July 18, 2023 • 65 mins
Oh, to taste the food of the past. Strawberry jam made from farm-fresh strawberries. Milk straight from the cow. Cookies baked with freshly churned butter and brown sugar. Because that’s how it was, right? Everything used to be fresher, more pure, unadulterated by preservatives or additives, right? Our latest TPWKY book club pick shows us just how wrong that notion is. Science journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Deborah Blum joins us this week to chat about her book, The Poison Squad, which tells the story of the fight for food safety regulation in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. In our conversation, Blum rips off those rose-tinted nostalgia glasses and reveals that strawberry jam rarely contained strawberries, milk could include a mix of formaldehyde and pond water, butter had borax, and brown sugar was mostly ground up insects. Until one man, chemist Harvey Wiley, stepped up and spearheaded the campaign for food safety legislation, all of these horrific practices of food adulteration were entirely legal. Tune in to learn what Wiley was up against and some of the tactics used in his struggle, including the wild story of the experiment that gave this book its title.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:42):
Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this podcast will
kill You. Welcome everyone to the latest installment of the
tp w k Y Book Club, where our two read
lists grow ever longer and our appreciation for amazing science
communicators writing the enlightening and entertaining books grows ever deeper.
(01:03):
On a personal note, this mini series has been an
absolute blast to put together, with some truly unforgettable conversations
about incredibly wide ranging topics, and I just really love
that I get to do this, So thank you so
much to all you wonderful people for listening, and to
all these amazing authors for chatting. Without you, this would
(01:27):
not be possible. We find ourselves now in the second
to last episode in this mini series, and while I
won't list off each book that we've talked about like
I've done in every other intro, because that's a whole
lot of books, at this point, I will just say
again how much I've loved hearing from you all about
these episodes, and will happily welcome any other feedback, favorites,
(01:50):
follow up questions, future book recommendations, or anything else you
want to tell me. Okay, but that's enough podcast business
for the time.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Being.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Now, let's go into what we'll be talking about today,
and that is the food of the past. If I
asked you to imagine what food tasted or looked like
back at the turn of the twentieth century, I think
many of us might imagine an idealized world where tomatoes
were plump, juicy, and always ripe, Where meat was pure,
(02:23):
untainted by hormones or antibiotics, where butter was always fresh,
churned from milk straight from the cow. That is, unless
you've read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, in which case you
might have a grittier, more realistic picture of what things
were actually like. But I think many of us buy
into this romantic notion that everything was fresher, more flavorful, healthier,
(02:48):
less processed, more pure back in the day, and frankly,
that could not be further from the truth. Acclaimed science journalist, professor,
and Pulitzer Prize writer Deborah Blum joins me today to
chat about her excellent book The Poison Squad, also made
into a PBS series in twenty twenty, which explores the wild,
(03:12):
unregulated mess that was the US food industry in the
early twentieth century and the contentious fight to clean up
that mess, led by some truly remarkable individuals. Blum, whose
best selling book, The Poisoner's Handbook is certainly a favorite
of many of our listeners, paints a vivid picture of
(03:33):
the preregulation food industry and the tremendous fight for safe foods.
The growing urban populations of the nineteenth century required a
food supply to keep up with the ever increasing demand,
and one way that producers found to do this was
through food adulteration, a deceptive practice that involves adding substances
(03:53):
to food to change its appearance, its taste, its volume,
or size. Blum's book is filled with horrifying examples of
early food adulteration, as well as not a small number
of scandals where people lost their lives due to poisoned food.
It seems like this practice of food adulteration would not
(04:14):
be tolerated by consumers or any regulatory body, making it
pretty bad for business. But the fact of the matter
was that there were no regulatory bodies to impose fines
upon these deceitful producers, and the lack of labels on
foods meant that consumers couldn't make an informed decision about
whether they wanted to buy butter that contained borax or
(04:37):
did not contain borax. So business went on as usual
until chemist Harvey Wiley stepped in and started his lifelong
crusade to make food safe for public consumption. The efforts
of Wiley and his poison Squad captured the public's attention
in a major way and greatly advanced the fight for
(04:57):
food safety legislation. Even though it seems like safe foods
and consumer protection should be a thing that everybody wants,
it was not a one sided battle. Wiley was fighting
against a corrupt industry that had long made sure to
keep the federal government on its side. In today's episode,
Blum and I discussed Wiley's monumental impact on food safety
(05:21):
legislation in the United States, some of the shocking food
poisoning scandals that incited the public to activism, how far
we've come in terms of consumer protection since the Pure
Food and Drug Act of nineteen oh six, and how
much further we still have to go. I am super
excited to get started, so let's take a quick break
(05:44):
and then dive in. Deborah, thank you so very much
(06:12):
for being here today. I am such a big fan
of your work, and I especially loved The Poison Squad
for how you brought to life the incredible story of
Harvey Wiley and his quest for food safety in the US.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Thank you so much. It's really a privilege. I'm excited
to be on this podcast, and I love talking about
Harvey Wilace and sort of the invention of food safety
in the United States that is part of his story.
So I really appreciate you having me on.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Well. I loved hearing about that story, and the other
thing that I loved about your book were all of
the delightfully disgusting and horrifying examples of food adulteration that
you describe.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
They were horrifying and discussed thing.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Who was truly shocking. I think there were many times
where I pulled my partner aside and was like, you've
got to read this, look at this. How did you
first come across the story of Harvey Wiley and what
most interested you about this period of history.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, that's a great question. So I have been what
I think of as a toxicology journalist for over the
past decade. I've written about.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Poisons and homicide.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
My real interest is poison in our everyday life, right
how we navigate a chemical world that includes things that
are really dangerous for us. And a lot of my
interests has been in the history of science as well,
how did we get here? And so when I was
looking at poisons in the early twentieth centuries, which is
(07:51):
a special interest of mine, I started seeing references to
what is truly one of the strangest public health experiments
in history, which was conducted by Harvey Wiley and was
nicknamed the Poison Squad, which I can explain later.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
By the Washington Post.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
And I almost in very simple minded I thought, well,
what in the world is that? And so then when
I started looking at the experiment, and one of the
things that makes this such an unusual experiment is you
really have a chemist at the US Department of Agriculture
(08:30):
deliberately poisoning as co workers. That's one of the elements
of the Poison Squad that's so fascinating, actually in the
interest of trying to figure out what's going into our food.
And when I was reading the descriptions of that, I thought,
why would you be so desperate as to do that?
What would it take to have an established government? Chemists say,
(08:55):
the only way that I can get the answer to
this problem is is to do this incredibly risky experiment
on young men working in my agency. And that sort
of pushed me off the cliff into the whole question
of what was going on at food at the time
that made things so crazy that you would need to
(09:17):
do that experiment. It was something I think I'd never
really thought about before, but that really was the sort
of tipping point of that inquiry.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah, and I think a lot of us tend to
think of food from that period of time as being,
you know, fresher meat was fresh, milk was straight from
the cow's utter, and foods in general were more you know,
quote unquote pure. But what was food actually like during
the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, particularly in
(09:48):
cities in the US.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yes, that was like almost a moment of horrifying discovery
for me because I also had thought, in the way
we'll sometimes talk about the one wonerful farm fresh food
of our ancestors, right this pinchy, healthy, happy period of
the nineteenth century, that was my I had brought into
that mythology as well completely, so that when I started
(10:14):
unpeeling the layers of what food was like in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was like, wait
a minute. And so part of it is that there
is a mythology to it, and some of that is
the way we tend to sort of romanticize the agriculture
of the past and the idea that we were, you know,
(10:34):
a happy rural nation with everyone just walking over to
farmer John's orchard to get their apples. But that wasn't true, right,
especially starting in the mid nineteenth century and posts the
Civil War, we were increasingly in industrial nations. So there
were people who lived on farms and eight farm fresh food,
(10:55):
I assume, right, And there were wealthy people who owned
their own farm or were able to purchase those things.
But the majority of Americans increasingly were living in cities.
They were working in factories, you know, scraping by. They
weren't going out into the country to get these expensive
farm fresh materials. They were buying them at corner stores
(11:18):
and local grocery stores, and they were buying a lot.
With the rise of industry came the rise of industrialized food,
so they were buying a lot of manufactured food. And
one of the things about the rise of sort of
food manufacturing canning and other ways that we sort of
(11:40):
bring things from the farm to the grocery store or
the grocery store to your table. Is that this was
also a period in which there was no food regulation,
which is sort of another part of the story. So
I am a food manufacturer. There were no laws telling
me what I can put in food.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
There are no applaws requiring.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
That you label the food. You don't have to tell
people what's in it. There's nothing. And so if in
a capitalistic society the idea is to maximize your profit,
it was like free reign to do so, and we
saw incredible consequences of that, to the point that I
start as thinking to myself, did people in the nineteenth
(12:26):
century ever eat what they thought they were eating? Because
there was so much fraud It was crazy.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
It's unbelievable. And I loved reading the list of the
many lists, the many instances, just my jaw dropping over
and over again with some of these examples. Were there
any in particular that you found the most shocking of
you know, like a food additive or a food lie,
or any that you found the most appalling in terms
(12:56):
of the producer's complete disregard for human health?
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Yeah, that's a really important point.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
I think. So you have widespread fraud, and you have
white sat broad and basically if you think about it,
and things that are easy to fake. So you know spices, right,
you had brick dusts that went into cinnamon and paprik
and the red red colored spices flour for bread. The
(13:24):
people would grind up gypsum which we put in wallboard
to make as a flower extender.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
I mean again going back to what were you actually eating?
I was myself horrified by coffee. I mean, I love coffee.
It's like the way I start every day. You almost
never got actual coffee in your coffee, or a full
cup of coffee. You know, you got sometimes you got
ground bone, right, Sometimes you just got dirt. There was
(13:56):
a doctor in the Upper Midwest or at one point
speculated that the phrase of muddy cup of coffee came
from the idea that most Americans were drinking a fair
amount of mud when they thought they were drinking coffee.
And it was so to give you an idea, because
coffee makes a good example of how entrenched the fraud was.
(14:18):
You know, the original fraud was with a ground coffee.
How can you tell what's actually in these particles in
the can of coffee? Right? It could be coffee, it
could be ground seeds, it could be ground coconut shells,
which were awful also used. And so people began to
become increasingly suspicious of ground coffee and switched over to
(14:39):
coffee beans. And of course this is the nineteenth century.
So you go down to the corner store. There's a
barrel full of coffee beans. You have the grocer scoop
them up for you. And so what you find is
this new industry in fake coffee beans, right, And you
can actually find the formulas for making the coffee beans.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
There's the little molds.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
For them of wax and clay. I mean, then when
you grind them up at home, of course they go
in to your coffee. And this is repeated over and
over again. You see it in whiskey, you see it
in wine. You see it sort of across the board
in all kinds of food products. You see, going on
(15:20):
to your other question about what I found shockingly unhealthy,
the use of toxic compounds to color food. So Arsenic
is used to make green food coloring. Lead is used
to make red food coloring. You would find lead in
cheese because they wanted that orange look of cheddar, so
(15:41):
they would mix in a little red lead. It's completely acceptable.
