im reading the book "the poison squad" by deborah blum and like, late 19th century american food was terrifying! milk, coffee, candies etc had salycylic acid, lead, and arsenic plus sawdust and bone fragments and literal dust sold as pepper.
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There is a British series called Hidden Killers of the (particular era) home and for the Victoria era, they did 20 minutes on how bread and milk were adulterated and dangerous. Most shocking to me was it taught me new ways milk was dangerous that my reading on US Milk Laws had not even mentioned.
The whole series (hosted by Suzannah Lipscomb) is super interesting. The infant death toll from TB due to raw milk and the adulteration of sour milk with boric acid in that episode were really shocking
I freaking love pretty much anything Suzannah Lipscomb does. She’s charismatic, approachable, and seems to do a good job. Being gorgeous as a TV presenter doesn’t hurt, either!
Not remotely unhinged. I was just speaking to someone well-connected in health policy at the state level here, and this is very much what they're expecting to happen.
I think we’re all going to have to do what we can to eat as local as possible. Whether that’s grow your own or shop at a food coop or farmers market, CSA, etc.
Acquaint yourself with your local farmers markets and food coops! CSA programs. If you have the space, grow some vegetables. Avoid the big national brands. At least we have a couple months to make changes where we can.
Yes there is: zero regulation means they can eliminate many expenses, and that includes ingredients that could be replaced with cheaper shit that has less/zero nutritional value or is actively bad for us, just to increase profits.
Yeah, but they're pretty invested in their current way of doing things. Will they really switch to putting sawdust in the Cheerios? Companies like/need a stable regulatory environment and this is potentially just a 4-year hiatus of regulation.
Hopefully just a 4-year hiatus in the governance that believes in regulation… but the time it takes to destroy regulatory administrative systems is much much shorter than the time it takes to [re]create them.
"This product is known to the State of California to contain XYZ", but the really big problem is that if someone fraudulently prints that label but sells it in another state, what's the remedy?
"totally unhinged"? Not even a little bit. You're pointing out what should be obvious to any reasonably intelligent person, who has been paying attention.
And that's gonna also have WILD added effects
1) shitting on a lot of Americas with chronic conditions where food data is vital and
2) this is gonna kill food exports dead. I remember the UK wanting a trade deal but not "chlorinated chicken" under Boris Johnson
This is why I want to explode when I think about Project 2025–it’s a lot of reviving things we KNEW WERE FUCKED in the late 19th C and addressed during the Progressive Era
It’s chilling and there’s essentially no way for people to avoid it when it happens because even if companies are good today and sell on being healthy etc. will not be that even a year after it’s torn down.
Not enough has been said about the influx of these snake oil salesmen “wellness influencers” who peddled shit tons of anti-vax conspiracies and misinformation during Covid that helped get a lot of people sick and killed.
They believe that sugar is the devil, it’s possible to eat “chemical free,” and that what you should do if you have an autistic kid is feed them diluted bleach
I have phrased that part of Protect 2025 as "Donald Trump and those with him want to kill me", since I have celiac.
Only to have a couple of Trump supporters pretend that it is not in there, along with all of the other lethal policies Trump and those with him will now attempt.
My mom is also a celiac and on a bloodthinner. A wheat cross contamination could very well kill her, given her personal constellation of celiac symptoms.
I fear for the possibility of gluten as an undeclared filler in medications.
(Although pharma companies wanting to keep selling the same medications in other countries would probably not try that if US rules should be undermined; it is not great to have to worry about it.)
My brother has so many food allergies that hiding fillers and such in food can literally kill him. There's allready too much stuff adulterated with soy so much that some restaraunts he can't even eat at because things like a hamburger are full of soy
the thing i hope for the most in coming months is for food safety people to weigh in on the things that are likely to be the most problematic so we can avoid them, or try to
Minor nitpick- Prussian blue (which does contain cyanide) is harmless at over a gram/day. The cyanide in Prussian blue is so tightly locked up you need furnace conditions to break it free.
@deborahb.bsky.social's book is so great and necessary
Our current FDA was able to catch the recent batches of cinnamon with LOADS of lead in them. Will they be able to in a year?
