The Poison Squad

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Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odu.com/box. That's oduo.com/box. Flower was routinely laced with gypsum which we use in wallboard. Places were sometimes 80-90% adulterated. Breakdust was used in cinnamon, floor sweepings were used in pepper. Ground bone was used in some of the other ground spices. Most food historians will tell you that food was one of the top 10 causes of death in the United States in the 19th century. And medical historians sometimes call it the century of the great American stomachache. Journalist Deborah Blum. Coffee was sometimes 100% adulterated. Literally sometimes people would grind up coconut shells. They would use lead infused dyes to color them. If people got wary of their ground coffee, they would buy coffee beans so they would fake coffee beans. They were usually made of dirt and wax. At one point in the 1890s, there was a congressional hearing about some of this and a manufacturer of strawberry jam testified that their strawberry jam contained no strawberries. It was corn syrup, grass seed, and antelun coltard dyes. And he said that they had to do that in order to keep their prices competitive with other manufacturers who were often doing even worse things. In the later half of the 19th century, more and more Americans were moving from farms to cities, where they were beginning to rely on industrially produced foods. Manufacturers found all kinds of ways to stretch their products with unlisted additions. At the same time, 19th century canning and food processing methods were often unsanitary, and there wasn't any widespread refrigeration. So there's just bacteria growing in food in all kinds of ways, milk being a classic example of that. In some ways, it's like a perfect profile of everything that's wrong with the 19th century food supply, right? Diaries were filthy. They were absolutely filthy, and dairymen would bring milk to farmers markets, and the dairy men would dip it out of a big container, and the containers were filthy, and the ladles were filthy, and adding to that problem, dairymen ever eager to make a profit would thin the milk with water. And so one of the common practices for this, but basically you'd mix water with milk until the milk turned kind of bluish, and then you would recolor the milk white with either chalk or plaster of Paris, so it looked like normal milk. Sometimes dairymen would add pureed calf brains to the top to make it look like there is cream floating on the water down milk. And finally, the preservative formaldehyde had become the number one preserver of bodies during the Civil War, and the American dairymen in their inventive way said, "Wow, if this really works so well to preserve rotting bodies, what could it do for dairy products?" And two things happened, one, the formaldehyde killed the bacteria, hands down. The other was the formaldehyde that's apparently fairly sweet, so when you mix the formaldehyde into the milk, it covered up the taste of the rot. And so dairymen then embraced this, and you had dairymen who would kind of go to themselves, "Well, if a little formaldehyde does the job, a lot would do it even better." And some of these guys would actually advertise, they would have advertised saying, "You know, buy our special milk, you can leave it on the counter for three weeks." But the problem was that often when that happened to the levels of formaldehyde were really toxic. They didn't have to tell the consumers, there's no requirement to label. They usually didn't acknowledge that it was formaldehyde, the formaldehyde formulas had names like Rosalene and Preservalene and Icee and sort of benign names. But the milk killed children. And so when you start going through American newspapers in the 19th century, you will actually find stories, they're called "embombed milk scandals," in which there's so much formaldehyde in the milk and it's an embomming agent that it's killing children. It wasn't only formaldehyde, manufacturers were starting to add all kinds of chemicals to food, borax to meat, salicylic acid to beer, sulfurous acid to dried fruit. And none of it was regulated by the U.S. government. There were, and the 19th century, no food safety laws. There was no law setting standards for what could go into food, there was no laws requiring that manufacturers label their products and there were actually no laws requiring manufacturers to put into a package what it pretended to be. At the beginning of the 20th century, a government chemist named Harvey Washington Wiley decided to find out what all these chemicals were actually doing to Americans. He found 12 volunteers who'd eat foods laced with formaldehyde, borax and salicylic acid every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to see what happened. They were called the boys in squad. I'm Phoebe Judge, this is criminal. Who was Harvey Washington Wiley? I always think of him as kind of a holy roller chemist because it was like crusading was part of his personality makeup from the beginning. His father was a itinerant preacher, he had been a conductor on the Underground Railroad. He was also a farmer. By the time Harvey was six, he was helping bring the cow's in to be milked. When he got older, he decided to study chemistry and eventually became the first chemistry professor at Purdue University. He'd been working there for seven years when the Indiana State Board of Health asked him if he could help them with something. They wanted to see if the honey sold in the state was actually honey. And he discovered that a majority of the honey in Indiana was actually corn syrup and died with a cold hard dye to be more golden. And then the fraudsters, I guess I'll call them, had been making fake honey come and crumbling it into the corn syrup to make it look like actual real honey. Harvey Wiley wrote that the product was, quote, "entirely free of B-mediation" and