Did you know that in the 19th century,
formaldehyde was used to preserve milk,
as well as cadavers, and
it caused the deaths of thousands
of children every year.
Or that arsenic and
lead were used to color candies?
Even though these chemicals also
cause children to die?
And did you know that we might still be
dealing with this if it hadn't been for
the strapping young men
of the Poison Squad and
their fearless leader,
Harvey Washington Wiley?
A new book was released this week and
it's already a number one
best seller on Amazon.
It's Pulitzer prize winning author
is our special guest tonight.
Deborah Blum is the director of the
Knight Science Journalism program at MIT,
and the perfect person to recount
the dramatic true story of the wild
west era of our food, and whether
the story today is really so different.
Please join me in welcoming Deborah Blum.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> It's such a pleasure to be here and
I wanted to start by saying how grateful
I am to the Museum of Science for
inviting me to give this talk.
Every science storyteller like
myself knows that Museums do
the most amazing job of illuminating
science, and exploring it, and
telling science stories in
a really innovative way.
So I've been inspired by them for
years, and
I've been dazzled by this museum since
I moved to Boston three years ago.
So thank you to Lisa,
and James, and Nick, and
everyone in the event team for
having me here.
And now what I wanna do is tell
you this amazing forgotten story,
food safety, the invention of food safety,
the people who first tried to
make the United States a country
that protected consumers
from business practices
of the 19th century,
which were really crazy.
And I want to start by saying these
people of the Poison Squad, Harvey Wiley,
everyone who is involved with
this made our food supply safer,
but they didn't make it perfect,
as you may already know, and
I want to come back to some of
those issues right at the end.
So this actually is Harvey Wiley and
his fearless group of chemists.
And he is, I'm gonna just stand
right underneath him I hope,
the tallest person here,
he has a kinda swashbuckling look,
right, a beard and a look of confidence.
So let me tell you a little
bit about him and this group.
Wiley was an Indiana farm boy.
He was raised on a small farm and
he developed an early interest in science.
He got an MD in Indiana and
a chemistry degree here at Harvard.
And he went back to Indiana and
joined the faculty of Purdue
the year it launched in 1874.
There were only six faculty members
including the president that year,
and he was the first professor
of chemistry at Purdue.
And while he was there, he became very
interested in the issue of fake food.
He went to Germany and studied in food
labs there, he came back with a whole lot
of European equipment that wasn't
available in the United States, he was
asked by the state of Indiana to look at
problems of fake honey and fake syrup.
And I want to stop on the honey question
for one minute because it will give you
a little bit of example of
how things have changed.
So when Wiley was looking at fake
honey in Indiana in the 1880's,
a lot of the honey sold,
as he liked to say, had never seen a bee.
It was corn syrup dyed a little golden and
the honey manufacturers
had actually created special molds
to make fake honeycomb that they
would crumble into the corn syrup,
so it was completely fake.
Today we still have problems
with adulterated honey,
you may have read some of these stories
and it's done differently today.
I'm not saying it's better but,
in general, there's some honey in the jar,
and then it's thinned with rice syrup,
corn syrup, or beet syrup, and
you can actually find stories
about some of those adulterations.
So that's just an example of how much
crazier I think things were then.
Wiley's work with sugar got him
national attention, and in 1883,
he moved to join this group,
this is the Bureau of Chemistry at
the US Department of Agriculture.
And in 1883, this was, in fact,
this group, it's very 1883, right?
It's all male, it's all white,
it's exactly what science looks like
in the 1880s in the United States.
And it's a very small group, and yet this
group is all the people in the federal
government at the moment who are trying to
make the food of the United States safe.
There's no one else.
There's no FDA,
there's no Consumer Protection Agency, and
in fact, there are no laws that
make it illegal to adulterate or
add untested things into food.
None of that exists,
except in a few states.
And I should mention, briefly,
that Massachusetts was one of the first
states in the country to have a food
safety law, and it passed in 1880.
The United States is not the first
country to have this problem.
And I love this illustration.
This is a book from 1820 that was
published in England about the problems of
the food supply there, and again it's
dealing with poisonous substances in food.
It's dealing with fakery in food.
It's part of an early push in Europe
to say we've gotta do better than this.
And eventually,
this is the satiric magazine, Puck.
Look before you eat, Is the cover.
And this follows a series
of scandals in England in
which children die
sometimes by the dozens.
And that was really related to candy.
And Lisa mentioned that arsenic used
to be one of the dyes in candy.
I love poisons.
Everyone knows that, I mean,
not everyone knows that, but
I really find poisons
fascinating in chemistry.
And the book I did before Poison Squad
was called the Poisoner's Handbook.
I looked at some of these compounds.
Arsenic makes a really nice green dye,
I mean really it's a beautiful color.
And in the 19th century
it was the go to dye, and
you can actually look across
the landscape of wallpapers,
cake decorations, fabrics, and
what you'll find is the green is arsenic,
and the preferred dye for
red and yellow is lead.
