes on, So folks really got tired of messing up
their mixing bowls to color their lily white edible oil spread.
In the early sixties, the manufacturer responded by selling uncolored
margarine and sealed plastic bags with a tiny button of
(31:36):
food dye in the middle. I recall being tasked by
my mom with popping the dye button and squishing the
bag until the color was nice. In uniform, it's called
easy color. He sent us some amazing picks and it
shows the process of the lily white oil spread and
the bag. A pair of delightful sixties kind of Frank
(31:57):
Lloyd Wright painted fingernailman's hands squishing the bag. You see
the little nipple in the middle popping with color, and
then more squishing hands with a diamond ring and then
boom it ends mixing bowl mess. The taste tells that's
the slogan. Oh there's another slogan too, it's pinched the color.
(32:19):
Berry need the bag for that rich, creamy flavor. Oh
my gosh, thank you so much for writing in Gordon,
this email, this email made our day and I keep
staring at these old advertisements. I think we're both fans
of vintage ads. Love it so much. He does in
the letter with easy color, truly stupid and yes ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
And our next email comes from Holly. Holly writes in
to say, one of my favorite things about the Old
Green Acres show was when they had to climb up
the pole outside the house to answer the phone or
make a call. Listening to your podcast brought to mind
one of the more memorable phone related episodes. Oliver got
really upset with the phone company and decided he could
do better, so they gave them the keys to the switchboard.
(33:02):
Hilarity ensues. Holly cites this it's Oliver versus the Phone
Company in nineteen sixty seven, Holly continues. Until I listen
to your show, I assumed that this was just a
way of laughing at how backwards their farming culture was
still using a system that was long gone, even in
rural areas. But it was filmed in the late sixties,
and according to your report, phone systems like that were
(33:22):
still operational at that time. And this was not so
unbelievable as I imagined it to be. Instead of a
dig at a negative aspect of rural culture hopelessly stuck
in the past, that show was more of a negative
view of the upper crust not being able to adapt,
which of course was the theme of the entire series.
Thanks for the podcast, and thanks to Green Acres for
presenting their own ridiculous history.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
New York as well. I'd rather stay, I get a
logic smelling. Hey, yeah, that was them. It presented two
sides in the theme. You know, the dude really was easy.
You know, what does he say? Fresh Air, DA Times
Square something, you are my wife? Goodbye city life? You know, yeah,
(34:04):
that's a really good point. It almost is the satire
of the upper crust and what big babies they can be.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Right, absolutely, And this concludes our listener mail, but not
our show. We hope you enjoyed this look at the
strange yet profoundly important mission of Harvey Wiley and his
poison Squad, and we hope you tune in for our
next episode, which takes us to ancient India.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, and we're gonna get super shady and.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Leave it at that, So tune in as always. Thanks
to our super producer, Casey Pegram. Thanks to Candice Gibson,
our contributor who wrote the article Ridiculous History, An ambitious
chemist and a poison Squad.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Thanks you Alex Williams for composing our theme, and thanks
to you for tuning in, and we hope you'll join
us for the next episode of Ridiculous History. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fillow ridiculous in stories. Welcome to our classic episode. You know,
nowadays in the United States, if you go to the
grocery store, you can be reasonably certain that the stuff
you're buying is going to be safe, if not super healthy.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Well, and you know, if it's not, it probably has
a giant skull and crossbones on the back or a
big warning. And so you know, it's sort of like
buyer beware. If you're gonna drink draino, that's on you.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
And how did we get to this? I mean, it's
normalized now, but it wasn't always the case. So how
did we get to this really cool era of food safety?
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Oh? Man, I mean it's it's I don't really even
want to spoil it, but it does remind me of
just like a time before something like the FDA existed
and it was just a wild West out there, you know,
in terms of what ingredients might be in food and
medicine and things that people were consuming on a regular basis.
It goes into like ideas of snake oil, you know,
(01:00):
sham remedies and all of that, and of course poison
in the food. Ah.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
And what an excellent setup for our protagonist of the story.