But to me, the sort of standout horror story involves
milk and the additives that go into milk.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Yes, absolutely, it's it's almost as though like the fraud
drove the most incredible creativity in terms of, like, how
can we make quote unquote food that has actual, not
edible components to it. It's it's amazing.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
It's insane.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
And so with milk, of course, the number one thing.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
It starts with people just watering the milk. Right, I
can make a lot more money if I use water.
I don't particularly care if it's clean water. I think
I put in the book this one instance where they
found horsehair worms and milk because the dairy man had just,
speaking of disgusting, just used pond water to water down
his milk. The milk when it was too watered would
(16:32):
turn kind of bluish. They'd add in plaster of Paris
or chalk. They would occasionally fake cream by purating pure
in calf brains and floating them on top of the
milk in this lovely creamy looking lace kind of disgusting.
But the other thing about milk is you have to
remember this is a time when there's no refrigeration, so
(16:53):
milk spoiled. And there were when we look at how
dangerous milk was in the nineteenth century, which it was.
Some of it has to do with that, right, you
have a huge milk is a wonderful substrate for bacteria.
It's got sugar, it's got protein, everything a good pathogenic
bacteria wants. Since you had all these horrible pathogens and
(17:14):
milk glow vine, tuberculosis, brucellosis right just and as the
milk began to rot, they grow and grow and grow.
So dairymen then are trying to figure out a cheap
way to deal with this, and they turn to an
embalming agent, form aldehyde, and they start embalming the milk,
right literally embomming the milk. When you go into newspapers
(17:37):
of that time, there are headlines in balm milk scandals
in which dairymen are putting fromaldehyde in the milk, not
under the name form aldehyde, and remember they don't have
to label it anyway. And then children are dying and
getting sick, and so that is such an insane thing
to do for aldehyde.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Is so poisonous.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
They knew it was poisonous, right, You could argue with
some of these additives like salicilic acid, which we you
know as a component of as form. We know that
makes the lining of the stomach bled. Did they really
know that then only somewhat but from aldehyde out and
mount poisons. So they did know and they just obviously
(18:19):
didn't care. It's really a horrifying story.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Yeah. Absolutely, So you just went through an incredible list
of foods that were adulterated or not even like spices, milk, coffee,
everything that contained harmful chemicals or pathogens and parasites. And
the list seems endless. But were there any foods in
particular that seemed to be the biggest problems or that
(18:45):
were the first targets in terms of food safety legislation.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Yeah, that's also an important point. So during this whole
period with the rise of industrial chemistry going into food,
there's a whole of failed attempts to regulate food. At
the national level. There were states that passed laws. Indiana,
which was the state that suffered a huge outbreak of
(19:11):
inbalm milk deaths, and I think they had four hundred
in Indianapolis one summer past a law driven by the
dangers of milk. So you see milk and dairy products
becoming one of the real targets of food safety laws,
and this sort of patchwork of responses at the state level.
At this point, it's milk, it's cheese, it's adulteration.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Of spices.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
The Congress held a number of hearings and one of
the things that come up there is the adult this
is fraud rather than risk. But honey and syrups were
largely corn syrup at that time, and again to show
you how ingenious it was, there would be honey, it
would actually be corn syrup, and they would had a
(20:02):
business of making fake honeycombs that they would make out
of wax and drop into the corn syrup to make
it look like, you know, real honey. So you have
a lot of interest in this. Again, there were states
that targeted maybe the fought and maple syrup, the fraud
and honey. They the government looked at fraud and gems
(20:24):
and jellies. Right, strawberry jam often had enough strawberry in
it at all, and they would use grass seed instead
of strawberry seeds. And then the dyes of the time
are analine cooltar dyes. Pretty much. You'd get these red
coultar dyes and you know in corn syrup and grass
seed and they actually, in one congressional hearing had a
(20:47):
manufacturer who said, well, we couldn't possibly do it another
way because you know, we would lose market share if
we went to the expensive putting strawberries in our strawberry jam.
So you have this whole system that is catching people's attention.
What really catches people attention are the really horrible frauds
(21:08):
and then the uh, you know, the scandals like the
above milk scandal, and so some of the things that
start coming up in addition are you know, the preservative
used in meat, and that really came up after the
Spanish American War when there was a huge scandal that
was actually called the ebald meat scandal, in which the
(21:32):
government had to investigate whether it had killed more soldiers
in Cuba by its own food supplies than the Spanish
had killed in Cuba during the Spanish American War. Right,
and yeah, insane time. Right. Really, when you look back
on it, in this landscape of do whatever you want
(21:56):
with food, it's a pretty unbelievable period of contaminated food.
That doesn't mean that, and this is one of the
important things to realize that, aside from very very very
toxic things like from aldehyde that people were literally dying
where they stood, it does mean that people were a
(22:20):
lot less healthy related to their diet. There's a wonderful
historian medical historian at the University of Michigan, Howard Markel,
who tends to describe the nineteenth century as the century
of the Great American stomach ache. Food was making people sick, right,
and that was almost an accepted part of life at
(22:43):
that time, something I think we don't appreciate now just
how unwell we were based on what we.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Ate in this discussion of food fraud versus food safety,
which is I think is a really interesting sort of
designation and important one. Did the conversations around food policies,
whether for fraud or safety, did that revolve initially around
protecting producers or consumers? Or when was that switch made
(23:12):
or was it sort of about both from the very beginning.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
You know, if I go back to Harvey Wiley, who's
the focus of my book, and let me just sort
of bring him into the conversation he was the chief
chemist of the Bureau of Chemistry and the Department of
Agriculture starting in eighteen eighty three. And at this point
there are no food safety laws at the federal level,
(23:39):
and there are no food safety organizations like the FDA.
Right there is the Department of Agriculture. It has this
tiny chemistry unit that's responsible for all agricultural chemistry issues,
you know, soils and fertilizers and you know, developing better
plants chemistry. And also because Wiley was uniquely interested in
(24:05):
food safety and integrity, he starts bringing that into the mix,
right and his real focus was on food fraud when
he came in. It grew into food safety. But when
he started he had done some early investigations in Indiana
on fake syrup and fake honey and that whole problem.
(24:27):
And when he came into the federal government from being
a professor of chemistry at Purdue, he brought that interest
in fake food with him, and so he commissioned a
series of reports just looking at the integrity of manufactured food,
starting with dairy obviously for the reasons we discussed, and
going on through all kinds of things, canned vegetables and lard,
(24:52):
and cocoa and coffee and wines and beers. I mean,
they're just sort of analyzing a random sample of food
and drink products in the United States. He was most
interested in fraud when he started. But those investigations, which
you can find under the incredibly boring title of Bulletin thirteen,
(25:14):
which is what they were not as. But those investigations
started to lead him to be aware that there were
more issues than just fraud than that mixed into the fraud,
and sometimes actually part of the fraud was the addition
of these things that were dangerous. So, for instance, I
might say to you, well, I don't see any harm
in putting gypsum into flour. I mean, there's been no
(25:38):
studies of gypsum that shows that it's poisonous. No studies,
of course had been done of gypsum.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
But you could make.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
A case that that's actually not that healthy.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
So as he starts looking at the sort of methodology
of the fraud, you know, he says, well, was it
really good for us to eat brick dust every day
with our you know spices? Is a really good for
us be charred bone in our coffee? Right? Are we
talking about health as well, and so during the course
of these reports that he started in the eighteen eighties
(26:09):
and went into the eighteen nineties, you start to see
him introducing the subject of risk more and in a
fairly moderate way. He's just saying, couldn't we label these
We've got children eating these materials, we have sick people
eating these materials. Couldn't we just put labels on these
so you would know that there was formaldehyde in your milk,
(26:33):
or borax in your butter, or salicilic acid and your wine.
And you might say, well, I don't want to have
that several times a day, right, I want to protect
myself from that. Couldn't we at least get the information out?
And that also is shut down at the federal level.
But you do start to see, and you're absolutely right,
(26:53):
this growing awareness that fraud is not disconnected from public health.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
I think what is so amazing about your book is
how Wiley comes alive as a person. And you mentioned
how you have this incredible wealth of source material about
his life and correspondence and stuff like that, and so
what sense of his personality did you get that may
have you know, made him a more righteous crusader for
(27:21):
this cause.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Yes, So I always kind of think of him as
a holy roller chemist.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Right.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
His degree in chemistry was from Harvard. He was trained,
you know in that and actually in medicine. His dad
was a itinerant preacher and a conductor on the underground
railroad in Indiana where he grew up. And he was
raised in the idea that we are put on life
to do good. And you'll see even in his early
(27:52):
writings this question of chemistry and the service of mankind
and science and the service of good that tend to
sort of pervade the way he thought about what he
did from the beginning, and that grows. He starts out,
you know, in a lot of ways as just a
well trained analytical chemist. He helped actually found the American
(28:15):
Society of Analytical Chemists. Right. He does a lot of
this you know analysis himself. But as he gets more
into the issue of food and food integrity, he's the
sort of holy roller. This is not acceptable, we have
to change. This side comes out and even in these
reports that I'm telling you about, you know, in the conclusions,
(28:37):
they get more and more this is not acceptable, this
needs to change. So you see him kind of growing
into this role and he grows into it. You know,
he works with congressmen who are trying to introduce food
safety legislation, which fails repeatedly. He becomes part of the
greater American community of food safety advocates. At the time,
(29:02):
this was referred to as the pure food movement, and
there are pure food Congresses, right, I mean, it's pretty fascinating,
you know, how do we define purity? And he becomes
involved in those congresses and talks at them. He helps
create public exhibitions of adulterated and tainted food at world fairs.
(29:25):
I kind of love that at the Chicago World's Fair
of eighteen ninety three at the Columbian which was the
Columbian Exhibition. He does it at the World's Fair in
New York, and he comes back and does a huge
one at the World's Fair at Saint Louis. So he
also is trying to do the other thing, which is
get this information out to the public. And he is
(29:47):
a fascinating person for his time. Right. He does a
lot of work with women's organizations, which is uniquely smart
because women don't have the vote at this time. Right,
you might argue, as a man of the time that
women have no political power, and they're not worth my time,
and many men did. He saw the women's organizations, as
(30:10):
you know, incredibly powerful and influential in getting information out,
and this would put him at loggerheads with his bosses
in the federal government. But he believed that it was
consumer over business from the beginning. You see this driving
him in a way that we don't always see.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
This driving the.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Decisions of the US government the American consumer, whether that
consumer be rich or poor, against the wealthy corporations that
are the financial backbone of the country. Let's say that
the government would be the government stance. Wiley is the
consumer every time, and that both drives the way he
(30:51):
approaches this issue, helps define some of the early approaches
and limits his power because this is not a position
that is universally held at the national level. For sure.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Yeah, absolutely, he is such a fascinating person. We're going
to take a quick break here, and when we get back,
I want to talk with you about his most famous experiment,
the poison Squad. Welcome back, everyone, all right, we've been
(31:47):
having some great conversations about the horrifying state of food
around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And now
I want to chat with you about the title of
your book, the Poison Squad, and this comes from the
name given to the project that Wiley put together to
determine what could be considered quote unquote safe levels of
(32:09):
certain additives to foods. Can you take us through this
experiment and what was learned from it?