And so you had real problems
with candy being poisonous.
And finally, about the time this is
published in England in the 1870s,
Britain passes its first
law demanding that food
manufacturers be held
to a certain standard.
But, in the United States,
again there is huge resistance to this for
a whole complex of interesting and
very American reasons.
This is a candy factory in the united
states, about 20 years later.
And I put these images up for
a couple of reasons,
what I wanna do right now is
kind of walk through not all but
some of the issues and unregulated
food in the in the 19th century.
I started with candy,
just because of the connection.
And there's two things that I
think are worth noticing here.
One is,
not only are there no safety requirements,
but government inspectors
do not actually go
out to see that there's a hygienic
factory at your disposal.
And so this is a candy factory,
its a mess, right?
And it's not particularly clean,
and that is also legal.
And over here,
is actually a notebook from one
of the people who worked in Wiley's
department, this is late 1880s.
And if you can read it, you'll see
that one line after eating of it,
one child died,
two others were taken sick.
Their chemist is recommending
that they try to figure out what
the poison is in the candy,
and it's likely arsenic.
I will say that arsenic was also
used to make chocolate shiny.
And they would go and look at,
analyze what they called the shellac,
which is the layer they would put
over commercial chocolates to make
them look glossy and beautiful.
And so again,
you'll see it is very strongly suspicious.
So you see these popping up, and Wiley and
this chemist are starting to do these
reports, I wanted to mention coffee.
Actually, I don't know what
makes coffee nutritive and
I don't think
the manufacturers did either.
One of the other things in pre-regulation
times is that there are no labels and
no requirement for labels.
So one of the things that's really going
on in the US in the 19th century is that
you never know what's in your food.
And no matter what someone puts in it,
they actually don't have
to tell you anything.
And you see why they,
back in the 1890s, started to go,
could we just please inform people
as to what is in their food?
So, they know for instance how many
doses of that particular compound
they are getting, or if they are sick.
So, do we want to know
what's in their coffee even.
And so, there is to things going on
with 19th century coffee, one is,
frankly, it often it isn't coffee.
And so, especially when we started
getting into cans and ground coffee,
people would dye sodas black.
They used something called
lead black to color it.
There were sometimes they would
find charred bones in the coffee.
I actually have started wondering what
coffee tasted like in the 19th century,
with all of these different additives?
And as people get more and
more suspicious of ground coffee,
you find that the manufacturers
switched to faking coffee beans.
And now we have molds to
make fake coffee beans, and
the most popular mixture for
the fake coffee beans is dirt and wax.
Although it sometimes clay and
I was just reading a book from about 1900.
In which one of the scientists,
it was immaculate.
He goes do you know the origin of
that phrase a muddy cup of coffee?
Do you think it's because
we are all drinking dirt?
And so you really see among
scientists a real awareness of this.
But again the general public doesn't
know this because no one tells them.
I wanted to then also mention whiskey.
And one of the things that's really
interesting to me about this
advertisement, this is, again, late 19th.
So what you see here is that this whiskey
is not blended and not adulterated.
And the whiskey manufacturer feels
that they have to tell you this,
because the world is just a wash and
fake whiskey.
And so what's fake whiskey, right?
That's when I make industrial alcohol.
I synthesize ethanol which is
the alcohol that we find in
all whiskeys that are drinkable,
that are safe to drink.
I synthesize it,
I dye it to look like scotch or rye, or
bourbon according to what?
And I dye it according to how
old I wanna make it look.
At that time,
you could go into manufacturing catalogs.
And if you're a whiskey maker,
you can order essence of rye,
or flavor of bourbon.
And then just to make sure that people
really thought this was the real deal.
They would, and that you could buy
this sort of slightly soapy mixture
that would make your fake whiskey cling
to the glass the way a good whiskey does.
So that the public really couldn't tell,
and
again going back to pre-regulation.
This is so common in extending
the profits of businessmen of the time.
That you start seeing advertisements and
marketing circulars go out to
whiskey makers, to coffee makers.
That say,
here's how you can improve your profits.
Just mix in these fake beans,
just add this stone into the flour,
because that was also a popular extender.
They would grind gypsum or
some white stone and mix it into flour.
I've also wonder about people eating
the bread that was baked with this
stone enriched flour and
how their teeth survived it.
But the fact is that you can go and
find all these wonderful enticements
to improve your profit by adding
these things into your product.
I want to briefly mention,
although I'm more focused on food,
the wonderful world of medicated sodas and
unregulated snake oil
medications at this time.
This is Wine Cola, Wine Coca, sorry.
Which [LAUGH] would've made you feel
really good when you were drinking it.
And if you look at the signature
at the bottom, JS Pemberton?
JS Pemberton is the person who invented
the original formula for Coca-Cola.
