After reading about how teas used to be adulterated, the synopsis of The Poison Squad caught my eye. And, I have to admit, the book shocked me – I didn’t think that deception in food could be that bad!

The Poison Squad is the story of Harvey Wiley, the father of the Pure Food and Drug Act. The early 1900s was a bad time for food – as the book puts it, ” ‘Honey’ often proved to be thickened, colored corn syrup, and ‘vanilla’ extract a mixture of alcohol and brown food coloring. ‘Strawberry’ jam could be sweetened paste made from mashed apple peelings laced with grass seeds and dyed red” and so forth.

Given my interest in tea, I kept an eye out for fake tea and found something called “lie tea”. As the book describes it, “this substance, as its name implied, was an imitation of tea, usually containing fragments or dust of the genuine leaves, foreign leaves, and mineral matters, held together by means of a starch solution.”

Ewwwww!

Apart from the fake food, a lot of food was preserved with poisonous substances like formaldehyde, borax, and much more. One scientist in Wiley’s division “tested 198 samples of candy and found that a full 115 were tainted by the use of dangerous dyes, mostly arsenic and lead chromate.”

Back then, food manufacturers argued against government interference in food regulation, arguing that these were harmful to the business. Additionally, they argued that it was better for the food to stay preserved than to have it rot (further) and spread diseases. It took Harvey Wiley and his poison squad, a team of volunteers who subjected themselves to the preservatives to see their effects, to prove that what was in the food was bad for the human body.

You would think that once all these fakery and harmful preservatives were brought to light, the government would want to move swiftly and clamp down on these food manufacturers, right? Well, although the American public was rightly outraged at what they were eating, the government was strangely reluctant to act. Agriculture Secretary, James Wilson, thought that Wiley was too much of a crusader and even brought in a board of people whose purpose was to ‘review’ Wiley’s findings.

I found The Poison Squad to be a fascinating read. It covers Wiley’s years in office and documents his battle to make sure food is pure. Wiley is extremely strict about food standards, perhaps so strict that harmed it his political career, but you have to admire him for it.

If you’re interested in food safety, or just interested in knowing more about how food and the regulation needed, this is the book to read. It’s hooked me from the start and I couldn’t put it down. And while there was a pretty long list of people (long enough that the first few pages were a character list), keeping track of them felt natural. You don’t have to be a history buff to enjoy this.

Disclaimer: I got a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a free and honest review.

Meat treated with borax? Milk dosed with formaldehyde? Food that could kill you and companies that didn’t care? It sounds terrible, but it used to be common — until chemistry professor Harvey Washington Wiley, journalist Upton Sinclair and other crusaders began a 30-year quest to make America’s food safe from an unregulated industry. This book is history, sure, but it offers lessons that resonate with the current push to deregulate so many industries that affect human health.

It is heartening to see this excellent new history getting favorable attention on the radio, in newspapers, in online journals, and in both food blogs and science blogs.

In addition, there are already many reviews here on Goodreads that adequately summarize and elaborate on this book's fine qualities, so I thought I would allow myself the freedom to write a few words about what the century-old struggle for safer food in the US has to say about current unpleasantness. There are many similarities.

It's hard to believe that anyone would construe the liberties we enjoy in the United States as permission to introduce known poisons, insect body parts, rodent excretia, etc., into food, but that's exactly what many food manufactures, big and small, did. Furthermore, attempts to limit known poisons, etc., from the food supply were treated as outrageous examples of government overreach and hysterical attention-seeking. Of course, from this distance, the champions of such “freedoms” look like the villains they were, and their arguments ring extremely hollow.

We can only hope that people will be around in a century to give today's analogs the ridicule they richly deserve. Now, of course, the stakes are higher. Instead of simply poisoning an entire country, today's villains have the opportunity to wreck the whole world.


This book also reminds how difficult it is to do the right thing. There are many pitfalls. For example, the book's splendidly cantankerous hero, log-cabin-born chemist Harvey Washington Wiley, was a thorn in the side of corner-cutters and quacks of all varieties well into his ninth decade. However, like a lot of people in the do-gooding business, he occasionally loses focus of the main goal and wastes precious time and resources on fringe issues. Wiley, for example, was an enthusiastic consumer of bourbon and pursued a strict definition of what type of restorative should be allowed to bear that proud label. I have been known to favor an occasional snort myself, so I appreciate his enthusiasm, but I recognize bourbon is (as is often said here in The Nation's Capital) not the hill you want to die on. Defending the purity of milk, flour, canned goods, etc., brings a rosy glow of mother- and baby-protecting saintliness to your advocacy. Bourbon – not so much. There are only so many hours in a day, so many battles you can fight. Choose wisely.

Speaking of choosing your battles: Wiley knew that his cause was just, and he was for much of his life the smartest person in the room. As a result, he tended to shoot off his mouth and (another Nation's Capital cliché coming up) not suffer fools gladly. Most of the time, people who really needed defending benefitted from this tendency, but when you are in the room with the President of the United States, it's often wise to choose your words carefully, even if (perhaps especially when) the President is a bit of a tool. In Wiley's case, he unnecessarily alienated the affections of Theodore Roosevelt. The consequences were not disastrous, but even Wiley himself admitted that it would have been wiser to keep his trap shut. 



Finally, remember: the struggle never ends. It's natural enough, when long work results in success, to take a moment out to do a triumphant happy-dance, but remember while shaking what God gave you that your opponents are already looking for ways to roll back your improvements and undermine your good works. As happens similarly today, evil lawyerly minions who opposed Wiley managed to change the wording of legislation and rule-making so that strict guidelines were replaced with weasel words (e.g., “The guidelines now merely banned an undefined 'excessive' amount” (Kindle location 2430)). These words can then be litigated into meaninglessness, and/or cost pesky do-gooders a small mountain of legal fees.

This is a fine book about a man whose life work benefitted others. In his lifetime, he received a certain amount of fame and monetary reward for his selflessness, but now he is largely forgotten, while names of murderous racists of the same period and earlier still grace our high schools and highways, and their graven images still infest our parks and public lands. Read this and remember someone worth remembering.

I received a free electronic advance review copy of this book via Netgalley and Penguin Random House.