Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this podcast will
Speaker 1: kill You. Welcome everyone to the latest installment of the
Speaker 1: tp w k Y Book Club, where our two read
Speaker 1: lists grow ever longer and our appreciation for amazing science
Speaker 1: communicators writing the enlightening and entertaining books grows ever deeper.
Speaker 1: On a personal note, this mini series has been an
Speaker 1: absolute blast to put together, with some truly unforgettable conversations
Speaker 1: about incredibly wide ranging topics, and I just really love
Speaker 1: that I get to do this, So thank you so
Speaker 1: much to all you wonderful people for listening, and to
Speaker 1: all these amazing authors for chatting. Without you, this would
Speaker 1: not be possible. We find ourselves now in the second
Speaker 1: to last episode in this mini series, and while I
Speaker 1: won't list off each book that we've talked about like
Speaker 1: I've done in every other intro, because that's a whole
Speaker 1: lot of books, at this point, I will just say
Speaker 1: again how much I've loved hearing from you all about
Speaker 1: these episodes, and will happily welcome any other feedback, favorites,
Speaker 1: follow up questions, future book recommendations, or anything else you
Speaker 1: want to tell me. Okay, but that's enough podcast business
Speaker 1: for the time.
Speaker 2: Being.
Speaker 1: Now, let's go into what we'll be talking about today,
Speaker 1: and that is the food of the past. If I
Speaker 1: asked you to imagine what food tasted or looked like
Speaker 1: back at the turn of the twentieth century, I think
Speaker 1: many of us might imagine an idealized world where tomatoes
Speaker 1: were plump, juicy, and always ripe, Where meat was pure,
Speaker 1: untainted by hormones or antibiotics, where butter was always fresh,
Speaker 1: churned from milk straight from the cow. That is, unless
Speaker 1: you've read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, in which case you
Speaker 1: might have a grittier, more realistic picture of what things
Speaker 1: were actually like. But I think many of us buy
Speaker 1: into this romantic notion that everything was fresher, more flavorful, healthier,
Speaker 1: less processed, more pure back in the day, and frankly,
Speaker 1: that could not be further from the truth. Acclaimed science journalist, professor,
Speaker 1: and Pulitzer Prize writer Deborah Blum joins me today to
Speaker 1: chat about her excellent book The Poison Squad, also made
Speaker 1: into a PBS series in twenty twenty, which explores the wild,
Speaker 1: unregulated mess that was the US food industry in the
Speaker 1: early twentieth century and the contentious fight to clean up
Speaker 1: that mess, led by some truly remarkable individuals. Blum, whose
Speaker 1: best selling book, The Poisoner's Handbook is certainly a favorite
Speaker 1: of many of our listeners, paints a vivid picture of
Speaker 1: the preregulation food industry and the tremendous fight for safe foods.
Speaker 1: The growing urban populations of the nineteenth century required a
Speaker 1: food supply to keep up with the ever increasing demand,
Speaker 1: and one way that producers found to do this was
Speaker 1: through food adulteration, a deceptive practice that involves adding substances
Speaker 1: to food to change its appearance, its taste, its volume,
Speaker 1: or size. Blum's book is filled with horrifying examples of
Speaker 1: early food adulteration, as well as not a small number
Speaker 1: of scandals where people lost their lives due to poisoned food.
Speaker 1: It seems like this practice of food adulteration would not
Speaker 1: be tolerated by consumers or any regulatory body, making it
Speaker 1: pretty bad for business. But the fact of the matter
Speaker 1: was that there were no regulatory bodies to impose fines
Speaker 1: upon these deceitful producers, and the lack of labels on
Speaker 1: foods meant that consumers couldn't make an informed decision about
Speaker 1: whether they wanted to buy butter that contained borax or
Speaker 1: did not contain borax. So business went on as usual
Speaker 1: until chemist Harvey Wiley stepped in and started his lifelong
Speaker 1: crusade to make food safe for public consumption. The efforts
Speaker 1: of Wiley and his poison Squad captured the public's attention
Speaker 1: in a major way and greatly advanced the fight for
Speaker 1: food safety legislation. Even though it seems like safe foods
Speaker 1: and consumer protection should be a thing that everybody wants,
Speaker 1: it was not a one sided battle. Wiley was fighting
Speaker 1: against a corrupt industry that had long made sure to
Speaker 1: keep the federal government on its side. In today's episode,
Speaker 1: Blum and I discussed Wiley's monumental impact on food safety
Speaker 1: legislation in the United States, some of the shocking food
Speaker 1: poisoning scandals that incited the public to activism, how far
Speaker 1: we've come in terms of consumer protection since the Pure
Speaker 1: Food and Drug Act of nineteen oh six, and how
Speaker 1: much further we still have to go. I am super
Speaker 1: excited to get started, so let's take a quick break
Speaker 1: and then dive in. Deborah, thank you so very much
Speaker 1: for being here today. I am such a big fan
Speaker 1: of your work, and I especially loved The Poison Squad
Speaker 1: for how you brought to life the incredible story of
Speaker 1: Harvey Wiley and his quest for food safety in the US.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. It's really a privilege. I'm excited
Speaker 2: to be on this podcast, and I love talking about
Speaker 2: Harvey Wilace and sort of the invention of food safety
Speaker 2: in the United States that is part of his story.
Speaker 2: So I really appreciate you having me on.
Speaker 1: Well. I loved hearing about that story, and the other
Speaker 1: thing that I loved about your book were all of
Speaker 1: the delightfully disgusting and horrifying examples of food adulteration that
Speaker 1: you describe.
Speaker 2: They were horrifying and discussed thing.
Speaker 1: Who was truly shocking. I think there were many times
Speaker 1: where I pulled my partner aside and was like, you've
Speaker 1: got to read this, look at this. How did you
Speaker 1: first come across the story of Harvey Wiley and what
Speaker 1: most interested you about this period of history.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question. So I have been what
Speaker 2: I think of as a toxicology journalist for over the
Speaker 2: past decade. I've written about.
Speaker 3: Poisons and homicide.
Speaker 2: My real interest is poison in our everyday life, right
Speaker 2: how we navigate a chemical world that includes things that
Speaker 2: are really dangerous for us. And a lot of my
Speaker 2: interests has been in the history of science as well,
Speaker 2: how did we get here? And so when I was
Speaker 2: looking at poisons in the early twentieth centuries, which is
Speaker 2: a special interest of mine, I started seeing references to
Speaker 2: what is truly one of the strangest public health experiments
Speaker 2: in history, which was conducted by Harvey Wiley and was
Speaker 2: nicknamed the Poison Squad, which I can explain later.
Speaker 3: By the Washington Post.
Speaker 2: And I almost in very simple minded I thought, well,
Speaker 2: what in the world is that? And so then when
Speaker 2: I started looking at the experiment, and one of the
Speaker 2: things that makes this such an unusual experiment is you
Speaker 2: really have a chemist at the US Department of Agriculture
Speaker 2: deliberately poisoning as co workers. That's one of the elements
Speaker 2: of the Poison Squad that's so fascinating, actually in the
Speaker 2: interest of trying to figure out what's going into our food.
Speaker 2: And when I was reading the descriptions of that, I thought,
Speaker 2: why would you be so desperate as to do that?
