The Poison Squad

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What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WNBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, post and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is and mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds, dropping May 14. Happy and with us!

“Flower was routinely laced with gypsum, which we use in lawboard.”

Spices were sometimes 80 to 90% adulterated, brick dust was used in cinnamon, floor sweepings were used in pepper, ground bone was used in some of the other ground spices.

Most food historians will tell you that food was one of the top 10 causes of death in the United States in the 19th century. And medical history and sometimes call it the century of the Great American stomachache. Journalist Deborah Blunt. Coffee was sometimes 100% adulterated, literally sometimes people would grind up coconut shells, they would use lead infused dyes to color them. If people got wary of their ground coffee, they would buy coffee beans, so they 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 an enlin coltard dyes. And they had to do that in order to keep their prices competitive with other manufacturers who were often doing even worse things. 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 unlisted additions. At the same time, 19th century canning and food processing methods were often unsanitary, and there wasn't any widespread refrigeration.

So, there's just bacteria growing in food and 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. Darius were filthy. They were absolutely filthy, and Dairyman 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, Dairyman ever eager to make a profit would then 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 blueish.

And then you would re-color the milk white with either chalk or plaster of Paris, so it looked like normal milk. Sometimes Dairyman would add pureed calf brains to the top, to make it look like there is cream floating on the water down milk. And finally, the preservative for maltohyde had become the number one preserver of bodies during the Civil War in the American Dairyman and 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 of the formaltohyde killed the bacteria, hands down. The other was that formaltohyde, it's apparently fairly sweet, so when you mix the formaltohyde into the milk, it covered up the taste of the rot. And so, Dairyman then embraced this, and you had Dairyman who would kind of go to themselves. Well, if a little formaltohyde 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, by 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 formaltohyde were really toxic, they didn't have to tell the consumers.

They usually didn't acknowledge that it was formaltohyde, the formaltohyde formulas had names like Rosaline and Preservaline and ICine and sort of benign name.

“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 formaltohyde in the milk, and it's an embalming age that it's killing children. It wasn't only for maltohyde. Manufacturers were starting to add all kinds of chemicals to food, borax to meat, cellicillic acid to beer, sulfurous acid to dried fruit, and none of it was regulated by the U.S. government.

There were, and the 19th century, no food safety laws. There was no laws setting, standards for what could go into food. There was no laws requiring that manufacturers label their products, and there were actually no laws

“requiring manufacturers to put into a package what it pretended to be.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, a government chemist named Harvey Washington Wiley decided to find out what all these chemicals were actually doing to Americans. He found twelve volunteers who would eat foods laced with formaltohyde, borax, and cellic acid every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to see what happened. They were called the poison squad. I'm Phoebe Judge, this is Cremino.

Who was Harvey Washington Wiley? I always think of him as kind of a holy roller chemist because

it was like crusading was part of his personality makeup from the beginning. His father was a itinerant preacher, he had been a conductor on the underground railroad. He was also a farmer. By the time Harvey was six, he was helping bring the 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. And he discovered that a majority of the honey in Indiana was actually corn syrup and died with a coltar guy to be more golden. And then the fraudsters, I guess I'll call them, had been making fake honey comb and crumbling it into the corn syrup to make it look like actual real honey. Harvey Wiley wrote that the product was put 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. 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. Harvey Wiley and the other USDA chemists looked at everything from canned vegetables to butter

to cocoa and they found all kinds of things. The cocoa had clay and sand and finally powdered

sand, soil, and powdered all of 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”

has to be transferred because he was so disgusted by what he found. And they were finding not only this panorama of fraud, but some really dangerous materials like red lead and cheddar, for instance, or arsenic and some of the sweet products or really dangerous levels of salicylic acid and beer

and wine. And they start if you read these reports, they say basically there's some really dangerous

stuff here and could we at least start labeling food? At a minimum we should label and the food and drink industry is like absolutely not. But Harvey Wiley kept looking into what Americans were eating and doing whatever he could to get the word out. He had even hired a journalist to help

“translate his technical reports into easy to understand press releases. But Americans”

didn't seem to be that concerned. Then tell the Spanish American War. So during the Spanish American

