Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Food And Drug Administration

Episode Date: February 1, 2022

Robert is joined by Matt Lieb to discuss the Food And Drug Administration.FOOTNOTES: Blum, Deborah. The Poison Squad (pp. 84-85). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/upton-sinclair-meat-industry  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/19th-century-fight-bacteria-ridden-milk-embalming-fluid-180970473/ Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat Marion Nestle Basic (2018) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07038-0 https://today.uconn.edu/2021/05/why-is-the-fda-funded-in-part-by-the-companies-it-regulates-2/# https://www.fraud-magazine.com/article.aspx?id=4294967770 https://www.npr.org/2007/11/10/5470430/timeline-the-rise-and-fall-of-vioxx https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5462419 https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/09/health/fda-approval-drug-events-study/index.html https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/has-the-drug-based-approach-to-mental-illness-failed/ https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/how-fda-failures-contributed-opioid-crisis/2020-08 https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-basics/when-and-why-was-fda-formed#:%7E:text=Though%20FDA%20can%20trace%20its,Pure%20Food%20and%20Drugs%20Act. https://www.outsourcing-pharma.com/Article/2005/05/30/Whistleblowers-reveal-FDA-exacerbated-Vioxx-scandal https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/14/399591292/why-the-fda-is-clueless-about-some-of-the-additives-in-our-food https://blogs.edf.org/health/2020/09/23/fdas-failure-food-chemical-safety-chronic-diseases/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, behind the bastards is the podcast you're listening to right now. I'm Robert Evans, the host. We talk about bad people, tell you all about them. And today, my guest, Matt Lieb, who is a comedian, and also, Mein Liebling. Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. That's cute. Your name is Matt Lieb, Mein Liebling? Kind of. Yeah, yeah. Lieb is this German for love, you know? So it's

like, you know, some people call me Matty Love. Matty Love. Oh, that's wonderful. Big Papa L. Yeah, Big Papa L. Like, these are all like, I would like people to, no one's actually done it yet, but if you want to call me Matty Love, Big Papa L, you know, the Love Matty, whatever you want, just, you know, fucking call me nice names. Yeah. That's what this podcast is. This is the show where I say nice things about a random guest. Hell yeah. If you want the show where I say cruel things about a random guest, just stick around for another half hour. And I'm going to make Gilbert Godfried cry. So specific, Robert. No, I love Gilbert. Anyone who has the courage to get up on stage the day after 9-11 and tell Jims about 9-11 is a hero. He was the true hero of 9-11.

He really was. Because Gilbert Godfried, firefighters, and Gilbert Godfried again. Yeah. Mat, before we get into it, because the topic today is just going to blow people away, you want to, you want to plug anything right now? Oh yeah. Well, I do a The Only Sopranos podcast. It's a rewatch podcast of the Sopranos called Pod Yourself a Gun. So yeah, you should, you should check that out if you like the Sopranos, even if you don't like the Sopranos, you know, it's just, it's just a good time. The Pod Yourself a Gun is legally the only Sopranos podcast. If you hear another one, call the ATF. They regulate that and they'll go shoot those people's dogs. Hey, hey, hey, hey. That's what the ATF does. I know. I know. I don't like

that vibe. I know. It's not cool that that's their job, but it is. It is their job. Yeah. Yeah. No, there's, some people think there's this other Sopranos podcast, but that's a, that's like a deep fake. So don't fuck with that. Yeah. That's the deep state trying to trick you. Exactly. That's a Psyop to get you to, to like, you know, the wire instead. But yeah, it's really just to stealth the wire podcast. Exactly. And fuck that shit. This is about the Sopranos. Fuck that shit. Yeah. Hell yeah. Also, I do a movie podcast called the Film Drunk Frogcast. Both of those are with Vince Mancini, who is my co-host and pod life partners. Now, is he at all related to Boom Boom Mancini? He, I doubt it, but it's, it's possible.

Pretty cool. Pretty good Warren Zevon song about Boom Boom Mancini. Yeah. Kill the guy. Vince Mancini is also the name of Sonny Corleone's bastard son in Godfather part three. So that's very fun. A lot of mafia tie-ins with this. Speaking of mafias, you know what else is an unaccountable group of dangerous criminals, Matt? Um, the police. Well, yes. This is a long time coming. But, but, but this is even worse than the police met today. We're talking about the arch bastard of them all, the FDA. Oh, shit. Yeah. That's right, motherfucker. The food and drug administration. That's right. That's who we're, we got two parts on the FDA this week. You know, that's right. I literally, I, this is, I did not know, I was coming in here

expecting, listen, we've talked about Nazis. We have talked about Nazis. We've talked about Dr. Oz. We've talked about people who, you know, created the Boy Scouts and touch. All amateurs. All amateurs. Reinhardt Hydrick ain't got shit on the food and drug. Okay. That might be going a little far. I'm excited. Yeah. We make a lot of fun of the FDA. And I've always found like goading them into violence funny because they're kind of like the most milk toast three letter agency the government has, right? The FBI is like terrifying. The ATF is this big drunken blood thirsty frat boy. The CIA kills entire governments. And meanwhile, the FDA can't even like ban people from drinking bleach in a timely manner. Like it takes years to be like, oh, we probably shouldn't

let people give their kids bleach water. They just do press conferences where like, stop. Yeah. Guys, this is bad for you. It's just a school marm. But the reality is that that kind of like amiable toothlessness is a front that hides an agency as corrupt and deadly as any part of the US government. In fact, probably has greater societal harm in a lot of ways than most. Our friends at the FDA may have a have a body count that might shock you. But before we get into that, we should spend some time talking about the world before the FDA, because this is not just as simple a story as like government agency does bad things. It's actually like, it's like an Anakin Skywalker story of this like great hero who rises up and then crumbles.

The FDA is the Anakin Skywalker of three letter agencies. Oh, shit. So today, we're going to like lead up to them becoming a Jedi. And the next episode, they wind up falling in the lava planet. Oh, shit. Yeah, I hate you. I love that shit, man. It's great. And and we'll we'll we'll try to figure out throughout this who the Obi Wan Kenobi of the FDA is. Actually, I think I may have it, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The Sackler family. Well, yeah, once upon a time, people foraged, trapped and hunted for food, generally in that order of like amount of calories gained, right? We developed methods of preservation over time, you know, stuff like you'd salt your meat, you could make like a jerky, you could even like even if you're a hunter gatherer,

you could do that in a cave or something. You would smoke certain things, you know. And as time went on, more foods, we got better at preserving stuff. And we also got better at like trading. And so more foods began to travel greater and greater distances. But the extent to which most foods could actually go geographically was very limited, right? You couldn't you couldn't take mangoes from one place to a place like 1000 miles away, you know, 800, 900 years ago, very well, you could take like the seeds, maybe you could grow them. But like, mangoes don't last all that long, you know? Yeah, they go bad real fast. So a lot of stuff like that's why some of this stuff became like so prized, because if you could manage to get it to like the emperor or something,

it was a gift that was really valuable because you couldn't get stuff to travel nearly as far as you can today, which meant that like back for most of human civilization, people ate pretty locally by default, right? There was trade and like spices and stuff that keeps well, but like most food was grown or whatever hunted, trapped whatever pretty close to where you lived. Now, when the Napoleonic Wars kicked off in the early 1800s, our boy Nappy offered a bounty to any inventor who could figure out a cheap, quick and effective way to preserve food and quantity, right? Because you still have this problem in the 1800s of like, we can kind of salt meat, we can bake these like shitty, really hard biscuits, hard tack and stuff that like will keep for a while. But like, most stuff doesn't keep

