Part One: The Food And Drug Administration

like people to know one's actually done it yet. But if you want to call me Maddie Love, big Papa l um, you know, the love Maddie, whatever you want, just you know, fucking call me nice names. Uh yeah, that's what this podcast is. This is the show where I say nice things about a random guest. Yeah. If you want the show where I say cruel things about a random guest, just just stick around for another half hour and I'm gonna make Gilbert Godfried cry. Um. You

know I love Gilbert. Anyone who has the courage to get up on stage the day after nine eleven until James about nine eleven is a hero. He wasn't the true hero of nine eleven. Gilbert Godfried Firefighters and Gilbert Godfrey freed again, Matt before we get into it, because the topic today is just gonna blow people away. You want to you want to plug anything right now? Oh yeah, well I do a the only Sopranos podcast. It's a rewatch podcast of the Sopranos called Pod Yourself a Gun. Um,

so yeah you should. You should check that out if you like the Sopranos. Even if you don't like the Sopranos, you know, it's just it's just a good time. And the Pod Yourself a Gun is legally the only Sopranos podcast. If you hear another one called the a t F. They regulate that and they'll go shoot those people's dogs. Yeah, no, that's a that's what does I know. I don't like that vibe. I know it's not cool that that's their job,

but it is. It is their job. Yeah, yeah, no, there's some people think there's this other sopros podcast, but that's a that's like a deep fake. So don't funk with that. That's the deep state trying to trick you exactly. That's a PSI op to get you to uh to like, you know, the wire instead. But yeah, it's really just a stealth the Wire podcast exactly, and that show this is about the shit. Yeah hell yeah. Also I do

a movie podcast called the Film Drunk Podcast. Both of those are with Vince Mancini, who is my co host and pod life partners. Now is he at all related to Boom Boom Mancini? He I doubt it, um, but it's it's possible. So about Boom Boom Mancini killed the guy all. Vince Mancini is also the name of Sonny cor Leoni's bastard son in Godfather Part three, So that's very fun. A lot of mafia tians with this, Uh speaking of mafia's you know what else is an unaccountable

group of dangerous criminals matt um the police. Well, yes, this is a long time coming back, but but but this is even worse than the police met today. We're talking about the archbastard of them all, the f d A. Oh ship, Yeah, that's right, motherfucker, the Food and Drug Administration. That's right, that's who we're We got two parts on the f d A this week. You know, that's literally this is I did not know I was coming in

here expecting. Listen, We've talked about Nazis, we talked about Nazis, We've talked about dr Oz, We've talked about people who uh, you know, created the boy Scouts and touched all amateurs, all amateurs right heart hydra and got ship on the food and drug Okay, I might be going a little far. I'm excited. Yeah, we we we. We make a lot of fun of the f d A. And I've always found like goating them into violence funny because they're kind of like the most milk toast three letter agency the

government has. Right The FBI is like terrifying, the a t F is this big drunken, bloodthirsty frat boy. The CIA kills entire governments, And meanwhile, the FDA can't even like ban people from drinking bleach in a timely manner, Like it takes years to be like we probably shouldn't let people give their kids bleach water. They just do. Press conferences were like stop, yeah, gys, this is bad

for you. Just schoolmarm. But the reality is that that kind of like amiable toothlessness is a front that hides an agency as corrupt and deadly as any part of the U. S. Government in fact, probably has greater society a harm in a lot of ways than most. Our friends at the FDA may have a have a body

count that might might shock you. But before we get into that, we should spend some time talking about the world before the FDA, because this is not just as simple as story as like government agency does bad things. It's actually like it's like an Anakin Skywalker story of this great hero who rises up and then crumbles. The f d A is the Anakin Skywalker of three letter

Agencies ship. So we're today we're gonna like lead up to them becoming a Jedi, and the next episode they wind up falling in the lava planet oh ship A man that's great and and well, well we'll try to figure out throughout this who the Obi wan Kenobi of the f d A s, because that's actually I think I may have but well, I'm getting ahead of myself. Family. Well, yeah, once upon a time, people foraged, trapped, and hunted for food,

generally in that order of like amount of calories gained. Right, Uh, we developed methods of preservation over time. Um, you know, stuff like you'd salt your meat, and you could make like a jerky. You could even like even if you're a hunter gather, you could do that in a cave or something. Um, you would smoke certain things, you know. And as as as time went on, more foods we got better at preserving stuff, and we also got better at like trading, and so more foods began to travel

greater and greater distances. But the extent to which most foods could actually go geographically was very limited, right. You couldn't You couldn't take mangoes from one place to a place like a thousand miles away, you know, eight hundred nine hundred years ago. Very well, you could take like the seeds, maybe you could grow them, but like mangoes

don't last all that long fast. So a lot of stuff like that's why some of this stuff became like surprized because if you could manage to get it to like the emperor or something, it was a gift that was really valuable. Because you couldn't get stuff to travel nearly as far as you can today, which meant that like back for most of human civilization, people ate pretty locally by default. Right, there was trade and like spices

and stuff that keeps well. But like most food was grown or whatever, hunted, trapped whatever, pretty close to where

you lived. Now. When the Napoleonic Wars kicked off in the early eighteen hundreds, our boy Nappy offered a bounty to any inventor who could figure out a cheap, quick and effective way to preserve food and quantity, right, because you still have this problem in the eighteen hundreds of like we can kind of salt meat, we can bake these like shitty really hard biscuits, hard tack and stuff that like will keep for a while, but like most

stuff doesn't keep well, and like scurvy's a problem. Vitamin deficiencies are a problem because if you're like on the march, or if you're usually not on the march, but like you're posted up and fortified in like the winter, it's like, well,

how do you get everyone? Maybe you don't have a lot of food available in the winter, so either you're gonna be like foraging from the local area or stealing from people, or you have a lot of famines cause because an army will camp out suddenly and they'll take all the food in the surrounding area. Um So Napoleon's like, I have a lot of war I want to do, and I don't want to be limited by the fact that we're shipped at preserving food. So somebody figure out

a way to do this. Napoleon does this with a bunch of stuff. He's a very like forward thinking he's real pretty smart dude. Um and this this bears fruit very quickly. In eighteen o nine, a French brewer named Nicholas Appert realized that food cooked inside a glass jar

and sealed didn't spoil. If you put whatever kind of food or something in a glass jarry stick and some salt or some spices, you cook it at for a while, it'll stay good for I mean really for years in some cases, and on think they were that good at them. But it'll stay good at hell of a lot longer to invented pickles. Not quite. But this is the guy who started the process of inventing canning. Um. And the French state was unable to master the art of canning

and quantity right. They figure out that this works, but it's like figuring out how to make the seals right and how to get like it's a process. We're not as good at glass then as we are now, so like having glass that can stand because you have to, like I do a lot of canning now. A good friend of mine taught me how. And it's you have to like basically boils a can with food in it for like minutes, you know. So like the glass, it takes a while to make glass that can reliably stand

up to that even the day some of it's gonna break. Um, So it's a Processingly, I totally relate to that every time I try to can Yeah, you know, I just can't. I'm as as a fellow canner. I uh, you know, it's just I get it, dude. Hard, It's hard. It's hard. It's hard to do if you're like trying to make

an army's worth of food and preserve it. So they figure out that this works, um, but it doesn't really get the French government doesn't get good at it in time for Napoleon to to stop to to like not lose his wars, right, um, and it would have helped like the whole Russian campaign, having like good canned and tin food might have really helped out. You know, I really would have liked that could have been it could have been a game changer. It could have been a

game changer, man. But you know, but obviously, like now that the basic idea is understood, the process gets more and more developed over kind of the early to mid eight hundreds, and it spreads all throughout Europe. As soon as other nations realized this as possible, a lot of resources get developed into like canning and then hinting food.

