Speaker 1: Oh, Behind the Fasterds is the podcast you're listening to
Speaker 1: right now. I'm Robert Evans, the host. We we talked
Speaker 1: about bad People tell you all about him, and today
Speaker 1: my guest Matt leeb who is a comedian and also
Speaker 1: mind Leebling. Yes, yeah, yeah, that's that's that's cute. Your
Speaker 1: name is Matt Lee Mine Leebling kind of yeah. Leeb
Speaker 1: Is is German for love, you know. So it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, some people call me Maddie loved love yeah,
Speaker 1: big Papa l Like these are all like I would
Speaker 1: like people to know one's actually done it yet. But
Speaker 1: if you want to call me Maddie Love, big Papa
Speaker 1: l um, you know, the love Maddie, whatever you want,
Speaker 1: just you know, fucking call me nice names. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what this podcast is. This is the show where
Speaker 1: I say nice things about a random guest. Yeah. If
Speaker 1: you want the show where I say cruel things about
Speaker 1: a random guest, just just stick around for another half
Speaker 1: hour and I'm gonna make Gilbert Godfried cry. Um. You
Speaker 1: know I love Gilbert. Anyone who has the courage to
Speaker 1: get up on stage the day after nine eleven until
Speaker 1: James about nine eleven is a hero. He wasn't the
Speaker 1: true hero of nine eleven. Gilbert Godfried Firefighters and Gilbert
Speaker 1: Godfrey freed again, Matt before we get into it, because
Speaker 1: the topic today is just gonna blow people away. You
Speaker 1: want to you want to plug anything right now? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: well I do a the only Sopranos podcast. It's a
Speaker 1: rewatch podcast of the Sopranos called Pod Yourself a Gun. Um,
Speaker 1: so yeah you should. You should check that out if
Speaker 1: you like the Sopranos. Even if you don't like the Sopranos,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just it's just a good time. And
Speaker 1: the Pod Yourself a Gun is legally the only Sopranos podcast.
Speaker 1: If you hear another one called the a t F.
Speaker 1: They regulate that and they'll go shoot those people's dogs. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: that's a that's what does I know. I don't like
Speaker 1: that vibe. I know it's not cool that that's their job,
Speaker 1: but it is. It is their job. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: there's some people think there's this other sopros podcast, but
Speaker 1: that's a that's like a deep fake. So don't funk
Speaker 1: with that. That's the deep state trying to trick you exactly.
Speaker 1: That's a PSI op to get you to uh to like,
Speaker 1: you know, the wire instead. But yeah, it's really just
Speaker 1: a stealth the Wire podcast exactly, and that show this
Speaker 1: is about the shit. Yeah hell yeah. Also I do
Speaker 1: a movie podcast called the Film Drunk Podcast. Both of
Speaker 1: those are with Vince Mancini, who is my co host
Speaker 1: and pod life partners. Now is he at all related
Speaker 1: to Boom Boom Mancini? He I doubt it, um, but
Speaker 1: it's it's possible. So about Boom Boom Mancini killed the
Speaker 1: guy all. Vince Mancini is also the name of Sonny
Speaker 1: cor Leoni's bastard son in Godfather Part three, So that's
Speaker 1: very fun. A lot of mafia tians with this, Uh
Speaker 1: speaking of mafia's you know what else is an unaccountable
Speaker 1: group of dangerous criminals matt um the police. Well, yes,
Speaker 1: this is a long time coming back, but but but
Speaker 1: this is even worse than the police met today. We're
Speaker 1: talking about the archbastard of them all, the f d A.
Speaker 1: Oh ship, Yeah, that's right, motherfucker, the Food and Drug Administration.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's who we're We got two parts on
Speaker 1: the f d A this week. You know, that's literally
Speaker 1: this is I did not know I was coming in
Speaker 1: here expecting. Listen, We've talked about Nazis, we talked about Nazis,
Speaker 1: We've talked about dr Oz, We've talked about people who uh,
Speaker 1: you know, created the boy Scouts and touched all amateurs,
Speaker 1: all amateurs right heart hydra and got ship on the
Speaker 1: food and drug Okay, I might be going a little far.
Speaker 1: I'm excited. Yeah, we we we. We make a lot
Speaker 1: of fun of the f d A. And I've always
Speaker 1: found like goating them into violence funny because they're kind
Speaker 1: of like the most milk toast three letter agency the
Speaker 1: government has. Right The FBI is like terrifying, the a
Speaker 1: t F is this big drunken, bloodthirsty frat boy. The
Speaker 1: CIA kills entire governments, And meanwhile, the FDA can't even
Speaker 1: like ban people from drinking bleach in a timely manner,
Speaker 1: Like it takes years to be like we probably shouldn't
Speaker 1: let people give their kids bleach water. They just do.
Speaker 1: Press conferences were like stop, yeah, gys, this is bad
Speaker 1: for you. Just schoolmarm. But the reality is that that
Speaker 1: kind of like amiable toothlessness is a front that hides
Speaker 1: an agency as corrupt and deadly as any part of
Speaker 1: the U. S. Government in fact, probably has greater society
Speaker 1: a harm in a lot of ways than most. Our
Speaker 1: friends at the FDA may have a have a body
Speaker 1: count that might might shock you. But before we get
Speaker 1: into that, we should spend some time talking about the
Speaker 1: world before the FDA, because this is not just as
Speaker 1: simple as story as like government agency does bad things.
Speaker 1: It's actually like it's like an Anakin Skywalker story of
Speaker 1: this great hero who rises up and then crumbles. The
Speaker 1: f d A is the Anakin Skywalker of three letter
Speaker 1: Agencies ship. So we're today we're gonna like lead up
Speaker 1: to them becoming a Jedi, and the next episode they
Speaker 1: wind up falling in the lava planet oh ship A
Speaker 1: man that's great and and well, well we'll try to
Speaker 1: figure out throughout this who the Obi wan Kenobi of
Speaker 1: the f d A s, because that's actually I think
Speaker 1: I may have but well, I'm getting ahead of myself. Family. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: once upon a time, people foraged, trapped, and hunted for food,
Speaker 1: generally in that order of like amount of calories gained. Right, Uh,
Speaker 1: we developed methods of preservation over time. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: stuff like you'd salt your meat, and you could make
Speaker 1: like a jerky. You could even like even if you're
Speaker 1: a hunter gather, you could do that in a cave
Speaker 1: or something. Um, you would smoke certain things, you know.
Speaker 1: And as as as time went on, more foods we
Speaker 1: got better at preserving stuff, and we also got better
Speaker 1: at like trading, and so more foods began to travel
Speaker 1: greater and greater distances. But the extent to which most
Speaker 1: foods could actually go geographically was very limited, right. You
Speaker 1: couldn't You couldn't take mangoes from one place to a
Speaker 1: place like a thousand miles away, you know, eight hundred
Speaker 1: nine hundred years ago. Very well, you could take like
Speaker 1: the seeds, maybe you could grow them, but like mangoes
Speaker 1: don't last all that long fast. So a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff like that's why some of this stuff became like
Speaker 1: surprized because if you could manage to get it to
Speaker 1: like the emperor or something, it was a gift that
Speaker 1: was really valuable. Because you couldn't get stuff to travel
Speaker 1: nearly as far as you can today, which meant that
Speaker 1: like back for most of human civilization, people ate pretty
Speaker 1: locally by default. Right, there was trade and like spices
Speaker 1: and stuff that keeps well. But like most food was
Speaker 1: grown or whatever, hunted, trapped whatever, pretty close to where
Speaker 1: you lived. Now. When the Napoleonic Wars kicked off in
Speaker 1: the early eighteen hundreds, our boy Nappy offered a bounty
Speaker 1: to any inventor who could figure out a cheap, quick
Speaker 1: and effective way to preserve food and quantity, right, because
Speaker 1: you still have this problem in the eighteen hundreds of
Speaker 1: like we can kind of salt meat, we can bake
Speaker 1: these like shitty really hard biscuits, hard tack and stuff
Speaker 1: that like will keep for a while, but like most
Speaker 1: stuff doesn't keep well, and like scurvy's a problem. Vitamin
Speaker 1: deficiencies are a problem because if you're like on the march,
Speaker 1: or if you're usually not on the march, but like
Speaker 1: you're posted up and fortified in like the winter, it's like, well,
Speaker 1: how do you get everyone? Maybe you don't have a
Speaker 1: lot of food available in the winter, so either you're
Speaker 1: gonna be like foraging from the local area or stealing
Speaker 1: from people, or you have a lot of famines cause
Speaker 1: because an army will camp out suddenly and they'll take
Speaker 1: all the food in the surrounding area. Um So Napoleon's like,
Speaker 1: I have a lot of war I want to do,
Speaker 1: and I don't want to be limited by the fact
Speaker 1: that we're shipped at preserving food. So somebody figure out
Speaker 1: a way to do this. Napoleon does this with a
Speaker 1: bunch of stuff. He's a very like forward thinking he's
Speaker 1: real pretty smart dude. Um and this this bears fruit
Speaker 1: very quickly. In eighteen o nine, a French brewer named
Speaker 1: Nicholas Appert realized that food cooked inside a glass jar
Speaker 1: and sealed didn't spoil. If you put whatever kind of
Speaker 1: food or something in a glass jarry stick and some
Speaker 1: salt or some spices, you cook it at for a while,
Speaker 1: it'll stay good for I mean really for years in
Speaker 1: some cases, and on think they were that good at them.
Speaker 1: But it'll stay good at hell of a lot longer
Speaker 1: to invented pickles. Not quite. But this is the guy
Speaker 1: who started the process of inventing canning. Um. And the
Speaker 1: French state was unable to master the art of canning
Speaker 1: and quantity right. They figure out that this works, but
Speaker 1: it's like figuring out how to make the seals right
Speaker 1: and how to get like it's a process. We're not
Speaker 1: as good at glass then as we are now, so
Speaker 1: like having glass that can stand because you have to,
Speaker 1: like I do a lot of canning now. A good
Speaker 1: friend of mine taught me how. And it's you have
Speaker 1: to like basically boils a can with food in it
Speaker 1: for like minutes, you know. So like the glass, it
Speaker 1: takes a while to make glass that can reliably stand
Speaker 1: up to that even the day some of it's gonna break. Um,
Speaker 1: So it's a Processingly, I totally relate to that every
Speaker 1: time I try to can Yeah, you know, I just can't.