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (32:16):
So, you know, as I said, we have this dismaying
landscape of food additive and adulteration with no regulation and
really very little scientific study of these additives that are
going into food. That was one of the things that
was interesting to me when I went back into the
scientific journals of the time and I'm looking for well
(32:38):
who was studying for Eldeha, who was studying box and
it's like almost nobody and there's almost nothing. And so
when Wiley is arguing that these things are not safe,
he doesn't have the data to back that up. So
this brings me to my original question, why would you
be so desperate? He's been trying for a more than
(33:00):
a decade to get some kind of safety regulations passed unsuccessfully,
and he finally decides it will never happen until we
have some basic data driven scientific understanding of whether these
are risks or not, and he persuades Congress to give
him a small amount of money for a study that
he called the Hygienic Table Trials. It's a wonderfully Victorian
(33:25):
term and that, of course the Washington Post found completely
boring and renamed the Poison Squad. And for reasons that
will become obvious. And so the basics of this is
that he recruits young, healthy men. This is kind of
an idea of the time. He wanted to have what
he thought was the healthiest human specimens because he didn't
(33:46):
want them to die. Right, let's not poison already sick people.
So young men in their twenties, most of them had
been college athletes. Most of these are underpaid clerks at
the US Department of Agriculture, and so he offers them
a minimum amount of money and three meals a day,
seven days a week. And the catch is they get
(34:07):
this one these wonderful meals, but they have to be
rigorously monitored, you know, all kinds of doctors poking and
prodding at them, and they have to split the group
into two. And so they basically have two tables of
young men about you know, a dozen at each table
or so maybe a little less, depending on which what
(34:30):
they were looking at. And one table is eating egg fat,
ideal farm fresh food. All of this food was untainted.
They got it from local farms. They used canned goods
when they had no preservatives. They hired a professional shelf.
This is amazing, wonderful food. But at table A, that's
(34:50):
all they're eating. At Table B, they're eating that. But
they have to also swallow capsules with an additive that
Wiley is studying at the time, and he is doing
the core of the study of each individual additive, going
to ratchet up the dose, and so he has a
list of additives he's interested in. Formaldehyde was one of them.
(35:11):
That one they had to call early because people got
so sick so fast they just quit. But they also
had borax, They had copper sulfate that's a heavy metal
that was used to turn peas and canned peas and
beans greener. They had they had a whole list of
these things, salicilic acid, right, and they started with borax
(35:34):
because they believed that that was basically an entry level additive.
They didn't think it was that dangerous box you can
still find today. You'll see it in the cleaning section
of your grocery store. It's twenty Mule Team. Borax, that's
exactly what people were eating every day. Was used in butter,
it was used in meat. I mean you could get
(35:55):
like multiple doses of borax every day at the time
and had never really been studied. So he started with borax.
And later when they had a congressional hearing about borax,
he said borax was sort of the study that made
him realize just how dangerous things were because he had
(36:16):
not predicted these young men would get sick, and some
of them got extremely sick. And the longer they were
taking these concentrated levels of borax, the sicker they got.
And when you look at the newspaper coverage of this study,
you'll start to see this sort of change in the
public discussion of food additives. They're not calling them additives,
(36:36):
they're calling them poisons. The New York Times is calling
them poisons. The Washington Post is calling them poisons. And
because this study is so strange, right, young men volunteering
to be the stomach of America essentially and try out
these dangerous things, it gets a huge amount of coverage.
It's front page news there's poems written about the poison squad,
(37:00):
there's all kinds of amazing and wonderful cartoons. It becomes
this sort of cultural phenomenon. So people are starting to
follow this, and probably as much as the science, which
is pretty primitive science, right, Like you can go back
at the way we do human clinical trials today and go, seriously,
(37:21):
you didn't have a control group, right, you didn't do this.
See all of the different things that we would do now.
I mean, he did have a group that wasn't eating
the poisonous things, but it was fairly small and random
compared to what we would consider a reasonable study today.
But it was a shocker to the United States. So
it was shocker to Whiley, and it was a shock
(37:42):
to everyone else.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
And so as he.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Starts going forward through these other additives, you see this
continued drumbeat of publicity, and you see the recognition by
American industry and also by the friends of American industry government,
this is bad news. This is not serving the interest
(38:04):
of unfettered manufactured food. And so Wiley becomes a huge target.
And not that he had been beloved, but following these studies,
you know the number of smear campaigns and attacks that
come up against him just amplify and in fact, some
of his bosses at the US Department of Agriculture, responding
(38:27):
to industry pressure, starts suppressing some of these studies and
won't let them be published because they think that they
are too damaging to American industry. So this study, which
is very primitive science, very influential in public opinion ways,
also puts him at loggerheads with the powers in the
(38:49):
US government in an industry.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
And is this fight for food safety. It's not just
wily against industry or wily against corporation. There were major
players on both sides of this. What were some of
the groups that were aligned with Wiley and this fight
for you know, safe foods?
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Sure, so there was the women's groups, as I mentioned,
and you see really famous early women advocates like Jane
Adams getting out there and trying to educate women. Wiley
worked very directly with the Women's Clubs of America. They
(39:31):
actually Alice Lakey, who was the leader in that movement,
actually persuaded him to have the Chemistry Department publish his
Chemistry Bureau publish a book on experiments the home cook
Can Do. I mean, they're almost when you read it
and they're telling you how to guard yourself against sulfuric
acid birds, you're thinking, okay, wait, right, this is pretty nuts.
(39:55):
But you know, all kinds of ways to get this
out there. He worked with food advocates in the pure
food group. There was the magazine What to Eat, which
was so there were publications that were really dedicated to this.
I should mention that because I had mentioned that there
(40:16):
were state laws that passed. The states were very active
in trying to get the federal government to respond to
this and setting rules that were far beyond what the
Feds were willing to do, and to put pressure on
the US government to try to, you know, come up
with some instead of this scattershot approach, come up with
(40:39):
some of this comprehensive kind of legislation. And it's interesting
as a portrait of the time because the most progressive
states were of state so we often think of as
red states.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
Now.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
The Dakotas were leaders in the fight for better food rules.
Kansas was, Texas was right, Wisconsin was and you know,
this is a period and it's a very different political map.
You know, my book is focused on Wiley in his fight,
and he sometimes described himself as a general in this fight.
(41:14):
So I want to pay tribute to all of these
other people without whom this would not have happened. The
Suffragette movement got involved in this fight, the prohibitionists, the
woman's Christian temperancely got involved in this fight. Wiley in
fact Mary a Suffragette, right, and which is one of
(41:38):
the reasons that we actually have so much information about
his internal dealings because she was also a librarian at
the Library of Congress and donated all of his papers.
But you know, he used every possible ally that he
could get. And it's really amazing when you look at
the telegrams that are coming into the White House and
to the Department of Agriculture to realize how many people
(42:03):
kind of across the spectrum of American life recognized that
this was important. And I want to say although industry
in general hugely opposed what he was doing, that wasn't
entirely true. The American Canners Association backed him because they
(42:24):
were really concerned about how toxic there, you know, products
were starting to be. There were major food manufacturers like
Henry Hines who got involved on his side and actively
worked to develop better versions of food, you know, a
ketchup that used no preservatives Wiley as I mean, Henry
(42:45):
Hines is famous for that, and so it is a
fascinating patchwork of people who come together fighting for this.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
It was interesting to read about how there was suppression
of these reports and the government is you know, not
everyone was, you know, saying one thing but voting a
different way. But eventually, over time, thanks to things like
the Poison Squad, thanks to things like the formaldehyde in
milk and the embalmed meat scandal, there seemed to be
(43:17):
like the tide was turning. And then there was also
Upton Sinclair and the Jungle, So how did that come
into play during this discussion of food safety.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
I love the story of Upton Sinclair in the Jungle right.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
And I should mention.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
One other group that I should mention was American cookbook writers,
which I just love that, you know, people like Fanny
Farmer would write into their cookbooks. Of course you can't
really trust milk and or just be aware that when you're,
you know, putting pepper, it may not be pepper. I mean,
it's kind of like there's this wonderful underground of education
(43:55):
of women through the cookbook authors of the time. It's
really fascinating. And so all of this is simmering along,
and there's this growing sense of unhappiness and outrage in
the American public, but not enough to really force Congress
to do anything. And that's where Upton Sinclair comes along
with The Jungle. The Jungle is a fascinating story because
(44:18):
it's a novel that is based in journalism. And one
of the reasons, of course, that it had so much
influence was that it is in fact based on the
ground journalistic research that Upton Sinclair did. And so The
Jungle is the story a poor immigrant family working in
the meatpacking industry in Chicago and their travails and trying
(44:42):
to survive in this capitalistic jungle, which was how Upton
Sinclair saw the book. He would later after The Jungle
came out, make this famous statement that he had aimed
for America's heart the plight of the worker, and hit
it in the stomach instead the horrors of American food production,
which is true. He went he was involved with the
(45:05):
kind of the muck ranking group of investigative journalists based
in New York. So when he decided to write his
serial novel. He went to Chicago, stayed at a settlement
house and just embedded himself with the meat packing workers
in the packing houses of the famous packing houses of
Chicago like armor, and cut a hay and their ilk.
(45:28):
And it took lots of notes and did lots of research,
and then went back and wrote this book in which
what happens is he is telling the story of this
beleaguered you know, family working in the packing houses, but
it's set against this background of the horrors of meat production,
which had certainly horrified him. And he publishes this first
(45:54):
in a socialist newspaper out of Kansas. As I said,
politics were very different. Kansas was a hotbed of American
socialism at the time. And then he works to get
it published as a book, and his first publisher was
so horrified by this that he bailed. But a publisher
called then called doubled a Page picked it up. And
(46:17):
what's interesting about that is they agreed to publish it,
but they fact checked it. They sent the editor in
one of their lawyers to Chicago. They came back and said, oh,
it's worse than in the book. And the book is gruesome, right,
it has mold covered meat that's washed off and goes
into the hams and has rats. All of this based
(46:40):
on his experiences. You know, they're poisoning rats with poisoned bread,
and the rats go into the sausages in the jungle.
This was never proved to be true. You know, a
worker falls into one of the live vats and ends
up in the potted ham or the large I think
Anderson's pure that which was his pseudonym for armor. And
(47:04):
you know, so there's horrifying blood spattered walls and all
of this stuff. So it was bad in the novel,
but these guys come back and go, oh my god,
it's worse. It's worse in the factories, right, So they
fact check the book, they publish it. They it becomes
an incidentt bestseller. Everyone's horrified. The meat packing industry and
(47:24):
their buddies in Congress are you know, just trying to
point out that Upton Saint Clair's the socialist and therefore
completely untrustworthy. But it becomes such a furre that Teddy
Roosevelt since his own fact checking team out. That's to
me is what's so interesting is all the people who
go out in fact check this, they come back, they
do a report which has never been published because apparently
(47:48):
it's so damning. And my understanding this is this report
is buried in the archives of the National Agricultural Library
in Beltsville, Maryland, but I never saw it. But basically,
Roosevelt says to Congress, Okay, I want a Meat Inspection Act,
and if you don't give it to me, I'm going
(48:09):
to publish this report. And they say, bolstered by all
the money they're getting from the meat packing industry, you know,
Congress is this is such a shocker. But Congress is
incredibly influenced by the money it gets from large corporate
donors at this time period. They won't pass this law.