We can't wait for you to meet him, A guy
named Harvey Wiley who didn't think that conventional safety studies
were enough. Wiley went straight to human experimentation.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
No boy Wiley and his poison Squad, which also could
be a good hip hop crew name. Or maybe it's
like a poison fan club. I don't know. Let's roll
the tape. Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
On Prussic Acid. We break our fast, we lunch on
a morphine stew, We dine with a match head, consume
and drink carbolic acid brew. That is an excerpt from
a song that will become increasingly relevant over the course
of this episode. Hi, I'm Ben.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
I want to kiss you about your lips aft full
of boras, I mean your food. My name's Nol And
this is Ridiculous History and we're talking about poisoned food today.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Yes, yes, we're talking about poison food. But don't worry, folks,
this will not be a downer of an episode. It's
actually pretty inspiring. As always. We'd like to introduce you
to our super producer, Casey Pegrim.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
He's not suffering anymore apparently.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
No, no, he's not suffering anymore. He has been through
the fire. So let's hop in the time machine. Nol,
what do you say?
Speaker 2 (03:00):
I am down for some time travel, Casey, can we
get our time travel? Sound? Que perfect?
Speaker 1 (03:09):
All right, Noel, here we are. We're in the eighteen hundreds,
the late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Is that what we put into the time machine dial?
We just typed in general? Late eighteen hundreds. Yeah, it's
a preset button. Okay, cool, it's right next to popcorn.
Just trying to make sure I understand the intricacies of
this device, right.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Well, it's a good thing that they had that button
pre set, because it helped us get here for today's episode.
In the late eighteen hundreds, you see, food in the
US was bananas in a slang way. It wasn't all bananas,
that's right. There was no way to really tell what
was in your food. We take for granted that today
(03:51):
we can take down a packet of crisps off of
the shelf in our local grocery and we can see,
you know, listed sequentially, what poisonous materials are in it
that will clog our arteries and slowly kill us. Back then,
it was a mystery, right exactly, It is true that
more people in the United States at least tended to
(04:12):
grow their own food, right, or the chicken they consumed,
for instance, would be chicken raised on their property. But
you are absolutely right about the grocery store, especially processed food,
something made in a factory with little to no oversight,
something maybe roughly along the lines of, hey, try not
to put any fingers in the beef stew.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, and you know pig parts, take your pick, right,
And things were adulterated, right.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
They could be polluted purposely to save cost. Sure, right,
they could also be accidentally contaminated because there weren't very
high health standards at the time.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Absolutely not. I mean, we know how important it is
to wash our hands when handling raw chicken, because Gordon
Ramsay told us so. But in our home there's no
oversight as to whether or not we did that. So
if we get a food born illness, it is on
our heads. But at least today we can hopefully depend
that the people working in chicken processing plants or any
food processing plants are operating under safety guidelines that keep
(05:18):
us from getting contaminants in our food, and they're tested
to make sure said contaminants do not make it through
the process in today where we are, because we're in
the late eighteen hundreds. Not the case. No, do you
happen to see that hot headed man looking increasingly aggravated
and perturbed here on our random late eighteen hundred street.
(05:40):
I think he has gout. I don't doubt he has gout.
I just said that because it rhymed. I am all
about the lack of doubt that he has gout.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Give me a shout if you can finish the stanza
for us. Hey, but who are we talking about?
Speaker 2 (05:56):
I'm so glad we pose this question.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
The fellow we see there getting increasingly irritated is a
guy named Harvey Washington.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Wiley, Oh, he doesn't have gout. He's a very health
conscious guy. No, No, yeah, yeah, he's he's talking about
the angry guy next to him. Yeah, there's a line
of angry people here. But Harvey was angry for a
pretty specific reason, right Ben, Yes, absolutely. He looked around
at the state of food and said, looks you mean
he's doing it right now? Sure? Sure, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
He looks around and he says, what on earth is
going on here? What is actually going into people's food?
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Wiley?
Speaker 1 (06:34):
You see is a man on a mission. He is
a Civil War vet who, after fighting for the Union side,
returned to the Academy capital A to continue his studies.
After he graduated, he started teaching in a public school,
(06:55):
and then he became He went back and became a doctor.
