Six
LESSONS IN FOOD POISONING
1903–1904
And our faith in the butter is apt to be weak,
For we haven’t a good place to pin it
Annato’s so yellow and beef fat so sleek
Oh, I wish I could know what is in it.
In 1903 Fannie Farmer was the most famous cookbook author in the United States. She had become a household name after publishing The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book seven years earlier. In it she had included more than recipes, written about more than preparation, presentation, and flavor. She’d also discussed food chemistry and principles of nutrition as she understood them.
“Food,” the book began simply, “is anything that nourishes the body.” She proceeded to explain that “thirteen elements enter into the composition of the body: oxygen, 62½ percent; carbon, 21½ percent; hydrogen, 10 percent; nitrogen, 3 percent; calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, chlorine, sodium, magnesium, iron, and fluorine the remaining 3 percent.” While other chemical elements were found in food, she noted, “as their uses are unknown, [they] will not be considered.” Farmer’s editor at Little, Brown and Company of Boston had wondered whether women needed such chemical information. Cookbooks, replied Farmer, were an essential form of education for American women, most of whom were afforded little if any opportunity to attend college.
Little, Brown eventually agreed to print the book, but only if the author herself paid for the first print run. Within a year, Farmer’s 1896 opus had been reprinted three times; within a decade it had sold close to 400,000 copies (and by the midtwentieth century that number would top two million). Little, Brown’s hesitation worked to Farmer’s advantage. She had agreed to pay for publishing the book only if she retained control of the rights. By her death in 1914, thanks to her cookbook sales, she held stock in businesses that ranged from railroad companies to chocolate factories.
In 1903 she was already financially secure. At forty-six, she could write as she chose. She chose to write a book that she would consider the most important of her career: Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent. The idea had arisen directly out of her own struggles for good health. Born in 1857, the youngest daughter of a Boston printer, she’d suffered a collapse at the age of sixteen. Doctors diagnosed the cause as a “paralytic stroke,” although later experts would wonder if the girl had suffered a polio infection. For several years Fannie was unable to walk. Her mother nursed her; her father carried her from bed to chair. She was in her twenties before she began to hobble around the house; thirty before she was independent enough to enroll as a student at the Boston Cooking School.
There, in addition to cooking techniques, students learned about germ theory—the understanding that microbes cause illness, still a cutting-edge idea in the nineteenth century—and how to apply hygienic principles. They studied the chemistry of food and read the latest research into the principles of nutrition. Within three years she was assisting the principal, and by the time she wrote her famous first cookbook, she had become the head of the cooking school.
Farmer may have been the most influential author so far to warn of impurities in the food supply. Her devoted audience—composed largely of mothers and homemakers—was particularly receptive to the warning. An entire section of Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent was focused on the “unappetizing and unhealthful pollution” of commercially sold milk. This supposedly “pure” food, she wrote, was still filthy, still too often thinned with water, full of chalk, food dyes, and harmful microorganisms. She joined other Americans advocating for pasteurization, the pathogen-killing heat process widely used in Europe. “The pathogenic germs in milk are often causes of typhoid fever, diphtheria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and cholera,” she warned. Some American dairies, especially in the larger cities, had begun employing the process, but it made their products more expensive. Most dairymen continued to prefer far cheaper chemical preservations. Farmer wanted to alert her devoted readers of the dangers of “borax, boracic acid, salicylic acid, benzoic acid, potassium chromate, and carbonate of soda.”
Earlier cookbook authors had also warned of the risks of food fakery; nineteenth-century recipes had routinely included asides about fraudulent spices or sham coffees. But Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent gained extra attention because of its famous author and because it was published in 1904, a year in which public awareness of food problems was increasing, partly due to press coverage of Wiley’s experiments. That May the New York Times announced that the first group of Chemistry Bureau volunteers had officially retired from the job of “eating poisons under the direction of the Agricultural Department” and been allowed to resume their normal lives. “The ill effects of eating drugs used in preserving articles of diet are said to be visible on all members of the squad, and one or two of them appear to be on the verge of breaking down,” the Times noted.