Speaker 2: What would it take to have an established government? Chemists say,
Speaker 2: the only way that I can get the answer to
Speaker 2: this problem is is to do this incredibly risky experiment
Speaker 2: on young men working in my agency. And that sort
Speaker 2: of pushed me off the cliff into the whole question
Speaker 2: of what was going on at food at the time
Speaker 2: that made things so crazy that you would need to
Speaker 2: do that experiment. It was something I think I'd never
Speaker 2: really thought about before, but that really was the sort
Speaker 2: of tipping point of that inquiry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think a lot of us tend to
Speaker 1: think of food from that period of time as being,
Speaker 1: you know, fresher meat was fresh, milk was straight from
Speaker 1: the cow's utter, and foods in general were more you know,
Speaker 1: quote unquote pure. But what was food actually like during
Speaker 1: the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, particularly in
Speaker 1: cities in the US.
Speaker 2: Yes, that was like almost a moment of horrifying discovery
Speaker 2: for me because I also had thought, in the way
Speaker 2: we'll sometimes talk about the one wonerful farm fresh food
Speaker 2: of our ancestors, right this pinchy, healthy, happy period of
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century, that was my I had brought into
Speaker 2: that mythology as well completely, so that when I started
Speaker 2: unpeeling the layers of what food was like in the
Speaker 2: late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was like, wait
Speaker 2: a minute. And so part of it is that there
Speaker 2: is a mythology to it, and some of that is
Speaker 2: the way we tend to sort of romanticize the agriculture
Speaker 2: of the past and the idea that we were, you know,
Speaker 2: a happy rural nation with everyone just walking over to
Speaker 2: farmer John's orchard to get their apples. But that wasn't true, right,
Speaker 2: especially starting in the mid nineteenth century and posts the
Speaker 2: Civil War, we were increasingly in industrial nations. So there
Speaker 2: were people who lived on farms and eight farm fresh food,
Speaker 2: I assume, right, And there were wealthy people who owned
Speaker 2: their own farm or were able to purchase those things.
Speaker 2: But the majority of Americans increasingly were living in cities.
Speaker 2: They were working in factories, you know, scraping by. They
Speaker 2: weren't going out into the country to get these expensive
Speaker 2: farm fresh materials. They were buying them at corner stores
Speaker 2: and local grocery stores, and they were buying a lot.
Speaker 2: With the rise of industry came the rise of industrialized food,
Speaker 2: so they were buying a lot of manufactured food. And
Speaker 2: one of the things about the rise of sort of
Speaker 2: food manufacturing canning and other ways that we sort of
Speaker 2: bring things from the farm to the grocery store or
Speaker 2: the grocery store to your table. Is that this was
Speaker 2: also a period in which there was no food regulation,
Speaker 2: which is sort of another part of the story. So
Speaker 2: I am a food manufacturer. There were no laws telling
Speaker 2: me what I can put in food.
Speaker 3: There are no applaws requiring.
Speaker 2: That you label the food. You don't have to tell
Speaker 2: people what's in it. There's nothing. And so if in
Speaker 2: a capitalistic society the idea is to maximize your profit,
Speaker 2: it was like free reign to do so, and we
Speaker 2: saw incredible consequences of that, to the point that I
Speaker 2: start as thinking to myself, did people in the nineteenth
Speaker 2: century ever eat what they thought they were eating? Because
Speaker 2: there was so much fraud It was crazy.
Speaker 1: It's unbelievable. And I loved reading the list of the
Speaker 1: many lists, the many instances, just my jaw dropping over
Speaker 1: and over again with some of these examples. Were there
Speaker 1: any in particular that you found the most shocking of
Speaker 1: you know, like a food additive or a food lie,
Speaker 1: or any that you found the most appalling in terms
Speaker 1: of the producer's complete disregard for human health?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a really important point.
Speaker 2: I think. So you have widespread fraud, and you have
Speaker 2: white sat broad and basically if you think about it,
Speaker 2: and things that are easy to fake. So you know spices, right,
Speaker 2: you had brick dusts that went into cinnamon and paprik
Speaker 2: and the red red colored spices flour for bread. The
Speaker 2: people would grind up gypsum which we put in wallboard
Speaker 2: to make as a flower extender.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: I mean again going back to what were you actually eating?
Speaker 2: I was myself horrified by coffee. I mean, I love coffee.
Speaker 2: It's like the way I start every day. You almost
Speaker 2: never got actual coffee in your coffee, or a full
Speaker 2: cup of coffee. You know, you got sometimes you got
Speaker 2: ground bone, right, Sometimes you just got dirt. There was
Speaker 2: a doctor in the Upper Midwest or at one point
Speaker 2: speculated that the phrase of muddy cup of coffee came
Speaker 2: from the idea that most Americans were drinking a fair
Speaker 2: amount of mud when they thought they were drinking coffee.
Speaker 2: And it was so to give you an idea, because
Speaker 2: coffee makes a good example of how entrenched the fraud was.
Speaker 2: You know, the original fraud was with a ground coffee.
Speaker 2: How can you tell what's actually in these particles in
Speaker 2: the can of coffee? Right? It could be coffee, it
Speaker 2: could be ground seeds, it could be ground coconut shells,
Speaker 2: which were awful also used. And so people began to
Speaker 2: become increasingly suspicious of ground coffee and switched over to
Speaker 2: coffee beans. And of course this is the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2: So you go down to the corner store. There's a
Speaker 2: barrel full of coffee beans. You have the grocer scoop
Speaker 2: them up for you. And so what you find is
Speaker 2: this new industry in fake coffee beans, right, And you
Speaker 2: can actually find the formulas for making the coffee beans.
Speaker 3: There's the little molds.
Speaker 2: For them of wax and clay. I mean, then when
Speaker 2: you grind them up at home, of course they go
Speaker 2: in to your coffee. And this is repeated over and
Speaker 2: over again. You see it in whiskey, you see it
Speaker 2: in wine. You see it sort of across the board
Speaker 2: in all kinds of food products. You see, going on
Speaker 2: to your other question about what I found shockingly unhealthy,
Speaker 2: the use of toxic compounds to color food. So Arsenic
Speaker 2: is used to make green food coloring. Lead is used
Speaker 2: to make red food coloring. You would find lead in
Speaker 2: cheese because they wanted that orange look of cheddar, so
Speaker 2: they would mix in a little red lead. It's completely acceptable.
Speaker 2: But to me, the sort of standout horror story involves
Speaker 2: milk and the additives that go into milk.
Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely, it's it's almost as though like the fraud
Speaker 1: drove the most incredible creativity in terms of, like, how
Speaker 1: can we make quote unquote food that has actual, not
Speaker 1: edible components to it. It's it's amazing.
Speaker 2: It's insane.
Speaker 3: And so with milk, of course, the number one thing.
Speaker 2: It starts with people just watering the milk. Right, I
Speaker 2: can make a lot more money if I use water.
Speaker 2: I don't particularly care if it's clean water. I think
Speaker 2: I put in the book this one instance where they
Speaker 2: found horsehair worms and milk because the dairy man had just,
Speaker 2: speaking of disgusting, just used pond water to water down
Speaker 2: his milk. The milk when it was too watered would
Speaker 2: turn kind of bluish. They'd add in plaster of Paris
Speaker 2: or chalk. They would occasionally fake cream by purating pure
Speaker 2: in calf brains and floating them on top of the
Speaker 2: milk in this lovely creamy looking lace kind of disgusting.
