BY: JESSICA BEUKER

It’s been over a century since 12 men in suits gathered for dinner in the basement of a government building in Washington. The men were served elaborate meals: roast chicken, braised beef, buttered asparagus, hot rolls and fresh fruit pies. The men ate each item one by one, knowing one of those was poisoned.

These dinners were part of Harvey Washington Wiley’s experiments, and no, Wiley wasn’t the malicious villain of what seems like an old-timey murder mystery film. Rather, he is the founding father of the Food and Drug Administration, and the experiments were to study how chemical preservatives in food could harm humans over time.

Wiley is the founding father of the Food and Drug Administration

At this time, there were no food safety regulations, despite Wiley, an established chemist’s, insistence. Without government controls, manufacturers would tamper with products and switch out ingredients listed on labels for cheap substitutes. According to the FDA website, honey was diluted with glucose syrup, olive oil was made with cottonseed and soothing syrups given to babies were laced with morphine.

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, many pure-food bills were introduced into congress, but none of them could survive against powerful lobbies. So, in 1902 Wiley organized a group of healthy young men who willingly volunteered to take part in the dinners—they called themselves the Poison Squad.

Wiley organized a group called the Poison Squad made up of healthy young men who volunteered to take part in the dinners

According to Slate, the first group of volunteers was all department employees who agreed to eat the meals over six months. They never knew which poison they were ingesting or which item of food it was in. The ingredients were chosen by Wiley beforehand from a list of highly suspected preservatives and colouring agents used in food.

The first ingredient used was borax, which made the list because butchers would often mix it with salt and red dye to disguise old or rotting meat. Other ingredients included copper sulfate and formaldehyde. Today, copper sulfate is used as a pesticide; back then it was used to make peas look greener. Formaldehyde, which is a corrosive poison and suspected carcinogen, was used as a meat preservative. This caused the men to become incredibly sick.

But it wasn’t all for nothing—Wiley won his battle on June 30, 1906 when Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drugs Act and appointed Wiley to oversee its administration. It wasn’t all smooth sailing from there however; Wiley had many adversaries in congress and in the food and patent medicine industries.

Today our food and safety concerns have hardly dwindled. According to Slate, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that food poisoning outbreaks can be blamed for 76 million illnesses and 3,000 deaths a year. According to Transistor, “The FDA doesn’t really test food additives anymore.  There are more than five thousand additives commonly found in processed food and most of them haven’t been tested on animals and almost none (except for dietary supplements) have been tested on humans.” Wiley’s experiments may have contributed a lot to food regulation, but today’s practices still raise many questions, proving that we still have a long way to go.

Image sourcing: transistor.prx.org,  pinterest.com,  assuntando.com.br