Science Friday - SciFri Extra: The Origin Of The Word 'Ketchup'

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

Science Diction is back! This time around, the team is investigating the science, language, and history of food. First up: Digging into America's favorite condiment, ketchup! At the turn of the 20th century, 12 young men sat in the basement of the Department of Agriculture, eating meals with a side of borax, salicylic acid, or formaldehyde. They were called the Poison Squad, and they were part of a government experiment to figure out whether popular food additives were safe. (Spoiler: Many weren’t.) Food manufacturers weren’t pleased with the findings, but one prominent ketchup maker paid attention. Influenced by these experiments, he transformed ketchup into the all-American condiment that we know and love today. Except ketchup—both the sauce and the word—didn't come from the United States. The story of America’s favorite condiment begins in East Asia. Want more Science Diction? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Harvey Wiley (back row, third from left) and the members of The Poison Squad. (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) Members of the Poison Squad dining in the basement of the Department of Agriculture. Harvey Wiley occasionally ate with them, to offer encouragement and support. (U.S. Food and Drug Administration)  The members of the Poison Squad came up with their own inspirational slogan, which hung on a sign outside the dining room. (U.S. Food and Drug Administration ) Guest Alan Lee is a freelance linguist and native Hokkien speaker.  Footnotes And Further Reading The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum tells the very entertaining history of Harvey Wiley, the early days of food regulation in the United States, and, of course, the Poison Squad. The Language of Food by Dan Jurafsky is a word nerd’s dream, and contains more on ketchup’s early history. Special thanks to Dan Jurafsky for providing background information on the early history of ketchup for this episode.  Can't get enough ketchup history? Check out Pure Ketchup: A History of America's National Condiment With Recipes by Andrew F. Smith. Learn more about ketchup's early origins in Dan Jurafsky's Slate article on "The Cosmopolitan Condiment."  Credits Science Diction is hosted and produced by Johanna Mayer. Our editor and producer is Elah Feder. We had additional story editing from Nathan Tobey. Our Chief Content Office is Nadja Oertelt. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, with help from Danya AbdelHameid. Daniel Peterschmidt is our composer, and they wrote our version of the “Song of the Poison Squad.” We had research help from Cosmo Bjorkenheim and Attabey Rodríguez Benítez. Sound design and mastering by Chris Wood. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey there, Ira here. Today we have a little treat in store for all the word nerds out there. Science Diction is back. And for the next month, they're all about the history, science, and language of food. Yeah, this is going to be a fun one. Host Johanna Mayer will talk about why some ice cream names just sound more delicious than others, why the earliest restaurants are places where chewing was not required. All kinds of good stuff.

But today we're bringing you an episode about this. the most all-American condiment of all time. You've probably been squirting a lot of it on your barbecue burgers and dogs these days. Ketchup. Except it turns out both the sauce and the word ketchup aren't American at all. I know you're going to want more, so subscribe to Science Diction wherever you get your podcasts. Now here's Johanna Mayer with the story of ketchup. In the early 1900s, there was a lot of,

a strange dining room in the basement of the Department of Agriculture. Sparse white walls, white china, two round oak tables with white tablecloths, 12 straight back chairs, and propped up at the entrance, a hand-painted sign that said, none but the brave can eat the fair. Every day, 12 young, healthy men would put on their suits and bow ties, march into the that dining room and dig into meals laced with borax, or salicylic acid, or even formaldehyde. They were called the poison squad, and the meals that they ate in that basement dining hall would completely transform America's most iconic condiment. Catch up. From Science Friday, this is science diction. I'm Johanna Mayer. Today, we're talking

about the word ketchup. At the turn of the century, food regulation in the United States was just not a thing. Manufacturers were making all kinds of substitutions, shall we call them, and you can never be completely sure what you were eating. Strawberry jam could be mashed up apple peels, grass seeds, dyed red, and black pepper, that could be anything. Bits of coconut shell, rope. little bit of floor sweepings. And even if you were getting the food that was on the label,

you didn't know what else was in it. Milk, for example. Yes, there was some actual milk in there, but milk producers would often cut it with lukewarm water. Sometimes they would even toss in a squirt of purified cow brains to make it look like there was a layer of cream on top. And if that wasn't bad enough, It was not unusual to spike milk with formaldehyde.