Speaker 2: But the other thing about milk is you have to
Speaker 2: remember this is a time when there's no refrigeration, so
Speaker 2: milk spoiled. And there were when we look at how
Speaker 2: dangerous milk was in the nineteenth century, which it was.
Speaker 2: Some of it has to do with that, right, you
Speaker 2: have a huge milk is a wonderful substrate for bacteria.
Speaker 2: It's got sugar, it's got protein, everything a good pathogenic
Speaker 2: bacteria wants. Since you had all these horrible pathogens and
Speaker 2: milk glow vine, tuberculosis, brucellosis right just and as the
Speaker 2: milk began to rot, they grow and grow and grow.
Speaker 2: So dairymen then are trying to figure out a cheap
Speaker 2: way to deal with this, and they turn to an
Speaker 2: embalming agent, form aldehyde, and they start embalming the milk,
Speaker 2: right literally embomming the milk. When you go into newspapers
Speaker 2: of that time, there are headlines in balm milk scandals
Speaker 2: in which dairymen are putting fromaldehyde in the milk, not
Speaker 2: under the name form aldehyde, and remember they don't have
Speaker 2: to label it anyway. And then children are dying and
Speaker 2: getting sick, and so that is such an insane thing
Speaker 2: to do for aldehyde.
Speaker 3: Is so poisonous.
Speaker 2: They knew it was poisonous, right, You could argue with
Speaker 2: some of these additives like salicilic acid, which we you
Speaker 2: know as a component of as form. We know that
Speaker 2: makes the lining of the stomach bled. Did they really
Speaker 2: know that then only somewhat but from aldehyde out and
Speaker 2: mount poisons. So they did know and they just obviously
Speaker 2: didn't care. It's really a horrifying story.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, So you just went through an incredible list
Speaker 1: of foods that were adulterated or not even like spices, milk, coffee,
Speaker 1: everything that contained harmful chemicals or pathogens and parasites. And
Speaker 1: the list seems endless. But were there any foods in
Speaker 1: particular that seemed to be the biggest problems or that
Speaker 1: were the first targets in terms of food safety legislation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's also an important point. So during this whole
Speaker 2: period with the rise of industrial chemistry going into food,
Speaker 2: there's a whole of failed attempts to regulate food. At
Speaker 2: the national level. There were states that passed laws. Indiana,
Speaker 2: which was the state that suffered a huge outbreak of
Speaker 2: inbalm milk deaths, and I think they had four hundred
Speaker 2: in Indianapolis one summer past a law driven by the
Speaker 2: dangers of milk. So you see milk and dairy products
Speaker 2: becoming one of the real targets of food safety laws,
Speaker 2: and this sort of patchwork of responses at the state level.
Speaker 2: At this point, it's milk, it's cheese, it's adulteration.
Speaker 3: Of spices.
Speaker 2: The Congress held a number of hearings and one of
Speaker 2: the things that come up there is the adult this
Speaker 2: is fraud rather than risk. But honey and syrups were
Speaker 2: largely corn syrup at that time, and again to show
Speaker 2: you how ingenious it was, there would be honey, it
Speaker 2: would actually be corn syrup, and they would had a
Speaker 2: business of making fake honeycombs that they would make out
Speaker 2: of wax and drop into the corn syrup to make
Speaker 2: it look like, you know, real honey. So you have
Speaker 2: a lot of interest in this. Again, there were states
Speaker 2: that targeted maybe the fought and maple syrup, the fraud
Speaker 2: and honey. They the government looked at fraud and gems
Speaker 2: and jellies. Right, strawberry jam often had enough strawberry in
Speaker 2: it at all, and they would use grass seed instead
Speaker 2: of strawberry seeds. And then the dyes of the time
Speaker 2: are analine cooltar dyes. Pretty much. You'd get these red
Speaker 2: coultar dyes and you know in corn syrup and grass
Speaker 2: seed and they actually, in one congressional hearing had a
Speaker 2: manufacturer who said, well, we couldn't possibly do it another
Speaker 2: way because you know, we would lose market share if
Speaker 2: we went to the expensive putting strawberries in our strawberry jam.
Speaker 2: So you have this whole system that is catching people's attention.
Speaker 2: What really catches people attention are the really horrible frauds
Speaker 2: and then the uh, you know, the scandals like the
Speaker 2: above milk scandal, and so some of the things that
Speaker 2: start coming up in addition are you know, the preservative
Speaker 2: used in meat, and that really came up after the
Speaker 2: Spanish American War when there was a huge scandal that
Speaker 2: was actually called the ebald meat scandal, in which the
Speaker 2: government had to investigate whether it had killed more soldiers
Speaker 2: in Cuba by its own food supplies than the Spanish
Speaker 2: had killed in Cuba during the Spanish American War. Right,
Speaker 2: and yeah, insane time. Right. Really, when you look back
Speaker 2: on it, in this landscape of do whatever you want
Speaker 2: with food, it's a pretty unbelievable period of contaminated food.
Speaker 2: That doesn't mean that, and this is one of the
Speaker 2: important things to realize that, aside from very very very
Speaker 2: toxic things like from aldehyde that people were literally dying
Speaker 2: where they stood, it does mean that people were a
Speaker 2: lot less healthy related to their diet. There's a wonderful
Speaker 2: historian medical historian at the University of Michigan, Howard Markel,
Speaker 2: who tends to describe the nineteenth century as the century
Speaker 2: of the Great American stomach ache. Food was making people sick, right,
Speaker 2: and that was almost an accepted part of life at
Speaker 2: that time, something I think we don't appreciate now just
Speaker 2: how unwell we were based on what we.
Speaker 1: Ate in this discussion of food fraud versus food safety,
Speaker 1: which is I think is a really interesting sort of
Speaker 1: designation and important one. Did the conversations around food policies,
Speaker 1: whether for fraud or safety, did that revolve initially around
Speaker 1: protecting producers or consumers? Or when was that switch made
Speaker 1: or was it sort of about both from the very beginning.
Speaker 2: You know, if I go back to Harvey Wiley, who's
Speaker 2: the focus of my book, and let me just sort
Speaker 2: of bring him into the conversation he was the chief
Speaker 2: chemist of the Bureau of Chemistry and the Department of
Speaker 2: Agriculture starting in eighteen eighty three. And at this point
Speaker 2: there are no food safety laws at the federal level,
Speaker 2: and there are no food safety organizations like the FDA.
Speaker 2: Right there is the Department of Agriculture. It has this
Speaker 2: tiny chemistry unit that's responsible for all agricultural chemistry issues,
Speaker 2: you know, soils and fertilizers and you know, developing better
Speaker 2: plants chemistry. And also because Wiley was uniquely interested in
Speaker 2: food safety and integrity, he starts bringing that into the mix,
Speaker 2: right and his real focus was on food fraud when
Speaker 2: he came in. It grew into food safety. But when
Speaker 2: he started he had done some early investigations in Indiana
Speaker 2: on fake syrup and fake honey and that whole problem.