RFK is about allowing fewer things in foods, based on what I've read. So, if he really is given reign over FDA, maybe he won't destroy all the groups of inspectors and labs that check for adulteration and contamination. We might get lucky.
Notes about substances at the end: Prussian blue has cyanide groups on the compound, but they are so tightly bound to iron they don't come off. It's not toxic. Chrome yellow is lead(II) & hexavalent chromium; Cr(VI). Them mentioning 1 but not the other tells me a lot about their toxicology training.
The US needs more, not less! I mean, the seed industry got laws rewritten so much could be hidden as 'trade secrets' as it is. And no one can track to see what ingredients might be linked to particular emerging health problems. Industry should have to prove safety, not consumers have to prove harm
Far down on the list of problems with this, but eating charcoal can fuck with absorption of medication -- it gets used to treat poisoning, but it can screw up people's health when it takes beneficial drugs out of your system.
I can't wait to go back to the early 2000s when nobody had heard of celiac disease, I had to ask my gastroenterologist what gluten was, and I couldn't trust anything on the shelves.
Hey, glutendude! I've been following your socials forever; glad you're here.
It makes all the sense in the world. I remember how excited I was to bake my own bread, until it came out of the bread maker. It was always gummy in the middle. It was my bread or no bread, so for years it was no bread.
While unmanaged Celiac can technically kill you, food allergies definitely will. Here's hoping whatever's wrong with RFK Jr. gets him before he gets us.
The book was written to highlight how awful the labor conditions were in the meat packing industry (low pay high danger) but the public got a hold of it and immediately latched onto how unsanitary the whole thing was and it led to health and sanitation reforms. Despite the whole point being labor.
The book focuses on workers because it's a pro-union, socialist propaganda piece. But the Literati at the time freaked out about the meat-packing accidents and food adulteration... not the hours, employee abuse, and little Polish kids getting washed down a Chicago street
Worth mentioning that yes, that's a very important, if very short, part of it, but even more importantly the book is about:
1. The vicious exploitation of immigrant workers
2. The need to organize for a socialist revolution.
It's a book people should read ALL of.
Absolutely. The original post was about food safety, so I was focusing on The Jungle in relation to that. But, there’s no doubt that when I was assigned the book in high school, that was the safest aspect to focus on.
Yes. And given the next admin’s stated support for child labor (and some stars doing right now—Arkansas) it is a very important piece of Sinclair’s original work in 1906. That date just guts me. How far back the clock is about to be turned.
"Why are American schoolchildren only taught about two pages of this extremely pro-socialist expose of the brutal treatment of immigrants every step of their way once they get here?" you ask.
Gosh, not sure.
Granted, and is also an effective painkiller for those not so afflicted. Also an effective bloodthinner and cardiac arrest preventative.
Too much of anything is generally not a good thing. 😊
There was a series called What the Victorians did for us and they talked about the stuff that was in food back then because of the lack of regulation. A short introduction to the topic but a good watch.
Fascinating that we still managed to advance this far regardless, yet fools want RFK jr. in charge of FDA cause, fluoride bad!!! Vaccines bad!!!
We are doomed.
That book is awesome and terrifying. I really want to make all my coworkers read it when they bitch about us being regulated. Sure, some of the rules don’t really apply to our niche, but they very much apply to others and I’d rather have too many rules than not enough.
It's become a nearly religious belief that "regulations" happen because mean liberals are control freaks. They happen because businesses are sociopathic and will do absolutely anything they can get away with.
Oh I think she came to talk to us in NZ. The origins of the FDA coming out of carbon monoxide poisoning cases and when it wasn't sure that spouses had killed each other. And Ethyl corp (who knew downwind inhalation of lead was bad for kids). Amazing story.
I don't think other countries were that much better off. Britain was certainly pretty bad in this regard. It's my understanding that this is how brands became a thing. It was an early (and obviously flawed but better than nothing) form of quality assurance for the customer.
the US significantly lagged on food safety behind other countries. by decades! and many many deaths & immiserations. mid to late 19th c, germans and french imported products to the US that were unfit or illegal under domestic laws
I have conversations with patients every day about food quality. I remind them that being born in the 70s we were exposed to far more highly processed foods and lead. I mean, I’ll give you $1000 for every organic apple kale salad you could find in Memphis Tennessee in 1983
The thing about the book is its very much from the perspective of the girls themselves. So it's really hard because it's not just facts you're emotionally invested in these young women
Have you read about the matchmaker girls? The book "Phosphorus" by John Emsley has a big section on what happened to the young women employed in match factories. Not food history in that case of course, but the handling of chemicals now known to be A Very Bad Idea.