well and like scurvy is a problem, vitamin deficiencies are a problem. Because if you're like on the march, or if you're usually not on the march, but like you're posted up and fortified in like the winter, it's like, well, how do you get everyone, maybe you don't have a lot of food available in the winter. So either you're going to be like foraging from the local area or stealing from people or you have a lot of famines caused because an army will camp out suddenly and they'll take all the food in the surrounding area. So Napoleon's like, I have a lot of war I want to do and I don't want to be limited by the fact that we're shit at preserving food. So somebody figure out a way to do this. Napoleon does this with a bunch of stuff. He's a very like forward

thinking. He's a pretty smart dude. And this bears fruit very quickly. In 1809, a French brewer named Nicholas Appert realized that food cooked inside a glass jar and sealed didn't spoil. If you put whatever kind of food or something in a glass jar, you stick in some salt or some spices, you cook it for a while, it'll stay good for, I mean, really for years in some cases. I don't think they were that good at them, but it'll stay good a hell of a lot longer. Is this a dude who invented pickles? Not quite, but this is the guy who started the process of inventing canning. And the French state was unable to master the art of canning and quantity, right? They figure out that this works. But it's like figuring out how to make the seals right and how to get like, it's a process

we're not as good at glass then as we are now. So like having glass that can stand because you have to like, I do a lot of canning now. A good friend of mine taught me how and it's you have to like basically boils a can with food in it for like 20, 30 minutes, you know? So like the glass, it takes a while to make glass that can reliably stand up to that even the day some of it's going to break. So it's a process. I totally relate to that every time I try to can. You know, I just can't. As a fellow canner, I, you know, it's just, I get it, dude. Hard. It's hard. It's hard to do if you're like trying to make an army's worth of food and preserve it. So they figure out that this works. But it doesn't really get, the French government doesn't get good at it in time for

Napoleon to stop, to like not lose his wars, right? And it would have helped like the whole Russian campaign having like good canned and tin food might have really helped out, you know? That could have been a game changer. It could have been a game changer, man. But you know, fuck, that's too bad. But obviously, like now that the basic idea is understood, the process gets more and more developed over kind of the early to mid 1800s, and it spreads all throughout Europe. As soon as other nations realize this is possible, a lot of resources get developed into like canning and then tinning food. The Portuguese are like the best at tinning. In fact, if you wind up in like Lisbon ever, which is a beautiful city, the airport has like these stores that are

just hundreds of different kinds of weird canned foods, like stuff you've never seen canned, because that's like Portugal's motherfucking thing is canning, particularly like seafood. They're the most proud of just canning different fucking weird, this is just canned dirt. Hell of canners. Yeah, we just put some dirt in a can. Nobody can stop us. We pretty much put anything in a can, dude. Yeah. And these developments in canning and tinning are a huge part of why the last, because the biggest wave of European colonization is the 1800s, right? That's like when stuff really starts to go huge outside of like, you know, North and Central America.

And like the scramble for Africa and stuff and a lot of like the colonialism in Asia starts happening in this period. And canned and tin food is a big part of what makes that possible. It's a big part of like why these guys we've talked about on the show, these explorers in Africa and whatnot for like Leopold are able to do what they're able to do because they're able to take, you know, a lot of what they need with them and keep it in the jungle heat. So cans aided like global colonialism. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's hugely important. Being able to like reliably have the nutrition you need and take it for a significant period of time. That's a very important. I never even considered that. Yeah. Yeah. So Nicholas Apert

had stumbled upon canning, but he didn't really know at the time what he was doing. And today, we call the process that he kind of helped to discover pasteurization. And this is again, heating a liquid to 120 to 140 degrees for about 20 minutes. Pasteur, the guy that the pasteurization come from actually like figured out what pasteurization was and like scientifically what was going on. And he did this in the 1850s. Well, he was actually trying to preserve wine. So 1850s, Pasteur discovers pasteurization, which people already kind of knew about, but he's like the guy who figures out scientifically what's going on and slapped his name on it and slapped his fucking name on it. That's right. But he's just trying to preserve wine. It takes another

20 years before a German chemist figures out that the same process could work on milk, which at the time was filled with salmonella and tuberculosis. We will talk a lot about how fucked up milk was in the end. That's like half of this episode. Milk was a fucking nightmare back in the day. Like, I don't give a shit like however much you like Lovecraft Cosmic car, nothing is scarier than milk in the 1870s. That's a great question, Matt, because it sounds like a nightmare. Everything was just so gross back then. Yeah. Yeah. Like, listen, one out of four of these main courses is going to kill you anyways. Might as well add some milk to it. Yeah. So the Germans figure out that you can pasteurize milk in like the 1870s. And obviously milk's not

the only thing you can pasteurize, but that's when that gets figured out. But pasteurized milk doesn't really hit the U.S. in quantity until the 30s. So there's like a 60-year period where we can, but we aren't. And this is the story of why. So in 1899, Harvard microbiologist Theobald Smith discovered salmonella, which obviously had existed for a long time and been killing people for a long time. But he figures out like why people are dying from milk. And he suggests like, hey, we should pasteurize this stuff. The Germans have figured it out. It's very easy. You just have to heat this shit up for a while. And there's this immediate panic by the American Pediatric Society, who as soon as this guy is like, we should be pasteurizing

our milk, they're like, pasteurized heated milk will give babies scurvy. It robs it of nutrients. Don't do it. Was there like a reason? Like, why would they give a shit? Or are they just in the pocket of big raw milk? You hear it a bunch like that, like cooking vegetables, steaming vegetables, you lose some, I'm sure you do lose some nutrients. I don't think it's enough to have any meaningful impact on diet. And I think it's that kind of thing. We're like, yeah, it's fine. Like maybe there's a little less nutrition, but there's also no salmonella. And that's probably a bigger problem for the baby. That's the best trade off. Babies are notoriously vulnerable to dying. Yeah. That's what everybody says about them. They're so easy to kill. Oh my God. Don't

need to get me started on it. Every time I see a baby, I'm like, easy, dude. Easy. If I wanted to, I could kill like many babies in a row. I don't because I'm not a monster, but I could do it. But it's good to know. It's good to know. Yeah. Sometimes I just like walk past a park and go like, I could take you all if I needed, if I needed to, you know, if I needed to, if the chips were down. Yeah. Anyway. So there's this immediate like backlash against pasteurization, which is mainly due to like the expense. It's going to cost money to do this. They're going to have to retool the milk producers. You'd have to retool your whole production line to allow for pasteurization. Now, obviously, pasteurization would also

allow milk to last a lot longer. You can keep it good for a shitload longer if you pasteurize it. So a logical person might say like, Hey, yeah, you're going to spend more money retooling your production lines, but you'll get to keep your milk for longer and it'll all work out in the end. But the milk companies are just like, no, it's going to cost us money. Like, fuck that shit. We don't want to stop having our cow juice dumped into a bottle that a guy then sneezes a mouthful of chewing tobacco into before half acidly sealing and leaving a knot. So they resisted pasteurization, but they were really open to better ways to preserve milk. They just wanted it to be cheaper than pasteurization was going to be. In 1896, Dr. John Herdy,