Speaker 2: And when he came into the federal government from being
Speaker 2: a professor of chemistry at Purdue, he brought that interest
Speaker 2: in fake food with him, and so he commissioned a
Speaker 2: series of reports just looking at the integrity of manufactured food,
Speaker 2: starting with dairy obviously for the reasons we discussed, and
Speaker 2: going on through all kinds of things, canned vegetables and lard,
Speaker 2: and cocoa and coffee and wines and beers. I mean,
Speaker 2: they're just sort of analyzing a random sample of food
Speaker 2: and drink products in the United States. He was most
Speaker 2: interested in fraud when he started. But those investigations, which
Speaker 2: you can find under the incredibly boring title of Bulletin thirteen,
Speaker 2: which is what they were not as. But those investigations
Speaker 2: started to lead him to be aware that there were
Speaker 2: more issues than just fraud than that mixed into the fraud,
Speaker 2: and sometimes actually part of the fraud was the addition
Speaker 2: of these things that were dangerous. So, for instance, I
Speaker 2: might say to you, well, I don't see any harm
Speaker 2: in putting gypsum into flour. I mean, there's been no
Speaker 2: studies of gypsum that shows that it's poisonous. No studies,
Speaker 2: of course had been done of gypsum.
Speaker 3: But you could make.
Speaker 2: A case that that's actually not that healthy.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So as he starts looking at the sort of methodology
Speaker 2: of the fraud, you know, he says, well, was it
Speaker 2: really good for us to eat brick dust every day
Speaker 2: with our you know spices? Is a really good for
Speaker 2: us be charred bone in our coffee? Right? Are we
Speaker 2: talking about health as well, and so during the course
Speaker 2: of these reports that he started in the eighteen eighties
Speaker 2: and went into the eighteen nineties, you start to see
Speaker 2: him introducing the subject of risk more and in a
Speaker 2: fairly moderate way. He's just saying, couldn't we label these
Speaker 2: We've got children eating these materials, we have sick people
Speaker 2: eating these materials. Couldn't we just put labels on these
Speaker 2: so you would know that there was formaldehyde in your milk,
Speaker 2: or borax in your butter, or salicilic acid and your wine.
Speaker 2: And you might say, well, I don't want to have
Speaker 2: that several times a day, right, I want to protect
Speaker 2: myself from that. Couldn't we at least get the information out?
Speaker 2: And that also is shut down at the federal level.
Speaker 2: But you do start to see, and you're absolutely right,
Speaker 2: this growing awareness that fraud is not disconnected from public health.
Speaker 1: I think what is so amazing about your book is
Speaker 1: how Wiley comes alive as a person. And you mentioned
Speaker 1: how you have this incredible wealth of source material about
Speaker 1: his life and correspondence and stuff like that, and so
Speaker 1: what sense of his personality did you get that may
Speaker 1: have you know, made him a more righteous crusader for
Speaker 1: this cause.
Speaker 2: Yes, So I always kind of think of him as
Speaker 2: a holy roller chemist.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: His degree in chemistry was from Harvard. He was trained,
Speaker 2: you know in that and actually in medicine. His dad
Speaker 2: was a itinerant preacher and a conductor on the underground
Speaker 2: railroad in Indiana where he grew up. And he was
Speaker 2: raised in the idea that we are put on life
Speaker 2: to do good. And you'll see even in his early
Speaker 2: writings this question of chemistry and the service of mankind
Speaker 2: and science and the service of good that tend to
Speaker 2: sort of pervade the way he thought about what he
Speaker 2: did from the beginning, and that grows. He starts out,
Speaker 2: you know, in a lot of ways as just a
Speaker 2: well trained analytical chemist. He helped actually found the American
Speaker 2: Society of Analytical Chemists. Right. He does a lot of
Speaker 2: this you know analysis himself. But as he gets more
Speaker 2: into the issue of food and food integrity, he's the
Speaker 2: sort of holy roller. This is not acceptable, we have
Speaker 2: to change. This side comes out and even in these
Speaker 2: reports that I'm telling you about, you know, in the conclusions,
Speaker 2: they get more and more this is not acceptable, this
Speaker 2: needs to change. So you see him kind of growing
Speaker 2: into this role and he grows into it. You know,
Speaker 2: he works with congressmen who are trying to introduce food
Speaker 2: safety legislation, which fails repeatedly. He becomes part of the
Speaker 2: greater American community of food safety advocates. At the time,
Speaker 2: this was referred to as the pure food movement, and
Speaker 2: there are pure food Congresses, right, I mean, it's pretty fascinating,
Speaker 2: you know, how do we define purity? And he becomes
Speaker 2: involved in those congresses and talks at them. He helps
Speaker 2: create public exhibitions of adulterated and tainted food at world fairs.
Speaker 2: I kind of love that at the Chicago World's Fair
Speaker 2: of eighteen ninety three at the Columbian which was the
Speaker 2: Columbian Exhibition. He does it at the World's Fair in
Speaker 2: New York, and he comes back and does a huge
Speaker 2: one at the World's Fair at Saint Louis. So he
Speaker 2: also is trying to do the other thing, which is
Speaker 2: get this information out to the public. And he is
Speaker 2: a fascinating person for his time. Right. He does a
Speaker 2: lot of work with women's organizations, which is uniquely smart
Speaker 2: because women don't have the vote at this time. Right,
Speaker 2: you might argue, as a man of the time that
Speaker 2: women have no political power, and they're not worth my time,
Speaker 2: and many men did. He saw the women's organizations, as
Speaker 2: you know, incredibly powerful and influential in getting information out,
Speaker 2: and this would put him at loggerheads with his bosses
Speaker 2: in the federal government. But he believed that it was
Speaker 2: consumer over business from the beginning. You see this driving
Speaker 2: him in a way that we don't always see.
Speaker 3: This driving the.
Speaker 2: Decisions of the US government the American consumer, whether that
Speaker 2: consumer be rich or poor, against the wealthy corporations that
Speaker 2: are the financial backbone of the country. Let's say that
Speaker 2: the government would be the government stance. Wiley is the
Speaker 2: consumer every time, and that both drives the way he
Speaker 2: approaches this issue, helps define some of the early approaches
Speaker 2: and limits his power because this is not a position
Speaker 2: that is universally held at the national level. For sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, he is such a fascinating person. We're going
Speaker 1: to take a quick break here, and when we get back,
Speaker 1: I want to talk with you about his most famous experiment,
Speaker 1: the poison Squad. Welcome back, everyone, all right, we've been
Speaker 1: having some great conversations about the horrifying state of food
Speaker 1: around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And now
Speaker 1: I want to chat with you about the title of
Speaker 1: your book, the Poison Squad, and this comes from the
Speaker 1: name given to the project that Wiley put together to
Speaker 1: determine what could be considered quote unquote safe levels of
Speaker 1: certain additives to foods. Can you take us through this
Speaker 1: experiment and what was learned from it?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 2: So, you know, as I said, we have this dismaying
Speaker 2: landscape of food additive and adulteration with no regulation and
Speaker 2: really very little scientific study of these additives that are
Speaker 2: going into food. That was one of the things that
Speaker 2: was interesting to me when I went back into the
Speaker 2: scientific journals of the time and I'm looking for well
Speaker 2: who was studying for Eldeha, who was studying box and
Speaker 2: it's like almost nobody and there's almost nothing. And so
Speaker 2: when Wiley is arguing that these things are not safe,
Speaker 2: he doesn't have the data to back that up. So
Speaker 2: this brings me to my original question, why would you
Speaker 2: be so desperate? He's been trying for a more than
Speaker 2: a decade to get some kind of safety regulations passed unsuccessfully,
Speaker 2: and he finally decides it will never happen until we
Speaker 2: have some basic data driven scientific understanding of whether these
Speaker 2: are risks or not, and he persuades Congress to give
Speaker 2: him a small amount of money for a study that
Speaker 2: he called the Hygienic Table Trials. It's a wonderfully Victorian
Speaker 2: term and that, of course the Washington Post found completely
Speaker 2: boring and renamed the Poison Squad. And for reasons that
Speaker 2: will become obvious. And so the basics of this is
Speaker 2: that he recruits young, healthy men. This is kind of
Speaker 2: an idea of the time. He wanted to have what
Speaker 2: he thought was the healthiest human specimens because he didn't
Speaker 2: want them to die. Right, let's not poison already sick people.
