by Deborah Blum
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.”
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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 la
rge 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.
Seven
THE YELLOW CHEMIST
1904–1906
The pepper perhaps contains cocoanut shells,
And the mustard is cottonseed meal;
And the coffee, in sooth, of baked chicory smells
In early November 1904, just as Theodore Roosevelt won election to the presidency in his own right, the writer Upton Sinclair traveled by train from the East Coast to Chicago, where he moved into a bare-bones settlement house, intent on researching his next novel.
The previous July, butchers had gone on a wage strike at packinghouses in nine cities, from Omaha to New York. The two-month strike failed because meatpacking firms, using a strategy developed by Chicago’s famously ruthless Armour family, hired unskilled, nonunion replacements who could be paid less than the union butchers.
Sinclair, a twenty-eight-year-old son of a New York shoe salesman, was instantly sympathetic. He had barely paid for his own education at City College by writing jokes, dime novels, and magazine articles. Upon graduation in 1897, the aspiring novelist and freelance journalist had joined the worker-friendly socialist cause, partly inspired by his own struggles to make a living. He had written up a passionately pro-strike article and sent it, unsolicited, to the Kansas-based socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason. In the same package Sinclair included a copy of his recent Civil War novel, Manassas, which had been a critical, if not commercial, success. The combination prompted the paper’s editor, Julius Wayland, to make him an offer. He would print Sinclair’s essay on the butchers’ strike, and he would pay the writer $500 for a serialized novel telling the story of the valiant workers of Chicago’s stockyards. Sinclair quickly accepted. He then persuaded his editor at Macmillan Publishing to give him another $500 contract to turn the serialized novel into a print book.