Speaker 1: I'm as as a fellow canner. I uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just I get it, dude. Hard, It's hard. It's hard.
Speaker 1: It's hard to do if you're like trying to make
Speaker 1: an army's worth of food and preserve it. So they
Speaker 1: figure out that this works, um, but it doesn't really
Speaker 1: get the French government doesn't get good at it in
Speaker 1: time for Napoleon to to stop to to like not
Speaker 1: lose his wars, right, um, and it would have helped
Speaker 1: like the whole Russian campaign, having like good canned and
Speaker 1: tin food might have really helped out. You know, I
Speaker 1: really would have liked that could have been it could
Speaker 1: have been a game changer. It could have been a
Speaker 1: game changer, man. But you know, but obviously, like now
Speaker 1: that the basic idea is understood, the process gets more
Speaker 1: and more developed over kind of the early to mid
Speaker 1: eight hundreds, and it spreads all throughout Europe. As soon
Speaker 1: as other nations realized this as possible, a lot of
Speaker 1: resources get developed into like canning and then hinting food.
Speaker 1: The Portuguese are like the best at tending effectively. If
Speaker 1: you'll wind up in like Lisbon, ever, which is a
Speaker 1: beautiful city, Um, the airport has like these stores that
Speaker 1: are just hundreds of different kinds of weird canned foods,
Speaker 1: like stuff you've never seen canned. Because that's like Portugal's
Speaker 1: motherfucking thing is canning, particularly like seafood, out of just
Speaker 1: we're canning different fucking weird. This is just yeah, we
Speaker 1: just put some dirt in a can. Nobody can stop
Speaker 1: us anything in a candy yeah. And these are this this,
Speaker 1: these developments and canning and tending are a huge part
Speaker 1: of why the last huge because the biggest wave of
Speaker 1: European colonization is the eighteen hundreds, right, that's like the
Speaker 1: when stuff really starts to go huge. Um, outside of
Speaker 1: like you know, North and in Central America and um,
Speaker 1: like the scramble for Africa and stuff, and a lot
Speaker 1: of like the colonialism and in in Asia starts happening
Speaker 1: in this period. UM. And canned in tin food is
Speaker 1: a big part of what makes that possible. It's a
Speaker 1: big part of like why these guys we've talked about
Speaker 1: on the show, these explorers in Africa and whatnot, for
Speaker 1: like Leopold are able to do what they're able to
Speaker 1: do because they're able to take, you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of what they need with them and keep it in
Speaker 1: the jungle heat. So cans aided like global colonialism. Oh absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's hugely important. UM, being able to like reliably have
Speaker 1: the nutrition you need and take it for a significant
Speaker 1: period of time. That's a that's very important. I never
Speaker 1: even considered that. Yeah. Yeah, So Nicholas Appert had stumbled
Speaker 1: upon canning, but he didn't really know at the time
Speaker 1: what he was doing. And today we call the process
Speaker 1: that he kind of helped to discover pasteurization. UM. And
Speaker 1: this is again heating a liquid to one forty degrees
Speaker 1: for about twenty minutes pasteur and the guide that the
Speaker 1: pasteurization comes from actually like figured out what pasteurization was
Speaker 1: and like, scientifically what was going on, And he did
Speaker 1: this in the eighteen fifties. Well, he was actually trying
Speaker 1: to preserve wine. Uh So, eighteen fifties past year discovers
Speaker 1: pasteurization um, which people already kind of knew about. But
Speaker 1: he's like the guy who figures out scientifically what's going
Speaker 1: on and slapped his fucking name on it. That's right,
Speaker 1: but he's just trying to preserve wine. It takes another
Speaker 1: twenty years before a German chemist figures out that the
Speaker 1: same process could work on milk, which at the time
Speaker 1: was filled with salmonella and tuberculosis. We will talk a
Speaker 1: lot about how fucked up milk was in the that's
Speaker 1: like half of this episode. Milk was a fucking nightmare
Speaker 1: back in the day. Like I don't give a ship, Like,
Speaker 1: however much you like Lovecraft cosmic horror, nothing is scarier
Speaker 1: than milk. In the eighteen seventies, it was like, that's
Speaker 1: a great question, Matt, because it sounds like a nightmare.
Speaker 1: Everything was just so gross back then. Yeah, yeah, they're like, listen,
Speaker 1: one out of four of these main courses is going
Speaker 1: to kill you. Anyways, might as well, add some milk
Speaker 1: to it. Yeah, So the Germans figure out that you
Speaker 1: can pasteurized milk, and like the eighteen seventies, and obviously
Speaker 1: milks not the only thing you can past yourized, but
Speaker 1: that that's when that gets figured out. But pasteurized milk
Speaker 1: doesn't really hit the US in quantity until the thirties,
Speaker 1: So there's like a sixty year period where we can
Speaker 1: but we aren't. And this is the story of why.
Speaker 1: So in eight nine, Harvard microbiologist Theobald Smith discovered salmonella,
Speaker 1: which obviously had existed for a long time and been
Speaker 1: killing people for a long time. But he figures out
Speaker 1: like why people are dying from milk? Um, and he
Speaker 1: suggests like, hey, we should pasteurize this stuff. The Germans
Speaker 1: have figured it out. It's very easy. You just have
Speaker 1: to heat this ship up for a while. Um. And
Speaker 1: there's this immediate panic by the American Pediatric Society who
Speaker 1: as soon as this guy is like, we should be
Speaker 1: pasteurizing our milk, they're like, pasture heated milk will give
Speaker 1: baby scurvy, it robs it of nutrients. Don't do it.
Speaker 1: Was there like a reason like why would they give
Speaker 1: a ship or are they just in the pocket of
Speaker 1: big raw milk. You hear it a bunch like that,
Speaker 1: Like cooking vegetables, steaming vegetables. You lose some I'm sure
Speaker 1: you do lose some nutrients. I don't think it's enough
Speaker 1: to have any meaningful impact on diet. And I think
Speaker 1: it's that kind of we're like, yeah, it's fine, Like
Speaker 1: maybe there's a little less nutrition, but there's also no salmonella.
Speaker 1: That's probably a bigger problem for the baby. That's the
Speaker 1: best trade off. Babies are notoriously vulnerable to dying. Um,
Speaker 1: that's what everybody says about. They're so easy to kill.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, don't you every time? I like, easy, dude, easy,
Speaker 1: If I wanted to, I could kill like many babies
Speaker 1: in a row. Absolutely, I'm not, but I could do it.
Speaker 1: But it's good to know. It's good to know, you know.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I just like walk past the park and go
Speaker 1: like I could take you all if I needed, if
Speaker 1: I needed to, you know, if I needed to, if
Speaker 1: the chips were down anyway. So there's this immediate like
Speaker 1: backlash against pasteurization, which is mainly due to like the expense,
Speaker 1: it's going to cost money to do this they're gonna
Speaker 1: have to retool the milk producers. You'd have to retool
Speaker 1: your whole production line to allow for pasteurization. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously pasteurization would also allow milk to last a lot longer.
Speaker 1: You can keep it good for a shipload longer if
Speaker 1: you pasteurize it. So a logical person might say like, hey, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're gonna spend more money retooling your production lines, but
Speaker 1: you'll get to keep your milk for longer and it'll
Speaker 1: all work out in the end. Um. But the milk
Speaker 1: companies are just like, no, it's gonna cost us money, Like,
Speaker 1: fuck that ship. We don't want to stop having our
Speaker 1: cow juice dumped into a bottle that a guy then
Speaker 1: sneezes a mouthful of chewing tobacco into before half acidly
Speaker 1: ceiling and leaving a the hots son. So they resisted pasteurization,
Speaker 1: but they were really open to better at ways to
Speaker 1: preserve milk. They just wanted it to be cheaper than
Speaker 1: pasteurization was going to be. In eighteen nine six, Dr
Speaker 1: John Herdie, a former professor from Purdue, formally endorsed the
Speaker 1: use of use of formaldehyde as a good food preservative.
Speaker 1: Now that sounds like we're gonna say something like quack
Speaker 1: doctor ship. It's actually not that fucked up. A whole
Speaker 1: lot of foods you eat every day contained formaldehyde. There's
Speaker 1: formaldehyde and pairs and apples and like all crustacean uh
Speaker 1: that all crustaceans that we eat in mushrooms, they've all
Speaker 1: got some amount of formal behyde in them. It's it's fine.
Speaker 1: It exists in because it preserves things like generally, when
Speaker 1: you're looking at like fruits that last longer on the shelf,
Speaker 1: it's because there's some formaldehyde in them. We're not shooting
Speaker 1: them into that. It's just like a thing that occurs
Speaker 1: in nature. Um. So Dr Herdie realizes this and he's like, well, clearly,
Speaker 1: even though like this stuff can be toxic, and quantity
Speaker 1: tiny amounts of it can be fine. And so he
Speaker 1: proposed using a very small amount two drops of formal
Speaker 1: lyne and formal line is like formaldehyde six water. So
Speaker 1: just two drops of very deluded formaldehyde per pint of milk.
Speaker 1: So that's his suggestion. If we do, if we put
Speaker 1: in a tiny amount, it will make the milk keep
Speaker 1: a lot longer and it won't be toxic. Um, they'll
Speaker 1: still have well, will it still have salmonella though? I mean,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, I mean potentially yes, that does. It does
Speaker 1: not clear the salmonella part. Now, that said like, the
Speaker 1: longer you leave it out, the more risk of a
Speaker 1: lot of bad things happen. So it does make it
Speaker 1: a lot safer. Um. But so he's like, hey, a
Speaker 1: tiny amount of formaldehyde can help your milk last longer
Speaker 1: on the shelf. The milk producers big businesses. All they
Speaker 1: hear is, oh, there's a way to make our product
Speaker 1: lasts longer. Uh, and we should just pour as much
Speaker 1: of the ship in there as we possibly can. Right.