The Portuguese are like the best at tending effectively. If you'll wind up in like Lisbon, ever, which is a beautiful city, Um, the airport has like these stores that are just hundreds of different kinds of weird canned foods, like stuff you've never seen canned. Because that's like Portugal's motherfucking thing is canning, particularly like seafood, out of just we're canning different fucking weird. This is just yeah, we just put some dirt in a can. Nobody can stop

us anything in a candy yeah. And these are this this, these developments and canning and tending are a huge part of why the last huge because the biggest wave of European colonization is the eighteen hundreds, right, that's like the when stuff really starts to go huge. Um, outside of like you know, North and in Central America and um, like the scramble for Africa and stuff, and a lot of like the colonialism and in in Asia starts happening in this period. UM. And canned in tin food is

a big part of what makes that possible. It's a big part of like why these guys we've talked about on the show, these explorers in Africa and whatnot, for like Leopold are able to do what they're able to do because they're able to take, you know, a lot of what they need with them and keep it in the jungle heat. So cans aided like global colonialism. Oh absolutely, Yeah, it's hugely important. UM, being able to like reliably have the nutrition you need and take it for a significant

period of time. That's a that's very important. I never even considered that. Yeah. Yeah, So Nicholas Appert had stumbled upon canning, but he didn't really know at the time what he was doing. And today we call the process

that he kind of helped to discover pasteurization. UM. And this is again heating a liquid to one forty degrees for about twenty minutes pasteur and the guide that the pasteurization comes from actually like figured out what pasteurization was and like, scientifically what was going on, And he did this in the eighteen fifties. Well, he was actually trying to preserve wine. Uh So, eighteen fifties past year discovers

pasteurization um, which people already kind of knew about. But he's like the guy who figures out scientifically what's going on and slapped his fucking name on it. That's right, but he's just trying to preserve wine. It takes another twenty years before a German chemist figures out that the same process could work on milk, which at the time was filled with salmonella and tuberculosis. We will talk a lot about how fucked up milk was in the that's

like half of this episode. Milk was a fucking nightmare back in the day. Like I don't give a ship, Like, however much you like Lovecraft cosmic horror, nothing is scarier than milk. In the eighteen seventies, it was like, that's a great question, Matt, because it sounds like a nightmare. Everything was just so gross back then. Yeah, yeah, they're like, listen, one out of four of these main courses is going to kill you. Anyways, might as well, add some milk

to it. Yeah, So the Germans figure out that you can pasteurized milk, and like the eighteen seventies, and obviously milks not the only thing you can past yourized, but that that's when that gets figured out. But pasteurized milk doesn't really hit the US in quantity until the thirties, So there's like a sixty year period where we can but we aren't. And this is the story of why.

So in eight nine, Harvard microbiologist Theobald Smith discovered salmonella, which obviously had existed for a long time and been killing people for a long time. But he figures out like why people are dying from milk? Um, and he suggests like, hey, we should pasteurize this stuff. The Germans have figured it out. It's very easy. You just have

to heat this ship up for a while. Um. And there's this immediate panic by the American Pediatric Society who as soon as this guy is like, we should be pasteurizing our milk, they're like, pasture heated milk will give baby scurvy, it robs it of nutrients. Don't do it. Was there like a reason like why would they give a ship or are they just in the pocket of big raw milk. You hear it a bunch like that, Like cooking vegetables, steaming vegetables. You lose some I'm sure

you do lose some nutrients. I don't think it's enough to have any meaningful impact on diet. And I think it's that kind of we're like, yeah, it's fine, Like maybe there's a little less nutrition, but there's also no salmonella. That's probably a bigger problem for the baby. That's the best trade off. Babies are notoriously vulnerable to dying. Um, that's what everybody says about. They're so easy to kill.

Oh my god, don't you every time? I like, easy, dude, easy, If I wanted to, I could kill like many babies in a row. Absolutely, I'm not, but I could do it. But it's good to know. It's good to know, you know. Sometimes I just like walk past the park and go like I could take you all if I needed, if I needed to, you know, if I needed to, if

the chips were down anyway. So there's this immediate like backlash against pasteurization, which is mainly due to like the expense, it's going to cost money to do this they're gonna have to retool the milk producers. You'd have to retool your whole production line to allow for pasteurization. Um. Now, obviously pasteurization would also allow milk to last a lot longer. You can keep it good for a shipload longer if

you pasteurize it. So a logical person might say like, hey, yeah, you're gonna spend more money retooling your production lines, but you'll get to keep your milk for longer and it'll all work out in the end. Um. But the milk companies are just like, no, it's gonna cost us money, Like, fuck that ship. We don't want to stop having our cow juice dumped into a bottle that a guy then sneezes a mouthful of chewing tobacco into before half acidly

ceiling and leaving a the hots son. So they resisted pasteurization, but they were really open to better at ways to preserve milk. They just wanted it to be cheaper than pasteurization was going to be. In eighteen nine six, Dr John Herdie, a former professor from Purdue, formally endorsed the use of use of formaldehyde as a good food preservative. Now that sounds like we're gonna say something like quack doctor ship. It's actually not that fucked up. A whole

lot of foods you eat every day contained formaldehyde. There's formaldehyde and pairs and apples and like all crustacean uh that all crustaceans that we eat in mushrooms, they've all got some amount of formal behyde in them. It's it's fine. It exists in because it preserves things like generally, when you're looking at like fruits that last longer on the shelf, it's because there's some formaldehyde in them. We're not shooting them into that. It's just like a thing that occurs

in nature. Um. So Dr Herdie realizes this and he's like, well, clearly, even though like this stuff can be toxic, and quantity tiny amounts of it can be fine. And so he proposed using a very small amount two drops of formal lyne and formal line is like formaldehyde six water. So just two drops of very deluded formaldehyde per pint of milk. So that's his suggestion. If we do, if we put in a tiny amount, it will make the milk keep a lot longer and it won't be toxic. Um, they'll

still have well, will it still have salmonella though? I mean, uh yeah, I mean potentially yes, that does. It does not clear the salmonella part. Now, that said like, the longer you leave it out, the more risk of a lot of bad things happen. So it does make it a lot safer. Um. But so he's like, hey, a tiny amount of formaldehyde can help your milk last longer on the shelf. The milk producers big businesses. All they hear is, oh, there's a way to make our product

