University Place

The Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Century

– Welcome to “University Place Presents. ” I’m Norman Gilliland. The more we learn about food in the 19th century in America, the more we marvel that anybody survived. In order to extend the life of the product, or make it look better, or just to make more money off it, food processors in this country often added things which could sicken or even kill the consumer. What did the U. S. government do about it? And what did the food processors do about it, and how did big business react? Well, we’re going to find out from my guest. She’s Deborah Blum, returning to “University Place Presents. ” She’s the author of various books, including The Poison Squad, and also a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, author of various other books, and is also the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And welcome back to “University Place Presents. ”

– Thank you, it’s great to be here.

– Food in the 19th century, we have this fairly, I suppose, idealized impression of it, when we look back. “Like grandmother used to make,” and that kind of thing. But I gather it wasn’t exactly wonderful.

– No, and I bought into that same kind of mythology of the 19th century. Everyone pink-cheeked, eating farm-fresh, perfect produce, and it’s totally untrue. I don’t know how we got sold that kind of story. So I was actually, when I started working on the book, really shocked to realize that what my grandparents and great-grandparents ate, was truly horrible. [Norman laughing] And in fact, I was talking about this book at the FDA a couple of weeks ago, and their historian said the estimate is that food was one of the top 10 causes of death [Norman laughing] in the 19th century. And if you look at them now, you don’t see it anywhere near that, so we have come a long, much better way since then.

– Well, okay, speaking about grandma first though, was this mostly an urban phenomenon? If people lived out on the farm, and raised their own, they presumably wouldn’t have tampered with the food.

– Yes, I think largely, but I know that it was spread across the country, and when we say urban, we say very small areas. People would go to the grocery store; they would buy, to flush out whatever they raised themselves, canned goods. Or you would go to the grocery store, you’d get your flour, which was mixed with gypsum. You’d get your ground coffee, which was mixed with charred bone. You’d buy your spices, you’d have brick dust in your cinnamon. So you really couldn’t escape this sort of fraud and chicanery and risky practices of manufacturers no matter where you were. You were maybe safer on a farm, but you were never buffered from the food practices of the 19th century.

– Was this just an American phenomenon? Or elsewhere?

– No, cheating in food is time-old, and you can go back even into the records of ancient Rome and Greece and find things about faked wine, and other things like that. But awareness of it really arose in Europe in the early 19th century.

There was a famous book called Death in the Pot by a chemist based in London. And it was published in 1820. And it really explored all kinds of dangerous additives to manufactured food. And that chemist really focused on heavy metals in the food supply. The use of lead to dye candy, the use of arsenic, which is a metalloid element, to dye candy again. Green from arsenic, yellow and red from lead, it’s kinda crazy. [Norman laughing] And eventually, in England at least, there was a law passed in the 1860s, after a couple dozen kids just outside London died from eating arsenic-laced candy, and they started saying “Enough. ” But that didn’t happen in the United States, even though we had a similar kind of situation, the U. S. government still refused to actually set standards, or regulate food and drink, or drugs, actually.

– What do you think the difference was?
– You know, I’ve asked myself that. Part of it I think, is the American character. We really don’t like the government telling us what to do. And you see people actually, food safety chemists, complaining about that in the 19th century. Americans are so focused on keeping the government out of their kitchen, they don’t think about this bigger picture. So that was some of it. We were a younger country, so we had less of a history, barely 100 years old in the late 19th century, less of a history of having government set rules and standards. And in our case, uniquely I think, we had two other factors. One was business had never been regulated. They organized and pushed back very effectively, and something that will remind you of today, gave a lot of money to Congress to make sure that didn’t happen.

And the Civil War still haunted the country, so that you still had a lot of Southern states saying, “I would never let that Yankee government “tell me what to do. ” Even after the Civil War. So you had all of those factors blocking these efforts to try to make the food supply safer.

– How aware were Americans in general of the problem? When you have children dying after eating candy or drinking milk?

– Right, and in some specific cases, where you had a very acute poisoning, I think people were aware. For the most part, the danger of the food supply was kind of a mystery. And part of that is, if you really think about what it was like before regulations, it wasn’t just that the government was saying to companies, “You need to safety assess “what goes into your food, “you need to set limits on how much of a particular additive “you put in your food, and oh, by the way, “you need to put labels on your food. ” And so there were no labels. So in the case of a child dying, say of, a popular preservative in milk was formaldehyde.

– [laughing] Yeah, it’s hard to believe, it’s crazy.

– And I’m gonna come back to that, it was just crazy.

You know your kid would die, but people were sick a lot in the 19th century. Sometimes you actually didn’t make that connection, right? And there’s no real public health tracking of this. I actually talked to a food historian, or a medical historian at the University of Michigan about it, and he said “In general, “people look back at the 19th century, “and they call it, in America, “the century of the American stomachache. ” [both laughing] Because so many people didn’t feel well, all the time.

– Between catching a disease, or who knows what else, lead in the water pipes.

– Exactly, and so it was really difficult to sort it out. If you didn’t know what was going into your food anyway, as an individual, you could hardly make the connection.

– So who made the connection?

– Well eventually, the hero of my book, Harvey Washington Wiley, comes to the U. S. Department of Agriculture, and that’s really important because he goes in around 1883, he’s a Indiana-raised farm boy.