So Roosevelt releases a few select pages, and these are
(48:33):
so bad that everyone in Europe instantly cancels are their
meat contracts with the United States. And at that point
the meat industry itself is like oops. They permit Congress
to pack a Meat Inspection Act. And when the Meat
Inspection Act of nineteen o six passes, it pulls across
(48:54):
the line that very battered Food and Drug Act that
Wiley has been working on for years. And so both
of those laws, the Meat Inspection Act and the Food
in Direct Act pass in June of nineteen oh six.
And this is a paradigm changing moment because it's not
just that we've passed a Meat Inspection Act and a
(49:15):
Food and Drug Act, it's that we have set a
precedent in which the US government is now officially declaring
consumer protection as its business. That's never happened before. That
is the first time that the US government agrees that
when we say in the Constitution promotion of the general welfare,
(49:39):
we actually mean protection of American citizens in their everyday lives.
And on the precedent of those two laws comes everything
that follows. OSHA, the EPA, every consumer protection agency that
follows is built on this battle to have food safety
(50:00):
introduced into the United States. And that when I came
to that realization, which I hadn't realized until I did
all of this, it was a wow moment for me. Wow,
this was such a big fight with such important consequences.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
You know, on the one hand, nineteen oh six feels
like so long ago, But on the other hand, that
was actually quite late in comparison to a lot of
countries in Europe who had long since recognized the need
for legislation protecting consumers and making sure that food was
safe to eat. Why do you think the US lagged
(50:41):
behind much of Europe in these types of laws.
Speaker 3 (50:46):
Yeah, we lagged behind Canada too.
Speaker 2 (50:48):
Canada had a national food safety law before we did.
I mean there were a couple of factors. One of
them is actually the Civil War. In this period in
the late nineteenth century, there is bitter mistrust between northern
and Southern states, and the Southern states vote as a
block against any effort by the federal government to dictate
(51:11):
to them how their people, the Southerners, live their life.
Speaker 3 (51:16):
And so you.
Speaker 2 (51:16):
See this come up actually in the discussions of these
food and drug laws. You know, we're not going to
have this Yankee government tell us what to do. So
that was part of it, just the timing of those divisions.
The other part, and it's something you'll also recognize today,
is that there's this American ethic of individual rights. And
(51:43):
in fact, some of the chemists beyond Wiley, who were
working and advocating for federal food safety laws, they brought
this up in the eighteen eighties. We run against this
bedrock resistance in which individual rights trump call good and
so that also I think hugely held us back in
(52:06):
that sense, and I think probably some of it was
the economics of the time. You know, this is a
time of boom growth and acceleration and industrialization. We're reaping
wealth and status because of that. Why would we want
to hinder that? And that's how people saw it. Not
let's make better, safer, smarter products, but we will be
(52:29):
hindering the titans of industry. Right. All of that I
think went into this huge resistance by the United States,
and we did, like Britain passed its first food safety
law in the eighteen sixties, Germany and France in a
very similar time period. You do see in this period
(52:49):
and even after, you know, moments were the European countries,
not just in the horrible scandals you know revealed by
the Jungle we cannot import this American product or even
I was talking about the use of sala silic acid.
Salicilic acid makes your stomach lining bleed. You do not
want it in something you drink every day, right.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
But Germany.
Speaker 2 (53:13):
So Germany had two sets of rules. They forbade the
use of salicilic acid and their beer for their own countrymen,
but they permitted it as a preservative and beer that
they sold to the United States because it was allowed here.
So we just lag behind for all of those reasons.
Some of those reasons, you know, still being at play today,
(53:36):
American individualism, the tilt toward captains of industry, right that
we see today.
Speaker 1 (53:44):
Oh, absolutely, and we've come a long way. We've made
incredible strides since Wiley's Law or the Pure Food and
Drug Act of nineteen o six, But there are still
issues with misrepresentative labeling or a lack of transparent labeling,
or just food safety in general. What are some examples
(54:06):
of some of the ways that you think we could
still improve in terms of food safety here in the US.
Speaker 2 (54:12):
So you're right that labels are not entirely transparent. I
mean two of my favorite examples of that, or the
permission for manufacturers who use the term natural flavorings, which
are often not natural and sometimes toxic but you don't
know what they are. There's no information about that, or
(54:32):
one of my favorite I don't think this is so
much of a safety issue as much as a you know,
don't alarm the American consumer. Example, but if you ever buy,
say a bag of shredded cheese or it's ilk. You'll see,
you know, reference to cellulos, what it's cellulose. Cellulos is
(54:53):
wood pull and you know, outside of people, you know,
the manufacturers do not want to put what pulp in
their label, right the US government permits that. I myself
feel that I would like to know if I'm eating
oakre pine with my cheese. And I totally believe that
(55:14):
given some of the non transparencies of issues, it is
unfair to expect the American consumer to defend themselves against
every issue of food safety, of which there continue to
be many in this country. There's no way for us
to keep up with them or to be fully informed
on them. I mean, I have looked to argued for
(55:37):
geographic labeling of rice, for instance, because rice can contain
naturally occurring with arsenic there are areas where the arsenic
is more concentrated, say in the American South. I would
like to know if my rice comes from the American
South or somewhere where there's less arsenic in the soil.
You can't even get that onto labels. So all of
(56:00):
the ways that if we just had a little information
or a better inform we could defend ourselves are denied
to us because of these issues of non transparency. We
have labels, and the labels are you know, a whole
lot better than no labels, and they've been updated. They
were updated in the George W. Bush Administration for better
(56:21):
Nutrition Information and they've been improved.
Speaker 3 (56:24):
But could they be better?
Speaker 2 (56:27):
Absolutely? Do people look at a label on that list
of ingredients and have any idea what it means?
Speaker 3 (56:32):
Now?
Speaker 2 (56:33):
So you know, I don't know that we need encyclopedic labels,
but I think labels that are easier to understand would
be an excellent point. And we do know speaking of lugs,
that there are a lot of compounds that are permitted
in American food that are banned in Europe to this day,
(56:53):
titanium dioxide being a good example of that.
Speaker 3 (56:57):
Banned by the EU.
Speaker 2 (56:58):
Permitted in food in the UNI stays as a coloring agent.
People don't actually even know that, And so there's all
kinds of ways that I think we do need to
be a better educated public. And the system is non
transparent to that degree, so I think that's part of it. Also,
you know, we don't keep food entirely safe. Has been
(57:23):
clear by a whole lot of series of contamination issues
with bacteria. You know, those are bigger picture issues. We don't,
for instance, entirely regulate the water supply going into crops,
which is one of the reasons we see some of
these bacterial issues coming up and people die. Right, Salmonella
(57:45):
is a bad bacteria. People are injured, people die, and
so is it as bad as it was in the
nineteenth century? Is it not?
Speaker 3 (57:54):
Is it acceptable?
Speaker 2 (57:56):
CDC estimates at least three thousand deaths month, and you know,
well over one hundred thousand illnesses, of which we don't
always even identify the source of those food born illnesses. Recently,
there was a suggestion, I've seen it both in the
Post and elsewhere, that we pulled the Food Safety Division
(58:21):
out of the FDA, entirely, combine it with the USDA
Food Safety Division, and make a department that would really
be dedicated to food safety and actively concentrated on just
protecting the food supply and decently funded. Thanks to the
way the Meat Inspection Act came about and the Food
(58:41):
Safety Act came about food and drug safety at the
Meat Inspection the US Department of Agriculture has a whole
lot more money for food safety than the USDA does
a lot, and that really has to do with the
fact that meat was the scandal of the time, right,
and that was funding mechanisms laid down in nineteen o six,
(59:02):
and they plague us to this day. The USDA is
hugely well funded on this front. The FDA is usually underfunded.
We really need to say, let's set aside all of that,
you know, partisan argument of you know, more than one
hundred years ago, and build a modern food safety protection
(59:22):
network and enforce the laws we have, which we don't
always do so at all. So I feel very strongly
about that.
Speaker 1 (59:32):
Do you think that food safety policies are by nature
reactive or can they ever be proactive?
Speaker 2 (59:40):
It's a great question, and you're absolutely right that we
tend to be reactive whether rather than proactive. And if
I just take the history of food and drug legislation,
for instance, the nineteen oh six Food and Drug at
passed heavily watered down by industry and by its buddies
(01:00:01):
in the US government. But something it lays down a precedent, right,
it starts the issue. It's completely inadequate. And so in
nineteen thirty eight, following a scandal in which hundreds of
children are killed by a poisonous cough syrup that's permitted
(01:00:23):
under the nineteen oh six law. We get the nineteen
thirty eight Food Drug and Cosmetics Act that establishes the
modern FBA. That is a reactive People have been pushing
for this for obviously more than twenty years or more
than thirty years, right, But we get it when children
die in the nineteen fifties, we get the Delainey Close
(01:00:45):
nineteen fifties nineteen sixties, which deals with toxic food dies
that is reactive to children who got sick from toxic
food dies.
Speaker 3 (01:00:55):
And this continues onward.
Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
And the one most recently that's worth mentioning is the
twenty eleven FISMA, the Food Safety Modernization Act that passed
under Barack Obama, and that was a reaction to the
Peanut Corporation of America scandal, in which peanut butter was
so contaminated with molds and toxins that it killed a
(01:01:20):
whole lot of elderly people before they actually figured out
that this particular company was getting away with nineteenth century
factory standards. In fact, right, it's one of the few
cases in which the head of Peanut Corporation of America
went to prison. It was not bad, but reacting to
(01:01:41):
that spurred FISMA, and then of course the Trump administration
refused to enforce FISMA. So my point that, you know,
we have some decent laws on the book, most of
them are generated reactively.
Speaker 3 (01:01:56):
You know, we're in.
Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
A great position right now to be proactive. That doesn't
mean that I think we will, but we are in
a great position at this moment to be proactive. There
have been a lot of food safety scandals recently related
to the FDA, you know, baby formulas the being one example.
(01:02:18):
The you know, repeated incidents of bacterial contamination and food.
There continues to be adulteration and fake products that we
barely even hear about but are in the American food
supply today. And so this would be a great moment
at the national level for our leaders, if they're not
(01:02:39):
distracted by everything else that's going on at the national level. Right,
I say to say, let's get this right, let's take
a moment, let's not be reactive, let's proactively put a
decent system in place, more similar to the In fact,
I would argue the EU system, which is you know,
(01:03:00):
much more proactive, and saying this looks dangerous. Let's take
it out till it's proven safe. And I believe that
Harry Willy would believe that too. I believe that his
ghost would stand up and say, you know, come on right,
let's get this right at long last. We have the
tools to do it, we just need the will.
Speaker 1 (01:03:38):
That was just so amazing. Thank you so much, Deborah
for taking the time to chat. I don't know if
I'll ever be able to get the images of some
of these adulterated foods out of my brain. If you
all enjoyed this as much as I did and want
to learn more, check out our website this podcast will
Kill You dot com. We're I'll post a link to
where you can find The Poison Squad, one chemist's single
(01:04:01):
minded crusade for food safety at the turn of the
twentieth century. I'll also post a link to Blum's other work,
including The Poisoner's Handbook and the Poison Squad PBS series,
and don't forget. You can check out our website for
all sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to, transcripts,
Quarantini and Placeiver, reader recipes, show notes and references for
(01:04:25):
all of our episodes, links to merch our bookshop dot
org affiliate account, our Goodreads list, a first hand account form,
and music by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which, thank you to
Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all
of our episodes. Thank you to Leanna Scuialacci for our
audio mixing, and thanks to you listeners for reading with me.
