Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just stuff you should know in it, doing some stuff you should know, kind of stuff on the Stuff you should know podcasts.
Yeah, yeah, Hey, can I make.
A couple of quick announcements?
Oh boy, is it a correction about me?
No, that's a listener mail. Okay, just a couple of quick things. Firstly, I have had my front tooth implant redone, So the next roughly eighty episodes might be a little lispy here and there.
Can you say sibilants, sibilants?
It's actually more f's.
Can you say fibilants fibilance.
Yeah.
Sometimes air just shoots out of that a little toothhole tooth the thh at the end. That's problematic. So you know, here we are again everyone, and bear with it. And I appreciate your support.
You can't even tell Chuck like, had you not said something, maybe one person would have noticed. I think it's fine.
I appreciate that.
Well, yeah, but you'll have some some words you will stand out. The other quick one is just for this episode massive CoA trigger warning any vegetarians or vegans or really anybody who is just grossed out by gross food stuff.
This is choc bowl.
Yeah. If you find the human body and the stuff it can do odious two, you might want to just be prepared. Yeah, all right, So that was good, good CoA buddy. Yeah, because we are talking about what things were like before America started regulating the meat that we bought in ate and it turns out it was a total free for all until then. But it was really
just kind of nestled in a short period. Yeah, you know where like the Second Industrial Revolution happened and all of a sudden, everybody moves to the cities and you can't buy your bacon from the guy down the street anymore, or make your own milk or whatever. You have to buy it. And so these companies sprung up to supply that stuff and they started cutting corners immediately.
Yeah, it's the American way time and time again. We've seen from the very beginning corporate interest, corporate lobby all in the name of profit. And this isn't just US railing. This is the history of the United States.
Yes, for sure, most of them are advertisers on stuff you should know too, probably so so people needed this stuff and if they filled a void, like it was
a necessary thing that they were doing. But the problem is because there's zero regulation, I mean none, Like there was an author named Deborah Blum, and she wrote The Poison Squad colon One chemist's single minded crusade for safety at the turn of the twentieth century, and she said that there was nothing that could be done to food that was illegal because there were no food safety laws. There was nothing you could do aside from kill your customers.
And even then you might just get some bad press and everybody's like, oh, well it happens.
Yeah.
I wonder if it was because they just assumed that these new corporations would just sort of deliver food the right way, or I just don't wonder if it was naivete I mean, eventually it was. Obviously stuff started coming out as we'll see in this episode, and Congress, you know, bows down to the donors, as they still do today. But I just wonder what they thought at first, just like, no, this is great, and you know, they're supplying more food and I'm sure they're doing it right.
My take on it is because this is like set largely in the Gilded Age, that there was a general like hands off approach like, hey, this business is zooming this economy into the stratosphere. Sure, and we don't want to interfere with it, and I'm sure they're going to do the right thing anyway.
Yeah, that's a good point.
So that's my take. I think that there was a combination of not really realizing that we needed regulations because we never needed them before, and then not wanting to meddle with this red hot economic engine that was flaming, just with so many flames.
Yeah, flames on the side of your base.
Yeah, so I guess we should start with milk, huh.
Yeah, why not? Because it was pretty bad stuff.
Yeah, it was.
Pasturization had been around for a long time. It was a minute in the eighteen fifties, but they didn't get on the widespread pasturization of milk till about the eighty or so years later. So if you went and bought your milk, you know, I think the understanding for a lot of people is like, oh, well, back then you would buy your milk from the local dairy, right, and it was that's way better just to get it fresh from the teat like that, and that was not true
because this milk was nasty. It was killing babies. Four hundred thousand babies a year from drinking bad milk.
In America alone. That's not a global stat that's just in the United States.
Yeah, unbelievable.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
It's nuts. So everybody's like, yeah, this just happens. But I guess people just thought that's what happened when you
drink milk sometimes, or I don't know what the thinking was. Yeah, But a guy named John Newell Hurdi h R t Y. He became the chief Health Officer of Indiana in eighteen ninety six, and we should say by this time, just kind of to give it some context, the pure food movement, which was a progressive movement in the nineteenth century, along with like temperance, suffrage, abolition, it had really kind of started to gain steam. So this guy wasn't laying the groundwork,
but his work was very noteworthy. But he became the chief Health Officer of Indiana and he immediately started investigating the state's dairy farms and found what they were doing is what was killing, you know, infants who were being fed cow's milk.