They figured, hey, works on dead bodies, it'll probably keep milk from spoiling, too. As for ketchup, all sorts of trashy fillers were blended up in there. Pumpkin rinds, apple trimmings, you name it. So this is the sorry state of food regulation. When along came a man named Harvey Wiley. He was the chief chemist at the Agriculture Department. apartment. Wiley was absolutely devoted to food purity. He once told a reporter that he ate bread that was bread, meat that was meat, butter that was uncolored and unsalted. And Wiley was appalled at all

of these stunts that these food makers were pulling, especially the preservatives. He wanted to show people just how bad they could be. So in 1901, he rounded up a group of of volunteers, young, healthy men, mostly low-paid clerks in the Agriculture Department, and he fed them. Three meals a day. Good quality food, actually. Roast beef, oysters. The catch was that half the time, they'd be getting the same meal just with a little borax

or salicylic acid or whatever preservative they were testing that week. Wiley's crew quickly became something of a pop culture phenomenon. Monaster, newspapers called them the Poison Squad. They wrote all about these, quote, healthy specimens of manhood, who were sacrificing their own stomachs to protect the public. Someone wrote a song about them that oh so cleverly rhymed Poison Squad with gruesome Wad. Believe me, we tried to find a surviving copy, but alas. These experiments were really just about food additives, getting the bad ones out.

out. But they ended up having an unintended side effect. They forever changed ketchup. Americans eat $800 million worth of ketchup every year. Hot dogs, burgers, french fries, eggs. In the U.S., we put that stuff on everything. Except ketchup and the name itself didn't come from the U.S. at all. It came from East Asia. And the original ketchup didn't include the one ingredient that we think of as the most integral, defining, essential thing that makes ketchup ketchup, ketchup. It had no tomatoes. The original ketchup was fish sauce. It's a little murky precisely when and where ketchup as fish sauce came to be. And there's no single original ketchup mother sauce recipe. But we do know that for centuries, people had been making these fish sauces all over east and southeast Asia.

The kinds you'd probably associate with Thai and Vietnamese food. And one of the places that made these sauces was the Fujian province of China, where they speak a dialect called Hokkien. And in Hokkien, fish was ke, sauce was chak. I needed a little bit of help with the pronunciation. I don't really know the Hokkien pronunciation because it's just not in use. anymore? This is Alan Lee, a linguist and a native Hokkien speaker. Even though the word for this fish sauce isn't around anymore, Alan gave it his best shot. I guess it's something like, uh, ketchup. Sound familiar? Fish sauce. Kachop. Ketchup. Ketchup. Or Katsup. Hokean doesn't use the

Roman alphabet, so English speakers just kind of guessed at how to spell it. Katsup and ketchup are two different versions of that. So, theory goes, the word started in Hokkien, and from there, the sauce and the word traveled. In Malay, it's kichap, although in modern Malay, it generally refers to soy sauce. If you go to a supermarket in Malaysia or somewhere around here, you would see words like kichap masin, which means salty kichup ketchup, which is soy sauce. But you also have other variants like kichap manis, which is the sweeten soy sauce. and kichap ikan, which is like fish sauce, literally, and that may have been its origin. So in Malay, kichap can be kind of a soy sauce, sometimes fishy, sometimes kind of sweet,

vaguely close to its roots. But here, how did fish sauce turn into a sugary tomato pulp? Well, from China, ketchup traveled the globe, and like a lot of borrowed foods, it changed beyond recognition. At some point, British sailors. bought it from Chinese merchants in Indonesia, brought it back to the Western world. Probably added a nice little kick to all that bland food they were eating on ships. But it was also an opportunity to sell and market the stuff back home as a fancy delicacy from overseas. And you know what happens when you have a fancy-shmancy imported product.

Knock-offs. The original fish sauce had this salty, tangy flavor and what we would call it. today, umami. And when ketchup landed in Britain, they swapped in a bunch of Western ingredients to give it a similar punch, just cheaper and more local. And let me tell you, it was nothing like the stuff that we dip our fries into today. If you were to spoon a dollop of ketchup onto your plate in mid-18th century Britain, you'd be looking at a dark, thin, runny sauce. Some versions of ketchup contained beer, anchovies were a staple for a while, what made ketchup ketchup was the umami kick that all of those ingredients were trying to deliver, like the original

fish sauce. And you know what else has umami? Tomatoes. So eventually they threw those in, too. In 1812, we see our very first recorded tomato ketchup recipe, a horticulturist, named James Meese, instructed the ketchup cook to slice the tomatoes thinly, sprinkle on some salt, beat them well, and after a half-hour simmer, top it all off with the dash of brandy and cloves. He called this his recipe for love apple catsup, yet they used to call tomatoes love apples. I kind of wish that name had stuck. By the time Harvey Wiley and the Poison Squad hit the scene,

ketchup had very much arrived stateside. an article in 1896 called tomato ketchup the National Sauce of America. And the reporter is deeply enthralled with it. Like, weirdly. He wrote, The skill of the French cook is surpassed in this instance. If he wants real tomato ketchup, he must buy it in America. And the ketchup business was good.