that the demand for honest food should be heard. A couple of years later, he became the chief chemist of the United States Department of Agriculture, the USDA. And it's really important to recognize that at the point that he goes into the Department of Agriculture, it's not just that we don't have any food safety laws in the United States at the federal level. We don't have any consumer protections at all. And he comes into the Department of Agriculture, tiny department in a government that has never been interested in this issue at all. And he says in a very cautious analytical chemist way, "Why don't we just take a look? Why don't we just start analyzing what's actually in the food supply?" No one's ever done that before, but we can take our brilliant analytical chemistry methods that we've been applying to things like soil quality and we can try to figure out what's in food. And so almost as soon as he went there starting in 1883, the Department of Chemistry starts It's testing food. and they start publishing a series of bulletins with the incredibly boring title of bulletin 13. And it's so boring sounding that the food industry does not actually realize what this means. Harvey Wiley and the other USDA chemists looked at everything from canned vegetables to butter to cocoa, and they found all kinds of things. The cocoa had clay and sand and finally powdered tin in it. A lot of the butter was actually margarine, and ground pepper had sawdust, cereal crumbs, sand, soil, and powdered all of stones to quote an astonishing extent. It also had dust, possibly from floor sweeping. One of the USDA scientists, Wiley assigned to look at spices, asked to be transferred, because he was so disgusted by what he found. And they're finding not only this panorama of fraud, but some really dangerous materials like red lead and cheddar, for instance, or arsenic in some of the sweet products, or really dangerous levels of salicylic acid and beer and wine, and they start, if you read these reports, they say, basically, there's some really dangerous stuff here, and could we at least start labeling food? At a minimum, we should label, and the food and drink industry is like, absolutely not. But Harvey Wiley kept looking into what Americans were eating, and doing whatever he could to get the word out. He had even hired a journalist to help translate his technical reports, and to easy to understand press releases. But Americans didn't seem to be that concerned, until the Spanish-American War. So during the Spanish-American War, one of the things that was shipped down to American soldiers fighting in Cuba was both canned meat, and then some semi-preserved chunks of carcasses of meat. And afterwards, there were a number of officers who had served in Cuba, who accused the US government of killing more soldiers with the food, than the actual Cuban fighters had been able to accomplish. And they particularly focused on meat. Newspapers around the country reported accounts of cans that contained maggots and pieces of charred rope along with the meat, and a chemical smell that led one major to call it "embombed beef." One soldier said that the smell was so bad that when someone opened a can, they often had to, quote, "retire distance" to prevent being overcome. And it began such a scandal that the then Department of War held hearings about it. And one of the people who testified was Teddy Roosevelt, who had been a rough rider in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. And he said that he would rather have eaten his hat than the canned meat that was provided by the soldiers. And he actually told a story about one of his soldiers in his command, refusing to eat the food out of the can, and he ordered him to do it, and the man almost immediately started throwing up. Harvey Wiley was also called to testify at the hearings. He and his staff had examined the cans of meat that the soldiers had eaten, and found that what was in the cans wasn't any different than the canned meat that Americans were getting every day at the grocery store. No charges were brought against the military. It wasn't their fault soldiers had died. They were just feeding them whatever American ate. That same year, Harvey Wiley participated in a series of hearings on the country's food supply. He talked about his department's findings, and asked the manufacturers to help consumers what they were really eating by listing all the ingredients on labels. To help make his point, he read a poem he'd written about food fraud. I actually really loved that poem. He just goes through kind of all the things we're talking about, right? The butter is really only a margarine, the pepper is really ground bone, the coffee is not coffee, the milk is just completely dangerous. It had minds like the wine which you drink never heard of a grape and ended with the banquet how fine don't begin it till you think of the past and the future inside how I wonder, I wonder what's in it. But when food safety legislation was introduced in the house and the Senate the next year, food manufacturers pushed back and the bills were shut down in less than a month. It wasn't the first time this had happened. I think Wiley got to the point where he was feeling he was starting to feel just desperate about this. How do I fix this? In 1901 Harvey Wiley asked Congress for the funds to do something that hadn't been done before to systematically test some of these food additives on human subjects. He called his experiment the hygienic table trials, but newspapers started calling it the poison-swat experiments after the volunteers. He recruited young clerks and entry-level employees of the Department of Agriculture to essentially agree to dine dangerously. The Department of Agriculture received lots of applications. One eager volunteer wrote, "Dear sir, I have a stomach that can stand anything. I have a stomach that will surprise you." The poison squad members were