lasts longer. Uh, and we should just pour as much of the ship in there as we possibly can. Right. And to talk about how this went, I'm going to quote Deborah Bloom, who was like the fucking expert on specifically this ship, writing for Smithsonian magazine. Quote, So, dairymen began increasing the dosa fermaldehyde, seeking to keep their product fresh for as long as possible. Chemical companies came up with new formaldehyde mixtures with an ocuous names such as

ice lean or preserve a Lean for milk died. The latter was said to keep a pint of milk fresh for up to ten days, and as the dairy industry increased the amount of preservatives, the milk became more and more toxic. Heard. He was alarmed enough that by eight he was urging that formaldehyde used to be stopped, citing increasing knowledge that the compound could be dangerous even in small doses, especially to children, but the industry did not

heed the warning. In the summer of nineteen hundred, the Indianapolis News reported the deaths of three infants in the city's orphanage due to formaldehyde poisoning. A further investigation indicated that at least thirty children had died two years prior due to the use of the preservative, and in nineteen o one, Hurdy himself referenced the death of deaths of more than four hundred children due to a combination of

formaldehyde dirt in bacteria in the milk. Another analysis calculated that there was so much raw ship in milk that the citizens of Indianapolis consumed and estimated two thousand pounds of poop per year. What the so it's not just the formaldehyde, but they go hog wild, They're just dumping it in there. Um, it's very funny. Two thousand pounds of ship per year by the city of Indianapolis. I mean, just like straight there's they're just they're the dudo is

in the milk. The ship in the milk. Now too, Oh there's always been ship in the milk, buddy, man. Well, I don't know if you've ever had like livestock, but they're not they get ship gets everywhere they poop and they're not. They don't like it's like you've seen that pig poop balls image, like, oh yeah, my favorite animals that get poop on them and they don't really care

about it that much. And sometimes that means poop's going to get in the milk, especially if you're keeping them in like a really dirty, horrific feed lot where like the ship piles up to their ankles. Um. And we'll talk about the conditions these cows are kept in because oh boy, Matt, are you going to enjoy that organic? Do do? Bath? Let's hear about it, dude, I'm excited now. So this guy Hurti, who had been like, yeah, a little bit of for amalde hyde might help and then

was like immediately horrified by what the food industry was doing. Um. He becomes an advocate for reform within the legal system to stop this stuff, and as a result of his lobbying, Indiana passes a pure food law in eight which should have made the adulteration that, as we already said, went on well passed eighteen nine very illegal. But this keeps going on because the law was kind of it was more of an aspirational law than a real law, because

they were like, this isn't allowed. But they were also like, we're going to spend zero dollars to stop this, Like we we're not gonna you will not enforce this, like we don't have the resources to stop the formaldehyde milk from spreading, but we just want to let you know not cold. It is kind of my ideal situation for drugs, where we keep them illegal, but we also make it like fire all of the police in in d e A Agents so that nobody can prosecute you for it,

and then you can still feel cool when you do drugs. Right, Yeah, that's that's the ideal. That's the sea. Yeah. You convince children not to do heroin until you turn a certain age, and you know, and exactly, yeah, that's the age of yeah, a certain amount, right, yeah, you know, yeah, a little bit, a little bit goes a long way. It's like that, and that's why they used to give babies medicinal children's medicinal heroin, good times. That's why our grandparents were all healthy. Yeah,

so chill about everything. That's why they spent their whole lives withdrawing love our grandparents. Yeah so uh. The year after that log gets passed in in Indiana, Herdi's lab analyzes a pint bottle of milk that was handed to them by a family, and the family like buys some milk for their baby, and they noticed that as they describe it, the milk appears to be wriggling. Oh fuck you like this one, man, So I don't even have to do like a chemical analysis. I'm like a big

milk drinker, so this is gonna fuck me up. Like I just I enjoy a glass of milk and a banana. It's my one of my favorite little snacks. It turns out that what happened was that the dairyman had cut his milk because he wanted to make it go longer like heroin, and he cuts it with stagnant water, and there there was a worm colony in the stagnant water, and so many larva breed in the milk that it's just like a kind of soggy, massive, writhing larga larva

they find for their baby. It's got extra protein called moving milk. Milk. Oh you got some of that still milk up, still milk. I happen to love my child. I want them to get the extra nutrients real babies have. It's like we call it a milkshake. This is the origin of the milkshake. Some poor motherfucker was eating cereal when this episode started. Oh so Indiana. Obviously we've been focusing on because Dr Herdi was there and he gave

a shit about this. This is happening every state in the Union, right, This is everywhere everywhere that there's a city. At least. I think people who live in rural areas probably have access to healthier milk because they're getting it directly from the cow. They're probably better conditions for the cow. Um they're not, you know, buying it from somebody who's gonna mix in pond water filled with the ship it's the city milk that's just and thus the milk that

the most people are drinking is fucking poison milk. Now, in the eighties, one group of researchers had analyzed, like this is happening all over the U. S. And in New Jersey there's a case from the eighteen eighties where these researchers analyzed random samples of milk um and they just they found what they described as liquefying colonies of bacteria and numbers so great that they gave up counting. Like it's just like this isn't even where that like

a lot. This isn't this is just just bacteria. This is pure bacteria. Yeah, they have eaten all the milk. There's none left for the babies. Yeah. And in all of these cases, this again happening everywhere. And the reason everywhere is that there's there's no such thing as health standards. Really. A couple of states, like in the and have tried to pass laws, there's usually no enforcement and in most places there's just no laws about what you can do um.

And Yeah, a lot of like where the adulter ins and like the poisonous stuff gets in is when the milk dealers cut their ship with very chemicals. Now, uh, and it's kind of like you know drug dealers today, I'll cut like cocaine with a little bit of baby powder or yeah, and the Finnel answer for milk usually well, the baby I'll say the baby powder. Like the least harmful way generally to cut it was that they would add water. Um, and the standard ratio was one pint

of water for every quart of milk. Now, they also skimmed the cream off the top of the milk, right, because they're trying to make as much money as possible, so they don't want you getting extra cream. They're going to use that to like make something else and sell it to you. But when you skim the cream off your milk and then water it down by like half, there what it looks. It's it doesn't look like milk. It's this kind of like pale blue, weird looking beverage

because it's not really milk anymore. Um, So dairy milk continue, they call it skim milk. Yeah, yes, yeah, I mean that's that. Yeah, that is like that. That is literally why they call it skim milk. And I guess you could call this the origin of skim milk, but they're not saying it is. They're hiding it. So they have to in order to hide it, they have to alterate it so it looks right. So for the color, because it's this kind of pale blue color, they pour in

plaster of Paris and chalk um. So that's good. Let's listen on this podcast. I was expecting they poured in pure com Oh wait, it gets worse because that just fixes the color, Matt. They haven't. They've skimmed the cream off, right. You don't want people to know you've skimmed the cree off. So you have to fake a layer of cream on top. And what's what looks most like cream? No, calm, straight colmb No, no liquefied cow brains. Oh bro, there's other

things that look like cream. There's other things pouring cow brains on that ship. It is extremely funny. That is no longer coach your milk. Of course, sometimes they'll they'll put because it gives it has a little bit of a yellow color. They'll put a little bit of lead in there too, just to make it look quite you know, right deepen. Yeah, of course you can put a little bit of lead in there makes a sweeter too, a little bit of anti freeze. You know, they put lead in.