(01:04:47):
I hope you liked the second to last episode of
the TPWKY book Club. And a special thank you, as
always to our wonderful, fantastic patrons. We appreciate your support
so very much. Okay, until next time, keep washing those hands.
Speaker 2 (01:05:05):
M
Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this podcast will
kill You. Welcome everyone to the latest installment of the
tp w k Y Book Club, where our two read
lists grow ever longer and our appreciation for amazing science
communicators writing the enlightening and entertaining books grows ever deeper.
(01:03):
On a personal note, this mini series has been an
absolute blast to put together, with some truly unforgettable conversations
about incredibly wide ranging topics, and I just really love
that I get to do this, So thank you so
much to all you wonderful people for listening, and to
all these amazing authors for chatting. Without you, this would
(01:27):
not be possible. We find ourselves now in the second
to last episode in this mini series, and while I
won't list off each book that we've talked about like
I've done in every other intro, because that's a whole
lot of books, at this point, I will just say
again how much I've loved hearing from you all about
these episodes, and will happily welcome any other feedback, favorites,
(01:50):
follow up questions, future book recommendations, or anything else you
want to tell me. Okay, but that's enough podcast business
for the time.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Being.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Now, let's go into what we'll be talking about today,
and that is the food of the past. If I
asked you to imagine what food tasted or looked like
back at the turn of the twentieth century, I think
many of us might imagine an idealized world where tomatoes
were plump, juicy, and always ripe, Where meat was pure,
(02:23):
untainted by hormones or antibiotics, where butter was always fresh,
churned from milk straight from the cow. That is, unless
you've read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, in which case you
might have a grittier, more realistic picture of what things
were actually like. But I think many of us buy
into this romantic notion that everything was fresher, more flavorful, healthier,
(02:48):
less processed, more pure back in the day, and frankly,
that could not be further from the truth. Acclaimed science journalist, professor,
and Pulitzer Prize writer Deborah Blum joins me today to
chat about her excellent book The Poison Squad, also made
into a PBS series in twenty twenty, which explores the wild,
(03:12):
unregulated mess that was the US food industry in the
early twentieth century and the contentious fight to clean up
that mess, led by some truly remarkable individuals. Blum, whose
best selling book, The Poisoner's Handbook is certainly a favorite
of many of our listeners, paints a vivid picture of
(03:33):
the preregulation food industry and the tremendous fight for safe foods.
The growing urban populations of the nineteenth century required a
food supply to keep up with the ever increasing demand,
and one way that producers found to do this was
through food adulteration, a deceptive practice that involves adding substances
(03:53):
to food to change its appearance, its taste, its volume,
or size. Blum's book is filled with horrifying examples of
early food adulteration, as well as not a small number
of scandals where people lost their lives due to poisoned food.
It seems like this practice of food adulteration would not
(04:14):
be tolerated by consumers or any regulatory body, making it
pretty bad for business. But the fact of the matter
was that there were no regulatory bodies to impose fines
upon these deceitful producers, and the lack of labels on
foods meant that consumers couldn't make an informed decision about
whether they wanted to buy butter that contained borax or
(04:37):
did not contain borax. So business went on as usual
until chemist Harvey Wiley stepped in and started his lifelong
crusade to make food safe for public consumption. The efforts
of Wiley and his poison Squad captured the public's attention
in a major way and greatly advanced the fight for
(04:57):
food safety legislation. Even though it seems like safe foods
and consumer protection should be a thing that everybody wants,
it was not a one sided battle. Wiley was fighting
against a corrupt industry that had long made sure to
keep the federal government on its side. In today's episode,
Blum and I discussed Wiley's monumental impact on food safety
(05:21):
legislation in the United States, some of the shocking food
poisoning scandals that incited the public to activism, how far
we've come in terms of consumer protection since the Pure
Food and Drug Act of nineteen oh six, and how
much further we still have to go. I am super
excited to get started, so let's take a quick break
(05:44):
and then dive in. Deborah, thank you so very much
(06:12):
for being here today. I am such a big fan
of your work, and I especially loved The Poison Squad
for how you brought to life the incredible story of
Harvey Wiley and his quest for food safety in the US.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Thank you so much. It's really a privilege. I'm excited
to be on this podcast, and I love talking about
Harvey Wilace and sort of the invention of food safety
in the United States that is part of his story.
So I really appreciate you having me on.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Well. I loved hearing about that story, and the other
thing that I loved about your book were all of
the delightfully disgusting and horrifying examples of food adulteration that
you describe.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
They were horrifying and discussed thing.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Who was truly shocking. I think there were many times
where I pulled my partner aside and was like, you've
got to read this, look at this. How did you
first come across the story of Harvey Wiley and what
most interested you about this period of history.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, that's a great question. So I have been what
I think of as a toxicology journalist for over the
past decade. I've written about.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Poisons and homicide.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
My real interest is poison in our everyday life, right
how we navigate a chemical world that includes things that
are really dangerous for us. And a lot of my
interests has been in the history of science as well,
how did we get here? And so when I was
looking at poisons in the early twentieth centuries, which is
(07:51):
a special interest of mine, I started seeing references to
what is truly one of the strangest public health experiments
in history, which was conducted by Harvey Wiley and was
nicknamed the Poison Squad, which I can explain later.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
By the Washington Post.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
And I almost in very simple minded I thought, well,
what in the world is that? And so then when
I started looking at the experiment, and one of the
things that makes this such an unusual experiment is you
really have a chemist at the US Department of Agriculture
(08:30):
deliberately poisoning as co workers. That's one of the elements
of the Poison Squad that's so fascinating, actually in the
interest of trying to figure out what's going into our food.
And when I was reading the descriptions of that, I thought,
why would you be so desperate as to do that?
What would it take to have an established government? Chemists say,
(08:55):
the only way that I can get the answer to
this problem is is to do this incredibly risky experiment
on young men working in my agency. And that sort
of pushed me off the cliff into the whole question
of what was going on at food at the time
that made things so crazy that you would need to
(09:17):
do that experiment. It was something I think I'd never
really thought about before, but that really was the sort
of tipping point of that inquiry.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah, and I think a lot of us tend to
think of food from that period of time as being,
you know, fresher meat was fresh, milk was straight from
the cow's utter, and foods in general were more you know,
quote unquote pure. But what was food actually like during
the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, particularly in
(09:48):
cities in the US.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yes, that was like almost a moment of horrifying discovery
for me because I also had thought, in the way
we'll sometimes talk about the one wonerful farm fresh food
of our ancestors, right this pinchy, healthy, happy period of
the nineteenth century, that was my I had brought into
that mythology as well completely, so that when I started
(10:14):
unpeeling the layers of what food was like in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was like, wait
a minute. And so part of it is that there
is a mythology to it, and some of that is
the way we tend to sort of romanticize the agriculture
of the past and the idea that we were, you know,
(10:34):
a happy rural nation with everyone just walking over to
farmer John's orchard to get their apples. But that wasn't true, right,
especially starting in the mid nineteenth century and posts the
Civil War, we were increasingly in industrial nations. So there
were people who lived on farms and eight farm fresh food,
(10:55):
I assume, right, And there were wealthy people who owned
their own farm or were able to purchase those things.
But the majority of Americans increasingly were living in cities.
They were working in factories, you know, scraping by. They
weren't going out into the country to get these expensive
farm fresh materials. They were buying them at corner stores
(11:18):
and local grocery stores, and they were buying a lot.
With the rise of industry came the rise of industrialized food,
so they were buying a lot of manufactured food. And
one of the things about the rise of sort of
food manufacturing canning and other ways that we sort of
(11:40):
bring things from the farm to the grocery store or
the grocery store to your table. Is that this was
also a period in which there was no food regulation,
which is sort of another part of the story. So
I am a food manufacturer. There were no laws telling
me what I can put in food.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
There are no applaws requiring.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
That you label the food. You don't have to tell
people what's in it. There's nothing. And so if in
a capitalistic society the idea is to maximize your profit,
it was like free reign to do so, and we
saw incredible consequences of that, to the point that I
start as thinking to myself, did people in the nineteenth
(12:26):
century ever eat what they thought they were eating? Because
there was so much fraud It was crazy.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
It's unbelievable. And I loved reading the list of the
many lists, the many instances, just my jaw dropping over
and over again with some of these examples. Were there
any in particular that you found the most shocking of
you know, like a food additive or a food lie,
or any that you found the most appalling in terms
(12:56):
of the producer's complete disregard for human health?
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Yeah, that's a really important point.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
I think. So you have widespread fraud, and you have
white sat broad and basically if you think about it,
and things that are easy to fake. So you know spices, right,
you had brick dusts that went into cinnamon and paprik
and the red red colored spices flour for bread. The
(13:24):
people would grind up gypsum which we put in wallboard
to make as a flower extender.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
I mean again going back to what were you actually eating?
I was myself horrified by coffee. I mean, I love coffee.
It's like the way I start every day. You almost
never got actual coffee in your coffee, or a full
cup of coffee. You know, you got sometimes you got
ground bone, right, Sometimes you just got dirt. There was
(13:56):
a doctor in the Upper Midwest or at one point
speculated that the phrase of muddy cup of coffee came
from the idea that most Americans were drinking a fair
amount of mud when they thought they were drinking coffee.
And it was so to give you an idea, because
coffee makes a good example of how entrenched the fraud was.
(14:18):
You know, the original fraud was with a ground coffee.
How can you tell what's actually in these particles in
the can of coffee? Right? It could be coffee, it
could be ground seeds, it could be ground coconut shells,
which were awful also used. And so people began to
become increasingly suspicious of ground coffee and switched over to
(14:39):
coffee beans. And of course this is the nineteenth century.
So you go down to the corner store. There's a
barrel full of coffee beans. You have the grocer scoop
them up for you. And so what you find is
this new industry in fake coffee beans, right, And you
can actually find the formulas for making the coffee beans.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
There's the little molds.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
For them of wax and clay. I mean, then when
you grind them up at home, of course they go
in to your coffee. And this is repeated over and
over again. You see it in whiskey, you see it
in wine. You see it sort of across the board
in all kinds of food products. You see, going on
(15:20):
to your other question about what I found shockingly unhealthy,
the use of toxic compounds to color food. So Arsenic
is used to make green food coloring. Lead is used
to make red food coloring. You would find lead in
cheese because they wanted that orange look of cheddar, so
(15:41):
they would mix in a little red lead. It's completely acceptable.
But to me, the sort of standout horror story involves
milk and the additives that go into milk.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Yes, absolutely, it's it's almost as though like the fraud
drove the most incredible creativity in terms of, like, how
can we make quote unquote food that has actual, not
edible components to it. It's it's amazing.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
It's insane.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
And so with milk, of course, the number one thing.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
It starts with people just watering the milk. Right, I
can make a lot more money if I use water.
I don't particularly care if it's clean water. I think
I put in the book this one instance where they
found horsehair worms and milk because the dairy man had just,
speaking of disgusting, just used pond water to water down
his milk. The milk when it was too watered would
(16:32):
turn kind of bluish. They'd add in plaster of Paris
or chalk. They would occasionally fake cream by purating pure
in calf brains and floating them on top of the
milk in this lovely creamy looking lace kind of disgusting.