Speaker 2: So young men in their twenties, most of them had
Speaker 2: been college athletes. Most of these are underpaid clerks at
Speaker 2: the US Department of Agriculture, and so he offers them
Speaker 2: a minimum amount of money and three meals a day,
Speaker 2: seven days a week. And the catch is they get
Speaker 2: this one these wonderful meals, but they have to be
Speaker 2: rigorously monitored, you know, all kinds of doctors poking and
Speaker 2: prodding at them, and they have to split the group
Speaker 2: into two. And so they basically have two tables of
Speaker 2: young men about you know, a dozen at each table
Speaker 2: or so maybe a little less, depending on which what
Speaker 2: they were looking at. And one table is eating egg fat,
Speaker 2: ideal farm fresh food. All of this food was untainted.
Speaker 2: They got it from local farms. They used canned goods
Speaker 2: when they had no preservatives. They hired a professional shelf.
Speaker 2: This is amazing, wonderful food. But at table A, that's
Speaker 2: all they're eating. At Table B, they're eating that. But
Speaker 2: they have to also swallow capsules with an additive that
Speaker 2: Wiley is studying at the time, and he is doing
Speaker 2: the core of the study of each individual additive, going
Speaker 2: to ratchet up the dose, and so he has a
Speaker 2: list of additives he's interested in. Formaldehyde was one of them.
Speaker 2: That one they had to call early because people got
Speaker 2: so sick so fast they just quit. But they also
Speaker 2: had borax, They had copper sulfate that's a heavy metal
Speaker 2: that was used to turn peas and canned peas and
Speaker 2: beans greener. They had they had a whole list of
Speaker 2: these things, salicilic acid, right, and they started with borax
Speaker 2: because they believed that that was basically an entry level additive.
Speaker 2: They didn't think it was that dangerous box you can
Speaker 2: still find today. You'll see it in the cleaning section
Speaker 2: of your grocery store. It's twenty Mule Team. Borax, that's
Speaker 2: exactly what people were eating every day. Was used in butter,
Speaker 2: it was used in meat. I mean you could get
Speaker 2: like multiple doses of borax every day at the time
Speaker 2: and had never really been studied. So he started with borax.
Speaker 2: And later when they had a congressional hearing about borax,
Speaker 2: he said borax was sort of the study that made
Speaker 2: him realize just how dangerous things were because he had
Speaker 2: not predicted these young men would get sick, and some
Speaker 2: of them got extremely sick. And the longer they were
Speaker 2: taking these concentrated levels of borax, the sicker they got.
Speaker 2: And when you look at the newspaper coverage of this study,
Speaker 2: you'll start to see this sort of change in the
Speaker 2: public discussion of food additives. They're not calling them additives,
Speaker 2: they're calling them poisons. The New York Times is calling
Speaker 2: them poisons. The Washington Post is calling them poisons. And
Speaker 2: because this study is so strange, right, young men volunteering
Speaker 2: to be the stomach of America essentially and try out
Speaker 2: these dangerous things, it gets a huge amount of coverage.
Speaker 2: It's front page news there's poems written about the poison squad,
Speaker 2: there's all kinds of amazing and wonderful cartoons. It becomes
Speaker 2: this sort of cultural phenomenon. So people are starting to
Speaker 2: follow this, and probably as much as the science, which
Speaker 2: is pretty primitive science, right, Like you can go back
Speaker 2: at the way we do human clinical trials today and go, seriously,
Speaker 2: you didn't have a control group, right, you didn't do this.
Speaker 2: See all of the different things that we would do now.
Speaker 2: I mean, he did have a group that wasn't eating
Speaker 2: the poisonous things, but it was fairly small and random
Speaker 2: compared to what we would consider a reasonable study today.
Speaker 2: But it was a shocker to the United States. So
Speaker 2: it was shocker to Whiley, and it was a shock
Speaker 2: to everyone else.
Speaker 3: And so as he.
Speaker 2: Starts going forward through these other additives, you see this
Speaker 2: continued drumbeat of publicity, and you see the recognition by
Speaker 2: American industry and also by the friends of American industry government,
Speaker 2: this is bad news. This is not serving the interest
Speaker 2: of unfettered manufactured food. And so Wiley becomes a huge target.
Speaker 2: And not that he had been beloved, but following these studies,
Speaker 2: you know the number of smear campaigns and attacks that
Speaker 2: come up against him just amplify and in fact, some
Speaker 2: of his bosses at the US Department of Agriculture, responding
Speaker 2: to industry pressure, starts suppressing some of these studies and
Speaker 2: won't let them be published because they think that they
Speaker 2: are too damaging to American industry. So this study, which
Speaker 2: is very primitive science, very influential in public opinion ways,
Speaker 2: also puts him at loggerheads with the powers in the
Speaker 2: US government in an industry.
Speaker 1: And is this fight for food safety. It's not just
Speaker 1: wily against industry or wily against corporation. There were major
Speaker 1: players on both sides of this. What were some of
Speaker 1: the groups that were aligned with Wiley and this fight
Speaker 1: for you know, safe foods?
Speaker 2: Sure, so there was the women's groups, as I mentioned,
Speaker 2: and you see really famous early women advocates like Jane
Speaker 2: Adams getting out there and trying to educate women. Wiley
Speaker 2: worked very directly with the Women's Clubs of America. They
Speaker 2: actually Alice Lakey, who was the leader in that movement,
Speaker 2: actually persuaded him to have the Chemistry Department publish his
Speaker 2: Chemistry Bureau publish a book on experiments the home cook
Speaker 2: Can Do. I mean, they're almost when you read it
Speaker 2: and they're telling you how to guard yourself against sulfuric
Speaker 2: acid birds, you're thinking, okay, wait, right, this is pretty nuts.
Speaker 2: But you know, all kinds of ways to get this
Speaker 2: out there. He worked with food advocates in the pure
Speaker 2: food group. There was the magazine What to Eat, which
Speaker 2: was so there were publications that were really dedicated to this.