War, one of the things that was shipped down to American soldiers fighting in Cuba was both

canned meat and then some semi-preserved chunks of carcasses of meat. And afterwards there were a number of officers who had served in Cuba who accused the US government of killing more soldiers with the food than the actual Cuban fighters had been able to accomplish. And they particularly focused on meat. Newspapers around the country reported accounts of cans that contained maggots and pieces of charred rope along with the meat and a chemical smell that led one major to call it

“embombed beef. One soldier said that the smell was so bad that when someone opened a can,”

they often had to quote retiree distance to prevent being overcome. And it began such a scandal that the then Department of War held hearings about it. And one of the people who testified was Teddy Roosevelt who had been a rough writer in Cuba during the Spanish American War. And he said that he would rather have eaten his hat than the canned meat that was provided by the soldiers. And he actually told a story about one of his soldiers in his command refusing to eat the food out

of the can and he ordered him to do it. And the man almost immediately started throwing up. Harvey Wiley was also called to testify at the hearings. He and his staff had examined the cans of meat that the soldiers had eaten and found that what was in the cans wasn't any different than the canned meat that Americans were getting every day at the grocery store. No charges were brought against the military. It wasn't their fault soldiers had died. They were just

feeding them what every American ate. That same year, Harvey Wiley participated in a series of hearings on the country's food supply. He talked about his department's findings and asked the manufacturers to open tumors what they were really eating by listing all the ingredients on labels. To help make his point, he read a poem he'd written about food fraud. I actually really loved that poem and he just goes through kind of all the things we're talking about, right? The butter is really

only a margarine that pepper is really ground bomb. That coffee is not coffee that milk is just completely

dangerous. It had minds like the wine that 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 what's in it. But when food safety legislation was introduced in the house in the Senate, the next year food manufacturers pushed back and the bills were shut down in less than a month. It wasn't the first time this had happened. I think Wiley got to the point where he was feeling,

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-swatt experiments after the volunteers. He recruited young clerks and entry-level employees of the Department of Agriculture to essentially agree to dying dangerously. The Department of Agriculture received lots of applications. One eager volunteer wrote,

"Dear Sir, I have a stomach that can stand anything. I have a stomach that will surprise you."

The poison-swatt members were young, athletic, man, a lot of them had been college athletes and

“they were in their 20s and he picked them because he thought of them as basically sturdy, right?”

He didn't want to kill people. He wasn't trying to have fragile people in his experiment. He wanted people who he thought could tolerate some of this. I guess in a early 20th century way, he picked these healthy young men. They would get a very small stipend and they would get three meals a day, seven days a week for free. And at these very minimal salaries, this was a huge benefit. Harvey Wiley had a test kitchen and a dining room built in the basement of the Department of Agriculture.

He set up two round tables with white table claws 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 lace with something that could be poisonous.”

Meals would be served on a strict schedule. Breakfast at 8am, lunch at noon, dinner at 5.30. The volunteers took an oath not to eat or drink anything outside of the dining room, except water, which they would measure out and report to Wiley. If they were hungry, they had to wait. Before each meal, they would be weighed, have their temperature taken, and have their pulse rate recorded. After meals, they had to write down every single thing they ate or drank,

and exactly how much. Doctors would examine them twice a week. And they would be blood tested, and urine tested, and all of the tests in white and measured and poked and prodded. They had to carry around bags issued by the USDA to collect any waste products. So that they could be analyzed later. And they were told to be on their best behavior in general, quote, "to pursue their ordinary vocations without any excesses and to take their ordinary hours

of sleep." And they would eat really great food. He hired a high-end chef. All of these meals were the genuine farm-fresh article. They actually went out to farms around the DC area in Maryland,

Virginia, and bought super-fresh produce. They carefully got food that had never had preservatives in it.

They cooked all kinds of elaborate, wonderful meals. And when you go back and you look at the pictures of the dining room, it kind of looks like a nice restaurant, right? It's got these round tables. They have white table claws. 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.”