I read one a few years ago called Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee—The Dark History of the Food Cheats, and foolishly thought about how glad I was those days were in the past.
Unless you can afford the time and money to inspect and fly product yourself, I'm afraid your fears may be valid. I'm stockpiling a few things and researching how to cook without a lot.
honestly, the chocolate I'm not worried about in terms of safety, it's just gonna be prohibitively expensive with the new tariffs.
It's the *domestic* items I'm worried about: heavy cream, eggs, sugar, and the like. Mostly dairy, since if that gets deregulated we're screwed.
That I definitely also understand. As a city dweller, personal relationships with farmers for dairy and eggs is a pipe dream at best. I wish you and all of us luck and safety.
I appreciate that!
I'm spoiled to live in the sf bay area, so I have access to farmer's markets, fresh eggs (I used to have my own chickens, then I got a big ol' pittie who thought they were toys, lol), but dairy is gonna hurt.
I'm hoping all the threatened deregulation falls short!
Her books are fascinating and make me grateful for the protections we have today. Same with Radium Girls. It also makes me wonder what’s happening now that we don’t know is bad yet.
They do in China! Remember the run on baby formula a few years back? It was bcoz baby formula there was made with plastic! Melamine. They executed the CEO for that tho, so maybe that catches on here too, wait and see
I’m sure someone has already said it, but the lead they put gasoline to keep car engines from knocking was finally removed in the late 1970s. Scientists now believe this single act is responsible for the astonishing decrease in violent crime in the last 30 years.
Such a fantastic book! There's a documentary by the same name that's phenomenal too! Coming from someone who is pursuing their master's in regulatory, I can tell ya, pre-FDA food & drugs were absolutely terrifying!! Let's just throw antifreeze and formaldehyde into everything.
You had to trust your grocer to not give you adulterated flour and milk, that trust was very important. But that trust would not save you from dangers your grocer didn't know about.
When my dad was a kid in the 1930s; he got a Christmas present that was a toy soldier making kit—you poured HOT LEAD into a mold…..late in life he was dx’d with the Parkinson’s Disease that he died of in 2022, and my mind always goes back to 8 yr old him, playing with molten lead….
There’s an excellent American Experience episode based on her book. I have had Dr Wiley and his team much on my mind as USDA / FDA is soon to enter some interesting times.
This was in Britain, so it might not be in the book. 20 people were killed and 200 sickened by arsenic in candies - because a mistake was made & instead of the LEGAL unhealthy additive they planned to use, gypsum, the chemist accidentally gave them arsenic instead.
Kinda like the Chinese dog food a few years ago. They put melamine in the kibble as a filler. A plastic!
I was going to buy a puppy from a guy. I picked out the little girl and went back to get her 6 weeks later. She was in bad health. In the corner was that dog food. No nutrition in it.
The Bully Pulpit is also a good read. It shows how hard we had to fight just to have basic rights and safety, and now we may have to fight for them again.
There's a reason why the precursor to the FDA was created in 1905, and after some poor folks died after taking a toxic drug they strengthened it further in 1938, and in the wake of thalidomide they further empowered it to mandate safety and effectiveness testing. And some folks want to undo it all.
Oh, but they are about to find out. You can’t save people from themselves and they need to learn choices have consequences. Sadly we all are. About to learn
Seemed a bit of a corny/scary movie at the time (1973)but watched the sci-fi future of what becomes of our food supply. Considering the wack-jobs that’ll be running the country cutting every agency designed to protect us, ‘Soylent Green’ doesn’t seem so far fetched.
read Upton Sinclair's the Jungle it use to be mandatory reading in high school I guess that stopped. But it is what help to highlight the issues in the food industry that then started the FDA.
I was literally shrieking at the book when they laced milk with FORMALDEHYDE to hide the gone-bad smell and fed it to children because otherwise it would go to waste and besides, they were just orphans.