Speaker 2: I should mention that because I had mentioned that there
Speaker 2: were state laws that passed. The states were very active
Speaker 2: in trying to get the federal government to respond to
Speaker 2: this and setting rules that were far beyond what the
Speaker 2: Feds were willing to do, and to put pressure on
Speaker 2: the US government to try to, you know, come up
Speaker 2: with some instead of this scattershot approach, come up with
Speaker 2: some of this comprehensive kind of legislation. And it's interesting
Speaker 2: as a portrait of the time because the most progressive
Speaker 2: states were of state so we often think of as
Speaker 2: red states.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: The Dakotas were leaders in the fight for better food rules.
Speaker 2: Kansas was, Texas was right, Wisconsin was and you know,
Speaker 2: this is a period and it's a very different political map.
Speaker 2: You know, my book is focused on Wiley in his fight,
Speaker 2: and he sometimes described himself as a general in this fight.
Speaker 2: So I want to pay tribute to all of these
Speaker 2: other people without whom this would not have happened. The
Speaker 2: Suffragette movement got involved in this fight, the prohibitionists, the
Speaker 2: woman's Christian temperancely got involved in this fight. Wiley in
Speaker 2: fact Mary a Suffragette, right, and which is one of
Speaker 2: the reasons that we actually have so much information about
Speaker 2: his internal dealings because she was also a librarian at
Speaker 2: the Library of Congress and donated all of his papers.
Speaker 2: But you know, he used every possible ally that he
Speaker 2: could get. And it's really amazing when you look at
Speaker 2: the telegrams that are coming into the White House and
Speaker 2: to the Department of Agriculture to realize how many people
Speaker 2: kind of across the spectrum of American life recognized that
Speaker 2: this was important. And I want to say although industry
Speaker 2: in general hugely opposed what he was doing, that wasn't
Speaker 2: entirely true. The American Canners Association backed him because they
Speaker 2: were really concerned about how toxic there, you know, products
Speaker 2: were starting to be. There were major food manufacturers like
Speaker 2: Henry Hines who got involved on his side and actively
Speaker 2: worked to develop better versions of food, you know, a
Speaker 2: ketchup that used no preservatives Wiley as I mean, Henry
Speaker 2: Hines is famous for that, and so it is a
Speaker 2: fascinating patchwork of people who come together fighting for this.
Speaker 1: It was interesting to read about how there was suppression
Speaker 1: of these reports and the government is you know, not
Speaker 1: everyone was, you know, saying one thing but voting a
Speaker 1: different way. But eventually, over time, thanks to things like
Speaker 1: the Poison Squad, thanks to things like the formaldehyde in
Speaker 1: milk and the embalmed meat scandal, there seemed to be
Speaker 1: like the tide was turning. And then there was also
Speaker 1: Upton Sinclair and the Jungle, So how did that come
Speaker 1: into play during this discussion of food safety.
Speaker 2: I love the story of Upton Sinclair in the Jungle right.
Speaker 3: And I should mention.
Speaker 2: One other group that I should mention was American cookbook writers,
Speaker 2: which I just love that, you know, people like Fanny
Speaker 2: Farmer would write into their cookbooks. Of course you can't
Speaker 2: really trust milk and or just be aware that when you're,
Speaker 2: you know, putting pepper, it may not be pepper. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's kind of like there's this wonderful underground of education
Speaker 2: of women through the cookbook authors of the time. It's
Speaker 2: really fascinating. And so all of this is simmering along,
Speaker 2: and there's this growing sense of unhappiness and outrage in
Speaker 2: the American public, but not enough to really force Congress
Speaker 2: to do anything. And that's where Upton Sinclair comes along
Speaker 2: with The Jungle. The Jungle is a fascinating story because
Speaker 2: it's a novel that is based in journalism. And one
Speaker 2: of the reasons, of course, that it had so much
Speaker 2: influence was that it is in fact based on the
Speaker 2: ground journalistic research that Upton Sinclair did. And so The
Speaker 2: Jungle is the story a poor immigrant family working in
Speaker 2: the meatpacking industry in Chicago and their travails and trying
Speaker 2: to survive in this capitalistic jungle, which was how Upton
Speaker 2: Sinclair saw the book. He would later after The Jungle
Speaker 2: came out, make this famous statement that he had aimed
Speaker 2: for America's heart the plight of the worker, and hit
Speaker 2: it in the stomach instead the horrors of American food production,
Speaker 2: which is true. He went he was involved with the
Speaker 2: kind of the muck ranking group of investigative journalists based
Speaker 2: in New York. So when he decided to write his
Speaker 2: serial novel. He went to Chicago, stayed at a settlement
Speaker 2: house and just embedded himself with the meat packing workers
Speaker 2: in the packing houses of the famous packing houses of
Speaker 2: Chicago like armor, and cut a hay and their ilk.
Speaker 2: And it took lots of notes and did lots of research,
Speaker 2: and then went back and wrote this book in which
Speaker 2: what happens is he is telling the story of this
Speaker 2: beleaguered you know, family working in the packing houses, but
Speaker 2: it's set against this background of the horrors of meat production,
Speaker 2: which had certainly horrified him. And he publishes this first
Speaker 2: in a socialist newspaper out of Kansas. As I said,
Speaker 2: politics were very different. Kansas was a hotbed of American
Speaker 2: socialism at the time. And then he works to get
Speaker 2: it published as a book, and his first publisher was
Speaker 2: so horrified by this that he bailed. But a publisher
Speaker 2: called then called doubled a Page picked it up. And
Speaker 2: what's interesting about that is they agreed to publish it,
Speaker 2: but they fact checked it. They sent the editor in
Speaker 2: one of their lawyers to Chicago. They came back and said, oh,
Speaker 2: it's worse than in the book. And the book is gruesome, right,
Speaker 2: it has mold covered meat that's washed off and goes
Speaker 2: into the hams and has rats. All of this based
Speaker 2: on his experiences. You know, they're poisoning rats with poisoned bread,
Speaker 2: and the rats go into the sausages in the jungle.
Speaker 2: This was never proved to be true. You know, a
Speaker 2: worker falls into one of the live vats and ends
Speaker 2: up in the potted ham or the large I think
Speaker 2: Anderson's pure that which was his pseudonym for armor. And
Speaker 2: you know, so there's horrifying blood spattered walls and all
Speaker 2: of this stuff. So it was bad in the novel,
Speaker 2: but these guys come back and go, oh my god,
Speaker 2: it's worse. It's worse in the factories, right, So they
Speaker 2: fact check the book, they publish it. They it becomes
Speaker 2: an incidentt bestseller. Everyone's horrified. The meat packing industry and
Speaker 2: their buddies in Congress are you know, just trying to
Speaker 2: point out that Upton Saint Clair's the socialist and therefore
Speaker 2: completely untrustworthy. But it becomes such a furre that Teddy
Speaker 2: Roosevelt since his own fact checking team out. That's to
Speaker 2: me is what's so interesting is all the people who
Speaker 2: go out in fact check this, they come back, they
Speaker 2: do a report which has never been published because apparently
Speaker 2: it's so damning. And my understanding this is this report
Speaker 2: is buried in the archives of the National Agricultural Library
Speaker 2: in Beltsville, Maryland, but I never saw it. But basically,
Speaker 2: Roosevelt says to Congress, Okay, I want a Meat Inspection Act,
Speaker 2: and if you don't give it to me, I'm going
Speaker 2: to publish this report. And they say, bolstered by all
Speaker 2: the money they're getting from the meat packing industry, you know,
Speaker 2: Congress is this is such a shocker. But Congress is
Speaker 2: incredibly influenced by the money it gets from large corporate
Speaker 2: donors at this time period. They won't pass this law.
