WEBVTT - Special Episode: Deborah Blum & The Poison Squad 0:00:42.479 --> 0:00:46.199 Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this podcast will 0:00:46.280 --> 0:00:50.400 kill You. Welcome everyone to the latest installment of the 0:00:50.479 --> 0:00:54.160 tp w k Y Book Club, where our two read 0:00:54.240 --> 0:00:58.360 lists grow ever longer and our appreciation for amazing science 0:00:58.440 --> 0:01:03.400 communicators writing the enlightening and entertaining books grows ever deeper. 0:01:03.960 --> 0:01:06.800 On a personal note, this mini series has been an 0:01:07.000 --> 0:01:12.000 absolute blast to put together, with some truly unforgettable conversations 0:01:12.120 --> 0:01:17.080 about incredibly wide ranging topics, and I just really love 0:01:17.160 --> 0:01:19.800 that I get to do this, So thank you so 0:01:20.000 --> 0:01:23.000 much to all you wonderful people for listening, and to 0:01:23.200 --> 0:01:27.440 all these amazing authors for chatting. Without you, this would 0:01:27.480 --> 0:01:30.920 not be possible. We find ourselves now in the second 0:01:31.000 --> 0:01:34.080 to last episode in this mini series, and while I 0:01:34.160 --> 0:01:36.720 won't list off each book that we've talked about like 0:01:36.760 --> 0:01:39.399 I've done in every other intro, because that's a whole 0:01:39.400 --> 0:01:42.199 lot of books, at this point, I will just say 0:01:42.240 --> 0:01:45.639 again how much I've loved hearing from you all about 0:01:45.680 --> 0:01:50.000 these episodes, and will happily welcome any other feedback, favorites, 0:01:50.080 --> 0:01:54.080 follow up questions, future book recommendations, or anything else you 0:01:54.080 --> 0:01:57.880 want to tell me. Okay, but that's enough podcast business 0:01:57.960 --> 0:01:58.440 for the time. 0:01:58.480 --> 0:01:58.760 Being. 0:01:59.440 --> 0:02:02.000 Now, let's go into what we'll be talking about today, 0:02:02.360 --> 0:02:05.920 and that is the food of the past. If I 0:02:06.000 --> 0:02:09.640 asked you to imagine what food tasted or looked like 0:02:09.840 --> 0:02:12.839 back at the turn of the twentieth century, I think 0:02:12.960 --> 0:02:18.160 many of us might imagine an idealized world where tomatoes 0:02:18.240 --> 0:02:22.920 were plump, juicy, and always ripe, Where meat was pure, 0:02:23.360 --> 0:02:28.320 untainted by hormones or antibiotics, where butter was always fresh, 0:02:28.600 --> 0:02:32.440 churned from milk straight from the cow. That is, unless 0:02:32.480 --> 0:02:35.360 you've read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, in which case you 0:02:35.480 --> 0:02:38.480 might have a grittier, more realistic picture of what things 0:02:38.520 --> 0:02:42.200 were actually like. But I think many of us buy 0:02:42.280 --> 0:02:47.799 into this romantic notion that everything was fresher, more flavorful, healthier, 0:02:48.000 --> 0:02:52.639 less processed, more pure back in the day, and frankly, 0:02:53.000 --> 0:02:58.440 that could not be further from the truth. Acclaimed science journalist, professor, 0:02:58.720 --> 0:03:03.120 and Pulitzer Prize writer Deborah Blum joins me today to 0:03:03.240 --> 0:03:07.320 chat about her excellent book The Poison Squad, also made 0:03:07.320 --> 0:03:11.960 into a PBS series in twenty twenty, which explores the wild, 0:03:12.240 --> 0:03:16.120 unregulated mess that was the US food industry in the 0:03:16.160 --> 0:03:20.320 early twentieth century and the contentious fight to clean up 0:03:20.360 --> 0:03:26.000 that mess, led by some truly remarkable individuals. Blum, whose 0:03:26.040 --> 0:03:29.720 best selling book, The Poisoner's Handbook is certainly a favorite 0:03:29.720 --> 0:03:33.080 of many of our listeners, paints a vivid picture of 0:03:33.120 --> 0:03:37.640 the preregulation food industry and the tremendous fight for safe foods. 