Wiley had turned in his borax report, nearly five hundred pages, to Secretary Wilson for review. The department had “declined to give out figures” without Wilson’s approval. But the Times anticipated the conclusion. Its subhead read PROFESSOR WILEY HELD THE MICROSCOPE WHILE THE VOLUNTEERS WRIGGLED. The experiments, the story explained, were designed to help solve the “poison mysteries” related to eating canned and preserved foods. How much “poison”—as the paper repeatedly called borax—did the squad members consume? “It is known that each of the martyrs to science ate several ounces of poison—about the same amount fed to soldiers in Cuba in the unpleasantness with Spain.” (The newspaper gave no source for this dubious comparison.) Did the study prove that preservatives were indeed poisonous? “The result shows that many preservatives are deadly, causing pronounced inflammation of the digestive tract.”
In June the Department of Agriculture released its official report on the borax experiment. Wilson had hesitated to make the results public, but sensationalistic press coverage had rendered such reluctance futile. At best, the report had the potential to temper the tone of what had been written elsewhere about the trials. Titled Influence of Food Preservatives and Artificial Colors on Digestion and Health. I. Boric Acid and Borax, it did not throw around the word “poison.” It did not suggest that volunteers were tottering toward death or had turned pink. It did state that a steady diet of borax was shown to harm the human system.
Wiley had put his volunteers through five rounds of differing dose tests. In all cases the squad members spent time eating borax-laced meals alternating with time dining preservative free. Every squad member, he said, had been tested at the start of every toxicity phase and retested after the recovery period. Whenever they were eating a “clean” diet, all men had been in solid good health. During the dosage period, all had not been so well. Only half of the test subjects had endured to the end of the fifth series of borax testing. The other half dropped out due to illness.
“The experience of the previous series having shown that the administration of increasing doses of borax produced feelings of distress in both the stomach and head,” the scientists attempted to alleviate the problems by decreasing the dose in the final test series. Throughout, the high dose was three grams and the low dose was a “minute” half gram. But by the fifth round, Wiley suspected the illnesses were due to a cumulative effect: “If continued for a long time in quantities not exceeding a half gram per day, they [borax-laced capsules] cause occasional periods of loss of appetite, bad feeling, fullness in the head and distress in the stomach. If given in larger and increasing doses, these symptoms are more rapidly developed and accentuated with a slight clouding of the mental processes. When increased to three grams a day the doses sometimes cause nausea and vomiting.”
Most people would never—knowingly, at least—consume three grams of borax a day, but because the product was in such a range of food products, it was possible that an enthusiastic eater might risk such a level. But the chemists had concluded that a higher, more acutely toxic dose wasn’t the real issue. The issue—as Wiley himself had long worried—was chronic daily exposure with cumulative effects: “On the whole, the results show that ½ gram per day is too much for the normal man to receive regularly.”
Wiley and his chemists had tested a range of foods preserved with these compounds, notably butter and meat. They calculated that a person who ate buttered bread with each meal could consume a half gram of borax and/or boric acid each day, just from the butter. More if they ate meat. Not only that, but the average consumer also would be taking in “salicylic acid, saccharin, sulfurous acid and sulfites, together with the whole list of the remaining preservatives.”
Wiley speculated that the borax, and probably those others, adversely affected the kidneys, if not other organs, thus leading to “disturbances of appetite, of digestions and of health.” His first Poison Squad experiment admittedly was too small and too short to yield the definitive evidence he’d have liked to find. “On the other hand, the logical conclusion which seems to follow from the data at our disposal is that the use of boric acid and equivalent amounts of borax should be restricted,” especially since in many cases the food could be preserved by safer means.
He repeated his argument that consumers had a right to know what manufacturers were mixing into their food. “As a matter of public information, and especially for protection of the young, the debilitated, and the sick . . . each article of food should be plainly labeled and branded in regard to the character and quantity of the preservative employed.”
By the time the report was released, the next group of volunteers was consuming salicylic acid instead of borax, and they were exhibiting worse symptoms, already showing signs of nausea and dizziness.
As songs were performed, cookbook authors worried, and the studies continued, public awareness grew and pressure built. Congress once again weighed the idea of basic protective rules, not only for food and drink but also for the unrestricted, anything-goes patent remedies and other so-called medications in the United States. Two legislators from agricultural states—Congressman William P. Hepburn of Iowa and Senator Porter J. McCumber of North Dakota—spearheaded the efforts in their respective houses. Both scheduled committee hearings on the issue and both, not surprisingly, invited Wiley as the government’s leading expert on chemical additives to food and drink to testify. Wiley, keenly aware of the power of the food-processing industry to stymie legislation, proceeded with caution. He stressed the need for accurate labeling first. “The real evil of food adulteration is deception of the consumer,” he said.