You're gonna love the passages in my rickets book where the good doctors shut babies in dark hospital wards and took all foods that might prevent rickets out of their diets, so that when the babies' bones softened the good doctors could test the preventive they wanted to test.
All industry must be regulated and supervisoned
Gas/oil in the begining of last century was posining us with plumb.
Miners poluted Rivers
Agribusiness poluted lands and foods with agrotoxics
Tabacco industry idem
Big techs as well. Government must protect us and our future. it is recall me....
It's really a wonder anyone survived the 19th century. I went to a fashion exhibit at the Beta Shoe Museum and it talked about how the dye in the clothing was slowly poisoning everyone, and of course too tight corsets and crinolines catching on fire.
yes now imagine unlabeled, non measured amounts of it in wine, jam, butter, etc. imagine youre inadvertently consuming aspirin at every meal. that can cause gi bleeding!
I mean, you can still look at modern examples of this in multiple other countries. I believe it was just a couple years ago that Bangladesh solved their own lead issue by finally getting vendors to stop adulterating turmeric. I’m sure we will be able to find many new examples locally soon.
Yes but they found the source of the adulteration relatively quickly and recalled those products - it appears to be one bad actor in the supply chain. It was a much more widespread systemic practice in Bangladesh and took some serious effort to restrict, because people pay more for pretty turmeric.
Hoo boy it’s gets so much worse! When I had visited New Orleans several years back, a local told me about how baby formula was killing infants because companies wanted to reuse whiskey runoff and not pay extra for proper cow feed.
8,000 babies a year shriveled up and died due to this neglect.
There’s a history of candy one that goes into similar deets…and yeah. Our food has always had some level of contamination when grown on a large scale. Regulations are necessary
"The Jungle" was supposed to be a call for socialism but when everyone read about the disgusting conditions in the meat packing industry, it was a major call for food handling reforms! And, try to eat meat after reading THAT book!!!
What is the problem with salicylic acid???
OK, you have to go slow on arsenic trioxide & there are better sweeteners than lead salts, but salicylic acid is mostly harmless...
(dosis facit venum applies, but that's always the case)
One of the most upsetting things I’ve ever read about is swill milk.
It’s terrible that people were drinking it, certainly. But my god, the poor animals…
fwiw I'm a historian and have written extensively on the history of the early FDA. My expertise is more on the drugs side, but happy to answer questions if I can
This also reminds me of the book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. I have a hard time looking at hotdogs after I read that book!!! That book also led the United States to start looking at food regulations in the early 1900’s.
I feel as if more people would be taught this in school. It wouldn't be as easy to fool the public about regulation. Deregulation will be the true downfall of the US.
oh that book rules so hard. I don't know if it mentions it or not, but when Al Capone got into the dairy industry he was absolutely gobsmacked by how crooked the milk producers were both in terms of the adulteration of the product and the price they charged.
Right? This guy took over all of Chicago, ran the second largest Mafia family for 13 years, had more than 200 bodies on him, gets into milk bottling and is all, “these people are the worst.”
The milk industry back then poured damn formaldehyde into milk (to keep it from spoiling, this was pre-refrigeration). Of course the poisoned milk killed babies. So common it barely made news, just a regular occurrence. "Oh darn, poison milk killed more babies." Capone was a jaywalker in comparison.
We still refer to all that here as "choice sweepings" -- as in,
"Effectively 100% pure Cacao Powder, together with less than 2% Salycylic acid; Plumbum; graduated arsenicum; cellulose (pulp); carbo animalis; and trace amounts of domestic Pulvis".
I'd like a large space, call it the bogeyman box, to shove all the things I do not want to know about. Those who want to study them have to sign in and be careful about not letting horrendous food practices etc out into stream of public things we need to know. Yeah, will probably read. Masochist.
Bit that will always stick with me is when the courts called on a guy that made "strawberry jam" that contained no actual fruit, just the worst slop possible, and he went "look, my competitors do the same. I make it better, I have to charge more, people don't buy." That's life without the FDA.
Food regulations are like mass vaccination or the Voting Rights Act in that they work, and because they work, people growing up in the better world they create don't all appreciate the dangers they're being protected from. Too many only see the side effects and "burdens" of what's protecting them.
Comments
https://keystonenewsroom.com/2024/09/11/project-2025-poison-americans/
me:
I really love not having kidney stones.