0:03:38.280 --> 0:03:41.960 The growing urban populations of the nineteenth century required a 0:03:41.960 --> 0:03:45.040 food supply to keep up with the ever increasing demand, 0:03:45.640 --> 0:03:48.320 and one way that producers found to do this was 0:03:48.360 --> 0:03:53.480 through food adulteration, a deceptive practice that involves adding substances 0:03:53.520 --> 0:03:57.080 to food to change its appearance, its taste, its volume, 0:03:57.280 --> 0:04:02.400 or size. Blum's book is filled with horrifying examples of 0:04:02.480 --> 0:04:06.160 early food adulteration, as well as not a small number 0:04:06.200 --> 0:04:10.200 of scandals where people lost their lives due to poisoned food. 0:04:10.800 --> 0:04:14.320 It seems like this practice of food adulteration would not 0:04:14.360 --> 0:04:19.080 be tolerated by consumers or any regulatory body, making it 0:04:19.160 --> 0:04:22.159 pretty bad for business. But the fact of the matter 0:04:22.400 --> 0:04:25.760 was that there were no regulatory bodies to impose fines 0:04:25.880 --> 0:04:29.680 upon these deceitful producers, and the lack of labels on 0:04:29.760 --> 0:04:33.640 foods meant that consumers couldn't make an informed decision about 0:04:33.800 --> 0:04:37.240 whether they wanted to buy butter that contained borax or 0:04:37.360 --> 0:04:41.640 did not contain borax. So business went on as usual 0:04:42.320 --> 0:04:46.479 until chemist Harvey Wiley stepped in and started his lifelong 0:04:46.560 --> 0:04:50.839 crusade to make food safe for public consumption. The efforts 0:04:50.880 --> 0:04:54.440 of Wiley and his poison Squad captured the public's attention 0:04:54.640 --> 0:04:57.719 in a major way and greatly advanced the fight for 0:04:57.760 --> 0:05:01.800 food safety legislation. Even though it seems like safe foods 0:05:01.800 --> 0:05:05.680 and consumer protection should be a thing that everybody wants, 0:05:06.240 --> 0:05:09.800 it was not a one sided battle. Wiley was fighting 0:05:09.880 --> 0:05:13.359 against a corrupt industry that had long made sure to 0:05:13.480 --> 0:05:17.440 keep the federal government on its side. In today's episode, 0:05:17.720 --> 0:05:21.800 Blum and I discussed Wiley's monumental impact on food safety 0:05:21.880 --> 0:05:25.679 legislation in the United States, some of the shocking food 0:05:25.720 --> 0:05:29.960 poisoning scandals that incited the public to activism, how far 0:05:30.200 --> 0:05:33.599 we've come in terms of consumer protection since the Pure 0:05:33.640 --> 0:05:37.360 Food and Drug Act of nineteen oh six, and how 0:05:37.440 --> 0:05:40.880 much further we still have to go. I am super 0:05:40.960 --> 0:05:44.000 excited to get started, so let's take a quick break 0:05:44.120 --> 0:06:12.159 and then dive in. Deborah, thank you so very much 0:06:12.200 --> 0:06:15.279 for being here today. I am such a big fan 0:06:15.320 --> 0:06:18.719 of your work, and I especially loved The Poison Squad 0:06:19.200 --> 0:06:22.000 for how you brought to life the incredible story of 0:06:22.160 --> 0:06:25.640 Harvey Wiley and his quest for food safety in the US. 0:06:26.400 --> 0:06:30.200 Thank you so much. It's really a privilege. I'm excited 0:06:30.200 --> 0:06:33.159 to be on this podcast, and I love talking about 0:06:33.200 --> 0:06:37.599 Harvey Wilace and sort of the invention of food safety 0:06:37.640 --> 0:06:41.200 in the United States that is part of his story. 0:06:41.320 --> 0:06:44.120 So I really appreciate you having me on. 0:06:44.880 --> 0:06:47.920 Well. I loved hearing about that story, and the other 0:06:47.960 --> 0:06:51.120 thing that I loved about your book were all of 0:06:51.320 --> 0:06:57.080 the delightfully disgusting and horrifying examples of food adulteration that 0:06:57.120 --> 0:06:57.839 you describe. 0:06:58.080 --> 0:07:00.400 They were horrifying and discussed thing. 0:07:02.279 --> 0:07:04.799 Who was truly shocking. I think there were many times 0:07:05.120 --> 0:07:07.279 where I pulled my partner aside and was like, you've 0:07:07.279 --> 0:07:12.200 got to read this, look at this. How did you 0:07:12.240 --> 0:07:15.360 first come across the story of Harvey Wiley and what 0:07:15.600 --> 0:07:18.360 most interested you about this period of history. 