Book Review: Poison Squad by Deborah Blum

A while ago, I heard an interview with author Deborah Blum on NPR, where she talked about her book The Poison Squad. Though it was six-seven  (meme intended ) years back, it left an impression on me, so I picked it up when I was browsing the aisles of Barnes & Noble last month. The book chronicles the life's work of Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley to ensure food safety in the US. This is an easy but scary read, especially since we mostly take food safety for granted compared to what was going on in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As the author narrates, the US population was booming at the time. As a result, the need for more food was also rising, with production getting industrialized wherever possible. But since this was before the formation of the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), there were no laws or rules against food adulteration, no restrictions on additives, and no requirements to maintain sanitary conditions on factory floors, or track shipments for quality, or label what was actually contained in the products being sold. Manufacturers would do anything to make a product cheaper while making it look more attractive and appetizing, paying minimal attention to quality or purity, while advertising it as wholesome and pure.

To give just one example, adding water to milk to increase volume is a well-known trick around the world. But back then, milk vendors would add whatever water they could find, including random pond water, resulting in families finding live worms in their milk! And that was just the beginning. Since adding water thinned the milk, they added things like chalk, formaldehyde, and plaster to thicken it back up. This would turn the product grayish, so to give it a yellowish, creamy look and feel, adding liquefied calf brain on top was apparently a common practice. Because formaldehyde is a poisonous substance normally used in embalming, "embalmed milk" scandals frequently broke out when people, especially children, got sick or died.

The exact same practices were in play whether the product was canned beef, bleached flour, whiskey, cough syrup, or soda. The end goal was always to hide the foul smells emanating from often-rotting food, make it visually attractive with colorful chemical additives, and sell it off. For instance, copper sulfate—a toxic chemical used as a fungicide and pesticide—was added to old, rotting peas during canning just to make them appear bright green. If anyone ever complained about getting sick, manufacturers could always claim it was because of something else the person ate or was exposed to, and there was no formal way to prove otherwise. Even if they did get caught, there was no law against adding these substances to food, so they were legally in the clear. While it might be easy to say 'no preservatives', simple things like salt did serve as preservative and so what to allow and what to ban was not clear. 

Wiley entered this world as the Chief Chemist in the Department of Agriculture, armed with a single-minded obsession to address this issue. For four decades, he fought manufacturers to force them to label products and explicitly list their ingredients. He battled to ban toxic substances from being used as additives/preservatives and finally managed to help get the "Pure Food and Drug Act" passed in 1906 under President Theodore Roosevelt, which ever so slowly started moving things in the right direction.

To get to that point, he did something that would be impossible to do today. He recruited young men from his department as volunteers. They were fed three nice, chef-prepared meals a day, including water and drinks, but they had to agree that half of them would secretly be fed food additives and preservatives in the form of pills, substances that could be toxic. They were not allowed to eat or drink anything outside so that what effects these chemicals had on them could be assessed via regular medical checkups. When the press got wind of it, they dubbed the team the "Poison Squad," which provided the title for this book, strap lined: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.

Wiley became quite famous during his tenure because the public recognized his tenacity. He spoke directly with sitting US Presidents, fought often with his boss who is the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, and was regularly eulogized in newspapers. While this might sound all positive and we might think any substance proven by the poison squad to be bad for human beings will naturally be banned, that really wasn't the case. Food manufacturers fought him tooth and nail at every step. They convinced the Secretary to set up another "industry-friendly" board to override Wiley's recommendations, and they went to court and won cases because judges didn't want businesses encumbered by "unnecessary" regulations. The book is full of stories of backstabbing, Presidents siding one way or the other to make final rulings, and senators trying to sneak lines into bills stating that specific items should not be regulated to protect corrupt food manufacturers (often because those companies provided campaign contributions or local factory jobs).

At times, the detailed quotes from multiple letters and newspaper articles used to make just one point feel a bit excessive, but that doesn't happen too often in the narrative. The initial few pages talking about how bad the meat delivered to the US military and general public was also felt a bit long and slow. But once Upton Sinclair enters the narrative with his book The Jungle, the pace picks up. It is intriguing how much Sinclair's book, originally written to push for better working conditions for Chicago meatpacking district workers, ended up pushing the cause for safe food instead. As Sinclair famously quipped, he aimed for the public's heart but hit them in the stomach instead.

When you read books like this, many surprising little factoids roll out. The chapter on ketchup talks about how its origin story is an ancient mystery. While there are competing claims that it originated in China, Fiji, the West Indies, or Vietnam, one ancient Chinese recipe went like this: Take the intestine, stomach, and bladder of the yellow fish, shark, and mullet; wash them well, mix them with salt, seal them into a jar, and let it sit in the sun for up to one hundred days! Over a few centuries, this fish sauce morphed into various iterations made of mushrooms, oysters, and walnuts before finally settling on tomatoes (which was mistakenly thought of as poisonous once). The Heinz company actually worked with Wiley to eliminate harmful substances from their ketchup, creating a preservative-free, high-quality product using tomatoes, and marketed the hell out of it—to such an extent that we now all assume ketchup is naturally a thick, bright red, syrupy liquid derived from tomatoes.

Naturally, ensuring food safety, making sure labeling is correct, are all on going endeavors that need to continue with enough vigilance. Though we have quite far from where we were 100 years ago, food adulteration is a big problem not only in countries like India, but also in the US where chemical food coloring, various preservatives are all still in wide usage. This warrants worldwide implementation of rules and enforcement. On the whole, it is well worth reading. The material is fascinating, the prose is simple, and at less than 300 pages, it isn't a massive commitment. PBS also made a documentary out of the book for their American Experience series. If you don't want to read the book, you can check that out instead, as it is available for free on YouTube.

Though this book is focusing on food safety, I am particularly interested in higher level meta learnings. Because food safety and banning toxins in our food supply is the norm now, and every country has an organization equivalent to the FDA in the US, all of this might sound obvious to us today. But when there is no regulation in a newly identified domain (think of Artificial Intelligence today) how do you go about developing a new model, process, or set of rules to ensure the general public isn't harmed when there is no existing template or playbook?

Any attempt to monitor and control AI technology today is often criticized by its supporters in one of many ways: as unnecessary government interference in technological progress, OR that competing countries will get ahead of us, OR claim that regulations will prevent the virtues of the new tech from improving people's lives faster. Food manufacturers were making the exact same arguments a century ago. Balancing regulation to ensure progress isn't impeded while making sure the public isn't harmed is incredibly tricky in uncharted fields, whether it's AI or gene editing. Hats off to those who work in the trenches to create frameworks that can scale to support whole nations and can be sustained for decades.