1) shitting on a lot of Americas with chronic conditions where food data is vital and
2) this is gonna kill food exports dead. I remember the UK wanting a trade deal but not "chlorinated chicken" under Boris Johnson
https://bsky.app/profile/torrleonard.bsky.social/post/3lak77doixu26
They will, if you pardon the metaphor, eat it up
…the fuck!
Only to have a couple of Trump supporters pretend that it is not in there, along with all of the other lethal policies Trump and those with him will now attempt.
(Although pharma companies wanting to keep selling the same medications in other countries would probably not try that if US rules should be undermined; it is not great to have to worry about it.)
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6wwZGVz6ZZxsUHDSpB6Bpx?si=AIfl1QI6QN2FPybVBgCGtA
Our current FDA was able to catch the recent batches of cinnamon with LOADS of lead in them. Will they be able to in a year?
Don't worry about the brain damage, just an added perk
It makes all the sense in the world. I remember how excited I was to bake my own bread, until it came out of the bread maker. It was always gummy in the middle. It was my bread or no bread, so for years it was no bread.
(Although my celiac did not go active until well after that.)
That book was supposed to be about worker safety and protections and ended up leading to food regulations. As good a miss as you’ll find.
1. The vicious exploitation of immigrant workers
2. The need to organize for a socialist revolution.
It's a book people should read ALL of.
Gosh, not sure.
We're all very afraid.
But salicylic acid? That’s just aspirin.
Too much of anything is generally not a good thing. 😊
We are doomed.
It's become a nearly religious belief that "regulations" happen because mean liberals are control freaks. They happen because businesses are sociopathic and will do absolutely anything they can get away with.
The way I became aware of my tongue and my jaw...
I may pick it up again someday, but it will be small increments until I finish it
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squad/
For example they used to add gypsum to milk to make it white. Before the FDA food was literally poison.
It's the *domestic* items I'm worried about: heavy cream, eggs, sugar, and the like. Mostly dairy, since if that gets deregulated we're screwed.
I'm spoiled to live in the sf bay area, so I have access to farmer's markets, fresh eggs (I used to have my own chickens, then I got a big ol' pittie who thought they were toys, lol), but dairy is gonna hurt.
I'm hoping all the threatened deregulation falls short!
I try to push it on everyone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_Bradford_sweets_poisoning
I was going to buy a puppy from a guy. I picked out the little girl and went back to get her 6 weeks later. She was in bad health. In the corner was that dog food. No nutrition in it.
"Good old days" my aunt Fanny.
Gas/oil in the begining of last century was posining us with plumb.
Miners poluted Rivers
Agribusiness poluted lands and foods with agrotoxics
Tabacco industry idem
Big techs as well. Government must protect us and our future. it is recall me....
It’s just old enough it got grandfathered in without the checks
Great if you need a blood thinner.
Really bad if you need to avoid bleeding.
https://thispodcastwillkillyou.com/2023/07/26/special-episode-deborah-blum-the-poison-squad/
and this one if you want to know about the radium girls:
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/how-the-radium-girls-fought-back
/sarcasm
I kid. I kid in case anyone was wondering.
8,000 babies a year shriveled up and died due to this neglect.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poisoners/
OK, you have to go slow on arsenic trioxide & there are better sweeteners than lead salts, but salicylic acid is mostly harmless...
(dosis facit venum applies, but that's always the case)
It’s terrible that people were drinking it, certainly. But my god, the poor animals…
When the new regime dismantles the FDA, we’ll be thrown back into the dark ages… Back to not knowing if our lunch or vitamin D will kill us…
Ooh, I wonder if she's here yet
Highly recommend watching it. It's a great story of how one doctor fought entire industries and the government to get clean food.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squad/
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8jbub8
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zvbkvk7#:~:text=There's%20a%20rumour%20that%20the,dates%20is%20far%20less%20altruistic.
"Effectively 100% pure Cacao Powder, together with less than 2% Salycylic acid; Plumbum; graduated arsenicum; cellulose (pulp); carbo animalis; and trace amounts of domestic Pulvis".
It was quite terrifying.
Especially the parts where Blum quotes detailed instructions that vendors could get for things like cutting tea and coffee with flour.