Deborah Blum

He just goes through kind of all the things we're talking about, right?

The butter is really oleo margarine, the...

pepper is really ground bone, that coffee is not coffee, that milk is just completely dangerous.

I think Wiley got to the point where he was feeling, he was starting to feel just desperate about this.

How do I fix this?

He recruited young clerks and entry-level employees of the Department of Agriculture to essentially agree to dine dangerously.

The Poison Squad members were young, athletic men.

A lot of them had been college athletes, and they were in their 20s.

And he picked them because he thought of them as basically sturdy, right?

He didn't want to kill people.

He wasn't trying to have fragile people in his experiment.

He wanted people who he thought could tolerate some of this violence.

And I guess in an early 20th century way, he picked these sort of healthy young men.

They would get a very small stipend, and they would get three meals a day, seven days a week for free.

And at these very minimal salaries, this was a huge benefit.

And they would be blood tested and urine tested and all of the tests and weighed and measured and poked and prodded.

And they would eat really great food.

He hired a high-end chef.

All of these meals were the genuine farm-fresh article.

They actually went out to farms around the D.C.