I always think of him is kind of a holy roller chemist. His father was a preacher, and a conductor on the Underground Railroad during the Civil War. And Wiley actually was a soldier on the Union side in the Civil War. And he had become a professor of chemistry at Purdue, when it started. He was one of a faculty of six. And there, he got very interested in fraud in the Indiana food supply. He started looking at fake sugars, and fake syrups, and fake honey, and his sugar work caught the attention of the federal government. And in 1883, he was recruited to run what was called the Bureau of Chemistry. Now at this time, because we don’t have any consumer protection laws, there’s no FDA, there’s no EPA, there’s no agency dedicated to keeping the food supply safe, expect the USDA, and they had never done it. So when Wiley came into this tiny unit of chemists, there were maybe a dozen of them, he comes in and he says “Let’s just investigate.

” That was how he started, what’s really in the food supply? And so he took these chemists, who had spent many years analyzing soils and crop chemistry, and he said “I want you to go out “and investigate dairy products,” that was the first. “And let’s investigate canned vegetables, “and let’s investigate cocoa, and tea, and coffee. ” I mean they went across the landscape.

– Booze?

– And booze. Rye, wine, beer, whiskey, there was nothing that they didn’t look at. And when you read these, they were a series of reports called the Bulletin 13 reports, they’re just an incredible portrait of an awful, troubled, corrupt, food supply. And I think he was able to get away with it for so long, because industry itself didn’t realize what these reports were gonna show. But they built a really damning portrait.

– Let’s talk about motive a little bit. Not Wiley’s, I think that was pretty clear what he was after, but you talk about fraud, so that’s misrepresentation of the product on the one hand, but then there’s also, I don’t know, would you say, an unknowing component to some of these? Where we didn’t know that the formaldehyde was going to kill people, or we didn’t know that the chalk in the milk was going to sicken children?

– I mean some. Formaldehyde, it became very obvious very fast that it was a poisonous substance, right? But some of the other additives in the food supply they used, the cleaning agent Borax was a popular preservative. Salicylic acid, which we find in aspirin, was a popular preservative. They put– copper sulphate was used to make vegetables green. There was the continued use of arsenic in other things, in candy, to color the candy. Some of the things they knew, some things they were just making up as they went. And the late 19th century is the rise of industrial chemistry. So all of these compounds are suddenly available, and you’re in this period where science is kind of magic. Suddenly you have these miraculous compounds that can extend food, color it better, make it taste different, disguise rot. It’s like science is our friend. So I think there was actually a period where people were both knowingly using dangerous things, and just thinking they were in this miraculous period where science was solving all their problems, and they didn’t want to look too closely at what that meant.

– I guess part of it must’ve been just this broader distribution, as you get into better transportation, communication. You might be in New York making candy, but then sending it to somebody in Denver.

– Yes, that’s exactly right. And there’s a point in the book where I relate this phone call that the chief food chemist in North Dakota has with lawyers from Nabisco, in which he’s yelling at them that he’s tired of East Coast company dumping their garbage into the state of North Dakota, where people are eating all of these chemically enhanced, horrible foods. So it goes out, the railroads start crisscrossing the country. You start seeing this widespread shipping. And again with that, you want really good preservatives. There wasn’t great refrigeration. We didn’t have electricity in many, many places. So chemical preservatives were the go-to thing.

– Well, let’s enter into what we might call Deborah Blum’s rogues’ gallery here, [both laughing] starting with an image of a candy factory.

– Yes so, I love this image of the candy factory which I use in my book, and that’s in part because, this is really what factories of the time looked like. There were no government inspectors saying “Why don’t we keep these clean? “Let’s have sterile conditions. “Let’s make sure there’s not dirt on the floor, “and pools of water, and flies gathering around. ” So if you look at this picture, you can see just how filthy, often, these processing conditions were. But the other part of it is, on the– I think at one point I had an image of an inspector from Wiley’s group, and you will see the reference to children dying of poison candy, so it’s like this double whammy of dirt and toxic substances. And then, you can go on to look at some of the misleading claims. So again, you can say whatever you want. I mean it was interesting because, Wisconsin was part of the great butter fight of the 1880s, [both laughing] in which everyone was so irate because the Chicago meat producers were making oleomargarine. And we don’t remember this, most of us, but in the 19th century, oleomargarine was made from animal fat.

And so you had the meat packers, like Armour and Cudahy and Smith, saying “What do we do with all this unwanted fat? “We’ll make oleomargarine. ” And so oleomargarine was this animal fat product, and they would call it butter. They would dye it yellow. And then you can get into these big fights in Congress, with dairy state people, including Bob La Follette saying, “Fraud, chicanery, they’re scraping animal carcasses “off the streets and putting it in your butter. ” It gets to be a real dogfight between the traditionalists. And you could describe it as anything, you could call coffee nutritious, without even telling people what in the world that meant. Or you could fake all kinds of things in ground coffee. I mean, there is an incredible amount of fakery in coffee.

– So, it looks great doesn’t it? Everybody gathered around the table there and enjoying, but what are they actually drinking [laughing] you suppose?

– That’s exactly right. And sometimes things like nutritive, or you would sometimes find cans of coffee that would say “coffee essence,” which if you actually knew what was going on, meant there’s no coffee in this at all.

It’s essence of coffee. [both laughing] And then, so what was that? It was burnt, charred, ground seeds, and chicory, and sometimes other flavorings. Or, but mostly what people would do, and Wiley’s chemists found that ground coffee at this time period was between 50 and 90% adulterated. Which usually meant it was extended. – Is this just to save a buck? I mean really.

– Yes.

– What other reason?

– These things were much, so coffee is expensive, as we all know today, when we drink a cup of coffee. But, if you mixed in burnt rope, or ground coconut shells, or charred bone, which they sometimes did. Or dyed sawdust, which they often used, then you could extend out the coffee, there’d still be a slight coffee buzz, and you would make a lot more money because you were charging for real coffee. And there was actually this insane moment when I was looking at this, when people started getting very suspicious of ground coffee, so they start faking the coffee beans.