He has bonafides, is what I'm saying here.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
That's right, Ben. He got his undergrad in eighteen sixty
seven from Hanover College and then proceeded to get an
MD from Indiana Medical College in eighteen seventy one. He
also studied for a year at the Lawrence Scientific School
of Harvard University, and afterwards he became a professor.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
This is all backstory for this guy next to the
guy with gout, for everyone who's keeping track of our
time travel. In eighteen seventy four, he took a position
as a professor of chemistry at Purdue University. And you
will find we found in the course of our research
that he did leave Purdue. But I heard an interesting
anecdote about him that I thought you might enjoy. Apparently
(07:45):
he left with a bit of a scandal.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
A scandal.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
It's a very different time, dish okay. So apparently he
left because he was riding a bicycle around campus, and
this was seen as unbecoming of a professor.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Well, yeah, what is he some kind of common riff
raff writing a bicycle two wheels? Absurd malarkey, one would say,
what was he doing at Purdue? He was studying sugar
and sorghum cultures, and throughout this process he started discover
that the sugar that was available, I'm sorry, is available
in the time that we're still occupying in our travels
(08:22):
was adulterated. It had extra stuff in it that did
not belong in there, like filler right ben right.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And his fascination with the dark side of sweet things
didn't stop there. He published his first paper on food
adulteration connected to the use of glucose, specifically in honey.
This was his mission. What are you eating?
Speaker 2 (08:43):
He keeps saying to people, is that when a food
cheets on its spouse.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Well, I guess it depends on the relationship the food
has with the spouse.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Do you think foods have to only like foods can
commune or banana commune, you know, with a piece of bread.
I don't know. This is conversation for another time. Let's
leave it. But he found this stuff, this filler in
the sugar, in the honey, and it made him go, huh,
maybe I haven't reached the bottom of this problem yet.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Right, how deep does this culinary rabbit hole go? So
his interests began to expand beyond the academy, right, beginning
in eighteen eighty. Oh look, now we're back in present tense.
Now we're done with his backstory. Here's what's happening to him.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Right.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
He is protesting against the practice of adulteration in food
and in fertilizers, but primarily narrowing his focus to food
as time goes on. In eighteen eighty one, he was
appointed state chemist of Indiana to analyze the contents of this.
So his passion became his job. Yeah, and he was
even elected to something called the German Chemical Society, which
(09:52):
sounds very fancy. And he worked in Germany at a
lab called the Imperial Food Laboratory, which was in Bismarck.
And it was at this time that he started getting
really comfy with a new fangled device called the polariscope
that allowed him to do that deep research of food
(10:12):
stuffs and off air. We were talking about this, Nol.
You mentioned that he didn't just stay with Indiana and Germany.
Eventually he goes federal correct.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
He did, in fact get a job, was appointed indeed
at the US Department of Agriculture in their Chemical division.
This was in eighteen eighty three.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
And this is where he goes big time Noel, because
now he has a budget and he has the wherewithal,
the latitude, the agency to figure out how to tackle
what he sees is the systemic contamination of food in
the United States.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
I think his budget was in the neighborhood of five k.
You want to plug that into your handy dandy inflation calculator. Yes,
five grand, five large in eighteen eighty three is equal
to about one hundred and fifteen thousand, seven hundred dollars
in today's today's cash. So not a blockbuster budget, but
(11:13):
not exactly meager either. But most importantly he had that budget,
he also got himself some test subjects.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Yes, twelve eager young men in their twenties who were
described as clerks that had passed the Civil Service exam
and had insatiable appetites.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
There's actually a letter from one of them to Harvey
asking to be a part of this study. That really
relied on the ability to have kind of an iron gut.
And this fellow really thought he fit the bill. He says,
dear sir, I read in the paper of your experiments
on diet. I have a stomach can stand anything. I
(11:51):
have a stomach that will surprise you. I am afflicted
with seven And then he spells out seven diseases. Never
went to a for fifteen years. They told me fifteen
years ago that I could not live eight months. What
do you think of it? My stomach can hold anything.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
That's the kind of guy that Harvey is looking for,
because you see, he is planning to poison these twelve
hungry men, and he's you know, he's played to poison
them with their consent. I think that's important to note some.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Kind of fetish thing. What are we talking about here.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
It's sort of like in the Middle Ages they would
have the trope of the royal taste tester, who who
would check food for the aristocracy to make sure, you know,
their jellied eels weren't poisoned.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
You think that guy volunteered though, I feel like he
was just some schmuck that just sort of got stuck
with that job.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Yeah, I don't know, I bet it's one of those
jobs that you sort of fall into. It doesn't seem
like you go to school for that. You're just in
the right place at the right time, or the wrong
place at the wrong time.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
But this is in.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Many ways a modern analog. He was turning these test
subjects into sort of the taste testers for the United States.
