The Poison Squad: One Chemists Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Deborah Blum

The Poison Squad: One Chemists Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Reviews

• 
  Brenda

  Dude.
  
  The Industrial Revolution, for all its major leaps toward with invention and innovation, definitely fucked over some people.
  
  Like a lot of people.
  
  The biggest take away from this nonfiction book is that given the opportunity, big business will screw us over tenfold unless someone holds them accountable.
  
  They put copper, lead, formaldehyde and so much more in our food.
  
  Kids died from drinking milk. That’s so mind boggling that I had to reread the paragraphs focused on that. Paragraphs, plural, because it HAPPENED MORE THAN ONCE OVER SEVERAL YEARS.
  
  This author does an amazing job of compiling all of the information together in a cohesive form. There’s a inordinate amount of information within these pages and while it can get a bit dense and repetitive, it never lost my interest. I’m so glad I had the opportunity to read it and I’m going to make damn sure everybody knows to read it.
  
  FIGHT THE MAN!
  (Or just hold corporations like Coca-Cola accountable)
• 
  David Rubenstein

  This is an amazing book about Dr. Harvey Wiley, a chemist in the Department of Agriculture at the turn of the century. He worked tirelessly to keep food and beverages safe for consumption. A hundred years ago, adulterated food products were very common. Unhealthful--or even poisonous--additives stretched the volume of foods, making them devoid of nutrition, and even harmful. Sometimes the additives were employed to stretch the apparent volume of products. Sometimes the additives were used to prolong shelf life. Sometimes the foods were deliberately mislabeled, to trick consumers. And, some foods were processed under very unsanitary conditions. It was a very big problem. And it could be argued that the problem still exists.
  
  While Theodore Roosevelt was president, the first law was passed, aimed at these problems. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was passed was passed, to help ameliorate these problems. However, the law did not, by itself, fix any problems. The Department of Agriculture was still in bed with food manufacturers. And, there was no proof that food additives or adulterants were dangerous to health. And, in order to prohibit a manufacturer from adding a chemical to foods, it was necessary to first prove that the chemical was dangerous to health.
  
  Harvey Wiley, the head of the chemistry division at the Department of Agriculture, was the leading proponent of food safety and honesty in labeling. He formed what was known as the "Poison Squad". He had some rooms in the basement fixed up like a restaurant. He invited healthy civil servants to be served free meals there. Participants were admonished to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at this location, and to eat nothing at any other location. Of course, free meals were a big attraction, but they realized that they would be participating in nutrition experiments. The cooks added different concentrations of food additives, with the purpose of determining who would get sick. These experiments showed that certain food additives were clearly dangerous, and therefore prohibited from use.
  
  Wiley's efforts at upholding the safety of foods made him a nationwide hero in the eyes of women. He had to constantly battle against the Secretary of Agriculture, who very frequently sided with food producers instead of siding with food safety. But Wiley's popularity made it difficult to fire him, although firing was attempted several times.
  
  This book is about the courage of this man who stood for food safety and honesty, above all else. It was an enjoyable read, engaging, and full of surprises. But, I didn't read this book--I listened to the audiobook. It is narrated very nicely by Kirsten Potter. I listened to the book while taking long walks from Arlington to Theodore Roosevelt Island. And the most amazing experience occurred while listening to the discussions between Harvey Wiley and Theodore Roosevelt, while viewing the super-sized statue of Theodore Roosevelt! The central circle on the island is ornamented by Roosevelt's statue and chiseled quotes by Roosevelt that show how progressive he was for his times. What a treat!
• 
  Amy

  During his successful 2016 campaign for the White House, Trump promised to have his cabinet "submit a list of every wasteful and unnecessary regulation which kills jobs, and which does not improve public safety, and eliminate them." His FDA commission, Scott Gottlieb, followed that promise by saying what while he recognizes the importance of food safety legislation he wants to "strike the right balance" in its implementation. Consumer groups now anticipate delayed and reduced protections from agencies facing deep budget cuts. The Earthjustice Institute has warned of the "Trump administration's willingness to accommodate even unfounded and partial industry opposition to the detriment of the health and welfare of people and families across the country."
  
  Such a warning, with its mix of theatrical anger and genuine dismay could have been written, almost word for word, by Harvey Washington Wiley more than a century ago. The sense of deja vu, echoing down the years, should remind us of the ways that food safety practices have dramatically changed in this country--and of the ways they have changed hardly at all. (The Poison Squad, pg. 289)
  
  I found this book while browsing in my local library and picked it up because public health is always an interesting topic to me. It took me a little while to get started on this book, but once I did I could hardly put it down. The Poison Squad follows Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley in his career primarily as chief chemist for the Department of Agriculture, explains how his research on altered and deliberately unlabeled/mislabeled products came to shape his advocacy for safe and pure (or, at the very least, properly labeled) food and drink, and illustrates for readers the parallels between the complaints and schemes of business of decades ago and the complaints and schemes of business today. Just like the Earthjustice statement could have been written by Dr. Wiley, The Poison Squad is littered with quotations from 19th and 20th century businessmen, their lawyers, and the their lobbyists, that could be written - word for word - by the industry-at-any-cost interests of today.
  
  I knew about a couple of the cases cited in the text - the poisoning of children with milk that had been 'preserved' with formaldehyde, the mass poisoning of mainly children by Elixir Sulfanilamide - but not the vast majority. Well written, informative, and very, very relevant, The Poison Squad was an amazing book and it is one that I would highly recommend.
  