That doesn't even count as bad because let they put they're putting lead in everything was just part of it. It It was like you have your salt shaker and with vitamin le and then vitamin le lead shaker. So milk was not alone or exceptional in its tendency to be adulterated among foods of the day. It's kind of the most shocking example a lot of the time. But food sellers, grocery stores, like food manfacturers, they're doing it with everything.

And to make that point, I'm going to quote from Deborah Bloom again, this time writing in her wonderful book The Poison Squad. Quote. 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, beats, 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. Or gypsum as a cheap extender. Ground insects could be mixed into brown sugar, often without detection.

They're used linked to an unpleasant condition known as grocer's itch. We've all had a little bit of grocer had grocer's atch cookies, and now I got grocers atch. European governments, especially those of Germany and Great Britain, had been far quicker than the US government to recognize and addressed problems

of food adulteration. In eighteen twenty, a pioneering book by chemist Frederick Accumb titled A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons, had aroused widespread public outrage when it was published in London. Acume minced no words. Are pickles are made green by copper? Are vene rendered sharp by sulfuric acid. Are cream composed of rice, powder or arrow root and bad milk? Are comfees mixed of sugar, starch and clay, and colored with preparations of copper and lead.

Are ketchup? Often formed of the dregs of distilled vinegar with a decoction of the outer green husk of walnuts, and seasoned with all spice. He wrote, they had all spice back then. Oh yeah, they conquered the world for all spice. They did three or four genocides just to get their hands on all sp That's not an exaggeration, um, And it gets worse. With the candy industry, confectioners often

turned to poisonous metallic elements and compounds. Green came from arsenic or copper, yellow from lead chromate, cheerful rose, and pink tones from red lead. In eighteen thirty and editorial in The Lancet the British Medical General complained that millions of children are the daily dosed with lethal substances, but the practices continued, largely due to business pressures on would be government regulators. By mid century, though, casual teas were

starting to mount in Britain. In eighteen forty seven, three English children fell seriously ill after eating birthday cake descorated with arsenic tinted green leaves. Five years later, two London brothers died after eating a cake who's frosting contained both arsenic and copper. In an eighteen fifty four report, London physician Arthur hasseltracked forty cases of child poisoning caused by

penny candies. Three years later, twenty one people in Bradford, Yorkshire, died after consuming candy accidentally laced with deadly arsenic trioxide, accidentally because the confectioner meant to mix in plaster of Paris instead. Although he had noticed his workers falling ill while mixing up the stuff, the business owner had put the candy on sale anyway. He was arrested and jailed, as was the pharmacist who had mistakenly sold him the poison in place of plaster, but they could not even

be convicted of any crime. Britain had no law against making unsafe or even lethal food products. Jesus Christ looking insane, insane pouring arsenic into candy Kidder, Diane left it when it's green? What screen? Um? Something more poisonous, Get some more poison in there. That's too bland in color. I just love. They killed twity one people with bad candy, and then the cops are like, it's not illegal. You can put as much poison in candy as you want.

It's not actually in the UK, there's nothing in the rules that says candy can't be arsenic. Listen, if you write a law that says I can't poison children for profit, I'll gladly abide by it. And in England's credit, again, this is like the eighteen thirties forties, like England, Jerremany, a lot of europe Like bands, a lot of this ship. But everything we've talked about keeps going. In the US,

they're throwing arsenic and lead and candy. They don't give a fuck in the United States, right, this is the lane and the goddamn free. We can do whatever we want. I'm sing like one of the amendments should be my right to eat arsenic damn right, Matt. That's why I'm starting a new bakery. These cakes will kill your children. These cakes will in fact kill your children, but they'll die free. You know, they won't die Cocked by the

medical establishment. He says children can't handle arsenic five year olds just saluting on a cot in the I see you. You know who else likes to salute five year olds while they're dying in the I see you? The sponsors. That's right, that's right, Matt Leap. That's why they do it. That's why they sell all these products. They have time for their real passion, saluting dying children who are poisoned by lead cake. All right, here we go, we're back back.

So in the United States, for basically the whole eighteen hundreds, every attempt to impose any kind of like national food safety standards is there. All these attempts are opposed vigorously by the big businesses who made a lot of money

selling lead candy and formaldehyde milk, for example. Bowl Massachusetts lawyer George Thorndyke Angle gave a big speech in eighteen seventy nine to the American Social Science Public Health Association where he read through a list of commercially sold foods that had been found to include parasites and brands of butter and cheese that had been found to be nothing but processed animal fat. Angle accused food producers of being a threat to both rich and poor, and compared them

to pirates, robbing people of their good health. Angle mailed copies of a speech to newspapers around the country, which forced American Grocer, a major trade publication, to take aim at him as a sensationalist doing a disservice to consumers, although they did concede that it was bad when milk and candy killed children. So like, look, it's bad that kids keep dying, but this guy is this guy is

not like out, this guy's out of his mind. This guy is biased, alright, and listen, yeah, I have grocer's itch who doesn't. Okay, look, we all wish kids would stop dying, but at what cost? That's what we the people putting lead in your children's food ask Listen, you can either have a crying baby or a baby with a one in five chance of dying from this lollipop. Which would you prefer? Yeah, what do you want? You want milk that kills your kids? You want milk that's

three cents cheaper. Huh? How much of those kids worth for you? Anyway? It's supplying to man here, buddy. Angles argument, though, was convincing to Congressman Richard Beale from Virginia. He put forward legislation federally to ban all interstate commerce and chemically altered foods. And it's wild to think about how different that like it would have gotten appealed at some point, right, because you just couldn't have a society like ours with that law on the books. But it never it never

gets made, It dies in committee. I'm not even saying like at the time certainly would have been a good thing. There's that would have wouldn't have aged well, but it doesn't even get off the ground floor. Um. And of course that bill was not the only thing that died in committee. Shiploads of kids were still being offed by

poisonous foods. It all got bad enough that the United States Congress decided to take a break from edging the tip of the national cock into over these colonialism, and in nineteen o two they funded the very first controlled trials of human food toxicity. These tests would be carried out by the U. S Department of Agricultures Chemistry Squad, which was headed by a guy named Harvey Washington Wiley. Now, while he's pretty dope, he maybe the obi Wan of

our story. Um. He'd gotten his start in food science in eighteen eighty one when the Indiana State Board of Health asked him to look into honey, maple syrup and other sweeteners, and his findings were that, in short, like a lot of the people buying these things are not, in fact buying these things on most of the like a lot of the maple syrup and honey in the markets, just like corn syrup. It would sometimes even make like a fake wax honeycomb and dip it in the corn

syrups that it looked like you were getting real honey. Um. And and realizing that like, oh wow, like people going to the grocery store have no fucking clue what they're getting, Like they don't have a goddamn idea what they're actually buying because there's no requirement that they tell people what they're buying and actually deliver it on it um. And this kind of radicalizes widely, and he'd like like spends

the rest of his career trying to stop this. Now Nature right up I found in Nature magazine describes his new job at the U. S d A. Quote widely recruited young healthy men as guinea pigs, starting with civil servants.