What he did was to first have them consent and
sign a waiver, essentially removing all liability from him or
the USDA, and then they would agree to eat all
(13:20):
of their meals three meals a day from his test kitchen.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, not like America's test kitchen. This was a much
more disturbing version of that. And it had the very
tidy name of Hygienic Table Trials. But the Washington Post
gave it a much sexier name, didn't they.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yes, they called it Casey. We might need some dramatic
music for this.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
The Poison Squad, Yeah, I mean, that's that's a great
name for almost anything. The Poison Squad rolls deep. My
friend off Air Ben and I were talking about how
our new hip hop duo would maybe be called the
Port Squad.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
It's either that or start a fan group for the
rock band poison, which I think we went the right
direction with hip hop.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
I'm feeling it. So here's here's what he did. Here's
the kind of stuff he put in these poor guys food, borax,
copper sulfate, salicilic acid, and formaldehyde even and they would
they would just eat this food. Now, he didn't tell them.
This is important.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
He didn't tell them what item would have been poisoned.
The whole meal wouldn't necessarily have some kind of contaminant
in it. But the early trials gave him some I guess,
added insight into human behavior. Because imagine you have, let's say,
just for example, roast chicken, potatoes, the coal slaw.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
What else you got like four or five maybe some
asparagus here we go, a nice side, perhaps some mac
and cheese. I don't know, I'm editorializing here.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
I think that's a delicious meal, and they probably did too.
But what Wile he found is that when someone was
eating something, they could detect a contaminant in the food
and they would just, you know, stop eating that mac
and cheese dish, or stop eating those potatoes.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
So he realized he would.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Have to change his testing method, and he started putting
in the contaminates in these gelatin capsules.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah, because they were complaining about they could actually taste
it in the food. They say the milk tastes metallic,
or the soup tastes like it's gone bad. But ben,
was it really important that it maintained that sense of
they didn't know which one they were eating. I guess
it didn't really matter because what they're eating the capsules.
Then why do they even have to eat the meal?
Why don't you eat the capsules? Why what does the
food even play into the research anymore? At that point? Right?
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Part of it is to replicate the experience of the
American household eating right, like how much how much borax
do you have to have in potatoes before you get
taste it?
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Right? Just to bashtacks lightly these guys, and they had
to be guys because Wiley was a well renowned misogynist.
He said that women were quote savages and that they
(16:14):
were bereft of the brain capacity that men were blessed with.
So kind of a jerk. Yeah, not necessarily a good guy.
He did do some good work here, But you know,
it's that same discussion, I guess about separating the art
from the artist or the research from the researcher. But
there was a lot that went into this process. There
(16:35):
were a lot of measurements that had to be taken.
These subjects had to be weighed. They had to have
their poop checked, and their urine and their hair and
all kinds of bodily fluids collected, and he tested, you know,
the prevalence of these materials that would come out, and
he would check them before and after and then compare
the results.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Right, and building on Wiley's terrible opinions of women, he
did have subjectivity when he came to selecting these young men.
He wanted them to have what he described as high
moral character, which is not really something you can effectively measure.
It kind of boils down to do I like them?
(17:17):
And so when he was meticulously measuring these folks, or
him and his team, I should say, you were absolutely right.
They were getting there urine and their feces analyzed, being waved,
their hair was being checked. They were also getting sick.
This did happen. It wasn't something that they just stopped.
(17:39):
They continued and as a result, these test subjects got sick.
They learned the hard way how much borax or a
fmaldehyde is you know.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Too much and as part of their qualifications, they had
these iron guts because it just made them willing to
do the thing, I guess more than anything, to willingly
be poisoned. I'm not sure if it was were they
getting paid. I guess they had to have been getting
paid something, right, surely a stipend, I would hope. So.
Oh no, Ben, I'm sorry, I just found they weren't paid.
(18:09):
Their pay was there's three squares a day? Oh wow? Yeah,
so it was kind of like prison rules, different time. Indeed,
I guess so.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
But they also, one could argue, were paid in public
renown because this project was a watershed moment for food
regulation in the United States, and this Poison Squad was
lionized by the press, not just the Washington Post, but
people were writing songs about them. They were writing to
(18:38):
their legislators and demanding food regulation because they were getting
stomach aches, they were vomiting, they had nausea, and the
public was aware of this. The song we opened the
show with, or the excerpt we opened the show with,
is from a song called the Song of the Poison
Squad by S. W. Gillilan. These were like public figures.