Yeah, it was because it was cow's milk that was watered down so they could stretch profits. But it was watered down. It's not like they had some beautiful filtration system from a Poland spring.
Right.
Actually, I don't even know what a Poland spring is.
It's a specific spring. It is ironically not in Poland.
I had a feeling so they weren't using that.
Of course, they were using like the farm's pond water, which was disgusting. It was stagnant at one point, like he literally held up a bottle of milk from Indiana and saw actual worms inside of it.
Yeah, isn't that awful?
Live worms they were moving.
Yeah, and that wasn't all he found. He found insects, hares, blood, pus, cow manure. He estimated that just the residents of Indianapolis ingested about two thousand pounds of cow manure every year, just from the milk they were drinking.
Yeah, that's collective, not each person, of course, but that's still a lot of I.
Think you would ode on cowpoop if you ate that much.
Or maybe it would make you into like a superhero.
There is another really gross one that Dave turned up. I think it was originally in an Atlantic article about the early days of milk. But one of the things that they would do so like if you thinned milk with water, it was very clearly thinned it. It didn't look like milk it because it was bluish gray. So they put like chalk or flour or plaster of Paris in. Not great, but still it gets much worse. You also, when you got a bottle of milk, expected the cream
to still be there on top. The cream rises to the top, as they say, right, well, if you've been watering down your milk, there probably isn't much cream left in it, but you need to put that cream back in. There's something that looks like it. So they said, aside from stagnant pond water, what else do I have on the farm that's basically free that I'm not using that I can use for this? Oh yeah, these little calves
that I'm slaughtering and selling is veal. I could use their brains impure because it has kind of a creamy texture, and that will stand in for the cream that I'll put on top of the watered down milk that I'm selling in the bottle.
Yeah, so that is a horrifying thing to hear. Yeah, with human ears, we should point out that wasn't It wasn't like everybody was doing that. This is like an example of you know, who knows, it could have been one farm. But what they did find out what was being used widespread and just sort of with regularity in the industry was using formaldehyde to preserve milk pre pasteurization, which is you know, we all know it's an embalming chemical used for dead bodies to make them last longer.
And this was literally killing babies if you were a kid in Indianapolis in an orphanage, or actually anywhere in the United States. They didn't have a baby formula back then. You can listen to our episode on do we do one just on baby formula?
Yeah, one on formula and one on the breast.
I think, oh, that's right. I thought there was two on the breast, but it was too total. That wasn't trying to be funny.
There, Well, it was hilarious.
They would you know, you would get cow's milk as a little bebie in an orphanage, so it would you know, it would it would kill a kid very quickly if you're drinking formaldehyde.
Right, Yeah, it doesn't take much for a little infant, right, And it's apparently one of those things I read that it's it will just kill you, like almost immediately if you ingest the right amount. So it's not good. And even if it doesn't kill you right away, it's it's not a pleasant way to die. And again, four hundred thousand babies a year we're dying in the United States just from bad milk. So it was definitely more than just one one dairy farm in Indiana. It was a widespread problem.
Right.
Oh, absolutely, So you know that's hero number one. Hero number two also comes to us from Indiana.
Wait, wait, before we move on, you got to tell him that great, great quote from doctor Herdy.
Oh, I thought it was kind of smarmy. Sure, I guess he had the right to be smarmy. A reporter asked if formaldehyde and milk was dangerous, and he said, well, I guess it's all right if you want to embalm the baby.
That didn't strike me as smarmy.
Is it smarmy for the nineteen twenties or whatever?
I guess, But he's he's saying like that's what the milk producers are doing. They're embalming babies.
Yeah, I just I don't know. I thought a man of science would say it is extremely dangerous.
I see, you know, I see, yeah, I get so.
Still a hero, a little smarmy maybe, but who is to spare him?
The second hoo's your.
Hero that's coming in is a gentleman named doctor Harvey Washington Wiley. In the eighteen eighties, he got to be in his bonnet about the problem with food.
He was a boiler.
Maker professor there at Purdue, and then the USDA, the fairly new USDA, said all right, we're going to start a Bureau of Chemistry, and you're the guy that's going to.
Run it, right he was.