But the other thing about milk is you have to
remember this is a time when there's no refrigeration, so
(16:53):
milk spoiled. And there were when we look at how
dangerous milk was in the nineteenth century, which it was.
Some of it has to do with that, right, you
have a huge milk is a wonderful substrate for bacteria.
It's got sugar, it's got protein, everything a good pathogenic
bacteria wants. Since you had all these horrible pathogens and
(17:14):
milk glow vine, tuberculosis, brucellosis right just and as the
milk began to rot, they grow and grow and grow.
So dairymen then are trying to figure out a cheap
way to deal with this, and they turn to an
embalming agent, form aldehyde, and they start embalming the milk,
right literally embomming the milk. When you go into newspapers
(17:37):
of that time, there are headlines in balm milk scandals
in which dairymen are putting fromaldehyde in the milk, not
under the name form aldehyde, and remember they don't have
to label it anyway. And then children are dying and
getting sick, and so that is such an insane thing
to do for aldehyde.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Is so poisonous.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
They knew it was poisonous, right, You could argue with
some of these additives like salicilic acid, which we you
know as a component of as form. We know that
makes the lining of the stomach bled. Did they really
know that then only somewhat but from aldehyde out and
mount poisons. So they did know and they just obviously
(18:19):
didn't care. It's really a horrifying story.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Yeah. Absolutely, So you just went through an incredible list
of foods that were adulterated or not even like spices, milk, coffee,
everything that contained harmful chemicals or pathogens and parasites. And
the list seems endless. But were there any foods in
particular that seemed to be the biggest problems or that
(18:45):
were the first targets in terms of food safety legislation.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Yeah, that's also an important point. So during this whole
period with the rise of industrial chemistry going into food,
there's a whole of failed attempts to regulate food. At
the national level. There were states that passed laws. Indiana,
which was the state that suffered a huge outbreak of
(19:11):
inbalm milk deaths, and I think they had four hundred
in Indianapolis one summer past a law driven by the
dangers of milk. So you see milk and dairy products
becoming one of the real targets of food safety laws,
and this sort of patchwork of responses at the state level.
At this point, it's milk, it's cheese, it's adulteration.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Of spices.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
The Congress held a number of hearings and one of
the things that come up there is the adult this
is fraud rather than risk. But honey and syrups were
largely corn syrup at that time, and again to show
you how ingenious it was, there would be honey, it
would actually be corn syrup, and they would had a
(20:02):
business of making fake honeycombs that they would make out
of wax and drop into the corn syrup to make
it look like, you know, real honey. So you have
a lot of interest in this. Again, there were states
that targeted maybe the fought and maple syrup, the fraud
and honey. They the government looked at fraud and gems
(20:24):
and jellies. Right, strawberry jam often had enough strawberry in
it at all, and they would use grass seed instead
of strawberry seeds. And then the dyes of the time
are analine cooltar dyes. Pretty much. You'd get these red
coultar dyes and you know in corn syrup and grass
seed and they actually, in one congressional hearing had a
(20:47):
manufacturer who said, well, we couldn't possibly do it another
way because you know, we would lose market share if
we went to the expensive putting strawberries in our strawberry jam.
So you have this whole system that is catching people's attention.
What really catches people attention are the really horrible frauds
(21:08):
and then the uh, you know, the scandals like the
above milk scandal, and so some of the things that
start coming up in addition are you know, the preservative
used in meat, and that really came up after the
Spanish American War when there was a huge scandal that
was actually called the ebald meat scandal, in which the
(21:32):
government had to investigate whether it had killed more soldiers
in Cuba by its own food supplies than the Spanish
had killed in Cuba during the Spanish American War. Right,
and yeah, insane time. Right. Really, when you look back
on it, in this landscape of do whatever you want
(21:56):
with food, it's a pretty unbelievable period of contaminated food.
That doesn't mean that, and this is one of the
important things to realize that, aside from very very very
toxic things like from aldehyde that people were literally dying
where they stood, it does mean that people were a
(22:20):
lot less healthy related to their diet. There's a wonderful
historian medical historian at the University of Michigan, Howard Markel,
who tends to describe the nineteenth century as the century
of the Great American stomach ache. Food was making people sick, right,
and that was almost an accepted part of life at
(22:43):
that time, something I think we don't appreciate now just
how unwell we were based on what we.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Ate in this discussion of food fraud versus food safety,
which is I think is a really interesting sort of
designation and important one. Did the conversations around food policies,
whether for fraud or safety, did that revolve initially around
protecting producers or consumers? Or when was that switch made
(23:12):
or was it sort of about both from the very beginning.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
You know, if I go back to Harvey Wiley, who's
the focus of my book, and let me just sort
of bring him into the conversation he was the chief
chemist of the Bureau of Chemistry and the Department of
Agriculture starting in eighteen eighty three. And at this point
there are no food safety laws at the federal level,
(23:39):
and there are no food safety organizations like the FDA.
Right there is the Department of Agriculture. It has this
tiny chemistry unit that's responsible for all agricultural chemistry issues,
you know, soils and fertilizers and you know, developing better
plants chemistry. And also because Wiley was uniquely interested in
(24:05):
food safety and integrity, he starts bringing that into the mix,
right and his real focus was on food fraud when
he came in. It grew into food safety. But when
he started he had done some early investigations in Indiana
on fake syrup and fake honey and that whole problem.
(24:27):
And when he came into the federal government from being
a professor of chemistry at Purdue, he brought that interest
in fake food with him, and so he commissioned a
series of reports just looking at the integrity of manufactured food,
starting with dairy obviously for the reasons we discussed, and
going on through all kinds of things, canned vegetables and lard,
(24:52):
and cocoa and coffee and wines and beers. I mean,
they're just sort of analyzing a random sample of food
and drink products in the United States. He was most
interested in fraud when he started. But those investigations, which
you can find under the incredibly boring title of Bulletin thirteen,
(25:14):
which is what they were not as. But those investigations
started to lead him to be aware that there were
more issues than just fraud than that mixed into the fraud,
and sometimes actually part of the fraud was the addition
of these things that were dangerous. So, for instance, I
might say to you, well, I don't see any harm
in putting gypsum into flour. I mean, there's been no
(25:38):
studies of gypsum that shows that it's poisonous. No studies,
of course had been done of gypsum.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
But you could make.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
A case that that's actually not that healthy.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
So as he starts looking at the sort of methodology
of the fraud, you know, he says, well, was it
really good for us to eat brick dust every day
with our you know spices? Is a really good for
us be charred bone in our coffee? Right? Are we
talking about health as well, and so during the course
of these reports that he started in the eighteen eighties
(26:09):
and went into the eighteen nineties, you start to see
him introducing the subject of risk more and in a
fairly moderate way. He's just saying, couldn't we label these
We've got children eating these materials, we have sick people
eating these materials. Couldn't we just put labels on these
so you would know that there was formaldehyde in your milk,
(26:33):
or borax in your butter, or salicilic acid and your wine.
And you might say, well, I don't want to have
that several times a day, right, I want to protect
myself from that. Couldn't we at least get the information out?
And that also is shut down at the federal level.
But you do start to see, and you're absolutely right,
(26:53):
this growing awareness that fraud is not disconnected from public health.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
I think what is so amazing about your book is
how Wiley comes alive as a person. And you mentioned
how you have this incredible wealth of source material about
his life and correspondence and stuff like that, and so
what sense of his personality did you get that may
have you know, made him a more righteous crusader for
(27:21):
this cause.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Yes, So I always kind of think of him as
a holy roller chemist.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Right.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
His degree in chemistry was from Harvard. He was trained,
you know in that and actually in medicine. His dad
was a itinerant preacher and a conductor on the underground
railroad in Indiana where he grew up. And he was
raised in the idea that we are put on life
to do good. And you'll see even in his early
(27:52):
writings this question of chemistry and the service of mankind
and science and the service of good that tend to
sort of pervade the way he thought about what he
did from the beginning, and that grows. He starts out,
you know, in a lot of ways as just a
well trained analytical chemist. He helped actually found the American
(28:15):
Society of Analytical Chemists. Right. He does a lot of
this you know analysis himself. But as he gets more
into the issue of food and food integrity, he's the
sort of holy roller. This is not acceptable, we have
to change. This side comes out and even in these
reports that I'm telling you about, you know, in the conclusions,
(28:37):
they get more and more this is not acceptable, this
needs to change. So you see him kind of growing
into this role and he grows into it. You know,
he works with congressmen who are trying to introduce food
safety legislation, which fails repeatedly. He becomes part of the
greater American community of food safety advocates. At the time,
(29:02):
this was referred to as the pure food movement, and
there are pure food Congresses, right, I mean, it's pretty fascinating,
you know, how do we define purity? And he becomes
involved in those congresses and talks at them. He helps
create public exhibitions of adulterated and tainted food at world fairs.
(29:25):
I kind of love that at the Chicago World's Fair
of eighteen ninety three at the Columbian which was the
Columbian Exhibition. He does it at the World's Fair in
New York, and he comes back and does a huge
one at the World's Fair at Saint Louis. So he
also is trying to do the other thing, which is
get this information out to the public. And he is
(29:47):
a fascinating person for his time. Right. He does a
lot of work with women's organizations, which is uniquely smart
because women don't have the vote at this time. Right,
you might argue, as a man of the time that
women have no political power, and they're not worth my time,
and many men did. He saw the women's organizations, as
(30:10):
you know, incredibly powerful and influential in getting information out,
and this would put him at loggerheads with his bosses
in the federal government. But he believed that it was
consumer over business from the beginning. You see this driving
him in a way that we don't always see.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
This driving the.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Decisions of the US government the American consumer, whether that
consumer be rich or poor, against the wealthy corporations that
are the financial backbone of the country. Let's say that
the government would be the government stance. Wiley is the
consumer every time, and that both drives the way he
(30:51):
approaches this issue, helps define some of the early approaches
and limits his power because this is not a position
that is universally held at the national level. For sure.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Yeah, absolutely, he is such a fascinating person. We're going
to take a quick break here, and when we get back,
I want to talk with you about his most famous experiment,
the poison Squad. Welcome back, everyone, all right, we've been
(31:47):
having some great conversations about the horrifying state of food
around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And now
I want to chat with you about the title of
your book, the Poison Squad, and this comes from the
name given to the project that Wiley put together to
determine what could be considered quote unquote safe levels of
(32:09):
certain additives to foods. Can you take us through this
experiment and what was learned from it?
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (32:16):
So, you know, as I said, we have this dismaying
landscape of food additive and adulteration with no regulation and
really very little scientific study of these additives that are
going into food. That was one of the things that
was interesting to me when I went back into the
scientific journals of the time and I'm looking for well
(32:38):
who was studying for Eldeha, who was studying box and
it's like almost nobody and there's almost nothing. And so
when Wiley is arguing that these things are not safe,
he doesn't have the data to back that up. So
this brings me to my original question, why would you
be so desperate? He's been trying for a more than
(33:00):
a decade to get some kind of safety regulations passed unsuccessfully,
and he finally decides it will never happen until we
have some basic data driven scientific understanding of whether these
are risks or not, and he persuades Congress to give
him a small amount of money for a study that
he called the Hygienic Table Trials. It's a wonderfully Victorian
(33:25):
term and that, of course the Washington Post found completely
boring and renamed the Poison Squad. And for reasons that
will become obvious. And so the basics of this is
that he recruits young, healthy men. This is kind of
an idea of the time. He wanted to have what
he thought was the healthiest human specimens because he didn't
(33:46):
want them to die. Right, let's not poison already sick people.
