48 pages • 1 hour read
Deborah BlumThe Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “What’s in It?”
In 1899, Senator William Mason of Illinois initiated a series of hearings to evaluate the rampant adulteration of food and drink in the United States. Known as the Mason hearings, the sessions continued for almost a year, and Dr. Wiley provided expert testimony at Mason’s request. The hearings explored the uses of adulterants, additives, preservatives, and dyes. They also exposed the rampant practice of flatly deceiving consumers by mislabeling packaging. For example, some “coffee beans” were made by mixing flour, molasses, dirt, and sawdust and then pressing the paste into molds to resemble the correct shape.
In his testimony, Dr. Wiley stressed that those products in question were overwhelmingly “foods made for selling to the poor” (67), emphasizing the inevitable vulnerability of customers without the financial means to purchase safe, healthy alternatives from reputable, ethical suppliers. Consumers who needed to purchase their food from a grocer were at a disadvantage because the effects of additives and adulterants were not yet understood. Furthermore, there were no legal requirements for disclosure in labeling which would allow them to make informed decisions. Even if pure food were available, consumers wouldn’t know how to distinguish it among the options offered, because there had been no clear assessment of ingredients. Dr. Wiley raised an additional ethical issue: the potential for even greater harm to members of vulnerable populations. Unsanitary production practices had already been proven dangerous if not deadly. If adulterants were also harmful, Wiley reasoned that the young, the elderly, and those with chronic illnesses and physical disabilities would be most impacted by the ingestion of these substances.
Wiley also raised the issue of the unknown effects of cumulative doses of these chemicals on the human body. He appreciated the difference between the ingestion of a small amount of borax, in a single dose, and the repeated inundation of the system with multiple adulterants compounding one another. South Dakota food chemist James Shepard created a sample menu of three meals in the average American’s diet. Listing each ingredient, he included beside it the chemicals likely to be found in it (83-84). He counted 13 different adulterants which would likely comprise the meals, and a total of eight doses of chemicals and dyes for breakfast, sixteen doses for dinner, and sixteen doses for supper.
After Mason’s hearings were concluded, the senator called for legislation to protect consumers from added adulterations in their food, saying, “This is the only civilized country in the world that does not protect the consumer of food products against the adulterations of manufacturers (70).” Manufacturers acted quickly to stymie his efforts, and the two bills the senator proposed both died before gaining traction. The publicity surrounding the hearings led to increased interest in Dr. Wiley’s work at the Bureau, and his department received numerous requests from writers asking for a copy of Bulletin 13. Around this time, Dr. Wiley wrote his detailed, revealing tome “What’s In It?” sprinkled with humor but utterly accurate in its descriptions of the litany of adulterants found in food (xi).
In 1893, Dr. Wiley met USDA librarian Anna Kelton, a George Washington University graduate. He fell instantly in love with her, declaring to a colleague that he was going to marry her. He asked her supervisor if she might provide some assistance to the Bureau in an administrative assistance capacity, and they began spending more time together. When he proposed to her in 1900, she tentatively accepted, but after some consideration she gracefully ended the engagement.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Only the Brave”
In 1901, Dr. Wiley received funding from Congress to begin conducting experiments on some of the 152 food preservatives his Bureau identified. He referred to his experimental concept as “hygienic table trials;” his test subjects were to be human volunteers. Dr. Wiley sets up a dining room and kitchen in the basement of his Washington, DC laboratory. Participants were paid $5 a month and agreed to consume only those three meals served to them in Dr. Wiley’s dining room. They also consented to rigorous medical testing, including collection and evaluation of all their bodily excretions and regular physical exams by Dr. Wiley and his staff. Dr. Wiley realized that one of his main obstacles in attempting to accurately assess the effects of chemical additives in food was the challenge of effectively controlling the types and amounts of adulterants evaluated. With most food on the market already irrevocably tainted, Dr. Wiley went to considerable lengths to source pure, unadulterated foods for use in his kitchens. With this measure of control in place, he felt confident that only those chemicals he added to his participants’ meals would affect his results.
Dr. Wiley was surprised by the number of young men who responded to his request for recruits. He sought out young men in their 20s, currently in the civil service, in good health, and with rigorous constitutions and robust digestive systems. Dr. Wiley attempted to keep the identities of his volunteers and the methods and goings-on of the experiments as secretive as possible, but reporters were very intrigued by the Chief Chemist’s undertaking. Though anonymous, the intrepid young volunteers gained popularity and admiration from the American public, as reports of Dr. Wiley’s experiments and their participants were covered in the press. An especially tenacious reporter named George Rothwell Brown managed to glean some information from the project’s cook, Chef Perry, which he included in his series of articles. What Brown could not discover on his own, he made up. Dr. Wiley was initially frustrated by the intrusive nature of reporters who he feared would disrupt his experiments, but he realized that the press he was receiving was leading to favorable public opinion. The nickname “the Poison Squad” for the young men participating in the studies came from one of Brown’s articles, and Dr. Wiley came to embrace it.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “Lessons in Food Poisoning”
In June of 1904, Dr. Wiley published the results of the first round of Poison Squad experiments. He began with testing the effects of borax, a mineral salt commonly used in household cleaning, but which had also become a common food preservative. Dr. Wiley’s findings concluded that borax produced harmful effects, was unfit for human consumption, and should be banned from use in food production. Further, Dr. Wiley confirmed that cumulative exposure in increasing doses resulted in increasing severity of symptoms. His participants had experienced a range of effects including confusion, loss of focus, loss of appetite, headaches, nausea, and vomiting.