Speaker 1: And to talk about how this went, I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote Deborah Bloom, who was like the fucking expert on
Speaker 1: specifically this ship, writing for Smithsonian magazine. Quote, So, dairymen
Speaker 1: began increasing the dosa fermaldehyde, seeking to keep their product
Speaker 1: fresh for as long as possible. Chemical companies came up
Speaker 1: with new formaldehyde mixtures with an ocuous names such as
Speaker 1: ice lean or preserve a Lean for milk died. The
Speaker 1: latter was said to keep a pint of milk fresh
Speaker 1: for up to ten days, and as the dairy industry
Speaker 1: increased the amount of preservatives, the milk became more and
Speaker 1: more toxic. Heard. He was alarmed enough that by eight
Speaker 1: he was urging that formaldehyde used to be stopped, citing
Speaker 1: increasing knowledge that the compound could be dangerous even in
Speaker 1: small doses, especially to children, but the industry did not
Speaker 1: heed the warning. In the summer of nineteen hundred, the
Speaker 1: Indianapolis News reported the deaths of three infants in the
Speaker 1: city's orphanage due to formaldehyde poisoning. A further investigation indicated
Speaker 1: that at least thirty children had died two years prior
Speaker 1: due to the use of the preservative, and in nineteen
Speaker 1: o one, Hurdy himself referenced the death of deaths of
Speaker 1: more than four hundred children due to a combination of
Speaker 1: formaldehyde dirt in bacteria in the milk. Another analysis calculated
Speaker 1: that there was so much raw ship in milk that
Speaker 1: the citizens of Indianapolis consumed and estimated two thousand pounds
Speaker 1: of poop per year. What the so it's not just
Speaker 1: the formaldehyde, but they go hog wild, They're just dumping
Speaker 1: it in there. Um, it's very funny. Two thousand pounds
Speaker 1: of ship per year by the city of Indianapolis. I mean,
Speaker 1: just like straight there's they're just they're the dudo is
Speaker 1: in the milk. The ship in the milk. Now too,
Speaker 1: Oh there's always been ship in the milk, buddy, man. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've ever had like livestock, but
Speaker 1: they're not they get ship gets everywhere they poop and
Speaker 1: they're not. They don't like it's like you've seen that
Speaker 1: pig poop balls image, like, oh yeah, my favorite animals
Speaker 1: that get poop on them and they don't really care
Speaker 1: about it that much. And sometimes that means poop's going
Speaker 1: to get in the milk, especially if you're keeping them
Speaker 1: in like a really dirty, horrific feed lot where like
Speaker 1: the ship piles up to their ankles. Um. And we'll
Speaker 1: talk about the conditions these cows are kept in because
Speaker 1: oh boy, Matt, are you going to enjoy that organic?
Speaker 1: Do do? Bath? Let's hear about it, dude, I'm excited now.
Speaker 1: So this guy Hurti, who had been like, yeah, a
Speaker 1: little bit of for amalde hyde might help and then
Speaker 1: was like immediately horrified by what the food industry was doing. Um.
Speaker 1: He becomes an advocate for reform within the legal system
Speaker 1: to stop this stuff, and as a result of his lobbying,
Speaker 1: Indiana passes a pure food law in eight which should
Speaker 1: have made the adulteration that, as we already said, went
Speaker 1: on well passed eighteen nine very illegal. But this keeps
Speaker 1: going on because the law was kind of it was
Speaker 1: more of an aspirational law than a real law, because
Speaker 1: they were like, this isn't allowed. But they were also like,
Speaker 1: we're going to spend zero dollars to stop this, Like
Speaker 1: we we're not gonna you will not enforce this, like
Speaker 1: we don't have the resources to stop the formaldehyde milk
Speaker 1: from spreading, but we just want to let you know
Speaker 1: not cold. It is kind of my ideal situation for drugs,
Speaker 1: where we keep them illegal, but we also make it
Speaker 1: like fire all of the police in in d e
Speaker 1: A Agents so that nobody can prosecute you for it,
Speaker 1: and then you can still feel cool when you do drugs. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's the ideal. That's the sea. Yeah. You convince
Speaker 1: children not to do heroin until you turn a certain age,
Speaker 1: and you know, and exactly, yeah, that's the age of yeah,
Speaker 1: a certain amount, right, yeah, you know, yeah, a little bit,
Speaker 1: a little bit goes a long way. It's like that,
Speaker 1: and that's why they used to give babies medicinal children's
Speaker 1: medicinal heroin, good times. That's why our grandparents were all healthy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so chill about everything. That's why they spent their whole
Speaker 1: lives withdrawing love our grandparents. Yeah so uh. The year
Speaker 1: after that log gets passed in in Indiana, Herdi's lab
Speaker 1: analyzes a pint bottle of milk that was handed to
Speaker 1: them by a family, and the family like buys some
Speaker 1: milk for their baby, and they noticed that as they
Speaker 1: describe it, the milk appears to be wriggling. Oh fuck
Speaker 1: you like this one, man, So I don't even have
Speaker 1: to do like a chemical analysis. I'm like a big
Speaker 1: milk drinker, so this is gonna fuck me up. Like
Speaker 1: I just I enjoy a glass of milk and a banana.
Speaker 1: It's my one of my favorite little snacks. It turns
Speaker 1: out that what happened was that the dairyman had cut
Speaker 1: his milk because he wanted to make it go longer
Speaker 1: like heroin, and he cuts it with stagnant water, and
Speaker 1: there there was a worm colony in the stagnant water,
Speaker 1: and so many larva breed in the milk that it's
Speaker 1: just like a kind of soggy, massive, writhing larga larva
Speaker 1: they find for their baby. It's got extra protein called
Speaker 1: moving milk. Milk. Oh you got some of that still
Speaker 1: milk up, still milk. I happen to love my child.
Speaker 1: I want them to get the extra nutrients real babies have.
Speaker 1: It's like we call it a milkshake. This is the
Speaker 1: origin of the milkshake. Some poor motherfucker was eating cereal
Speaker 1: when this episode started. Oh so Indiana. Obviously we've been
Speaker 1: focusing on because Dr Herdi was there and he gave
Speaker 1: a shit about this. This is happening every state in
Speaker 1: the Union, right, This is everywhere everywhere that there's a city.
Speaker 1: At least. I think people who live in rural areas
Speaker 1: probably have access to healthier milk because they're getting it
Speaker 1: directly from the cow. They're probably better conditions for the cow.
Speaker 1: Um they're not, you know, buying it from somebody who's
Speaker 1: gonna mix in pond water filled with the ship it's
Speaker 1: the city milk that's just and thus the milk that
Speaker 1: the most people are drinking is fucking poison milk. Now,
Speaker 1: in the eighties, one group of researchers had analyzed, like
Speaker 1: this is happening all over the U. S. And in
Speaker 1: New Jersey there's a case from the eighteen eighties where
Speaker 1: these researchers analyzed random samples of milk um and they
Speaker 1: just they found what they described as liquefying colonies of
Speaker 1: bacteria and numbers so great that they gave up counting.
Speaker 1: Like it's just like this isn't even where that like
Speaker 1: a lot. This isn't this is just just bacteria. This
Speaker 1: is pure bacteria. Yeah, they have eaten all the milk.
Speaker 1: There's none left for the babies. Yeah. And in all
Speaker 1: of these cases, this again happening everywhere. And the reason
Speaker 1: everywhere is that there's there's no such thing as health standards. Really.
Speaker 1: A couple of states, like in the and have tried
Speaker 1: to pass laws, there's usually no enforcement and in most
Speaker 1: places there's just no laws about what you can do um.
Speaker 1: And Yeah, a lot of like where the adulter ins
Speaker 1: and like the poisonous stuff gets in is when the
Speaker 1: milk dealers cut their ship with very chemicals. Now, uh,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of like you know drug dealers today,
Speaker 1: I'll cut like cocaine with a little bit of baby
Speaker 1: powder or yeah, and the Finnel answer for milk usually well,
Speaker 1: the baby I'll say the baby powder. Like the least
Speaker 1: harmful way generally to cut it was that they would
Speaker 1: add water. Um, and the standard ratio was one pint
Speaker 1: of water for every quart of milk. Now, they also
Speaker 1: skimmed the cream off the top of the milk, right,
Speaker 1: because they're trying to make as much money as possible,
Speaker 1: so they don't want you getting extra cream. They're going
Speaker 1: to use that to like make something else and sell
Speaker 1: it to you. But when you skim the cream off
Speaker 1: your milk and then water it down by like half,
Speaker 1: there what it looks. It's it doesn't look like milk.
Speaker 1: It's this kind of like pale blue, weird looking beverage
Speaker 1: because it's not really milk anymore. Um, So dairy milk continue,
Speaker 1: they call it skim milk. Yeah, yes, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that's that. Yeah, that is like that. That is literally
Speaker 1: why they call it skim milk. And I guess you
Speaker 1: could call this the origin of skim milk, but they're
Speaker 1: not saying it is. They're hiding it. So they have
Speaker 1: to in order to hide it, they have to alterate
Speaker 1: it so it looks right. So for the color, because
Speaker 1: it's this kind of pale blue color, they pour in
Speaker 1: plaster of Paris and chalk um. So that's good. Let's
Speaker 1: listen on this podcast. I was expecting they poured in
Speaker 1: pure com Oh wait, it gets worse because that just
Speaker 1: fixes the color, Matt. They haven't. They've skimmed the cream off, right.
Speaker 1: You don't want people to know you've skimmed the cree off.
Speaker 1: So you have to fake a layer of cream on top.