He essentially dedicated his entire adult life and career to fighting for like making the American food market wholesome. Essentially, like that's what that guy did. And he actually had a bit of the showman in him. He had a huge ego. Apparently, most of the people who were talking about today had enormous egos, and they rubbed up against one another, and even though they didn't like one another, most of them they still managed to work together to
affect real change. Which is kind of a cool little hats off to everybody. So one of the first things that doctor Wiley did when the USDA hired him to run the Bureau of Chemistry, which apparently was a new department at the time. This is in the I think the eighteen eighties or the late nineteenth century at the very least, he started testing syrup and jam and all
sorts of stuff. I'm not quite sure if he was doing it to compare because he was actually researching corn syrup at the time, to find out if this was actually okay to use as a food because there was that whole pure food movement was like, hey, I don't know what we're putting into our food to preserve it, Like we didn't used to do that ten years ago before everybody moved to the city. I'm not sure how
I feel about this. So doctor Wiley's job was to find out if these things were actually harmful or if you could use them. One of the first things he found out was that most of the maple syrup and the honey, like ninety percent of the honey was fake. There wasn't a drop of honey in it.
Yeah, it was corn syrup. They would flavor a little bit with maple. For the syrup, they would flavor it like whatever fruit.
I guess. For jam, I'm not sure what they flavored it with.
For honey, I don't know either, Like how would you take a bite and be like, this is honey?
I guess, I don't know.
But that was just sort of a jumping off point where he was like, well, wait a minute, if they're doing this to honey and maypay syrup, we need to start looking into other things. And he started to learn about formaldehyde in foods. Borax, which is a it's a cleaner, you know, like boric acid cleaner under the brand. I think it was a brand, wasn't it Borax?
Yeah?
I think it was like twenty Mule team Borax.
Oh, that kind of thing.
Was the name. That was the name of the brand.
But he started realizing this stuff was in our food. He got obviously pretty upset about it and goes to Congress, and Congress is not interested in passing anything because, as you will see, just like you know the things that go on today, the food lobby was strong and rich and powerful, and Congress sat on their hands.
Yeah that. Author Deborah Blum also said that like there was no political will, not just because they were in the pockets of like the food producers. They a lot of them, most certainly were, and basically all of them were getting money from them at the very least. But that also if you introduced one of these bills, you were like a crackpot. You were a quack. You were you had no idea, right, you had no idea what it meant to like be in the business world. You
were just a dummy. That's how. That's how these things were reviewed. And I think something like a hundred or something. I think like more than one hundred bills were introduced and just within a decade or so, and only like eight or nine of them managed to get passed. Yeah, that's how that's how looked down upon the idea of food regulation was at the time.
Yeah.
So Wiley is a pretty smart guy, he said, He's kind of had a little bit of showman quality to him. So he got together an experiment, also sort of a
PR stunt. In nineteen oh two, he took twelve government clerks and put them in housing in the basement of the Agricultural Department building there in DC, and they were exposed to what they called Hygienic Table trials, where half of these young men were secretly fed formaldehyde, borax, sodium benzonate, all kinds of nasty chemicals like the stuff that was going in food, and it was conveniently leaked to the
press and doctor Wiley. They were called the Poison Squad, and doctor Wiley was dubbed Old Borax.
Yeah, so he he actually became a national figure, like people like just as the average American knew about him. If you read the newspaper, you probably were familiar with doctor.
Wiley, the old Borax, old Borax.
And we talked about him in the Poison Squad in I think that does the FDA Protect Americans episode? Yeah, just kind of briefly, But I mean that whole book that Deborah Blum wrote was about doctor Wiley and the Poison Squad and the work he did amazing, and Wiley definitely deserves a lot of credit. He gets less credit than he probably should get because around that time people started to kind of look at Teddy Roosevelt, as we'll see, as the person who really got the legislation pushed through.
But it probably would not have happened it when it did without doctor Wiley. But in addition to doctor Wiley, there was also Teddy Roosevelt and another guy, a muck ranking journalist, a socialist named Upton Sinclair, and those two were considered to be some real driving forces behind food regulation in America.
Absolutely, you know what that means.
It means that it's time for a message break.
Now.
It means I'm going to go try and find a tiny chick lit it to shove into my tooth hole.
You should just switch the colors once in a while.
Aaron Cooper has my flipper.
Oh yeah, that's right, man, quite a gift.
I don't think it would fit now anyway. Okay, So don't feel bad, Coop. Just keep praying to that thing every night and it'll be okay.
So weird, all right, we'll be right back, all right.
So we left off with quite a teaser that a gentleman named Teddy Roosevelt and a socialist writer named Upton Sinclair would change the course of America.
And boy did they.