a former professor from Purdue, formally endorsed the use of formaldehyde as a good food preservative. Now, that sounds like we're going to say some like quack doctor shit. It's actually not that fucked up. A whole lot of foods you eat every day contain formaldehyde. There's formaldehyde in pears and apples and like all crustaceans that all crustaceans that we eat in mushrooms. They've all got some amount of formaldehyde in them. It's fine. It exists in because it preserves things like generally when you're looking at like fruits that last longer on the shelf, it's because there's some formaldehyde in them. We're not shooting them into that. It's just like a thing that occurs in nature. So Dr. Herdy realizes this and he's like, well,

clearly, even though like this stuff can be toxic in quantity, tiny amounts of it can be fine. And so he proposed using a very small amount, two drops of formaldehyde. And formaldehyde is like 40% formaldehyde, 60% water. So just two drops of very diluted formaldehyde per pint of milk. So that's his suggestion. If we put in a tiny amount, it'll make the milk keep a lot longer and it won't be toxic. Will it still have salmonella though? I mean, yeah, I mean, potentially, yes, it does not cure the salmonella part. Now that said, like the longer you leave it out, the more risk of a lot of bad things happening. So it does make it a lot safer. But so he's like, hey, a tiny amount of formaldehyde can help your milk last

longer on the shelf. The milk producers, big businesses, all they hear is, oh, there's a way to make our product last longer. And we should just pour as much of this shit in there as we possibly can. And to talk about how this went, I'm going to quote Deborah Bloom, who is like the fucking expert on specifically this shit, writing for Smithsonian Magazine, quote, so dairymen began increasing the dose of formaldehyde seeking to keep their product fresh for as long as possible. Chemical companies came up with new formaldehyde mixtures with innocuous names such as iceline or preservoline. The latter was said to keep a pint of milk fresh for up to 10 days. And as the dairy industry increased the amount of preservatives, the milk became more

and more toxic. Herdy was alarmed enough that by 1899, he was urging that formaldehyde use be stopped, citing increasing knowledge that the compound could be dangerous even in small doses, especially to children. But the industry did not heed the warning. In the summer of 1900, the Indianapolis News reported the deaths of three infants in the city's orphanage due to formaldehyde poisoning. A further investigation indicated that at least 30 children had died two years prior due to the use of the preservative. And in 1901, Herdy himself referenced the deaths of more than 400 children due to a combination of formaldehyde, dirt, and bacteria in the milk. Another analysis calculated that there was so much raw shit in milk that the citizens of Indian

apolis consumed an estimated 2,000 pounds of poop per year. What the fuck? So it's not just the formaldehyde, but they go hog wild. They're just dumping it in there. It's very funny. 2,000 pounds of shit per year by the city of Indianapolis. I mean, just like straight, the doodoo is in the milk. They're shit in the milk now, too. Oh, there's always been shit in the milk, buddy. Oh, man. Well, I don't know if you've ever had like livestock, but they're not, they get shit gets everywhere. They poop, and they don't like, it's like you've seen that pig poop balls image, like. Oh, yeah, my favorite image. Like animals that get poop on them, and they don't really care about it that much. And sometimes that means poop's going to get in

the milk, especially if you're keeping them in like a really dirty, horrific feedlot where like the shit piles up to their ankles. Yeah, sure. And we'll talk about the conditions these cows are kept in because, oh boy, Matt, are you going to enjoy that? It's organic doodoo bath. Let's hear about it, dude. I'm excited. Now, so this guy, Hardy, who had been like, yeah, a little bit of formaldehyde might help and then was like immediately horrified by what the food industry was doing. He becomes an advocate for reform within the legal system to stop this stuff. And as a result of his lobbying, Indiana passes a pure food law in 1899, which should have made the adulteration that, as we already said, went on well past 1899 very illegal. But this keeps going on because the

law was kind of, it was more of an aspirational law than a real law, because they were like, this isn't allowed, but they were also like, we're going to spend $0 to stop this. Like we will not check on you. We will not enforce this. We don't have the resources to stop the formaldehyde milk from spreading, but we just want to let you know, not cool, buddy. It is kind of my ideal situation for drugs where we keep them illegal, but we also make it like fire all of the police and DEA agents so that nobody can prosecute you for it. And then you can still feel cool when you do drugs, right? Yeah, that's the ideal. That's the sweet spot, baby. You can convince children, yeah, you convince children not to do heroin until you turn a certain age and, you know,

and yeah, 13 exactly. Yeah, that's the age of what you're brain. That's the age in which you can have fun. Yeah, a certain amount, right? Yeah, you know, a little bit, a little bit goes a long way. It's like, that's why they used to give babies medicinal children's medicinal heroin. You know, good times. That's why our grandparents were all chill healthy. Yeah, so chill about everything. That's why they spent their whole lives withdrawing. Mm hmm. Love our grandparents. Yeah. So the year after that law gets passed in Indiana, Herdy's Lab analyzes a pint bottle of milk that was handed to them by a family, and the family like buys some milk for their baby, and they notice that as they describe it,

the milk appears to be wriggling. Oh, fuck. Damn it. Yeah, like this one, man. So you don't even have to do like a chemical analysis. I'm like a big milk drinker. So this is going to fuck me up. Like I just, I enjoy a glass of milk and a banana. It's my one of my favorite little snacks. It turns out that what happened was that the dairyman had cut his milk because he wanted to make it go longer like heroin, and he cuts it with stagnant water. And there was a worm colony in the stagnant water and so many larva breed in the milk that it's just like a kind of soggy mass of writhing larva. What's the milk they buy for their baby? It's got extra protein. It's called moving milk. Don't worry, move milk. Oh, you got some of that

still milk, huh? Yeah, all that. Still milk. I happen to love my child. I want them to get the extra nutrients. Real babies have, it's like we call it a milkshake because it shakes. This is the origin of the milkshake. Some poor motherfucker was eating cereal when this episode started. Oh, no. Oh, bad time to have some cereal. So Indiana, obviously, we've been focusing on because Dr. Herdy was there and he gave a shit about this. This is happening every state in the union, right? This is everywhere. Everywhere that there's a city at least. I think people who live in rural areas probably have access to healthier milk because they're getting it directly from the cow. They're probably better conditions for the cow. They're not, you know, buying it from

somebody who's going to mix in the pond water filled with shit. It's the city milk that's just filled with unevenness and death. And thus the milk that the most people are drinking is fucking poison milk. Now, in the 1880s, one group of researchers had analyzed, like this is happening all over the U.S. In New Jersey, there's a case from the 1880s where these researchers analyzed random samples of milk and they found what they described as liquefying colonies of bacteria in numbers so great that they gave up counting. Like, they're just like, this isn't even worth it, like a lot. This isn't milk. This is just bacteria. This is pure bacteria. Yeah, they have eaten all the milk. There's none left for the babies. Yeah. And in all of these cases, this is, again,

happening everywhere. And the reason everywhere is that there's no such thing as health standards, really. A couple of states, like Indiana, have tried to pass laws. There's usually no enforcement. And in most places, there's just no laws about what you can do. And yeah, a lot of like, aware of the adulterants and like the poisonous stuff gets in is when the milk dealers cut their shit with various chemicals. Now, and this is kind of like, you know, drug dealers today will cut like cocaine with a little bit of baby powder or fentanyl. Yeah. And the fentanyl answer for milk, usually, well, the baby, I'll say the baby powder, like the least harmful way, generally, to cut it was that they would add water. And the standard ratio was one pint of water for every

quart of milk. Now, they also skimmed the cream off the top of the milk, right? Because they're trying to make as much money as possible. So they don't want you getting extra cream. They're going to use that to like make something else and sell it to you. But when you skim the cream off your milk and then water it down by like half, what it looks, it doesn't look like milk. It's this kind of like pale blue, weird looking beverage, because it's not really milk anymore. So dairymen... Wait, is that why they call it skim milk? Yeah, yes. Yeah. I mean, that's... I never thought about that because they skim the cream off it. Yeah, that is literally why they call it skim milk. And I guess you could call this the origin

of skim milk, but they're not saying it is. They're hiding it. So they have to, in order to hide it, they have to adulterate it. So it looks right. So for the color, because it's this kind of pale blue color, they pour in plaster of Paris and chalk. So that's good. I want to listen. On this podcast, I was expecting they pour it in pure cum. Oh, wait, it gets worse because that just fixes the color, man. They haven't... They've skimmed the cream off, right? You don't want people to know you've skimmed the cream off. So you have to fake a layer of cream on top. And what looks most like cream? No, no, cum, straight cum, no. No, liquefied cow brains. Oh, bro, there's other things that look like cream. That is other things.