They signed liability waivers and agreed to take part in hygienic table trials, eating free but strictly prescribed meals in an experimental kitchen in the U. S d A's basement in Washington, d C. An excitable press dubbed them the poison Squad, and they're trying to figure out like what things are bad for people. They're also trying to just like gain a real understanding of like nutrition and like what works, what preserves food. No one had really this

hadn't been done. Pieces of this had been done in an organized way, but like this is the first time that our government's like we should really like figure out what this stuff does to people, like in a controlled setting. Gives some people some lead and just know and you don't know at that point, right, Like it is like we laugh about it, but like the Romans put lead and funking everything because they didn't realize it, like it

was bad for him. Um, so you have and at this point that we're starting to get some understanding of that. But like a big part of it is this, and there's a lot of very brave people who are like, yeah, try ship on me. We should know if this is killing people, so give it, give it a shot. Put it in me. Um thanks due, Yeah you really you took one for the team here. You're like, I'll eat pretty much anything. So just like hook it up, dude, throw it in me. Who gives a ship? Yeah, I'm drunk. Yeah,

I ain't gonna live that long anyway. Is the eight nineties. I made it into twenty. You know, I'm an old man. I am dead inside. Already, feed me some of them. My earliest memory is Sherman's March to the Sea. I'm done. So that brings us back to milk. Now. Under President Grover Cleveland, Whiley's Chemistry division started digging into the dirty world of big dairy, there was a lot of money in dairy, particularly since milk was seen is like the

best thing to feed small children. The milk industry had been happy to cut corners for profits for quite some time. And I want to talk a little bit about swill, which is the kind of milk that most people in cities are drinking through. Like most of the mid to late eighteen hundreds, even some of the early nineteen was its branded swill. No, that's just what everyone called it,

and we'll explain why in a second. So Deborah Bloom describes this swill as quote like making swill as quote the practice wherein distillers liquor distillers housed dairy cows in stinking urban warehouses where each animal was tethered immobile and fed on the spin mash or swill from the fermentation process used in making whiskey. So you have all these grains and ship for like whiskey, even for beer too.

I'm sure they do it with that where you're like boiling all this grain for forever in order to like make the thing that you then ferment. Right. Um. And once you boil anything for a while, like like all this grain and stuff, it doesn't have any real nutrition anymore because you've like boiled it to get all of that out. That all goes into the thing that you're making. That's why it's flavored and ship um. So the cows that are fed on this stuff are like dying their

entire lives. They're horribly malnourished, their bones are very soft, um because the swol they're eating isn't food anymore. So, like all of these animals, by the time their adults have all of their teeth wrought out, um, they live

very short lives. Their malnourished bodies only produce milk for a short period of time, and the milk they make, which is what all these poor kids are drinking, doesn't really have any nutritional value because again the cows aren't eating anything with nutritional value, so there's just like making

colored water in a lot of cases. One pediatrition at the time wrote, I have every year grown more suspicious of distillery milk wherever I have seen a child presenting a sickly appearance, loose, flabby flesh, weak joints, capricious appetite, frequent wretchings, and occasional vomitage, irregular bowels with the tendency to diarrhea and fetid breath. So like people are aware of this. Also, the fact that it's called distillery milk should key you and I don't want to go to

the same place from my bourbon and my milk. Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh we sell cocaine. Oh we also sell fair trade coffee. It's like, I don't think it's fair trade. I mean, I'm sure it was a fair trade for somebody. Someone got a good end of the deal for sure. Yeah, our sponsors, the scene of low cartel folk pretty good

about that trade. So the swill milk industry was eventually reformed, but that industry just yielded to the formalde hyde doping that we've already covered By nineteen oh four, doping had formalde hyde milk had spread to New Jersey, where one doctor blamed a surge in child deaths on the substance. In New York City, twenty thousand deaths of children under two per year were blamed on poisoned milk. Formaldehyde wasn't even twenty kids a year in New York City dying

from bad milk. Yeah, Like that's fucking wild. That is so many dead children, that is an insane amount of It's like at some point you have to go like, wouldn't this like like like would kill less? I mean it just leads me to believe that this was the time. It's like, oh yeah, a lot a lot of drewn dyes. Some of its milk poisoning. Some of it is from the slide that's made of razor blades, and we have at every park like this is were you were strapping

kids to the street cars to act as mirrors. Like we have all sorts and we're just like using their bodies as chimney sweets. I mean they die, They for sure die. They're very easy to do. Um. So yeah, uh And and formaldehyde was not even necessarily the biggest threat, and milk most of the deaths due to poison milk in New York, particularly in like nineteen o two, are probably as the result of a typhus epidemic that could spread through tainted milk, because that's a big cause of

typhus outbreaks, is like milk um. Now, whiley and Hurley were among the learned advocates who urged the government to take action, everywhere they looked Americans were being tricked into consuming things that weren't food, and of course a shipload of babies were dying. Regulations keep being proposed, and they are fought tooth and nail every time by food manufacturers.

So by the time the early nine hundred run roll around, a handful of journalists set themselves to the task of like exposing what's happening here, often with the direct help of guys from the chemical Division. So like, these reporters are kind of working with Wiley and his men. And one of these journalists is Henry Irving Dodge, who adopted poison milk as his cause in nineteen o four Debora

Bloom rights. Dodge had learned from a friend in the U. S. Senate that manufacturers were prepared to spend more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to defeat any regulations, and had already made major contributions to the campaigns of senators considered friendly to the cause. No wonder the proposed food legislation was going nowhere, he wrote. The Senate does not indulge in bawling opposition to the bill. Oh no, its weapons are much more effective and more deadly. It lets

the bill die. The American government, he concluded, would rather protect wealthy business interests than protect the American people. That's the thing people today would understand. No, no, no, no, no, thank god that's changed. I mean we can all be grateful for that. But no, I mean like two thousand dollars, which is like four or five billion dollars exactly, like to fight the just just boil the milk. Yeah, just boil the goddam It's not hard. You're putting so much

money into not boiling the milk. Yes, that's ridiculous. It's not like we're asking a lot. It's really the least you could do with the milk. Hey, maybe we don't need to have twenty babies a year die in New York City to keep fire away from my milk. It's faking amazing. So obviously this is an outrage and should really piss people off. But the American people, as is often the case, had a lot going on right around

this time. And while there were isolated eruptions of outrage, when like a tainted meat can ten would kill some soldiers. This happens around the time of the Spanish American War, a bunch of soldiers get sick from like bad meat or like whenever spoiled milk batch would kill a whole kindergarten worth of kids. There's like all there's outrage in

bursts and hurts, but it's very decentralized and scattered. And because of this, the massive meat packing in dairy industry, these huge corporations and like conglomerates that have formed around this stuff are able to bribe and bully their way out of any kind of real regulations. One of the things that leads that actually changes this, that like really is a huge factor is a book called The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, which I'm sure most people are at

least broadly familiar with. Um Upton went undercover for months in a Chicago meat packing neighborhood, and his vivid recollections of what he saw there were first published in serial form via a socialist magazine named Appeal to Reason. When it was republished as a book in nineteen o six, huge numbers of Americans were confronted with scenes like this,