Speaker 1: And what's what looks most like cream? No, calm, straight
Speaker 1: colmb No, no liquefied cow brains. Oh bro, there's other
Speaker 1: things that look like cream. There's other things pouring cow
Speaker 1: brains on that ship. It is extremely funny. That is
Speaker 1: no longer coach your milk. Of course, sometimes they'll they'll
Speaker 1: put because it gives it has a little bit of
Speaker 1: a yellow color. They'll put a little bit of lead
Speaker 1: in there too, just to make it look quite you know,
Speaker 1: right deepen. Yeah, of course you can put a little
Speaker 1: bit of lead in there makes a sweeter too, a
Speaker 1: little bit of anti freeze. You know, they put lead in.
Speaker 1: That doesn't even count as bad because let they put
Speaker 1: they're putting lead in everything was just part of it. It
Speaker 1: It was like you have your salt shaker and with
Speaker 1: vitamin le and then vitamin le lead shaker. So milk
Speaker 1: was not alone or exceptional in its tendency to be
Speaker 1: adulterated among foods of the day. It's kind of the
Speaker 1: most shocking example a lot of the time. But food sellers,
Speaker 1: grocery stores, like food manfacturers, they're doing it with everything.
Speaker 1: And to make that point, I'm going to quote from
Speaker 1: Deborah Bloom again, this time writing in her wonderful book
Speaker 1: The Poison Squad. Quote. Fakery and adulteration ran rampant in
Speaker 1: other American products as well. Honey often proved to be
Speaker 1: thickened colored corn syrup and vanilla extract a mixture of
Speaker 1: alcohol and brown food coloring. Strawberry jam could be sweetened
Speaker 1: paste made from mashed apple peelings, laced with grass seeds
Speaker 1: and dyed. Red coffee might be largely sawdust or wheat, beans, beats, peas,
Speaker 1: and dandelion seeds, scorched black and ground to resemble the
Speaker 1: genuine article. Containers of pepper, cinnamon, or nutmeg were frequently
Speaker 1: laced with a cheaper filler material, such as pulverized coconut shells,
Speaker 1: charred rope, or occasionally floor sweepings. Flour routinely contained crushed
Speaker 1: stone or gypsum. Or gypsum as a cheap extender. Ground
Speaker 1: insects could be mixed into brown sugar, often without detection.
Speaker 1: They're used linked to an unpleasant condition known as grocer's itch.
Speaker 1: We've all had a little bit of grocer had grocer's
Speaker 1: atch cookies, and now I got grocers atch. European governments,
Speaker 1: especially those of Germany and Great Britain, had been far
Speaker 1: quicker than the US government to recognize and addressed problems
Speaker 1: of food adulteration. In eighteen twenty, a pioneering book by
Speaker 1: chemist Frederick Accumb titled A Treatise on Adulterations of Food
Speaker 1: and Culinary Poisons, had aroused widespread public outrage when it
Speaker 1: was published in London. Acume minced no words. Are pickles
Speaker 1: are made green by copper? Are vene rendered sharp by
Speaker 1: sulfuric acid. Are cream composed of rice, powder or arrow
Speaker 1: root and bad milk? Are comfees mixed of sugar, starch
Speaker 1: and clay, and colored with preparations of copper and lead.
Speaker 1: Are ketchup? Often formed of the dregs of distilled vinegar
Speaker 1: with a decoction of the outer green husk of walnuts,
Speaker 1: and seasoned with all spice. He wrote, they had all
Speaker 1: spice back then. Oh yeah, they conquered the world for
Speaker 1: all spice. They did three or four genocides just to
Speaker 1: get their hands on all sp That's not an exaggeration, um,
Speaker 1: And it gets worse. With the candy industry, confectioners often
Speaker 1: turned to poisonous metallic elements and compounds. Green came from
Speaker 1: arsenic or copper, yellow from lead chromate, cheerful rose, and
Speaker 1: pink tones from red lead. In eighteen thirty and editorial
Speaker 1: in The Lancet the British Medical General complained that millions
Speaker 1: of children are the daily dosed with lethal substances, but
Speaker 1: the practices continued, largely due to business pressures on would
Speaker 1: be government regulators. By mid century, though, casual teas were
Speaker 1: starting to mount in Britain. In eighteen forty seven, three
Speaker 1: English children fell seriously ill after eating birthday cake descorated
Speaker 1: with arsenic tinted green leaves. Five years later, two London
Speaker 1: brothers died after eating a cake who's frosting contained both
Speaker 1: arsenic and copper. In an eighteen fifty four report, London
Speaker 1: physician Arthur hasseltracked forty cases of child poisoning caused by
Speaker 1: penny candies. Three years later, twenty one people in Bradford, Yorkshire,
Speaker 1: died after consuming candy accidentally laced with deadly arsenic trioxide,
Speaker 1: accidentally because the confectioner meant to mix in plaster of
Speaker 1: Paris instead. Although he had noticed his workers falling ill
Speaker 1: while mixing up the stuff, the business owner had put
Speaker 1: the candy on sale anyway. He was arrested and jailed,
Speaker 1: as was the pharmacist who had mistakenly sold him the
Speaker 1: poison in place of plaster, but they could not even
Speaker 1: be convicted of any crime. Britain had no law against
Speaker 1: making unsafe or even lethal food products. Jesus Christ looking insane,
Speaker 1: insane pouring arsenic into candy Kidder, Diane left it when
Speaker 1: it's green? What screen? Um? Something more poisonous, Get some
Speaker 1: more poison in there. That's too bland in color. I
Speaker 1: just love. They killed twity one people with bad candy,
Speaker 1: and then the cops are like, it's not illegal. You
Speaker 1: can put as much poison in candy as you want.
Speaker 1: It's not actually in the UK, there's nothing in the
Speaker 1: rules that says candy can't be arsenic. Listen, if you
Speaker 1: write a law that says I can't poison children for profit,
Speaker 1: I'll gladly abide by it. And in England's credit, again,
Speaker 1: this is like the eighteen thirties forties, like England, Jerremany,
Speaker 1: a lot of europe Like bands, a lot of this ship.
Speaker 1: But everything we've talked about keeps going. In the US,
Speaker 1: they're throwing arsenic and lead and candy. They don't give
Speaker 1: a fuck in the United States, right, this is the
Speaker 1: lane and the goddamn free. We can do whatever we want.
Speaker 1: I'm sing like one of the amendments should be my
Speaker 1: right to eat arsenic damn right, Matt. That's why I'm
Speaker 1: starting a new bakery. These cakes will kill your children.
Speaker 1: These cakes will in fact kill your children, but they'll
Speaker 1: die free. You know, they won't die Cocked by the
Speaker 1: medical establishment. He says children can't handle arsenic five year
Speaker 1: olds just saluting on a cot in the I see you.
Speaker 1: You know who else likes to salute five year olds
Speaker 1: while they're dying in the I see you? The sponsors.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right, Matt Leap. That's why they do it.
Speaker 1: That's why they sell all these products. They have time
Speaker 1: for their real passion, saluting dying children who are poisoned
Speaker 1: by lead cake. All right, here we go, we're back back.
Speaker 1: So in the United States, for basically the whole eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: every attempt to impose any kind of like national food
Speaker 1: safety standards is there. All these attempts are opposed vigorously
Speaker 1: by the big businesses who made a lot of money
Speaker 1: selling lead candy and formaldehyde milk, for example. Bowl Massachusetts
Speaker 1: lawyer George Thorndyke Angle gave a big speech in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine to the American Social Science Public Health Association
Speaker 1: where he read through a list of commercially sold foods
Speaker 1: that had been found to include parasites and brands of
Speaker 1: butter and cheese that had been found to be nothing
Speaker 1: but processed animal fat. Angle accused food producers of being
Speaker 1: a threat to both rich and poor, and compared them
Speaker 1: to pirates, robbing people of their good health. Angle mailed
Speaker 1: copies of a speech to newspapers around the country, which
Speaker 1: forced American Grocer, a major trade publication, to take aim
Speaker 1: at him as a sensationalist doing a disservice to consumers,
Speaker 1: although they did concede that it was bad when milk
Speaker 1: and candy killed children. So like, look, it's bad that
Speaker 1: kids keep dying, but this guy is this guy is
Speaker 1: not like out, this guy's out of his mind. This
Speaker 1: guy is biased, alright, and listen, yeah, I have grocer's
Speaker 1: itch who doesn't. Okay, look, we all wish kids would
Speaker 1: stop dying, but at what cost? That's what we the
Speaker 1: people putting lead in your children's food ask Listen, you
Speaker 1: can either have a crying baby or a baby with
Speaker 1: a one in five chance of dying from this lollipop.
Speaker 1: Which would you prefer? Yeah, what do you want? You
Speaker 1: want milk that kills your kids? You want milk that's
Speaker 1: three cents cheaper. Huh? How much of those kids worth
Speaker 1: for you? Anyway? It's supplying to man here, buddy. Angles argument, though,
Speaker 1: was convincing to Congressman Richard Beale from Virginia. He put
Speaker 1: forward legislation federally to ban all interstate commerce and chemically
Speaker 1: altered foods. And it's wild to think about how different
Speaker 1: that like it would have gotten appealed at some point, right,
Speaker 1: because you just couldn't have a society like ours with
Speaker 1: that law on the books. But it never it never
Speaker 1: gets made, It dies in committee. I'm not even saying
Speaker 1: like at the time certainly would have been a good thing.