0:07:19.040 --> 0:07:21.520 Yeah, that's a great question. So I have been what 0:07:21.680 --> 0:07:25.360 I think of as a toxicology journalist for over the 0:07:25.400 --> 0:07:27.320 past decade. I've written about. 0:07:27.400 --> 0:07:28.800 Poisons and homicide. 0:07:29.080 --> 0:07:32.720 My real interest is poison in our everyday life, right 0:07:32.800 --> 0:07:35.840 how we navigate a chemical world that includes things that 0:07:35.880 --> 0:07:39.320 are really dangerous for us. And a lot of my 0:07:39.480 --> 0:07:42.679 interests has been in the history of science as well, 0:07:42.800 --> 0:07:46.480 how did we get here? And so when I was 0:07:46.600 --> 0:07:51.120 looking at poisons in the early twentieth centuries, which is 0:07:51.160 --> 0:07:55.280 a special interest of mine, I started seeing references to 0:07:55.640 --> 0:07:59.600 what is truly one of the strangest public health experiments 0:07:59.640 --> 0:08:04.640 in history, which was conducted by Harvey Wiley and was 0:08:04.880 --> 0:08:08.400 nicknamed the Poison Squad, which I can explain later. 0:08:08.680 --> 0:08:09.920 By the Washington Post. 0:08:10.000 --> 0:08:13.320 And I almost in very simple minded I thought, well, 0:08:13.360 --> 0:08:17.400 what in the world is that? And so then when 0:08:17.440 --> 0:08:21.040 I started looking at the experiment, and one of the 0:08:21.080 --> 0:08:24.840 things that makes this such an unusual experiment is you 0:08:24.960 --> 0:08:30.200 really have a chemist at the US Department of Agriculture 0:08:30.400 --> 0:08:34.160 deliberately poisoning as co workers. That's one of the elements 0:08:34.160 --> 0:08:38.319 of the Poison Squad that's so fascinating, actually in the 0:08:38.360 --> 0:08:40.920 interest of trying to figure out what's going into our food. 0:08:41.760 --> 0:08:44.800 And when I was reading the descriptions of that, I thought, 0:08:46.000 --> 0:08:48.200 why would you be so desperate as to do that? 0:08:49.160 --> 0:08:55.199 What would it take to have an established government? Chemists say, 0:08:55.280 --> 0:08:58.440 the only way that I can get the answer to 0:08:58.559 --> 0:09:02.760 this problem is is to do this incredibly risky experiment 0:09:02.880 --> 0:09:07.200 on young men working in my agency. And that sort 0:09:07.240 --> 0:09:10.400 of pushed me off the cliff into the whole question 0:09:10.960 --> 0:09:14.480 of what was going on at food at the time 0:09:15.000 --> 0:09:17.800 that made things so crazy that you would need to 0:09:17.880 --> 0:09:21.360 do that experiment. It was something I think I'd never 0:09:21.400 --> 0:09:24.240 really thought about before, but that really was the sort 0:09:24.280 --> 0:09:26.480 of tipping point of that inquiry. 0:09:27.080 --> 0:09:29.800 Yeah, and I think a lot of us tend to 0:09:29.920 --> 0:09:33.360 think of food from that period of time as being, 0:09:34.000 --> 0:09:36.959 you know, fresher meat was fresh, milk was straight from 0:09:36.960 --> 0:09:40.240 the cow's utter, and foods in general were more you know, 0:09:40.320 --> 0:09:44.800 quote unquote pure. But what was food actually like during 0:09:44.920 --> 0:09:48.800 the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, particularly in 0:09:48.920 --> 0:09:50.319 cities in the US. 0:09:51.160 --> 0:09:55.040 Yes, that was like almost a moment of horrifying discovery 0:09:55.080 --> 0:09:58.200 for me because I also had thought, in the way 0:09:58.320 --> 0:10:01.240 we'll sometimes talk about the one wonerful farm fresh food 0:10:01.800 --> 0:10:07.080 of our ancestors, right this pinchy, healthy, happy period of 0:10:07.120 --> 0:10:10.360 the nineteenth century, that was my I had brought into 0:10:10.440 --> 0:10:14.000 that mythology as well completely, so that when I started 0:10:14.120 --> 0:10:17.400 unpeeling the layers of what food was like in the 0:10:17.480 --> 0:10:20.960 late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was like, wait 0:10:20.960 --> 0:10:24.760 a minute. And so part of it is that there 0:10:24.840 --> 0:10:27.880 is a