And I'm gonna read from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. There were cattle which had been fed on whiskey malt the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men called steerly, which means covered in boils. It was a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them, they would burst and splatter foul smelling stuff

onto your face. And when a man's sleeves were smeared with blood, his hands steeped in it, how was he ever to wipe his face or to clear his eyes so that he could see Jesus Christ, they're just sucking blood pinatas. Yeah, they're like boil and puss and blood and it's all getting over the meat, right because you can't see, and it's all over your hands, it's all over your knife, and you're like, you're processing this if you're we slaughter and process animals semi regularly, where I live.

And if you're doing that, like one of the key you don't even want like the hair of the animal when you skin it, to touch the meat because it can spoil you. You want to be very careful otherwise it makes it nasty. And they're they're just like puss is just like you're marinating and man, get it in there. Just more nutrients. It's more nutrients. Don't worry about the smell. It's got a lot of vitamin P. That's good stuff. So Sinclair had meant to reveal to people that the

work in stockyards and meatpacking facilities was unconscionably inhumane. Both are the humans working there and the animals. Right, he was, he was upset about like the treatment of all of the living things in this nightmare system. That's not what America really cares about. The real impact that the Jungle has on public opinion is that it scares people about how fucking filthy their food is. Sinclair later said, quote, I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident, I

hid it in the stomach. Honestly, I'd like to pretend like I'm any better, but no, I'm not. Like fucking I didn't stop eating chicken nuggets until someone showed me the green the pink goo that it's made out of. And I lasted a year and then I was like, nah, I could eat the goo. And then I went back to chicken nuggets. So someone figured out how I can just get the raw goo. I'd like to just have that as a shake in the morning, stuck down some pink goo. Yeah, get out in the sun a little

bit so it gets good in night. What so yeah pink And you know what I think if I just mixed that fifty fifty with bourbon, that all the nutrients I need. That's like, that's that's my soilet. That's that's a performance beverage. So exactly in the morning you throw a couple of shots of espresso in there too. You're good to go. I'm doing. And then you branded it and I went out. That's how you get that keto body. That's true. The brand immediately makes it fun. Yeah, I'll

eat it. That's that's gonna be my new soilet. So if you figure out find find us a sponsor who will make my meat coffee bourbon shakes it self them as a performance beverage. You know who? These are good vorous truckers, and we'll get you the right amount of drunk away convomiting to really do those long haul drives. Yeah, you can get it all done in one go, literally, one math movement and out immediately. And look, school's waste

a lot of time cooking food, my meat, slurry, bourbon, beverage. Everything. A child needs to both be neutrified and to keep quiet because there's a lot of there's a lot of bourbon. Their little bodies can't handle that much. You know, we call it sleeping time, shake meat. It's very good. Yeah, just keep him quiet. You know what, you're just warehousing. I'm really that's what all we're doing anymore. It's called five loco. It's even more local than the previous. They

barely breathe on it, so it's pandemic safe. So it's worth noting that when The Jungle was published as a proper book, like outside of like a magazine thing, when it finds its publisher, the publisher insisted on sending a copy of the manuscript to the Chicago Tribune and they're like, hey, here's the book we're publishing. It's making some pretty shocking claims.

You guys are journalists, Why don't you investigate these claims and like render an opinionist whether or not it's accurate, right, which, if journalism exists, is a responsible thing for a publisher to do. Here's the thing it is. Nineteen o six. Upton Sinclair is the first person who's ever done a journalism in the United States. So I'm gonna quote again from the Poison Squad by dead Point. Journalism is just

for going to war. Yeah, that's that's when it was invited to get people agreed to a war with Spain. This book isn't about Spain at all. Quote. Tribune editors responded with a two dozen page rebuttal of the packing house descriptions. Alarmed Page and Double Day. His publishers called Sinclair to their offices, but Sinclair promptly began picking apart the Tribunes critique. For instance, the paper had denied that the tuberculosis bacterium could survive on walls or floors of

the packing rooms. Sinclair pointed out that the germ could indeed survive on those surfaces and couldn't transfer to anything that touched them. He brought medical studies to prove it, as well as other evidence to back up his story. He further noted that the papers owners were obviously friendly with the meat packers and sided with them. In fact, it would turn out that the newspapers management had not assigned a reporter to study Sinclair's claims, but instead passed

the task onto a publicist who worked for the meat packer. Nice. Yeah, the newspaper goes right to the people that he's investigating. It's like, is this you guys want to write a thing for us about this? It's like, um, so I need you guys to write something that says not And just every time he says, yeah, huh, you just got it right now, I would write it. But you would not believe the amount of war with Spain we got.

We got a lot of war with Spain. There's so much Spain left and we had to nip that ship right in the button. Also, I'm a little bit busy because all of my children are in the hospital for milk poisoning. You know that, you know, babies, babies and handle their milk. The New York Times goes on to note quote about a month after the Jungle was published, the White House started receiving a hundred letters a day

demanding a federal cleanup of the meat industry. Roosevelt invited Sinclair to the White House, then ordered a federal investigation. Sinclair took every opportunity to harangue the beef truck as the meat trap packing industry was known, and sent a stream of telegrams to the White House demanding reform. Roosevelt seemed tired of Sinclair's outspokenness. In a note to the author's publisher, the President wrote, tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while. Oh, Teddy,

I love it. What a but but they do this actually gets some ship done from from Teddy's credit, he's part of ships starting to get done here. Um, the Pure Food and Drug Act is past well, it's introduced into Congress in nineteen o five, the same year that Sinclair puts out the first version of the Jungle, And but in early nineteen o six when the book version comes out, the the Act is stalled. Um. And it's so stalled that Harvey White Wiley, who's the main impetus

behind the book, starts trolling people out of like hopelessness. Right, and he is he kind of is the first guy to use Twitter. He said, he settles into a strategy of writing protest letters to newspapers and magazines about the ads they had for different snake oil medicines and tainted foods. He wrote this to the Washington Star. I have read, with your regret and your issue of Monday, January twenty nine,

of the probably fatal illness of buck Ewing, the celebrated catcher. Ewing, a former star player and manager for the New York Giants, was diagnosed with Bright's disease, which is a blood vessel inflammation and the kidneys um and it killed people pretty fast in those days. Wiley noted that like, Hey, you're talking about how sad this is, but you've previously published an article about Dr Kilmer swamp root and claim that

it clears bright disease. And He's like, I keep a bottle of it near me all the time because you've you've ensured me that it works. So why don't you just tell this guy? You know, Mike, chemists say it's nothing but alcohol in turpentine with a couple of spices. But if you're worried about buck Ewing, why don't you tell him to take this stuff? It should cure his thing. Right away. In fact, I'll send him a copy of your paper and let you know what he says. And

he dies like very shortly there after. I love the idea that someone was just like, all right, we got this, writes disease. Let's try swamp root that swamps are dark? Right? What the and knock that right out with some dark what's darker than a swamp? It's darker than the swamp people, it's still dying. Well whatever, It's a clever head campaign.

