The Poison Squad One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Another one is Deb Blum's Poison Squad. And this is like an excellent look through a biography of one of the former chemists at the USDA who did research that helped lead to the establishment of the FDA and a lot of the food regulations and other types of consumer protection laws that we have.

So dairymen began increasing the dose of formaldehyde, seeking to keep their product fresh for as long as possible. Chemical companies came up with new formaldehyde mixtures with innocuous names such as ice lean or preserva lean. The latter was said to keep a pint of milk fresh for up to 10 days.

Fakery and adulteration ran rampant in other American products as well. 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. Coffee might be largely sawdust or wheat, beans, beets, peas and dandelion seeds. Scorched black and ground to resemble the genuine article.

Containers of pepper, cinnamon or nutmeg were frequently laced with a cheaper filler material such as pulverized coconut shells, charred rope or occasionally floor sweepings. Flour routinely contained crushed stone or gypsum as a cheap extender. Ground insects could be mixed into brown sugar, often without detection.

So dairymen began increasing the dose of formaldehyde, seeking to keep their product fresh for as long as possible. Chemical companies came up with new formaldehyde mixtures with innocuous names such as ice lean or preserva lean. The latter was said to keep a pint of milk fresh for up to 10 days.

Fakery and adulteration ran rampant in other American products as well. 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. Coffee might be largely sawdust or wheat, beans, beets, peas and dandelion seeds. Scorched black and ground to resemble the genuine article.

Containers of pepper, cinnamon or nutmeg were frequently laced with a cheaper filler material such as pulverized coconut shells, charred rope or occasionally floor sweepings. Flour routinely contained crushed stone or gypsum as a cheap extender.

Ground insects could be mixed into brown sugar, often without detection. Their use linked to an unpleasant condition known as grocer's itch.

the main source of this episode is pure food the press and the poison squad evaluating the coverage of Harvey Wiley's hygienic table by Kevin Murphy Columbia University.