(18:59):
So I think, you know, the question is what price
could you put on fame? Would you exchange some stomach
aches and vomiting to, you know, be a national food hero.
We should also mention all that Harvey Wiley. I know,
we're making him sound like a little bit of a
mad scientist. But in his defense, he did also eat
(19:21):
some of these meals with his poison squad boys.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Maybe that was, you know, as a result of his
war experience. He felt like if he was going to
ask these boys to take a bullet, he had to
be willing to take one two, which.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Is, you know, a great point to make. This guy
is increasingly complex.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
He is quite complex, but again a total jerk when
it came to his treatment of women. As it turns out,
in addition to the slurs that I mentioned that he
said earlier, the program had a chef by the name
of Chef Perry, and at one point, according to an
article from Esquire called The Poisons An Incredible History by
(20:01):
Bruce Watson, Chef Perry was replaced by a female and
you know his poison squad, wile he's poison squad, they
were kind of his bros. And I guess maybe one
of the weird qualifications might have been misogyny as well,
because one of them was quoted as saying, a woman
a tut tut, why the very idea a woman can
(20:22):
potter around a domestic hearth, But when it comes to
frying eggs in a scientific mode and putting from maldehyde
in the soup, never, that was kind of my Like
the doctor the professor from Futurama, kind of came out
of nowhere, this sort of a professor Farnsworth, that's the guy.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
And despite this rampant, cartoonish, supervillain level misogyny, this guy
was lauded in the in the public sphere, in magazines
like Good Housekeeping, which called him the watch dog of
the kitchen. According to an article by the Science History
(20:59):
in Institute, he was garnering public support. Who's garnering governmental support,
and in this specific case, public support from the same
people that he thought so little of, was instrumental enforcing
large businesses and food manufacturers to actually, you know, stop
(21:20):
putting formaldehyde and sodium benzoweight and stuff.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
But there was another super villain in this story, wasn't there?
The food lobby, the dreaded food lobby who looked at
Wiley as persona non grata, and they fought him and
his findings tooth and nail and did everything in their
power to discredit him. But despite that adversity, he managed
to continue to turn public opinion to the point where
(21:47):
a law passed that led to the foundation of a
pretty important organization.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Yes, at last, at last, nineteen o six, the Pure
Food and Drugs Act passes. And this is at this
point in Wiley's life he has been an unceasing advocate
of some sort of regulation. He also, we should mention,
expanded later into the field of contamination in drugs. But
(22:15):
the Pure Food and Drugs Act of nineteen oh six
AKA one of the biggest reasons you're not going to
vomit when you eat a bag of chips, hopefully in
theory crisps, Yes, crisp chips, freeze, dried asparagus, cashew milk,
pretty much, any.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Any nut milk really, any nut milk really.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
This Act passes with a backing of President Theodore Roosevelt,
and it specifically prohibits adulteration and misbranding of food and drugs.
At this point, it was the most comprehensive legislation of
its kind in the United States. It paved the way
for the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
And to make a long story short, foundation of the
Food and Drug Administration led to the nutrition and ingredient
labels that we see today in our local hole foods.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
And this is something that continues in the modern day.
We are back in the present, right, But we've taken
the long way around.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Yeah, it was a slog. It was a slog. We
should have just hopped back in the time machine. Spoiler alert,
there's no time machine. Well you know this figurative, I guess.
I mean, we're all time travelers, aren't. We were just
moving at a rate of one second. It's all about imagination.
There we go, There we go. And when you and
(23:37):
I were looking into this, I don't know about you, Nol,
but I was surprised to find that some food legislation
was far more recent than one would have supposed. I
am surprised to hear that, Ben tell me more. I'm
so glad, I'm so glad you're into this. In nineteen ninety,
the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act passes. This requires all
(24:00):
packaged food to bear nutrition labeling and all health claims
for food to be consistent with current regulations. There's a
really interesting and strange ongoing conflict between food advertisers and
the US government and probably the government in which you
live if it's not the US. Like all, have you
(24:20):
ever gone grocery shopping and you see a cereal that says,
maybe it's all natural or wholesome? How do you define wholesome? Yeah,
that's sort of vague. Language is a thing all across manufacturing,
and like I guess a good example is like a
bottle of water where it as it contains up to
ten percent recycled material, and that up to could mean zero, yeah,
(24:44):
it could be up to zero zero, zero, zero, zero,
one percent. Yeah, and you see that with food packaging.
