The Poison Squad

Summary

Criminal – "The Poison Squad" (May 8, 2026)

Host: Phoebe Judge (with guest Deborah Blum)

Theme:
An illuminating conversation about the hidden dangers of America’s 19th-century food supply and the radical experiment—The Poison Squad—that helped launch the first national food safety laws. This episode explores the work of chemist Harvey Washington Wiley, the shocking realities of industrial food adulteration, and how public outrage led to the birth of modern consumer protections.

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Main Discussion Points

1. The Shocking State of 19th-Century American Food ([01:08]–[06:47])

• Rampant Food Adulteration:

  • Flour was mixed with gypsum (wallboard), brick dust in cinnamon, floor sweepings in pepper, ground bone, and even fake coffee beans made from dirt and wax ([01:08], Deborah Blum).
  • "Spices were sometimes 80 to 90% adulterated... Coffee was sometimes 100% adulterated. Literally. Sometimes people would grind up coconut shells. They would use lead-infused dye to color them." ([01:13], Deborah Blum)
  • Strawberry jam could be made entirely out of corn syrup, grass seed, and coal-tar dyes—no strawberries at all ([01:53], Deborah Blum).

• Dairy Dangers & Formaldehyde Milk:

  • Milk diluted with water, then whitened with chalk or plaster of Paris ([03:06], Deborah Blum).
  • Dairymen used “pureed calf brains to the top to make it look like there was cream floating on the watered down milk” ([04:07], Phoebe Judge).
  • Formaldehyde, originally a body preservative, was added to milk—sometimes in highly toxic amounts, killing children. "You will actually find stories... called embalmed milk scandals, in which there's so much formaldehyde in the milk... that it's killing children." ([05:39], Deborah Blum).

• No Regulation:

  • No food safety laws, no labeling requirements, and no obligation to provide what was promised on packaging ([06:20]).

2. Harvey Washington Wiley: Chemist, Crusader, & Architect of U.S. Food Safety ([06:47]–[14:53])

• His Background:
  • Son of an itinerant preacher and Underground Railroad conductor ([07:32]).
  • Discovered widespread honey fraud—most was corn syrup with fake honeycomb ([08:17]).
• Wiley’s USDA Work:
  • Begins systematically testing and publishing what's actually in food ([08:58]).
  • Finds dangerous additives: red lead in cheddar, arsenic in sweets, dangerous levels of salicylic acid in beer and wine ([10:53]-[11:35]).
• Outreach & Frustration:
  • Hired a journalist to communicate his findings but public didn’t pay much attention until the aftereffects of the Spanish-American War ([11:35]).
  • Military scandal over “embalmed beef”—spoiled, chemically-laden meat likely killed more soldiers than combat ([12:38], Phoebe Judge).
  • His poem about food fraud, lines like, “the wine which you drink, never heard of a grape... How I wonder, I wonder what’s in it?” ([14:53], Phoebe Judge).

3. The Poison Squad: Human Testing for Food Safety ([15:36]–[19:44])

• Origins and Design:
  • Wiley requests funds to feed volunteers foods laced with preservatives and chemicals under controlled conditions—known as the Hygienic Table Trials, but the media called them "the Poison Squad" ([15:36]-[15:59]).
• Volunteer Selection & Conditions:
  • Young, healthy, athletic male government employees; “I have a stomach that will surprise you” ([16:13], Phoebe Judge).
  • Meals meticulously prepared, weighed, and monitored; volunteers signed waivers releasing the government from liability ([17:10]-[19:44]).

4. The Borax Experiment and its Ripple Effects ([22:49]–[27:45])

• Testing and Unexpected Illness:
  • Borax hidden in butter, milk, and coffee; eventually given as pills ([23:08]).
  • Reporters lampoon the situation; humorous stories gave way to alarming ones as volunteers grew seriously ill. “That was the experiment that changed the way he saw the entire program... they had been underestimating... how dangerous this was.” ([25:02], Deborah Blum).
• Industry Backlash and Public Reaction:
  • Food industry attempts to discredit Wiley, even hiring PR agents to write fake public letters ([25:02]-[27:45]).
  • Media coverage becomes increasingly serious: “The message to the American public then is, you're eating poison every day.” ([25:59], Deborah Blum).
• Further Testing:
  • Salicylic acid tests showed even more severe illness among volunteers ([27:45]).
  • Wiley becomes more outspoken, attacked by his critics as “the policeman of the American stomach” ([27:45]-[28:38]).