mythology to it, and some of that is 0:10:27.920 --> 0:10:31.439 the way we tend to sort of romanticize the agriculture 0:10:31.559 --> 0:10:34.600 of the past and the idea that we were, you know, 0:10:34.679 --> 0:10:38.840 a happy rural nation with everyone just walking over to 0:10:39.160 --> 0:10:42.959 farmer John's orchard to get their apples. But that wasn't true, right, 0:10:43.160 --> 0:10:47.520 especially starting in the mid nineteenth century and posts the 0:10:47.600 --> 0:10:51.280 Civil War, we were increasingly in industrial nations. So there 0:10:51.320 --> 0:10:55.600 were people who lived on farms and eight farm fresh food, 0:10:55.679 --> 0:10:59.280 I assume, right, And there were wealthy people who owned 0:10:59.320 --> 0:11:02.200 their own farm or were able to purchase those things. 0:11:02.240 --> 0:11:06.120 But the majority of Americans increasingly were living in cities. 0:11:06.720 --> 0:11:10.880 They were working in factories, you know, scraping by. They 0:11:10.960 --> 0:11:14.520 weren't going out into the country to get these expensive 0:11:14.679 --> 0:11:18.480 farm fresh materials. They were buying them at corner stores 0:11:18.520 --> 0:11:21.520 and local grocery stores, and they were buying a lot. 0:11:23.040 --> 0:11:27.040 With the rise of industry came the rise of industrialized food, 0:11:27.160 --> 0:11:32.160 so they were buying a lot of manufactured food. And 0:11:32.360 --> 0:11:34.560 one of the things about the rise of sort of 0:11:34.600 --> 0:11:40.560 food manufacturing canning and other ways that we sort of 0:11:40.600 --> 0:11:45.360 bring things from the farm to the grocery store or 0:11:45.400 --> 0:11:49.120 the grocery store to your table. Is that this was 0:11:49.200 --> 0:11:52.720 also a period in which there was no food regulation, 0:11:53.200 --> 0:11:56.400 which is sort of another part of the story. So 0:11:56.480 --> 0:11:59.800 I am a food manufacturer. There were no laws telling 0:11:59.840 --> 0:12:01.240 me what I can put in food. 0:12:02.000 --> 0:12:04.000 There are no applaws requiring. 0:12:03.600 --> 0:12:05.520 That you label the food. You don't have to tell 0:12:05.559 --> 0:12:10.320 people what's in it. There's nothing. And so if in 0:12:10.360 --> 0:12:14.400 a capitalistic society the idea is to maximize your profit, 0:12:15.320 --> 0:12:18.040 it was like free reign to do so, and we 0:12:18.080 --> 0:12:22.720 saw incredible consequences of that, to the point that I 0:12:22.760 --> 0:12:26.920 start as thinking to myself, did people in the nineteenth 0:12:26.920 --> 0:12:30.800 century ever eat what they thought they were eating? Because 0:12:30.840 --> 0:12:34.000 there was so much fraud It was crazy. 0:12:34.480 --> 0:12:38.800 It's unbelievable. And I loved reading the list of the 0:12:39.720 --> 0:12:42.960 many lists, the many instances, just my jaw dropping over 0:12:43.000 --> 0:12:46.240 and over again with some of these examples. Were there 0:12:46.280 --> 0:12:50.000 any in particular that you found the most shocking of 0:12:50.080 --> 0:12:52.800 you know, like a food additive or a food lie, 0:12:53.520 --> 0:12:56.480 or any that you found the most appalling in terms 0:12:56.600 --> 0:12:59.959 of the producer's complete disregard for human health? 0:13:00.880 --> 0:13:03.240 Yeah, that's a really important point. 0:13:03.320 --> 0:13:06.760 I think. So you have widespread fraud, and you have 0:13:06.760 --> 0:13:09.439 white sat broad and basically if you think about it, 0:13:09.480 --> 0:13:15.360 and things that are easy to fake. So you know spices, right, 0:13:15.600 --> 0:13:18.840 you had brick dusts that went into cinnamon and paprik 0:13:18.960 --> 0:13:24.559 and the red red colored spices flour for bread. The 0:13:24.679 --> 0:13:27.640 people would grind up gypsum which we put in wallboard 0:13:28.120 --> 0:13:30.200 to make as a flower extender. 0:13:30.559 --> 0:13:30.839 Right. 0:13:31.520 --> 0:13:34.840 I mean again going back to what were you actually eating? 0:13:35.240 --> 0:13:39.520 I was myself horrified by coffee. I mean, I love coffee. 