And so the name Coca-Cola, of course,
comes from the fact that in the 19th
century it was a cocaine drink.
But this was his,
another version of this before he
went into the Coca-Cola business.
And he sold that company
to the Candler family and
in about 1902,
they had to take cocaine out of Coca-Cola.
But during the 19th century,
there were just an incredible amount of
these kinds of products on the market.
And now I'm just going to talk
about milk in two different ways.
This is a cartoon by a famous cartoonist
from the 19th century, again, Thomas Nast,
who's very famous for actually doing
a lot of political corruption cartoons.
But in this period, a lot of the ways
that you got your milk is you would go to
a milk vendor, and
they would dip it out of a barrel or
container for you, and
you would take it home.
So here, he shows deaf laying
out milk to this family.
So why is that?
In the middle of the 19th century,
you see journalists and
doctors in New York starting to
use the term, milk poison, for
milk, rather than just milk.
And you see an enormous number
of deaths attributed to milk.
So the practice of American Dairymen
in the 19th century
was to take farm fresh milk,
to finite with water.
I had a wonderful, I just read this
wonderful report out of Indiana.
In which they analyzed a bottle of milk
that was purchased by a family there.
[COUGH] The family brought it to
the state health department because it
was wriggling.
When they did the analysis,
they discovered that the wriggling
was horsehair worms.
They're at the bottom of the bottle.
And when they further analyzed
the milk that had been used to,
the water that been used to thin the milk,
it was stagnant.
So they had basically thinned
the milk with swamp water.
And they found assorted other
swamp related things in the milk.
But theoretically,
let's just say it's nice, clean water.
But then your milk is now blue, right?
You thinned it to the point
that it's not white anymore.
So what did you do?
Dairymen would put chalk into milk.
They would put plaster dust
into milk to re-whiten it.
They would put gelatin
into it to thicken it up.
And again, this is a story out of Indiana,
just because they had a really
good health department.
[LAUGH] They would occasionally say,
well let's just fake the cream.
And the dairymen in Indiana had,
or the cattlemen had discovered
that they could not persuade Americans
to really eat brain, cow brains.
And they had been trying to make cow brain
sandwiches popular in Indiana and failed.
So once they realized that if
they pureed the calf brains,
they could simulate cream.
And so what happened was they would
add a extra layer to the milk
of pureed calf brain, and
it worked beautifully.
It actually looked like cream, until
you poured it into your cup of coffee.
And then the brains would
cook in the hot coffee, and
you would get these weird
little lumps from your milk.
So milk was a complete mess
in the 19th century for
many people who lived in cities.
And I pulled this one example
from the New York Times.
This is pre-refrigeration.
So the milk is shoddy quality.
It's dirty, it has bacteria.
And it rots.
And there's no refrigeration,
so it's an expensive product,
cuz it doesn't last very long.
And so what the dairymen started to do,
if the milk was still rotting
while it was in their possession is
they would improve it with formaldehyde.
And formaldehyde in the United States
had become very well known during
the Civil War.
It was the number one embalming
fluid during the the Civil War.
And literally, you find both meat
producers and milk producers saying, well,
you know, if it will preserve a body,
what about this rotten meat?
Or what about this rotten milk?
And so you see, you can see this headline,
embalmed milk In Omaha,
you start seeing across the country these
outbreaks of embalmed milk scandals.
Where children are getting sick,
where the dairy men keep adding just
a little more formaldehyde,
because now your milk lasts even longer.
And finally, you see advertisements
from the makers of this.
And these compounds were never called
formaldehyde, they were called Rosaline,
and Preservaline and Icine, and
wonderful innocuous sounding names.
But the advertisements that are sold to
the dairy men say, and now you can put
a glass of milk on the counter and
it will last perfectly for ten days.
And so this will be a wonderful
selling point for you.
Everyone will want your milk,
because it doesn't rot on the counter.
And so you see that spreading,
spreading, spreading.
There is no requirement to
safety test the formaldehyde.
And even when you do have
these epidemics of death,
there is no law that says that
that practice is illegal.
So finally, Harvey Wiley, and
this is the title of my book,
decides that the only way that he is
ever going to start changing the system,
and he's been trying, he's been
publishing the reports on just about
everything comes from a Wileyy
food report starting in the 1880s.
He's been publishing these reports,
he's been working with congressmen.
He's been gathering together allies.
He had a wonderful network of consumer
activists who were trying to get some
kind of basic regulation of food.
They were not able to compete
with American business.
And so finally, he says okay, well,
why don't we just find out how
dangerous these things are.
And he persuades Congress to give him,
it was $5,000 back in 1902.
To test these additives on human beings.
You could never do that today.
But what he does is he puts out a call for
young government employees.
And he says we'll give you
three free meals a day for
months, if you will agree to
dine dangerously on occasion.
So, and they do.
He got applications from all over
the country for this experiment.
And people would write him and
they'd say, put me in your experiment.