They just pour in cow brains on that shit. It is extremely funny. That is no longer kosher milk. I'm sorry. And of course, sometimes they'll put, because it has a little bit of a yellow color, they'll put a little bit of lead in there too, just to make it look quite, you know, right? Are you serious? Yeah, of course, you're going to put a little bit of lead in there. Makes it sweeter too. A little bit of antifreeze, you know. They put lead in... That doesn't even count as bad, because they're putting lead in everything. Yeah, back in the day, lead was just part of it. It was like, you had your salt shaker and you had... With vitamin L. And then you had your vitamin L lead shaker.

Fucking A, dude. So, milk was not alone or exceptional in its tendency to be adulterated among foods of the day. It's kind of the most shocking example a lot of the time. But food sellers, grocery stores, like food manufacturers, they're doing it with everything. And to make that point, I'm going to quote from Deborah Bloom again, this time writing in her wonderful book, The Poison Squad. Quote, Fakery and adulteration ran rampant in other American products as well. Honey often proved to be thickened, colored corn syrup. And vanilla extract, a mixture of alcohol and brown food coloring.

Strawberry jam could be sweetened paste made from mashed apple peelings, laced with grass seeds and dyed red. Coffee might be largely sawdust, or wheat, beans, beets, peas, and dandelion seeds. Scorched black and ground to resemble the genuine article. Containers of pepper, cinnamon, or nutmeg were frequently laced with a cheaper filler material, such as pulverized coconut shells, charred rope, or occasionally floor sweepings. Flour routinely contained crushed stone or gypsum as a cheap extender. Ground insects could be mixed into brown sugar, often without detection.

Their use linked to an unpleasant condition known as grocers itch. Oh, well, we've all had a little bit of grocers itch. A little bit of that grocers itch, right? Because you're eating too many bugs in your bread. I know a bunch of chocolate chip cookies, and now I got grocers itch from the bugs. European governments, especially those of Germany and Great Britain, had been far quicker than the US government to recognize and address problems of food adulteration. In 1820, a pioneering book by chemist Frederick Akum, titled A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons,

had aroused widespread public outrage when it was published in London. Akum minced no words. Our pickles are made green by copper, our vinegar rendered sharp by sulfuric acid, our cream composed of rice powder or arrowroot and bad milk, our confit mixed of sugar, starch and clay, and colored with preparations of copper and lead, our ketchup often formed of the dregs of distilled vinegar, with a decoction of the outer green husk of walnuts and seasoned with allspice, he wrote. They had allspice back then?

Oh, yeah, they conquered the world for allspice. They did three or four genocides just to get their hands on allspice. Just to get their delicious- That's not an exaggeration. And it gets worse with the candy industry. Confectioners often turned to poisonous metallic elements and compounds. Green came from arsenic or copper, yellow from lead chromate, cheerful rose and pink tones from red lead.

In 1830, an editorial in the Lancet, the British Medical General, complained that millions of children are daily dosed with lethal substances, but the practices continued largely due to business pressures on would-be government regulators. By mid-century, though, casualties were starting to mount in Britain. In 1847, three English children fell seriously ill after eating birthday cake, decorated with arsenic-tinted green leaves. Five years later, two London brothers died after eating a cake whose frosting contained both arsenic and copper. In an 1854 report, London physician Arthur Hassel tracked 40 cases of child poisoning

caused by penny candies. Three years later, 21 people in Bradford, Yorkshire, died after consuming candy accidentally laced with deadly arsenic trioxide, accidentally because the confectioner meant to mix in plaster of Paris instead. Although he had noticed his workers falling ill while mixing up the stuff, the business owner had put the candy on sale anyway. He was arrested and jailed, as was the pharmacist who'd mistakenly sold him the poison in place of plaster, but they could not even be convicted of any crime. Britain had no law against making unsafe or even lethal food products.

Jesus Christ, dude. This is that fucking insane. This is insane. This is like- Pouring arsenic into candy, kids are dying left and right. No, kids like it when it's green. What's green? Something more poisonous, please. Get some more poison in there. That's too bland of color.

That's so insane. I just love- they kill 21 people with bad candy and then the cops are like, it's not illegal. You can put as much poison in candy as you want. It's not actually in the rule book. You're allowed to do this. There's nothing in the rules that says candy can't be arsenic. Listen, if you write a law that says I can't poison children for profit, I'll gladly abide by it. Fucking A, dude. It is the pur- and in England's credit again, this is like the 1830s, 40s,

like England, Germany, a lot of Europe like bans a lot of this shit. But everything we've talked about keeps going in the U.S. They're throwing arsenic and lead in candy. They don't give a fuck in the United States, right? This is the land of the goddamn free. We can do whatever we want. Like one of the amendments should be my right to eat arsenic because green is a cool color.

You damn right, Matt. That's why I'm starting a new bakery. These cakes will kill your children. Yes, these cakes will, in fact, kill your children, but they'll die free, you know? They won't die cocked by the medical establishment. He says children can't handle arsenic. Five-year-olds just saluting on a cot in the ICU. You know who else likes to salute five-year-olds while they're dying in the ICU?

The sponsors? That's right. That's right, Matt Leap. That's why they do it. That's why they sell all these products. They have time for their real passion. Saluting dying children who are poisoned by lead cake. All right, here we go. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not on the good-bad-ass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial. To discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. So in the United States, for basically the whole 1800s, every attempt to impose any kind of like national food safety standards is there are all these attempts are opposed vigorously by the big businesses who made a lot of money selling lead candy and formaldehyde milk. For example, Massachusetts lawyer George Thorndike Engel gave a big speech in 1879

to the American Social Science Public Health Association, where he read through a list of commercially sold foods that had been found to include parasites and brands of butter and cheese that had been found to be nothing but processed animal fat. Engel accused food producers of being a threat to both rich and poor and compared them to pirates robbing people of their good health. Engel mailed copies of a speech to newspapers around the country, which forced American Grocer, a major trade publication, to take aim at him as a sensationalist doing a disservice to consumers, although they did concede that it was bad when milk and candy killed children. So like, look, it's bad that kids keep dying, but this guy is not like out of his

mind. This guy is biased. All right. And listen, yeah, I have grocers itch. Who does it? Okay. Look, we all wish kids would stop dying, but at what cost? That's what we the people putting lead in your children's food ask. Listen, you can either have a crying baby or a baby with a one in five chance of dying from this lollipop. Which would you prefer? Yeah, what do you want? You want milk that kills your kids? You want milk that's three cents cheaper? Huh? Yeah. Come on, man. How much are those kids worth for you anyway? Supply and demand here, buddy. So Engel's argument, though, was convincing to Congressman Richard Beale from Virginia. He put forward legislation federally to ban all interstate commerce and chemically altered foods.

