The Poison Squad

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0:40Sell them on Depop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. And you at least get some of your dignity, money back. Someone on Depop wants what you've got. Start selling now. Depop, where taste recognizes taste. Flour was routinely laced with gypsum, which we use in wallboard. Spices were sometimes 80 to 90 percent 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 historians sometimes call it the century of the great American stomachache.

1:37Journalist Deborah Blum. Coffee was sometimes 100 % adulterated. Literally, sometimes people would grind up coconut shells. They would use lead-infused dyes to color them. If people got wary of their ground coffee, they would buy coffee beans. So they 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 aniline coltard dyes. And he said that they had to do that in order to keep their prices competitive with other manufacturers who were often doing even worse things.

2:29During the later half of the 19th century, more and more Americans were moving from farms to cities, where they were beginning to rely on industrially produced foods. Manufacturers found all kinds of ways to stretch their products with unlisted additions At the same time, 19th century canning and food processing methods were often unsanitary And there wasn't any widespread refrigeration So there's just bacteria growing in food in all kinds of ways Milk being a classic example of that In some ways, it's like a perfect profile of everything that's wrong with the 19th century food supply, right? Dairies were filthy.

3:16They were absolutely filthy. And dairymen would bring milk to farmers' markets, and the dairymen 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. Sometimes dairymen would add pureed calf brains to the top to make it look like there was cream floating on the watered-down milk.

4:07And 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.

4:56And 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 Rosaline and Preservaline and Icine 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.

5:41They'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. It wasn't only formaldehyde. Manufacturers were starting to add all kinds of chemicals to food. Borax to meat, salicylic acid to beer, sulfurous acid to dried fruit. And none of it was regulated by the U.S. government. There were, 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.

6:38At 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.

7:19Who 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 an 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.

8:04They 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 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. 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.

8:49And 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.

9:37And 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 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.

10:30It also had dust, possibly from floor sweepings. One of the USDA scientists, widely assigned to look at spices, asked 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 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.

11:26But 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. 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, you know, chunks of carcasses of meat. And afterwards, there were a number of officers who had served in Cuba who accused the U.S. government of killing more soldiers with the food than the actual Cuban fighters had been able to accomplish.

12:27And 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 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. And it began such a scandal that the then Department of War held hearings about it, and one of the people who testified was Teddy Roosevelt, who had been a rough rider in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. And he said that he would rather have eaten his hat than the canned meat that was provided by the soldiers.

13:18And 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.

13:59That 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. 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 oleo margarine. The pepper is really ground bone. The coffee is not coffee. The milk is just completely dangerous. It had lines like, The wine which you drink never heard of a grape.

14:50And ended with, the banquet how fine, don't begin it till you think of the past and the future inside, how I wonder, I wonder what's in it. But when food safety legislation was introduced in the House and the Senate the next year, food manufacturers pushed back, and the bills were shut down in less than a month. It wasn't the first time this had happened. I think Wiley got to the point where he was feeling, he was starting to feel just desperate about this. How do I fix this? In 1901, Harvey Wiley asked Congress for the funds to do something that hadn't been done before. To systematically test some of these food additives on human subjects.

15:41He called his experiment the Hygienic Table Trials. But newspapers started calling it the poison squad experiments after the volunteers. He recruited young clerks and entry-level employees at the Department of Agriculture to essentially agree to dine dangerously. The Department of Agriculture received lots of applications. One eager volunteer wrote, Dear sir, I have a stomach that can stand anything. I have a stomach that will surprise you. The Poison Squad members were young, athletic men. A lot of them had been college athletes, and they were in their 20s. And he picked them because he thought of them as basically sturdy, right?

16:30He didn't want to kill people. He wasn't trying to have fragile people in his experiment. He wanted people who he thought could tolerate some of this. And I guess in an early 20th century way, he picked these sort of healthy young men. They would get a very small stipend, and they would get three meals a day, seven days a week for free. And at these very minimal salaries, this was a huge benefit. Harvey Wiley had a test kitchen and a dining room built in the basement of the Department of Agriculture. He set up two round tables with white tablecloths in the dining room. Six volunteers would sit at each table.

17:15They 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 8 a.m., 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.

18:00Doctors would examine them twice a week. And they would be blood tested and urine tested and all of the tests and weighed 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 D.C.

18:47area and Maryland, Virginia, and bought super-fresh produce. They carefully got food that had never had preservatives in it. They cooked all kinds of elaborate, wonderful meals. And when you go back and you look at the pictures of the dining room, it kind of looks like a nice restaurant, right? It's got these round tables. They have white tablecloths. He got nice china and flatware. They've got these ladder-backed 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.

19:35Each 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.

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22:06Lower bills based on Harris X billing snapshots from Q321 to Q425 compared to average AT &T and Verizon bills. Comparison excludes discounts, credits, and optional charges. Price guarantee on talk text and data. Exclusions like taxes and fees apply. See T-Mobile.com. 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. 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.

22:50Wiley 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. But the test subjects were able to figure that out so quickly that basically they ended up just saying, you need to swallow this capsule with every meal and we're going to stand there and watch you do it. The volunteers reportedly called the 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.

23:35The 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,

24:03After 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 written about it. You can find the host of the most incredible cartoons. But as the Borax experiment went on, the volunteers started getting very sick. You know, they were throwing up. They were losing weight. They felt incredibly off.

24:53Wiley, 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?

25:41The 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 dine 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.

26:32And 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. Oh, the borax industry actually hired a publicist who wrote fake letters to newspapers 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.

27:21People 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 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?

28:06Critics called him the policeman of the American stomach. One editorial in a publication called The California Fruit Grower said, let somebody muzzle the chemist who would destroy our appetite. He kind of goes on the speaking circuit and talks to anyone who will listen to him, and you can see him. And this, too, I think, was one of the criticisms that was leveled against him 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.

28:52And he absolutely refuses to back down.

29:05We'll be right back.