So young men in their twenties, most of them had
been college athletes. Most of these are underpaid clerks at
the US Department of Agriculture, and so he offers them
a minimum amount of money and three meals a day,
seven days a week. And the catch is they get
(34:07):
this one these wonderful meals, but they have to be
rigorously monitored, you know, all kinds of doctors poking and
prodding at them, and they have to split the group
into two. And so they basically have two tables of
young men about you know, a dozen at each table
or so maybe a little less, depending on which what
(34:30):
they were looking at. And one table is eating egg fat,
ideal farm fresh food. All of this food was untainted.
They got it from local farms. They used canned goods
when they had no preservatives. They hired a professional shelf.
This is amazing, wonderful food. But at table A, that's
(34:50):
all they're eating. At Table B, they're eating that. But
they have to also swallow capsules with an additive that
Wiley is studying at the time, and he is doing
the core of the study of each individual additive, going
to ratchet up the dose, and so he has a
list of additives he's interested in. Formaldehyde was one of them.
(35:11):
That one they had to call early because people got
so sick so fast they just quit. But they also
had borax, They had copper sulfate that's a heavy metal
that was used to turn peas and canned peas and
beans greener. They had they had a whole list of
these things, salicilic acid, right, and they started with borax
(35:34):
because they believed that that was basically an entry level additive.
They didn't think it was that dangerous box you can
still find today. You'll see it in the cleaning section
of your grocery store. It's twenty Mule Team. Borax, that's
exactly what people were eating every day. Was used in butter,
it was used in meat. I mean you could get
(35:55):
like multiple doses of borax every day at the time
and had never really been studied. So he started with borax.
And later when they had a congressional hearing about borax,
he said borax was sort of the study that made
him realize just how dangerous things were because he had
(36:16):
not predicted these young men would get sick, and some
of them got extremely sick. And the longer they were
taking these concentrated levels of borax, the sicker they got.
And when you look at the newspaper coverage of this study,
you'll start to see this sort of change in the
public discussion of food additives. They're not calling them additives,
(36:36):
they're calling them poisons. The New York Times is calling
them poisons. The Washington Post is calling them poisons. And
because this study is so strange, right, young men volunteering
to be the stomach of America essentially and try out
these dangerous things, it gets a huge amount of coverage.
It's front page news there's poems written about the poison squad,
(37:00):
there's all kinds of amazing and wonderful cartoons. It becomes
this sort of cultural phenomenon. So people are starting to
follow this, and probably as much as the science, which
is pretty primitive science, right, Like you can go back
at the way we do human clinical trials today and go, seriously,
(37:21):
you didn't have a control group, right, you didn't do this.
See all of the different things that we would do now.
I mean, he did have a group that wasn't eating
the poisonous things, but it was fairly small and random
compared to what we would consider a reasonable study today.
But it was a shocker to the United States. So
it was shocker to Whiley, and it was a shock
(37:42):
to everyone else.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
And so as he.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Starts going forward through these other additives, you see this
continued drumbeat of publicity, and you see the recognition by
American industry and also by the friends of American industry government,
this is bad news. This is not serving the interest
(38:04):
of unfettered manufactured food. And so Wiley becomes a huge target.
And not that he had been beloved, but following these studies,
you know the number of smear campaigns and attacks that
come up against him just amplify and in fact, some
of his bosses at the US Department of Agriculture, responding
(38:27):
to industry pressure, starts suppressing some of these studies and
won't let them be published because they think that they
are too damaging to American industry. So this study, which
is very primitive science, very influential in public opinion ways,
also puts him at loggerheads with the powers in the
(38:49):
US government in an industry.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
And is this fight for food safety. It's not just
wily against industry or wily against corporation. There were major
players on both sides of this. What were some of
the groups that were aligned with Wiley and this fight
for you know, safe foods?
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Sure, so there was the women's groups, as I mentioned,
and you see really famous early women advocates like Jane
Adams getting out there and trying to educate women. Wiley
worked very directly with the Women's Clubs of America. They
(39:31):
actually Alice Lakey, who was the leader in that movement,
actually persuaded him to have the Chemistry Department publish his
Chemistry Bureau publish a book on experiments the home cook
Can Do. I mean, they're almost when you read it
and they're telling you how to guard yourself against sulfuric
acid birds, you're thinking, okay, wait, right, this is pretty nuts.
(39:55):
But you know, all kinds of ways to get this
out there. He worked with food advocates in the pure
food group. There was the magazine What to Eat, which
was so there were publications that were really dedicated to this.
I should mention that because I had mentioned that there
(40:16):
were state laws that passed. The states were very active
in trying to get the federal government to respond to
this and setting rules that were far beyond what the
Feds were willing to do, and to put pressure on
the US government to try to, you know, come up
with some instead of this scattershot approach, come up with
(40:39):
some of this comprehensive kind of legislation. And it's interesting
as a portrait of the time because the most progressive
states were of state so we often think of as
red states.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
Now.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
The Dakotas were leaders in the fight for better food rules.
Kansas was, Texas was right, Wisconsin was and you know,
this is a period and it's a very different political map.
You know, my book is focused on Wiley in his fight,
and he sometimes described himself as a general in this fight.
(41:14):
So I want to pay tribute to all of these
other people without whom this would not have happened. The
Suffragette movement got involved in this fight, the prohibitionists, the
woman's Christian temperancely got involved in this fight. Wiley in
fact Mary a Suffragette, right, and which is one of
(41:38):
the reasons that we actually have so much information about
his internal dealings because she was also a librarian at
the Library of Congress and donated all of his papers.
But you know, he used every possible ally that he
could get. And it's really amazing when you look at
the telegrams that are coming into the White House and
to the Department of Agriculture to realize how many people
(42:03):
kind of across the spectrum of American life recognized that
this was important. And I want to say although industry
in general hugely opposed what he was doing, that wasn't
entirely true. The American Canners Association backed him because they
(42:24):
were really concerned about how toxic there, you know, products
were starting to be. There were major food manufacturers like
Henry Hines who got involved on his side and actively
worked to develop better versions of food, you know, a
ketchup that used no preservatives Wiley as I mean, Henry
(42:45):
Hines is famous for that, and so it is a
fascinating patchwork of people who come together fighting for this.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
It was interesting to read about how there was suppression
of these reports and the government is you know, not
everyone was, you know, saying one thing but voting a
different way. But eventually, over time, thanks to things like
the Poison Squad, thanks to things like the formaldehyde in
milk and the embalmed meat scandal, there seemed to be
(43:17):
like the tide was turning. And then there was also
Upton Sinclair and the Jungle, So how did that come
into play during this discussion of food safety.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
I love the story of Upton Sinclair in the Jungle right.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
And I should mention.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
One other group that I should mention was American cookbook writers,
which I just love that, you know, people like Fanny
Farmer would write into their cookbooks. Of course you can't
really trust milk and or just be aware that when you're,
you know, putting pepper, it may not be pepper. I mean,
it's kind of like there's this wonderful underground of education
(43:55):
of women through the cookbook authors of the time. It's
really fascinating. And so all of this is simmering along,
and there's this growing sense of unhappiness and outrage in
the American public, but not enough to really force Congress
to do anything. And that's where Upton Sinclair comes along
with The Jungle. The Jungle is a fascinating story because
(44:18):
it's a novel that is based in journalism. And one
of the reasons, of course, that it had so much
influence was that it is in fact based on the
ground journalistic research that Upton Sinclair did. And so The
Jungle is the story a poor immigrant family working in
the meatpacking industry in Chicago and their travails and trying
(44:42):
to survive in this capitalistic jungle, which was how Upton
Sinclair saw the book. He would later after The Jungle
came out, make this famous statement that he had aimed
for America's heart the plight of the worker, and hit
it in the stomach instead the horrors of American food production,
which is true. He went he was involved with the
(45:05):
kind of the muck ranking group of investigative journalists based
in New York. So when he decided to write his
serial novel. He went to Chicago, stayed at a settlement
house and just embedded himself with the meat packing workers
in the packing houses of the famous packing houses of
Chicago like armor, and cut a hay and their ilk.
(45:28):
And it took lots of notes and did lots of research,
and then went back and wrote this book in which
what happens is he is telling the story of this
beleaguered you know, family working in the packing houses, but
it's set against this background of the horrors of meat production,
which had certainly horrified him. And he publishes this first
(45:54):
in a socialist newspaper out of Kansas. As I said,
politics were very different. Kansas was a hotbed of American
socialism at the time. And then he works to get
it published as a book, and his first publisher was
so horrified by this that he bailed. But a publisher
called then called doubled a Page picked it up. And
(46:17):
what's interesting about that is they agreed to publish it,
but they fact checked it. They sent the editor in
one of their lawyers to Chicago. They came back and said, oh,
it's worse than in the book. And the book is gruesome, right,
it has mold covered meat that's washed off and goes
into the hams and has rats. All of this based
(46:40):
on his experiences. You know, they're poisoning rats with poisoned bread,
and the rats go into the sausages in the jungle.
This was never proved to be true. You know, a
worker falls into one of the live vats and ends
up in the potted ham or the large I think
Anderson's pure that which was his pseudonym for armor. And
(47:04):
you know, so there's horrifying blood spattered walls and all
of this stuff. So it was bad in the novel,
but these guys come back and go, oh my god,
it's worse. It's worse in the factories, right, So they
fact check the book, they publish it. They it becomes
an incidentt bestseller. Everyone's horrified. The meat packing industry and
(47:24):
their buddies in Congress are you know, just trying to
point out that Upton Saint Clair's the socialist and therefore
completely untrustworthy. But it becomes such a furre that Teddy
Roosevelt since his own fact checking team out. That's to
me is what's so interesting is all the people who
go out in fact check this, they come back, they
do a report which has never been published because apparently
(47:48):
it's so damning. And my understanding this is this report
is buried in the archives of the National Agricultural Library
in Beltsville, Maryland, but I never saw it. But basically,
Roosevelt says to Congress, Okay, I want a Meat Inspection Act,
and if you don't give it to me, I'm going
(48:09):
to publish this report. And they say, bolstered by all
the money they're getting from the meat packing industry, you know,
Congress is this is such a shocker. But Congress is
incredibly influenced by the money it gets from large corporate
donors at this time period. They won't pass this law.
So Roosevelt releases a few select pages, and these are
(48:33):
so bad that everyone in Europe instantly cancels are their
meat contracts with the United States. And at that point
the meat industry itself is like oops. They permit Congress
to pack a Meat Inspection Act. And when the Meat
Inspection Act of nineteen o six passes, it pulls across
(48:54):
the line that very battered Food and Drug Act that
Wiley has been working on for years. And so both
of those laws, the Meat Inspection Act and the Food
in Direct Act pass in June of nineteen oh six.