Speaker 2: So Roosevelt releases a few select pages, and these are
Speaker 2: so bad that everyone in Europe instantly cancels are their
Speaker 2: meat contracts with the United States. And at that point
Speaker 2: the meat industry itself is like oops. They permit Congress
Speaker 2: to pack a Meat Inspection Act. And when the Meat
Speaker 2: Inspection Act of nineteen o six passes, it pulls across
Speaker 2: the line that very battered Food and Drug Act that
Speaker 2: Wiley has been working on for years. And so both
Speaker 2: of those laws, the Meat Inspection Act and the Food
Speaker 2: in Direct Act pass in June of nineteen oh six.
Speaker 2: And this is a paradigm changing moment because it's not
Speaker 2: just that we've passed a Meat Inspection Act and a
Speaker 2: Food and Drug Act, it's that we have set a
Speaker 2: precedent in which the US government is now officially declaring
Speaker 2: consumer protection as its business. That's never happened before. That
Speaker 2: is the first time that the US government agrees that
Speaker 2: when we say in the Constitution promotion of the general welfare,
Speaker 2: we actually mean protection of American citizens in their everyday lives.
Speaker 2: And on the precedent of those two laws comes everything
Speaker 2: that follows. OSHA, the EPA, every consumer protection agency that
Speaker 2: follows is built on this battle to have food safety
Speaker 2: introduced into the United States. And that when I came
Speaker 2: to that realization, which I hadn't realized until I did
Speaker 2: all of this, it was a wow moment for me. Wow,
Speaker 2: this was such a big fight with such important consequences.
Speaker 1: You know, on the one hand, nineteen oh six feels
Speaker 1: like so long ago, But on the other hand, that
Speaker 1: was actually quite late in comparison to a lot of
Speaker 1: countries in Europe who had long since recognized the need
Speaker 1: for legislation protecting consumers and making sure that food was
Speaker 1: safe to eat. Why do you think the US lagged
Speaker 1: behind much of Europe in these types of laws.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we lagged behind Canada too.
Speaker 2: Canada had a national food safety law before we did.
Speaker 2: I mean there were a couple of factors. One of
Speaker 2: them is actually the Civil War. In this period in
Speaker 2: the late nineteenth century, there is bitter mistrust between northern
Speaker 2: and Southern states, and the Southern states vote as a
Speaker 2: block against any effort by the federal government to dictate
Speaker 2: to them how their people, the Southerners, live their life.
Speaker 3: And so you.
Speaker 2: See this come up actually in the discussions of these
Speaker 2: food and drug laws. You know, we're not going to
Speaker 2: have this Yankee government tell us what to do. So
Speaker 2: that was part of it, just the timing of those divisions.
Speaker 2: The other part, and it's something you'll also recognize today,
Speaker 2: is that there's this American ethic of individual rights. And
Speaker 2: in fact, some of the chemists beyond Wiley, who were
Speaker 2: working and advocating for federal food safety laws, they brought
Speaker 2: this up in the eighteen eighties. We run against this
Speaker 2: bedrock resistance in which individual rights trump call good and
Speaker 2: so that also I think hugely held us back in
Speaker 2: that sense, and I think probably some of it was
Speaker 2: the economics of the time. You know, this is a
Speaker 2: time of boom growth and acceleration and industrialization. We're reaping
Speaker 2: wealth and status because of that. Why would we want
Speaker 2: to hinder that? And that's how people saw it. Not
Speaker 2: let's make better, safer, smarter products, but we will be
Speaker 2: hindering the titans of industry. Right. All of that I
Speaker 2: think went into this huge resistance by the United States,
Speaker 2: and we did, like Britain passed its first food safety
Speaker 2: law in the eighteen sixties, Germany and France in a
Speaker 2: very similar time period. You do see in this period
Speaker 2: and even after, you know, moments were the European countries,
Speaker 2: not just in the horrible scandals you know revealed by
Speaker 2: the Jungle we cannot import this American product or even
Speaker 2: I was talking about the use of sala silic acid.
Speaker 2: Salicilic acid makes your stomach lining bleed. You do not
Speaker 2: want it in something you drink every day, right.
Speaker 3: But Germany.
Speaker 2: So Germany had two sets of rules. They forbade the
Speaker 2: use of salicilic acid and their beer for their own countrymen,
Speaker 2: but they permitted it as a preservative and beer that
Speaker 2: they sold to the United States because it was allowed here.
Speaker 2: So we just lag behind for all of those reasons.
Speaker 2: Some of those reasons, you know, still being at play today,
Speaker 2: American individualism, the tilt toward captains of industry, right that
Speaker 2: we see today.
Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely, and we've come a long way. We've made
Speaker 1: incredible strides since Wiley's Law or the Pure Food and
Speaker 1: Drug Act of nineteen o six, But there are still
Speaker 1: issues with misrepresentative labeling or a lack of transparent labeling,
Speaker 1: or just food safety in general. What are some examples
Speaker 1: of some of the ways that you think we could
Speaker 1: still improve in terms of food safety here in the US.
Speaker 2: So you're right that labels are not entirely transparent. I
Speaker 2: mean two of my favorite examples of that, or the
Speaker 2: permission for manufacturers who use the term natural flavorings, which
Speaker 2: are often not natural and sometimes toxic but you don't
Speaker 2: know what they are. There's no information about that, or
Speaker 2: one of my favorite I don't think this is so
Speaker 2: much of a safety issue as much as a you know,
Speaker 2: don't alarm the American consumer. Example, but if you ever buy,
Speaker 2: say a bag of shredded cheese or it's ilk. You'll see,
Speaker 2: you know, reference to cellulos, what it's cellulose. Cellulos is
Speaker 2: wood pull and you know, outside of people, you know,
Speaker 2: the manufacturers do not want to put what pulp in
Speaker 2: their label, right the US government permits that. I myself
Speaker 2: feel that I would like to know if I'm eating
Speaker 2: oakre pine with my cheese. And I totally believe that
Speaker 2: given some of the non transparencies of issues, it is
Speaker 2: unfair to expect the American consumer to defend themselves against
Speaker 2: every issue of food safety, of which there continue to
Speaker 2: be many in this country. There's no way for us
Speaker 2: to keep up with them or to be fully informed
Speaker 2: on them. I mean, I have looked to argued for
Speaker 2: geographic labeling of rice, for instance, because rice can contain
Speaker 2: naturally occurring with arsenic there are areas where the arsenic
Speaker 2: is more concentrated, say in the American South. I would
Speaker 2: like to know if my rice comes from the American
Speaker 2: South or somewhere where there's less arsenic in the soil.
Speaker 2: You can't even get that onto labels. So all of
Speaker 2: the ways that if we just had a little information
Speaker 2: or a better inform we could defend ourselves are denied
Speaker 2: to us because of these issues of non transparency. We
Speaker 2: have labels, and the labels are you know, a whole
Speaker 2: lot better than no labels, and they've been updated. They
Speaker 2: were updated in the George W. Bush Administration for better
Speaker 2: Nutrition Information and they've been improved.