A little background on Teddy Roosevelt just because it really applies here to how he got sort of swept up in all this. To begin with, he was a soldier. He led the rough riders and the invasion of Spanish held Cuba. And the reason that is important to this story is because that invasion and that whole war was a lot of Americans died, but not from the battle itself. I think about four hundred Americans died in combat, but about fifty five hundred died from disease, from malaria and
dysentery and typhoid. So President McKinley, after the war started, just a big military commission to investigate what it was like to be a soldier in all these awful conditions. And that very key to this story included the food.
That they ate.
Yeah, because there was at least among the people who had fought in the Spanish American War, there was this awareness that the roast beef, especially the canned roast beef god that had been delivered as rations. Yeah. Yeah, you're walking a fine line just even attempting canned roast beef, Right, it better be good. This was so not good. It was it was like it would make you immediately start vomiting. According to Teddy Roosevelt, Yeah, they called it embalm meek
because some of it was clearly rotted. But then they'd added formaldehyde. This wasn't even like, Okay, this is fresh meat, we're gonna add formaldehyde. They would put the formaldehyde in after it was rotted to try to counteract the.
Rod you know, to bring it back to life.
Exactly to frankenstein it up. And they found that that, Yeah, when you ate the stuff, it didn't matter what you did to cook it or anything like that. It would just make you throw up or just start pooping your pants, like almost immediately. And Teddy Roosevelt and all the other veterans of the Spanish American War were pretty miffed about this.
So when Roosevelt got the chance to go testify for Congress, he was the governor of New York by this time, about that beef, that tinned beef, he definitely took the chance, or took the opportunity.
Yeah, he called that canned beef a disgrace to our country and also had a little testimonial description when the cans were opened to the top was nothing more than a layer of slime. It was disagreeable looking, that's putting it mildly and nasty. Sometimes we stowed it with potato and onions. But I could have eaten my hat stewed with potato and onions rather than the beef. Nearly all the men sickened after eating it.
Yeah, isn't that cross?
Yeah?
Any you know, like you said, by this time, I mean he was already a war hero, but governor of New York, he has you know, some clout all of a sudden.
For sure. Yeah. He was fairly well known enough that when McKinley stood for reelection in nineteen hundred, he chose Teddy Roosevelt as his running mate. Yeah, and he was still young. I think he was forty two. Less than a year into the second McKinley administration, McKinley was assassinated and died, and so suddenly Teddy Roosevelt, the vice president, is president, and he became the youngest president in history. K was forty three, Roosevelt was forty two. And it's
really weird. It's one of those moments in history where the right person happens to be in the right place to really make things happen that seemed intractable before.
Yeah.
And I don't know enough about Teddy Roosevelt to fully sing his praises, but from what I can tell, just the brief stuff I've read about him researching this. He was a really interesting, level headed dude, at least as far as balancing the interests of the United States went. Dare I say that, Well he was.
He figured big in the foundation of our national parks.
So that was a big part. But also like in this specifically, he saw a very important need that needed to be filled, which was the meat producers, but the food producers in general, the meat producers in particular needed regularly. They were doing some nasty stuff, he found out, and he went to Congress and was like, make this happen. If you don't make it happen, I'm going to basically expose all of you who are in the pockets of this beef trust as they call it, the Big five
beef producers, which included Armor, Swift, and Libby. Who are all three still around making meat in the United States.
Yeah, but you know his hands were even as president, tied by Congress and the lobby.
Until that is.
Our final hero of the day comes along a gentleman named Upton Sinclair, like you said, a hardcore socialist and a writer who wrote the very very famous book The Jungle about well most people, if they've never read the Jungle would probably say, yeah, it's about exposing the meat packing in Chicago, right, But fourteen I'm sorry, fifteen pages really covered that meatpacking disgust that we are going to have to talk about.
So just get ready.
The book was really about an immigrant worker who comes to America and has sort of just stopped on by capitalism because again, he was a socialist and this was his cause.
Right.
Yeah, So in the end of the book, the worker who's I think only identified as Urgis j u Rgis, he just keeps getting like, he loses his family, he loses essentially anything good to his life by being ground through the gears of capitalism. And on the other side, he comes out and finds that socialism is the answer and starts dedicating himself to building a socialist paradise or whatever. Right. So that was, like you said, the point of the book. But when America read this book, they did not pay
any attention to that socialist message at all. In fact, plenty of them ignored the fact that there was an overt socialist message and still read the book and got
something out of it. And what they got was those fifteen pages of disgusting descriptions of what was going on in Chicago's meatpacking district where essentially all of the beef and pork and I guess sheep mutton was processed this one area and just where they kept the live live stock before slaughter, just when they arrived by train and put them into a pen. Just that pen, chuck was a square mile big.