The American Medical Association also sent representatives to support the proposed Hepburn-McCumber legislation. So did the National Association of State Dairy and Food Departments. Wisconsin, Indiana, Texas, Louisiana, California, New Jersey, Tennessee, Vermont, Kansas, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky had all crafted food legislation to try to protect their citizens. But these were a patchwork of different rules and standards. The health officers in all those states were united in thinking that this wasn’t enough; there ought to be nationally consistent rules for food safety.
Kentucky’s chief food chemist, Robert M. Allen, assured the Senate Committee on Manufactures, which McCumber chaired, that a national law was widely desired. Even manufacturers thought uniform federal rules would work to their benefit, he insisted. But although Allen’s public persona was one of cheerful optimism, in private he was far less sure of the outcome. He wrote to Wiley that the meatpacking industry was aggressively fighting the legislation; Allen had also heard that the railroads, which held a big stake in the packing industry, were quietly working against the legislation.
Meanwhile, the processed-food industry had formed a new organization, the National Food Manufacturers Association, which was seeking a “proper” law, one that would sidestep both Wiley and his recommendations. The association offered high fees to scientists willing to testify at the hearings that preservatives were chemically harmless and that because the compounds prevented decay, they also prevented countless Americans from contracting ptomaine poisoning. The association included some three hundred members, ranging from importers of tea and coffee to fish packers and mustard purveyors to the meatpackers. And it was joined in opposing the Heyburn-McCumber legislation by the dairy industry, with its growing dependence on formaldehyde to salvage sour milk; the baking industry, which worried about limits on aluminum in products such as baking powder; the bleached flour industry; and the industrial chemical industry, with its growing investment in preservatives and aniline dyes. Whiskey blenders and rectifiers also stood in opposition to label requirements, which would have forced them to list synthetic ethanol as a key ingredient.
As Warwick Hough, the chief lobbyist for the National Wholesale Liquor Distributors Association, once again wrote to remind Wiley, barrel-aged whiskey also contained toxic compounds. It was unfair to keep “natural poisons” off the label while forcing manufacturers who might use dyes or other materials to list them on the label. Hough urged that whiskey be removed from the legislation entirely—surely those issues could be dealt with separately. And the rectifiers were both wealthy and powerful enough that many of the bill’s supporters warned Wiley that including whiskey in the regulations could doom the legislation.
Wiley feared that if whiskey was exempted, producers of other substances might lobby for exemptions too. He also worried that without the inclusion of alcoholic beverages, the bill might lose the support of the also-powerful temperance movement. Despite those fears, Wiley did eventually opt for pragmatism and recommended that the requirement for labeling the chemical constituents of whiskeys be removed from the bill. But Hepburn and McCumber overruled him on that point; they also were wary of exemptions that might weaken the bill. Exasperated, the liquor wholesalers’ group urged its members to work against the legislation. Hough, ignoring Wiley’s efforts on his behalf, publicly accused the chief chemist of being in league with the straight-whiskey industry, increasing the bitter relations between the two men. But Hough insisted that his message was cautionary. Wiley’s known and friendly ties to the straight-whiskey industry gave the appearance of bias, Hough said, and “will seriously impair your usefulness as an officer of the government in a position which calls for the exercise of utmost impartiality.”
The decision to add nostrums and over-the-counter patent medicines to the bill brought out new but equally bitter opponents. The issue of drug fakery had never been Wiley’s primary cause; his focus had always been on food and drink. But as public indignation over pharmaceutical fraud had grown, the Bureau of Chemistry decided to add deceptively advertised tonics and cure-alls to the products it examined. Wiley hired a talented chemist named Lyman Kebler, a former pharmaceutical company researcher with an obsession for precise measurements, to lead the bureau’s investigations into snake-oil promises. It didn’t take Kebler long to find that many “medicines” were little more than flavored drinking alcohol. One of the country’s most popular “women’s remedies,” Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, turned out to be 20.6 percent ethanol. The digestive tonic Baker’s Stomach Bitters measured at 42.6 percent ethanol, or about 85 proof.