5. The Meatpacking Scandals and Upton Sinclair’s "The Jungle" ([31:18]–[34:44])

• Exposé in Literature and Fact:
  • Upton Sinclair’s undercover work in meatpacking plants led to horrifying discoveries.
  • Fact-checkers found the real conditions “worse than in the book” ([32:34], Deborah Blum).
• Political Consequences:
  • After public uproar and international embarrassment (“Europe cancels all its meat contracts with the United States” [33:52]), Roosevelt forces Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act and, soon after, the Pure Food and Drug Act ([34:44]).
  • “The Jungle gets us the Meat Inspection Act, and the Meat Inspection Act drives... the first food and drug law.” ([34:44], Deborah Blum).

6. The Pure Food and Drug Act and Lasting Legacy ([34:44]–[41:32])

• What the Law Did:
  • First federal regulation: food must not be mislabeled or dangerous ([35:28]).
  • “That is a paradigm changing moment... every single consumer protection law and agency that follows... they’re based on the precedent set by those two food law laws.” ([35:59], Deborah Blum).
• Aftermath and Wiley’s Later Career:
  • Wiley helps remove formaldehyde, borax, coal-tar dyes, and many other toxins from food; continues advocacy as a columnist and lab head at Good Housekeeping ([39:14]-[39:58]).
  • Starts the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval," refusing to endorse products shown to be unsafe ([39:58]).
  • Pioneers public warnings about sugar and tobacco, decades ahead of government action ([39:58]-[40:54]).

7. Reflections on the Ethics and Impact of the Poison Squad ([40:54]–[41:32])

• Couldn’t Be Done Today:

  • “You could not do the Poison Squad experiments today… 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?” ([40:54], Deborah Blum).

• A Safer World:

  • "Thanks to Wiley, we don’t have to worry about drinking a glass of milk nowadays." ([41:20], Phoebe Judge)
  • “We are not going to drink milk with formaldehyde in it... coffee with lead in it... beer and wine that contain a compound that might cause the lining of our stomach to bleed... lead in our cheese.” ([41:35], Deborah Blum)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Adulteration:
  • “The wine which you drink, never heard of a grape... How I wonder, I wonder what’s in it?” —Phoebe Judge reading Wiley’s poem ([14:53])
• On Wiley’s Motivation:
  • “He just goes through… the butter is really oleomargarine, that pepper is really ground bone, that coffee is not coffee, that milk is just completely dangerous.” —Deborah Blum ([14:29])
• On Public Outrage:
  • “They’re saying, 'Ate Poison. Professor Wiley was feeding his volunteers poison.' And the message to the American public then is, you’re eating poison every day.” —Deborah Blum ([25:59])
• On The Jungle:
  • “They came back... and they said, it’s worse than in the book.” —Deborah Blum ([32:34])
• On Impact:
  • “That is a paradigm changing moment for the United States because there’s no food consumer protection laws in the United States until that moment.” —Deborah Blum ([35:59])
• On Modern Legacy:
  • “Thanks to Wiley, we don’t have to worry about drinking a glass of milk nowadays.” —Phoebe Judge ([41:20])

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Key Timestamps by Segment

• [01:08] – Deborah Blum introduces the shocking reality of food adulteration in the 19th century.
• [04:15] – Formaldehyde in milk and “embalmed milk scandals.”
• [06:20] – No food safety laws.
• [06:47] – Harvey Wiley and the beginnings of food testing at USDA.
• [10:12] – Detailed findings in food and the disgust of scientists.
• [12:38] – Spanish-American War food scandal.
• [15:36] – Launch of the Poison Squad experiment.
• [18:11] – Protocols for volunteers and daily testing.
• [22:49] – The Borax experiment and ensuing illnesses.
• [25:02] – How the experiment changed Wiley and the public conversation.
• [31:28] – Upton Sinclair’s "The Jungle" and its fact-checking.
• [34:44] – Meat Inspection Act & Pure Food and Drug Act.
• [35:28] – Explained: what the new food law required.
• [36:56] – Substances removed as a result of Wiley’s work.
• [39:14] – Wiley’s career at Good Housekeeping and early tobacco warnings.
• [40:54] – Reflection on the historical and ethical context; the lasting legacy.

