Deborah Blum

But the milk killed children.

And so when you start going through American newspapers in the 19th century, you will actually find stories.

They're called embalmed milk scandals, in which there's so much formaldehyde in the milk, and it's an embalming agent, that it's killing children.

There were, in the 19th century, no food safety laws.

There was no law setting standards for what could go into food.

There was no laws requiring that manufacturers label their products.

And there were actually no laws requiring manufacturers to put into a package what it pretended to be.

I always think of him as kind of a holy roller chemist because it was like crusading was part of his personality makeup from the beginning.

His father was an itinerant preacher.

He had been a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

And he discovered that a majority of the honey in Indiana was actually corn syrup and dyed with a coal tar dye to be more golden.

And then the fraudsters, I guess I'll call them, had been making fake honeycomb and crumbling it into the corn syrup to make it look like actual real honey.

And...

It's really important to recognize that at the point that he goes into the Department of Agriculture, it's not just that we don't have any food safety laws in the United States at the federal level.

We don't have any consumer protections at all.

And he comes into the Department of Agriculture, tiny department in a government that has never been interested in this issue at all,

And he says in a very cautious analytical chemist way, why don't we just take a look?

Why don't we just start analyzing what's actually in the food supply?

No one's ever done that before, but we can take our brilliant analytical chemistry methods that we've been applying to things like soil quality, and we can try to figure out what's in food.

And so almost as soon as he went there, starting in 1883,