The Poison Squad Worksheet PDF

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Worksheet (part I): The Poison Squad The American People had No Idea What They Were Eating By the close of the Industrial Revolution, the American food supply was tainted with frauds, fakes, and legions of new and untested chemicals, dangerously threatening the health of consumers. Based on the book by Deborah Blum, The Poison Squad tells the story of government chemist Dr. Harvey Wiley who, determined to banish these dangerous substances from dinner tables, took on the powerful food manufacturers and their allies. Wiley embarked upon a series of bold and controversial trials on 12 human subjects who would become known as the “Poison Squad.” Following Wiley’s unusual experiments and tireless advocacy, the film charts the path of the forgotten man who laid the groundwork for U.S. consumer protection laws, and ultimately the creation of the FDA. Total video time: 1hr 50 min. Website: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squad/#part01 1. In 1901, government chemist Harvey Washington Wiley set out to prove that Americans were being poisoned by an ever increasing number of new chemical preservatives secretly being added to their food. 2. Wiley’s controversial experiments captivated and even entertained the country and his volunteers earned the nickname “the poison squad.” This was one of the most influential scientific studies of the 20th century. 3. This is the first federal attempt to regulate the quality and adulteration of food. In a very real way, he is the Father of the FDA. 4. The Indiana state board of health had asked Wiley to examine the purity of commercially sold honey and maple syrup. Wiley collected samples from across the state. Much to his surprise his analysis revealed up to 90% of them were fake. Most of the jars labeled “honey” were just tinted corn syrup. 5. Post-Civil War, you start seeing a migration to the city and away from people who were living in the farm fresh communities. So there’s more and more people, more and more food has to be manufactured. 6. When Henry Ford came up with the assembly line for the Model T, it was inspired by the slaughter houses in Chicago. 7. With mass distribution across the country, food manufacturers were running into the problem of how to keep their products fresh. By 1901, companies like Dow and Monsanto had introduced a host of new chemicals to the food supply. There’s preservative discoveries, formaldehyde, the ability to synthesize formaldehyde. There’s copper sulfate, which is a heavy metal is used to turn vegetables ______________________ when they’re canned. 8. By 1860, Britain had already passed a major law to limit chemical adulteration of food after a series of deaths caused by toxic chemical additives stirred public outrage. In one incident, over 20 people from the town of Bradford died after being poisoned by arsenic laced food coloring in candy. 9. By 1881, France had banned the use of the chemical salicylic acid in their wine, after French chemists sounded alarms about its toxicity. Germany also banned the chemical from its beer.

10. The United States was unique among industrialized nations about not having food safety regulations, so you know there were all kinds of restrictions on American food imports in Europe because they didn’t trust the cleanliness of our food. 11. The US department of agriculture was created by president Lincoln in 1862 when America was still largely an agrarian nation it’s primary mission was to provide support for American farmers. 12. By the time Wiley began his study in 1885, dairy manufacturers had learned that there was money to be made by adulterating their product. The standard formula was a pint of warm water for every quart of milk. To rid the remaining liquid of its bluish tint, producers would add whitening agents such as plaster of paris or chalk For customers expecting a layer of cream on top, they might add something yellowish, perhaps a dollop of pureed calf brains. The dangers of milk, particularly in cities, were already well-known. 13. Milk purveyors were often selling a product laden with deadly bacteria. Outbreaks of scarlet fever, tuberculosis and cholera were common. 14. Dairymen start putting formaldehyde into milk. And as it turns out, it’s wonderful for them. Apparently it’s slightly sweetish in taste. So it would sweeten up the taste of souring milk, then they would sell this milk and so, you actually start seeing in newspapers around the country embalmed milk scandals because the milk starts killing people, mostly children, and the dairymen are never prosecuted. 15. Much of the “butter” that scientists found on the market had nothing to do with dairy products but were in fact a much cheaper compound, known as “oleomargarine,” made from the unprocessed scraps leftover by meat packers. 16. Wiley doubled down on his efforts to raise awareness about impurities and fakery, launching studies into everything from baking powder, spices, coffee and canned vegetables. The results were startling. His coffee study revealed large scale fakery - a product made mostly of chicory, sawdust and ash. 17. One study on pepper revealed fillers of charcoal and coconut shells. Canned beans were loaded with copper sulfate. He published his reports in a series of scientific digests and federal papers, which came to be known as bulletin 13.

18. Wiley’s professional life and his pursuit of food regulation would get an unexpected boost in 1898 after American troops were sent into Cuba during the Spanish American war. The war was a test for the big meat packing companies like Armour and Swift who’d won lucrative government contracts to feed the military. The companies were paid to ship fresh cuts of beef and canned meat to the soldiers on the frontlines. There’s this reek of formaldehyde and industrial chemicals coming out of the beef and eventually, the Army does a very reluctant investigation and concludes that everything’s

fine and this blows up in their face. And as news of the tainted rations spread, the military cover-up earned the nickname “embalmed beef scandal.” 19. The 19th Century is known as the century of the great American stomach ache The diet is so bad that everyone is sick at some level. 20. The committee rooms of congress, Wiley wrote, "were jammed with attorneys for the industries - a formidable lobby of influential men who would stop at nothing to kill legislation.” Wiley realized that in order to rouse the public into action, he first needed to demonstrate the health dangers of unregulated food production and adulteration with his own scientific data. The only way to achieve this, Wiley believed, was to test these chemicals on human beings and document their effects. 21. In 1902, much to his surprise, congress agreed to fund Wiley’s human experiments, granting him $5,000 to get started. 22. Wiley settled on 12 volunteers. In exchange for the food and pay, the men had to agree to eat only what was being served by doctor Wiley, submit to a battery of physical examinations after each meal, and promise not to sue the federal government if they were injured in the process. 23. Wiley’s first chemical to test: borax (a popular industrial food preservative that was more commonly used as a cleaning product). 24. It was discovered that when borax was applied to meat and also to vegetables, it reacts with the proteins in a way that firms them up, so meat that has become sort of loose and rotten, or leafy vegetables that have become sort of wilted tighten and crisp and become firm again. They maintain this appearance of being fresh. 25. What side effects were observed in the men of the Poison Squad as the borax dosage increased over time? Intestinal illness, vomiting, lose muscle mass, lose weight, headaches, trembling, appetite disturbance