And they made those out of wax and dirt. And so I actually read this one statement from a doctor in the Midwest who said that he thought the origin of the phrase “a muddy cup of coffee,” [both laughing] was because people drank so much dirt with their daily breakfast. But they said the same thing with spices. Spices were famously up to 90% adulterated.

– ‘Cause they are expensive often.

– That’s exactly right. And so they would use all kinds of different materials and grind them up. Pepper was famously mostly coconut shells. And the U. S. government actually went out and did a sting once where they sprayed a bunch of coconut shells on the dock with quinine, and then tested McCormick pepper, and found it was full of quinine. And literally– – McCormick?

– McCormick.

– A name brand.

– Right, so, yeah, it wasn’t just these little small random things, the big companies were doing it. And of course, cinnamon would have brick dust in it, so would cayenne. Flour had gypsum, or sometimes just ground stone. I always wondered about what settled to the bottom of a loaf of bread, [both laughing] where you were crunching your way through the gypsum. So it was sort of like crazy times. And you would actually start to see, in response to this, manufacturers trying to persuade the public that their product was pure. They’d put pure on the product, pure spices, pure whiskey; whiskey fraud was huge.

Well, whiskey, beer, and wine. So you would go out and you would have, especially the Kentucky bourbon makers, they would be pure whiskey, pure rye.

– Pure something, that’s what they would call it?

– Yes, that’s exactly right.

– And of course, there was a long tradition of people dying from bad liquor of one kind or another, as you point out in The Poisoner’s Handbook.

– That’s right; if it’s not ethanol, which is what we drink, if it’s methanol, which is wood alcohol, that is super lethal. But in a lot of cases, what they’d do here, is they’d say “I’m gonna sell you “an expensive bottle of aged rye. ” And they’d use manufactured ethanol, it was just made in a lab, and then they’d dye it, and you could buy little things called flavor of rye, or flavor of bourbon, and you could buy compounds that would make it bead on the glass, the way a good whiskey does, and then you could sell it as if it was a 10-year-old whiskey. So it’s a real dogfight about whiskey. And I wanna briefly mention, my book really focuses on food and drink, largely food, some drink, medicated soft drinks. But this is also a period of completely unregulated, over-the-counter medications.

So you would have narcotics come on the market and end up in your everyday products. There was a whole rush of a period where people thought cocaine was a wonderful thing. They would mix it into wine. [Norman laughing] The pope actually blessed some of these cocaine-enriched wines. And then if you think about what they used to call medicated soft drinks. So 7 Up was loaded with lithium; it was an upper. So they called it 7 Up, it pepped you up in seven ways.

– It had lithium?

– Mm-hmm, it was a lithium-based soft drink. And Coca-Cola of course, the name itself tells you it was made from cocaine. And in the early iterations of Coca-Cola, you can actually find ads in which they’re saying, “All the stimulating properties of the coca plant, “this incredible intellect-improving beverage. And Coca-Cola was largely cocaine until about 1902. And then it wasn’t the federal government; the state of Georgia forced them to take it out.

– Wasn’t cocaine a little expensive though? Or was it just a very minute quantity to give it what it was supposed to have?

– Actually that’s a good question about the price of cocaine. There was apparently enough of a market in it, ’cause it was legal, that it wasn’t that expensive. I think it got much more expensive once it became an under-the-counter drug, but at the time, you could just bring in a truckload of cocaine and mix it into your soft drinks. And Coca-Cola wasn’t the only cocaine-rich beverage. Wiley and his team eventually did a whole investigation of medicated soft drinks, and started shutting them down.

– How did they determine though, the state of Georgia, that cocaine was undesirable, if everybody else thought it was good at the time?

– Well, there started be some real pushback against some of these narcotics. If you actually drill down into some of the use of narcotics at the time, it wasn’t just that you had cocaine in wines and in soft drinks, you had morphine in baby tooth drops.

– Oh sure, to calm the child by knocking them out.

– That’s exactly right, that’s exactly right. And so people started to see these really bad affects. And cocaine itself, which was promoted by Sigmund Freud actually, as a helpful alternative to heroin. [both laughing] He actually published this famous paper called “On Cocaine. ” But cocaine itself eventually became realized as an addictive substance. And people started realizing that morphine was not a benign substance. And so you saw, actually organizations like the WCTU, which became very famous for opposing alcohol, started out really pushing back on some of these medicated soft drinks. Because people were really high after they had their handy glass of Coca-Cola. So, I mean it’s really a crazy time. And all completely legal.

– Was that the recipe for Coca-Cola, was it still secret once they took the cocaine out of it?

– You know it’s interesting, because much later Wiley sued the Coca-Cola company, Harvey Wiley, who’s the hero in my book, sues the Coca-Cola company for a number of reasons. And one was he thought they should quit calling it Coca-Cola ’cause it didn’t have cocaine anymore. [both laughing] And it was false advertising. And they even said, “You’re using pictures,” and they did, too, “pictures of the coca plant “on your trucks and boxes,” ’cause they really wanted to hint to people that it was this wonderful stimulating beverage. But the other thing they had done, so once they took the cocaine out, they ramped up the amount of caffeine to an incredible degree. So an old six-ounce soda fountain glass of Coca-Cola was about the same thing as a 16-ounce can of Red Bull today. And they were serving this in soda fountains to toddlers and elementary school kids. And so, he sued them; it was a trial much later, about 1911. And it’s a fabulous trial, because it’s the first real trial that looks at the chemistry and effects of caffeine. And some of the best early work on whether caffeine is dangerous came out of Wiley’s lawsuit against Coca-Cola. And they did not win that lawsuit, which was actually carefully scheduled in one of the towns that bottled Coca-Cola.

