'The Poison Squad' Review: A Spoonful of Borax Helps the Rancid Meat Go Down

Regulation can be a dirty word to American business, but “The Poison Squad”—the story of Harvey Wiley and his decades-long campaign to tame the Wild West of American food—does an inspiring job of detailing how filthy things can get when you don’t have any regulation at all.

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Toward the end of the 19th century, the country was experiencing an industrial overhaul; more and more Americans were moving to cities and away from the sources of their food. What developed, we are told, was an industry standard of one pint of warm water to each quart of actual milk. To counter the resulting bluish tint, whiteners—plaster of Paris, or chalk—were added to the recipe. To provide the illusion of yellowing cream collecting atop the “milk,” puréed calves brains might be added. The squalid conditions of many city-based dairies, with their convenient proximity to the meatpacking trade, were also exposing customers to cholera and scarlet fever.

Based on the book by Deborah Blum, one of the well-informed interviewees who appear throughout, “The Poison Squad” takes about 40 minutes to get to its title characters: a team of young, male civil servants enlisted by Wiley in 1902 to be the human guinea pigs in his study of the preservatives and additives that had become common to American food—including formaldehyde, copper sulfate, alum and something now better known as a cleanser, borax (which tightens proteins, making limp vegetables crisper and rancid meat firmer).

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The still-anonymous poison squad became a media sensation, but “The Poison Squad” is really about Wiley, who had grown up in Indiana, the son of a farmer who was also an itinerant evangelical preacher and had been a conductor on the Underground Railroad. The senior Wiley’s affinity for social justice apparently rubbed off on his son, who brought a religious zealotry to his fight against the newly birthed goliaths of the food industry—Pillsbury, Heinz, Nabisco, Campbell’s and the meat giants Armour and Swift, whose assembly-line approach inspired Henry Ford, rather than the other way around. Wiley was a crusader; his enemies were interested only in money. Or votes.

The latter included Teddy Roosevelt, who should have been—but wasn’t—a stalwart ally of Wiley’s: The president-to-be had seen, first-hand, the rotten meat provided to his troops during the Spanish-American War, something that had resulted in scandal but no legislation. It would take the public outcry over “The Jungle” to motivate Congress to pass the first Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906; as Wiley would acknowledge, it took Sinclair’s novel four months to accomplish what he’d been working on for 30 years.

More..

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-poison-squad-review-a-spoonful-of-borax-helps-the-rancid-meat-go-down-11579815654 (subscription)

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Locally, it will be on PBS Tuesday, Jan 28 at 8:00 Central