The Proprietary Association, an alliance representing manufacturers of such popular nostrums and “cures,” struck back by calling the studies an attack on personal freedom. Its officers warned publicly that if their products became subject to regulation, government control of people’s lives would know no limits. “If the Federal Government should regulate the Interstate traffic in drugs on the basis of their therapeutic value, why not regulate traffic in theology by excluding from transportation all theological books which Dr. Wiley and his assistants, upon the examination, should find to be ‘misleading in any particular,’” read a communication from the association.
Both the House and Senate versions of the bill died in committee that spring. Hepburn and McCumber promised Wiley that they would reintroduce their legislation again later that year. Hepburn had written directly to Roosevelt, asking him to include a favorable reference to the proposed food and drug act in a congressional address, but the president had declined. It was an election year and he was picking his battles, Roosevelt explained. “It will take more than my recommendation to get the law passed,” he added. “I understand there is some very stubborn opposition” to even the idea of a purefood and drug act.
Wiley, looking at another round of failed legislation, now accepted that his longtime strategy of working with legislators and scientific experts was not enough. If the regulations he dreamed of were to stand a chance, he needed new allies. He already had friends in the increasingly politics-savvy community of women activists; now he further sought their help. Through the consciousness raising of Fannie Farmer and cookbook authors like her, with their warnings that commercial foods could not be trusted, women were helping to shape the nation’s opinion about the problem of food adulteration. And women-led organizations were recognized as growing agents of change, as in the case of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
That group had in recent years broadened its focus from opposing alcoholic beverages and promoting women’s suffrage to other issues—including the movement for food and drug regulation. The organization’s leaders had come to that cause by way of studies like those from the Chemistry Bureau, showing that alcohol-rich patent “medicines” contributed to the problem of drunkenness. The WCTU had also decided to tackle the problem of intoxicating substances in “tonics” and soft drinks, including the popular and famously stimulating drink Coca-Cola. WCTU had been prominent among women’s groups that had pressured the beverage company to drastically reduce the amount of cocaine in its formula around 1902.
Wiley started supplying the organization’s leaders with copies of Kebler’s reports on patent remedies. He also began courting favor with other women’s groups, volunteering to give talks—as his secretary noted, dressing up for these with respectful formality, including a top hat—and scheduling friendly meetings with their leaders. His persistence, some said his obsession, on the issue of food and drug regulation kept earning him opponents. But he was also forging new partnerships, and the drive and determination of the women’s organizations gave him a fresh source of hope.
Although log cabin born and farm raised, he’d grown up with the understanding that women were strong, capable, smart, and worthy of respect. His parents had sent all three of his sisters to college, a rarity in the midnineteenth century. In his Hanover College days, he had once given an address heralding the unfettered woman of the future: “She will claim all the avenues of usefulness be opened to her, that she no longer be compelled to depend upon the bounty of a father or a friend, to marry without love or choice, to keep a crowded school which kills or wash her sister’s dishes which degrades.” As chief chemist, he occasionally startled his colleagues with such views. In a talk to chemists visiting from Europe, he said, “Man’s highest ambition in this country is to strive to be the equal of woman.”
At other times he sounded more dismissive, arguing like a privileged man of his time, echoing the sentiments of his companions. In an essay for the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, he wrote: “I know she is not intended by nature, taste, or by education, as a rule to follow the pursuits which are reserved for men.” But he then proceeded to point out that women had intelligence, energy, and the ability to drive public opinion. Nothing was gained, Wiley went on, by excluding women “from a participation, in an organized way, in the great problems which look to the uplifting of man.”
At a meeting of the Cranston, New Jersey, Village Improvement Association, where he’d been invited to speak, Wiley met the event’s organizer, Alice Lakey, who would become one of his staunchest allies. Born in 1856, Lakey had once dreamed of being a concert singer, but she was sidetracked by ill health. Illness also plagued her parents. She helped look after them and, after her mother died in 1896, continued to keep house for her ailing father. Seeking to understand and alleviate both their health problems, she, rather like Fannie Farmer, developed a deep interest in nutrition. At least partly through careful devotion to a healthy diet, Lakey succeeded in becoming much stronger and, as a result, had become a dedicated advocate for nutrition, a balanced diet, and pure, untainted food and drink.
