The Poison Squad

I’m glad not to be living in the U.S. a hundred years ago, that is, after reading The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum. While there is a slight connection to her earlier book, The Poisoner’s Handbook, Blum’s present investigation focuses on the personage of Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, chief chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Wiley’s tireless crusade for food safety eventually led to the formation of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1938, but he did not live to see it.

The Poison Squad is named after a series of trials run by Wiley and his team on healthy government workers who volunteered to consume a measurable amount of ‘added ingredients’ as part of daily food intake. Wiley would call these substances adulterants and poisons, while the food and beverage corporations disagreed vehemently with him. Borax and saccharin are among the substances tested by the Poison Squad. But the list of adulterants Wiley was fighting against was long and extensive. For example, coloring agents were used to make food more attractive, but many of them contained toxic metals compounds or benzene derivatives. Preservatives such as formaldehyde also take center stage in the story especially related to the dairy and meat industries.

Reading The Poison Squad was downright scary. Before there was regulation, any huckster trying to make a quick profit would scrape even dirt, shells and chalk into food. But larger corporations and supply chains were just as complicit. Truth in advertising was stretched so far that so-called maple syrup may contain no maple in it, although you’d still see the picture of a maple leaf on the bottle. Wiley championed accuracy in labeling and fought every food lobby imaginable – the whiskey lobby, the corn syrup lobby, the Coca-Cola company, Monsanto, etc. Many of the big chemical companies today such as Pfizer and Dow also had their fingers in the food chemistry process.

Chemistry isn’t the main story though. The two salient takeaways from Blum’s book are: (1) Politics overshadows science, and (2) Writing good legislation is very tricky. Wiley started as chief chemist in 1883, already known for championing the ‘pure food’ cause. But it wasn’t until 1906 that he was able to push through what became known as Wiley’s Food Law. To get to that stage, Wiley needed plenty of public support and advocacy coming from folks who weren’t necessarily scientists. Women’s groups in particular were a bulwark towards his campaign. And even then, the 1906 law was significantly flawed because the food corporations had successfully fought precision in wording thereby leading to compromises that would prove difficult to fight legislative cases against industry.

Having powerful pro-industry gatekeepers such as Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson stymied many of Wiley’s efforts. Some of the vignettes in The Poison Squad about the political maneuvering and deceit would be downright shocking, if it wasn’t for the parallels in today’s White House. While the FDA has made some headlines in its regulation rollbacks, they have been dwarfed by the travails within the EPA. In that sense, Blum’s historical tale isn’t just about how things were done ‘back in the day’. The same machinations of politics and legislation churn on today. The history of enacting consumer protection is littered with nasty large-scale events that provided enough political momentum to move the needle of legislation. Instead of pre-emptive forward-planning, we wait for the status quo to be eroded and each person hopes not to personally pay the price.