Dr. Wiley’s next group of Poison Squad volunteers had already begun ingesting salicylic acid as part of the second phase of experiments, and the side effects they experienced were already more severe than what their counterparts in the borax trial had endured.
Congress once again began to consider a set of laws addressing the regulation of not food, drink, alcoholic beverages, and over-the-counter remedies, disparagingly referred to as “snake oils,” which promised benefits without any evidence of their efficacy. Food manufacturers joined together to create the National Food Manufacturers Association, and they funded appearances at hearings by consultants who would attest to the safety of their products. The Proprietary Association, which represented the creators of tinctures and remedies, struck back against proposed government regulations with the argument that the rigid testing of products created by privately owned companies constituted an infringement on their right to conduct businesses without interference. Efforts to move forward with national legislation once again failed.
Realizing he could not count on the new Roosevelt administration for support, Dr. Wiley increased his public advocacy. He discovered that women’s political organizations, on both the local and national levels, were an excellent fit for a collaboration. These tenacious activist groups were using their growing popularity and increasing numbers to enact change. While speaking in New Jersey, Dr. Wiley met Alice Lakey, a highly influential suffragist who not introduced him to a plethora of powerful women’s groups. She became Dr. Wiley’s lifelong ally, a fierce advocate for his work, and a strong defender of his character. Lakey encouraged Dr. Wiley to publish an official USDA guide to assist home cooks in determining whether the food they were eating was safe for consumption. Some Forms of Food Adulteration and Simple Methods for Their Detection, co-authored with Willard Bigelow, explained the prevalence and methods of food adulteration. The authors were careful to avoid lobbing accusations at food manufacturers, painting them as well-meaning if misguided. The bulletin included instructions for setting up home testing laboratories, where cooks could test for the presence of adulterants to ensure the food they were consuming was safe.
Part 1, Chapters 4-6 Analysis
In the companion American Experience documentary to this work, journalist Bruce Watson synthesizes the attraction for the young volunteers who sign up to participate in Dr. Wiley’s hygienic table trials:
I mean, think…young bachelors on a government salary. The idea of not having to pay for any of your food does sound a little bit attractive. So you got them from a, you know, money saving perspective. You’ve got them from a $5 bucks a month perspective which is, you not, not inconsiderable at the time. And then plus they’re young men in their 20s, so the idea of doing stupid stuff because it’s important and cool actually has a certain ring to it (PBS, 2020).
Although they were never identified, the members of the Poison Squad attained celebrity status in the minds of the American public, who see them as heroic and courageous for sacrificing their safety to determine what is safe for others. Dr. Wiley was deliberate in his choice of young men of robust constitutions. He believed that if they, who he could establish through initial exams to be otherwise in excellent health, were negatively impacted by the ingestion of these chemicals, then naturally the chemicals would be very dangerous for vulnerable members of the population. These vulnerable populations included the elderly, those with chronic health conditions or disabilities, and the very young. Dr. Wiley believed it was his moral obligation to protect and defend the public, but especially those who were more susceptible to harm.
Among American women arose a growing interest in the domestic sciences. Although women were not yet able to vote, they were politically influential in other ways. Pure food was especially relevant to American women in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period because the cultural role society had assigned for them rendered them overwhelmingly responsible for the overseeing, purchase, and the preparation of foods coming into their home. Women made most decisions with respect to feeding their families. Women were protecting themselves and their loved ones by advocating for adequate food regulations. This was a righteous crusade for women, who wanted greater social and political power outside the home but more influence over what was going on inside their homes. In the late Victorian and early Edwardian period in American culture, there was great reverence for women as homemakers and symbols of virtue. That they were demanding the laws and standards which would allow them to fulfill this social ideal appealed even to those for whom women’s rights were not a primary concern. Dr. Wiley was very aware that his crusade for pure food laws to protect consumers would have no traction without women’s rights activists. By depicting other progressive movements as running in parallel to Dr. Wiley’s efforts, the author conveys the theme that the success of pure food legislation can be traced to social and cultural Changes and progressive activism.
Dr. Wiley was confident that there would be no action on the part of these businesses to behave ethically, so long as there were no means by which they could be punished for causing harm. As consumers, on whom big food business relied for profits, women found a space to exercise their growing authority and influence.
