Which Member Of The Poison Squad Are You?
At the turn of the century, amidst the great industrial boom, industrial food manufacturing boomed in the American market. The consolidation, mass manufacturing, and efficiency of the food business led huge food manufacturers to use chemicals such as formaldehyde, copper sulfate, borax, and sodium benzoate to make the food look fresher and preserve them for longer. America’s lack of food regulation was unique compared to European countries at the time, who had all passed food regulation bills decades earlier. Consumers were completely unprotected from the false advertising that the food manufacturers were using, which blatantly lied about what they were putting in their foods. In 1901 57-year-old government chemist Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, passionate about public health and social justice, wanted to prove that citizens were being poisoned by the preservatives. He had been trying to get the government to regulate food manufacturing corporations for 2 decades, and his desperateness led him to a new idea: human testing to prove the danger of the unregulated food manufacturers. Wiley’s group of human volunteers gained huge amounts of publicity and were popularly referred to as the “poison squad”. The highly publicized military cover-up of the rancid and toxic meat that was given to soldiers in the Spanish-American war at the turn of the century and the involvement of then New York governor Teddy Roosevelt boosted the popularity of Wiley’s efforts and provided the national stage that his “Poison Squad” experiment would be conducted on. His experiment to prove that the preservatives in American food was poisoning it’s citizens would ultimately become one the the most influential experiments of the 20th century and the basis for the founding of the FDA and almost all food regulation laws and lawsuits in the early 20th century.
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