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Concluding Thoughts

"The Poison Squad" brings to life the dark, unregulated world of America’s industrializing food system, and the relentless efforts of Harvey Wiley and his courageous volunteers to expose and fix it. Their story not only changed what Americans ate, but set the foundation for every consumer protection law that followed. As guest Deborah Blum says, “Food is no longer one of the top 10 causes of death. Our food supply is not perfect today in any way. But you know, thanks to Wiley, we don’t have to worry about drinking a glass of milk nowadays.” ([41:20])

Recommended reading: “The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the 20th Century” by Deborah Blum.

Transcript

[Phoebe Judge]

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[Deborah Blum]

Flour was routinely laced with gypsum, which we use in wallboard. Spices were sometimes 80 to 90% adulterated. Brick dust was used in cinnamon. Floor sweepings were used in pepper, ground bone, and 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 D to color them. If people got wary of their ground coffee, they would buy coffee beans. So there were 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 analyn Coaltar dies. 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.

[Phoebe Judge]

During 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 with unlisted additions. At the same time, 19th century canning and food processing methods were often unsanitary and there wasn't any widespread refrigeration.

[Deborah Blum]

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? Dairies were filthy. They were absolutely filthy. And dairymen would bring milk to farmers markets and the dairyman 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, 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.

[Phoebe Judge]

Sometimes dairymen would add pureed calf brains to the top to make it look like there was cream floating on the watered down milk.

[Deborah Blum]

And finally, the preservative formaldehyde had become the number one preserver of bodies during the Civil War. And the American dairyman, 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 that formaldehyde, it'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, 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 Preservoline and Isine 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 embalmed milk scandals, in which there's so much formaldehyde in the milk and it's an embalming agent that it's killing children.

[Phoebe Judge]

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 US government.

[Deborah Blum]

There were, in 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.

[Phoebe Judge]

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 would eat foods laced with formaldehyde, borax, and salicylic acid every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to see what happened. They were called the Poison Squad. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Who was Harvey Washington Wiley?

[Deborah Blum]

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.

[Phoebe Judge]

He was also a farmer. By the time Harvey was six, he was helping bring the cows 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.

[Deborah Blum]

And he discovered that a majority of the honey in Indiana was actually corn syrup and dyed with a coal tar dye to be more golden. And then the fraudsters, I guess I'll call them, had been making fake honeycomb and crumbling it into the corn syrup to make it look like actual real honey.

[Phoebe Judge]

Harvey Wiley wrote that the product was, quote, entirely free of bee 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.

[Deborah Blum]

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 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.

[Phoebe Judge]

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 finely powdered tin in it. A lot of the butter was actually margarine, and ground pepper had sawdust, cereal crumbs, sand, soil, and powdered olive stones, to quote an astonishing extent. It also had dust, possibly from floor sweepings. One of the USDA scientists Wiley assigned to look at spices asked to be transferred because he was so disgusted by what he found.

[Deborah Blum]

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 in 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.

[Phoebe Judge]

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 into easy to understand press releases. But Americans didn't seem to be that concerned until the Spanish American War.

[Deborah Blum]

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.

[Phoebe Judge]

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 embalmed beef. One soldier said that the smell was so bad that when someone opened a can, they often had to, quote, retire a distance to prevent being overcome.

[Deborah Blum]

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, you know, 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.

[Phoebe Judge]

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.

[Deborah Blum]

It wasn't their fault soldiers had died. They were just feeding them what every American ate.

[Phoebe Judge]

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 that manufacturers tell 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.

[Deborah Blum]

I actually really loved that poem. He just goes through kind of all the things we're talking about, right? The butter is really oleomargarine, that pepper is really ground bone, that coffee is not coffee, that milk is just completely dangerous.