young athletic men. A lot of them had been college athletes and they were in their 20s and he picked them because he thought of them as basically sturdy, right? He didn't want to kill people. He wasn't trying to have fragile people in his experiment. He wanted people who he thought could tolerate some of this. And I guess in an early 20th century way he picked these sort of healthy young men. They would get a very small stipend and they would get three meals a day, seven days a week for free. And at these very minimal salaries this was a huge benefit. Harvey Wiley had a test kitchen and a dining room built in the basement of the Department of Agriculture. He set up two round tables with white tablecloths in the dining room. Six volunteers would sit at each table. They would all eat at the same time. But at one of the tables they would be having food laced with something that could be poisonous. Meals would be served on a strict schedule, breakfast at 8am, lunch at noon, dinner at 5.30. The volunteers took an oath not to eat or drink anything outside of the dining room, except water, which they would measure out and report to Wiley. If they were hungry they had to wait. Before each meal they would be weighed, have their temperature taken and have their pulse rate recorded. After meals they had to write down every single thing they ate or drank and exactly how much. Doctors would examine them twice a week. And they would be blood tested and you're in tested and all of the tests and weight and measured and poked in product. They had to carry around bags issued by the USDA to collect any waste products so that they could be analyzed later. And they were told to be on their best behavior in general, quote, "to pursue their ordinary vocations without any excesses and to take their ordinary hours of sleep." And they would eat really great food. He hired a high-end chef. All of these meals were the genuine farm fresh article. They actually went out to farms around the DC area in Maryland, Virginia and bought super fresh produce. They carefully got food that had never had preservatives in it. They cooked all kinds of elaborate, wonderful meals. And when you go back and you look at the pictures of the dining room, it kind of looks like a nice restaurant, right? It's got these round tables. They have white tablecloths. He got nice china and flatware. They've got these ladder back chairs and beautifully polished glasses. And I think that was part of his plan. He wanted it to feel like I'm just dining with friends. He didn't want it to feel like I'm being experimented on. Each of the volunteers signed a waiver releasing the government from any responsibility if they became very sick or died. One of the volunteers put aside. at the door that said, "None but the brave can eat the fair." We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Right now we're offering a free seven-day trial. Go to patreon.com/criminalplus. Support for Criminal comes from NetSuite. Making sure your business keeps up with the competition can be complicated. NetSuite Next can make things simple. 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So he chose borax first because he thought, and he actually testified to Congress about this, that it wasn't that dangerous, and he wanted to start low-in. He thought, you know, some of them might get an upset stomach or something, but he actually had expected very little effect. Wiley decided to hide the borax and the butter, but the volunteers somehow found out it was there and stopped putting butter on their bread. Next, Wiley mixed it into the milk, and then the coffee. But the test subjects were able to figure that out so quickly that basically they ended up just saying, you need to swallow this capsule with every meal and we're going to stand there and watch you do it. The volunteers reportedly called the capsule's bullets. One reporter for the Washington Post published what he imagined the volunteers Christmas dinner menu would look like. Apple sauce, borax, soup, borax, turkey, borax. The Washington Post reported on the Poison Squad often. People seemed to like reading about it so much that sometimes a reporter would just make something up. One article claimed that eating the borax had made the volunteers turn pink. "Each of the young men undergoing the course of treatment has blossomed out with a bright pink complexion that would make a society bride sick with envy." After it was published, the USDA received a stack of letters from women asking what they needed to take to get such beautiful skin. And this Poison Squad, as it went forward, got a huge amount of attention. It wasn't just that newspapers were covering it. There were songs about it. There were shows about it. There were not just wiles, you know. I wonder what's in it, but poems written about it. You can find the host of the most incredible cartoons. But as the borax experiment went on, the volunteers started getting very sick. You know, they were throwing up. They were losing weight. They felt incredibly off. While he hadn't expected that to happen. And he said, which really stuck with me, that that was the experiment that changed the way he saw the entire program. Because it was the one that convinced him that they had been underestimating, not overestimating, but underestimating how dangerous this was, that these compounds that everyone was just like, oh, yeah, this is part of the daily diet. When you added them up as he was doing, were much more dangerous than he had expected. And you see the tone of his messaging change after the borax experiment. And you see the tone of the way newspapers are covering this change, right? The Post-Head really wrote some early articles in which they kind of saw this as high comedy, man agreeing to sit around a table and dine dangerously and these food adventurers and all that. But by the time the borax results come out, they're just not even messing around. They're