Chapter 1: What was the historical context of food safety in the 19th century?
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Flour was routinely laced with gypsum, which we use in wallboard. Spices were sometimes 80 to 90% adulterated. Brick dust was used in cinnamon. Floor sweepings were used in pepper. Ground bone was used in some of the other ground spices. Most food historians will tell you that food was one of the top ten causes of death in the United States in the 19th century.
And medical historians sometimes call it the century of the great American stomachache.
Journalist Deborah Blum.
Coffee was sometimes 100% adulterated. Literally, sometimes people would grind up coconut shells. They would use lead-infused dyes to color them. If people got wary of their ground coffee, they would buy coffee beans. So there were fake coffee beans. They were usually made of dirt and wax.
At one point in the 1890s, there was a congressional hearing about some of this, and a manufacturer of strawberry jam testified that their strawberry jam contained no strawberries. It was corn syrup, grass seed, and aniline coal tar dyes. And he said that they had to do that in order to keep their prices competitive with other manufacturers who were often doing even worse things.
During the later half of the 19th century, more and more Americans were moving from farms to cities, where they were beginning to rely on industrially produced foods. Manufacturers found all kinds of ways to stretch their products with unlisted additions. At the same time, 19th century canning and food processing methods were often unsanitary, and there wasn't any widespread refrigeration.
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Chapter 2: Who was Harvey Washington Wiley and what was his role?
And finally, the preservative formaldehyde had become the number one preserver of bodies during the Civil War. And the American dairymen, in their inventive way, said, wow, if this really works so well to preserve rotting bodies, what could it do for dairy products? And two things happened. One, the formaldehyde killed the bacteria, hands down.
The other was that formaldehyde, it's apparently fairly sweet. So when you mix the formaldehyde into the milk, it covered up the taste of the rot. And so dairymen then embraced this. And you had dairymen who would kind of go to themselves. Well, if a little formaldehyde does the job, a lot would do it even better. And some of these guys would actually advertise.
They would have advertised saying, you know, buy our special milk. You can leave it on the counter for three weeks. But the problem was that often when that happened, the levels of formaldehyde were really toxic. They didn't have to tell the consumers. There's no requirement to label. They usually didn't acknowledge that it was formaldehyde.
The formaldehyde formulas had names like Rosaline and Preservaline and Icing and sort of benign names. But the milk killed children. And so when you start going through American newspapers in the 19th century, you will actually find stories. They're called embalmed milk scandals, in which there's so much formaldehyde in the milk, and it's an embalming agent, that it's killing children.
It wasn't only formaldehyde. Manufacturers were starting to add all kinds of chemicals to food. borax to meat, salicylic acid to beer, sulfurous acid to dried fruit. And none of it was regulated by the U.S. government.
There were, in the 19th century, no food safety laws. There was no law setting standards for what could go into food. There was no laws requiring that manufacturers label their products. And there were actually no laws requiring manufacturers to put into a package what it pretended to be.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a government chemist named Harvey Washington Wiley decided to find out what all these chemicals were actually doing to Americans. He found 12 volunteers who would eat foods laced with formaldehyde, borax, and salicylic acid every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to see what happened. They were called the Poison Squad. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
Who was Harvey Washington Wiley?
I always think of him as kind of a holy roller chemist because it was like crusading was part of his personality makeup from the beginning. His father was an itinerant preacher. He had been a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
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Chapter 3: What experiment did the Poison Squad conduct and why?
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.
And they're finding not only this panorama of fraud, but some really dangerous materials like red lead and cheddar, for instance, or arsenic in some of the sweet products or really dangerous levels of salicylic acid in beer and wine. And they start, if you read these reports, They say, basically, there's some really dangerous stuff here, and could we at least start labeling food?
At a minimum, we should label. And the food and drink industry is like, absolutely not.
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.
So, during the Spanish-American War, one of the things that was shipped down to American soldiers fighting in Cuba was both canned meat and then some semi-preserved, you know, Afterwards, there were a number of officers who had served in Cuba who accused the U.S. government of killing more soldiers with the food than the actual Cuban fighters had been able to accomplish.
And they particularly focused on meat.