And this is a paradigm changing moment because it's not
just that we've passed a Meat Inspection Act and a
(49:15):
Food and Drug Act, it's that we have set a
precedent in which the US government is now officially declaring
consumer protection as its business. That's never happened before. That
is the first time that the US government agrees that
when we say in the Constitution promotion of the general welfare,
(49:39):
we actually mean protection of American citizens in their everyday lives.
And on the precedent of those two laws comes everything
that follows. OSHA, the EPA, every consumer protection agency that
follows is built on this battle to have food safety
(50:00):
introduced into the United States. And that when I came
to that realization, which I hadn't realized until I did
all of this, it was a wow moment for me. Wow,
this was such a big fight with such important consequences.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
You know, on the one hand, nineteen oh six feels
like so long ago, But on the other hand, that
was actually quite late in comparison to a lot of
countries in Europe who had long since recognized the need
for legislation protecting consumers and making sure that food was
safe to eat. Why do you think the US lagged
(50:41):
behind much of Europe in these types of laws.
Speaker 3 (50:46):
Yeah, we lagged behind Canada too.
Speaker 2 (50:48):
Canada had a national food safety law before we did.
I mean there were a couple of factors. One of
them is actually the Civil War. In this period in
the late nineteenth century, there is bitter mistrust between northern
and Southern states, and the Southern states vote as a
block against any effort by the federal government to dictate
(51:11):
to them how their people, the Southerners, live their life.
Speaker 3 (51:16):
And so you.
Speaker 2 (51:16):
See this come up actually in the discussions of these
food and drug laws. You know, we're not going to
have this Yankee government tell us what to do. So
that was part of it, just the timing of those divisions.
The other part, and it's something you'll also recognize today,
is that there's this American ethic of individual rights. And
(51:43):
in fact, some of the chemists beyond Wiley, who were
working and advocating for federal food safety laws, they brought
this up in the eighteen eighties. We run against this
bedrock resistance in which individual rights trump call good and
so that also I think hugely held us back in
(52:06):
that sense, and I think probably some of it was
the economics of the time. You know, this is a
time of boom growth and acceleration and industrialization. We're reaping
wealth and status because of that. Why would we want
to hinder that? And that's how people saw it. Not
let's make better, safer, smarter products, but we will be
(52:29):
hindering the titans of industry. Right. All of that I
think went into this huge resistance by the United States,
and we did, like Britain passed its first food safety
law in the eighteen sixties, Germany and France in a
very similar time period. You do see in this period
(52:49):
and even after, you know, moments were the European countries,
not just in the horrible scandals you know revealed by
the Jungle we cannot import this American product or even
I was talking about the use of sala silic acid.
Salicilic acid makes your stomach lining bleed. You do not
want it in something you drink every day, right.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
But Germany.
Speaker 2 (53:13):
So Germany had two sets of rules. They forbade the
use of salicilic acid and their beer for their own countrymen,
but they permitted it as a preservative and beer that
they sold to the United States because it was allowed here.
So we just lag behind for all of those reasons.
Some of those reasons, you know, still being at play today,
(53:36):
American individualism, the tilt toward captains of industry, right that
we see today.
Speaker 1 (53:44):
Oh, absolutely, and we've come a long way. We've made
incredible strides since Wiley's Law or the Pure Food and
Drug Act of nineteen o six, But there are still
issues with misrepresentative labeling or a lack of transparent labeling,
or just food safety in general. What are some examples
(54:06):
of some of the ways that you think we could
still improve in terms of food safety here in the US.
Speaker 2 (54:12):
So you're right that labels are not entirely transparent. I
mean two of my favorite examples of that, or the
permission for manufacturers who use the term natural flavorings, which
are often not natural and sometimes toxic but you don't
know what they are. There's no information about that, or
(54:32):
one of my favorite I don't think this is so
much of a safety issue as much as a you know,
don't alarm the American consumer. Example, but if you ever buy,
say a bag of shredded cheese or it's ilk. You'll see,
you know, reference to cellulos, what it's cellulose. Cellulos is
(54:53):
wood pull and you know, outside of people, you know,
the manufacturers do not want to put what pulp in
their label, right the US government permits that. I myself
feel that I would like to know if I'm eating
oakre pine with my cheese. And I totally believe that
(55:14):
given some of the non transparencies of issues, it is
unfair to expect the American consumer to defend themselves against
every issue of food safety, of which there continue to
be many in this country. There's no way for us
to keep up with them or to be fully informed
on them. I mean, I have looked to argued for
(55:37):
geographic labeling of rice, for instance, because rice can contain
naturally occurring with arsenic there are areas where the arsenic
is more concentrated, say in the American South. I would
like to know if my rice comes from the American
South or somewhere where there's less arsenic in the soil.
You can't even get that onto labels. So all of
(56:00):
the ways that if we just had a little information
or a better inform we could defend ourselves are denied
to us because of these issues of non transparency. We
have labels, and the labels are you know, a whole
lot better than no labels, and they've been updated. They
were updated in the George W. Bush Administration for better
(56:21):
Nutrition Information and they've been improved.
Speaker 3 (56:24):
But could they be better?
Speaker 2 (56:27):
Absolutely? Do people look at a label on that list
of ingredients and have any idea what it means?
Speaker 3 (56:32):
Now?
Speaker 2 (56:33):
So you know, I don't know that we need encyclopedic labels,
but I think labels that are easier to understand would
be an excellent point. And we do know speaking of lugs,
that there are a lot of compounds that are permitted
in American food that are banned in Europe to this day,
(56:53):
titanium dioxide being a good example of that.
Speaker 3 (56:57):
Banned by the EU.
Speaker 2 (56:58):
Permitted in food in the UNI stays as a coloring agent.
People don't actually even know that, And so there's all
kinds of ways that I think we do need to
be a better educated public. And the system is non
transparent to that degree, so I think that's part of it. Also,
you know, we don't keep food entirely safe. Has been
(57:23):
clear by a whole lot of series of contamination issues
with bacteria. You know, those are bigger picture issues. We don't,
for instance, entirely regulate the water supply going into crops,
which is one of the reasons we see some of
these bacterial issues coming up and people die. Right, Salmonella
(57:45):
is a bad bacteria. People are injured, people die, and
so is it as bad as it was in the
nineteenth century? Is it not?
Speaker 3 (57:54):
Is it acceptable?
Speaker 2 (57:56):
CDC estimates at least three thousand deaths month, and you know,
well over one hundred thousand illnesses, of which we don't
always even identify the source of those food born illnesses. Recently,
there was a suggestion, I've seen it both in the
Post and elsewhere, that we pulled the Food Safety Division
(58:21):
out of the FDA, entirely, combine it with the USDA
Food Safety Division, and make a department that would really
be dedicated to food safety and actively concentrated on just
protecting the food supply and decently funded. Thanks to the
way the Meat Inspection Act came about and the Food
(58:41):
Safety Act came about food and drug safety at the
Meat Inspection the US Department of Agriculture has a whole
lot more money for food safety than the USDA does
a lot, and that really has to do with the
fact that meat was the scandal of the time, right,
and that was funding mechanisms laid down in nineteen o six,
(59:02):
and they plague us to this day. The USDA is
hugely well funded on this front. The FDA is usually underfunded.
We really need to say, let's set aside all of that,
you know, partisan argument of you know, more than one
hundred years ago, and build a modern food safety protection
(59:22):
network and enforce the laws we have, which we don't
always do so at all. So I feel very strongly
about that.
Speaker 1 (59:32):
Do you think that food safety policies are by nature
reactive or can they ever be proactive?
Speaker 2 (59:40):
It's a great question, and you're absolutely right that we
tend to be reactive whether rather than proactive. And if
I just take the history of food and drug legislation,
for instance, the nineteen oh six Food and Drug at
passed heavily watered down by industry and by its buddies
(01:00:01):
in the US government. But something it lays down a precedent, right,
it starts the issue. It's completely inadequate. And so in
nineteen thirty eight, following a scandal in which hundreds of
children are killed by a poisonous cough syrup that's permitted
(01:00:23):
under the nineteen oh six law. We get the nineteen
thirty eight Food Drug and Cosmetics Act that establishes the
modern FBA. That is a reactive People have been pushing
for this for obviously more than twenty years or more
than thirty years, right, But we get it when children
die in the nineteen fifties, we get the Delainey Close
(01:00:45):
nineteen fifties nineteen sixties, which deals with toxic food dies
that is reactive to children who got sick from toxic
food dies.
Speaker 3 (01:00:55):
And this continues onward.
Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
And the one most recently that's worth mentioning is the
twenty eleven FISMA, the Food Safety Modernization Act that passed
under Barack Obama, and that was a reaction to the
Peanut Corporation of America scandal, in which peanut butter was
so contaminated with molds and toxins that it killed a
(01:01:20):
whole lot of elderly people before they actually figured out
that this particular company was getting away with nineteenth century
factory standards. In fact, right, it's one of the few
cases in which the head of Peanut Corporation of America
went to prison. It was not bad, but reacting to
(01:01:41):
that spurred FISMA, and then of course the Trump administration
refused to enforce FISMA. So my point that, you know,
we have some decent laws on the book, most of
them are generated reactively.
Speaker 3 (01:01:56):
You know, we're in.
Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
A great position right now to be proactive. That doesn't
mean that I think we will, but we are in
a great position at this moment to be proactive. There
have been a lot of food safety scandals recently related
to the FDA, you know, baby formulas the being one example.
(01:02:18):
The you know, repeated incidents of bacterial contamination and food.
There continues to be adulteration and fake products that we
barely even hear about but are in the American food
supply today. And so this would be a great moment
at the national level for our leaders, if they're not
(01:02:39):
distracted by everything else that's going on at the national level. Right,
I say to say, let's get this right, let's take
a moment, let's not be reactive, let's proactively put a
decent system in place, more similar to the In fact,
I would argue the EU system, which is you know,
(01:03:00):
much more proactive, and saying this looks dangerous. Let's take
it out till it's proven safe. And I believe that
Harry Willy would believe that too. I believe that his
ghost would stand up and say, you know, come on right,
let's get this right at long last. We have the
tools to do it, we just need the will.
Speaker 1 (01:03:38):
That was just so amazing. Thank you so much, Deborah
for taking the time to chat. I don't know if
I'll ever be able to get the images of some
of these adulterated foods out of my brain. If you
all enjoyed this as much as I did and want
to learn more, check out our website this podcast will
Kill You dot com. We're I'll post a link to
where you can find The Poison Squad, one chemist's single
(01:04:01):
minded crusade for food safety at the turn of the
twentieth century. I'll also post a link to Blum's other work,
including The Poisoner's Handbook and the Poison Squad PBS series,
and don't forget. You can check out our website for
all sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to, transcripts,
Quarantini and Placeiver, reader recipes, show notes and references for
(01:04:25):
all of our episodes, links to merch our bookshop dot
org affiliate account, our Goodreads list, a first hand account form,
and music by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which, thank you to
Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all
of our episodes. Thank you to Leanna Scuialacci for our
audio mixing, and thanks to you listeners for reading with me.
(01:04:47):
I hope you liked the second to last episode of
the TPWKY book Club. And a special thank you, as
always to our wonderful, fantastic patrons. We appreciate your support
so very much. Okay, until next time, keep washing those hands.
Speaker 2 (01:05:05):
M
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