– Okay, little change of venue might have helped.

– Super friendly to Coca-Cola, but the federal government did not quit on this, and they bulldogged Coke. And so about in 1917, Coke pulled the caffeine amount in their product down by about half.

– Because originally they would want the caffeine in it because that too is addictive?

– A stimulant, right. I think there are people who would describe themselves as caffeine addicts, and I’ve certainly met people, even at my own journalism school here at Wisconsin, who if they missed a cup of coffee, would start getting a really bad headache. There are things that keep you on the caffeine diet. So it was partly that, but it was partly that Coca-Cola had built its reputation as something that pepped you up. And so, when they couldn’t put cocaine [chuckling] to pep you up, they just ramped up the caffeine to these insane levels. And the interesting thing is, back when Wiley’s trial came out, the nickname for Coca-Cola in the United States was dope.

[Norman chuckling] And so people would describe Coca-Cola addicts. They brought in Coca-Cola addicts to testify at this trial as dope-heads. And the Coca-Cola company was very irate about that. And then they would call Coca-Cola Coke, which was a nickname for cocaine.

– So that goes back that far?

– Yes, that’s exactly right. So it’s super interesting, complicated history on soft drinks.

– Well, let’s go back into childhood, but we’re still in the rogues’ gallery,

– Yes.

– and look at milk.

– Yeah, so, milk was one of my favorite case studies of why the food supply was so bad. And that was for a number of reasons. You’re in the 19th century, the U. S., there’s no pasteurization. Milk is a fabulous substrate for pathogenic bacteria. It’s got proteins and sugars that provide a wonderful home for some really dangerous bacteria. And in the 19th century in particular, you found a lot of bovine tuberculosis in the milk. And people got really sick from milk. It was lethal to a lot of people.

– I gather refrigeration wasn’t really up to code either.

– No, especially when you used to go to the mid, there isn’t refrigeration. We’re just starting in the late 19th century to use electricity. The old phrase an “ice box” was because people would get a block of ice and they’d have a box for it, and so that was your best way of chilling things. So you had a lot problems just with the bacteria growing in milk, anyway, but you had a lot of efforts by the dairy industry, and I’m gonna use the term Dairy Man, ’cause that’s what everyone said. The American Dairy Men, also wanted to make greater profits. And so there was a widespread practice of thinning milk. And you can actually find the recipes, which was about one gallon of milk to two gallons of water. When you did that, of course, you ended up with this grayish, bluish, kind of thin liquid that you had to recolor. It’s gross, right?

– Yeah, it sounds gross from before you color it.

– Yeah, and so they would put plaster of Paris in it, or they would put chalk in it, and recolor it. They didn’t really fuss about the quality of the water that they thinned it with. So, speaking of pathogenic bacteria, there was one famous case in Indianapolis where a family brought their milk bottle and it was wiggling. And when they analyzed what was in the milk, it was horsehair worms from a local pond.

– Oh, because that’s where they got the water.

– That was where they got the water. And then occasionally, dairy farmers, they would lose cows, how do we use the different parts? They were very good about trying to use everything. And so they would puree the calf brains, which would make a kind of creamy layer, and they would float them on the top of this thinned milk, to make it look like it had golden, creamy stuff floating on top. And it would be a giveaway when you poured it in your hot coffee and it cooked. [both laughing] Which is completely disgusting. But the other part of this is that you found them then say, “My biggest problem is that “people are buying less milk ’cause it keeps rotting, “and it’s an expensive product. “But what if we can make the milk last longer?” So during the Civil War, they had discovered this wonderful new embalming agent called formaldehyde, and the Germans had learned to synthesize it.

And so you could make vats of formaldehyde. And literally the dairy industry said, “Well, you know this obviously preserves body, “what about milk?” And so they started putting it in milk, and it worked really well. I haven’t drunk formaldehyde, but it has a kind of sweetish taste apparently, so it would’ve masked the souring of the milk.

– What does it smell like?

– It does not have a strong smell at all. You can barely smell it. And then it did preserve the milk. You could actually find ads in which it said “Buy our wonderful milk, “you can put it on your counter “and leave it there for two weeks, and nothing will happen. ” Which today, we would all kind of go, “Ew. ” But again, then, it was miracle of science. So you started getting these embalmed milk scandals, that’s what they called it.

Where children would die because there was so much formaldehyde in the milk. But the Dairy Men were never prosecuted because it was not illegal to do this. And then you saw the meat industry pick up the same thing. They would take formaldehyde, they would take Borax, they would put all these weird preservatives in milk, and so companies like Swift were eventually prosecuted by the War Department after the Spanish-American War, because of the use of all these preservatives. And Teddy Roosevelt, who had been a Rough Rider, testified that when he had forced one of his soldiers to eat the canned meat, the soldier had started throwing up. And he ended up by saying “I would have rather “eaten my hat than eat these meat supplies. ” And that was actually called the Embalmed Beef Scandal. It ginned up a huge amount of publicity.

– In a way, in quotation marks, a good thing, I suppose because, for a couple of reasons, I’m talking about the Spanish-American War, and the Embalmed Beef Scandal. In effect, you have a control group with the military, these are all soldiers, these are all healthy people, certain age group, and if they’re all getting sick by eating the same thing, coming out of a can.