  However, given that a good many of the descriptions are graphic, I have one caveat: I would try not to recommend The Poison Squad to someone who didn't have at least an ok tolerance for nauseating descriptions, the likes of which are extremely likely to cause intense revulsion at the very idea of some things once being considered 'food.' For example:
  
  Doctors continued to worry over continued reports of "grocer's itch," a side effect of the deceptive practice of grinding up insects and passing the result off as brown sugar. Sometimes live lice survived the process. (The Poison Squad, pg. 66)
  
  The secretary [of agriculture, Wilson] also had endorsed a November decision to seize fifty-two industrial-sized cans of eggs preserved in a 2 percent solution of boracic acid. The Hipolite Egg Company of St. Louis sold these huge cans--forty-two pounds each--to the baking industry at a price much lower than fresh eggs. Hipolite specialized in salvaging dirty, cracked, and even rotting eggs for use in breads and cakes. The company was particularly known for using "spots" (decomposing eggs); mixing their contents into a thick, homogeneous mass; using boracic acid, a by-product of borax [the cleaning product also used for pest control] to halt further decomposition; and then selling the eggy soup by the can. (The Poison Squad, pg. 203)
  
  New options [for coloring agents] arose with synthetic dyes made from coal tars--dense, chemically complex residues left over the processing of coal...The new dyes were durable, cheap, and potent--and rapidly adopted by industrial processors of everything from fabric to food. (The Poison Squad, pg. 229)
  
  The organizers [of the pure food exhibit] decided to exhibit two thousand different brands presenting tainted food and drink sold in the United States. ...Minnesota and South Dakota sent sheets of silk and wool, each five feet square, brilliantly colored with coal-tar dyes extracted from a variety of strawberry syrups, ketchup, jams and jellies, and red wine. Michigan sent samples of lemon extract in which the manufacturer had used cheap but deadly wood alcohol as a base. Illinois provided more faked extracts, such as "vanilla" made only of alcohol and brown food coloring...Participating states provided forty brands of ketchup, labeled as a tomato product, that were mostly stewed pumpkin rind dyed red, and some fifty brands of baking powder that were largely well-ground chalk enhanced by aluminum compounds. To the fury of food industry executives, the fair's head of publicity, Mark Bennett, send out a news release titled "Lessons in Food Poisoning," which noted: "If you want to have your faith in mankind rather rudely shaken, take the time to look about in the exhibit of the State Food Commissioners in the south end of the Palace of Agriculture." (The Poison Squad, pg. 115)
  
  This is a small sampling of just what I could easily find and could be easily understood from a relatively short quote. I personally think the text is all the better for including these details; they do not allow industry malpractice and unethical behavior to hide behind the veneer of polite wording. I think it is necessary the same way that Upton Sinclair's graphic descriptions of the Chicago stockyards and packing plants were necessary (The Jungle, as well as other information about it and the yards themselves are also quoted, by the way). But, because I know not everyone has the same opinion as me, I would try to take into account personal taste when making - or choosing not to make - a recommendation.
• 
  Viola

  Rūpnieciskā revolūcija neapšaubāmi deva pasaulei daudz labu un progresīvu lietu, tomēr bija arī savas ēnas puses. Šī grāmata apskata to, kā 19.gs. otrajā pusē negodīgi uzņēmēji darīja visu, lai gūtu papildus peļņu. Viņiem palīdzēja arī fakts, ka pirmais likums ASV, kas regulēja pārtikas standartus, tika pieņemts tikai 1906.g. Līdz tam, piemēram, balzamēšanas šķidrums pienā bija bieži sastopama parādība.
  Ņemot par piemēru Dr. H. Vailiju, kurš bija šī likuma viens no iniciātoriem, autore meistarīgi atklāj visas grūtības ar ko saskārās gan veselības speciālisti gan parastie patērētaji, lai nodrošinātu drošu un veselīgu pārtiku.
• 
  Mark

  Another superb book by Deborah Blum. Like her previous book, The Poisoner's Handbook, Blum dives deep into our recent past to show how different we were in some ways just a century ago, and yet how alike we are in many respects.
  
  The Poisoner's Handbook told the story of the birth of forensic science, along with the frighteningly common availability of murderous poisons in the early 1900s. The Poison Squad tells the story of the birth of pure food and drug laws in the United States, led largely by a single iron-willed man, Harvey Washington Wiley, although he had a lot of help from crusading reformers, muckraking journalists and state food inspectors.
  
  Wiley came of age in the late 1800s, when the desire of food manufacturers to provide cheap products in an age before refrigeration caused them to dose their food with preservatives that seem almost ludicrously dangerous today --borax, sodium benzoate, and even formaldehyde. For purely deceptive purposes, they also produced ketchup with no tomatoes, coffee with no coffee, and whiskey with no whiskey.
  
  At a time when American activists were seeking reform on many fronts -- women the right to vote, temperance committees a ban on alcohol, Teddy Roosevelt an attack on monopolies -- the pure food movement became another plank in this broad reformist effort, and Wiley was its leading figure.
  
  The title of the book comes from an experiment that Wiley put together while running the Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agriculture, which for ethical reasons might never occur today. To test how safe various preservatives were, he recruited volunteers -- mostly young single men working for the federal government -- and put them on a strictly regulated diet, with some in the group getting regular food and others adding capsules of whatever preservative he was studying. By doing this, Wiley was able to show the dangers of substances like sodium benzoate and formaldehyde -- none of his young men died, but some got very sick -- and refute the arguments of manufacturers that the preservatives were harmless.
  
  After years of campaigning, both through his bureau's careful testing and through his charismatic speaking appearances, Wiley finally managed to persuade Congress and President Roosevelt to pass a pure food and drug act. But once the bill was signed into law in 1906, the manufacturers did everything in their power to dilute it, and years of fighting and court battles remained ahead.
  