0:13:39.559 --> 0:13:43.040 It's like the way I start every day. You almost 0:13:43.320 --> 0:13:47.800 never got actual coffee in your coffee, or a full 0:13:47.840 --> 0:13:51.080 cup of coffee. You know, you got sometimes you got 0:13:51.160 --> 0:13:56.160 ground bone, right, Sometimes you just got dirt. There was 0:13:56.280 --> 0:14:00.000 a doctor in the Upper Midwest or at one point 0:14:00.160 --> 0:14:03.800 speculated that the phrase of muddy cup of coffee came 0:14:03.920 --> 0:14:07.439 from the idea that most Americans were drinking a fair 0:14:07.440 --> 0:14:10.079 amount of mud when they thought they were drinking coffee. 0:14:10.400 --> 0:14:13.000 And it was so to give you an idea, because 0:14:13.000 --> 0:14:17.320 coffee makes a good example of how entrenched the fraud was. 0:14:18.520 --> 0:14:21.800 You know, the original fraud was with a ground coffee. 0:14:21.840 --> 0:14:24.840 How can you tell what's actually in these particles in 0:14:24.880 --> 0:14:27.920 the can of coffee? Right? It could be coffee, it 0:14:27.920 --> 0:14:31.120 could be ground seeds, it could be ground coconut shells, 0:14:31.160 --> 0:14:34.960 which were awful also used. And so people began to 0:14:35.040 --> 0:14:39.040 become increasingly suspicious of ground coffee and switched over to 0:14:39.080 --> 0:14:42.040 coffee beans. And of course this is the nineteenth century. 0:14:42.080 --> 0:14:44.320 So you go down to the corner store. There's a 0:14:44.320 --> 0:14:47.040 barrel full of coffee beans. You have the grocer scoop 0:14:47.120 --> 0:14:49.520 them up for you. And so what you find is 0:14:49.600 --> 0:14:52.960 this new industry in fake coffee beans, right, And you 0:14:52.960 --> 0:14:57.920 can actually find the formulas for making the coffee beans. 0:14:58.040 --> 0:14:59.640 There's the little molds. 0:14:59.200 --> 0:15:03.720 For them of wax and clay. I mean, then when 0:15:03.800 --> 0:15:06.000 you grind them up at home, of course they go 0:15:06.080 --> 0:15:09.160 in to your coffee. And this is repeated over and 0:15:09.200 --> 0:15:11.680 over again. You see it in whiskey, you see it 0:15:11.720 --> 0:15:15.760 in wine. You see it sort of across the board 0:15:16.000 --> 0:15:20.040 in all kinds of food products. You see, going on 0:15:20.120 --> 0:15:23.400 to your other question about what I found shockingly unhealthy, 0:15:24.080 --> 0:15:28.120 the use of toxic compounds to color food. So Arsenic 0:15:28.280 --> 0:15:32.000 is used to make green food coloring. Lead is used 0:15:32.000 --> 0:15:35.680 to make red food coloring. You would find lead in 0:15:35.880 --> 0:15:40.960 cheese because they wanted that orange look of cheddar, so 0:15:41.040 --> 0:15:44.920 they would mix in a little red lead. It's completely acceptable. 0:15:44.960 --> 0:15:48.560 But to me, the sort of standout horror story involves 0:15:48.600 --> 0:15:50.960 milk and the additives that go into milk. 0:15:51.840 --> 0:15:55.840 Yes, absolutely, it's it's almost as though like the fraud 0:15:56.000 --> 0:15:59.760 drove the most incredible creativity in terms of, like, how 0:15:59.840 --> 0:16:03.040 can we make quote unquote food that has actual, not 0:16:03.280 --> 0:16:06.440 edible components to it. It's it's amazing. 0:16:06.840 --> 0:16:07.640 It's insane. 0:16:07.680 --> 0:16:10.480 And so with milk, of course, the number one thing. 0:16:10.560 --> 0:16:13.560 It starts with people just watering the milk. Right, I 0:16:13.560 --> 0:16:15.480 can make a lot more money if I use water. 0:16:16.040 --> 0:16:19.360 I don't particularly care if it's clean water. I think 0:16:19.400 --> 0:16:21.520 I put in the book this one instance where they 0:16:21.520 --> 0:16:25.080 found horsehair worms and milk because the dairy man had just, 0:16:25.440 --> 0:16:29.120 speaking of disgusting, just used pond water to water down 0:16:29.160 --> 0:16:32.440 his milk. The milk when it was too watered would 0:16:32.440 --> 0:16:35.320 turn kind of bluish. They'd add in plaster of Paris 0:16:35.400 --> 0:16:41.080 or chalk. They would occasionally fake cream by purating pure 0:16:41.240 --> 0:16:44.120 in calf brains and floating them on top of the 0:16:44.160 --> 0:16:48.240 milk in this lovely creamy looking lace kind of disgusting. 