– Right, yes. And then you get somebody with celebrity clout involved, like Theodore Roosevelt, in a way you have a perfect storm to stop the embalmed beef, right?

– You would have thought. I mean the interesting thing, and this should have made people even more angry, is that the conclusion of that military trial was that it was no big deal because that’s just the stuff that everybody bought in the grocery store. That this was the actual state of the American food supply. But the real effect of that, going back to did people know this, is the embalmed milk scandals and the huge national attention from the embalmed beef scandals, started making people realize that there were unsafe products in their food. I think that they had lived through this golden period of not really realizing what it was like, and certainly, there’s no labels, right? The U. S. government is not really getting this information out. Wiley for quite a while did these Bulletin 13 for other food chemists, not for the general public. So you start to see, right about at this period, this rise of public awareness.

You get pure food congresses, you get food advocate magazines, you just start seeing people, including Wiley, starting to say, “We have to fix this. “This is really bad. ” And you need that. We never change anything until the weight of public opinion starts getting behind a question.

– Well, though, with Theodore Roosevelt we’re talking by now, he’s president shortly, by 1901.

– Right. And he realizes that there’s a problem with this embalmed beef, and maybe some other aspects of American food culture. As president, what does he do?

– Well, at that particular time he didn’t do anything. And when the food advocates would meet with him, he said to them, it wasn’t that he was trying not to regulate corporations; he was famously trust busting. But he said to them, “I don’t want to waste “all my political capital on a fight I’m gonna lose.

“And the food industry and the drink industry “are so organized against this,” which they were, “and they give so much money to Congress, “that I just don’t think–” and he actually said this, “this is not a fight that I’m gonna waste capital on “because it’s not a fight that I’m going to win. “I think I can be more effective “looking at things like railroads,” which were some of his early targets. And so he, at that moment, was really focused there. What happens though, is that Wiley, who has been working with Congress, trying to get some kind of requirement for labeling, or some kind of safety standards, and all these bills keep getting shot down. He finally runs out of patience, and he says “Okay, maybe what we don’t have “is the weight of evidence. “We talk about these things being dangerous, “there’s anecdotal evidence that these are a problem, “but there’s no good scientific studies,” which there were not. We just didn’t have that kind of science; toxicology was still being invented at that time. So he finally decides, you could never do this today, that he’s going to skip any animal studies, he’s gonna go right to people, and he’s going to run an experiment that he called the Hygienic Table Trials, in which he’s basically going to poison his colleagues.

– Oh, his colleagues, are they gonna know about this, or is he gonna sneak it in on them?

– No, it was a really interesting experiment. Basically what he did, is he sent out a call for volunteers, and he got some funding from Congress so that he could set up this experiment. They built a kitchen and a dining room in the basement of the U. S. Department of Agriculture building. And then they sent out recruitment notices, in which they said, to young government workers who made very little money, “We’ll give you three free meals a day. “And it’ll be fabulous food. “We’ve hired a professional chef,” All the meals– because they needed this sort of baseline, the meals would really be that 19th century mythological, preservative free, farm fresh, wonderful thing, and you can eat all you want, but the only catch is, half of you, at any given moment, are gonna be adding capsules to every meal with the food additive that I’m studying at the time. And we’re gonna ratchet up that dose, and you’re going to have blood draws, and many other medical tests, and you cannot eat or drink anything but at these meals. And people signed up in droves. He got letters from around the country. People said “Pick me, pick me! “I have a cast iron stomach.

– Were these all men?

– Yes, and one of the reasons they were was that Wiley selected for young men in their 20s, because he made, you could call it a sort of turn-of-the-century male decision, but he made a decision that he thought those would be the healthiest people that he could put in the study. And he wanted really healthy, strong people in the study. A lot of these young clerks at the Department of Agriculture who volunteered had been athletes in college. Some of them had been award-winning runners. So they were really looking for someone who they thought wouldn’t fold as soon as they had the taste of a preservative in their system. So everyone had it ’cause they were eating it anyway, but at the levels that they were doing it.

– But in this case, it wasn’t exactly a blind study because the people who were getting the additives knew because they were the ones actually adding these capsules.

– Yes, it was interesting, ’cause they started out trying to hide these additives. So the first of these Poison Squad studies, that was a nickname given to the studies by the Washington Post that just stuck. They thought Hygienic Table Trials was boring. [laughing]

– Poison Squad is catchier.

– Yes. So the first one they actually tried hiding the additives, it was Borax, which we see today, 20 Mule Team Borax. And they hid it in the butter. But there was always this kind of underground whisper network, so pretty soon people quit buttering their bread. And then they mixed it into the milk, and pretty soon people quit drinking the milk. So then they just said “Okay, this is not working. “And so we’re just gonna be really straightforward, “and there will be this dish of capsules. “They won’t know the dose, “and we’re gonna watch them swallow these capsules. ” So and people criticized the study on those grounds.

That you had people who knew they were taking these, so were they more inclined to suddenly think they were developing weird symptoms?

– Right, so they didn’t try placebo capsules?

– No, it was either you were getting these capsules or you were not. So it was a very straightforward experiment. You can look back on it and you can say, “Man, that’s primitive science,” which it was. And Wiley later, when he did his first report on the Borax study, he went through all what he thought were the legitimate scientific criticisms. They had a couple dozen people at any given time in the studies, that’s not that many people, that was how many people they could afford to do this.

– Yeah sure, it’s not a huge sample is it?

