This weekend Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Deborah Blum will be in Harbor Springs as part of the Festival of the Book, which brings poets and writers to the region.
WCMU's Ben Thorp sat down with Blum to talk about her latest book, The Poison Squad, which follows the early history of fake food, preservatives, and regulation in the U.S.
Ben: Your book, The Poison Squad, follows the early history of preservatives and fake food in the mid-1800’s. Can you tell us a little bit about the state of food then?
Blum: Yeah, that was actually one of the things that was most shocking to me when I started doing the research. Because I had, as I think many people had, this idea of this wonderful farm-fresh universe of food in the 19th century. But it turns out, of course that was part of it, but for a lot of people, especially people who weren’t living on the farms they were getting heavily manufactured, faked, and often food that was full of toxic additives at a time when there was no regulation so food manufacturers could do whatever they want.
Ben: So then Harvey Wiley comes onto the scene and you describe him as a food purist and he begins testing for the Department of Agriculture and he discovers formaldehyde in milk, which doctors at the time were saying might have been linked to child deaths. I’m wondering if you can talk about the politics of all of this?
Blum: Right. So if you can imagine this is a period in which business has never been regulated in this way, and they loved it. Why wouldn’t you? You can do anything you want and the government just looks the other way. Consumers don’t know because there’s no information getting out there. And then you have someone like Wiley who’s a complete spoiler. He’s getting the information out, he’s lobbying for change, he’s networking with all kinds of consumer safety and activist groups, he just made them nuts. You see this amazing period from when he takes up the issue to when we finally get some minimal regulation of incredible corporate pushback and efforts to destroy his career.
Ben: There’s one section where you talk about what food manufacturers were doing in terms of some of the testing and it had to do with putting some of the chemicals into rabbits and if they didn’t die within minutes the material was deemed non-poisonous. Which today seems insane. Also, it seems like Wiley is one of the first to start doing one of these long terms tests, but some of those long-term tests are on himself and his staff. Can you talk about that?
Blum: Yes. That’s actually the title of the book, the Poison Squad. And you’re absolutely right that toxicology and safety testing was incredibly primitive and really never done in a methodical way at that time. So one of the things Wiley did, and this is before the law, is he said ‘we don’t have any information, at all, that is reliable about what’s going into the food supplies so let's run some carefully planned out tests.’ These became nicknamed the poison squad in which he persuaded young government employees to dine dangerously. And what they found consistently, especially at the higher doses, people got sick. We can look at it now and say surprise surprise, people taking formaldehyde with every meal got sick. But literally, there was no real information about that at that time. So this was groundbreaking work. The other thing that did is it caught national attention at a time when most people really didn't know how bad the food supply was. When you’re reading about these young, heroic, government employees sacrificing themselves to swallow a bad compound at every meal you start realizing you’re eating that. It’s in your butter and your ketchup, it’s in your milk, it’s in your meat, and so wait a minute this is really about me. You start seeing a shift in public opinion.
Ben: One of the things that stood out is how quickly some of this hard work from Wiley in getting some regulation could be undone. What does this tell us about how fragile these regulations are, despite all the work that’s been done?
Blum: Fragile is the perfect word I think because we have this very thin net of consumer protection. Sometimes I think we toss around the word regulation as if it’s a bad word, but what we’re really talking about is protecting consumers. Protecting the American citizen.
Ben: Do we need more Harvey Wiley's in the government looking out for our best interest today?
Blum: I actually think you can always use a Harvey Wiley. They are really hard to live with but they won’t compromise on your safety and you need some people in government who say too bad for you, I believe the consumer comes first. Go ahead and call me names and try and push me around but my feet are planted here in the name of consumer protection.
Ben: Thank you so much for taking the time, we look forward to seeing you up at the Harbor Springs Festival.
Blum: Thank you, take care.
Deborah Blum is the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and publisher of Undark magazine.