Nothing makes me sick.
I have a cast iron stomach.
I mean, he got some amazing letters
from people who wanted to do this.
And so what he did was,
he got only young federal employees.
And as you can see again,
these are young men.
And he did that very deliberately.
Most of these guys had some
kind of athletic history.
He thought these are really strong and
healthy, and so
let's pick the strongest and
healthiest people we can find.
And if they get sick, then that has a big
message for people who are not so healthy.
So he recruited these guys.
They had to agree to
only eat in this kitchen,
which was in the basement of
the agriculture department.
They had to agree never to snack.
They couldn't go out for a beer.
They could only eat and
drink what he gave them.
They were tested constantly,
blood tests, and urinalysis, and
many other tests to see how they did it.
And he started with a cleaning product
which was a little more popular than
formaldehyde actually as a preservative.
And you can still find this
in your grocery stores.
It's called 20 Mule Team Borax.
And Borax was a really
popular food preservative.
It was in butter,
it was in milk, it was in meat.
And he started out by feeding
them capsules of borax.
And he split them into two groups.
The capsule free group.
And the comparison group.
And he hired a cook.
His name was SS Perry who had cooked
at some very fancy restaurants.
And he had to weigh everything,
everyone had to know exactly
how much they were eating.
And all the ingredients had
to be preservative-free,
and super fresh, and really delicious.
And then he waited to
see if anyone got sick.
I mean, you can't do that today.
But he told Congress later
after the first report that
he had not expected people
to get as sick as they did.
And he was watching these guys eat borax.
He picked it first,
because he thought it was really mild.
And then when people started throwing up,
and getting sicker and
sicker, and developing headaches and
aches and other symptoms,
he would later say,
my own research converted me.
And I realize we really had to do
something to get this out of the food
supply.
And what happened there was in part that
this really caught the national attention.
He'd actually called these experiments
the hygienic table trials,
which is a very noncommittal
Victorian name.
But the Washington Post
nicknamed them the Poison Squad,
and The Post loved this story.
The reporter from The Post used to
actually look around and talk to this
cook through the window, [LAUGH] and
get details of what was going on.
So this became a front
page national story.
And when these stories of
the results started coming out,
there was all this evidence for
people across the country, that they
were eating things in their food every
day that was poisoning healthy young men.
And Wiley did everything he
could to get the word out.
This is a typically faked publicity photo,
and he did that, too.
And he went around the country
talking about these experiments,
and urging, urging,
urging some kind of regulation.
You got lots of sympathetic coverage,
right, sympathetic cartoons,
and nothing happened,
there was still no regulation.
He finished those experiments in, or
most of those experiments were
finished by that 1904, and
we did not get another law for
another two years.
And that leads me to one
more part of this story.
So this is a very romantic, lovely
post card made by Swift and Company,
which was one of the Chicago meat packers
right around the turn of the century.
And these meat packers had already
been involved in one scandal which was
called the embalmed beef scandal.
Which was after the Spanish-American war,
there were generals
who said that the most injury done
to American soldiers was the food.
And that they blamed it
primarily on the meat, and
this led to an big scandal,
there was several military hearings.
Teddy Roosevelt, who had been a rough
rider in the Civil War, came and testified
and he said he would rather eat his hat
than the meat supply sent to the army.
And what was really interesting
about that scandal, and Swift and
Company was one of the companies
who was selling meat to the army.
Was that what they did when they went
through all of the analysis, and
they had Wiley was there, and
his chief food chemist was there,
was they basically came out and said, yes.
This food sucks, but that's what's on
the grocery stores across the country, so
the army is not really to blame.
And so in 1905, Upton Sinclair,
who was a young socialist writer,
published a serialized
novel in a socialist
newspaper out of Kansas,
which was then a hotbed of socialism.
In fact, Kansas in 1905 was the most
socialist state in the United States,
and they published a national
newspaper called Appeal to Reason.
And Upton Sinclair,
who was very sympathetic,
he was a starving writer, right?
He was really sympathetic
to the socialist cause.
Got very interested in a strike
by butchers in Chicago, and
he pitched first a news story to
the editor of this Kansas socialist
newspaper called Appeal to Reason.
And then he said, let me write it as
a novel, and the editor said, okay,
we'll run a serialized novel of your book.
And he said, I'm gonna call it
The Jungle because that is about
predatory American business
preying on the poor worker.
And it would've stayed, I think,
a kinda socialist preachy wonky kinda
book, except to do the research,
he went to Chicago and
he moved into a settlement house.
And he wandered, and he was so poor,
this came out later, he was so
poor that people thought he was a worker.
He had horrible threadbare clothes,
no one could tell him from the actual
underpaid stockyard workers.
So he wondered freely around and
he got all these incredible details of the
really horrible way meat was processed.
And when this book finally came out,
he started sending it to
an editor at Macmillan,
who was so
horrified by the book he cancelled it.