saying eight poison. Professor Wiley was feeding his volunteers poison. And the message to the American public, then, is you're reading poison every day. You're starting to see this sort of shift in public attitude in which people are actually hearing this and realizing. I really think for the first time just how dangerous this was and that they might be poisoning their children. And so you start to get this sort of, I always think of it as a low simmering public fire. People are starting to get angry, but they're probably not angry enough. And the food industry, about the time these studies started coming out, start really actively working to discredit Wiley as a scientist. The borax industry actually hired a publicist who wrote fake letters to newspapers to pretending to be a citizen who were grateful for borax in their food and felt that Wiley was trying to make their food more dangerous. And he wrote all these letters. They all got published, right, that were just people he had made up criticizing Wiley. People went after him in other ways. And you see this huge pushback. But it was too late. Wiley and the Poison Squad had already moved on to salicylic acid. And those volunteers were doing even worse than the ones who eat in the borax. Wiley started writing complaint letters to magazines when they printed advertisements for foods that worked what they claimed to be. In one letter he wrote about a product called Malt Coffee that was made from roasted barley and asked how it could have, quote, "real coffee flavor." He wrote, "Is there anything that can have the real coffee flavor except coffee?" Critics called him the policeman of the American stomach, one editorial in a publication called "The California Fruit Grower" said, "Let somebody muzzle the chemist who would destroy our appetite." He kind of goes on the speaking circuit and talks to anyone who will listen to him. And you can see him. And this too, I think, was one of the criticisms that was leveled against him as he doesn't really sound. We have an idea of a scientist as being, you know, completely methodical and objective. They have no opinion. They're just telling you what the data says. And Wiley's not doing that anymore. He wants this to change. And he absolutely refuses to bat down. We'll be right back. Support for criminal comes from Mint Mobile. If you're looking for ways to save money this summer, then you can start by lowering some of your expensive monthly bills, like your phone bill. Mint Mobile can help. Right now, all of Mint's plans are only $15 per month. All of their plans come with high speed 5G data. an unlimited talk in text. We have a friend who switched Mint Mobile and says he's saving money every month since he made the change. To get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to MintMobile.com/phibi. That's MintMobile.com/phibi. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at MintMobile.com/phibi. That's it, there's no catch. 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The mold growing on the walls, the dead rats that were chopped up and went into the sausage, the horrible filthy conditions. Updinson Claire's publisher thought the descriptions of how the meat was processed were so disgusting that the cancels his contract. When he finally found a new publisher, they decided to send two fact checkers to Chicago to make sure that what he was describing in the book was real. And they came back from stockers and they said it's worse than in the book, right? It's absolutely worse. So they published the book and they sent it to Roosevelt and they sent it with a copy of their fact chat. Meanwhile, the jungle becomes this sort of literary sensation and everyone is focused on the horrors of the food production. And it becomes such a scandal that finally Roosevelt sends his own fact checkers to Chicago. And even though the packing houses knew they were coming, things were so bad that Roosevelt goes to Congress and he says, this is terrible, I want this fixed, I want you to pass a meat inspection at. And Congress under pressure from the packing houses says no. And Roosevelt says, fine, I'm going to publish a portion of the report. Then if you don't give me what I want, I'm going to publish the whole thing. One part of the published section of the report describes sick people spitting on the quote, spongy wooden floors of the dark workrooms from which falling scraps of meat are later shoveled up to be later converted into food products. Instantly, Europe cancels all its meat contracts with the United States. And at that point, the packing houses realize or the meat producers realize that they've got to get this fixed. And they go back to Congress and say, yes, we'll agree to a meat inspection act. And so the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 passes in June. And then in this sort of tidal wave of fury, the bonfire finally at full roar as it were. Roosevelt goes to Congress and he says, I'm going to sign a food and drug law if you pass one. And they pass it. And it follows the Meat Inspection Act by about two weeks. So the jungle gets us the Meat Inspection Act and the Meat Inspection Act drives the politics in a way that gets us the first food and drug law. It was called the Pure Food and Drug Act, but it was known as Dr. Wiley's Law. Wiley and the Poison Squad laid the groundwork for people to realize just how dangerous the food supply was. And even up until the 1906 law, people were increasingly writing to Congress and sending telegrams to the White House say, I want some kind of protection. So the sort of public will was growing. And I admire the jungle, but it wouldn't have done that if people hadn't already been so angry if the fire hadn't already been burning in that way. Under the Pure Food and Drug Act, foods couldn't be labeled or branded to mislead the customer, or contain added ingredients which were poisonous or harmful, or have substances mixed in