0:16:48.320 --> 0:16:50.360 But the other thing about milk is you have to 0:16:50.400 --> 0:16:53.360 remember this is a time when there's no refrigeration, so 0:16:53.520 --> 0:16:56.720 milk spoiled. And there were when we look at how 0:16:56.800 --> 0:16:59.800 dangerous milk was in the nineteenth century, which it was. 0:17:00.400 --> 0:17:02.680 Some of it has to do with that, right, you 0:17:02.680 --> 0:17:06.160 have a huge milk is a wonderful substrate for bacteria. 0:17:06.200 --> 0:17:09.760 It's got sugar, it's got protein, everything a good pathogenic 0:17:09.800 --> 0:17:14.119 bacteria wants. Since you had all these horrible pathogens and 0:17:14.200 --> 0:17:19.080 milk glow vine, tuberculosis, brucellosis right just and as the 0:17:19.119 --> 0:17:22.040 milk began to rot, they grow and grow and grow. 0:17:22.680 --> 0:17:25.680 So dairymen then are trying to figure out a cheap 0:17:25.720 --> 0:17:28.000 way to deal with this, and they turn to an 0:17:28.040 --> 0:17:32.800 embalming agent, form aldehyde, and they start embalming the milk, 0:17:33.320 --> 0:17:36.919 right literally embomming the milk. When you go into newspapers 0:17:37.320 --> 0:17:41.400 of that time, there are headlines in balm milk scandals 0:17:41.520 --> 0:17:44.359 in which dairymen are putting fromaldehyde in the milk, not 0:17:44.640 --> 0:17:47.199 under the name form aldehyde, and remember they don't have 0:17:47.240 --> 0:17:51.040 to label it anyway. And then children are dying and 0:17:51.119 --> 0:17:56.320 getting sick, and so that is such an insane thing 0:17:56.440 --> 0:17:58.119 to do for aldehyde. 0:17:57.680 --> 0:17:58.480 Is so poisonous. 0:17:58.480 --> 0:18:01.920 They knew it was poisonous, right, You could argue with 0:18:02.000 --> 0:18:06.080 some of these additives like salicilic acid, which we you 0:18:06.080 --> 0:18:08.440 know as a component of as form. We know that 0:18:08.480 --> 0:18:11.520 makes the lining of the stomach bled. Did they really 0:18:11.560 --> 0:18:15.720 know that then only somewhat but from aldehyde out and 0:18:15.760 --> 0:18:19.280 mount poisons. So they did know and they just obviously 0:18:19.359 --> 0:18:22.080 didn't care. It's really a horrifying story. 0:18:22.800 --> 0:18:26.560 Yeah. Absolutely, So you just went through an incredible list 0:18:26.720 --> 0:18:32.440 of foods that were adulterated or not even like spices, milk, coffee, 0:18:33.040 --> 0:18:38.040 everything that contained harmful chemicals or pathogens and parasites. And 0:18:38.160 --> 0:18:41.720 the list seems endless. But were there any foods in 0:18:41.800 --> 0:18:45.639 particular that seemed to be the biggest problems or that 0:18:45.720 --> 0:18:49.640 were the first targets in terms of food safety legislation. 0:18:50.480 --> 0:18:55.280 Yeah, that's also an important point. So during this whole 0:18:55.320 --> 0:18:58.359 period with the rise of industrial chemistry going into food, 0:18:59.000 --> 0:19:03.080 there's a whole of failed attempts to regulate food. At 0:19:03.119 --> 0:19:07.640 the national level. There were states that passed laws. Indiana, 0:19:07.880 --> 0:19:11.800 which was the state that suffered a huge outbreak of 0:19:11.920 --> 0:19:14.919 inbalm milk deaths, and I think they had four hundred 0:19:14.960 --> 0:19:19.600 in Indianapolis one summer past a law driven by the 0:19:19.680 --> 0:19:23.879 dangers of milk. So you see milk and dairy products 0:19:23.920 --> 0:19:27.040 becoming one of the real targets of food safety laws, 0:19:27.040 --> 0:19:30.920 and this sort of patchwork of responses at the state level. 0:19:31.000 --> 0:19:36.280 At this point, it's milk, it's cheese, it's adulteration. 0:19:37.400 --> 0:19:38.360 Of spices. 