He wanted it to feel like I'm just dining with friends. He didn't want it to feel like I'm being experimented on. Each of the volunteers signed a waiver, releasing the government from any responsibility if they became very sick or died. One of the volunteers put a sign at the door that said, "None but the brave can eat the fair." We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Right now, we're offering a free

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don't need. Support for criminal comes from Kachava. Most of us have a daily drink that's part of our morning routine, like coffee, a press juice, or a protein shake. Kachava can be an easy

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greens, probiotics, omegas, electrolytes, and more. And it comes in great flavors like chocolate, vanilla, chai, mocha, coconut, assai, 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, KACHAVA.com, Code "criminal." The first substance, Harvey Wiley, wanted the poison squad to eat, was Borex, which was used as a cleaning

product, but was also a popular preservative in meat and butter. So he chose Borex first, because he thought, and he actually testified to Congress about this, that it wasn't that dangerous, and he wanted to start low-in. He thought, you know, some of them might get an upset stomach or something, but he actually had expected very little effect. Why they decided to hide the Borex 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. 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 I want to stand there and watch you do it." The volunteers reportedly called the capsule's "bullets." One reporter for the Washington Post published what he imagined the volunteers Christmas dinner menu would look like. Apple sauce, Borex, soup, Borex, Turkey, Borex. 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 Borex

had made the volunteers turn pink. "Each of the young men undergoing the course of treatment has blossomed out with a bright pink complexion that would make a society bride sick with envy." After it was published, the USDA received a stack of letters from women asking what they needed to take to get such beautiful skin. And this poison squad, as it went forward, got a huge amount of attention. It wasn't just that newspapers were covering it. There were songs about it. There

were shows about it. There were not just Wiley's, you know, I wonder what's in it, but poems

are written about it. You can find the host of the most incredible cartoons. But as the Borex

experiment went on, the volunteers started getting very sick. "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

we're much more dangerous than he had expected, and you see the tone of his messaging change

after the Borex experiment. And you see the tone of the way newspapers are covering this change, right? The post-ed really wrote some early articles in which they kind of saw this as high comedy, you know, man agreeing to sit around a table and dyeing dangerously, and you know, these food adventures and all that. But by the time the Borex results come out, they're just not even messing around, they're saying eight poisons. Professor Wiley was feeding his volunteers poison, and the message

to the American public then is your eating poison every day. You're starting to see the sort of

“shift in public attitude in which people are actually hearing this and realize it. I really think”

for the first time just how dangerous this was and that they might be poisoning their children.

And so you start to get this sort of, I always think of it as a low simmering public fire. People

are starting to get angry, but they're probably not angry enough. And the food industry, about the time these studies started coming out, start really actively working to discredit Wiley as a scientist. The Borex industry actually hired a publicist who wrote fake letters to newspapers to pretending to be a citizens who were grateful for Borex 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. 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 eaten the Borex. While he 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 "Molt Coffee," that was made from roasted barley, and asked how it could have "real coffee flavor." He wrote, "Is there anything that can have the real coffee flavor?" except coffee.

Critics called him "the policeman of the American stomach," one editorial in a publication called "The California Fruit Grower," said, "let somebody muzzle the chemist who would destroy our appetite." He kind of goes on the speaking circuit and talks to anyone who will listen to him,

“and you can see him. And this two, I think, was one of the criticisms that was”

leveled against him as he doesn't really sound. We have an idea of a scientist as being, you know, completely methodical and objective. They have no opinion. They're just telling you what the data says. And Wiley is not doing that anymore. He wants this to change, and he absolutely refuses to bat out. We'll be right back.

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from its national team. Before I went pro, I graduated from Harvard with a degree in psychology.

Which comes in handy more than you think. Any athlete pursuing greatness knows there's a certain

“mentality you have to have. What people don't know is what that costs. In my podcast, confessions”

have really athlete. I sit down with the best athletes in the world and explore the psychology mindset and unseen battles on the path to greatness. So take a seat and learn from the confessions of an elite athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1904, the writer Uptonson Claire traveled to Chicago. He was planning to start work on a novel that would later be called 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 meet packing plants. And I'm just in color. I 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. Uptonson Claire's publisher thought the descriptions of how the meat was processed

were so disgusting that the 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. 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 chat. Meanwhile, the jungle becomes this sort of literary sensation

“and everyone is focused on the horrors of the food production. And it becomes such a scandal that”

finally Roosevelt, since his own fact checkers to Chicago. And even though the packing houses knew they were coming, things were so bad that Roosevelt goes to Congress and he says, "This is terrible. I want this fixed. I want you to pass a meat inspection at and Congress under pressure from the packing houses says no." And Roosevelt says, "Fine, I'm going to publish a portion of the report and then if you don't give me what I want,

