Green Group discussion

I will be reading and discussing The Poison Squad: One Chemist's' Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Deborah Blum.

by Deborah Blum

Feel free to contribute anything about food safety.

The author gives many examples of deceptive food practices in the 1800s and the turn of the century. Here is one: Honey was often tinted corn syrup. Without laws and regulations, how would we stop such unscrupulous practices? A few years ago I heard a friend complain about laws in California that required honey makers to register with the state for quality control. They forget that there are reasons for regulations.

The book is a tribute to the great Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley who in 1883 as a young chemist first wrote a paper exposing such practices. And guess who opposed him? The honey producers themselves. They thought it would do harm to their reputations. So the trade journals attacked him. All the while ignoring the fact that many "beekeepers" had NO BEES.

A report on milk production in 1850 reads like a horror story. The cows lived in misery, and the children drinking the milk were sick and often dying.

Wiley became famous as a chemist doing his best to expose such practices. He was hated by some as a man "who is doing all he can to destroy American business."

Lead solder was used to seal the seams of tin cans. Europe regulated the use of lead, but the US had no standards even for food. This libertarian philosophy continues even to today. We have many who want the companies to regulate themselves. A dose of history might get them to think again about such a philosophy.

Medicines were often little more than flavored drinking alcohol. Legislation was constantly flouted. Businesses opposed even the idea of a pure food and drug act.

Wiley found support from women's organizations. One area of concern was a famously stimulating soft drink known as Coca-Cola. They wanted the company to drastically reduce the amount of cocaine in its formula. It also contained caffeine. That is still a problem.

https://teens.drugabuse.gov/blog/post...

Upton Sinclair, another hero, had a grubstake of $1,000 (about $30,000 today) to work on a novel about the courageous workers of the Chicago stockyards who were fighting for better living conditions. He would spend 7 weeks in the stockyards dressing in the grubby clothes of a worker to blend in. He would settle down to write the most influential book of his prolific career: The Jungle. It was about a Lithuanian immigrant with the dream of a better life in America. But he is nearly destroyed by the horrendous working conditions of the fictional "Anderson" meat-processing company. That name stood for Armour Meats. The conclusion of the book is that the only way out is to embrace socialism.

Sinclair wanted to focus on workers' rights, but it was the meat stories that affected the reading public. Once again, it showed that there is always a connection between social justice and good environmental protection.

The whiskey makers did not want to have labels to show the dyes, additives, and synthetic alcohol in their products. They warned it would hurt taxes. Manufacturers in almost every industry joined together to fight any sign of food, drink, or drug regulation. Some things never change.

From Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle, we learn such things as how pickled beef had to be bathed in acid; the men working that line had their fingers eaten away by repeated exposure. Tuberculosis germs thrived in the moist, stinking air of the processing plants and spread from animal to animal. Workers occasionally fell into vats of acid and "when they were fished out, there was never enough left of them to be worth exhibiting." Sometimes a worker would slip into a vat and be "overlooked for days till all but the bones of them had gone out into the world as Anderson's Pure Beef Lard." Everyone knew he meant Armour's.

Poisoned bread was put out to control the rat population. "Then the rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together."

One hero in the publishing industry was Isaac Marcosson, who pushed to have Sinclair's book published by Doubleday, Page, & Company.

Sinclair was discouraged, even though his book sold well and made a great impact. He said, "I aimed for the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." All anyone cared about was their food and not the workers who suffered miserably.

Passing the Food and Drug Act in 1906 did not end the troubles. Wiley would be attacked constantly for the rest of his life. Manufacturers would spend all their time and money trying to gut the law. Just like they do today with our Consumer Protection Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Endangered Species Act, and every regulation on the book designed to protect us all.

One other tactic still used today was to limit funding of these laws. Then there are not enough inspectors. Cheating continues.

The exception often proves the rule. There was one man and one company that tried to do it right: Heinz. They advertised a ketchup free from additives. It costs a few cents more, but they convinced consumers it was worth it. His company fought for pure food and decent working conditions. The fact that he was the only one shows how bad things were.

Cocaine was famously used in Coca-Cola. Also many "soothing syrups" for children were laced with morphine, heroin, and chloral hydrate. Same for cough syrups and asthma medications.

I salute the heroic life of Dr. Wiley. He believed in the power of science to benefit society. He said, "The freedom of science should be kept inviolate." In today's world we could use that type of idealism again. The President of the United States of America fights science all the time, and his party and others enable him. The so-called libertarian/conservative movement supports them. There is nothing conservative about such people. Nothing.

Thanks for all these great observations. And of course the concern for food safety extends to the poisons we use in food production itself. For another look back, in 1960 Rachael Carson calculated that the U.S. chemical industry was producing 290 million tons of pest-control toxins per year. California was applying enough parathion to kill the whole world’s human population at least five times over. Naturally, all this poison got into the food, land, or water, and effects began to appear. As Carson put it in Silent Spring, “The crusade to create a chemically sterile, insect-free world seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists and most of the so-called control agencies.”

It took 11 years after the publication of Silent Spring for the public to win the right not to be sprayed with DDT. And even after all this, in the 1980s, when a United Nations accord proposed publishing a list of industrial chemicals identified as hazardous, the U.S. government blocked it. The prevailing argument was that such a list “could unfairly discriminate against the export and sale of products of certain companies.”

As weeds grew resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, the company sought to enable increased doses on the fields. To get crops that could survive that, they bio-engineered crops for extra tolerance to their own chemical product, making them "Roundup Ready." Still, by the summer of 2013, new “superweed” versions of pigweed or giant ragweed were strangling Roundup-ready crops on 70 million acres of farmland in more than 20 U.S. states. And to meet this latest escalation of the war on weeds, some scientists proposed to develop a new generation of genetically modified crops, bred to survive increased applications of 2, 4-D, which was one of the active ingredients in Agent Orange. Sure enough, in 2014 the U.S. Department of Agriculture gave approval for Dow Chemical to develop 2, 4-D-tolerant strains of corn and soybeans. The Department’s staff argued that the hybrid seeds themselves were harmless, and the resultant increased doses of 2, 4-D on food crops was a separate issue. Also in 2014, the EPA approved use of a new herbicide combo, namely 2, 4-D with Roundup (known as “Enlist Duo”).

Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley was a very great man who had to overcome all kinds of obstacles to get his ideas of what was acceptable to add to food put into law. When he started, a lot of food was simply packed in formaldehyde to preserve it. People then ate the food that had been pickled in formaldehyde.

Teddy Roosevelt was president when Wiley was working on some of his programs of food safety. Teddy would sometimes be supportive and other times be totally against what Wiley was proposing. This was because Roosevelt was personal friends of many of the owners of major industries in America and would personally intercede on their behalf. When we stop looking at only the positive things presidents have accomplished and include all the decisions they made, most, if not all presidents, barely get by with a grade of D+.

Other substances added to food would be the equivalent of putting thick applications of inedible make up on the food and then eating it.

The poison squad was a group of healthy, fit, young men who volunteered to eat this garbage being sold as food and be medically tested after each meal to see if the food had any ill effects. Sometimes only a few meals were needed to see how bad the food was.

We have to always remember that we are competing with big money. So we have to use our numbers to beat back the large companies. That only works if everyone has the knowledge to know what side to be on.

Tired or Toxic? A Blueprint for Health is a very helpful book for figuring out how to cope with the poisoned environment.