Yeah, it was known as packing town. And in order to get this information, he went undercover. He spent seven weeks posing as a worker in this meatpacking district, which was like I said, it's called packing town, but it was in the heart of the Union stockyards, and like you said, they would bring in by train. It was the most efficient system on earth for processing animals. Ten thousand cattle, ten thousand hogs, five thousand sheep a day
coming in being processed. They were doing I think they were going through eighteen million animals a year at this point because of a very innovative new system called assembly line work, which is you know, we know what it is now, but back then it was kind of revolutionary. And that they would put make one person do one job and one job only, all day long, for twelve hours a day, and as fast as they could.
Yeah, and if you screwed up. The four men would be like, you had one job.
Yeah, don't get your finger cut off and put into a sausage.
Yeah, so that would happen, right. They would use everything they could from the animal. Apparently there was a widely known phrase that was used there that they used everything about the hog except for the squeal just haunting.
Yeah.
Well, I want to point out though, like not in the way that like an ethical master chef wants to use or a hunter that you know, provides meat for their family tries to use every you know, good edible part of the animal.
That's a different deal.
We're talking about like you know, grinding up hoofs for you know, filler exactly.
Yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out right.
Yeah.
So when he wrote The Jungle, he interviewed, first of all, he witnessed what he wrote about firsthand. But he said, like I did not I did not like exaggerate this stuff. This is not me embellishing, Like I witnessed this firsthand. And the stuff that I didn't witness firsthand, I interviewed people who witnessed it firsthand. Yeah, and so he's like, this stuff in the book is real. People and we haven't even really kind of cracked into what was in those fifteen pages. I say we do that.
Now, should we take a break into it.
I think that's a fine idea.
Chuck, all right, we'll be right back.
Okay, Chuck, So we're back. It's time to get into the grizzly details of the jungle. There's some pretty famous stuff in there, just because it just it got out so far and wide. It was a very widely read book and an even more widely discussed book because of the disgust that it generated. But for example, when they when they generated when they created sausage, like Upton Sinclair told everybody how the sausage is made, and everybody's like, we didn't want to know, but now we know, and
we can't unknow it. They would grind up moldy sausage that had been rejected from Europe so it was bad when it got to Europe, and then they shipped it back to America, and then they used it in the sausage they fed Americans. That stuff would also be mixed in with scraps of meat that had been shoveled off of the floor. Probably at that couple of times a day, they would shovel meat scraps and flesh and blood off
of the floor put it into the sausage mixture. That's bad enough that it was on the floor, but the workers frequently had things like tuberculosis and they were spitting bloody tuberculotic spit onto the floor, so that would get mixed in with the food scraps, the meat scraps that would be put into the sausages. There was a rat problem there, so they would put out poison pieces of bread for the rats, and then when the rats ate the bread and died, they put the rats in the sausage.
And then furguod measure, they put the poison bread in the sausage too. This was just the sausage that they were making.
Yeah, Like I get the feeling that there was. If there was a poster on the wall of this workplace, it was if it's on the floor, it's in the sausage.
Yeah, for sure.
Tobacco spit, That's that's probably the best thing you could hope for.
Yeah, you being a flavor tobacco spit.
Yeah, if anyone's still listening, you know, obviously potted meats, you know, mystery meat is kind of a funny thing to say these days, but back then it was truly dangerous. It was you know, organ meats, It was tripe. This is a quote, and it's hard for me to even say this word for because of my tooth and because
it's disgusting. But the hard car cardalin is cardlinagenus, cartilaginous, cartilaginous. Yeah, there we go, hard cartilaginous gullets of beef after the tongues had been cut out, was in this potted meat as well.
Yeah, and the potted chicken in particular. It always appears in quotes because it was later determined there was no chicken at all in the potted chicken. It was just, like you said, every piece of the animal they could use, not for ethical purposes, but because they could sell it as potted chicken and tell everybody, yeah, it's just ground up chicken, just to eat it and shut up.