Speaker 1: There's that would have wouldn't have aged well, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't even get off the ground floor. Um. And of
Speaker 1: course that bill was not the only thing that died
Speaker 1: in committee. Shiploads of kids were still being offed by
Speaker 1: poisonous foods. It all got bad enough that the United
Speaker 1: States Congress decided to take a break from edging the
Speaker 1: tip of the national cock into over these colonialism, and
Speaker 1: in nineteen o two they funded the very first controlled
Speaker 1: trials of human food toxicity. These tests would be carried
Speaker 1: out by the U. S Department of Agricultures Chemistry Squad,
Speaker 1: which was headed by a guy named Harvey Washington Wiley. Now,
Speaker 1: while he's pretty dope, he maybe the obi Wan of
Speaker 1: our story. Um. He'd gotten his start in food science
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighty one when the Indiana State Board of
Speaker 1: Health asked him to look into honey, maple syrup and
Speaker 1: other sweeteners, and his findings were that, in short, like
Speaker 1: a lot of the people buying these things are not,
Speaker 1: in fact buying these things on most of the like
Speaker 1: a lot of the maple syrup and honey in the markets,
Speaker 1: just like corn syrup. It would sometimes even make like
Speaker 1: a fake wax honeycomb and dip it in the corn
Speaker 1: syrups that it looked like you were getting real honey. Um.
Speaker 1: And and realizing that like, oh wow, like people going
Speaker 1: to the grocery store have no fucking clue what they're getting,
Speaker 1: Like they don't have a goddamn idea what they're actually
Speaker 1: buying because there's no requirement that they tell people what
Speaker 1: they're buying and actually deliver it on it um. And
Speaker 1: this kind of radicalizes widely, and he'd like like spends
Speaker 1: the rest of his career trying to stop this. Now
Speaker 1: Nature right up I found in Nature magazine describes his
Speaker 1: new job at the U. S d A. Quote widely
Speaker 1: recruited young healthy men as guinea pigs, starting with civil servants.
Speaker 1: They signed liability waivers and agreed to take part in
Speaker 1: hygienic table trials, eating free but strictly prescribed meals in
Speaker 1: an experimental kitchen in the U. S d A's basement
Speaker 1: in Washington, d C. An excitable press dubbed them the
Speaker 1: poison Squad, and they're trying to figure out like what
Speaker 1: things are bad for people. They're also trying to just
Speaker 1: like gain a real understanding of like nutrition and like
Speaker 1: what works, what preserves food. No one had really this
Speaker 1: hadn't been done. Pieces of this had been done in
Speaker 1: an organized way, but like this is the first time
Speaker 1: that our government's like we should really like figure out
Speaker 1: what this stuff does to people, like in a controlled setting.
Speaker 1: Gives some people some lead and just know and you
Speaker 1: don't know at that point, right, Like it is like
Speaker 1: we laugh about it, but like the Romans put lead
Speaker 1: and funking everything because they didn't realize it, like it
Speaker 1: was bad for him. Um, so you have and at
Speaker 1: this point that we're starting to get some understanding of that.
Speaker 1: But like a big part of it is this, and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of very brave people who are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: try ship on me. We should know if this is
Speaker 1: killing people, so give it, give it a shot. Put
Speaker 1: it in me. Um thanks due, Yeah you really you
Speaker 1: took one for the team here. You're like, I'll eat
Speaker 1: pretty much anything. So just like hook it up, dude,
Speaker 1: throw it in me. Who gives a ship? Yeah, I'm drunk. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I ain't gonna live that long anyway. Is the eight nineties.
Speaker 1: I made it into twenty. You know, I'm an old man.
Speaker 1: I am dead inside. Already, feed me some of them.
Speaker 1: My earliest memory is Sherman's March to the Sea. I'm done.
Speaker 1: So that brings us back to milk. Now. Under President
Speaker 1: Grover Cleveland, Whiley's Chemistry division started digging into the dirty
Speaker 1: world of big dairy, there was a lot of money
Speaker 1: in dairy, particularly since milk was seen is like the
Speaker 1: best thing to feed small children. The milk industry had
Speaker 1: been happy to cut corners for profits for quite some time.
Speaker 1: And I want to talk a little bit about swill,
Speaker 1: which is the kind of milk that most people in
Speaker 1: cities are drinking through. Like most of the mid to
Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds, even some of the early nineteen was
Speaker 1: its branded swill. No, that's just what everyone called it,
Speaker 1: and we'll explain why in a second. So Deborah Bloom
Speaker 1: describes this swill as quote like making swill as quote
Speaker 1: the practice wherein distillers liquor distillers housed dairy cows in
Speaker 1: stinking urban warehouses where each animal was tethered immobile and
Speaker 1: fed on the spin mash or swill from the fermentation
Speaker 1: process used in making whiskey. So you have all these
Speaker 1: grains and ship for like whiskey, even for beer too.
Speaker 1: I'm sure they do it with that where you're like
Speaker 1: boiling all this grain for forever in order to like
Speaker 1: make the thing that you then ferment. Right. Um. And
Speaker 1: once you boil anything for a while, like like all
Speaker 1: this grain and stuff, it doesn't have any real nutrition
Speaker 1: anymore because you've like boiled it to get all of
Speaker 1: that out. That all goes into the thing that you're making.
Speaker 1: That's why it's flavored and ship um. So the cows
Speaker 1: that are fed on this stuff are like dying their
Speaker 1: entire lives. They're horribly malnourished, their bones are very soft,
Speaker 1: um because the swol they're eating isn't food anymore. So,
Speaker 1: like all of these animals, by the time their adults
Speaker 1: have all of their teeth wrought out, um, they live
Speaker 1: very short lives. Their malnourished bodies only produce milk for
Speaker 1: a short period of time, and the milk they make,
Speaker 1: which is what all these poor kids are drinking, doesn't
Speaker 1: really have any nutritional value because again the cows aren't
Speaker 1: eating anything with nutritional value, so there's just like making
Speaker 1: colored water in a lot of cases. One pediatrition at
Speaker 1: the time wrote, I have every year grown more suspicious
Speaker 1: of distillery milk wherever I have seen a child presenting
Speaker 1: a sickly appearance, loose, flabby flesh, weak joints, capricious appetite,
Speaker 1: frequent wretchings, and occasional vomitage, irregular bowels with the tendency
Speaker 1: to diarrhea and fetid breath. So like people are aware
Speaker 1: of this. Also, the fact that it's called distillery milk
Speaker 1: should key you and I don't want to go to
Speaker 1: the same place from my bourbon and my milk. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh we sell cocaine. Oh we also sell
Speaker 1: fair trade coffee. It's like, I don't think it's fair trade.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm sure it was a fair trade for somebody.
Speaker 1: Someone got a good end of the deal for sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: our sponsors, the scene of low cartel folk pretty good
Speaker 1: about that trade. So the swill milk industry was eventually reformed,
Speaker 1: but that industry just yielded to the formalde hyde doping
Speaker 1: that we've already covered By nineteen oh four, doping had
Speaker 1: formalde hyde milk had spread to New Jersey, where one
Speaker 1: doctor blamed a surge in child deaths on the substance.
Speaker 1: In New York City, twenty thousand deaths of children under
Speaker 1: two per year were blamed on poisoned milk. Formaldehyde wasn't
Speaker 1: even twenty kids a year in New York City dying
Speaker 1: from bad milk. Yeah, Like that's fucking wild. That is
Speaker 1: so many dead children, that is an insane amount of
Speaker 1: It's like at some point you have to go like,
Speaker 1: wouldn't this like like like would kill less? I mean
Speaker 1: it just leads me to believe that this was the time.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh yeah, a lot a lot of drewn dyes.
Speaker 1: Some of its milk poisoning. Some of it is from
Speaker 1: the slide that's made of razor blades, and we have
Speaker 1: at every park like this is were you were strapping
Speaker 1: kids to the street cars to act as mirrors. Like
Speaker 1: we have all sorts and we're just like using their
Speaker 1: bodies as chimney sweets. I mean they die, They for
Speaker 1: sure die. They're very easy to do. Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: uh And and formaldehyde was not even necessarily the biggest threat,
Speaker 1: and milk most of the deaths due to poison milk
Speaker 1: in New York, particularly in like nineteen o two, are
Speaker 1: probably as the result of a typhus epidemic that could
Speaker 1: spread through tainted milk, because that's a big cause of
Speaker 1: typhus outbreaks, is like milk um. Now, whiley and Hurley
Speaker 1: were among the learned advocates who urged the government to
Speaker 1: take action, everywhere they looked Americans were being tricked into
Speaker 1: consuming things that weren't food, and of course a shipload
Speaker 1: of babies were dying. Regulations keep being proposed, and they
Speaker 1: are fought tooth and nail every time by food manufacturers.
Speaker 1: So by the time the early nine hundred run roll around,
Speaker 1: a handful of journalists set themselves to the task of
Speaker 1: like exposing what's happening here, often with the direct help
Speaker 1: of guys from the chemical Division. So like, these reporters
Speaker 1: are kind of working with Wiley and his men. And
Speaker 1: one of these journalists is Henry Irving Dodge, who adopted
Speaker 1: poison milk as his cause in nineteen o four Debora
Speaker 1: Bloom rights. Dodge had learned from a friend in the U. S.
Speaker 1: Senate that manufacturers were prepared to spend more than two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand dollars to defeat any regulations, and
Speaker 1: had already made major contributions to the campaigns of senators
Speaker 1: considered friendly to the cause. No wonder the proposed food
Speaker 1: legislation was going nowhere, he wrote. The Senate does not
Speaker 1: indulge in bawling opposition to the bill. Oh no, its
Speaker 1: weapons are much more effective and more deadly. It lets
Speaker 1: the bill die. The American government, he concluded, would rather
Speaker 1: protect wealthy business interests than protect the American people. That's
Speaker 1: the thing people today would understand. No, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: thank god that's changed. I mean we can all be
Speaker 1: grateful for that. But no, I mean like two thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: which is like four or five billion dollars exactly, like
Speaker 1: to fight the just just boil the milk. Yeah, just
Speaker 1: boil the goddam It's not hard. You're putting so much
Speaker 1: money into not boiling the milk. Yes, that's ridiculous. It's
Speaker 1: not like we're asking a lot. It's really the least
Speaker 1: you could do with the milk. Hey, maybe we don't
Speaker 1: need to have twenty babies a year die in New
Speaker 1: York City to keep fire away from my milk. It's
Speaker 1: faking amazing. So obviously this is an outrage and should
Speaker 1: really piss people off. But the American people, as is
Speaker 1: often the case, had a lot going on right around
Speaker 1: this time. And while there were isolated eruptions of outrage,
Speaker 1: when like a tainted meat can ten would kill some soldiers.
