Deborah Blum

The Department of Chemistry starts testing food and they start publishing a series of bulletins with the incredibly boring title of Bulletin 13.

And it's so boring sounding that the food industry does not actually realize what this means.

And they're finding not only this panorama of fraud, but some really dangerous materials like red lead and cheddar, for instance, or arsenic in some of the sweet products or really dangerous levels of salicylic acid in beer and wine.

And they start, if you read these reports,

They say, basically, there's some really dangerous stuff here, and could we at least start labeling food?

At a minimum, we should label.

And the food and drink industry is like, absolutely not.

So, during the Spanish-American War, one of the things that was shipped down to American soldiers fighting in Cuba was both canned meat and then some semi-preserved, you know,

Afterwards, there were a number of officers who had served in Cuba who accused the U.S.

government of killing more soldiers with the food than the actual Cuban fighters had been able to accomplish.

And they particularly focused on meat.

And it began...

such a scandal that the then Department of War held hearings about it.

And one of the people who testified was Teddy Roosevelt, who had been a rough rider in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

And he said that he would rather have eaten his hat

than the canned meat that was provided by the soldiers.

And he actually told a story about one of his soldiers in his command refusing to eat the food out of the can, and he ordered him to do it, and the man almost immediately started throwing up.

It wasn't their fault soldiers had died.

They were just feeding them what every American ate.

I actually really loved that poem.