Of course, these regulations are hugely important. But with any regulation,
you're going to find a loophole, right, and manufacturers are
doing that all over the place.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
We found in the course of poking around in this
food war between advertisers in the government, we found that
contamination of foods or counterfeiting of foods still occurs today,
and this is kind of surprising. One of the anecdotes
that I heard unconfirmed was that there was a calamari
(25:22):
counterfeiting problem is.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
That the ones that's made of pig buttoles.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Yes, yeah, no, ch Chitlin's fried with some sort of
adulterants who make them taste more seafood y.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Is this true? This is true? I always heard that
was urban myth. Is it really true? Ben?
Speaker 1 (25:37):
I don't want to ruin this for everyone, so I
will say that I have not seen a hard, wide
reaching study on this. But there's a pretty interesting piece
that ran on This American Life about what's marketed as
imitation calamari. So it's not illegal to sell something as imitation, right,
(26:00):
like imitation crab meat or one of our mutual favorites
cheese food flavored product.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah, or even back to our margarine versus Butter episode,
where the reason that margarine was so maligned by the
butter industry is because it was looked at as potentially
being sold as a faux butter. But that all powerful
butter lobby made damn sure that the margarine folks couldn't
even color the stuff yellow. And we got a great
(26:27):
email that think we'll read about die packs in margarine,
that people could dye their own margarines so they could
make it yellow at home.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
That one comes with pictures and we're going to post
those on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter where you can find
us as ridiculous history or some variation thereof. So while
we're in the modern day to sew it up. Another
thing that is often reported as counterfeit would be sushi.
Study by nonprofit group Oceana around twenty sixteen cited that
(26:57):
thirty nine percent of restaurants in New York City are
serving fraudulent fish, a phrase that I am oddly fond of.
It's it's it's like a good insult. You could call
someone a fraudulent fish, faux fish, a faux fish. And
according to these reports, what's happening is that restaurants or
(27:21):
maybe even wholesalers are selling a cheaper alternative to a
certain type of fish a grade.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Maybe right, right, you got a sushi grade tuna, but
maybe they're selling a slightly cheaper cut and calling it
that is that? What is that what you're saying?
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah, that's one. That's one aspect of it, h for sure.
But here's here's one of the really dirty ones. Since
we're talking about tuna.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Dirty, some of the fraudulent fish that would be substituted
for tuna is something called escolar, commonly referred to in
the seafood industry as x lax fish. Does it do
what I think it does?
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yes, it is not an ironic name. This is not
a little job and situation got it. So the problems
continue today, but luckily they were mitigated to a great
and amazing degree by one man who was not perfect,
who made it his mission to clean up the grocery store.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, and today, I think a big thing that we're
still having to deal with is concern about pesticides being
in our food and hormones being injected into livestock and
it kind of leaching into milk and eggs because you know,
back in the day, in the early days we were
talking about livestock was largely being raised by individual families
(28:35):
on family farms. Today, you know, the meatpacking industry is
a whole ginormous conglomerate, and you know there is concern
about that. So hopefully the FDA continues to fulfill its mission.
But you can never be sure, right because I mean,
it is only one organization, and there's so many new
food products coming out all the time. Even recently, the
(28:57):
Sargento company recalled a huge batch of their ultra thin
sliced longhorn Colby six four ounce product, and with this
recall comes the UPC code and all of that because
some adulterants made it through the process. So even with
this organization and the work of our misogynist friend, stuff
(29:19):
still does make it through. That might even give the
most iron gutted of us a run for our money,
no matter how many pre existing diseases you have. For
the runs or the run for our money, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
There we go spot on and we want to hear
from you. What are your encounters with contaminated or adult
orated food? What do you think about the FDA? And
also just out of curiosity, what's the weirdest thing you
ever ate?
