The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Audiobook (Free)

A New York Times Notable Book

From Pulitzer Reward winner and New York Times-bestselling author Deborah Blum, the dramatic true story of how food was made safe in america as well as the heroes, led with the inimitable Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who fought for transformation

By the finish of nineteenth century, food was dangerous. Lethal, even. ‘Milk’ might contain formaldehyde, frequently used to embalm corpses. Decaying meats was preserved with both salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical chemical, and about The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety in the Turn from the Twentieth Hundred years borax, a compound first identified as a cleaning product. This was not by accident; food manufacturers acquired rushed to embrace the rise of commercial chemistry, and were knowingly selling dangerous items. Unchecked by government regulation, basic safety, and even labelling requirements, they place profit before the wellness of their customers. By some estimations, in NEW YORK alone, a large number of children had been wiped out by ’embalmed dairy’ each year. Citizens–activists, journalists, scientists, and women’s groups–began agitating for transformation. But even while protective measures had been enacted in European countries, American corporations blocked even modest rules. Then, in 1883, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemistry teacher from Purdue University or college, was named key chemist from the agriculture section, and the agency began methodically looking into drink and food fraud, even conducting shocking human exams on sets of young men who came to be known as, ‘The Poison Squad.’

Over another thirty years, a titanic struggle took place, using the courageous and fascinating Dr. Wiley campaigning indefatigably for food safety and consumer protection. As well as a gallant solid, like the muckraking reporter Upton Sinclair, whose fiction exposed the horrific truth about the Chicago stockyards; Fannie Farmer, then the most well-known cookbook writer in the united states; and Henry J. Heinz, mostly of the meals producers who actively advocated for natural meals, Dr. Wiley transformed history. When the landmark 1906 Meals and Drug Work was finally approved, it was known over the land, as ‘Dr. Wiley’s Law.’

Blum brings alive this timeless and hugely satisfying ‘David and Goliath’ story with righteous verve and style, driving house the moral imperative of confronting corporate greed and government corruption with a bracing clearness, which speaks resoundingly towards the enormous social and political problems we encounter today.