And it's wild to think about how different that like it would have gotten appealed at some point, right? Because you just couldn't have a society like ours with that law on the books. But it never, it never gets made. It dies in committee, not even saying like at the time, certainly would have been a good thing. There's that would have wouldn't have aged well, but it doesn't even get off the ground floor. And of course, that bill was not the only thing that died in committee. Shitloads of kids were still being offed by poisonous foods. It all got bad enough that the United States Congress decided to take a break from edging the tip of the national cock into overseas colonialism. And in 1902, they funded the very

first controlled trials of human food toxicity. These tests would be carried out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chemistry squad, which was headed by a guy named Harvey Washington Wiley. Now, Wiley's pretty dope. He may be the Obi-Wan of our story. He'd gotten his start in food science in 1881 when the Indiana State Board of Health asked him to look into honey, maple syrup, and other sweeteners. And his findings were that in short, like a lot of the people buying these things are not in fact buying these things. Most of the like a lot of the maple syrup and honey in the market is just like corn syrup. It would sometimes even make like a fake wax honeycomb and dip it in the corn syrups that it looked like you were getting real honey. And realizing that like, oh,

wow, like people going to the grocery store have no fucking clue what they're getting. Like they don't have a goddamn idea what they're actually buying because there's no requirement that they tell people what they're buying and actually deliver it on it. And this kind of radicalizes Wiley. And he like spins the rest of his career trying to stop this. Now, Nature, a write up I found in Nature magazine describes his new job at the USDA, quote, 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. And they're trying to figure out like what things are bad for people. They're also trying to just like gain a real understanding of like nutrition and like what works, what preserves food. No one had really, this hadn't been done. These pieces of this had been done in an organized way. But like this is the first time that our government's like, we should really like figure out what this stuff does to people. Right. Yeah. Like in a controlled setting, give some people some lead and just, you know, and you don't know at that point, right? Like it is like we laugh about it. But like the Romans put lead and fucking everything because they didn't realize it like it was bad for them. So you have

and at this point we're starting to get some understanding of that. But like a big part of it is this. And there's a lot of very brave people who are like, yeah, try shit on me. We should know if this is killing people. So give it, give it a shot. Put it in me. That's a bad ass, dude. Yeah, you really, you took one for the team here. You're like, I'll eat pretty much anything. So just like hook it up, dude. I don't give a shit. Throw it in me. Who gives a shit? Yeah, I'm drunk. Yeah. I ain't gonna live that long anyway. It is the 1890s. I made it to 20, you know? I am dead inside already. Feed me some more of that brain. My earliest memory is Sherman's March to the Sea. I'm done.

So that brings us back to milk. Now, under President Grover Cleveland, Wiley's chemistry division started digging into the dirty world of big dairy. There was a lot of money in dairy, particularly since milk was seen as like the best thing to feed small children. The milk industry had been happy to cut corners for profits for quite some time. And I want to talk a little bit about swill, which is the kind of milk that most people in cities are drinking through like most of the mid to late 1800s, even some of the early 1900s. Was it branded swill? No, that's just what everyone called it, and we'll explain why in a second. So Deborah Bloom describes this swill as quote,

like making swill as quote, the practice wherein distillers, liquor distillers, housed dairy cows in stinking urban warehouses where each animal was tethered immobile and fed on the spent mash or swill from the fermentation process used in making whiskey. So we have all these grains and shit for like whiskey and for beer too. I'm sure they do it with that. Were you like boiling all this grain for forever in order to like make the thing that you then ferment, right? And once you boil anything for a while, like all this grain and stuff, it doesn't have any real nutrition anymore because you've like boiled it to get all of that out. That all goes into the thing that you're making. That's why it's flavored and shit.

So the cows that are fed on this stuff are like dying their entire lives. They're horribly malnourished. Their bones are very soft because the swill they're eating isn't food anymore. So like all of these animals, by the time their adults have all of their teeth wrought out, they live very short lives. Their malnourished bodies only produce milk for a short period of time. And the milk they make, which is what all these poor kids are drinking, doesn't really have any nutritional value. Because again, the cows aren't eating anything with nutritional value. So they're just like making colored water in a lot of cases. One pediatrician at the time wrote, I have every year grown more suspicious of distillery milk wherever I have seen a child

presenting a sickly appearance, loose flabby flesh, weak joints, capricious appetite, frequent retchings and occasional vomitage, irregular bowels with the tendency to diarrhea and fetid breath. So like people are aware of this. Also, the fact that it's called distillery milk should key you in. I don't want to go to the same place for my bourbon and my milk. Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh, we sell cocaine. Oh, we also sell fair trade coffee. It's like, I don't think that's fair trade. I mean, I'm sure it was a fair trade for somebody. Someone got a good end of the deal for sure. Yeah, our sponsor is the Cina Loa cartel folk. Pretty good about that trade. So the swill milk industry was eventually reformed, but that industry just yielded

to the formaldehyde doping that we've already covered. By 1904, doping had a formaldehyde milk had spread to New Jersey, where one doctor blamed a surge in child deaths on the substance. In New York City, 20,000 deaths of children under two per year were blamed on poisoned milk. Formaldehyde wasn't even 20,000 kids a year in New York City dying from bad milk. Yeah, like that's fucking wild. That is so many dead children. That is an insane amount. It's like, at some point, you have to go like, wouldn't this, like, just shooting them z's would kill less. I mean, it just leaves me to believe that it was the time. It's like, oh, yeah, a lot of children die. Some of it's milk poisoning. Some of it is

from the slide that's made of razor blades that we have at every park. Like, this is, that's an insane amount. Yeah, we're strapping kids to the street cars to act as mirrors. Like, we have all sorts of ways of killing kids. It is New York in 1902. And we're just like using their bodies as chimney sweeps. I mean, they die. They for sure die. They're very easy to kill. So, yeah. And formaldehyde was not even necessarily the biggest threat in milk. Most of the deaths due to poison milk in New York, particularly in like 1902, are probably as the result of a typhus epidemic that gets spread through tainted milk, because that's a big cause of typhus outbreaks, is like milk. Now, Wiley and Hurley were among the learned advocates who urged the government to

take action. Everywhere they looked, Americans were being tricked into consuming things that weren't food. And of course, a shitload of babies were dying. Regulations keep being proposed, and they are fought tooth and nail every time by food manufacturers. So, by the time the early 1900s roll around, a handful of journalists set themselves to the task of like exposing what's happening here, often with the direct help of guys from the chemical division. So, like, these reporters are kind of working with Wiley and his men. And one of these journalists is Henry Irving Dodge, who adopted poison milk as his cause in 1904. Deborah Bloom writes, Dodge had learned from a friend in the U.S. Senate that manufacturers were prepared to spend more

than $250,000 to defeat any regulations and had already made major contributions to the campaigns of senators considered friendly to the cause. No wonder the proposed food legislation was going nowhere, he wrote. The Senate does not indulge in balling opposition to the bill. Oh no, its weapons are much more effective and more deadly. It lets the bill die. The American government, he concluded, would rather protect wealthy business interests than protect the American people. Not a thing people today would understand. No, no, no, no. Thank God that's changed. I mean, we can all be grateful for that. But no, I mean, like $200,000 to. 250,000. Which is like four or five billion dollars. Exactly. Like, to fight the, just boil