And then, he took his novel from
the socialist newspaper, went
door to door in New York, trying to find
a publisher who would pick up his book.
And finally,
persuaded an editor at Doubleday Page,
what was then Doubleday Page,
to take a chance on it.
But everyone was so
freaked out by his descriptions of
the meat that Doubleday Page sent
investigators to Chicago to make
sure it wasn't entirely fictional.
And so one of the things that people don't
know about The Jungle is that it was
hugely influential, it was a tipping
point in all of our food safety issues.
But it was really the journalism and
the investigations that tipped it.
The book was a novel, but
Doubleday Page actually owned a magazine.
And so when they released The Jungle,
they published all their evidence
in the magazine to go with it, and
then they sent an autographed
copy to Teddy Roosevelt.
And Roosevelt read it, and even with
the investigation from the publisher,
he said, I don't believe this.
So he sent investigators to Chicago,
and they came back and they said, and
The Jungle has horrible descriptions,
right?
Poisoned rats being ground up and
going into the food, the poison for
the rats going into the food,
people going into the food.
Rotting meat that where they
scrape off the mold, and
pour some formaldehyde and borax on it,
and repackage it and sell it to you.
I mean, it's really grisly, and so
everyone was going, you're exaggerating.
But when Teddy Roosevelt's
inspectors came back, they said no,
it's worse than that, right,
[LAUGH] and so it's absolutely worse.
And so what finally happened is
that Roosevelt used that report.
This is a Puck cartoon,
the beef trough, deodorized ham.
But Roosevelt, this is my favorite,
Roosevelt took that report and
he blackmailed Congress with it.
And he said if you don't pass
meat inspection legislation,
I'm gonna release the full report.
And a lot of these guys
were from states that had,
like Illinois,
that had major meat interest.
And then they still didn't budge,
so he released part of it.
And when he released part of it,
Europe canceled its meat
contracts with the United States,
that we're not eating this.
And that eventually lead to
the Meat Inspection Act of 1906,
and when that act passed Wiley's Food and
Drug Act was carried
along in that same momentum, and
it passed about a week later.
So they weren't the same thing, but
they were very closely related.
And there was just this tidal wave of
American outrage that pushed this forward.
And the last thing I wanna mention
about this image is that you see
that Teddy Roosevelt has
an investigative rake here.
That's a reference to
muckraking journalism.
Investigative journalists of the time
infuriated Roosevelt on a regular basis,
and he coined the terms muckrakers for
investigative journalists.
But in this case he was
doing the investigation,
and things were so
bad that his rake is burning.
I just love this picture so much.
So what happens?
It's actually the Food and Drug Act, but
people call it the Pure Food and Drug Act.
Now you start seeing companies advertising
that their food is the purest.
And so here's Heinz.
Are you sure your vinegar is pure?
You need to buy Heinz.
And Heinz was actually a huge
supporter of this act.
He was one of the few big food
manufacturers who worked for this act
that as soon as this law passed, he was
all over these kinds of advertisements.
So you see, companies now say,
our food is the safest,
our food is the purest,
our food is the best.
Wiley though, eventually,
is forced out of government service, and
he looks a lot different here than he
did when he was starting his studies.
And what happens is what
is gonna lead me to today.
The law passes, and
I then spend some time in the book,
and I won't go into those details here,
talking about the almost
instant corruption of that law.
The government is very business friendly.
They actually put in a shadow
Bureau of Chemistry to
second guess what his chemists are doing.
And that is put in there to
represent the interests of business.
They shut down a lot of his insistence
that it's always the consumer first.
And you can go into the different
memos and letters and arguments within
the Agriculture Department in which you
see him arguing the European approach.
Which is there's a lot of evidence
that this is dangerous, so
let's put a hold on it until
we're able to test it.
And you go more to the American approach,
which is let's put it out there and
if nobody gets sick,
then we'll know it's safe.
So this kind of argument goes back and
forth while he's doing this.
We actually have something like this
in the US today, which is called the,
if you go to the FDA site, generally
recognized as safe, the GRAS rule.
And that says if this is
a longstanding substance that didn't
cause problems here,
it's generally recognized as safe,
and so we do not have to safety
test that particular substance.
An interesting example of that,
while I'm just looking at that,
is titanium dioxide is a long standing
compound used cosmetics and skin products.
We now find it widely used in food,
it's used as a brightening agent,
it's used as a coloring agent,
it's never been tested for safety in food.
Because it didn't kill anyone in cosmetics
and so it is generally recognized as safe.
This is a practice that the US has adopted
because a lot of these regulations are and
the regulatory apparatus
is really underfunded.
We don't have the manpower
to test all these things, so
we come up with rules that allow us to not
test them, which is not an ideal system.
So I am going to argue here and
then I'm happy to take questions.
Would, if Wiley was here today,
he was an inflexible guy.
It was consumer first or nothing with him.
That didn't make him easy to live with.
