INTRODUCTION

W
e tend these days to cast a romantic glow over the foods
of our forefathers. In such rosy light, we may imagine
grandparents or great-grandparents thriving happily—
and solely—on farm-fresh produce and pasture-raised livestock. We
may even believe that they ate and drank in a world untouched by the
chemically enhanced and deceptive food manufacturing practices of
today.
In this we would be wrong.
By the mid-nineteenth century, in fact, many foods and drinks sold
in the United States had earned a reputation as often untrust- worthy
and occasionally downright dangerous.
Milk offers a stunning case in point. Dairymen, especially those
serving crowded American cities in the nineteenth century, learned
that there were profits to be made by skimming and watering down
their product. The standard recipe was a pint of lukewarm water to
every quart of milk—after the cream had been skimmed off. To im-
prove the bluish look of the remaining liquid, milk producers learned
to add whitening agents such as plaster of paris or chalk. Sometimes
they added a dollop of molasses to give the liquid a more golden,

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 2 the poison squad

creamy color. To mimic the expected layer of cream on top, they

might also add a final squirt of something yellowish, occasionally
pureed calf brains.
“Where are the police?” demanded New York journalist John
Mullaly as he detailed such practices and worse in his 1853 book,
The Milk Trade in New York and Vicinity. Mullaly’s evidence in-
cluded reports from frustrated physicians stating that thousands of
children were killed in New York City every year by dirty (bacteria-
laden) and deliberately tainted milk. His demands for prosecution
were partly theater. Despite his and others’ outraged demands for
change, no laws existed to make such adulterations illegal. Still Mul-
laly continued to ask, when would enough be enough?
Fakery and adulteration ran rampant in other American products
as well. “Honey” often proved to be thickened, colored corn syrup,
and “vanilla” extract a mixture of alcohol and brown food coloring.
“Strawberry” jam could be sweetened paste made from mashed apple
peelings laced with grass seeds and dyed red. “Coffee” might be
largely sawdust, or wheat, beans, beets, peas, and dandelion seeds,
scorched black and ground to resemble the genuine article. Contain-
ers of “pepper,” “cinnamon,” or “nutmeg” were frequently laced with
a cheaper filler material such as pulverized coconut shells, charred
rope, or occasionally floor sweepings. “Flour” routinely con- tained
crushed stone or gypsum as a cheap extender. Ground insects could
be mixed into brown sugar, often without detection—their use linked
to an unpleasant condition known as “grocer’s itch.”
By the end of the nineteenth century, the sweeping industrial
revolution—and the rise of industrial chemistry—had also brought a
host of new chemical additives and synthetic compounds into the food
supply. Still unchecked by government regulation, basic safety
testing, or even labeling requirements, food and drink manufacturers
embraced the new materials with enthusiasm, mixing them into goods
destined for the grocery store at sometimes lethal levels.
The most popular preservative for milk—a product prone to rot

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 Introduction 3

in an era that lacked effective refrigeration—was formaldehyde, its

use adapted from the newest embalming practices of undertakers.
Processors employed formaldehyde solutions—sold under innocuous
names such as Preservaline—to restore decaying meats as well. Other
popular preservatives included salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical com-
pound, and borax, a mineral-based material best known as a clean- ing
product.
Food manufacturers also adopted new synthetic dyes, derived
from coal by-products, to improve the color of their less appealing
products. They found inexpensive synthetic compounds that they
could secretly substitute into food and drink—saccharin to replace
sugar; acetic acid instead of lemon juice; lab-created alcohols, dyed
and flavored, to mimic aged whiskeys and fine wines. As progressive
Wisconsin senator Robert M. La Follette described such practices in
1886: “Ingenuity, striking hands with cunning trickery, compounds a
substance to counterfeit an article of food. It is made to look like
something it is not; to taste and smell like something it is not; to sell
something it is not, and so do deceive the purchaser.”
No wonder, then, that when alarmed citizens began pushing for
federal help in checking such fraud and fakery, they did so under the
banner of purity. They saw themselves as “pure food” crusaders,
fighting to clean up not only a contaminated supply chain but also a
system that was dirty to its roots and protected by politicians friendly
to industry. As Mullaly had done decades earlier, the new crusaders—
scientists and journalists, state health officials and leaders of wom-
en’s groups—loudly deplored their national government’s willingness
to allow such corrupt practices to continue.
The leaders of the pure-food movement united behind the idea that
regulatory oversight was the only realistic answer. They’d seen many
times that the country’s food processors and manufacturers felt little
or no responsibility to protect the food supply, especially if it meant
reducing profits. Formaldehyde, for instance, had been di- rectly
linked to deaths—notably of children drinking what came to