the milk. Yeah, just boil the God day. It's not hard. You are putting so much money. It's not boiling the milk. It's just, it's ridiculous. It is not like we're asking a lot. It's literally the least you could do with the milk. Hey, maybe we don't need to have 20,000 babies a year die in New York City. I will pay any amount of money to keep fire away from my milk. That's freaking amazing. So obviously, this is an outrage and should really piss people off. But the American people, as is often the case, had a lot going on right around this time. And while there were isolated eruptions of outrage when like a tainted meat tin would kill some soldiers, this happens around the time of the Spanish-American war, a bunch of soldiers get sick from like bad meat,

or like whenever a spoiled milk batch would kill a whole kindergarten worth of kids, there's like all, there's outrage in bursts and spurts, but it's very decentralized and scattered. And because of this, the massive meatpacking and dairy industry, these huge corporations and like conglomerates that have formed around this stuff are able to bribe and bully their way out of any kind of real regulations. One of the things that leads that actually changes this, that like really is a huge factor, is a book called The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, which I'm sure most people are at least broadly familiar with. Upton went undercover for months in a Chicago meatpacking neighborhood, and his vivid recollections of what he saw there were first published

in serial form via a socialist magazine named Appeal to Reason. When it was republished as a book in 1906, huge numbers of Americans were confronted with scenes like this, and I'm going to read from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. There were cattle which had been fed on whiskey malt, the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men called steerly, which means covered in boils. It was a nasty job killing these. For when you plunged your knife into them, they would burst and splatter foul-smelling stuff onto your face. And when a man's sleeves were smeared with blood, his hands steeped in it. How was he ever to wipe his face or to clear his eyes so that he could see? Jesus Christ. They're just fucking blood pinatas?

Yeah, they're like boil and puss in blood, and it's all getting over the meat, right? Because you can't see, and it's all over your hands, it's all over your knife, and you're like, you're processing this. If you're, we slaughter and process animals semi-regularly where I live, and if you're doing that, like one of the key, you don't even want like the hair of the animal when you skin it to touch the meat, because it can spoil it. You want to be very careful, otherwise it makes it nasty. These guys are like, no, you just... You pop them like a balloon. Puss is just like, you're marinating, and man, get it in there. No, just more nutrients. It's more nutrients. Don't worry about the smell.

It's got a lot of vitamin P. Oh, man. That's good stuff. So Sinclair had meant to reveal to people that the work in stockyards and meat packing facilities was unconscionably inhumane. Both of the humans working there and the animals, right? He was upset about like the treatment of all of the living things in this nightmare system. That's not what America really cares about. The real impact that the jungle has on public opinion is that it scares people about how fucking filthy their food is. Sinclair later said, quote, I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident, I hid it in the stomach. Honestly, I'd like to pretend like I'm any better, but no, I'm not. Like fucking, I didn't stop eating

chicken nuggets until someone showed me the green, the pink goo that it's made out of. And even then, I lasted a year, and then I was like, no, I could eat the goo. And then I went back to chicken nuggets. Someone figure out how I can just get the raw goo. I'd like to just have that as a shake in the morning. Like a goger. Suck down some pink goo. Yeah, leave it out in the sun a little bit so it gets good and aged. I like when it's thick, a thick green pink goo in my mouth. You know what? I think if I just mixed that 50-50 with bourbon, that would be all the nutrients I need. That's like, that's my soilet. We call it goo-kirt. That's your soilet. That's my, that's a performance beverage, Sophie. Yeah, exactly. In the morning, you throw a couple of

shots of espresso in there too. You're good to go. I was horrified. And then you branded it, and I went, okay. That's how you get that keto body. That's true. The brand immediately makes it fun. Here you go. All right, I'll eat it. That's going to be my new soilet. Sophie, figure out, find a sponsor who will make my meat coffee bourbon shakes and sell them as a performance beverage. You know who these are good for is truckers. It will get you the right amount of drunk awake and vomiting to really do those long haul drives. Yeah, you can get it all done in one go, literally one mouth movement in, out immediately. And look, schools waste a lot of time cooking food. My meat slurry bourbon beverage, everything a child needs to both be

nutrified and to keep quiet. There's a lot of bourbon. Their little bodies can't handle that much. We call it sleepy time shake meat. It's very good. Yeah, just keeping quiet. You know what? You're just warehousing them really. That's what all we're doing anymore. It's called five loco. It's even more local than the previous. They barely breathe on it. So it's pandemic safe. So it's worth noting that when the jungle was published as a proper book, like outside of like a magazine thing, when it finds its publisher, the publisher insisted on sending a copy of the manuscript to the Chicago Tribune. And they're like, Hey, here's the book we're publishing. It's making some pretty shocking claims. You guys are journalists. Why don't you investigate these

claims and like render an opinionist whether or not it's accurate, right? Which if journalism exists is a responsible thing for a publisher to do. Right. Here's the thing. It is 1906. Upton Sinclair is the first person who's ever done a journalism in the United States. So I'm going to quote again from the Poison Squad by Debra Blue. At this point, journalism is just for going to war with Spain. Yeah, that's what it was invented to do. That's a point. It's to get people to agree to a war with Spain. This book isn't about Spain at all. Quote, Tribune editors responded with a two dozen page rebuttal of the Packing House descriptions alarmed page and double day his publishers called Sinclair to their offices. But Sinclair

promptly began picking apart the Tribune's critique. For instance, the paper had denied that the tuberculosis bacterium could survive on walls or floors of the packing rooms. Sinclair pointed out that the germ could indeed survive on those surfaces and could transfer to anything that touched them. He had brought medical studies to prove it as well as other evidence to back up his story. He further noted that the paper's owners were obviously friendly with the meat packers and sided with them. In fact, it would turn out that the newspaper's management had not assigned a reporter to study Sinclair's claims, but instead passed the task on to a publicist who worked for the meat packers. Nice. Yeah. The newspaper goes right to the people

that he's investigating is like, is this, you guys would have write a thing for us about this? Yeah. It's like, um, so I need you guys to write something that says nah-uh and just every time he says yah-huh, you just got to write nah-uh. I would write it, but you would not believe the amount of war with Spain we got to justify. We got a lot of war with Spain. There's so much Spain left and we got to nip that shit right in the bud. Yeah. Also, I'm a little bit busy because all of my children are in the hospital for milk poisoning. You know, that whole thing. You know, babies. You know, babies. Can't handle their milk. The New York Times goes on to note, quote,

About a month after the jungle was published, the White House started receiving 100 letters a day demanding a federal cleanup of the meat industry. Roosevelt invited Sinclair to the White House, then ordered a federal investigation. Sinclair took every opportunity to harangue the beef trust as the meat packing industry was known and sent a stream of telegrams to the White House demanding reform. Roosevelt zoom tired of Sinclair's outspokenness. In a note to the author's publisher, the president wrote, tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while. Oh, Teddy, I love it. What a pussy. But but they do. This actually gets some shit done from from Teddy's credit. He's part of shit starting to get done here. The the Pure Food and Drug Act

is passed. Well, it's introduced into Congress in 1905, the same year that Sinclair puts out the first version of the jungle. And but in early 1906, when the book version comes out, the the act is stalled. And it's so stalled that Harvey Wiley, who's the main impetus behind the book, starts trolling people out of like hopelessness, right? And he is he kind of is the first guy to use Twitter. He said he settles into a strategy of writing protest letters to newspapers and magazines about the ads they had for different snake oil medicines and tainted foods. He wrote this to the Washington Star, I have read with regret and your issue of Monday, January 29th of the probably fatal illness of Buck Ewing, the celebrated catcher. Ewing, a former star player

and manager for the New York Giants, was diagnosed with Breitz disease, which is a blood vessel inflammation in the kidneys. And it killed people pretty fast in those days. Wiley noted that like, hey, you're talking about how sad this is, but you've previously published an article about Dr. Kilmer's swamp root and claimed that it clears Breitz disease. And he's like, I keep a bottle of it near me all the time because you've ensured me that it works. So why don't you just tell this guy, you know, my chemists say it's nothing but alcohol and turpentine with a couple of spices. But if you're worried about Buck Ewing, why don't you tell him to take this stuff? It should cure his thing right away. In fact, I'll send him a copy of your paper and let you know what he says.