them that reduce their quality or strength, or be colored or mixed or coated to disguise damage or inferiority, or consist in whole or in part of a filthy decomposed or putrid animal or vegetable substance. And that is a paradigm changing moment for the United States because there is no consumer protection laws in the United States until that moment, right? That's the moment that the federal government says, yes, we're in the business of protecting American consumers. And that when the Constitution says promote the general welfare, it actually meets people in their everyday lives. And so we're going to pass these two laws and they're only designed to make American consumers safer. And if you think about it, every single consumer protection law and agency that follows, eventually the FDA, of course, but also the EPA and OSHA and all of the agencies, the Consumer Protection Bureau, all of the agencies that work to make us safer, they're based on the precedent set by those two food laws. It's really amazing. Harvey Wiley continued to publish the results of Poison Squad tests after the pure food and drug act passed. They found that sulfur is acid and sodium benzoate, a substance used in ketchup, both made the volunteers so sick that some of them had to drop out of the study. The last chemical they tested was formaldehyde. They had to call it off fairly soon because people were getting so sick so quickly. And it was one of the first compounds that got taken out of the food supply. It just got taken out, right? 4x came out, cellosilic acid came out. Some of the Ellen coltardis, Wiley commissioned a whole study of dyes and a huge number of the dyes got taken out. They were toxic. Not just the metal metallic dyes like arsenic and lead, but some of these coltardis were really dangerous. Those got taken out. He was directly responsible for getting some very bad things taken out of the food supply. After the Poison Squad studies ended, Wiley spent a lot of his time trying to figure out how to implement the food and drug act. The food and drug laws is a huge complicated thing. And it includes for the first time setting safety regulations for food, right? How are those implemented? Who does the tests? Who's responsible? How do we hold industry to account? And Wiley's really holding out for consumer protection overall. He doesn't want to give an inch on any of these rules. And he realizes that he's at a point that he doesn't really have any power in government anymore, that he's made so many enemies that-- and this is the cost of refusing, I think, to negotiate or compromise to some extent. But his goals are very different from the people he's working with. He realizes that he just can't be an effective person in food safety, in government, anymore. And he resigns from government in 1912. He was offered a job in his own laboratory and food safety column by Goodhouse Keeping Magazine, which at that time was a very different publication. It was a crusading magazine. They allowed him to-- set up something called the Good House Keeping Test Kitchens and he created a part of that called the Good House Keeping Seal of Approval. So in his laboratories at Good House Keeping, he went ahead and ran tests that the government was refusing to do and then Good House Keeping would publish those results and they would give the seal of approval to food and drink that he felt was safe. The seal still exists today. His contract with the magazine stated that they wouldn't advertise any food, drug or cosmetic products that Wiley didn't approve. When he discovered that a product was potentially dangerous or fraudulent, they pulled the ad. He encouraged readers to eat whole grains and avoid too much sugar and in 1928 he warned readers against using tobacco and linked cigarette smoking to cancer. The surgeon general issued its first report on smoking 36 years later in 1964. Harvey Wiley died in 1930. His tombstone reads, "Father of the Pure Food Ball." What do you think is Wiley in the poison squad's legacy? Let me say this. You could not do the poison squad experiments today, right? There's not an institutional review board that would say yes. Why don't we just run experiments in which we knowingly feed dangerous substances to our co-workers? That would never happen today. But food is no longer one of the top 10 causes of death. Our food supply is not perfect today. In any way. But thanks to Wiley, we don't have to worry about drinking a glass of milk nowadays. Right. If it's pasteurized. Let's not even get into the wrong milk. No, we are not going to drink milk with formaldehyde in it. We are not going to have coffee with lead in it because it contains chart bone that was blackened with lead to look like coffee grounds. We are not going to be drinking beer and wine that contain a compound that might cause the lining of our stomach to bleed. We are not going to be having lead in our cheese. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, and Lena Silicin. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Seminetti. This episode was fact checked by Katie Cedarborg. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at this is criminal.com and you can sign up for our newsletter at this is criminal.com/newsletter. Deborah Blum's book is The Poison Squad. One chemist single-minded crusade for food safety at the turn of the 20th century. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal This Is Love and Phoebe Reads in Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal Co-creator Lauren Spore talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com/criminal. We're on Facebook at this is Criminal. And Instagram and TikTok at Criminal_Podcast. You're also on youtube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Imagine setting your makeup then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new grippy setting missed from Mavily New York. 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