  Throughout most of this period, Wiley was saddled with a particular burden. His boss, Agriculture Secretary James Wilson, served under four presidents and was so industry-friendly that he blunted much of what Wiley was able to do, prohibiting him from publishing scientific findings, blocking him from speaking appearances, and finally appointing a special committee that had the power to overrule many of Wiley's recommendations.
  
  Despite all those roadblocks, Wiley became enormously popular both within his agency and with the broader public, and when he finally decided to leave government service, he was given a prominent position and much higher pay as a consultant and author for Good Housekeeping, then a powerhouse magazine for America's educated women.
  
  The magic Blum brings to these books is her ability to take government reports, transcripts of testimony and court hearings and other dusty tomes and bring them to life, infusing this critical change in our attitudes toward government regulation with humanity and drama.
  
  And while we no longer face borax and formaldehyde in our food, the elemental struggle between businesses trying to get away with whatever they can for profit, vs. the government preventing their worst excesses through regulation, remains just as powerful an issue today as it did when the Pure Food and Drug law was passed.
  
  Highly recommended.
• 
  Jelena R

  Tedious.
• 
  Kris

  This book focuses on chemicals like formaldehyde, sodium benzoate, Borax, and strong acids and dyes. There's also mention of arsenic, led, mercury, and copper. I wanted a little more about foods laced with blatantly crazy drugs we still think of today —like morphine, cocaine, and heroine.
  
  It sounds like these drugs were harming people, but the field was so new there wasn't documented evidence and studies to prove it beyond doubt. Once the research got started, it was damning. I was fascinated by the fact that volunteers willingly ingested poison for weeks on end just to help a scientist prove this stuff.
  
  Even the strongest conservative has to admit the government's role is to protect people from harm. And this stuff harmed. It isn't a question of enforcing regulation to protect health, it's a question of how much regulation is needed to protect health. It's obvious some kind of regulation was sorely needed during these times.
  
  But it's a far cry from the regulations on the books today. Blum would have you believe there's no difference between 1910 and 2010. Her leftist bias is clear, and every once in a while her voice pops out to pester at you annoyingly from the page (...Shame on those people who dare try to reduce regulations... It's so obvious you should think the way I do... How dare Trump do x, y, and z...). Blegh. This was clearly written in a post-Trump era. Luckily her bias was occasional, easy enough to spot, then proceed to ignore.
  
  I do wonder if people 50 or 100 years from now will look back at all the chemicals in our processed junk foods, alongside the increased rates of cancer, and call us crazy too.
  
  I also want to read:
  
  Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal
• 
  Claudia

  Today, when talking about the safety of our food, we are concerned with MSG; high-fructose corn syrup; trans fats, synthetic sweeteners, artificial colors among others. In the late 1800's into the early years of the twentieth century, you would have been concerned more about arsenic, formaldehyde (yes, embalming fluid); salicylic acid, copper sulfate, and borax being used as preservatives. Coal-tar dyes to make the food appear fresh and bright. Saccharin to replace the more expensive sugar. Acetic acid replacing lemon juice. So-called neutral spirits colored, flavored and called whiskey. Nitrites to bleach flour to brilliant whiteness. Lead and a variety of minerals in candy.
  
  It is suspected that hundreds if not thousands of young children were killed by milk that was more chemical than dairy - the recipe could be a pint of water to each quart of milk after the cream was skimmed off. Add a bit of chalk or plaster of paris for whitening. Molasses to give it a golden color and to replace the cream, a squirt of something that may include pureed calf brains. And don't forget the formaldehyde! Yummy, isn't it? You don't want to know what could be in butter.
  
  Food manufacturers were certainly inventive with their additives. Sometimes the only thing missing in the product was what it was advertised and sold as. Of course, what it could include was mashed fruit and vegetable leavings. Charred rope. Sawdust. Crushed nut shells, ground insects and floor sweepings of all kinds.
  
  This book is about Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemist in the employ of the federal Department of Agriculture (the infant FDA) and his fight to eliminate toxic minerals and chemicals from the foods available to the American people. The same chemicals/additives, which were forbidden for use in Europe and Canada, flooded American food.
  
  And it was a long, exhausting fight. Utilizing the resources available, Wiley would create his 'poison squads' which would be volunteers who would take in the chemical investigated over a period of time and record any negative impacts on their health. The data would be analyzed and the report released to the public.
  
  Of course, the manufacturers fought hard and long. They were all about using cheaper materials instead of authentic, pure food products. Most were certainly were not willing to make the product a few cents more expensive but without toxic additives. But Dr. Wiley had his supporters as well - the AMA, women's groups, several Congressmen and Senators, various state-level secretaries of agriculture, newspaper journalists especially after the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle which blew the lid off the meatpacking industry of Chicago. Fanny Farmer and her famous cookbook. H.J. Heinz that proved that food could be uncontaminated, tasty and appealing to the buying public.
  
  1906 saw the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act but food industry lobbyists managed to convince industry-friendly politicians to basically weaken and gut the law. But it was a start and Dr. Wiley eventually lost his neutrality in his crusade for unadulterated and safe food which caused tension within the Department of Agriculture. Taking on Coca Cola for their cocaine and caffeine. Taking on the whiskey manufacturers. Saccharin and bread whitening agents.
  
  In the end, Dr. Wiley felt the best decision for him and his family was to continue his crusade through a job offered by Good Housekeeping magazine. He never saw the modified Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 which corrected the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Unfortunately, it took the death of more than a 100 people who were poisoned and killed by cough syrup sweetened by antifreeze.
  
  This is a vital book to read. Not just because of how far food safety has advanced over the years but how much more work needs to be done. Additional laws and updates to food and drug regulation over the years is in danger from our current administration as Trump promised to eliminate every unnecessary regulation and it seems that the FDA and its work is once again under fire. Only time will tell if it survives or is stripped of its authority and dominion.
  