She’d joined the village association as a member of its Domestic Science Division and became association president, the post she held when Wiley came to speak. The two crusaders struck up an instant bond. Under Lakey’s leadership, the Cranston Village Improvement Association petitioned Congress to pass food and drug legislation and she persuaded the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs to do the same. She then began a push for more support at the national level, contacting the National Consumers League and encouraging its more famous leaders to speak out on the issue.
Started in 1899 by influential social reformers Josephine Lowell and Jane Addams, the league primarily focused on helping the working poor. Addams—whose tireless work to help the disadvantaged would be honored in 1931 with a Nobel Peace Prize—had become nationally known for pioneering programs to bring education to America’s low-income communities. She was the cofounder of one of the country’s best-known settlement houses in Chicago, Hull House, which offered a range of classes and recreational activities for immigrant workers and also did detailed studies on the results. Addams recognized that shoddy food especially undermined the health of the poor. It took little urging from Lakey for Addams to begin to speak publicly in favor of pure-food legislation. Even the “most conservative woman,” even the most traditional housewife, Addams emphasized at a national women’s club convention, had a stake in the fight. It was shameful that she could not keep a “clean and wholesome” house, or feed her children safely, or buy “untainted meat” for the family dinner due to the troubled state of the American food supply.
Lakey also joined the pure-food committee of another national organization, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Founded in 1890 by New York journalist Jane Cunningham Croly, a pioneer of American feminism, the federation linked volunteer women’s clubs across the country. Like the WCTU, the federation had become interested in food and drug safety regulations some years earlier: Members had written pamphlets on “The Chemistry of Food” and invited speakers including Fannie Farmer to discuss preservatives and other issues in food science. They’d also backed state food regulations across the country. The federation members, Wiley wrote, were “the most efficient organizations now existing” in terms of political activity and good works.
“I think women’s clubs of this country have done great work in whatever they have undertaken to the betterment of the condition of society,” he wrote to one club president. “There is something wonderful in the power which organized effort can develop and the women of this country, through organized effort, in my opinion can secure any good thing which they demand.”
Lakey urged Wiley to take a further lesson from the cookbook writers. There was a reason that domestic science was so popular among women frustrated by the lack of educational opportunities. The Chemistry Bureau’s publications contained a wealth of scientific information. Why not, she asked, put that to practical use in the country’s kitchens? Not only would it be helpful, but also it would serve to remind women that the simple act of assembling a meal could, far too often, put their families at risk. Her idea was to publish a guide to simple tests that home cooks might use to identify adulterated products.
There had been precedents for that in the private sector. In 1861 the Boston physician Thomas A. Hoskins had published a book called What We Eat: An Account of the Most Common Adulterations of Food and Drink with Simple Tests by Which Many of Them May Be Detected. “For the purpose of adding something to the means of self-protection,” Hoskins explained, “I have endeavored to furnish simple directions, by which many of the more dangerous frauds in foods may be detected.”
Battershall’s 1887 book on food adulteration had also included many such home tests, and more recently the magazine What to Eat had published an article titled “How to Detect Food Adulterations,” by John Peterson, food commissioner of Utah. It included several pages of instructions for testing milk, cream, ice cream, coffee, spices, sugar, salt, baking soda, cream of tartar, and extracts of lemon and vanilla. For example, Peterson advised adding a few drops of tincture of iodine to a sample of ice cream to find out if it was genuine or made from skim milk thickened with cornstarch. “A deep blue color is instantly developed if corn starch or flour is present,” he wrote. He suggested introducing a little vinegar to test a sample of milk. The resultant curds should be white. If they turned “a distinct orange color,” it meant the liquid had been colored with an aniline coal-tar dye. If the curds were brownish, it meant the vegetable dye annatto was present.
The test for formaldehyde and its ilk was simpler yet: “Keep the milk or cream in a warm place for forty-eight hours. If the sample is still sweet at the expiration of this time, a preservative is strongly indicated.”
Because so much had already been published on the topic, Wiley wasn’t sure there was a need for an official USDA report, but he admitted that the bureau’s chemists could do a better job of sharing their expertise with the public. He had his staff prepare a new publication: Bulletin 100, Some Forms of Food Adulteration and Simple Methods for Their Detection. More than sixty pages long, it was coauthored by Willard Bigelow, now head of the bureau’s food division, and Burton Howard, chief of its microchemical laboratory.