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.
And it began... such a scandal that the then Department of War held hearings about it. And one of the people who testified was Teddy Roosevelt, who had been a rough rider in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. And he said that he would rather have eaten his hat than the canned meat that was provided by the soldiers.
And he actually told a story about one of his soldiers in his command refusing to eat the food out of the can, and he ordered him to do it, and the man almost immediately started throwing up.
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Chapter 4: What were the findings from the Poison Squad's tests on food additives?
How do I fix this?
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.
He recruited young clerks and entry-level employees of the Department of Agriculture to essentially agree to dine dangerously.
The Department of Agriculture received lots of applications. One eager volunteer wrote, Dear sir, I have a stomach that can stand anything. I have a stomach that will surprise you.
The Poison Squad members were young, athletic men. A lot of them had been college athletes, and they were in their 20s. And he picked them because he thought of them as basically sturdy, right? He didn't want to kill people. He wasn't trying to have fragile people in his experiment. He wanted people who he thought could tolerate some of this violence.
And I guess in an early 20th century way, he picked these sort of healthy young men. They would get a very small stipend, and they would get three meals a day, seven days a week for free. And at these very minimal salaries, this was a huge benefit.
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. Six volunteers would sit at each table. They would all eat at the same time. But at one of the tables, they would be having food laced with something that could be poisonous.
Meals would be served on a strict schedule, breakfast at 8 a.m., lunch at noon, dinner at 5.30. The volunteers took an oath not to eat or drink anything outside of the dining room, except water, which they would measure out and report to Wiley. If they were hungry, they had to wait. Before each meal, they would be weighed, have their temperature taken, and have their pulse rate recorded.
After meals, they had to write down every single thing they ate or drank and exactly how much. Doctors would examine them twice a week.
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Chapter 5: How did public perception of food safety change after the Poison Squad's findings?
They have white tablecloths. He got nice china and flatware. They've got these ladder-backed chairs and beautifully polished glasses. And I think that was part of his plan. He wanted it to feel like I'm just dining with friends. He didn't want it to feel like I'm being experimented on.
Each of the volunteers signed a waiver, releasing the government from any responsibility if they became very sick or died. One of the volunteers put a sign at the door that said, none but the brave can eat the fair. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Right now, we're offering a free seven-day trial. Go to patreon.com slash criminal plus.
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The first substance Harvey Wiley wanted the poison squad to eat was borax, which was used as a cleaning product, but was also a popular preservative in meat and butter.
So he chose borax first because he thought, and he actually testified to Congress about this, that it wasn't that dangerous, and he wanted to start low-end. He thought, you know, some of them might get an upset stomach or something, but he actually had expected very little effect.
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Chapter 6: What impact did Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle' have on food safety regulations?
One reporter for the Washington Post published what he imagined the volunteers' Christmas dinner menu would look like. Applesauce. Borax. Soup. Borax. Turkey. Borax. The Washington Post reported on the poison squad often. People seemed to like reading about it so much that sometimes a reporter would just make something up.
One article claimed that eating the borax had made the volunteers turn pink. Quote, Each of the young men undergoing the course of treatment has blossomed out with a bright pink complexion that would make a society bride sick with envy. After it was published, the USDA received a stack of letters from women asking what they needed to take to get such beautiful skin.
And this Poison Squad, as it went forward, got a huge amount of attention. It wasn't just that newspapers were covering it. There were songs about it. There were shows about it. There were not just Wiley's, you know, I Wonder What's In It, but poems written about it. You can find the host of the most incredible cartoons.
But as the Borax experiment went on, the volunteers started getting very sick.
You know, they were throwing up. They were losing weight. They felt incredibly off. Wiley, he hadn't expected that to happen. And he said, which really stuck with me, that that was the experiment that changed the way he saw things. the entire program because it was the one that convinced him that they had been underestimating, not overestimating, but underestimating how dangerous this was.
That these compounds that everyone was just like, oh yeah, this is part of the daily diet when you added them up as he was doing. were much more dangerous than he had expected. And you see the tone of his messaging change after the Borax experiment. And you see the tone of the way newspapers are covering this change, right?
