Julia Belluz

speaker

540 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 8 May

Julia Belluz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Plain English with Derek Thompson · Plain English BEST OF: What’s the Matter With America’s Food? · 3 Feb 2026 podcast

Over the years where we saw this explosion of diet-related chronic diseases, including obesity, our genes didn't change.

What changed was the food environment.

So yeah, that's sort of what we mean by that.

So Wiley was the chief chemist at the U.S.

Department of Agriculture in the late 18, early 1900s.

And he was interested in this question.

So this is a time when America is urbanizing.

People are moving off of the farms and into cities further away from the food supply.

And basically, food manufacturers are trying to figure out how do we keep food safe and feed people when they're basically not living on the farm anymore.

And one of the ways they did that was they started to add preservatives and other additives to food.

I think we all have this idea that, you know, our great, great grandparents were sort of eating this pure, like lovely meals that we don't have access to anymore.

But in this time, it was not uncommon to leave lunch or dinner with like a raging stomach ache and to even be acutely poisoned from your food because there was basically no regulation of the food supply in this moment.

So there's a wonderful book by the science journalist, Deborah Blum, and she details, it's a Wiley biography, and she details all the gruesome things food manufacturers were doing in this time.

So it was like,

to milk to kind of give it this illusion of cream at the top of yellow cream at the top of the milk they would add ground calf brains it was just horrendous what was happening so Wiley becomes interested in can we isolate what the poisons are and so he designs these famous poison squad trials that were actually very similar to what Kevin was doing

He randomizes, it was young men at the time, clerks in the Department of Agriculture to two groups.

One group just gets, you know, they eat all their meals in this room in the Department of Agriculture.

And the other group is getting the meals plus little tablets containing the commonly used preservatives.

And so he's trying to isolate with graduated doses when might these preservatives start to cause or additives start to cause problems for people.

Then it was his research along with the jungle by Upton Sinclair that ends up resulting in the establishment of basically the food, what we know as the Food and Drug Administration today.

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