And he dies like very shortly thereafter. I love the idea that someone was just like, all right, we got this Breitz disease. Let's try swamp root. The swamps are dark, right? What defeats the bright? Yeah, he had it knocked that bright out with some dark. What's darker than a swamp? What's darker than the swamp? People still dying? Oh, well, whatever. It's a clever ad campaign. And he does this like there's this malt coffee, which contains no actual coffee. It's pure barley, but it advertises itself as having real coffee flavor. And he sends a letter to the newspaper advertising them being like, how can you have real coffee flavor with anything but coffee? Isn't that the only thing that can have real coffee flavor? He's just quote tweeting.

Yeah, he's really just Twittering. Oh, yeah. You know who else loves Twitter? The products and services that support this podcast. They are all reply guys for the same K-pop band. And it gets very sexual, actually, with all of our sponsors, very sexual replies to this K-pop band. Oh, good, good. And if we know one thing, it's the K-pop people, they're very normal online and they love to be sexualized. That's actually the motto of very normal online and we love to be sexual. Am I am I bleeping? Yeah, you should believe that. Oh, here's some ads.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad

ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev,

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted

pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. So while he was hectoring sketchy newspaper owners in print, Wiley and his poison squad had gathered together the sum of their years of study into America's

endless variety of shit foods. And this is literally while they're trying to pass this act because they put all this information together to try to convince Congress we should do something. Yeah, we got to stop eating poison and poo. Yeah, we really got to deal with all of these dead babies. Yeah, like fucking step one of a society, no more eating the poison poo. Yeah, no more eating the poop milk. Step two, maybe less wormed milk, not none. Yeah, just less. So this passage from Deborah Bloom's book sums up the case that Wiley and his scientists made to Congress. For every food product, the chemistry division could point to a trick involved in its manufacture. Doctors continued to worry over reports of

grocers itch, a side effect of the deceptive process of grinding up insects and passing the result off as brown sugar. Sometimes live lice survived the process. Beer, which most consumers imagine to be derived from malted barley and hops, was often made from a cheaper ferment of rice or even corn grits. So-called aged whiskey was often still routinely rectified alcohol, diluted and colored brown. As Wiley had found 20 years earlier at Purdue, corn syrup was widely still used as the basis for fake versions of honey and maple syrup. Many manufacturers argued that they had to fake products to stay competitive. Detroit canner Walter Williams of Williams Brothers described the making of his Highland strawberry preserves. The jam was, he said, 45% sugar, 35%

corn syrup, 15% apple juice made from discarded apple skins, some scraps of apple skin and cores, and usually one or two pieces of strawberry. The strawberries cost him, he added. Many compare up, yeah. It costs a lot of money to get those two strawberries. You got those two pieces of strawberries and really put me at a house and home. Many comparably priced preserves were just glucose, apple juice, and red dye and Timothy seed, added to simulate strawberry seeds. If we could sell peer goods, I would be pleased, Williams insisted. I believe they should be labeled showing their ingredients and showing the quality of the goods. But as there was no law setting such standards and as he had to compete with less scrupulous

canners, there was no way for him to stay in business unless he cut costs to match. Wiley testified that about 5% of all foods were routinely adulterated, with the number being much higher, up to 90% in categories such as coffee, spices, and food products made for selling to the poor. God, of course. If your food is for poor people, it is not food. It's not food, it's just made up not food. We just ground up some dirt.

Yeah, this is the sawdust pizza that I feed to my maid every three weeks. We mix some sawdust in with piss, you can't tell the difference between that and bread. I'm gonna eat it off the ground, you know, she doesn't know the difference. Ground is what we call a natural plant. It's piss from the bars, so there's lots of barley in it. Well, they're poor bars, so it's just ground up rice meal, but you know. Sometimes I just shove a bar of soap into the mouth of a poor to see if they live for another week. It's nice. It cleans the body and it's delicious.

So Wiley's solution to all of this horror is the peer food and drug act. And it's hard to see this as anything unreasonable, but the grocery meatpacking and canning companies threatened by the bill had to find a way to make it unreasonable. In the time-honored tradition of shady rich bastards, they decided to smear Wiley. Since his data was impeccable, they went after him for hating freedom. Deadly in company. Yeah, baby, that's how you do it. That's how you do America. That's how you do it, man.

Our freedom to feed poor people sawdust. It's extremely funny. Deadly in co. canned goods used the grocery world magazine to publish editorials attacking Wiley as the nation's janitor, which it's hard to make that seem. He wants to clean things up. Yeah, that's an insult is just like, oh, you know, fucking janitors always going around.

He's like those guys who stop us from living in our own shit. Exactly. So I'm trying to wipe my ass, mom. I like it like this. The idea is that he was a busybody policing the American stomach and again attacking freedom. During one industry event where Wiley meets with food company representatives, he's accused in person by the owner of a cannery for wanting to be dictator of the food industry. Oh, Mr. Stalin trying to stop us from putting sawdust in the bread and piss in the whiskey.

Fuck it. Stalin over here was just like, oh, I don't like when children die from poison milk. Look at his mother. But what does he think he is? The czar trying to stop kids from dying from milk? Oh, man. Much of this. This is amazing because like it just. So America.

It's so American. It couldn't be more American. You can't be more American than people literally spending like the equivalent of millions of dollars to just be like, I got to feed them the poison. I got to do it. I don't care that this is costing me more money than taking the poison out. And guess what? Freedom.

I love it. You love to see it. We love to see it. We've always been the same. Yeah. Now, Wiley was not purely concerned with food here or with like the raw ingredients that people generally consider food. And in fact, as this law came closer and closer to passing, he was increasingly getting involved

in something that had become a source of substantial profits for the biggest players in the industry. Wiley was now obsessed with the use of new and experimental preservatives on various food stuffs. Now, some of them were like what we've talked about based on formaldehyde like freezing. But there were a whole bunch of other different, not all preservatives, new food additives. This is the period in which people start to adulterate food when you eat your first processed meats and these companies are putting stuff in for flavor and to preserve it. And there's no regulation for any of this at this point. And this is really concerning to Wiley.

The poison squad describes the birth of the subset of the chemical industry in a paragraph that you may recognize some of the names from. In addition to preservatives, companies developed synthetic compounds to make food production cheaper. The sweetener, Sacherin, discovered in 1879 at Johns Hopkins University, cost far less than sugar and quickly replaced it as it cost saving alternative. Flavoring agents such as laboratory brewed citric acid or peppermint extracts could now be used in drinks and other products.

Instead of fresh lemon juice or mint, again, saving costs and again, crowding the farmer out of the supply chain. The pioneering and just industrial chemist Charles Pfizer, who had founded his New York pharmaceutical company in 1849, now also produced borax, boric acid, cream of tartar and citric acid for use in food and drink. They loved putting borax and shit. Like doses so high it would kill people. It was great.