Worksheet (part II): The Poison Squad The American People had No Idea What They Were Eating Website: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squad/#part01 1. One of the problems that he discovered, there were concerns about the cumulative effect, and you can’t label that if you eat this particular product every day for six weeks you could have these symptoms. So, Wiley’s approach to labeling had to be abandoned. 2. By late 1902 Wiley’s efforts to force congress to act on food: “the consumer is entitled to know the nature of the substances he purchases,” Wiley proclaimed, “and to be assured that their food is pure and wholesome.” It didn’t take long for the food manufacturers to strike back, and the attacks would be personal, portraying Wiley as a press hungry radical, opposed to business. 3. Without Roosevelt’s backing, the food bill of 1902 fizzled out in congress and was never even brought up for a vote. 4. …A sense of outrage was building amongst American progressives, and Wiley soon learned he had powerful new allies within the burgeoning Pure Food movement. They’re the ones buying the food. They’re the ones charged with taking care of their families so this is information that is relevant to them and women at the turn of the century started organizing in many ways - big and small. 5. The Pure Food Movement received a boost when Fannie Farmer, one of the most prominent progressive voices empowering women and a leader in the emerging movement known as domestic science, joined the cause. Farmer was the country’s most prominent cookbook author and when she turned her attention to pure food, her devoted audience (largely mothers and homemakers) listened carefully. 6. Fannie alerted her readers to the dangers of “borax, salicylic acid, potassium chromate, and carbonate of soda,” - precisely the substances that also concerned Wiley. 7. Fannie Farmer really promoted the domestic science movement. She included nutritional information in her book. So even if you couldn’t go to her cooking school or go to college and get a degree in domestic science, if you read the Boston Cooking School Cookbook, you were gleaning some of that information. 8. Henry J. Heinz, an industry titan, saw early the power of pure food branding. He felt that there was new interest in safer food and that his company could and should take advantage of this. The thing that crystallized it for him was ketchup. 9. Salicylic acid is an acid, and so it has antioxidant effects for food, it keeps oxygen out of food, it keeps bacteria out of food because it kills them because it’s an acid. So that’s one way of retarding spoilage. 10. Wiley concluded salicylic acid was one of the worst of all preservatives currently in use on American food products. 11. By _1905, it was becoming clear to Wiley that the path to food legislation lay beyond the many bought politicians on Capitol Hill. And he chose instead to focus his energy on pressuring the whitehouse. 12. One of the things Roosevelt disagreed with him on was saccharin. Roosevelt had been prescribed saccharin by his doctor. It’s thought that his doctor believed that Roosevelt was probably prediabetic so

the doctor suggested substituting saccharin. Wiley was really not behind saccharin. He didn't really believe in its safety. 13. Wiley helped organize a delegation that included the suffragist Alice Lakey, representatives from Heinz and other progressive leaders, to meet with President Roosevelt at the White House. 14. In December of 1905, Roosevelt puts support for a food and drug law into his message to Congress at the end of the year. 15. On February 10th, 1906, the American public awoke to shocking headlines about a scandal within the meatpacking industry. Newspapers were filled with stomach churning details of the filthy conditions of Chicago’s largest beef companies, as described in a damning new book called “The Jungle” by novelist Upton Sinclair. 16. True or False (circle one): The Jungle was written as an argument for safe food legislation. 17. On June 30th 1906, Roosevelt officially signed into law both the Meat Inspection Act and the Food and Drug Act- the first consumer protection laws in American history. 18. Upton Sinclair generated an extraordinary amount of publicity for the issue but the groundwork had been laid for this legislation for years and years by Wiley. 19. If there’s one study that the Poison Squad did that was never disputed, it was the influence of formaldehyde. The effects were far more serious than for some of the other chemicals that they saw. 20. The Remson Board really criticized some of the study design (from the Poison Squad). You really needed one clear control group and one clear tainted group for comparison and Wiley didn’t do that perfectly. 21. Analysis (of medicated soft drinks) turned up a shocking number of adulterants, like cocaine, benzoic acid, and saccharin. But what worried him most were dangerously high levels of caffeine he was finding across the board, which led to the seizure of multiple popular drink brands. 22. True or False (circle one): Coca-cola is the first product that contains caffeine that is being marketed specifically to children. 23. On march 15th, 1912, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley officially resigned from the USDA after nearly 30 years as its chief chemist. 24. Under Wiley, the Bureau of Chemistry had grown from a half dozen employees to more than 600. 25. Good Housekeeping offered Wiley a job as the publication’s director of food, health, and sanitation. He had veto power over any of the advertisers in the magazine. The advertisers that really did have these pure, unadulterated products would get this Good Housekeeping “seal of approval,” which was really Wiley saying, yes, these are the products you should buy. 26. Wiley would spend the rest of his life railing against a corrupt food industry and lobbying the government to support and enforce the Pure Food Act. 27. When he died in 1930at the age of 85, Harvey Washington Wiley was buried in Arlington cemetery. On his headstone were inscribed the words Father of the Pure Food Law

28. Eight years after Wiley’s death, president Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 empowering the Food and Drug Administration (the direct descendent of Wiley’s chemistry division) and providing it with real authority to protect Americans against unsafe food and drugs....