  
• 
  Emily

  This author's
  previous book is one of the most popular I've encountered, in that everyone I know who's read it, loved it. It was about the emergence of forensic medicine (and solving poisoning cases) against the backdrop of Prohibition-era New York.
  
  In this work she takes on a scientifically similar topic with a good deal less surrounding jazz and excitement. Early in the twentieth century, the food supply was far from the bucolic ideal we might imagine having existed before the emergence of junk food and factory farms. In fact, food purveyors regularly adulterated foods with all sorts of disgusting bulking materials, or added toxic substances like arsenic to achieve bright colors. Some foods were straight-up fakes.
  
  The book is full of hair-raising examples. For example, milk producers wanted to stretch their production. "The standard recipe was a pint of lukewarm water to every quart of milk—after the cream had been skimmed off. To improve the bluish look of the remaining liquid, milk producers learned to add whitening agents such as plaster of paris or chalk. Sometimes they added a dollop of molasses to give the liquid a more golden, creamy color. To mimic the expected layer of cream on top, they might also add a final squirt of something yellowish, occasionally pureed calf brains." (loc 236). "Cloves" were made of burned seashells or "pepper" from charcoal and sawdust--and there were few laws restricting any of these practices. Children were poisoned by milk "preserved" with formaldehyde.
  
  The main figure here is Dr. Harvey Wiley, who tried to use his role at the Agriculture Department to research food safety and bring about legislation to protect Americans' health. The fundamental problem with this book is that Wiley's career was long and slow-moving, full of bureaucratic maneuvers that don't exactly leap of the page like the juicy revenge poisonings in Blum's previous book. In his personal life, Wiley also romanced a librarian from the Library of Congress, which reads like a painfully prolonged case of mild sexual harassment culminating in the lady taking stock of her independent economic prospects and marrying him.
  
  Blum's writing, research, and story-telling are still well-done--this is just a topic that's going to appeal to fewer, and only more patient readers.
• 
  Romie

  I got about halfway through, reading less and less in each sitting, and then put it down and didn't pick it back up again. I expected a book on The Poison Squad - on the food tests done by the precursor to the FDA to establish guidelines for the safety (or unsafety) of various preservatives. But the book spends very little time on that subject.
  
  A lot of it feels like someone trying to hit a word count - chapters and chapters of summaries of "so and so submitted this bill and it was voted on and the vote was x to x," and "this person thought this person was flirting with him but she wasn't." There were three chapters of well-trod ground about Upton Sinclair writing "The Jungle." (In fairness, I did appreciate the nitty-gritty details of how it was financed, because I am the sort of person who watches a movie and then looks up its per-screen average.)
  
  I tried to take this book on its own merits once it was clear it was a dry history of the political efforts that led to the eventual passage of food safety legislation in the U.S., rather than a story of a chemist doing experiments. However, once I hit a chapter on Heinz's development of modern ketchup, a subject I have written about myself, I found so many factual errors in the first few pages that it made me question whether I could trust the other areas I know less about. (For the record: the idea that Europeans thought tomatoes were poisonous is an American myth, and the idea that the acidity of tomatoes but not lemons caused lead poisoning from pewter plates, which are part of Medieval Times and not a real thing in medieval times,
  is an even newer urban legend. I don't know why books are held to a lower fact-checking standard than magazines. You'd think it would be the other way around.)
  
  Disappointing.
• 
  David

  It is heartening to see this excellent new history getting favorable attention on the
  radio, in
  newspapers, in
  online journals, and in both
  food blogs and
  science blogs.
  
  In addition, there are already many reviews here on Goodreads that adequately summarize and elaborate on this book's fine qualities, so I thought I would allow myself the freedom to write a few words about what the century-old struggle for safer food in the US has to say about current unpleasantness. There are many similarities.
  
  It's hard to believe that anyone would construe the liberties we enjoy in the United States as permission to introduce known poisons, insect body parts, rodent excretia, etc., into food, but that's exactly what many food manufactures, big and small, did. Furthermore, attempts to limit known poisons, etc., from the food supply were treated as outrageous examples of government overreach and hysterical attention-seeking. Of course, from this distance, the champions of such “freedoms” look like the villains they were, and their arguments ring extremely hollow.
  
  We can only hope that people will be around in a century to give today's analogs the ridicule they richly deserve. Now, of course, the stakes are higher. Instead of simply poisoning an entire country, today's villains have the opportunity to wreck the whole world.
  
  This book also reminds how difficult it is to do the right thing. There are many pitfalls. For example, the book's splendidly cantankerous hero, log-cabin-born chemist Harvey Washington Wiley, was a thorn in the side of corner-cutters and quacks of all varieties well into his ninth decade. However, like a lot of people in the do-gooding business, he occasionally loses focus of the main goal and wastes precious time and resources on fringe issues. Wiley, for example, was an enthusiastic consumer of bourbon and pursued a strict definition of what type of restorative should be allowed to bear that proud label. I have been known to favor an occasional snort myself, so I appreciate his enthusiasm, but I recognize bourbon is (as is often said here in The Nation's Capital) not the hill you want to die on. Defending the purity of milk, flour, canned goods, etc., brings a rosy glow of mother- and baby-protecting saintliness to your advocacy. Bourbon – not so much. There are only so many hours in a day, so many battles you can fight. Choose wisely.
  
  Speaking of choosing your battles: Wiley knew that his cause was just, and he was for much of his life the smartest person in the room. As a result, he tended to shoot off his mouth and (another Nation's Capital cliché coming up) not suffer fools gladly. Most of the time, people who really needed defending benefitted from this tendency, but when you are in the room with the President of the United States, it's often wise to choose your words carefully, even if (perhaps especially when) the President is a bit of a tool. In Wiley's case, he unnecessarily alienated the affections of Theodore Roosevelt. The consequences were not disastrous, but even Wiley himself admitted that it would have been wiser to keep his trap shut.
  