But would he approve
of where we are today?
The food system's safer than it was,
we don't have arsenic and
formaldehyde in our food products.
We don't have children dying in scandals.
We have labels, imperfect labels,
but we have them.
So we are much father forward, but
are we always consumer first
over all other interests?
We are not.
I would argue that if we really believe in
the principle of
the American Constitution,
promote the general welfare,
that's what that means.
It means the welfare of all of us.
It doesn't mean the welfare of some of us.
And we should apply that to food
safety and drink safety and
the way we apply it to many other things.
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> And I've many other horrible stories to
tell you but I'm also happy to answer
any questions you might have about this,
the history of where we are today.
>> Great, we have
your first question here in the center.
>> There you are.
[LAUGH]
>> I'm just wondering what the history
of when people recognized
that arsenic was poisonous?
>> That's a really good question, because
it also looks at when we know something
is dangerous, and we still use it.
Arsenic's a long time homicidal,
famous poison.
People knew in the 19th century
that it was lethal in high doses.
In fact, the nickname for
arsenic in the 19th century was
the inheritance powder, because it was so
widely used homicidally.
And that leads me to food,
this is something that's really
important about additives like arsenic.
Arsenic's tasteless and it's odorless.
One of the things that made
it such a good poison for
killers was that your
victim couldn't detect it.
So you couldn't taste it, it had no smell.
It caused a generalized, if you had it in
a low dose, you got sick to your stomach,
but you didn't just keel over on the spot.
So people knew when they were using
it as a dye that it was poisonous.
Their assumption was that,
but it's just a tiny amount.
So when people died, and
they did, mostly children,
it was because they got the dose too high.
There weren't any standards saying
you have to carefully measure this.
So they would just say,
I'll make a brighter green,
a deeper red with the led, and
trust that it was gonna be safe.
So you have people playing this game,
which is even though I know this is
dangerous, I think I can get away with it.
That was the same thing with formaldehyde.
People knew formaldehyde was poisonous,
and
there were even these
outbreaks where kids died.
But they were just like but
it's just a tiny amount and
I'm sure I'm the person
who's gonna get this right.
So it sounds very coldhearted and it is.
But you saw people taking substances
they knew were dangerous and
running a calculation that
they could get away with it.
The tricky thing, this is a long answer
but I wanna make one more point.
With low dose toxicology is that
what we know is that a poisonous
substance like arsenic behaves
very differently at a high
lethal dose than it does at the tiny
dose you might get in food.
For instance,
we know that arsenic at a lethal dose,
which might be a teaspoon or two,
it shuts down cellular respiration.
It interferes with the ATP cycle.
But if you get it in a very tiny dose,
like in the part per billion,
the EPA limit for arsenic in drinking
water is ten parts per billion.
If you get it at a very tiny dose,
50 parts per billion,
it doesn't do that, but it's corrosive.
It's uniquely corrosive to cells,
say, in the cardiovascular system.
There's a lot of research that shows
that low dose expose to arsenic at these
tiny part per billion levels,
you're not dropping dead.
But it's not good for your health, right?
That's 21st century knowledge, right?
They didn't know that back then.
They just knew that arsenic was lethal,
and they gambled with it.
>> Next question,
to your left.
>> [LAUGH] okay.
>> Very good presentation.
>> Thank you.
>> Could you tell us what's the current
status of the Delaney Clause?
>> Right, so the Delaney Clause was passed
when the FDA was struggling,
especially to regulate color.
And one of the things, I'm just going
back in history again for a minute.
When Wiley came in, there was this
panorama of toxic dyes, right?
Some of them were things like arsenic and
lead, but
some of it was in the 19th century.
There was the huge rise in industrial
chemistry and we started replacing
vegetable dyes like annatto for yellow
with coal tar dyes, which were derived
from coal production, aniline coal tar
dyes, and we still use those today.
And these were, again,
a crazy range of concentrations and doses.
I actually am getting
to the Delaney Clause.
[LAUGH] And so when Wiley came in,
one of the things he did as
soon as this law passed is he
got a color chemist to go, and
analyze almost 500 dyes that were
in the food supply at the time,
and just which ones pose a risk.
And out of those almost 500 dyes,
they were able to only identify
less than 20 that posed what they
look like zero risk at the time.
So they drew up this list of dyes,
you would know them today,
red dye number five right?
Is one of those dyes,
they grew up that list of dyes and
those are the dyes we still
have on the market today.
They're generally recognized as safe,
right?
And some of those dyes turned out to be
much more poisonous than people realized.
And so, about in the 1950s when
the Delaney hearings were on food dyes,
there had been some outbreaks of
children being poisoned by orange dye,
for instance, like in popcorn balls and
candy corn, those dyes.
And those dyes turned out to be more
toxic than people had realized, and
people had ramped up the dose,
and they had people getting sick.
