Phoebe Judge
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
One soldier said that the smell was so bad that when someone opened a can, they often had to, quote, retire a distance to prevent being overcome.
Harvey Wiley was also called to testify at the hearings.
He and his staff had examined the cans of meat that the soldiers had eaten and found that what was in the cans wasn't any different than the canned meat that Americans were getting every day at the grocery store.
That same year, Harvey Wiley participated in a series of hearings on the country's food supply.
He talked about his department's findings and asked that manufacturers tell consumers what they were really eating by listing all the ingredients on labels.
To help make his point, he read a poem he'd written about food fraud.
It had lines like, the wine which you drink never heard of a grape, and ended with, the banquet how fine, don't begin it till you think of the past and the future and sigh, how I wonder, I wonder, what's in it.
But when food safety legislation was introduced in the House and the Senate the next year, food manufacturers pushed back, and the bills were shut down in less than a month.
In 1901, Harvey Wiley asked Congress for the funds to do something that hadn't been done before, to systematically test some of these food additives on human subjects.
He called his experiment the Hygienic Table Trials, but newspapers started calling it the Poison Squad Experiments, after the Volunteers.
The Department of Agriculture received lots of applications.
One eager volunteer wrote, Dear sir, I have a stomach that can stand anything.
Harvey Wiley had a test kitchen and a dining room built in the basement of the Department of Agriculture.
He set up two round tables with white tablecloths in the dining room.
But at one of the tables, they would be having food laced with something that could be poisonous.