  Finally, remember: the struggle never ends. It's natural enough, when long work results in success, to take a moment out to do a triumphant happy-dance, but remember while shaking what God gave you that your opponents are already looking for ways to roll back your improvements and undermine your good works. As happens similarly today, evil lawyerly minions who opposed Wiley managed to change the wording of legislation and rule-making so that strict guidelines were replaced with weasel words (e.g., “The guidelines now merely banned an undefined 'excessive' amount” (Kindle location 2430)). These words can then be litigated into meaninglessness, and/or cost pesky do-gooders a small mountain of legal fees.
  
  This is a fine book about a man whose life work benefitted others. In his lifetime, he received a certain amount of fame and monetary reward for his selflessness, but now he is largely forgotten, while names of murderous racists of the same period and earlier still grace our high schools and highways, and their graven images still infest our parks and public lands. Read this and remember someone worth remembering.
  
  I received a free electronic advance review copy of this book via
  Netgalley and
  Penguin Random House.
• 
  Yibbie

  Really, this is the career biography of Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley not the detailed history of the 'Poison Squad’. It does include a detailed description of its setup and the first test and random references to it throughout, but that’s all. The vast majority is a chronicle of political and legal battles over food safety laws.
  It is not an impartial book. The author conspicuously biased in her presentation of the multiple conflicts. Anyone who differs with Wiley, even slightly, is painted as weak or corrupt, the enemy. Any practice that doesn’t immediately conform to his opinions is vilified whether he can back them up with evidence or not. Then there is the virulent anti-business bias. With the exception of a handful of companies, every business is viewed as evil incarnate. The proposed solution is always federal intervention. The heroes are always the activists and bureaucrats. That got irritating.
  
• 
  John Mccullough

  Left to themselves, businessmen who live in a dog-eat-dog world apparently will do anything to stay alive. In “Free Enterprise” without regulation the consumer is at the mercy of businessmen’s honesty or lack thereof. The ones that DO present an honest product are at a severe disadvantage to those that cut corners, or in the case of comestibles, dishonest merchants often adulterate the product with inert or dangerous additives to reduce costs or preserve the product, or worse. It is only with government intervention and establishing standards that both the consumer AND the honest businessman can hope to survive or come out ahead. Don’t like regulation? Think of s baseball game without umpires or football without referees. Yes, like that. So, it was pretty much like that in 1850 in the US. Of course, Europe was already way ahead on food regulation at the time.
  
  Author Blum describes the fight for food purity in the US at the turn of the past century. Everyone should already have read Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book, “The Jungle,” accurately painting the ghastly picture of life for workers in the meat-packing plants of Chicago in the first decade of the 20th Century. It also describes the putrid products these packing houses foisted on the public and the US military in the Spanish-American War of 1898. If that doesn’t make an impression, nothing will.
  
  Blum’s book centers on the story of Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a huge, gawky Indiana native who championed food purity, became a champion in the fight against commercial and government corruption and became a national hero to progressives, a villain to established commercial and governmental interests. He even ended up on a US postage stamp to celebrate his courage and effectiveness in making us a healthier nation.
  
  The book chronicles the history of the inventiveness of humans to cheat their fellow humans versus the forces that demand honesty. Thousands of products have been developed that give good value for money and tens of thousands to the contrary. As one pundit put it to describe “religious” deceivers, “They pray for themselves on Sunday and prey on their neighbors the rest of the week.”
  
  Have we passed the age of deception? Just recently, the Abbott Laboratories’ infant formula division close down because a whistleblower alerted the public of hidden contamination in the production process. Rather than self-correct the problem, once discovered, Abbott Labs just shut down production completely, throwing the country into a genuine panic because infant formula was now being produced at levels well below consumption levels.
  
  In Wiley’s early years of food purity crusading it was the Democrats in Congress who were obstinately opposed to reform. Today it is the Republican “Party” that seeks to minimize regulations and inspections that endanger our health, even our lives, as long as their special-interest commercial bribers control our laws. The fight goes on – public safety versus investor profits – who will win this year as the D. C. soap opera grinds on? Blum expertly describes the melodrama up to the beginning of the disastrous Trump administration that takes charge of our safety network and destroys it piece-by-piece. Necessary reading for the informed public. Sour reading for the crooks in our midst.
  
  Best advice: READ THE LABELS!!! And don’t eat anything you can’t pronounce!
  
• 
  Karyl

  I saw this for sale at B&N and was immediately drawn to it, so I requested it from my library. But before I could get to it, my DVR recorded the episode of American Experience titled The Poison Squad, which is about this exact subject. So if you’re interested in the subject matter, but you aren’t really in the mood to read, I would highly recommend watching that documentary. It features Deborah Blum, the author, so it’s a great summary of the material she covered in this book.
  
  Harvey Washington Wiley was a man on a mission. At the time that he became the chief chemist of the US Department of Agriculture in 1883, food safety in America was non-existent. Cows were fed the swill from breweries, and the resulting milk they gave was watery and lacking much nutrition. They were chained upright in their stalls and forced to give milk until they fell over dead. Canned food started with rotting and decaying scraps brought back to life with dangerous additives. Flour was bleached with nitrogen oxides, leaving large doses of nitrates in the resulting product, which couldn’t be baked out. Not only were there no laws regulating what chemicals and preservatives could be added to the nation’s food supply, but there were no studies showing how safe or dangerous they were, and there was no requirement for labeling the products either. Containers could have higher bottoms than they appeared to have, making consumers believe they were getting more in a larger container when they really were getting less. And the consumer had no idea exactly what was in the food they were buying, whether they felt it was safe or not; they couldn’t decide for themselves whether to ingest saccharine or copper sulfate or the nitrates resulting from bleaching flour because there was no regulation on any of it.
  
