With The Poison Squad I was just sort of poking around that question: what were people really exposed to in the early 20th century? And I saw references to this experiment that the Washington Post had called the Poison Squad, run by a USDA chemist, Harvey Washington Wiley. I thought, well, what is that? That's how I started. So I went and looked at that experiment—a very peculiar public health experiment in which you have a senior chemist at a government agency poisoning his coworkers. The Poison Squad was a group of young clerks at USDA who ate meals that included food additives that Harvey Wiley thought or suspected were truly dangerous. And I thought, why would you do that? Why would you feel that the only way that you could get at a problem would be to poison your coworkers?
That led me into something that I actually had not expected to find. I started looking at what brought him to this point of desperation, because you have to be pretty desperate to do an experiment on your colleagues where you're having them eat capsules of formaldehyde. When I went back to the 19th century, I realized I had bought into this mythology of the happy, pink-cheeked Americans eating their farm-fresh food, and everything's wonderful. And you get this sometimes from, you know, super foodies. They'll be like, don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't have touched or couldn't spell. Yeah, but your grandmother was eating crap. The food supply, the commercial food supply in the 19th century, was awful. And I hadn't realized that, so I started really getting into the subject: what was going into food in the 19th century? Really bad things, for reasons of profit primarily. And why weren't we doing anything about it? That was the other question for me.
That's really where the Wiley story comes into it. You have all of these different really bad things that are going into the industrial food supply. In England, there's a book, A Treatise on Adulteration of Food and Culinary Poisons, that came out in 1820 that talks about the use of heavy metals in the food supply—arsenic as a green food coloring, copper sulfate as a green food coloring, lead as both a yellow and orange food coloring. And eventually, through that and a series of scandals, Britain passed a food safety law in 1860.
But there's nothing in the United States, and yet the same things are in the food supply. There's two things going on. One is the food supply is full of all kinds of incredible fakery. You could put anything into a can of coffee or a jar of jam or flour or whiskey, and you didn't have to label it, and you didn't have to safety-test. So when Harvey Wiley becomes a federal chemist in 1883, he starts just by investigating. He wasn't a crusader, he just launches this series called “Bulletin 13”, which consists of investigations of the American food supply. And he finds all the things I'm telling you about, really poisonous things in the food supply.