Deborah Blum

People are starting to get angry, but they're probably not angry enough.

And the food industry, about the time these studies started coming out, started really actively working to discredit Wiley as a scientist.

The borax industry actually hired a publicist who wrote fake letters to newspapers pretending to be citizens who were grateful for borax in their food.

felt that Wiley was trying to make their food more dangerous, and he wrote all these letters.

They all got published, right?

That were just people he had made up criticizing Wiley.

People went after him in other ways, and you see this huge pushback.

He kind of goes on the speaking circuit and talks to anyone who will listen to him, and you can see him.

And this, too, I think was one of the criticisms that was leveled against him, is he doesn't really sound...

We have an idea of a scientist as being, you know, completely methodical and objective.

They have no opinion.

They're just telling you what the data says.

And Wiley's not doing that anymore.

He wants this to change, and he absolutely refuses to back down.

And it's about the plight of people working in the packing yards in Chicago.

He'd gotten very interested in the plight of workers in Chicago, and he had actually gone and gone undercover in the Chicago stockyards and meatpacking plants.

And Upton Sinclair was so poor that he kind of blended in with all of these very underpaid immigrant workers who were what he was interested in.

And because he had spent so much time in the packing houses themselves, he had these incredibly gruesome descriptions, right?

The mold growing on the walls, the dead rats that were chopped up and went into the sausage, the horrible, filthy conditions.

And they came back from the stockyards and they said, it's worse than in the book, right?