  Wiley wanted to change all of that. Initially he sought simply to label food products so the consumer would be informed regarding what s/he was ingesting, but once he started his Poison Squad, in which he fed a team of twelve young men a specific diet over time to test various additives, he realized that the US needed laws against these harmful chemicals. But as in modern times, various lobbies sought to have his research buried so they could continue to make money with impunity. It was mind-boggling, coming off the impeachment hearings in which the Republicans kept making various excuses as to why the hearings weren’t even legitimate, to read about congressmen against any kind of food labeling, with such inane statements of, “The American consumer doesn’t need the government telling him what to eat!” when Dr. Wiley was simply trying to request laws that caused the government to tell the consumer what was in his food so he could decide what he wanted to ingest. It just sounded all so familiar.
  
  It also makes me shake my head to know that there are so many people in 21st century America that don’t realize how literally dangerous our food was just over a hundred years ago. In the age of wondering about pesticides and organic farming and “all-natural” foods and folks looking for “raw milk” (ie, un-pasteurized, which I cannot even fathom wanting after reading this book), at least we don’t have formaldehyde mixed into our milk, the sweet taste of which covered up the fact that it was spoiling quickly without pasteurization or refrigeration. And it was this addition of formaldehyde, an embalming fluid and a poison, which killed children that drank the milk.
  
  This book is interesting, but it does get bogged down in a lot of names and data. I would actually recommend watching the documentary over reading this book because it’s just so much information that it’s hard to keep a hold of. That said, if reading is more your speed, I highly recommend this book.
• 
  Siria

  A fascinating read, albeit not one to undertake on a full stomach. Deborah Blum's The Poison Squad recounts the origins of food safety laws in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century U.S. Come for the anecdotes which you will be forced, forced, to read aloud to anyone unlucky enough to be in earshot of you (the U.S. government once sued some barrels of Coca-Cola! It used to be possible, and indeed legal, to buy 42lb barrels of decaying eggs mixed with borax to use in cake baking!), stay for the horrifying realisation of how little has truly changed in the battle between those working for food safety and environmental health standards and pro-business capitalists with their eye only on a corporation's bottom line.
• 
  Lis Carey

  This is the fascinating, alarming, and encouraging story of the first great round in the fight for food safety in the USA.
  
  In the second half of the 19th century, the food industry embraced the chemical industry, and preservatives, colorants, and substitutions became common. This might not sound all that alarming, as all those terms apply to things legitimately used in food now. However, at that time, milk could contain formaldehyde, jellies and jams might contain none of the claimed fruit at all and get their color from coal tar dyes, and there were no labeling requirements at all. Basic food safety legislation was making progress in Europe, but was completely squelched by industry efforts in America.
  
  In 1883, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley was appointed chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture, and began a thirty-year crusade for clean, safe, and honestly packaged food. Under him, the agency began methodically investigating fraud in the manufacture and sale of food and drink. This included tests on human volunteers dubbed "The Poison Squad," tests that probably wouldn't pass an ethics committee review now, but were for the time a serious early attempt at controlled testing with informed volunteer test subjects. Among the commonly used preservatives in food at the time, aside from formaldehyde, were borax (a cleaning compound) and salicylic acid (a pharmaceutical). Saccharine was used as a sugar substitute in food products that continued to be labeled, if they were at all, as being sweetened with sugar. Even honest labeling was seen as an outrageous infringement on noble American business.
  
  Wiley wasn't just fighting industry greed; he was often fighting politicians in the House and Senate, and even his own colleagues in the Department of Agriculture. On the other hand, he also had allies: the American Medical Association, women's suffrage groups, Fannie Farmer and other popular cookbook writers, women's magazines, and even those companies in the food industry, such as J.B. Heinz, who took pride in their products being manufactured to high standards with only the expected ingredients (ketchup made primarily of tomatoes, for instance.)
  
  It's a fascinating battle, with victories and setbacks, and Wiley himself is an interesting character. Nor is he the only interesting character here. It was never a one-man battle, on either side of the fight, and Blum truly does justice to the story.
  
  Highly recommended.
  
  I bought this audiobook.
• 
  Jimmy

  The author gives many examples of deceptive food practices in the 1800s and the turn of the century. Here is one: Honey was often tinted corn syrup. Without laws and regulations, how would we stop such unscrupulous practices? A few years ago I heard a friend complain about laws in California that required honey makers to register with the state for quality control. They forget that there are reasons for regulations.
  
  The book is a tribute to the great Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley who in 1883 as a young chemist first wrote a paper exposing such practices. And guess who opposed him? The honey producers themselves. They thought it would do harm to their reputations. So the trade journals attacked him. All the while ignoring the fact that many "beekeepers" had NO BEES.
  
  A report on milk production in 1850 reads like a horror story. The cows lived in misery, and the children drinking the milk were sick and often dying.
  
  Wiley became famous as a chemist doing his best to expose such practices. He was hated by some as a man "who is doing all he can to destroy American business.
  
  Lead solder was used to seal the seams of tin cans. Europe regulated the use of lead, but the US had no standards even for food. This libertarian philosophy continues even to today. We have many who want the companies to regulate themselves. A dose of history might get them to think again about such a philosophy.
  
  Medicines were often little more than flavored drinking alcohol. Legislation was constantly flouted. Businesses opposed even the idea of a pure food and drug act.
  
