Deborah Blum

The food and drug law is this huge, complicated thing.

And it includes, for the first time, setting safety regulations for food, right?

How are those implemented?

Who does the tests?

Who's responsible?

How do we hold industry to account?

And Wiley's really holding out for consumer protection overall.

You know, he doesn't want to

give an inch on any of these rules.

And he realizes that he's at a point that he doesn't really have any power in government anymore, that he's made so many enemies that, and this is the cost of refusing, I think, to negotiate or compromise to some extent.

But his goals are very different from the people he's working with.

He realizes that he just can't be an effective person in

food safety in government anymore, and he resigns from government in 1912.

which at that time was a very different publication.

It was a crusading magazine.

They allowed him to set up something called the Good Housekeeping Test Kitchens, and he created a part of that called the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

So in his laboratories at Good Housekeeping, he went ahead and ran tests that the government was refusing to do, and then Good Housekeeping would publish those results, and they would give the seal of approval to food and drink that he felt was safe.

Let me say this.

You could not do the poison squad experiments today, right?

There's not an institutional review board that would say, yes, why don't we just run experiments in which we knowingly feed dangerous substances to our coworkers?