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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, no, it goes back to where we started this conversation.
Like there's this great book, The Tyranny of the Gene, where the author talks about basically this obsession with genes and individuals and treatments and biology when so much of what is shaping health is environmental and we just don't look there and we don't fund that research.
One thing we mentioned in the book, Kevin, you know the specifics, it's how much should we spend on the precision research
So I think this original sin probably goes back to Wiley's time.
What actually gets Congress to act on the findings of his poison squad trials is a book called The Jungle by Upton Sinclair that you might have read in high school.
So Sinclair is interested in exposing how horribly workers are being treated in meatpacking plants in Chicago.
and kind of telling the story of the plight of the American laborer.
But because of the work and all the advocacy Wiley had been doing, the public was primed to read it another way as more evidence of just this tainted food supply and how terrible and unsanitary the conditions for food processing are at that time in the U.S.,
And so there's this public uproar that ensues and other countries start to boycott imports of U.S.
meat.
And in 1906, two laws get passed.
So one is the Pure Food and Drug Act that leads to the creation of FDA.
And this regulation of food and drugs.
And then the other one is the Meat Inspection Act.
And this is giving authority to the USDA to do pre-market health and safety checks for meat, including having USDA inspectors present in slaughterhouses.
And the meat industry, to be able to actually do that, lobbies heavily to get USDA a big budget for food safety.
And the result is that it's bigger than FDA's entire food safety budget, even though FDA is responsible for regulating something like 80% of the American food supply.
So you have this well-resourced USDA program for meat and this historically under-resourced FDA food safety program for the rest of what we eat.
And then lots of what happens with the rest of food is that we basically rely on companies to do the right thing.
And there's no pre-market vetting of much of what we eat.
Showing 481–500 of 540 · page 25 of 27
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