  Wiley found support from women's organizations. One area of concern was a famously stimulating soft drink known as Coca-Cola. They wanted the company to drastically reduce the amount of cocaine in its formula. It also contained caffeine. That is still a problem.
  
  
  https://teens.drugabuse.gov/blog/post...
  
  Upton Sinclair, another hero, had a grubstake of $1,000 (about $30,000 today) to work on a novel about the courageous workers of the Chicago stockyards who were fighting for better living conditions. He would spend 7 weeks in the stockyards dressing in the grubby clothes of a worker to blend in. He would settle down to write the most influential book of his prolific career: The Jungle. It was about a Lithuanian immigrant with the dream of a better life in America. But he is nearly destroyed by the horrendous working conditions of the fictional "Anderson" meat-processing company. That name stood for Armour Meats. The conclusion of the book is that the only way out is to embrace socialism.
  
  Sinclair wanted to focus on workers' rights, but it was the meat stories that affected the reading public. Once again, it showed that there is always a connection between social justice and good environmental protection.
  
  From Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle, we learn such things as how pickled beef had to be bathed in acid; the men working that line had their fingers eaten away by repeated exposure. Tuberculosis germs thrived in the moist, stinking air of the processing plants and spread from animal to animal. Workers occasionally fell into vats of acid and "when they were fished out, there was never enough left of them to be worth exhibiting." Sometimes a worker would slip into a vat and be "overlooked for days till all but the bones of them had gone out into the world as Anderson's Pure Beef Lard." Everyone knew he meant Armour's.
  
  Poisoned bread was put out to control the rat population. "Then the rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together."
  
  One hero in the publishing industry was Isaac Marcosson, who pushed to have Sinclair's book published by Doubleday, Page, & Company.
  
  Sinclair was discouraged, even though his book sold well and made a great impact. He said, "I aimed for the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." All anyone cared about was their food and not the workers who suffered miserably.
  
  The whiskey makers did not want to have labels to show the dyes, additives, and synthetic alcohol in their products. They warned it would hurt taxes. Manufacturers in almost every industry joined together to fight any sign of food, drink, or drug regulation. Some things never change.
  
  Passing the Food and Drug Act in 1906 did not end the troubles. Wiley would be attacked constantly for the rest of his life. Manufacturers would spend all their time and money trying to gut the law. Just like they do today with our Consumer Protection Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Endangered Species Act, and every regulation on the book designed to protect us all.
  
  One other tactic still used today was to limit funding of these laws. Then there are not enough inspectors. Cheating continues.
  
  The exception often proves the rule. There was one man and one company that tried to do it right: Heinz. They advertised a ketchup free from additives. It costs a few cents more, but they convinced consumers it was worth it. His company fought for pure food and decent working conditions. The fact that he was the only one shows how bad things were.
  
  Cocaine was famously used in Coca-Cola. Also many "soothing syrups" for children were laced with morphine, heroin, and chloral hydrate. Same for cough syrups and asthma medications.
  
  I salute the heroic life of Dr. Wiley. He believed in the power of science to benefit society. He said, "The freedom of science should be kept inviolate." In today's world we could use that type of idealism again. The President of the United States of America fights science all the time, and his party and others enable him. The so-called libertarian/conservative movement supports them. There is nothing conservative about such people. Nothing.
  
  We need to carry on Dr. Wiley's fight and never give up.
• 
  Leah K

  A fascinating look at the beginning of the FDA and the man who made it possible. Definitely kept me interested. We've come so far and have so much further to go.
• 
  Jillian Doherty

  Page turning and solicitous! This incredible story widens the view of what we think we know about how our nation’s food. From flood shavings in the chowder, to exactly how much plaster makes sour milk looks just right again – this book is for anyone who loves reading about history that you can’t believe is true.
  
  Where the Food Explorer took us on a wild ride, discovering where our food came from – this wowzers of a history will make you sooooo glad we had Dr. Wiley on our side ensuring we aren’t poisoned daily!
  
  Galley borrowed from the publisher.
• 
  Mary

  Fascinating but, at the same time, deeply disturbing, account of the decades-long effort by Dr. Harvey Wiley, a chemist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the beginning of the 20th century, to protect consumers from adulterated food and drugs. A hundred years ago, Dr. Wiley's name was probably familiar to most Americans. My thanks to author Deborah Blum for reminding us of his important contributions, which continue to improve our lives today.
• 
  Ailith Twinning

  I keep trying to tell people that things are always more the same than you can imagine - this book is a new go-to to try and show that.
  
  2021: I strongly suspect this world is going to collapse. And these same arguments will follow us all to whatever new thing comes. They say it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Somehow, I can imagine capitalism surviving the end of the world (as now known anyway).
  
  Not a happy thought.
• 
  Liz Newton

  The title of the book is a bit of a bait and switch. It alludes to a very interesting study of food additives done with real human subjects, but that is only a fraction of this book. 80% of it is a real snooze-fest, unless you're a policy wonk.
• 
  John Poertner

  Great documentation of Dr Wiley’s pure food and truth in labeling struggles. The challenge continues.
• 
  Toni

  3.5 stars. The author did great research to write this book. I learned a lot and the stories about how the FDA came to be was interesting. However, it’s a very dry read.
• 
  Nikki

  Sometimes we buy into the illusion that our grandparents lived in a time before corporate greed, when food was simple and honest and businesses looked out for their customers. But of course this is all a fancy. Even at the turn of the nineteenth century, businesses were habitually adulterating foods in odious ways. The United States had no food safety laws which allowed for unsanitary preparation conditions: tours of a meat packing facility revealed work stations and privies separated only by rotting wooden walls and the auditor even witnessed a hog falling into a privy and being fished out and shuffled into the packing line along with the rest of the fodder. Workers chewed and spit tobacco from their workstations while processing food, and nothing was routinely cleaned.
  