“Sir,” wrote Wiley to Secretary Wilson, “I have the honor to submit for your approval a manuscript on food adulteration and simple methods for the detection of some of the more prevalent forms. This bulletin has been prepared to meet the numerous demands for non-technical information. . . . It is believed that it will be of service both to housekeepers and to dealers.”
The bulletin’s diplomatic introduction took pains not to accuse food processors of deliberate malice. “It is not in their interests to shorten the lives of their customers nor to impair their appetites,” it noted. “We must assume they honestly believe the products they employ to be wholesome. Therefore, in judging the wholesomeness of preservatives and other products added in the preparation of foods, the subject must be treated in a conservative manner and no criminal or even dishonest motives attributed to those who disagree with us on the subject.”
Among the easiest tests that the bulletin recommended was simply looking at the product. A cook could easily detect copper sulfate: “We sometimes find upon our market, pickles of a bright green hue which is not suggestive of any natural food.” The same remained true for so-called fancy French peas. The report noted that of thirty-seven cans of peas examined by the bureau, thirty-five were loaded with copper sulfate.
More than half of bulletin 100 consisted of tables and charts detailing the continued problems of food adulteration in the United States. Twelve of thirteen samples of sausage had been found to contain borax. Ten of nineteen additional samples were packed with more cornstarch than meat. Coffee continued to be only partly coffee. Spices continued to be adulterated with ground coconut shells, Indian corn, almond shells, olive pits, and sawdust. Fraud was not just pervasive; it was standard practice.
Bigelow and Howard recommended that the curious cook invest in a strong magnifying glass, a small glass funnel (perhaps three inches in diameter), some filter paper, and some golden-brown “turmeric paper,” heavily embedded with that spice and known to be useful in specific tests.
They also recommended that the household cook buy a few reagents, including grain alcohol, chloroform, potassium permanganate, tincture of iodine, and hydrochloric acid. These could all easily be purchased at a local pharmacy and were also useful in testing food and drink. The authors also issued a strong warning: “CAUTION: The corrosive nature of hydrochloric acid must not be forgotten. It must not be allowed to touch the skin, clothes or any metal.”
Once equipped, and dressed protectively, the home cook could follow instructions to detect fakes and chemical additives in her groceries. As a typical example, the federal scientists offered this way to check for the preservative borax in meat: Macerate a tablespoon of chopped meat with hot water, press it through a bag, and then put two or three tablespoons into a sauce dish. Drip in fifteen to twenty drops of hydrochloric acid per tablespoon. Pour the liquid through the filter-paper-lined funnel. Then dip a piece of turmeric paper into the filtered liquid and dry the wet paper near a stove or lamp. “If boric acid or borax were used for preserving the sample, the turmeric paper should turn a bright cherry red.”
The chemists provided several other kitchen-table experiments, but they also admitted that for some tests a laboratory was needed. “Although spices are very frequently adulterated, there are few methods that may be used by one who has not had chemical training and who is not skilled in the use of a compound microscope for the detection of the adulterants employed.”
On April 30, 1904, the bustling city of St. Louis opened the gates to yet another spectacular world’s fair, an exposition designed to outdo those hosted earlier by Chicago and Buffalo. Food, in its many incarnations, held a starring role. The daily World’s Fair Bulletin announced that some of the “swellest” restaurants in the country could be found along the midway—known as the Pike—or integrated into exhibits. The fair boasted 125 eateries, ranging from the upscale, serving fifteen-course meals, to crowded snack stands. A simulated coal mine included a restaurant staffed by waiters dressed as miners. At a farm exhibit, visitors could look over a flock of chickens and pick out the specific bird they wanted roasted for their dinner.
In the midst of this cornucopia, Wiley’s growing contingent of pure-food enthusiasts staged their own counter-display. They had been inspired partly by the Chemistry Bureau’s modest presentation at the Pan-American Exposition, with its samples of adulterated products. This time they wanted something bigger, more dramatic, a showy staging that would garner national attention. They had spent more than a year planning a pure-food exhibit designed to shock fairgoers with its display of adulterations and dangers.