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 4 the poison squad

be called embalmed milk—without any move by producers to dis-

continue the preservative’s use. The preservative’s usefulness in sal-
vaging bad milk—otherwise unsalable—was too valuable to lose.
American corporations had successfully and repeatedly blocked
efforts to pass even modest food safety legislation. This especially
galled consumer safety advocates because governments in Europe
were enacting protective measures; some foods and drinks sold freely
in the United States were now banned abroad. Unlike their American
counterparts, European beer and wine makers were blocked from
using risky preservatives in their beverages (although they could put
them in products destined for U.S. sales).
At the first National Pure Food and Drug Congress, held in
Washington, DC, in 1898, delegates noted that American food fraud
had continued to flourish since La Follette’s speech on the floor of the
Senate some thirteen years earlier. How long would the country go
without some policy or plan to deal with industrial food? No one
knew. But surely, one delegate suggested hopefully, “this great coun-
try [must eventually] take its proper place among civilized nations and
protect its citizens.”
Many of the several hundred pure-food advocates at the congress
saw their best chance for progress in what might have seemed an
unlikely source of heroics: a small chemistry unit in the U.S. Depart-
ment of Agriculture and its chief scientist, a middle-aged Indiana
native who’d trained in chemistry at Harvard University.
But that was, in reality, a savvy choice.
Decades before the federal government had even considered any-
thing resembling a food and drug administration, the Department of
Agriculture (created in 1862 by President Abraham Lincoln) was
tasked with analyzing the composition of American food and drink. It
was the only agency to do so and that work was mostly in re- sponse
to unhappy farmers who saw manufactured food undercut- ting their
market. An 1870s complaint from a Minnesota agricultural
association asked the division to investigate the “misapplication of

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 Introduction 5

science to deodorize rotten eggs, revive rancid butter, and dye pithy
peas” green again.
But it wasn’t until the Agriculture Department named Harvey
Washington Wiley chief chemist in 1883—recruiting him from a job
at Purdue University—that the agency began methodically investi-
gating food and drink fraud. Although best known as an expert in
sugar chemistry, Wiley had studied food fakery while still in Indiana
and had warned then that “counterfeit” products could be consid- ered
a threat to public health. Upon arrival at the Agriculture De- partment,
he promptly initiated a series of investigations of products ranging
from butter to spices to wine and beer, building a detailed and
sometimes horrifying portrait of the country’s food supply. Those
reports would lead him, in the early twentieth century, to test some of
the most suspect chemical additives on human volunteers, a series of
experiments dubbed the “Poison Squad” studies by the na- tion’s
newspapers.
His food and drink investigations—and the detailed criticism they
contained—both infuriated manufacturers and alarmed Wiley’s
business-minded supervisors. But he refused, under pressure, to stop
the studies. And as the pure-food advocates noted with admiration,
Wiley stuck by his research—and his researchers—even when they
reached conclusions that embarrassed powerful corporate and politi-
cal interests.
Even worse, in the view of those interests, he publicized the find-
ings. He steadfastly sought to inform not just government officials and
lawmakers but also the public at large—including pure-food
activists—about what his investigations revealed. The years of re-
search findings, he told a congressional committee, had convinced
him that polite resignation was unacceptable.
And Wiley tended to stand out anyway. He was a tall man, dark
haired and dark eyed, imposing in stature, humorously charming in
private, by turns ministerial and theatrical in public. He would be-
come the best-known face of the national battle for food safety

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 6 the poison squad

regulation at the turn of the twentieth century, building an alliance of

consumer advocates and rallying them, in the face of repeated set-
backs, to stay in the fight. He was America’s first great food safety
chemist, but his greatest contribution to the cause—even more than
the scientific work he conducted and supervised, even more than his
considerable ability to dramatize the cause—was “the inspired gener-
alship he offered,” wrote public-health historian Oscar Anderson Jr.
Wiley, he added, “was the one leader who consistently saw the big
picture,” the long-term goal of strong consumer protection.
Wiley also had his imperfections. The son of a lay preacher, he
tended to claim the moral high ground largely for his alliance alone.
Faced with hostility, he became more rigid in his stance, often refus-
ing to compromise even on small details. He quarreled over pictures
on labels as firmly as he quarreled over toxic compounds in baked
goods. His refusal to make nice, even when nitpicking, strained his
alliances and, some felt, limited his effectiveness. He knew that too.
He failed, Wiley himself believed, to achieve the kind of fearlessly
tough regulatory protections he wanted for his country. He could not
forget or forgive the times that he’d stood up alone in—and some-
times lost—the fight against corporate interference in the law. His
own criticisms of his grand achievement—the passage and enforce-
ment of the landmark 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act—may well have
undercut our perceptions of his accomplishments and caused us to
undervalue his contributions.
But in that too we would be wrong.
Yes, we are still fighting for pure food. But let us recognize that
we’ve come a wonderfully long way from the unregulated food, drink,
and drug horrors of the nineteenth century. And in an era when
business interests rail—as they did in Wiley’s time—about gov-
ernment overreach and the need to eliminate regulations, we should
remember how much Wiley’s work laid the foundation that allows us
to stand up to that. He changed the way we regulate, and he was

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 Introduction 7

essential in changing the way we think about food, health, and con-
sumer protection.
It may not always serve us to cast a rosy glow over the past—or
even over its heroes. But we should take care not to forget those early
lessons on protecting our country—and ourselves. And as we look
back to that first fierce battle for federal consumer protection, we
would do well to remember what an intensely personal fight it often
was. There’s a remarkable and revealing story—one that illuminates
where we stand today—behind the simple fact that what we now call
the “pure food and drug law” was once known, coast to coast, as “Dr.
Wiley’s Law.”

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