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Was it good? Let us know? You know, this makes
me think of there's a Tim and Eric sketch of
songs called all the Food Is Poison. It's just like tacos, poison,
hot dogs. It's poisons. I just rattling off food and
all the food is poison. That's just that's gonna be
in my head for the rest of the day. Now.
(30:09):
If you haven't seen that, check it out. It's it's upsetting.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
And speaking of you, friends and neighbors, follow food fans
or food fiends alike, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Our first listener mail comes from Gordon in Ontario, Canada.
He says Jents. I thoroughly enjoyed the last week's margarine episode.
Of all things, it brought back childhood memories of small
town Ontario and the packaging innovation shown below. We mentioned
this a little while ago. Ontario consumers were restricted by
law from buying yellow margarine and got really tired of
messing up their mixing bowls to color their lily white
(30:45):
edible oil spread. Ben, do you see the impulse there?
Why do we need to trick ourselves? We know it's
not butter. It's very strange because you know again, folks,
you have to see these pictures. It's so it's so weird.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
I was wondering where this motivation would come from, and
I can't help but think maybe there was a cook
somewhere who was buying margarine and wanted it to appear
to be butter at the home dinner table or in
a restaurant. But there was a there's a weird method
to this product.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Well, it really strengthens big butters beef with margarine. That
this coloring was such an important factor. So the message
goes on, So folks really got tired of messing up
their mixing bowls to color their lily white edible oil spread.
In the early sixties, the manufacturer responded by selling uncolored
margarine and sealed plastic bags with a tiny button of
(31:36):
food dye in the middle. I recall being tasked by
my mom with popping the dye button and squishing the
bag until the color was nice. In uniform, it's called
easy color. He sent us some amazing picks and it
shows the process of the lily white oil spread and
the bag. A pair of delightful sixties kind of Frank
(31:57):
Lloyd Wright painted fingernailman's hands squishing the bag. You see
the little nipple in the middle popping with color, and
then more squishing hands with a diamond ring and then
boom it ends mixing bowl mess. The taste tells that's
the slogan. Oh there's another slogan too, it's pinched the color.
(32:19):
Berry need the bag for that rich, creamy flavor. Oh
my gosh, thank you so much for writing in Gordon,
this email, this email made our day and I keep
staring at these old advertisements. I think we're both fans
of vintage ads. Love it so much. He does in
the letter with easy color, truly stupid and yes ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
And our next email comes from Holly. Holly writes in
to say, one of my favorite things about the Old
Green Acres show was when they had to climb up
the pole outside the house to answer the phone or
make a call. Listening to your podcast brought to mind
one of the more memorable phone related episodes. Oliver got
really upset with the phone company and decided he could
do better, so they gave them the keys to the switchboard.
(33:02):
Hilarity ensues. Holly cites this it's Oliver versus the Phone
Company in nineteen sixty seven, Holly continues. Until I listen
to your show, I assumed that this was just a
way of laughing at how backwards their farming culture was
still using a system that was long gone, even in
rural areas. But it was filmed in the late sixties,
and according to your report, phone systems like that were
(33:22):
still operational at that time. And this was not so
unbelievable as I imagined it to be. Instead of a
dig at a negative aspect of rural culture hopelessly stuck
in the past, that show was more of a negative
view of the upper crust not being able to adapt,
which of course was the theme of the entire series.
Thanks for the podcast, and thanks to Green Acres for
presenting their own ridiculous history.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
New York as well. I'd rather stay, I get a
logic smelling. Hey, yeah, that was them. It presented two
sides in the theme. You know, the dude really was easy.
You know, what does he say? Fresh Air, DA Times
Square something, you are my wife? Goodbye city life? You know, yeah,
(34:04):
that's a really good point. It almost is the satire
of the upper crust and what big babies they can be.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Right, absolutely, And this concludes our listener mail, but not
our show. We hope you enjoyed this look at the
strange yet profoundly important mission of Harvey Wiley and his
poison Squad, and we hope you tune in for our
next episode, which takes us to ancient India.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, and we're gonna get super shady and.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Leave it at that, So tune in as always. Thanks
to our super producer, Casey Pegram. Thanks to Candice Gibson,
our contributor who wrote the article Ridiculous History, An ambitious
chemist and a poison Squad.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Thanks you Alex Williams for composing our theme, and thanks
to you for tuning in, and we hope you'll join
us for the next episode of Ridiculous History. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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