A History of Food Regulation

From Deborah Blum at Slate (h/t The Dish):

There's excellent precedent for such actions. If we look back to a similar crisis of food safety in the last century, we see that federal regulators were willing to risk their lives to protect the rest of us. I'm talking, of course, about USDA scientist Harvey Washington Wiley, who helped pioneer food safety legislation by creating volunteer "poison squads" to taste-test the nation's groceries.

At the time when Wiley began his work with the poison squad, the powerful food industry had managed to derail every attempt to regulate its products. No labeling requirements existed, no safety tests, no monitoring of additives, no good information on the risks. Determined to change this, Wiley persuaded Congress in 1902 to fund what he called "hygienic table trials" of commercial food products.

His plan was simple from the beginning. He'd build a test kitchen and dining room in the basement of the Agriculture Department building on Independence Avenue. Then he'd serve poisoned food to a group of young volunteers. Wiley chose men in their 20s because he thought they were sturdy enough to withstand the diet he had in mind.

It helped that the meals served from that tidy kitchen were guaranteed excellent—a typical meal might be roast chicken, braised beef, buttered asparagus, hot rolls, and fresh fruit pies with coffee and cream. The only catch was that one of those dishes—and the squad members never knew which—would be laced with a test substance. These added ingredients were chosen by Wiley from a list of highly suspect preservatives and coloring agents used in food.

The first compound mixed into the meals was borax, a commonly used preservative loaded with the silvery, metallic element boron. Borax and the related compound, boric acid, were high on Wiley's list because butchers commonly mixed them with salt and red dye to disguise old, or even rotting, meat.

Wiley started out by mixing borax powder into butter but rapidly discovered that the diners were responding to its metallic tang. They quit buttering their bread. He then mixed it into milk and coffee, but the men then began avoiding those beverages. Finally, Wiley gave up on deception altogether. He simply placed capsules of the poison into a serving bowl, and put it out for each meal.

The most remarkable part of the story is that the men doggedly swallowed those borax-filled capsules. They did so even though they developed persistent low-grade headaches, nausea, and rumbling abdominal pain as a result. Borax, as we now know, is not acutely poisonous, but it's definitely irritating to tissues and over the long term can cause weight loss and reproductive system damage. "Today the men are thinner than usual and all show the effects of the strain," the New York Times reported in 1904, in an article on some recent graduates from the poison squad.

Later volunteers swallowed capsules filled with other toxic food additives, including copper sulfate and formaldehyde. Copper sulfate, today primarily used as a pesticide, was at the time added to fancy grades of peas to make them look greener than ordinary ones. Formaldehyde, used as a meat preservative, is widely known today as a corrosive poison and suspected carcinogen. Wiley had to end those tests early when the men became so sick that they could not rise from their beds. "The addition of formaldehyde to food tends to derange metabolism," Wiley explained.

In retrospect, historians have suggested that the poison squad trials were as much showmanship as meticulous science. The cozy-kitchen style of doing research and the very public nature of the studies made the work seem less than clinical. The squads were so widely known that songs were written about their heroic work, a form of tribute that doesn't usually follow the traditional research approach published in medical journals.

That is unbelievable.  Copper sulfate, mmm mmm good.