So there were the Delaney hearings that
actually looked at the way the FDA
regulated for safety, and they pulled
two dyes out following those hearings.
And the Delaney Amendment requires
the FDA to actually impose
a higher safety standard
on these products.
It's just not enforced, right.
And one of the problems that we
do have is that sometimes we have
really good laws on the books.
We just don't enforce them.
So another example of that in
FDA history is that under Obama,
Congress passed an Obama signed
a Food Safety Modernization Act.
And it said our food regulations
are really old right?
We're still working with Wiley's
list of chemical compounds.
We're still working with a 1938 Food and
Drug Act.
It's the 21st century.
Let's apply some modern standards and
let's hold people to things like
the question about low dose tox.
Let's hold people to standards that
really recognize that these very
small doses are dangerous.
That's never been funded, right?
So we have some really good laws,
we just don't put the muscle behind them.
And one of the things I wanna
say before I quit this very long
winded answer to your very
good question is I've
started thinking to myself
that part of the problem for
us is that we use the term regulation or
regulate in pejorative sense.
We regulate, that's a bad thing.
When what we really should say
is consumer protection, right,
because what is a regulation?
It's to protect us, right?
And I think here we should really
think about the fact that that's
an important part of who we are, and
we should put more muscle behind it.
Other questions?
>> Next questions also.
>> Wait.
I think.
>> It's okay.
>> Yeah.
>> Thank you for your lecture tonight.
It's definitely appreciated and
really interesting.
I have so many questions for you, but
one of the questions that comes to
mind especially is In the early 1900s
you said that was when the first
regulations were starting to become
noticeable and pass through government.
Did you come across anything
in your research and
readings in the past regarding what the
researchers thought about radium in food?
>> That's a great question, [LAUGH] and
I actually can answer
that from my other book.
So, radium is a,
everyone knows radium right?
It's like nothing that you want
to imbibe on a regular basis, and
it was first discovered by Marie and
Pierre Curie in the late 19th century.
And people really saw it
as a miracle element.
If you can imagine, what you thought were
dead rocks under your feet were alive and
they're sparking with energy.
And so
the idea was at that time at first, wow,
if we can just absorb more radium,
we're gonna shine and
sparkle and be healthier, too.
I mean, from our perspective that's crazy,
but at that time they really didn't know
that radiation was dangerous, right,
when they first started this.
And so you see radium going
into all kinds of products.
And this really takes off probably
after World War I in particular,
which is a little later than
the period I'm in for this book,
because in World War I, we started
having glow in the dark watches,
right, which were developed for
the military.
And so you need to know the time or
you need to read your instruments but
you don't wanna turn on a light and have
someone shoot you, so you have tiny green
glowing markers on your instruments
that are created by radium-based paint.
And during the 1920s,
you see radium cosmetics,
it's like put this radium-based lotion
on your face until your face falls off,
radium-based drinks,
Radithor was one, radium based candy.
They gave radium candy
to kids thinking that
this extra jolt of energy
would be good for them.
And they even put radium in cigarettes,
which is like dead on the spot.
I mean, it was crazy.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Is how I imagine it.
And it really took until the late 1920s
before people figured this out, right?
And started seeing how dangerous it was.
And that was a lot because of the watches,
right?
They hired young women to
paint these watch faces,
they would lip point their brushes to make
the point super sharp where they were
painting these things, so
they would swallow the radiu.
And radium's an alpha emitter.
So it's not really dangerous outside but
it is dangerous if you swallow it.
And so these girls got really,
really sick.
And then even so they still had
radium in health drinks, right?
It took probably between when
the radium dial painters got sick until
about the mid 1930s,
which tells you how slow we are, right?
We have people dying.
But it's gonna take us another six years
before we're gonna actually start putting
in these standards.
So that's the kinda arc of it.
I don't think they were really looking
at that in this period of this book, but
I know it was a huge issue later, and
that's a good question.
>> I remember a couple years ago
there were some, I think Chinese, little
milk cartons or juice cartons for kids.
And they found that there was some white
stuff in there that sounded more like
building material than
a nutritive product.
I don't know how it was found,
do you have any thoughts on that scandal?
And your talk made me realize, well, maybe
they were just trying to get more product
by adding stuff, but I'm just curious.
>> I mean, one of the problems,
I think, and we see this when I
was talking about fake honey,
a lot of those come from China where
the regulations are different.
There was a scandal with milk in which,
in fact, you're exactly right,
they were extending milk.
And there is a compound called melamine,
which we find in plastic.
And this was largely in China, and
really hundreds of little kids
in China died in that scandal.
And it was a thing where they were
paying off government inspectors, and
they were looking the other way.
But it was very comparable to sort
of the milk dilution problems, or
the milk manipulation issues that
we had in the United States.
And we've seen this before
with products from China.
The other one that came up,
man, I want to say it was six,
seven years ago, was toothpaste.