– Right, and it wasn’t secret, and there were some other criticisms about should you have given them more of a break between the doses? So we could’ve seen whether it was a different kind of cumulative affect? And he acknowledged all of that. So when you look at that study, you don’t look at it and say “Well, this is perfect science,” but it was still a groundbreaking first look at whether these were safe. And what was really interesting about that first Borax study was that he had predicted that no one would get sick. That he himself, there were a few meager looks at animals and Borax, the animals were fine, nothing really happened. He picked it ’cause he thought it was the safest thing he wanted to look at, and then people did get sick.

And it wasn’t fake symptoms; they were throwing up, they had terrible headaches, they were nauseated, they had all of these GI problems, and he actually testified to Congress that that was the study that changed his mind about how he needed to approach that. Because that was the study, he said “I was persuaded by my own evidence. ” That said to him we’re not just hyperventilating about potential danger; we’re actually putting dangerous things into the food supply and this has got to stop.

– And here’s the dining room, if any of this sounds appetizing to you, you can see [both laughing] the Poison Squad. It looks very nice, like a hotel dining room.

– It does look like a hotel, I mean white tablecloths and rush back chairs. I don’t remember they had flowers, or art on the walls or anything, but it was not like a depressing, dank, horrible place.

– It wasn’t a lab, exactly, in our sense of the word. Now was any of this being publicized at the time?

– Well it’s interesting, ’cause when Wiley started, he wanted to keep it a secret. And they actually had this reporter at the Washington Post, George Rothwell Brown, who saw it in one of the congressional budget items, and came down and realized that this was this insane study, and haunted the place.

And Wiley for a while was telling people not to talk to reporters, and he had to give that up. And once the Post started reporting on it, everyone reported on it. It was such a crazy experiment, and you have these young men essentially risking their lives in the interest of public health. And so there was the Post, there was The New York Times, you could find these stories in papers across the country. There were minstrel shows, there were songs, there were poems; it really caught the public imagination. And if you look at some of the stories, like The New York Times for instance, you’ll see repeatedly in it the use of the word poison, poison, poison. Not just Poison Squad, but “These volunteers “are eating poisons. ”

– But poisons that are in our food supply.

– That’s right, deliberately introduced into the food supply. So it was sending a message out to the American public that these additives, that they were not even really being informed about, that manufacturers were using deliberately, were really dangerous. And you start again to see more of that awakening based on these studies.

– So what’s the timeframe between, it was about 1902 or so when he initiates the Poison Squad, and some time to get the data out? And then some time before any kind of either government or business reaction can set in?

– That’s exactly right. So the study starts in 1902. They publish the Borax study in 1903. They continue publishing the formaldehyde report. They basically had to say “We could not continue this, “people got so sick, so fast, “we realized we were gonna kill them. “And so we just cut it off. ” But some of the other ones they continued for quite some time, and as they came out, many businesses became increasingly unhappy about this. So unhappy that in fact, the Secretary of Agriculture, who at one point been a real Wiley supporter, starts seeing him as anti-business.

– Is he working for the Secretary of Agriculture?

– Yes, because the Bureau of Chemistry is in the Department of Agriculture. And the Secretary of Agriculture, who was from Iowa, his name was Jim Wilson, had originally been a big supporter of Wiley’s work, because farmers were very unhappy about this kind of food fraud, because it depressed their own sales. But as these studies come out, and as the big agribusiness community gets angry, and as the chemical industry gets angry, and as the food production industry gets angry, Wilson gets more and more unhappy about these also. And in fact, he tried to suppress publication of the last of the Poison Squad studies, because he was like, “Enough of telling “the American people about this bad stuff. ” And so in general, the business community was really hostile. They hated Wiley, they were always trying to get him fired. There were exceptions to that, and one of the ones I write about in the book, and a personal favorite of mine, is Henry J. Heinz. And Henry J. Heinz invented modern ketchup. He made a decision that he was gonna make preservative-free ketchup. Ketchup at the time was sort of a thin vegetable sauce, often made of vegetable waste.

– Oh, tomato in there anywhere?

– A little, but they mostly used red dye to color it red.

– Oh, of course.

– And then they would dump a load of preservatives in it. And it was very thin, it would slosh out like we slosh out a hot sauce today. And so Heinz, when he decides to make a preservative-free ketchup, finally figures out that what it needs is a lot of vinegar, because the acid in the vinegar is bacteria-killing, and a lot of tomato pulp, because that’s a high acid material, and that kills bacteria. And to do that, he invents this new ketchup that he can bottle without preservatives, but the big problem with it is it’s so thick, it’s hard to get it out of the bottle.

– [chuckling] Sometimes still a problem.

– Yes, and so he puts this new ketchup on the market, and it really takes off. And he essentially, in the course of doing this, invents modern ketchup.

– And it doesn’t need refrigeration?

– After you open it, you usually want to put your bottle in a refrigerator, but you could actually leave it out for some time. And you know that with a bottle of ketchup, you could leave it out for some time. They may not have preservatives in it, but it’s gonna sit on the counter okay. And he got very involved in fighting for the pure food movement. And so Wiley recruited every businessman he could. He recruited the pure food guys, and interestingly enough, he recruited women. And that to me is one of the most interesting parts of his story.

– And why did he do that?

– Well it is a good question, ’cause women had no political power; they didn’t have the vote at federal government level, but he saw them as really smart and really organized. And you could actually find these things where he says “No one organizes and gets things done better than women. ”

– Well it is sort of hard to say no to a mother

– [laughing] Yes.

–when it comes to safety issues.