[Phoebe Judge]

It had lines 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.

[Deborah Blum]

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?

[Phoebe Judge]

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 squat experiments.

[Deborah Blum]

After the volunteers, he recruited young clerks and entry level employees at the Department of Agriculture to essentially agree to dying dangerously.

[Phoebe Judge]

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.

[Deborah Blum]

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. 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.

[Phoebe Judge]

Harvey Wylie 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.

[Deborah Blum]

And they would be blood tested and urine tested and all of the tests and weighed and measured and poked and prodded.

[Phoebe Judge]

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.

[Deborah Blum]

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 D.C. 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 ladderback chairs and beautifully polished glasses. And I think that was part of his plan. And 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.

[Phoebe Judge]

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 a sign at the door that said none but the brave can eat the fare Foreign. We'll be right back to listen without ads. Join CriminalPlus right now we're offering a free 7 day trial. Go to patreon.com criminalplus. Thanks to Squarespace for their support. Making a website can be intimidating, especially because it's often the first thing people see about your business. If you want to build a website that makes a great first impression on people, you don't need years of coding experience. You just need Squarespace. It's the all in one website platform made to help you stand out online. Squarespace has the tools you need to make your website look exactly how you want it to look, sell your services, and get paid no matter what business you're in. You can choose from a library of templates designed by professionals, or if you don't want to scroll through all the template options. Squarespace's blueprint AI can build a website for you in just a couple of minutes based on a few prompts. It'll pull from different templates. To create the website you need, go to squarespace.com criminal for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use the offer Code criminal to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Support for Criminal comes from Cachava Most of us have a daily drink that's part of our morning routine. Like coffee, a pressed juice or a protein shake, Cachava can be an easy addition to that routine. I like to start my day with a green smoothie and it's really easy to add a couple of scoops of Cachava before blending it. Cachava is an all in one shake that can help with your energy, digestion, immunity and more. It's crafted with high quality ingredients without any artificial flavors, colors or sweeteners. It's just clean nutrition to fuel you wherever your day takes you. Their new travel packs make it even easier to do that. You can just throw one in your bag. One packet provides lots of protein, fiber, vitamins and minerals, greens, probiotics, omegas, electrolytes and more. And it comes in great flavors like chocolate, vanilla, chai, matcha, coconut, acai and strawberry. Take your daily ritual with you. Go to kachava.com and use code criminal for 15% off your first order. That's Kachava K A C-H-A-V-A.com code criminal. The first substance Harvey Wiley wanted the Poison Squad to eat was Borax, which was used as a cleaning product but was also a popular preservative in meat and butter.

[Deborah Blum]

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 end. He thought, you know, some of them might get an upset stomach or something, but he actually had expected very little effect.

[Phoebe Judge]

Wiley decided to hide the Borax in 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.

[Deborah Blum]

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.

[Phoebe Judge]

The volunteers reportedly called the capsules bullets. One reporter for the Washington Post published what he imagined the volunteers Christmas dinner menu would look like. Applesauce, borax, soup, borax, turkey borax. The Washington Post reported on the poison squad. Often people seem 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. Quote, 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.

[Deborah Blum]

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 Wiley's, you know, I wonder what's in it, but poems written about it. You can find a host of the most incredible cartoons.

[Phoebe Judge]

But as the borax experiment went on, the volunteers started getting very sick.

[Deborah Blum]

You know, they were throwing up, they were losing weight. They felt incredibly off. Wiley, 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 had really wrote some early articles in which they kind of saw this as high comedy, you know, men agreeing to sit around a table and dying dangerously and, you know, 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, ate poison. Professor Wiley was feeding his volunteers poison. And the message to the American public then is, you're eating 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. They oh, the borax industry actually hired a publicist who wrote fake letters to newspapers to pretending to be citizens who were grateful for borax and 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.

[Phoebe Judge]

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 had eaten the borax. Wiley started writing complaint letters to magazines when they printed advertisements for foods that weren't 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.

[Deborah Blum]

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 is 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 back down.