Yeah. So you know this is awful. The workers themselves are working in deplorable conditions, twelve hours a day in these disgusting rooms, doing this stuff, the same job over and over and over, which was a new thing. Like people weren't used to assembly line work much less like if your job all day is to I don't even know. I can't even imagine what they were doing.
Skinning, slicing, removing, deboning.
Yeah, there you go. They I made the joke about losing a finger, but they did. They would lose digits, they would lose limbs. This stuff would go into the food. There were even people that fell into lard vats and boiled alive and that.
Went into the food. Yeah, there was a well, they went into the lard.
There was a quote that well which eventually went into food, you know exactly. There was a quote from Sinclair that said, all but the bones of them went out into the world as DRAMs pure beef flowed.
I don't think Derams is around anymore.
Durhams couldn't survive that one. Yeah, there's another quote from Upton Sinclair that he said, I aimed at the public's heart and by accident, I hit it in the stomach, which is him. Yeah, with him recognizing that he wrote this book about socialism and everybody just focused in on the really gross food stuff and that even still it affected change. It just wasn't the change he was trying to affect. But he wasn't one of those guys who's like, oh great, I'm a celebrity either way, I don't care
how I got there. He turned out to be like really bitter at everybody missing this message. Like his book was widely read and nobody got it, at least they didn't get it the way that he intended them to get it.
Yeah, this is another good quote. He said that he was made to a celebrity not because the public cared anything about the workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef.
Yeah. Man, that word. You start messing with that word, it gets grosser and grosser.
Yeah, tubercular beef should open for diarrhea planet.
Oh boy, I think you've just come up with a tour.
So this is a very sort of a bombshell book.
It was released in nineteen o six in January, sold twenty five thousand copies right out of the gate, which was just a ton of books back then. There's a lot of books now, as we've learned. Within about five months, it was translated into seventeen different languages and eventually became a silent movie as well in nineteen fourteen.
Yeah, it was, like you said, it was a bombshell. Basically, that log jam in Congress of you know that had kept any food regulation bills essentially from passing this book like broke it open. It dislodged all that stuff, and the reason why was multifaceted. In addition to grossing out the public and being like, we're eating this, government, do
something about this. Somebody do something about this, you had that public outcry, which is kind of in line with the progressive drum beat, right, you also had a developing drum beat coming out of the business side, because that's where that's the whole The debate was divided between the progressives who were cranks and crazy and didn't understand business, and the business side who were like, to shut up
and eat this stuff. We're trying to make a profit here and get the engine of the United States revving. There was a group in business that was like, hey, we're already following like food safety practices totally and it's really expensive compared to our competitors who are cutting every corner possible and selling unsanitary products for way lower than we can sell our safe products. So if these guys start getting regulated, we're going to even the playing field.
And as a matter of fact, they'll be behind us because they're going to have to play catch up expense wise to get to the same level that we're operating at and have been all this time. And I said, ketchup, which is ironic because one of those companies that was already doing things safe was the Heinz Company.
Yeah, hats off to the Heinz Company.
Right, Yeah, not just Heines, but also old Taylor Whiskey.
Yeah, so you know there were it wasn't everyone. And that's a really good point. I'm glad you made it because Heines probably since that has been saying. By the way, you know, we weren't a part of all that, right, you know, it should have been called the Jungle Colon except for Hines. So Roosevelt all of a sudden is getting one hundred calls I'm sorry, not calls. He was getting one hundred letters a day, calls. He would have been like, what's happening here about food safety? He calls
up Upton Sinclair. These guys should not be buddies, And spoiler, they did not end up being buddies. Yeah, it wasn't like some crazy like you're like this and I'm like this, but you know, we have a lot in common. As it turns out, the only thing they had in common, it seems like, was that they wanted to clean up the food situation in the United States. They didn't trust each other, of course, they didn't really like each other.
Of course, Roosevelt.
Did not like a muck breaking journalist, and of course Sinclair was like, Hey, the Beef Trust is giving you two hundred thousand dollars for your presidential campaign, which in the future, in twenty twenty four, that would be seven million dollars.
Wow, so you're in.
The pocket of the Beef Trust, which he denied, of course, because he had to eat that beef in Cuba.
Yeah, he said, mister Sinclair, I bear no love for those gentlemen, for I ate the meat they can for the army in Cuba.
Yeah, comma, but their checks cashed all the same.