Speaker 1: This happens around the time of the Spanish American War,
Speaker 1: a bunch of soldiers get sick from like bad meat
Speaker 1: or like whenever spoiled milk batch would kill a whole
Speaker 1: kindergarten worth of kids. There's like all there's outrage in
Speaker 1: bursts and hurts, but it's very decentralized and scattered. And
Speaker 1: because of this, the massive meat packing in dairy industry,
Speaker 1: these huge corporations and like conglomerates that have formed around
Speaker 1: this stuff are able to bribe and bully their way
Speaker 1: out of any kind of real regulations. One of the
Speaker 1: things that leads that actually changes this, that like really
Speaker 1: is a huge factor is a book called The Jungle
Speaker 1: by Upton Sinclair, which I'm sure most people are at
Speaker 1: least broadly familiar with. Um Upton went undercover for months
Speaker 1: in a Chicago meat packing neighborhood, and his vivid recollections
Speaker 1: of what he saw there were first published in serial
Speaker 1: form via a socialist magazine named Appeal to Reason. When
Speaker 1: it was republished as a book in nineteen o six,
Speaker 1: huge numbers of Americans were confronted with scenes like this,
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna read from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. There
Speaker 1: were cattle which had been fed on whiskey malt the
Speaker 1: refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men
Speaker 1: called steerly, which means covered in boils. It was a
Speaker 1: nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife
Speaker 1: into them, they would burst and splatter foul smelling stuff
Speaker 1: onto your face. And when a man's sleeves were smeared
Speaker 1: with blood, his hands steeped in it, how was he
Speaker 1: ever to wipe his face or to clear his eyes
Speaker 1: so that he could see Jesus Christ, they're just sucking
Speaker 1: blood pinatas. Yeah, they're like boil and puss and blood
Speaker 1: and it's all getting over the meat, right because you
Speaker 1: can't see, and it's all over your hands, it's all
Speaker 1: over your knife, and you're like, you're processing this if
Speaker 1: you're we slaughter and process animals semi regularly, where I live.
Speaker 1: And if you're doing that, like one of the key
Speaker 1: you don't even want like the hair of the animal
Speaker 1: when you skin it, to touch the meat because it
Speaker 1: can spoil you. You want to be very careful otherwise
Speaker 1: it makes it nasty. And they're they're just like puss
Speaker 1: is just like you're marinating and man, get it in there.
Speaker 1: Just more nutrients. It's more nutrients. Don't worry about the smell.
Speaker 1: It's got a lot of vitamin P. That's good stuff.
Speaker 1: So Sinclair had meant to reveal to people that the
Speaker 1: work in stockyards and meatpacking facilities was unconscionably inhumane. Both
Speaker 1: are the humans working there and the animals. Right, he was,
Speaker 1: he was upset about like the treatment of all of
Speaker 1: the living things in this nightmare system. That's not what
Speaker 1: America really cares about. The real impact that the Jungle
Speaker 1: has on public opinion is that it scares people about
Speaker 1: how fucking filthy their food is. Sinclair later said, quote,
Speaker 1: I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident, I
Speaker 1: hid it in the stomach. Honestly, I'd like to pretend
Speaker 1: like I'm any better, but no, I'm not. Like fucking
Speaker 1: I didn't stop eating chicken nuggets until someone showed me
Speaker 1: the green the pink goo that it's made out of.
Speaker 1: And I lasted a year and then I was like, nah,
Speaker 1: I could eat the goo. And then I went back
Speaker 1: to chicken nuggets. So someone figured out how I can
Speaker 1: just get the raw goo. I'd like to just have
Speaker 1: that as a shake in the morning, stuck down some
Speaker 1: pink goo. Yeah, get out in the sun a little
Speaker 1: bit so it gets good in night. What so yeah
Speaker 1: pink And you know what I think if I just
Speaker 1: mixed that fifty fifty with bourbon, that all the nutrients
Speaker 1: I need. That's like, that's that's my soilet. That's that's
Speaker 1: a performance beverage. So exactly in the morning you throw
Speaker 1: a couple of shots of espresso in there too. You're
Speaker 1: good to go. I'm doing. And then you branded it
Speaker 1: and I went out. That's how you get that keto body.
Speaker 1: That's true. The brand immediately makes it fun. Yeah, I'll
Speaker 1: eat it. That's that's gonna be my new soilet. So
Speaker 1: if you figure out find find us a sponsor who
Speaker 1: will make my meat coffee bourbon shakes it self them
Speaker 1: as a performance beverage. You know who? These are good
Speaker 1: vorous truckers, and we'll get you the right amount of
Speaker 1: drunk away convomiting to really do those long haul drives. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can get it all done in one go, literally,
Speaker 1: one math movement and out immediately. And look, school's waste
Speaker 1: a lot of time cooking food, my meat, slurry, bourbon, beverage. Everything.
Speaker 1: A child needs to both be neutrified and to keep
Speaker 1: quiet because there's a lot of there's a lot of bourbon.
Speaker 1: Their little bodies can't handle that much. You know, we
Speaker 1: call it sleeping time, shake meat. It's very good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just keep him quiet. You know what, you're just warehousing.
Speaker 1: I'm really that's what all we're doing anymore. It's called
Speaker 1: five loco. It's even more local than the previous. They
Speaker 1: barely breathe on it, so it's pandemic safe. So it's
Speaker 1: worth noting that when The Jungle was published as a
Speaker 1: proper book, like outside of like a magazine thing, when
Speaker 1: it finds its publisher, the publisher insisted on sending a
Speaker 1: copy of the manuscript to the Chicago Tribune and they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: here's the book we're publishing. It's making some pretty shocking claims.
Speaker 1: You guys are journalists, Why don't you investigate these claims
Speaker 1: and like render an opinionist whether or not it's accurate, right, which,
Speaker 1: if journalism exists, is a responsible thing for a publisher
Speaker 1: to do. Here's the thing it is. Nineteen o six.
Speaker 1: Upton Sinclair is the first person who's ever done a
Speaker 1: journalism in the United States. So I'm gonna quote again
Speaker 1: from the Poison Squad by dead Point. Journalism is just
Speaker 1: for going to war. Yeah, that's that's when it was
Speaker 1: invited to get people agreed to a war with Spain.
Speaker 1: This book isn't about Spain at all. Quote. Tribune editors
Speaker 1: responded with a two dozen page rebuttal of the packing
Speaker 1: house descriptions. Alarmed Page and Double Day. His publishers called
Speaker 1: Sinclair to their offices, but Sinclair promptly began picking apart
Speaker 1: the Tribunes critique. For instance, the paper had denied that
Speaker 1: the tuberculosis bacterium could survive on walls or floors of
Speaker 1: the packing rooms. Sinclair pointed out that the germ could
Speaker 1: indeed survive on those surfaces and couldn't transfer to anything
Speaker 1: that touched them. He brought medical studies to prove it,
Speaker 1: as well as other evidence to back up his story.
Speaker 1: He further noted that the papers owners were obviously friendly
Speaker 1: with the meat packers and sided with them. In fact,
Speaker 1: it would turn out that the newspapers management had not
Speaker 1: assigned a reporter to study Sinclair's claims, but instead passed
Speaker 1: the task onto a publicist who worked for the meat packer. Nice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the newspaper goes right to the people that he's investigating.
Speaker 1: It's like, is this you guys want to write a
Speaker 1: thing for us about this? It's like, um, so I
Speaker 1: need you guys to write something that says not And
Speaker 1: just every time he says, yeah, huh, you just got
Speaker 1: it right now, I would write it. But you would
Speaker 1: not believe the amount of war with Spain we got.
Speaker 1: We got a lot of war with Spain. There's so
Speaker 1: much Spain left and we had to nip that ship
Speaker 1: right in the button. Also, I'm a little bit busy
Speaker 1: because all of my children are in the hospital for
Speaker 1: milk poisoning. You know that, you know, babies, babies and
Speaker 1: handle their milk. The New York Times goes on to
Speaker 1: note quote about a month after the Jungle was published,
Speaker 1: the White House started receiving a hundred letters a day
Speaker 1: demanding a federal cleanup of the meat industry. Roosevelt invited
Speaker 1: Sinclair to the White House, then ordered a federal investigation.
Speaker 1: Sinclair took every opportunity to harangue the beef truck as
Speaker 1: the meat trap packing industry was known, and sent a
Speaker 1: stream of telegrams to the White House demanding reform. Roosevelt
Speaker 1: seemed tired of Sinclair's outspokenness. In a note to the
Speaker 1: author's publisher, the President wrote, tell Sinclair to go home
Speaker 1: and let me run the country for a while. Oh, Teddy,
Speaker 1: I love it. What a but but they do this
Speaker 1: actually gets some ship done from from Teddy's credit, he's
Speaker 1: part of ships starting to get done here. Um, the
Speaker 1: Pure Food and Drug Act is past well, it's introduced
Speaker 1: into Congress in nineteen o five, the same year that
Speaker 1: Sinclair puts out the first version of the Jungle, And
Speaker 1: but in early nineteen o six when the book version
Speaker 1: comes out, the the Act is stalled. Um. And it's
Speaker 1: so stalled that Harvey White Wiley, who's the main impetus
Speaker 1: behind the book, starts trolling people out of like hopelessness. Right,
Speaker 1: and he is he kind of is the first guy
Speaker 1: to use Twitter. He said, he settles into a strategy
Speaker 1: of writing protest letters to newspapers and magazines about the
Speaker 1: ads they had for different snake oil medicines and tainted foods.