The Post had really wrote some early articles in which they kind of saw this as high comedy, you know. men agreeing to sit around a table and dine dangerously and, you know, these food adventurers and all that. But by the time the Borax results come out, they're just not even messing around. They're saying, ate poison. Professor Wiley was feeding his volunteers poison.
And the message to the American public then is you're eating poison every day. you're starting to see this sort of shift in public attitude in which people are actually hearing this and realizing, I really think for the first time, just how dangerous this was and that they might be poisoning their children. And so you start to get this sort of, I always think of it as a low-simmering public fire.
People are starting to get angry, but they're probably not angry enough. And the food industry, about the time these studies started coming out, started really actively working to discredit Wiley as a scientist.
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Chapter 7: What laws were passed as a result of the Poison Squad and public outcry?
The borax industry actually hired a publicist who wrote fake letters to newspapers pretending to be citizens who were grateful for borax in their food. felt that Wiley was trying to make their food more dangerous, and he wrote all these letters. They all got published, right? That were just people he had made up criticizing Wiley.
People went after him in other ways, and you see this huge pushback.
But it was too late. Wiley and the Poison Squad had already moved on to salicylic acid, and those volunteers were doing even worse than the ones who had eaten the borax. Wiley started writing complaint letters to magazines when they printed advertisements for foods that weren't what they claimed to be.
In one letter, he wrote about a product called malt coffee that was made from roasted barley and asked how it could have, quote, real coffee flavor. He wrote, is there anything that can have the real coffee flavor except coffee? Critics called him the policeman of the American stomach.
One editorial in a publication called The California Fruit Grower said, let somebody muzzle the chemist who would destroy our appetite.
He kind of goes on the speaking circuit and talks to anyone who will listen to him, and you can see him. And this, too, I think was one of the criticisms that was leveled against him, is he doesn't really sound... We have an idea of a scientist as being, you know, completely methodical and objective. They have no opinion. They're just telling you what the data says.
And Wiley's not doing that anymore. He wants this to change, and he absolutely refuses to back down.
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Chapter 8: What is the lasting legacy of the Poison Squad and Harvey Wiley?
He'd gotten very interested in the plight of workers in Chicago, and he had actually gone and gone undercover in the Chicago stockyards and meatpacking plants. And Upton Sinclair was so poor that he kind of blended in with all of these very underpaid immigrant workers who were what he was interested in.
And because he had spent so much time in the packing houses themselves, he had these incredibly gruesome descriptions, right? The mold growing on the walls, the dead rats that were chopped up and went into the sausage, the horrible, filthy conditions.
Upton Sinclair's publisher thought the descriptions of how the meat was processed were so disgusting that they canceled his contract. When he finally found a new publisher, they decided to send two fact-checkers to Chicago to make sure that what he was describing in the book was real.
And they came back from the stockyards and they said, it's worse than in the book, right? It's absolutely worse. So they published the book and they sent it to Roosevelt and they sent it with a copy of their fact check.
meanwhile the jungle becomes this sort of literary sensation and everyone is focused on the horrors of the food production and it becomes such a scandal that finally roosevelt sends his own fact checkers to chicago and even though the packing houses knew they were coming things were so bad that roosevelt goes to congress and he says this is terrible. I want this fixed.
I want you to pass a meat inspection act. And Congress, under pressure from the packing houses, says no. And Roosevelt says, fine, I'm going to publish a portion of the report. And then if you don't give me what I want, I'm going to publish the whole thing.
One part of the published section of the report describes sick people spitting on the, quote, spongy wooden floors of the dark workrooms from which falling scraps of meat are later shoveled up to be later converted into food products.
Instantly, Europe cancels all its meat contracts with the United States. And at that point, the packing houses realize or the meat producers realize that they've got to get this fixed. And they go back to Congress and they say, yes, we'll agree to a Meat Inspection Act. And so, the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 passes in June.
And then in this sort of tidal wave of fury, the bonfire finally at full roar, as it were, Roosevelt goes to Congress and he says, I'm going to sign a food and drug law if you pass one, and they pass it. And it follows the Meat Inspection Act by about two weeks.
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