– And women of the time, even though they didn’t have the vote, they were organizing to change things. People don’t always admire the anti-alcohol actions of the WCTU, but they were very effective at influencing policy. And there were women’s clubs across the United States, and there were women organizing for the vote. So one of the things Wiley actually would do, he would go out to suffragette groups, and he would talk to them about the importance of food safety. And many of the suffragette groups took on that issue as part of one of their causes too, because they saw it as harmful to families. And unfair to women who were trying to take care of their families. And Wiley, by the way, married a suffragette. [chuckling] She was arrested at the Wilson White House later for picketing for the vote.

– For the right to vote.

– That’s right.

– So how then does business respond finally? And does government put any pressure on business to respond by the time we get to 1905, 1906?

– So the answer is that business is very effective at stopping anything from happening.

– Again, because of congressional pressure?

– And money, there was a huge amount of money that flowed from these businesses to different congressmen. There was a wonderful book called The Treason of the Senate which in fact tracked some of this money into the Senate. Roosevelt hated that book so much that he actually coined the term for the investigative journalist who did that kind of work, and he called them Muckrakers.

– And it stuck!

– And it did stick. It became a famous term for investigative journalists. So there’s a lot of public acclaim for Wiley’s work. You see cartoons all over the country praising what he’s done trying keep food safe, but the actual federal action is still on hold. And so he keeps pushing, he keeps pushing, and then he gets unexpected help from a socialist writer named Upton Sinclair.

– Before we get into Upton Sinclair, what were the businesses actually saying? Were they disputing Wiley’s evidence? Or were they just saying that this would ruin the economy?

– Yeah, that’s a good question. So they really felt that– They made the case that this would ruin the economy. And there was actually one congressional hearing where there is a manufacturer of jams and jellies, and he basically said, “Okay, here’s my recipe for strawberry jam. “I use corn syrup, I put in grass seed, “I put in red dye, I put in a few shreds of strawberry. “Or maybe I don’t even use strawberry, I use apple. “I bottle it up, I label it strawberry jam. ” He said, “But that’s what everyone does! “And if I was forced to actually put strawberries in my jam, “I would lose my business. ” This is just– So people came in and said “This is the way the system works, “and if you did this, people couldn’t afford to buy the food. “And our profit margins would erode, “and the whole U. S. economy. ” And they would say that, “The U. S. economy would suffer. ” And at the same time, all of the businesses that felt pressured would directly try to influence this by money, primarily. But they would also go behind the scenes. They went to Roosevelt, they went to the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Commerce, and they did their very best, not so much to counter Wiley’s evidence, ’cause they didn’t have counter evidence, but to portray him as a crank, a nut, just tarnish his character to the best of their ability.

– And what about his character, though? How congenial was he when it came to dealing with these movers and shakers outside of the lab?

– Well, you know it’s interesting, because he started out, and at one point Jim Wilson talked about how charming he was, and how funny he was. He could be a really congenial guy; people tended to like him. But as this situation with frustration over getting some kind of food safety continued to happen, and as he began to really think that we had a system that was dangerous to American citizens, he became less of a schmoozer and more of a crusader, and pretty rigid with it.

And that allowed him, he was able as a sort of general marshaling his forces, he was very effective. I think that later especially. But he had alienated so many people in business, and he was so set on his point, consumer safety before nothing, that he wouldn’t negotiate. That my personal opinion, as someone who wrote a quasi-biography on him, is that he was less effective later in trying to establish the standards, because people didn’t want to work with him. And he had alienated Roosevelt by that point, and his own Secretary of Agriculture didn’t trust him, and he had become so much of a crusader that there actually some of his scientist friends who were “What happened to your objectivity?” And so it became more and more difficult for him, I think, in the federal government, to be effective.

– How did he interact with Upton Sinclair?

– They got along, they were both on the same side. Upton Sinclair was not a food safety advocate. I love the Upton Sinclair story. He was a socialist writer, and when he first decided to write what became a very famous novel, The Jungle, he wrote it as a serial novel about the plight of the meatpacking workers in Chicago for a newspaper in Kansas.

– So he is more emphasizing then the workers’ working conditions,

– Deborah: That is exactly why he did it.

– Norman: Rather than consumer conditions.

– And later, because The Jungle became a big food scandal book, he very bitterly complained that he had aimed for America’s heart and hit it in the stomach. It was not his intention. But what happened with The Jungle, and this is what I think people don’t realize; it’s a novel, but it’s got a lot of journalistic power behind it. He went to Chicago and he lived in the stockyards. And so the backdrop of his story about these poor workers is the horrible status of the meat packing industry. And they’re poisoning rats in the factory, and the poison rats go into the sausage, meat rots as it stands, they wash it off, give it a bath of Borax, and add it into the food supply. And he goes so far in The Jungle, to the point where workers fall in the lard vats, they go into the lard.

– It’s perfect Halloween reading.

– It is really grisly. And it was so grisly that his first publisher outside of his socialist newspaper, Macmillan, canceled the contract. They were like, “We’re not publishing this, “we don’t believe it. ” And he talked another publisher, Doubleday, Page into doing it. And they ended up fact-checking it. They sent a lawyer and his editor to Chicago, and they came back and they said “It’s worse than in the book. ” And so when Doubleday, Page published the book, they sent an early autographed copy to Roosevelt, and as this became a huge scandal that Roosevelt had to deal with, Roosevelt send a fact-checking team to Chicago. He sent two independent investigators, they came back, they said, “It’s worse than in the book. ” And so Roosevelt used their report, that report has never been published, it actually, the complete report is in a vault in the National Agricultural Library.

– Why?