Speaker 1: He wrote this to the Washington Star. I have read,
Speaker 1: with your regret and your issue of Monday, January twenty nine,
Speaker 1: of the probably fatal illness of buck Ewing, the celebrated catcher. Ewing,
Speaker 1: a former star player and manager for the New York Giants,
Speaker 1: was diagnosed with Bright's disease, which is a blood vessel
Speaker 1: inflammation and the kidneys um and it killed people pretty
Speaker 1: fast in those days. Wiley noted that like, Hey, you're
Speaker 1: talking about how sad this is, but you've previously published
Speaker 1: an article about Dr Kilmer swamp root and claim that
Speaker 1: it clears bright disease. And He's like, I keep a
Speaker 1: bottle of it near me all the time because you've
Speaker 1: you've ensured me that it works. So why don't you
Speaker 1: just tell this guy? You know, Mike, chemists say it's
Speaker 1: nothing but alcohol in turpentine with a couple of spices.
Speaker 1: But if you're worried about buck Ewing, why don't you
Speaker 1: tell him to take this stuff? It should cure his thing.
Speaker 1: Right away. In fact, I'll send him a copy of
Speaker 1: your paper and let you know what he says. And
Speaker 1: he dies like very shortly there after. I love the
Speaker 1: idea that someone was just like, all right, we got this,
Speaker 1: writes disease. Let's try swamp root that swamps are dark? Right?
Speaker 1: What the and knock that right out with some dark
Speaker 1: what's darker than a swamp? It's darker than the swamp people,
Speaker 1: it's still dying. Well whatever, It's a clever head campaign.
Speaker 1: And he does this like there's this malt coffee which
Speaker 1: contains no actual coffee, it's pure barley, but it advertises
Speaker 1: itself as having real coffee flavor, and he sends a
Speaker 1: letter to the newspaper advertising them, being like, how can
Speaker 1: you have real coffee flavor with anything? But coffee isn't
Speaker 1: the only thing that can have real coffee flavor is
Speaker 1: just quote tweeting. It's really just twittering. Uh you know
Speaker 1: who else loves Twitter? The products and services that support
Speaker 1: this podcast, they are all reply guys for the same
Speaker 1: K pop band. And it gets very sexual, actually, with
Speaker 1: all of our sponsors, very sexual replies to this k
Speaker 1: pop band. Good. If we know one thing, it's the
Speaker 1: K pop people. They're very normal online and they love
Speaker 1: to be sexualized. That's actually the motto of very normal
Speaker 1: online and we love to be a sexual am I
Speaker 1: am I? Yeah you should believe that. Oh, here's some ads. Ah,
Speaker 1: we're back. So, while he was hectoring sketchy newspaper owners
Speaker 1: in print, Whiley and his poison squad had gathered together
Speaker 1: the some of their years of study into America's endless
Speaker 1: variety of ship foods um. And this is while they're
Speaker 1: trying to pass this act, because they put all this
Speaker 1: information together to try to like convince Congress we should
Speaker 1: do something. Yeah, we gotta stop the eating poison and
Speaker 1: po Yeah, we we really got to deal with all
Speaker 1: of these dead babies. Yea, so fucking step one of
Speaker 1: a society. No more eating the poison pooh yeah, no
Speaker 1: more eating the poop milk. Step maybe less war milk,
Speaker 1: not none, just less. So. This passage from Deborah Bloom's
Speaker 1: book sums up the case that Wiley and his scientists
Speaker 1: made to Congress. For every food product the chemistry Division
Speaker 1: could point to a trick involved in its manufacture. Doctors
Speaker 1: continued to worry over reports of Grocer's itch a side
Speaker 1: effect of the deceptive process of grinding up insects and
Speaker 1: passing the result office brown sugar. Sometimes live life survived
Speaker 1: the process. Beer, which most consumers imagined to be derived
Speaker 1: from malted barley and hops, was often made from a
Speaker 1: cheaper ferment of rice or even corn grits. So called
Speaker 1: aged whiskey was often still routinely rectified, alcohol diluted and
Speaker 1: colored brown, as widely had found twenty years earlier at Perdue.
Speaker 1: Corn syrup was widely still used as the basis for
Speaker 1: fake versions of honey and maple syrup. Many manufacturers argued
Speaker 1: that they had to fake products to stay competitive. Detroit
Speaker 1: canner Walter Williams of Williams Brothers described the making of
Speaker 1: his Highland strawberry preserves. The jam was, he said, forty
Speaker 1: five percent sugar, corn syrup, apple juice made from discarded
Speaker 1: apple skins, some scraps of apple skin and cores, and
Speaker 1: usually one or two pieces of strawberry. The strawberries cost him,
Speaker 1: he added, many compare it's costs a lot of money
Speaker 1: to get those two strawberries. Two pieces of strawberries are
Speaker 1: really putting me at a house at home. Many comparably
Speaker 1: priced preserves were just glucose apple juice and red red
Speaker 1: dye and timothy seed added to simulate strawberry seeds. If
Speaker 1: we could sell pure goods, I would be pleased. Williams insisted,
Speaker 1: I believe they should be labeled, showing their ingredients and
Speaker 1: showing the quality of the goods. But as there was
Speaker 1: no loss settling setting such standards, and as he had
Speaker 1: to compete with less scrupulous canners, there was no way
Speaker 1: for him to stay in business unless he cut costs
Speaker 1: to match. Widely testified that about five percent of all
Speaker 1: foods were routinely adulterated, with the number being much higher
Speaker 1: up to in categories such as coffee, spices and food
Speaker 1: products made for selling to the poor. Of course, if
Speaker 1: your food is for poor people, it is not food.
Speaker 1: Not food not We just ground up some dirt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the salt dust pizza that I've made every
Speaker 1: three weeks. We mixed some sawdust in with piss. You
Speaker 1: can't tell the difference between that that bread ground, you know,
Speaker 1: she doesn't know the difference. The ground is what we
Speaker 1: call a natural play. It's pissed from the bars, so
Speaker 1: there's lots of barley in it. Well, they're poor bars,
Speaker 1: so it's just ground up rice meal. But you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes I can shove a bar of soap into the
Speaker 1: mouth of a poor to see if they live for
Speaker 1: another week. It's nice, clean, and it's delicious. So Whitely
Speaker 1: solution to all of this horror is the Pure Food
Speaker 1: and Drug Act. And it's hard to see this as
Speaker 1: anything unreasonable, but the grocery, meatpacking, and canning companies threatened
Speaker 1: by the bill had to find a way to make
Speaker 1: it unreasonable, and the time honored tradition of shady rich bastards,
Speaker 1: they decided to smear widely. Since his data was impeccable,
Speaker 1: they went after him for hating freedom dead. Yeah, baby,
Speaker 1: they're how you do it. That's how you do America.
Speaker 1: You do it man our freedom to poor people. Saw does.
Speaker 1: It's extremely funny. Dudley and Co. Canned Goods used the
Speaker 1: Grocery World magazine to publish editorials attacking Whiley as the
Speaker 1: nation's janitor, which it's hard to make that seem he
Speaker 1: wants to clean things out. Yeah, that's an insult. Is
Speaker 1: just like, oh, you know, fucking janitor is always going around.
Speaker 1: He's like those guys who stop us from living in
Speaker 1: our own ship exactly, so I'm trying to wipe my ass. Mom,
Speaker 1: I like it like this. The idea is that he
Speaker 1: was a busy body policing the American stomach and again
Speaker 1: attacking freedom. During one industry event where Wiley meets with
Speaker 1: food company representatives, he's accused in person by the owner
Speaker 1: of a Canary for wanting to be dictator of the
Speaker 1: food industry. Mr Stalin trying to stop us from putting
Speaker 1: sawdust in the bread and piss in the whiskey, fucking
Speaker 1: stalling over here. It was just like, I don't like
Speaker 1: when children die from poison. Man his mother, But what
Speaker 1: does he think he is the tsarre trying to stop
Speaker 1: kids from dying from milk? Oh Man? Much of this
Speaker 1: this is amazing because like it's just so America. It's
Speaker 1: so American. It's American. You can't be more American than
Speaker 1: people literally spending like the equivalent of millions of dollars
Speaker 1: to just be like, I gotta feed them the poison.
Speaker 1: I gotta do it. I don't care that this has
Speaker 1: costing me more money than taking the poison out. And
Speaker 1: guess what, freedom, I love it. You love to see it.
Speaker 1: We love to see it. We've always been the same. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: whiley was not purely concerned with food here or with
Speaker 1: like the raw ingredients that people generally consider food, And
Speaker 1: in fact, as this law came closer and closer to passing,
Speaker 1: he was in recently getting and getting involved in something
Speaker 1: that had become a source of substantial profits for the
Speaker 1: biggest players in the industry. Whitely was now obsessed with
Speaker 1: the use of new and experimental preservatives on various food stuffs.
Speaker 1: Now some of them were like what we've talked about,
Speaker 1: based on formaldehyde, like freezing um, but there were a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of other different, not all preservatives, new food additives.
Speaker 1: This is the period in which people start to adulterate food,
Speaker 1: when you can your first processed meats, and these companies
Speaker 1: are putting stuff in for flavor and to preserve it,
Speaker 1: and there's no regulation for any of this at this point.
Speaker 1: And this is really concerning to Wiley. The Poison Squad
Speaker 1: describes the birth of this subset of the chemical industry,
Speaker 1: and a paragraph that you may recognize some of the
Speaker 1: names from. In addition to preservatives, companies developed synthetic compounds
Speaker 1: to make food production cheaper. The sweetener saccharine, discovered in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy nine at Johns Hopkins University, cost far less
Speaker 1: than sugar and quickly replaced it as it cost saving.
Speaker 1: Alternative flavoring agents such as laboratory brood, citric acid, or
Speaker 1: peppermint extracts could now be used in drinks and other
Speaker 1: products instead of fresh lemon, juice, mint against saving costs
Speaker 1: and again crowding the farmer out of the supply chain.