Well, he lived up to that quote. He took on the Beef Trust, and he got this legislation essentially passed through as we'll see. And then, just as a side note, you mentioned muckrakers. Apparently Teddy Roosevelt was the one who inadvertently coined that term. He was giving a speech about I'm not sure what the whole point of the speech was about, but he was basically railing against journalists to
go look and dig up scandal. And he allowed that there's a role that they play in the public forum that's a good role, which is if there's somebody doing something shady, these guys are going to go find out and tell everybody, and that's a public good. What he was saying is even when given the chance to just write legitimate journalism, after that, they still go look for scandal and like try to cause problems that might not
necessarily need, that aren't really problems. And he compared them to a character from Pilgrim's Progress who was the muckraker and muck is poop by the way, who had the chance to trade in his muckrake for not a muckrake and didn't even look up to didn't even bother looking up, just kept looking down at the muck he was raking for not a muckrake exactly.
So he doesn't like Sinclair, like we said, he certainly doesn't trust him. He thought that the account in the Jungle was he called it hysterical. So he's like, I'm going to look into this myself, and by myself, I mean I'm going to have other people do it for me. Charles Neil, who was a Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor at the time, and an attorney from New York named James Reynolds would do the same thing. Well, I don't think they posed as workers, but they did the
investigation in packing town in Chicago. It resulted in the Neil Reynolds report. And basically, I mean the long story short of the Neils Reynolds report is, by the way, everything he said what's true.
Yeah, and it's even more more than than he put it in his book. That was the thing you said, they didn't pose as packing workers. The packing companies knew they were coming, and they yes, and they were so like the stuff they were doing was just so bad and entrenched that they still were caught doing all this stuff knowing that these were coming to investigate. So now Teddy Roosevelt has documentation from two people that he trusts saying, yes,
this is actually going on. This is a huge problem and we need to do something about it.
Should we talk about the bathrooms.
Yes, let's because we haven't been super gross for a minute.
So like we said, they exposed even worse things than in the book, and this is one of them. The bathrooms weren't really bathrooms. Sometimes it would just be a little cordoned off area of the same workroom floor where they're scooping up god knows what to put into the sausage. There was obviously no sinks, there were no open toilets. You would just pee in that corner. There was no soap, no toilet paper, and that's when it was just sort of cordoned off.
There were also places where it was just nothing.
They would just pee where they were so they could keep working as fast as they could. They said, the fumes from the urine, I'll just read the quote hints in some cases, the fumes from the urine swell the sum of nauseating odors arising from the dirty, blood soaked rotting wood floors.
Fruitful.
Yeah, fruitful is hard for me to say. Fruitful culture beds for the disease germs of men and animals.
Yeah, and don't forget. Multiple times a day they scraped up the stuff that had dropped on the floor and put it in the sausage. And I saw a description of those floors that really turned my stomach. They called them spongy. Isn't that awful because they were rotting from spit and blood and urine. That's what the meat was coming into contact.
Yeah, so it held even more.
Yeah, so gross, dude, spongy wood as bad enough as it is.
Oh man.
So the other thing they did was said, and by the way, President Benjamin Harris former president, in eighteen ninety you signed a very weak meat inspection bill that basically put USDA inspectors at these meat packing plants. But all they were charged to do was say, well, this cow was healthy before they slaughtered it, and I'm going back to sleep now. They had no authority to oversee what happened after that point exactly.
So even the rejected animals that those USDA inspectors would be like, this one doesn't pass, muster, get rid of it. They would get rid of it, and then when the inspector left, they would go back and get it and process it anyway. So there was no actual like oversight. Yeah. Even the oversight that was there was just completely undermined.
Yeah.
So this this was like, this was bad news for the Beef Trust and other packers. This something was now going to happen because Teddy Roosevelt had this report, and in addition to the jungle being out in public, he said, Hey, I've got this report, Congress, I want these I want some reforms to be pushed through. Make it happen, or I'm going to release this report that I've commissioned that's really getting to blow the lid off of this stuff.
And he got cooperation from the Senate. They passed a bill, passed a great bill, and then it started to get blocked in the House, and I think it came down to like two senators or no, two congress people, congressmen who were so in the Beef Trust pocket that they staged a last ditch effort at stopping these meat inspection
bills from going through. And that finally did it for Roosevelt, and he released the Neil Reynolds report, and it just made anybody sticking up for the Beef Trust look so bad that you just couldn't get in the way of it any longer.
Yeah, And I think didn't someone leaked it beforehand too? Didn't Upton Sinclair help leak it?