– Because he used it as a blackmail tool. He went to Congress and he said, “I have this report, “this report will destroy the meat industry, “I want you to give me a Meat Inspection Act. ” And Congress literally said “No, no sorry, “sorry, sorry, we’re not doing that. ” They held hearings that only had people from Swift and Cudahy, talk about how wonderful everything was. So Roosevelt then released, I think it was about an eight-page summary of the report, and he said “Okay then, “I’m just gonna release this summary. ” And based on what was in that summary, which was really horrifying, every country in Europe canceled their meat contracts with the United States.

– Oh wow!

– And people started just refusing to buy meat, and so he was able to use that to go back to Congress and say “Pass that Meat Inspection Act. ” And when the Meat Inspection Act passed in June of 1906, it pulled the Food and Drug Act across the line. So even though I don’t think Upton Sinclair had ever seen himself as a food crusader, he was what we often would call the tipping point. There was all that pressure, and he pushed it over the line.

– When you mention this frustration that Wiley experienced, and of course with the Secretary of Agriculture too, his boss, giving him all kinds of trouble, was there a parting of the ways then?

– Yeah so, he was on the initial task force to try to implement the law. And it’s so interesting, because I went and I went through all these Wiley papers at the Library of Congress, and you can see the back-and-forth memos, where he keeps saying “This chemical is really not safe, “let’s not give this to kids. ” And then the other people at the Department of Agriculture saying basically, “Oh, don’t be such a baby, “we think this is gonna be fine. ” And so there’s this sort of back-and-forth in which he starts losing more and more fights. And eventually his enemies at the Department of Agriculture gin up a fake, sort of misuse of funds accusation against him; there’s a huge hearing. He wins it because it was a false accusation. But I think, finally he says, “I’ve had enough of this. “I’m not effective. And so in 1912 he resigned, and he went over to a crusading women’s magazine, Good Housekeeping.

– Good Housekeeping! Whoa!

– Yes, because the women’s magazines, Ladies’ Home Journal was one of the most famous crusading magazines of the early 20th century. And so the women magazines were super investigative, and he went to Good Housekeeping, he started something called the Good Housekeeping Test Laboratories. And he started something called the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, [both laughing] which we still see occasionally today. And he actually would test food and drink products that were advertised in the magazine, and if they failed his test, the magazine would pull the ads. They wouldn’t advertise them.

– That’s different.

– Yeah, it was a very different time. And he wrote a column for them about food called “Common Mistakes About Food,” which is a lot about nutrition. But he used it to continue to advocate for a better food law, and for proper enforcement of the food laws. So eventually, he’s really thought of as the father of the FDA. The FDA came later, but it was Wiley crusading away at the Bureau of Chemistry, that laid down the foundation of the FDA.

– So his legacy, the wake you might say, of that 1906 Pure Food and Drug Law, still with us in a way. You have not that many years ago, the story of Red Dye No. 2 for example, which was determined to be injurious to health.

– That’s right.

– And other similar things. And yet we also wonder sometimes what else is still in there?

– Yes, that’s exactly right. So the 1906 law, it was really weakened by industry, and a sort of secret handshake between government and industry. And it weakened the law, and so a lot of the basic safety standards that Wiley had proposed for were taken out of it. And eventually it became so problematic that in 1938 a better law was passed, the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act. But some of the wins from industry from the beginning of the 20th century, became ingrained into the FDA. And this is not me dissing the FDA, but the FDA uses something quite often that’s called GRAS, “generally recognized as safe. ” And that can be something like, my favorite example, titanium dioxide, it’s used as a whitening agent in paint and things. So nobody dies from white paint.

– DuPont product.

– So they move titanium dioxide over into cosmetics. You’ll see it in sunblocks and things. It’s generally recognized as safe, nobody dies from titanium dioxide in their sunblock, so now it’s in food. It’s never been safety tested as a food product, but it grandfathers in under generally recognized as safe. And so the actual list of approved food dyes, Wiley took almost 100 very toxic dyes out of the food supply, and that was something he really did effectively. And then the list of food dyes that we still use today is almost entirely his list. Some of those turned out to be bad, in the mid-20th century, there the Delaney Amendment, that took out some of the most dangerous food dyes. People ask questions about the other food dyes, but they are generally recognized as safe.

So they have not come out of the food supply. In Europe, they use the precautionary principle, which is, “There’s some evidence “that this could be harmful; we’ll take it out “until it’s proven safe. ” So they have a very different approach.

– Yeah, I would say.

– Yeah, so it’s not a perfect system, but the rules that are there, and the standards that are set, and the enforcement that we do have, has kept us a lot safer than in the 19th century. And the real risk to us today, moving way forward, is that even those, what I think of as fairly thin safety net is being rolled back. And so, to give you one quick example of that, the Trump administration just authorized the pork industry to basically self-inspect.

– That’s always dangerous. And it’s just bad principle, isn’t it?

– That’s what we had before the Meat Inspection Act, which required government inspectors in every plant. So they’re actually downsizing the meat inspection service, and they’re gonna have more and more of just industry saying “This is okay.” And once this was approved for the pork industry, the beef industry has come right behind us and said “We wanna inspect our own products, too. ” So we’re actually, some of these protections that are a hundred years old are starting to disappear again. We’ll see how that ends up, but I’m not super optimistic.

– It’s a topic that in any event, is very much alive.

– Yes.

– It has not settled at all. Deborah Blum, it’s been a pleasure, I don’t want to say a dubious pleasure, [Deborah laughing] but completely a pleasure,

– No, everyone says dubious, you’re right.

– Talking to you again, and it’s certainly colorful times, and as I say, still very much alive.

– Yes, I agree, I am amazed how applicable it is to today. And thank you so much for having me on.

– I’m Norman Gilliland, and I hope you can join me next time around for “University Place Presents. ”