And he does this like there's this malt coffee which contains no actual coffee, it's pure barley, but it advertises itself as having real coffee flavor, and he sends a letter to the newspaper advertising them, being like, how can you have real coffee flavor with anything? But coffee isn't the only thing that can have real coffee flavor is just quote tweeting. It's really just twittering. Uh you know

who else loves Twitter? The products and services that support this podcast, they are all reply guys for the same K pop band. And it gets very sexual, actually, with all of our sponsors, very sexual replies to this k pop band. Good. If we know one thing, it's the K pop people. They're very normal online and they love to be sexualized. That's actually the motto of very normal online and we love to be a sexual am I am I? Yeah you should believe that. Oh, here's some ads. Ah,

we're back. So, while he was hectoring sketchy newspaper owners in print, Whiley and his poison squad had gathered together the some of their years of study into America's endless variety of ship foods um. And this is while they're trying to pass this act, because they put all this information together to try to like convince Congress we should do something. Yeah, we gotta stop the eating poison and po Yeah, we we really got to deal with all of these dead babies. Yea, so fucking step one of

a society. No more eating the poison pooh yeah, no more eating the poop milk. Step maybe less war milk, not none, just less. So. This passage from Deborah Bloom's book sums up the case that Wiley and his scientists made to Congress. For every food product the chemistry Division could point to a trick involved in its manufacture. Doctors continued to worry over reports of Grocer's itch a side effect of the deceptive process of grinding up insects and

passing the result office brown sugar. Sometimes live life survived the process. Beer, which most consumers imagined to be derived from malted barley and hops, was often made from a cheaper ferment of rice or even corn grits. So called aged whiskey was often still routinely rectified, alcohol diluted and colored brown, as widely had found twenty years earlier at Perdue. Corn syrup was widely still used as the basis for fake versions of honey and maple syrup. Many manufacturers argued

that they had to fake products to stay competitive. Detroit canner Walter Williams of Williams Brothers described the making of his Highland strawberry preserves. The jam was, he said, forty five percent sugar, corn syrup, apple juice made from discarded apple skins, some scraps of apple skin and cores, and usually one or two pieces of strawberry. The strawberries cost him, he added, many compare it's costs a lot of money to get those two strawberries. Two pieces of strawberries are

really putting me at a house at home. Many comparably priced preserves were just glucose apple juice and red red dye and timothy seed added to simulate strawberry seeds. If we could sell pure goods, I would be pleased. Williams insisted, I believe they should be labeled, showing their ingredients and

showing the quality of the goods. But as there was no loss settling setting such standards, and as he had to compete with less scrupulous canners, there was no way for him to stay in business unless he cut costs to match. Widely testified that about five percent of all foods were routinely adulterated, with the number being much higher up to in categories such as coffee, spices and food products made for selling to the poor. Of course, if your food is for poor people, it is not food.

Not food not We just ground up some dirt. Yeah, this is the salt dust pizza that I've made every three weeks. We mixed some sawdust in with piss. You can't tell the difference between that that bread ground, you know, she doesn't know the difference. The ground is what we call a natural play. It's pissed from the bars, so there's lots of barley in it. Well, they're poor bars,

so it's just ground up rice meal. But you know, sometimes I can shove a bar of soap into the mouth of a poor to see if they live for another week. It's nice, clean, and it's delicious. So Whitely solution to all of this horror is the Pure Food and Drug Act. And it's hard to see this as anything unreasonable, but the grocery, meatpacking, and canning companies threatened by the bill had to find a way to make it unreasonable, and the time honored tradition of shady rich bastards,

they decided to smear widely. Since his data was impeccable, they went after him for hating freedom dead. Yeah, baby, they're how you do it. That's how you do America. You do it man our freedom to poor people. Saw does. It's extremely funny. Dudley and Co. Canned Goods used the Grocery World magazine to publish editorials attacking Whiley as the nation's janitor, which it's hard to make that seem he

wants to clean things out. Yeah, that's an insult. Is just like, oh, you know, fucking janitor is always going around. He's like those guys who stop us from living in our own ship exactly, so I'm trying to wipe my ass. Mom, I like it like this. The idea is that he was a busy body policing the American stomach and again attacking freedom. During one industry event where Wiley meets with food company representatives, he's accused in person by the owner of a Canary for wanting to be dictator of the

food industry. Mr Stalin trying to stop us from putting sawdust in the bread and piss in the whiskey, fucking stalling over here. It was just like, I don't like when children die from poison. Man his mother, But what does he think he is the tsarre trying to stop kids from dying from milk? Oh Man? Much of this this is amazing because like it's just so America. It's

so American. It's American. You can't be more American than people literally spending like the equivalent of millions of dollars to just be like, I gotta feed them the poison. I gotta do it. I don't care that this has costing me more money than taking the poison out. And guess what, freedom, I love it. You love to see it.

We love to see it. We've always been the same. Yeah. Now, whiley was not purely concerned with food here or with like the raw ingredients that people generally consider food, And in fact, as this law came closer and closer to passing, he was in recently getting and getting involved in something that had become a source of substantial profits for the biggest players in the industry. Whitely was now obsessed with the use of new and experimental preservatives on various food stuffs.

Now some of them were like what we've talked about, based on formaldehyde, like freezing um, but there were a whole bunch of other different, not all preservatives, new food additives. This is the period in which people start to adulterate food, when you can your first processed meats, and these companies are putting stuff in for flavor and to preserve it, and there's no regulation for any of this at this point.

And this is really concerning to Wiley. The Poison Squad describes the birth of this subset of the chemical industry, and a paragraph that you may recognize some of the names from. In addition to preservatives, companies developed synthetic compounds to make food production cheaper. The sweetener saccharine, discovered in eighteen seventy nine at Johns Hopkins University, cost far less than sugar and quickly replaced it as it cost saving.