Speaker 3: But could they be better?
Speaker 2: Absolutely? Do people look at a label on that list
Speaker 2: of ingredients and have any idea what it means?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 2: So you know, I don't know that we need encyclopedic labels,
Speaker 2: but I think labels that are easier to understand would
Speaker 2: be an excellent point. And we do know speaking of lugs,
Speaker 2: that there are a lot of compounds that are permitted
Speaker 2: in American food that are banned in Europe to this day,
Speaker 2: titanium dioxide being a good example of that.
Speaker 3: Banned by the EU.
Speaker 2: Permitted in food in the UNI stays as a coloring agent.
Speaker 2: People don't actually even know that, And so there's all
Speaker 2: kinds of ways that I think we do need to
Speaker 2: be a better educated public. And the system is non
Speaker 2: transparent to that degree, so I think that's part of it. Also,
Speaker 2: you know, we don't keep food entirely safe. Has been
Speaker 2: clear by a whole lot of series of contamination issues
Speaker 2: with bacteria. You know, those are bigger picture issues. We don't,
Speaker 2: for instance, entirely regulate the water supply going into crops,
Speaker 2: which is one of the reasons we see some of
Speaker 2: these bacterial issues coming up and people die. Right, Salmonella
Speaker 2: is a bad bacteria. People are injured, people die, and
Speaker 2: so is it as bad as it was in the
Speaker 2: nineteenth century? Is it not?
Speaker 3: Is it acceptable?
Speaker 2: CDC estimates at least three thousand deaths month, and you know,
Speaker 2: well over one hundred thousand illnesses, of which we don't
Speaker 2: always even identify the source of those food born illnesses. Recently,
Speaker 2: there was a suggestion, I've seen it both in the
Speaker 2: Post and elsewhere, that we pulled the Food Safety Division
Speaker 2: out of the FDA, entirely, combine it with the USDA
Speaker 2: Food Safety Division, and make a department that would really
Speaker 2: be dedicated to food safety and actively concentrated on just
Speaker 2: protecting the food supply and decently funded. Thanks to the
Speaker 2: way the Meat Inspection Act came about and the Food
Speaker 2: Safety Act came about food and drug safety at the
Speaker 2: Meat Inspection the US Department of Agriculture has a whole
Speaker 2: lot more money for food safety than the USDA does
Speaker 2: a lot, and that really has to do with the
Speaker 2: fact that meat was the scandal of the time, right,
Speaker 2: and that was funding mechanisms laid down in nineteen o six,
Speaker 2: and they plague us to this day. The USDA is
Speaker 2: hugely well funded on this front. The FDA is usually underfunded.
Speaker 2: We really need to say, let's set aside all of that,
Speaker 2: you know, partisan argument of you know, more than one
Speaker 2: hundred years ago, and build a modern food safety protection
Speaker 2: network and enforce the laws we have, which we don't
Speaker 2: always do so at all. So I feel very strongly
Speaker 2: about that.
Speaker 1: Do you think that food safety policies are by nature
Speaker 1: reactive or can they ever be proactive?
Speaker 2: It's a great question, and you're absolutely right that we
Speaker 2: tend to be reactive whether rather than proactive. And if
Speaker 2: I just take the history of food and drug legislation,
Speaker 2: for instance, the nineteen oh six Food and Drug at
Speaker 2: passed heavily watered down by industry and by its buddies
Speaker 2: in the US government. But something it lays down a precedent, right,
Speaker 2: it starts the issue. It's completely inadequate. And so in
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty eight, following a scandal in which hundreds of
Speaker 2: children are killed by a poisonous cough syrup that's permitted
Speaker 2: under the nineteen oh six law. We get the nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty eight Food Drug and Cosmetics Act that establishes the
Speaker 2: modern FBA. That is a reactive People have been pushing
Speaker 2: for this for obviously more than twenty years or more
Speaker 2: than thirty years, right, But we get it when children
Speaker 2: die in the nineteen fifties, we get the Delainey Close
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties nineteen sixties, which deals with toxic food dies
Speaker 2: that is reactive to children who got sick from toxic
Speaker 2: food dies.
Speaker 3: And this continues onward.
Speaker 2: And the one most recently that's worth mentioning is the
Speaker 2: twenty eleven FISMA, the Food Safety Modernization Act that passed
Speaker 2: under Barack Obama, and that was a reaction to the
Speaker 2: Peanut Corporation of America scandal, in which peanut butter was
Speaker 2: so contaminated with molds and toxins that it killed a
Speaker 2: whole lot of elderly people before they actually figured out
Speaker 2: that this particular company was getting away with nineteenth century
Speaker 2: factory standards. In fact, right, it's one of the few
Speaker 2: cases in which the head of Peanut Corporation of America
Speaker 2: went to prison. It was not bad, but reacting to
Speaker 2: that spurred FISMA, and then of course the Trump administration
Speaker 2: refused to enforce FISMA. So my point that, you know,
Speaker 2: we have some decent laws on the book, most of
Speaker 2: them are generated reactively.
Speaker 3: You know, we're in.
Speaker 2: A great position right now to be proactive. That doesn't
Speaker 2: mean that I think we will, but we are in
Speaker 2: a great position at this moment to be proactive. There
Speaker 2: have been a lot of food safety scandals recently related
Speaker 2: to the FDA, you know, baby formulas the being one example.
Speaker 2: The you know, repeated incidents of bacterial contamination and food.
Speaker 2: There continues to be adulteration and fake products that we
Speaker 2: barely even hear about but are in the American food
Speaker 2: supply today. And so this would be a great moment
Speaker 2: at the national level for our leaders, if they're not
Speaker 2: distracted by everything else that's going on at the national level. Right,
Speaker 2: I say to say, let's get this right, let's take
Speaker 2: a moment, let's not be reactive, let's proactively put a
Speaker 2: decent system in place, more similar to the In fact,
Speaker 2: I would argue the EU system, which is you know,
Speaker 2: much more proactive, and saying this looks dangerous. Let's take
Speaker 2: it out till it's proven safe. And I believe that
Speaker 2: Harry Willy would believe that too. I believe that his
Speaker 2: ghost would stand up and say, you know, come on right,
Speaker 2: let's get this right at long last. We have the
Speaker 2: tools to do it, we just need the will.
Speaker 1: That was just so amazing. Thank you so much, Deborah
Speaker 1: for taking the time to chat. I don't know if
Speaker 1: I'll ever be able to get the images of some
Speaker 1: of these adulterated foods out of my brain. If you
Speaker 1: all enjoyed this as much as I did and want
Speaker 1: to learn more, check out our website this podcast will
Speaker 1: Kill You dot com. We're I'll post a link to
Speaker 1: where you can find The Poison Squad, one chemist's single
Speaker 1: minded crusade for food safety at the turn of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century. I'll also post a link to Blum's other work,
Speaker 1: including The Poisoner's Handbook and the Poison Squad PBS series,
Speaker 1: and don't forget. You can check out our website for
Speaker 1: all sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to, transcripts,
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Speaker 1: audio mixing, and thanks to you listeners for reading with me.
Speaker 1: I hope you liked the second to last episode of
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Speaker 2: M