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NUTRITION
Poisoned platefuls
Felicity Lawrence extols two chronicles on the long, fierce fight for US food safety.
The Poison Squad: One Chemist's SingleMinded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
DEBORAH BLUM
Penguin Press (2018)
Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat
MARION NESTLE
Basic (2018)
TOO MANY STUDIES POSING AS SERIOUS SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY ARE IN FACT MARKETING RESEARCH.
Felicity Lawrence is author of Not on the Label, and is an Orwell-prizewinning writer for The Guardian in London. e-mail: [email protected]
In 1902, the US Congress funded the first controlled trials of food toxicity involving human participants. The chief chemist of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Harvey Washington Wiley, was given US$5,000 to investigate how food preservatives and colourings affected health. It was a key moment in a long and ongoing fight to stop industry riding roughshod over the public interest in the supply of food.
Wiley recruited young, healthy men as guinea pigs, starting with civil servants. They signed liability waivers and agreed to take part in "hygienic table trials", eating free but strictly prescribed meals in an experimental kitchen in the USDA's basement in Washington DC. An excitable press dubbed them the Poison Squad, giving Pulitzer-prizewinning science journalist Deborah Blum the title for her meticulous book tracking the early history of US food regulation. Meanwhile, Marion Nestle, academic scourge of'Big Food, brings the account up to date in Unsavory Truth, her latest withering analysis of industry efforts to corrupt science and dodge regulation.
As Blum's chronicle reveals, two rapidly developing industries untrammelled by government oversight came together to disastrous effect. The second half of the nineteenth century had seen an explosion in US chemical manufacturing as the country shifted from an agricultural economy to an increasingly industrialized and urbanized one. Newly synthesized preservatives were cheap, and were added liberally to all sorts of food. Refrigeration was still in its infancy, and not yet adapted for domestic use.
Meat, tinned fruit and vegetables, butter and cheese were dosed with boric acid, salicylic acid and sodium benzoate...