As well as the Kentucky food chemist Allen, representing the National Association of State Dairy and Food Departments, and the tireless Alice Lakey, the organizers of the exhibit included the Chicago-based writer and editor Paul Pierce. Slender, meticulously groomed, fastidious in his habits, Pierce had for years campaigned against overeating and obesity. He considered far too many Americans—especially of the era’s upper classes—to be “over-fed gluttons.” Yet his interests in food and nutrition were wide-ranging and eclectic, as reflected in his magazine What to Eat. In its first issue, printed in August 1896, Pierce had promised that “no food or practice will be slighted” and it featured topics ranging from nine-course party menus to a discussion of the pure-food movement’s battle against adulterations. “There is no more doubt that plain food is conducive to good health, than there is that pure air is good for respiratory organs,” Pierce wrote in his opening essay.
In the years since he’d launched the magazine, Pierce had grown more adamant in his opposition to adulteration and fakery. The pages of What to Eat were increasingly packed with horror stories about chemically poisoned groceries, bitter commentary on the government’s failure to protect its citizens from predatory manufacturers, and practical tips for surviving the current era of high-risk food. Like Wiley, he had become convinced that the nation’s activist women, through their closely knit associations, would be key in winning the fight for regulation. “Now let the food adulterer quail, for we have the women on our side” read one of his editorials. “With a million women in our ranks fighting for such a cause, we will fear no foe that man and the might of millions in money can muster.”
Wiley had successfully negotiated for an astonishingly large display space within the fair’s Agriculture Palace, a pavilion surrounded by brilliant gardens that spread across twenty acres. Within that complex, the pure-food exhibit would cover two full acres. As rumors spread about their plans, Allen discovered that some unhappy food processors and manufacturers had considered seeking an injunction against the exhibit but had dropped the idea, deciding that the resulting furor would only “increase public interest” in the display.
To create the exhibit, Pierce wrote to food commissioners around the country, asking them to provide examples of adulterated, over-dyed, heavily preserved, or otherwise problematic food and drinks. As the boxes and cartons began piling up, it rapidly became obvious that two acres would hardly do justice to the problem.
The organizers decided to exhibit only two thousand different brands representing tainted food and drink sold in the United States. North Dakota sent canned meats: “While potted chicken and potted turkey are common products, I have never yet found a can in the State which really contained in determinable quantity either chicken or turkey,” noted North Dakota food chemist Edwin Ladd. Minnesota and South Dakota sent sheets of silk and wool, each five feet square, brilliantly colored with coal-tar dyes extracted from strawberry syrups, ketchup, jams and jellies, and red wine. Michigan sent samples of a lemon extract in which the manufacturer had used cheap but deadly wood alcohol as the base. Illinois provided more faked extracts, such as “vanilla” made only of alcohol and brown food coloring, and a display of bottles carefully curved and carved to hide the fact that they held less than the advertised amount. Kansas offered up lemon drops colored yellow by poisonous lead chromate and chocolate faked by using burned sienna, a pigment made from oxides of iron and manganese.
Participating states provided forty brands of ketchup, labeled as a tomato product, that were mostly stewed pumpkin rind dyed red, and some fifty brands of baking powder that were largely well-ground chalk enhanced by aluminum compounds. To the fury of food industry executives, the fair’s head of publicity, Mark Bennett, sent out a news release titled “Lessons in Food Poisoning,” which noted: “If you want to have your faith in mankind rather rudely shaken, take the time to look about in the exhibit of the State Food Commissioners in the south end of the Palace of Agriculture.”
For those who hadn’t been following the issue, Bennett offered a guide to some of the continuing problems. “Maple syrup” was still likely to be mostly corn-derived glucose dyed brown; “cider vinegar” was found to be lab-made acetic acid colored with a little burned sugar; “lard” was mostly tallow (rendered mutton fat); “butter” still often turned out to be deliberately mislabeled oleomargarine; spices like “cayenne” were mostly ground nut shells; and, according to Bennett’s release, “jellies and jams are any old thing,” dyed any old color with coal-tar dyes. “Down a long list we might go, telling the secrets of those who are putting dollars into their pockets by putting poisons into our foods.” Pierce happily reprinted Bennett’s news release in his magazine.