And so the scandal that got
us the 1938 Food, Drug and
Cosmetics Act, which created
the modern FDA, Involved a bleah,
I can't say that, a cough syrup,
it was a cough syrup for children.
It was flavored with raspberries and
it was sweetened with ethylene glycol,
which is antifreeze.
And it was, again, under the old law, the
Wylie Law, which as I said was imperfect.
That was illegal, because it was
called an elixir, [LAUGH] but
it was not illegal because they had
put antifreeze in this cough syrup.
And the then FDA had to hunt down and
figure out what was going on,
they did too, but
hundreds of children died.
And that scandal in 1937,
the elixir sulfanilamide scandal,
I always have a hard time saying that,
was the tipping point.
In which everyone really said,
the 1906 law's great,
it’s changed a lot of things, it’s not
good enough, we’ve got to do better.
And that led us to the law that
started the modern FDA, and
the Chinese put ethylene
glycol in toothpaste.
And they shipped it primarily to poor
countries in Latin America, and there
were droves of deaths in Honduras and
in a number of Central American countries.
The United States actually, I mean,
and I would hope this is still true,
they were safety testing Chinese
products [LAUGH] as they came in.
So we did not see that happen in this
country, and that's a one-up for
us and our inspectors at the border.
But it did go to these other countries
that didn't have that kind of protective
apparatus in place, and
it's just another reminder,
guys, that there are a lot of
honest businesses out there, right?
This is not me dissing every businessman
or every manufacturer in the world, but
there are always people who are gonna
take advantage of this kind of loopholes,
right?
And there are always people who
are gonna take advantage of lax
regulatory standards, so
we need them and we need them enforced.
So yeah, I mean,
I’m careful about what I buy from China.
And just very briefly, off the topic of
food, when I wrote a toxicology column for
the New York Times a few years ago,
and I looked at lipsticks, and
the number [LAUGH] one thing
that every scientist said is,
don’t buy lipsticks made in China.
They’re too high in heavy metals, right?
And they’re not tested for that, and
you don't know that when you buy
your $1 lipstick at the dollar store or
whatever, so don't buy them.
And so I think we will still, again,
this is not me just saying everyone,
but we still have to acknowledge
that we have to be careful.
>> Great, we have our final question right
here in the front.
>> Yeah,
sometime next year my favorite candy
is gonna come back on the market,
Necco Wafers.
>> Good.
[LAUGH]
>> How should I enjoy my Necco Wafers,
will they be tested before I get to them?
>> That's a really good question, right?
But I think you should enjoy them, right?
[LAUGH] If it's your favorite candy,
go ahead and enjoy it.
So I'm a neurotic label reader, right?
And so when you get your Necco Wafers,
take a look at the label.
It will give you some guidance,
it won't give you all guidance.
This is another one of my big complaints,
right?
But I actually think,
here's what I will tell you.
From someone who writes only about
things that are bad for you, and
so has to fight neurosis on a daily basis,
mix it up.
If you don't eat them every day, right,
if you don't eat them every day and
you've got a tiny amount of something,
its probably not gonna be that harmful.
It's the things you eat everyday,
the repeated insult at a very low dose,
that are a problem.
So I say, go for it.
And this is the last, right?
>> There's a lot of
clothing coming in from China.
And the dies and so forth,
is that toxic to some
degree to your skin and absorption?
>> You know,
that's a really good question.
I mean, I did all kinds of
horrible things that are bad for
you when I was writing this column,
Poisoned Pen for the New York Times.
And I looked at dyed goods from China,
but I really looked at leather goods,
cheap belts and shoes, and
those were super high in lead.
And they actually had had, and so the
problem there, not so much I think with
fabric, you're gonna wash that all
the time, you're gonna wash stuff out.
Wash everything before you wear it,
right, is a good ruling principle.
But with leather goods,
they crumble and you get dust.
So they actually, with some of these
super cheap bright colored purses,
these were bright colors,
they were finding lead dust in the purse.
So you would put your hand in
to get your wallet out, and
you'd get lead on your fingers.
So again, I think it's just important.
Bright colors are warning
colors to some extent, right?
But know where your goods come from and
be aware that,
I'm not a big believer I will say, and
this is the last thing I'll say, that we
should be forced as consumers to live in a
constant terrified state of buyer beware.
I really believe that we have a right
to expect the people who test for
safety and the people who draw up
these regulations to stand for us.
And so if I was gonna have a final
message from this, is that we're still
working on getting it right and I would
like to push us to get it even righter.
Thank you all so much.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Bravo, well said.
[LAUGH] This was great, I love your
idea of, let's not call it regulation,
let's call it consumer protection.
>> Agreed.
>> And it's just going back to what's in
the Constitution, to promote
the general welfare of the population.
We are delighted to have Debra book for
sale here, and so
we invite you to buy a copy of the book,
and
to continue the conversation
with Debra as she signs books.
We'd love for you to come back to
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You can sign up to get
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