[Phoebe Judge]

We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from zocdoc. It's a great feeling when you find the perfect doctor who really understands you. You can find doctors like that on zocdoc. Zocdoc is a free app and website that helps you find and book high quality in network doctors so you can find someone you love. You can book in network appointments. With more than 150,000 providers across all 50 states. They offer more than 200 specialties, so you can easily search by specialty or symptom to find the right person. Thousands of verified patient reviews give you a real sense of who your doctor is. When you're ready, you can see their real time availability and click to book instantly. No phone tag, no waiting around. You can stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to Zocdoc.com criminal to find and instantly book a doctor you love today. That's Zocdoc.com criminal Zocdoc.com criminal thanks to Zocdoc for sponsoring this message.

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[Phoebe Judge]

In 1904, the writer Upton Sinclair traveled to Chicago. He was planning to start work on a novel that would later be called

[Deborah Blum]

the Jungle, and it's about the plight of people working in the packing yards in Chicago. He'd gotten very interested in the plight of workers in Chicago, and he had actually gone and gone undercover in the Chicago stockyards and meatpacking plants. And Upton Sinclair was so poor that he kind of blended in with all of these very underpaid immigrant workers who were what he was interested in. And because he had spent so much time in the packing houses themselves, he had these incredibly gruesome descriptions, right? The mold growing on the walls, the dead rats that were chopped up and went into the sausage, the horrible, filthy conditions.

[Phoebe Judge]

Upton Sinclair's publisher thought the descriptions of how the meat was processed were so disgusting that they canceled 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.

[Deborah Blum]

And they came back from the stockyards 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 check. 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 the Meat Inspection Act. And Congress, under pressure from the packing houses, says, no. And Roosevelt says, fine, I'm going to publish a portion of the report. And then if you don't give me what I want, I'm going to publish the whole thing.

[Phoebe Judge]

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.

[Deborah Blum]

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 they 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 gonna 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.

[Phoebe Judge]

It was called the Pure Food and Drug act, but it was known as Dr. Wiley's Law.

[Deborah Blum]

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 saying, 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.

[Phoebe Judge]

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.

[Deborah Blum]

And that is a paradigm changing moment for the United States because there's no food 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, it actually meets people in their everyday lives. And so we're gonna 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 law laws. It's really amazing.

[Phoebe Judge]

Harvey Wiley continued to publish the results of Poison Squad tests after the Pure Food and Drug act passed. They found that sulfurous 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.

[Deborah Blum]

They had to call it off fairly soon into it because people were getting so sick so quickly. And it was one of the first compounds that got taken out of the food supply. I mean, it just got taken out, right? Borax came out. Salicylic acid came out. Some of the aniline coal tar dyes. 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 coal tar dyes were really dangerous. Those got taken out. He was directly responsible for getting some very bad things taken out of the food supply.

[Phoebe Judge]

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.

[Deborah Blum]

The Food and Drug law is this 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. You know, 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

[Phoebe Judge]

in his own laboratory and food safety column by Good Housekeeping magazine, which at

[Deborah Blum]

that time was a very different publication. It was a crusading magazine. They allowed him to set up something called the Good Housekeeping Test Kitchens, and he created A part of that called the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. So in his laboratories at Good Housekeeping, he went ahead and ran tests that the government was refusing to do. And then Good Housekeeping would publish those results and they would give the Seal of Approval to Food and Drink that he felt was safe.

[Phoebe Judge]

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 Law. What do you think is Wiley and the Poison Squad's legacy?

[Deborah Blum]

Let me say this. You could not do the Poison Squad experiments today, right? There's not a 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.

[Phoebe Judge]

But you know, thanks to Wiley, we don't have to worry about drinking a glass of milk nowadays.

[Deborah Blum]

Right? If it's pasteurized, right.

[Phoebe Judge]

Let's not even get into the raw milk there.

[Deborah Blum]

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 charred 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.

[Phoebe Judge]

Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Roberson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark and Lena Silicon. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. This episode was fact checked by Katie Cederborg. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see [e-mail] and you can sign up for our [e-mail] Newsletter. Deborah Blum's book is the Poison Squad One Chemist's 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 a 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 thisiscriminal and Instagram and TikTok criminalpodcast. We're also on YouTube at YouTube.com criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast network. Discover more great [e-mail] I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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