Almost twenty million people—including President Roosevelt, who scheduled an elaborate and patriotically themed banquet—attended the fair. Roosevelt, in the midst of an election campaign to remain in office, did not mention the pure-food exhibit in his St. Louis remarks. But another attendee, the New York–based investigative journalist Mark Sullivan, made a point of doing so. Sullivan described the pure-food exhibit admiringly as “one of the most effective bits of propaganda ever achieved, for pure food or for any other purpose.”
The fair also was home, in late September 1904, to the eighth meeting of the International Pure Food Congress. Secretary Wilson declined to attend but sent personal regrets and, naturally, his chief chemist. Harvey Wiley gave three speeches, one on his inspection work, one on adulteration—“The real evil of food adulteration is the deception of the consumer”—and the last on his preservative research. Regarding the latter, he put a strong emphasis on the groups most at risk. The work with borax and his current study of salicylic acid demonstrated, he said, that while exposure to such compounds was obviously survivable by healthy young men, they posed a greater risk to children, the elderly, the ill, the “least resistant.”
As part of the Poison Squad tests, his staff was still evaluating the effects of salicylic acid ingestion on the bureau’s volunteer diners, so Wiley held his fire on the topic of that preservative, but he urged strong protective action against the use of borax in food products. “It should not, I believe, be put in foods of any kind, except when they are plainly marked, and even not then except in special cases and for special purposes.” Later that year in a speech at City College of New York, he clarified what he meant by “special purposes,” emphasizing that they would be quite limited and specific. “It is true that there may be occasions where chemical antiseptics are necessary. It is far better to have food preserved with chemical antiseptics than to have no food at all. If I were going, for instance, to the North Pole—which I hope I never do—or any other long journey where access to foods would be cut off, it might be safer to use chemical preservatives in the foods which were taken along than to trust other sources.”
In 1904 Wiley was taking a far tougher line on chemical additives than he had even a few years earlier. And he was further alarming his opponents within the food industry. They had reason to be alarmed, judging from the mood at September’s Pure Food Congress. In his talk opening the congress, delegate James W. Bailey of Oregon hailed the unprecedented number of participants and the intensity of their advocacy.
“There are times in life when one is awed by the greatness of the occasion,” said Bailey, who was the newly elected president of the National Association of State Dairy and Food Departments. “Such is my feeling today when I arise to address this, the greatest meeting ever held in the interests of pure food.” The cause, he declared, had finally come of age. “Like every new idea, the pure food movement was at first thought to be merely a fad and hailed as a farce.” But now the activists were getting through to the public. People were listening, and the St. Louis exhibit would, he predicted, surely change minds and spur reform. “I doubt if some of the sins of our manufacturers will be shown up more plainly on the day of judgment than they are at this exhibit.” Bailey went on to predict that safe and healthy food would soon be seen as “one of the dire necessities of the land and coexistent with our welfare and happiness.”
Makers of distilled spirits clashed again at the Pure Food Congress, and Wiley once again was drawn into the fight. As his friends and fellow social club members well knew, he favored good, aged bourbon—to drink and on principle. At the gathering, as in other public testimony, he continued to champion the traditional process of fermenting mash and barrel aging, citing the rich natural chemistry that produced a complex, satisfying taste that rectified whiskey could never match. He continued—despite warnings from Warwick Hough—to praise it also as a healthier drink than the lab-made and blended alternatives. As Wiley noted, aged whiskey required no dyes; it simply darkened as it aged. Barrel aging for at least four years also modified or eliminated most of the impurities, he claimed, and the old-fashioned way of making whiskey gave it certain characteristics of “health, purity, and flavor” that the artificial version could never attain.
Hough was also in attendance at the St. Louis fair, and he made it clear that he did not agree and did not appreciate the straight whiskey friendly corner of the food exhibit. Both in person and in correspondence, he once again urged Wiley to reconsider his arguments.
“I agree with you that false labeling is a deception which should be prohibited,” Hough wrote to Wiley after the congress. “To brand a Bourbon whiskey as a Rye whiskey, or to assert that a whiskey is not a blend when in fact it is a blend, or to say that whiskey is ten years old, when in fact it is only five years old. But it is an equal deception for you or any of the distillers interested in the bottled in bond goods to attempt to create the impression upon the public, that the stamp on bottled in bond goods guarantees either the quality or the purity of the whiskey.” The rectifiers, he said, were not finished with this fight. And the combative exhibits at the St. Louis fair had only stiffened that resolve.