Speaker 1: The pioneering and just industrial chemist Charles Feiser, who had
Speaker 1: founded his New York pharmaceutical company in eighteen forty nine,
Speaker 1: now also produced borax, boric acid, cream of tartar, and
Speaker 1: citric acid for use in food and drink. They loved
Speaker 1: putting boax and ship like dozes so high it would
Speaker 1: kill people. It was great. Chicago's Joseph Bauer, whose Liquid
Speaker 1: Carbonic company produced the pressurized gas used in the fizzing
Speaker 1: drinks of soda fountains, had become so interested in artificial
Speaker 1: sweeteners that in nineteen o one he had invested in
Speaker 1: a new business in St. Louis, the Monsanto Chemical Company,
Speaker 1: to produce saccer and in large quantities. Saccerin production had
Speaker 1: also launched the Hayden Chemical Works of New York City
Speaker 1: and nineteen hundred, although that company also branched into the
Speaker 1: preservative market, producing salicidic acid, formaldehyde, and sodium benzoate for
Speaker 1: use in food and drinks. The food and drink market
Speaker 1: also attracted Herbert Henry Dow founder at age thirty one,
Speaker 1: if the Dow Chemical Company in Midlands, Michigan now would
Speaker 1: been a chemistry student at the Case Institute of Technology
Speaker 1: in Cleveland, Ohio. Yeah, he so he creates now Chemical
Speaker 1: company in Sea. All of these guys this is where
Speaker 1: they get their start, like shooting ship into food. And
Speaker 1: while he's not wanting to, like, you're not saying we
Speaker 1: should ban all this. He's not some sort of like
Speaker 1: hippie fanatic, but he's like, we shouldn't know what these
Speaker 1: Number one, people need to know if these are in
Speaker 1: their food, right, Like you should have to tell people.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say you can't put citric acid or
Speaker 1: sony innate and food, but people should know, right Like
Speaker 1: that's that we should be doing that. And also we
Speaker 1: should figure out if this stuff like the food, the
Speaker 1: people putting this in food should be showing that it's
Speaker 1: not harmful, like they should be funding research to make which,
Speaker 1: as we'll talk about, becomes problematic, right, um, but it
Speaker 1: is a good idea that like, well, we can't just
Speaker 1: start shooting this stuff into food. We should know what
Speaker 1: it does right now. The people who are and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of scientists who are like not, like we
Speaker 1: don't need to be doing this, like the preservative stop
Speaker 1: the food from spoiling. Do we need to study what else?
Speaker 1: They do? We know how bad spoiled meat is. And
Speaker 1: they do have a point in this period where it's
Speaker 1: like we know it's this ship's so many kids a year,
Speaker 1: Like do we care if they get sick forty years later, right,
Speaker 1: which is like forty years that's the entire lifespan of
Speaker 1: a human, they'll be fine. Yeah, it's like you got
Speaker 1: to take the good with the bad here. I I
Speaker 1: understand a little bit of it. Or they're just like listen,
Speaker 1: they're not getting the food born illnesses and you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: their skin is like orange now and one of their
Speaker 1: lungs fell out, but like like whatever, they're alive. All
Speaker 1: these kids them were milk exactly. Harvey Wiley was not
Speaker 1: particularly good at the give and take compromise nature of politics.
Speaker 1: He was too much of a scientist, and so he's
Speaker 1: he one of the reasons this law has trouble passing,
Speaker 1: a lot of people will argue is that he's not
Speaker 1: willing to kind of like give any back. Um. And
Speaker 1: he's he's as adamant about like wanting strict laws about
Speaker 1: preservatives as he is about like what we should be
Speaker 1: pasteurizing milk. Right, And there's a good point to be making,
Speaker 1: like no pasteurizing milk is like get that done first, right,
Speaker 1: it's more of a priority to do this ship. Um.
Speaker 1: And so in the end, the pure Food Law only passes,
Speaker 1: but because Upton Sinclair's book causes this national outrage which
Speaker 1: prompts Teddy Roosevelt to champion the bill personally, and it passes.
Speaker 1: The Pure Food Law was the first major victory and
Speaker 1: the war to ensure Americans actually knew what the funk
Speaker 1: they were eating and cheap food you actually ate food
Speaker 1: as opposed to pure poison in a sax. It was
Speaker 1: followed in night. Yeah, just a completely like self inflicted wound,
Speaker 1: like this war that we created on ourselves. Oh good,
Speaker 1: it's very funny. Yeah. Now, the pure Food Law was
Speaker 1: the first major victory in the war to ensure Americans
Speaker 1: actually like yeah again, had any idea what they were eating.
Speaker 1: It was followed in nineteen thirty eight by the passing
Speaker 1: of the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, which established the
Speaker 1: Food and Drug Administration for the first time. So that's
Speaker 1: when the ninety eight you know six, we get the
Speaker 1: Pure Food Law, which lays the groundwork for the f
Speaker 1: d A. The FDA comes int into being in thirty eight,
Speaker 1: and initially when it started, it's funded entirely by taxpayer money, right,
Speaker 1: and it is invested with the you might say sacred
Speaker 1: authority to protect us consumers from the businesses making their food. Um.
Speaker 1: This is a titanic step forward, and it's cementson into
Speaker 1: the wildcat era of tainted milk, fake coffee, arsenic and
Speaker 1: lead riddled candy. It's a huge deal. Now a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff had started to get started to get fixed
Speaker 1: in nineteen o six, obviously, Um, but nineteen making the
Speaker 1: f d A is a huge move forward and a
Speaker 1: very good It was absolutely necessary, I want to established
Speaker 1: before we tear it down in the next episode. We
Speaker 1: had to have something like this, like you could not
Speaker 1: it's I don't care how much of a fucking libertarian is.
Speaker 1: You can't let that state of affairs go on the market.
Speaker 1: We have proved the market cannot correct itself with this.
Speaker 1: It's just so much cheaper to feed people poison, not
Speaker 1: the market would rather spend more money on continuing the
Speaker 1: poison trade. People can't stop him. You can't stop him.
Speaker 1: You can't stop a guy from all the people he's
Speaker 1: feeling good for. You know, the f d A starts
Speaker 1: as a beautiful, necessary thing. And then in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: about a century after Dr Wiley's journey began, the bright
Speaker 1: dream of the Food and Drug Administration began to go
Speaker 1: terribly wrong. But Matt, we're gonna talk about that in
Speaker 1: part two. Oh sure, sure, Uh yeah. The pod Yourself
Speaker 1: a Gun in the World's Only Sopranos podcast is out now,
Speaker 1: and check out the film Drunk Broadcast. Also, I'm on
Speaker 1: I'm on Instagram. Uh follow me at Matt leap jokes.
Speaker 1: I need more of those. You know, no one gives
Speaker 1: a shit about my Twitter anymore, you know, Yeah, follow
Speaker 1: him and Matt Leap jokes. Follow him, follow me, people
Speaker 1: send him pictures of your milk. Graham, I think people
Speaker 1: just care more about the Graham. You know, it just
Speaker 1: needs a shame because it Beyonce. I don't know if
Speaker 1: she's on the Graham. I assume so's the robber must
Speaker 1: be right, amateur. Also, like my Twitter, I do not
Speaker 1: have a Graham. I used to have a blue checkmark,
Speaker 1: but I got it taken away on Twitter, and I
Speaker 1: hope to get one your blue check work away Twitter
Speaker 1: did because I pretended to be The New York Times. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're not allowed to do that apparently, but it was
Speaker 1: a great post. It was you know, I mean, I
Speaker 1: do love that for you, like I love I think
Speaker 1: my favorite example of that issue it's the lady from
Speaker 1: I Think You Should Leave, who did the the I
Speaker 1: Can't get enough wine like that that that's She's been
Speaker 1: in a few of them, but she did. It was
Speaker 1: like when Oreos did some sort of Pride month think
Speaker 1: she uh pretended to Benila Wafers using her checkmark and
Speaker 1: was like, Nilla Wafers, we don't like bisexual people think
Speaker 1: you're not allowed to eat her cookies something like that.
Speaker 1: It was very funny and that's why she's not on
Speaker 1: Twitter anymore. I love it, Nilla Wafers taken strays from me.
Speaker 1: I should note people are going to give a ship
Speaker 1: every because they do every time we like make jokes
Speaker 1: about dying at forty. Obviously, the way lifespans work is
Speaker 1: that so many kids died as babies once. If you
Speaker 1: made it to an adulthood, you had a pretty good
Speaker 1: chance of at least making it to like fifty or sixty.
Speaker 1: People made it to their seventies. Yes, it's true. It's
Speaker 1: funny to joke about people dying at age like being
Speaker 1: old at age thirty back then, because look at a
Speaker 1: picture of a thirty year old from the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 1: They look like your fucking grandpa, like covered in soot.
Speaker 1: They're just taking it out. It is permanently embedded soot
Speaker 1: in their body all. Its extremely funny how sick and
Speaker 1: dying everybody was back in the day. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: they just a society that loved poison milk. It was
Speaker 1: a whole world of people exactly as healthy as you
Speaker 1: here Bolson Yaro, just constantly getting their dudoo backed up
Speaker 1: and being like, well are you and ship out of
Speaker 1: their noses because there's so much poop in the milk. Again,
Speaker 1: But first I gotta run by this emu and see
Speaker 1: if you'll punch me in the throat. Um boy, um
Speaker 1: so yeah. Find matt Leeb on Twitter. Also, I have
Speaker 1: a fiction novel, my book After the Revolution. You can
Speaker 1: find it for free. Is an e book at a
Speaker 1: tr book dot com. But it's also available for pre
Speaker 1: order through a K Press. If you order now, you
Speaker 1: will get a signed copy. So just google a k
Speaker 1: Press after the Revolution preorder my book. It will come
Speaker 1: out in May and you'll get it signed a k
Speaker 1: Press after the Revolution. Um google it and you'll find
Speaker 1: the pre order page. I'm pre ordering it right now.
Speaker 1: And we have a behind the bast livestream. God so
Speaker 1: much to plug ship Okay with prop on Anuary seventeen. Okay,
Speaker 1: get tickets at momenthouse dot com. Slash it will be
Speaker 1: a good episode, probably. I haven't written it yet. There
Speaker 1: I will, I think, so that's probable. I might even
Speaker 1: have an episode written alright,