0:19:39.760 --> 0:19:43.919 The Congress held a number of hearings and one of 0:19:43.960 --> 0:19:46.560 the things that come up there is the adult this 0:19:46.680 --> 0:19:49.959 is fraud rather than risk. But honey and syrups were 0:19:50.359 --> 0:19:54.440 largely corn syrup at that time, and again to show 0:19:54.480 --> 0:19:58.560 you how ingenious it was, there would be honey, it 0:19:58.560 --> 0:20:02.480 would actually be corn syrup, and they would had a 0:20:02.520 --> 0:20:06.240 business of making fake honeycombs that they would make out 0:20:06.240 --> 0:20:09.560 of wax and drop into the corn syrup to make 0:20:09.600 --> 0:20:12.399 it look like, you know, real honey. So you have 0:20:13.520 --> 0:20:17.480 a lot of interest in this. Again, there were states 0:20:17.520 --> 0:20:20.919 that targeted maybe the fought and maple syrup, the fraud 0:20:20.920 --> 0:20:24.680 and honey. They the government looked at fraud and gems 0:20:24.720 --> 0:20:29.560 and jellies. Right, strawberry jam often had enough strawberry in 0:20:29.640 --> 0:20:33.000 it at all, and they would use grass seed instead 0:20:33.040 --> 0:20:36.160 of strawberry seeds. And then the dyes of the time 0:20:36.200 --> 0:20:40.360 are analine cooltar dyes. Pretty much. You'd get these red 0:20:40.440 --> 0:20:43.639 coultar dyes and you know in corn syrup and grass 0:20:43.640 --> 0:20:47.680 seed and they actually, in one congressional hearing had a 0:20:47.720 --> 0:20:51.080 manufacturer who said, well, we couldn't possibly do it another 0:20:51.119 --> 0:20:53.880 way because you know, we would lose market share if 0:20:53.880 --> 0:20:59.080 we went to the expensive putting strawberries in our strawberry jam. 0:20:59.160 --> 0:21:03.760 So you have this whole system that is catching people's attention. 0:21:03.880 --> 0:21:08.720 What really catches people attention are the really horrible frauds 0:21:08.960 --> 0:21:11.879 and then the uh, you know, the scandals like the 0:21:11.920 --> 0:21:17.199 above milk scandal, and so some of the things that 0:21:17.320 --> 0:21:21.879 start coming up in addition are you know, the preservative 0:21:22.040 --> 0:21:25.239 used in meat, and that really came up after the 0:21:25.280 --> 0:21:28.760 Spanish American War when there was a huge scandal that 0:21:28.880 --> 0:21:32.639 was actually called the ebald meat scandal, in which the 0:21:32.680 --> 0:21:36.520 government had to investigate whether it had killed more soldiers 0:21:37.240 --> 0:21:42.040 in Cuba by its own food supplies than the Spanish 0:21:42.080 --> 0:21:46.080 had killed in Cuba during the Spanish American War. Right, 0:21:46.640 --> 0:21:52.639 and yeah, insane time. Right. Really, when you look back 0:21:52.680 --> 0:21:56.680 on it, in this landscape of do whatever you want 0:21:56.800 --> 0:22:02.960 with food, it's a pretty unbelievable period of contaminated food. 0:22:03.080 --> 0:22:06.040 That doesn't mean that, and this is one of the 0:22:06.080 --> 0:22:10.920 important things to realize that, aside from very very very 0:22:11.000 --> 0:22:16.159 toxic things like from aldehyde that people were literally dying 0:22:16.200 --> 0:22:20.520 where they stood, it does mean that people were a 0:22:20.560 --> 0:22:25.480 lot less healthy related to their diet. There's a wonderful 0:22:25.600 --> 0:22:29.640 historian medical historian at the University of Michigan, Howard Markel, 0:22:30.400 --> 0:22:33.720 who tends to describe the nineteenth century as the century 0:22:33.760 --> 0:22:39.800 of the Great American stomach ache. Food was making people sick, right, 0:22:40.240 --> 0:22:43.880 and that was almost an accepted part of life at 0:22:43.880 --> 0:22:47.280 that time, something I think we don't appreciate now just 0:22:47.359 --> 0:22:49.960 how unwell we were based on what we. 0:22:50.080 --> 0:22:54.760 Ate in this discussion of food fraud versus food safety, 0:22:54.760 --> 0:22:56.919 which is I think is a really interesting sort of 0:22:57.359 --> 0:23:03.600 designation and important one. Did the conversations around food policies, 0:23:03.680 --> 0:23:08.240 whether for fraud or safety, did that revolve initially around 0:23:08.400 --> 0:23:12.639 protecting producers or consumers? Or when was that switch made 0:23:12.760 --> 0:23:15.480 or was it sort of about both from the very beginning. 