  But even this was not the chief cause of concern for food chemist Dr. Wiley. A lack of legislation regarding food and drink purity and transparency of labeling opened the door for manufacturers to cut their products with other substances of varying deleterious effect to the customer. What began as cost-saving measures to reduce the cost of expensive spices by cutting in less expensive food stuffs quickly became a practice padding out bottles with crushed shells, ash of old burnt ropes, wood shavings, gypsum, and more. To make matters worse, this coincided with a burst of chemical innovations in the preservative and embalming industries and manufacturers did only cursory testing to determine whether it was safe to revive spoiled and rotting foods to pass off to the consumers. Dairy companies were literally mixing straight formaldehyde into rotting milk and brightening the color with crushed chalk in order to make a profit off of products they would normally have to throw out. Traditional plant-based coloring agents were being phased out at this time in favor of the far cheaper chemical alternatives in the form of lead, arsenic, and copper. (This had the unfortunate side-effect of targeting consumption by a vulnerable population when used in colored candies, frosting, sodas, and confections marketed for children.)
  
  New preservatives existed on the cusp of scientist's understanding in terms of long-term or cumulative effects on the consumer, and compounds like borax or salicylic acid were used in unprecedented amounts and because no trials had ever been conducted on their use in food, those who complained of ill effects or lobbied for their restrictions were eschewed as being anti-business. Some companies admitted that these chemicals could conceivably produce harmful effects on customers but argued that they are not meant to be consumed in large quantities and might cite a small-scale test performed by the business owner one afternoon as reason enough to consider the addition safe. "Well, I ate some that one time and didn't die, after all," was essentially the rebuttal, "why should government get involved in consumer affairs?" Nevertheless, Dr. Wiley feared that the pervasive inclusion of such additions in everyday food created a cumulative exposure that was linked to hundreds (and thousands) of illnesses and deaths, primarily among the vulnerable populations of children, the elderly, and the infirm.
  
  The Poison Squad is a nickname for the volunteer group of test subjects he recruited to consume various new food additives, and comprises a surprisingly small portion of the book. The main thrust of the narrative is a lesson in greed and the lengths to which people will go justifying their actions when it will profit them. Dr. Wiley spent more than a quarter of a century fighting to make the issue known to the everyday consumers, conducting trials and studies to confirm his mistrust of these substances, and advocating for those findings to inform regulations and laws restricting their use or at the very least, honestly reporting what had been used in the making of the food.
• 
  Dawn Michelle

  Well. Who knew that there were people who thought it was perfectly okay with putting FORMALDEHYDE in milk [to kill the maggots. Yeah. I was grossed out too. And it was not the last time] and then wondered why babies died. [Massive EYEROLL]. It really blew my mind that there were so many men that were willing to lie and cover up to basically poison people JUST. FOR. MONEY. I mean, it shouldn't surprise me, but here we are. I really admire Mr. Wiley and his willingness to fight and fight hard for the right things and to get food made safely and labeled [including PROPER weight - WTHECK?]. He spent his whole life trying to make food and drink safer for the American people [thankfully he had a dedicated team] and to fight all the sleazebags that kept trying to make him seem like a crackpot and to push him out [including his own wackadoodle boss]. There were moments where he really reminded me of Dr. Fauci and all that he has had to deal with in the last two years from all the crackpots - there was a LOT of similarities.
  
  There was just so much in this book [I will probably have to do a reread at some point because I am sure that there was stuff I missed - though I could do without all the gross meat {or what they called meat} ] that it was overwhelming at times. I also learned to NOT listen to the book while eating ANY meal [trust me on that one]. As one who suffers from many food allergies, I am so grateful for the lifelong work that Dr. Wiley and his team did to not only make food safer, but to make sure the labels truly showed what was inside. UNFORTUNATELY, we have seemed to get away from this again and we all need to fight to get the truth BACK on food packaging.
  Very well written and researched, I highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever wondered how food safety came to be.
• 
  Sheri

  So I have come across this book several times as a good historical account of the development of the FDA. While current politics are highlighting the exact problems with big business and government officials (Trump defunding the EPA and deregulating pork manufacturers are two easy examples), this book feels sadly timely. Polices are always (it seems) a balance between protecting the lower classes and negotiating with big business: "The story of consumer protection in the United States is often the story of a country playing defense, an account of government regulators waking up, time and again, to yet another public health crisis".
  
  That said, the was an super easy read and gives a good historical account of the process by which Americans began to understand that adulterated food was not a good thing. I found it not compelling at times, but I have also been very busy and distracted this week with other things. I probably would have enjoyed it more at a different time.
  
  Overall it is an important and approachable book, but in this moment of COVID coupled with racial protests over our incompetent criminal justice system it felt like just another example of American individualist culture putting capitalist pursuits over equality for all.
• 
  Nancy

  I gobbled this book up like candy, even if the descriptions of adulterated and poisoned food should have spoiled my reading appetite!
  
  The story of Dr Harvey Washington Wiley, chief chemist of the US Department of Agriculture in the early 20th c, is inspirational. He was determined that American should know what is in the food they are buying, and be assured that the food was safe.
  
  The battle was waged within his department and against big businesses that claimed they needed to cut costs to stay solvent. So what if they sold rancid meat treated with formaldehyde? Or, water down milk then added who knows what to make it thicker and whiter, and swirled some pureed calf brains to look like cream on top? And if kids were overdosing on saccharine, or sweets filled with chemical colors, or snacking on pickles treated with copper... It wouldn't really hurt them.
  
  Hooray for Heinz, supporter of pure foods! A few business leaders understood that if you don't use rotten foods, you don't need preservatives.
  
  To this very day, the fight continues for pure food in a never-ending battle.