I'm going to publish the whole thing." One part of the published section of the report describes sick people spitting on the quote, "spungy wooden floors of the dark workrooms from which falling scraps of meat are later shoveled up to be later converted into food products." And 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 title wave of fury,

the bonfire finally at full roars that were, Roosevelt goes to Congress and he says,

"I'm going to sign a food and drug law if you pass one and they pass it." And it follows the meat inspection act by about two weeks. So the jungle gets us the meat inspection act and the meat inspection act drives the politics in a way that gets us the first food and drug law. It was called the pure food and drug act, but it was known as Dr. Wiley's Law. Wiley and the poisons squad laid the groundwork for people to realize just how dangerous the

food supply was. And even up until the 1906 law people were increasingly writing to Congress and sending telegrams to the White House say, "I want some kind of protection." So the sort of public will was growing and I admire the jungle, but it wouldn't have done that if people hadn't already been so angry if the fire hadn't already been burning in that way. Under the pure food and drug act, foods couldn't be labeled or branded to mislead the customer,

that reduced their quality or strength, or be colored, or mixed, or coded, to disguise damage, or inferiority, or consist in whole or in part of a filthy decomposed or putrid animal, or vegetable substance. And that is a paradigm changing moment for the United States, because

“there'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 welfare, it actually means people and their everyday lives. And so we're going to pass these two laws and they're only designed to make American consumers safer. And if you think about it, every single consumer protection law and agency that follows, eventually the FDA, of course,

but also the EPA and OSHA and all of the agencies, the Consumer Protection Bureau, all of the agencies that work to make us safer, they're based on the precedents set by those two

“food laws. It's really amazing. Harvey Wiley continued to publish the results of Poison Squad”

tests after the pure food and drug act passed. They found that soul for his acid and sodium benzoyed, 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 for Maldide. 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. It just got taken out. Right. Forex came out, cellosilic acid came out. Some of the inland 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.

After the Poison Squad studies ended, Wiley spent a lot of his time trying to figure out how to implement the food and drug act. The food and drug loss is huge complicated then,

and it includes for the first time setting safety regulations for food. Right. How were those

implemented? Who does the test? 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 and

“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 and his own laboratory and food safety column, but good housekeeping magazine. Which at that time was a very different publication. It was a crusading magazine. They allowed him to set up something called the Good House

Keeping Test Kitchens. And he created a part of that called the Good House Keeping Seal of Approval. So in his laboratories at Good House Keeping, he went ahead and ran tests that the government was refusing to do. And then Good House Keeping would publish those results. And they would give the seal of approval to food and drink that he felt was safe. The seal still exists today. His contract with the magazine stated that they wouldn't advertise any food drug or cosmetic

products that Wiley didn't approve. When he discovered that a product was potentially dangerous or fraudulent, they pulled the ad. He encouraged readers to eat whole grains and avoid too much sugar. And in 1928, he warned readers against using tobacco and links a grette smoking to cancer.

The surgeon general issued its first report on smoking 36 years later in 1964.

"What do you think is is Wiley in the poison squads legacy?"

“Let me say this. You could not do the poison spot experiments today.”

Right? There's not a institutional review board that would say, "Yes, why don't we just run experiments or which we knowingly feed dangerous substances to our co-workers?"

That would never happen today. But food is no longer one of the top 10 causes of death.

Our food supply is not perfect today in any way. But thanks to Wiley, we don't have to worry about

“drinking a glass of milk nowadays. Right, if it's pasturized. Right. We can't let's not even get”

into the wrong news. We're not going to drink milk with formaldehyde in it. We are not going to have coffee

with lead in it because it contains chart bone that was blackened with lead to look like coffee grounds.

Not going to be drinking beer and wine that contain a compound that might cause the lining of our stomach to bleed. We are not going to be having lead in our cheese.

“Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer,”

Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie's Gico, Lily Clark, and Lena Cilicin. Our show is mixed in engineered by Veronica Seminetti. This episode was fact checked by Katie Cedarborg. Julianne Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at this is criminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at this iscriminal.com/newsletter.

Deborah Blom's book is The Poison Squad. One chemist, single-minded crusade, for food safety at the turn of the 20th century. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, this is love, and feeble 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 this iscriminal, an Instagram and TikTok at criminal_podcast. You're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.boxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge, this is Criminal.