0:23:16.840 --> 0:23:20.639 You know, if I go back to Harvey Wiley, who's 0:23:20.720 --> 0:23:25.359 the focus of my book, and let me just sort 0:23:25.359 --> 0:23:29.160 of bring him into the conversation he was the chief 0:23:29.240 --> 0:23:31.800 chemist of the Bureau of Chemistry and the Department of 0:23:31.840 --> 0:23:36.119 Agriculture starting in eighteen eighty three. And at this point 0:23:36.160 --> 0:23:39.840 there are no food safety laws at the federal level, 0:23:39.840 --> 0:23:44.920 and there are no food safety organizations like the FDA. 0:23:45.119 --> 0:23:48.879 Right there is the Department of Agriculture. It has this 0:23:49.080 --> 0:23:54.359 tiny chemistry unit that's responsible for all agricultural chemistry issues, 0:23:54.400 --> 0:23:58.880 you know, soils and fertilizers and you know, developing better 0:23:59.000 --> 0:24:05.119 plants chemistry. And also because Wiley was uniquely interested in 0:24:05.240 --> 0:24:10.280 food safety and integrity, he starts bringing that into the mix, 0:24:10.760 --> 0:24:14.200 right and his real focus was on food fraud when 0:24:14.240 --> 0:24:18.240 he came in. It grew into food safety. But when 0:24:18.320 --> 0:24:22.920 he started he had done some early investigations in Indiana 0:24:23.680 --> 0:24:27.360 on fake syrup and fake honey and that whole problem. 0:24:27.640 --> 0:24:30.560 And when he came into the federal government from being 0:24:30.560 --> 0:24:34.280 a professor of chemistry at Purdue, he brought that interest 0:24:34.359 --> 0:24:37.639 in fake food with him, and so he commissioned a 0:24:37.800 --> 0:24:41.840 series of reports just looking at the integrity of manufactured food, 0:24:42.280 --> 0:24:45.840 starting with dairy obviously for the reasons we discussed, and 0:24:46.280 --> 0:24:52.080 going on through all kinds of things, canned vegetables and lard, 0:24:52.600 --> 0:24:56.639 and cocoa and coffee and wines and beers. I mean, 0:24:56.680 --> 0:25:00.879 they're just sort of analyzing a random sample of food 0:25:00.920 --> 0:25:04.200 and drink products in the United States. He was most 0:25:04.240 --> 0:25:08.760 interested in fraud when he started. But those investigations, which 0:25:08.800 --> 0:25:13.560 you can find under the incredibly boring title of Bulletin thirteen, 0:25:14.320 --> 0:25:17.240 which is what they were not as. But those investigations 0:25:17.840 --> 0:25:20.160 started to lead him to be aware that there were 0:25:20.160 --> 0:25:24.000 more issues than just fraud than that mixed into the fraud, 0:25:24.080 --> 0:25:28.000 and sometimes actually part of the fraud was the addition 0:25:28.160 --> 0:25:30.919 of these things that were dangerous. So, for instance, I 0:25:31.000 --> 0:25:33.600 might say to you, well, I don't see any harm 0:25:33.960 --> 0:25:38.040 in putting gypsum into flour. I mean, there's been no 0:25:38.280 --> 0:25:41.840 studies of gypsum that shows that it's poisonous. No studies, 0:25:41.880 --> 0:25:43.120 of course had been done of gypsum. 0:25:43.880 --> 0:25:45.200 But you could make. 0:25:45.080 --> 0:25:47.119 A case that that's actually not that healthy. 0:25:47.640 --> 0:25:47.920 Right. 0:25:48.359 --> 0:25:51.399 So as he starts looking at the sort of methodology 0:25:51.440 --> 0:25:53.719 of the fraud, you know, he says, well, was it 0:25:53.760 --> 0:25:55.920 really good for us to eat brick dust every day 0:25:56.080 --> 0:25:59.720 with our you know spices? Is a really good for 0:25:59.800 --> 0:26:03.320 us be charred bone in our coffee? Right? Are we 0:26:03.359 --> 0:26:05.960 talking about health as well, and so during the course 0:26:06.040 --> 0:26:09.600 of these reports that he started in the eighteen eighties 0:26:09.600 --> 0:26:12.879 and went into the eighteen nineties, you start to see 0:26:12.960 --> 0:26:17.000 him introducing the subject of risk more and in a 0:26:17.080 --> 0:26:20.760