Chicago's Joseph Bauer, whose liquid carbonic company produced the pressurized gas used in the fizzing drinks of soda fountains, had become so interested in artificial sweeteners that in 1901 he had invested in a new business in St. Louis, the Monsanto chemical company, to produce Sacherin in large quantities. Sacherin production had also launched the Hayden Chemical Works of New York City in 1900, although that company also branched into the preservative market, producing salicylic acid, formaldehyde and sodium benzoate for use in food and drinks. The food and drink market also attracted Herbert Henry Dao, founder at age 31 of the

Dao Chemical Company in Midlands, Michigan. Dao had been a chemistry student at the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio. Yeah. So he creates Dao Chemical Company in 1897. So yeah, all of these guys, this is where they get their start, like shooting shit into food. While he's not wanting that, like not saying we should ban all this, he's not some sort of like hippie fanatic, but he's like, we should know what these, number one, people need to know if these are in their food, right? Like you should have to tell people, I'm not going to say you can't put citric acid or

sodium benzoate in food, but people should know, right? Like that we should be doing that. And also, we should figure out if this stuff, like the food, the people putting this in food should be showing that it's not harmful. Like they should be funding research to make, which as we'll talk about becomes problematic, right? But it is a good idea that like, well, we can't just start shooting this stuff into food, we should know what it does, right? Now, the people who are, and there's a lot of scientists who are like, no, like, we don't need to be doing this, like the preservatives stop the food from spoiling. Do we need to study what else they do? We know how bad spoiled meat is. And they do

have a point in this period where it's like, well, we know it's this shit's killing so many kids a year, like, do we care if they get sick 40 years later, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, like 40 years, that's the entire lifespan of a human. They'll be fine. Yeah, it's like, you got to take the good with the bad here. I understand a little bit of it where they're just like, listen, they're not getting the food, boring illnesses. And, you know, yeah, their skin is like orange now and one of their lungs fell out. But like, whatever, they're alive. Unlike all those kids who drank them were milk. Harvey Wiley was not particularly good at the give and take compromise nature of politics. He was too much of a scientist. And so he's, one of the reasons

this law has trouble passing a lot of people who argue is that he's not willing to kind of like, give any back. And he's his adamant about like, wanting strict laws about preservatives as he is about like, well, we should be pasteurizing milk, right? And there's a good point to be made like, no, pasteurizing milk is like, get that done first, right? It's more of a priority to do this shit. And so in the end, the pure food law only passes because Upton Sinclair's book causes this national outrage, which prompts Teddy Roosevelt to champion the bill personally and it passes. The pure food law was the first major victory in the war to ensure Americans actually knew what the fuck they were eating. To eat food. You actually ate food, as opposed to pure poison in a sack.

It was followed in night. Yeah, just a completely like self-inflicted wound. Like this war that we created on ourselves. Oh, good. It's very funny. Yeah. Now the pure food law was the first major victory in the war to ensure Americans actually like, yeah, again, had any idea what they were eating. It was followed in 1938 by the passing of the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, which established the Food and Drug Administration for the first time. So that's when 1938, 1906, we get the pure food law, which lays the groundwork for the FDA. The FDA comes into being in 38. And initially, when it started, it's funded entirely by taxpayer money, right? And it is invested with the, you might say, sacred authority to protect U.S. consumers from the businesses making their food.

This is a Titanic step forward. And it's cementing into the Wildcat era of tainted milk, fake coffee, arsenic and lead-riddled candy. It's a huge deal. Now, a lot of that stuff had started to get fixed in 1906, obviously. But making the FDA is a huge move forward and a very good, it was absolutely necessary. I want to establish before we tear it down on the next episode, we had to have something like this. Like you could not, I don't care how much of a fucking libertarian is, you can't let that state of affairs go on. The market, we have proved the market cannot correct itself with this stuff. It's just so much cheaper to feed people poison. Weirdly enough, the market would rather spend more money on continuing the poison trade.

Yes, they love poisoning people. You can't stop them. You can't stop them. You can't stop a guy from poisoning all of the people he's feeding. Good for him. So, you know, the FDA starts as a beautiful necessary thing. And then in the 1980s, about a century after Dr. Wiley's journey began, the bright dream of the Food and Drug Administration began to go terribly wrong. But Matt, we're going to talk about that in part two. You got any pluggables to plug? Oh, sure, sure. Yeah, the pod yourself again, the world's only Sopranos podcast is out now and check out the film drunk broadcast. Also, I'm on, I'm on Instagram. Follow me at Matt Leib jokes. I need

more of those. You know, no one gives a shit about my Twitter anymore, you know. Yeah, follow him at Matt Leib jokes. Follow him. Follow me. Send him pictures of your milk. Yeah, people just care more about the gram, I think. People just care more about the gram, you know, it's just a shame because of Beyonce. I don't know if she's on the gram, I assume so. Of course, she's on the gram, Robert. She must be, right? Amateur. Also, like my Twitter, I do not have a gram. I used to have a blue check mark, but I got it taken away on Twitter and I hope to get one. Who took your blue check mark away? Twitter did because I pretended to be the New York Times.

Yeah, you're not allowed to do that, apparently, but it was a great post. It was, you know, I mean, I do love that for you. Like what I love, I think my favorite example of that is it's the lady from I think you should leave who did the, I can't get enough wine like that. That sketch, she's been in a few of them, but she did. It was like, when Oreos did some sort of Pride Month thing, she pretended to be Nilla Wafers using her check mark and was like, Nilla Wafers, we don't like bisexual people. You're not allowed to eat our cookies. Something like that. It was very funny. And that's why she's not on Twitter anymore. I love it. Nilla Wafers taking strays from people. I should note, people are going to give a shit

because they do every time we like make jokes about people dying at 40. Obviously, the way life spans work is that so many kids died as babies. If you made it to an adulthood, you had a pretty good chance of at least making it to like 50 or 60. A lot of people made it to their 70s. Yes, that's true. It's funny to joke about people dying at age, being old at age 30 back then, because look at a picture of a 30 year old from the 1890s. They look like your fucking grandpa. They're covered in soot. They could have just taken a shot. It is permanently embedded soot in their body. All of their wrinkles. It's extremely funny how sick and dying everybody was back in the day. Well, you know, they just a society that loved poison

milk. What can you do? It was a whole world of people exactly as healthy as Jair Bolsonaro. Constantly getting their doodoo backed up and being like, well, I gotta go home. Steal a shit out of their noses because there's so much poop in the milk. I gotta go to the hospital again, but first I gotta run by this emu and see if he'll punch me in the throat. Oh boy. So yeah, find Matt Leib on Twitter. Also, I have a fiction novel, my book After the Revolution. You can find it for free as an ebook at atrbook.com, but it's also available for pre-order through AK Press. If you order now, you will get a signed copy. So just Google AK Press After the Revolution. Pre-order my book. It'll come out in May and you'll get it signed.

AK Press After the Revolution. Google it and you'll find the pre-order page. All right. I'm pre-ordering it right now. And right now we have a behind-the-bastards live stream show. Oh God. There's so much to plug. Shit. I know. With Prop on February 17th, you can get tickets at momenthouse.com. You sure can. It'll be a good episode, probably. I haven't written it yet. Shit. You'll be there. I will. I think so. That's probable. You have to. I might even have an episode written. Great. All right. Let's wing it, dude. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood

between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through

training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.