Sarah Gonzalez

And for the first time, the U.S.

put some real rules on food and drugs.

Granted, in the beginning, the government was pretty easy on companies.

What was I thinking?

And listen, the FDA did not ban these crazy ingredients in 1906.

They just said, disclose them.

That was their big thing.

Over time, the FDA's big thing became making sure that consumers were not

robbed of their hard-earned cash by companies who were adulterating food, you know, like adding sawdust to flour to make the flour stretch.

The government didn't start taking chemicals and additives really seriously until World War II.

You have a lot of men going off to war, women going into the workforce, having less time to cook things from scratch, and the market identifies this need for shelf-stable convenience foods.

This is when we see a ton of innovation in the food chemical space.

And Melanie says it's not really a problem for anyone until 1950.

Halloween.

A couple of candy manufacturers that year decided that they were going to make these candies really, really, really orange.

They used a lot of this orange dye, number one.

This orange dye was already being used in cakes and cookies and meat products like hot dogs.

We're just going to move right past that gross description.

This orange dye was a byproduct of coal, of processing coal.

These dyes turned out to be really toxic.