Yeah, supposedly, And I guess Teddy Roosevelt angrily wired Doubleday, the publisher, the actual guy named Doubleday, and said, like, can you please tell up upting Sinclair to leave the is of ruting the country to me? For once?
That was smarmy.
You see smarm everywhere in all the quotes.
I see smarmy people.
So this resulted in two things, the Meat Inspection Act of nineteen oh six and then eventually the Pure Food and Drug Act, which outlawed the sale of any altered, adulterated, mislabeled foods, drug, medicine, or liquor. Became known as doctor Wiley's Law or the Wiley Act. Contribute to doctor Wiley. That was not the creation of the FDA, though that would come along a little bit later. And like you said, we have a great episode on the FDA.
What year was that though nineteen twenty.
Seven, nineteen thirty. The Bureau of Chemistry was part of the USD until nineteen twenty.
Seven, all right, So then finally in nineteen thirty we get our FDA.
And then finally in nineteen thirty eight, after FDR came into office, the federal government was the agent. The FDA was finally given real teeth to actually regulate stuff. It was kind of nominal for a while until the late thirties.
You gotta say real teeth right now.
Sorry, I'm sorry, I mean as a slam.
That's all right.
Well, if you want to know more about this really interesting period in history, go research up Sin Saint Clair, Teddy Roosevelt, doctor Harvey Washington, Wiley, read the Jungle, do all that stuff, and just see how grossed out you can get before you vomit. And since Chuck laughed at vomit, that means it's time for listener mail.
Yeah. I read this.
It's an email about our live show in Seattle, and I read this as sort of a hey, here's what you get at a stuff you should know show. Because we've got we've got the cities lined up. We haven't announced on sale dates or anything, but I think we can probably say what cities were going through.
Right Yeah, Yeah, I think it's pretty much in the bag.
All right.
So we're going to hit Chicago, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis, all the apolis is and then where are we going in the Northeast this year?
In the Northeast, We're doing DC, We're going to do Boston. Yeah, we're going to us New York City, which we haven't been to in a while.
Yeah, it's been a minute since we've been to New York. And then we're going to finish out the year in Durham, North Carolina, and our final show the year in Atlanta, like we like to do.
Yeah, that's the schedule as it stands now, and it's pretty close to baked, close enough that we're willing to say this in the hopes that we don't have to edit out of town.
That's right.
So I read this because this is a little taste of what you can get here. And this is from Mary Benedict, a grandma to a grandson, and they went to the show together.
Oh, this is a great email.
It was Hey, guys, been listening for about ten years. I'm a huge fan and retired teacher. I introduced my grandson just stuff you should know, and he too has become a devoted fan. So for Christmas, I gave him tickets to the live event in Seattle. He was thrilled. We went to the show, absolutely loved the experience. The topic was fun. You two are as great as you sound in your episodes. As the questions move forward, so we do a little Q and a at the end. Surprise,
surprise if you haven't been to a show. So as the questions move forward toward the end, you declared one final question which would have left my grandson at the mic. I was repeating to myself, please please see that he's a kid. Please see that he's a kid, and Chuck did exactly that. You asked him how old he was, as well as the girl behind him, both were fourteen. You apologize to the other side and let the two
young people talk with you. Please know what a remarkable moment that was for my grandson, A euphoric life experience in memory.
So thank you.
I also want to share my appreciation for how kind you were to all the people in Q and A. You always asked a question about them or thoughtfully commented on personal things they shared with you.
That level of.
Compassion and kindness is extraordinary. In my regard for you, both rose even higher. And lastly, Josh, thank you for your vulnerability sharing that you need to avoid the news right now, for your well being, demonstrated strength and emotional intelligence to everyone present, and thank you for modeling great life strategies. Are you familiar with highly sensitive people? You may not be one, but I am and my grandson.
Is as well.
It is a character trait, not a problem, and that would make a fantastic topic for a podcast for sure. Sorry this ran long, but in the world where people are quick to point out what's wrong, Mary, we love you. I believe it's important to tell people what they are doing when they are doing great things. And you two are doing great things.
That's awesome, That is wonderful.
That is Mary with an I Benedict and Mary's grandson.
So thank you both for coming.
Yeah, thanks a lot, a lot, Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
The life strategy example I'm setting is avoidance.
Now, avoiding the news is not avoidance.
If it's true. If you want to be like Mary and her grandson and come to one of our shows, we will eventually put the information and links and all that for tickets up and in the meantime you can get in touch with us by email at stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.