Phoebe Judge

They wanted to see if the honey sold in the state was actually honey.

Harvey Wiley wrote that the product was, quote, entirely free of bee mediation, and that the demand for honest food should be heard.

A couple of years later, he became the chief chemist of the United States Department of Agriculture, the USDA.

Harvey Wiley and the other USDA chemists looked at everything from canned vegetables to butter to cocoa, and they found all kinds of things.

The cocoa had clay and sand and finely powdered tin in it.

A lot of the butter was actually margarine.

And ground pepper had sawdust, cereal crumbs, sand, soil, and powdered olive stones to, quote, an astonishing extent.

It also had dust, possibly from floor sweepings.

One of the USDA scientists, while he assigned to look at spices, asked to be transferred because he was so disgusted by what he found.

But Harvey Wiley kept looking into what Americans were eating and doing whatever he could to get the word out.

He had even hired a journalist to help translate his technical reports into easy-to-understand press releases.

But Americans didn't seem to be that concerned until the Spanish-American War.

Newspapers around the country reported accounts of cans that contained maggots and pieces of charred rope along with the meat.

and a chemical smell that led one major to call it embalmed beef.

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.

No charges were brought against the military.

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.