Alternative flavoring agents such as laboratory brood, citric acid, or peppermint extracts could now be used in drinks and other products instead of fresh lemon, juice, mint against saving costs and again crowding the farmer out of the supply chain. The pioneering and just industrial chemist Charles Feiser, who had founded his New York pharmaceutical company in eighteen forty nine, now also produced borax, boric acid, cream of tartar, and

citric acid for use in food and drink. They loved putting boax and ship like dozes so high it would kill people. It was great. Chicago's Joseph Bauer, whose Liquid Carbonic company produced the pressurized gas used in the fizzing drinks of soda fountains, had become so interested in artificial sweeteners that in nineteen o one he had invested in a new business in St. Louis, the Monsanto Chemical Company,

to produce saccer and in large quantities. Saccerin production had also launched the Hayden Chemical Works of New York City and nineteen hundred, although that company also branched into the preservative market, producing salicidic acid, formaldehyde, and sodium benzoate for

use in food and drinks. The food and drink market also attracted Herbert Henry Dow founder at age thirty one, if the Dow Chemical Company in Midlands, Michigan now would been a chemistry student at the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio. Yeah, he so he creates now Chemical company in Sea. All of these guys this is where they get their start, like shooting ship into food. And while he's not wanting to, like, you're not saying we

should ban all this. He's not some sort of like hippie fanatic, but he's like, we shouldn't know what these Number one, people need to know if these are in their food, right, Like you should have to tell people. I'm not gonna say you can't put citric acid or sony innate and food, but people should know, right Like

that's that we should be doing that. And also we should figure out if this stuff like the food, the people putting this in food should be showing that it's not harmful, like they should be funding research to make which, as we'll talk about, becomes problematic, right, um, but it is a good idea that like, well, we can't just start shooting this stuff into food. We should know what

it does right now. The people who are and there's a lot of scientists who are like not, like we don't need to be doing this, like the preservative stop the food from spoiling. Do we need to study what else? They do? We know how bad spoiled meat is. And they do have a point in this period where it's like we know it's this ship's so many kids a year, Like do we care if they get sick forty years later, right, which is like forty years that's the entire lifespan of

a human, they'll be fine. Yeah, it's like you got to take the good with the bad here. I I understand a little bit of it. Or they're just like listen, they're not getting the food born illnesses and you know, yeah, their skin is like orange now and one of their lungs fell out, but like like whatever, they're alive. All these kids them were milk exactly. Harvey Wiley was not particularly good at the give and take compromise nature of politics.

He was too much of a scientist, and so he's he one of the reasons this law has trouble passing, a lot of people will argue is that he's not willing to kind of like give any back. Um. And he's he's as adamant about like wanting strict laws about preservatives as he is about like what we should be pasteurizing milk. Right, And there's a good point to be making, like no pasteurizing milk is like get that done first, right,

it's more of a priority to do this ship. Um. And so in the end, the pure Food Law only passes, but because Upton Sinclair's book causes this national outrage which prompts Teddy Roosevelt to champion the bill personally, and it passes. The Pure Food Law was the first major victory and the war to ensure Americans actually knew what the funk they were eating and cheap food you actually ate food as opposed to pure poison in a sax. It was

followed in night. Yeah, just a completely like self inflicted wound, like this war that we created on ourselves. Oh good, it's very funny. Yeah. Now, the pure Food Law was the first major victory in the war to ensure Americans actually like yeah again, had any idea what they were eating. It was followed in nineteen thirty eight by the passing of the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, which established the

Food and Drug Administration for the first time. So that's when the ninety eight you know six, we get the Pure Food Law, which lays the groundwork for the f d A. The FDA comes int into being in thirty eight, and initially when it started, it's funded entirely by taxpayer money, right, and it is invested with the you might say sacred

authority to protect us consumers from the businesses making their food. Um. This is a titanic step forward, and it's cementson into the wildcat era of tainted milk, fake coffee, arsenic and lead riddled candy. It's a huge deal. Now a lot of stuff had started to get started to get fixed in nineteen o six, obviously, Um, but nineteen making the f d A is a huge move forward and a very good It was absolutely necessary, I want to established

before we tear it down in the next episode. We had to have something like this, like you could not it's I don't care how much of a fucking libertarian is. You can't let that state of affairs go on the market. We have proved the market cannot correct itself with this. It's just so much cheaper to feed people poison, not the market would rather spend more money on continuing the poison trade. People can't stop him. You can't stop him. You can't stop a guy from all the people he's

feeling good for. You know, the f d A starts as a beautiful, necessary thing. And then in the nineteen eighties, about a century after Dr Wiley's journey began, the bright dream of the Food and Drug Administration began to go terribly wrong. But Matt, we're gonna talk about that in part two. Oh sure, sure, Uh yeah. The pod Yourself a Gun in the World's Only Sopranos podcast is out now, and check out the film Drunk Broadcast. Also, I'm on I'm on Instagram. Uh follow me at Matt leap jokes.

I need more of those. You know, no one gives a shit about my Twitter anymore, you know, Yeah, follow him and Matt Leap jokes. Follow him, follow me, people send him pictures of your milk. Graham, I think people just care more about the Graham. You know, it just needs a shame because it Beyonce. I don't know if she's on the Graham. I assume so's the robber must be right, amateur. Also, like my Twitter, I do not

have a Graham. I used to have a blue checkmark, but I got it taken away on Twitter, and I hope to get one your blue check work away Twitter did because I pretended to be The New York Times. Yeah. Yeah, you're not allowed to do that apparently, but it was a great post. It was you know, I mean, I do love that for you, like I love I think my favorite example of that issue it's the lady from I Think You Should Leave, who did the the I Can't get enough wine like that that that's She's been

in a few of them, but she did. It was like when Oreos did some sort of Pride month think she uh pretended to Benila Wafers using her checkmark and was like, Nilla Wafers, we don't like bisexual people think you're not allowed to eat her cookies something like that. It was very funny and that's why she's not on Twitter anymore. I love it, Nilla Wafers taken strays from me. I should note people are going to give a ship every because they do every time we like make jokes

about dying at forty. Obviously, the way lifespans work is that so many kids died as babies once. If you made it to an adulthood, you had a pretty good chance of at least making it to like fifty or sixty. People made it to their seventies. Yes, it's true. It's funny to joke about people dying at age like being old at age thirty back then, because look at a picture of a thirty year old from the eighteen nineties. They look like your fucking grandpa, like covered in soot.

They're just taking it out. It is permanently embedded soot in their body all. Its extremely funny how sick and dying everybody was back in the day. Well, you know, they just a society that loved poison milk. It was a whole world of people exactly as healthy as you here Bolson Yaro, just constantly getting their dudoo backed up and being like, well are you and ship out of their noses because there's so much poop in the milk. Again, But first I gotta run by this emu and see

if you'll punch me in the throat. Um boy, um so yeah. Find matt Leeb on Twitter. Also, I have a fiction novel, my book After the Revolution. You can find it for free. Is an e book at a tr book dot com. But it's also available for pre order through a K Press. If you order now, you will get a signed copy. So just google a k Press after the Revolution preorder my book. It will come out in May and you'll get it signed a k Press after the Revolution. Um google it and you'll find

the pre order page. I'm pre ordering it right now. And we have a behind the bast livestream. God so much to plug ship Okay with prop on Anuary seventeen. Okay, get tickets at momenthouse dot com. Slash it will be a good episode, probably. I haven't written it yet. There I will, I think, so that's probable. I might even have an episode written alright,