The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum

Author:Deborah Blum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

Eleven

EXCUSES FOR EVERYTHING

1908–1909

Is covered with germs, each armed with a hook

To grapple with liver and spleen.

In April 1908, as his Poison Squad study of sodium benzoate and benzoic acid was being readied for publication, Wiley gave a somewhat defiant speech to a meeting of the venerable American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, an organization that Benjamin Franklin had founded in 1743. He provided information about his preliminary results on sodium benzoate, pressed his case for strict enforcement of the pure-food law, and advocated for tighter limits on what processors could put into commercial foodstuffs.

“The use of chemical preservatives and artificial colors is of quite recent date,” he told his audience. “I think I may say with safety that if one could go back thirty, or at most forty, years he would find a food supply practically free” of such additives. Rapid advances in chemistry had brought about the change, he continued, making it possible to “offer manufacturers chemical preservatives of high potency . . . at prices which make it entirely possible to use them freely in food products.”

He emphasized that it was this ability to make a cheaper product—not safety, not quality—that drove the industry’s embrace of industrial food chemistry. And it wasn’t that much more expensive to do it right, he argued. A “conscientious manufacturer” of ketchup (clearly Heinz) had shown that it cost only an additional fifteen to twenty cents per case to make a preservative-free version of the product.

Previewing the impending official report, Wiley called sodium benzoate “highly objectionable.” It “produced a very serious disturbance of the metabolic functions, attended with injury to digestion and health.” This was a study, as he’d earlier told Congress, in which only three of the twelve volunteers had lasted until the end of the experiment. Wiley finished this speech by once again stressing that any compound proven dangerous or that was used only to support the “convenience, carelessness or indifference of the manufacturer” should be removed from the American food supply “entirely.”

The sodium benzoate trials had deeply dismayed the chief chemist. He’d predicted minor or no ill effects in his Poison Squad volunteers and seen the opposite. As he’d told legislators, “The most pronounced symptoms were burning sensations in the throat and esophagus, pains in the stomach, some dizziness, bad taste, and when the limit of endurance was reached, the subject suddenly became nauseated and ill.” Eleven of the twelve volunteers lost a measurable amount of weight during the trial and—except in two of the men—recovery was proving painfully slow. Following the other findings, this study cemented his conviction that industrially made preservatives posed a more serious health risk than he’d previously realized. “I was converted by my own investigation,” he wrote.

But even as Wiley grew more alarmed about processed foods, and more anxious to police them, his boss was moving in the other direction. Secretary Wilson had grown tired of what he considered alarmist investigations. He’d also started blocking publication of what he considered industry-unfriendly findings. Over the course of

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