But thanks to Harvey Wiley, manufacturers, like a lot of food manufacturers, were in a bit of a pickle. They needed to get their catch-up to customers without it spoiling. But here was the scientist making a big fuss about preservatives possibly poisoning people. And they were especially unhappy when you zeroed in on sodium benzodiaate. It seemed to them that this preservative was harmless enough. Sodium benzoid is the salt of sodium and benzoic acid. Now, benzoic acid might sound scary, but it naturally.

centrally occurs in cranberries and in some milk products. And the compound, sodium benzuate, seemed like an ideal preservative. It was odorless, mostly tasteless, and it was cheap. But if you think Harvey Wiley is going to let this one slide, think again. If this preservative was going to fly, it had to pass the Poison Squad test. And it didn't. Every single member, save for one, had bad side effects. Inflamed throats, stomach pain, weight loss.

Only three out of the 12 were able to stick it out through the sodium benzodiae experiments. The others got too sick, had to quit. But I don't want to throw sodium benzodiaeat under the bus here. Because the dose makes the poison, right? The quantities of sodium benzodiaeate that the poison squad were eating were way bigger than what you would find in a regular old square to catch up. And later tests by other researchers just didn't back. up the Poison Squad's findings. To this day, the FDA considers sodium benzodiaeat safe in small

quantities. But even though sodium benzate eventually got the green light, back at the turn of the century, one ketchup maker took note of Wiley's Poison Squad experiments, and he decided, if that's what it's doing to people, no way, not for my ketchup. You may have heard of him. His name was Henry J. Hines. Heinz was a businessman through and through. At the tender age of eight, little Henry went door to door with a basket, peddling surplus from his family's garden. By age 10, he'd upgraded to a wheelbarrow.

He grew up to look like the absolute classic vision of a 19th century wealthy white dude, wispy white hair, big old mustache, three-piece suit. And for a wealthy 19th century businessman, Henry Hines was ahead of the curve. His employees got free life and death insurance. They had access to on-site cafeterias and medical stations. There were even roof gardens at his factory. And Heinz staked his reputation on purity, cleanliness, and transparency. By cleanliness, I mean, he had laundry services for his workers,

even an in-house manicurist to keep their nails pristine. But the Heinz Company, like pretty much everybody else, had been using preservatives, sodium benz-o-ate included. And when Henry Hines heard about these Poison Squad experiments, he decided that these additives, they just didn't really vibe with his pure ketchup ethos. So here's Henry's challenge. How do you make a ketchup that stays fresh and red

and is equally scrumptious? All without preservatives. Well, there's a concept in food preservatives. called hurdle technology. If you want to keep food from spoiling, you don't necessarily need one potent preservative in there. Instead, you throw up a bunch of little hurdles, each of which make it tough for microbes to live there. Like, you make food more acidic, boil it, reduce water activity by adding lots of salt or sugar. Each of these hurdles on their own won't be enough.

But all of them together, that's too much for a little microbe. Hurdle technology is a relatively new term, but even without knowing it, people have been using this combination punch approach for centuries. And that's basically what Heinz ketchup was doing. After a whole lot of testing, thousands of experimental batches, Heinz company scientists came up with a brand new recipe, with a lot more vinegar to boost the acidity and plenty of salt and sugar. And there was one more thing. Here, ketchup's coming a lot slower than ours does. You might remember Heinz's anticipation ads. The ketchup comes out so slow because it's so thick, but it's worth the weight.

Heinz's secret to making thick, slow-moving ketchup was to use fresh, ripe tomatoes. Most manufacturers used unripened ones. Definitely more expensive, but besides sounding more apple, advertising, fresh tomatoes had more pectins, which are long chains of carbohydrates that help gel food. So whereas ketchupes could be kind of runny? Heinz was thick with pectins. Mmm. Once Heinz reformulated, they launched a major advertising campaign, touting their ketchup as pure and wholesome. I think of ketchup as just about the most non-fresh, indestructible condiment that could survive the apocalypse just sitting in my refrigerator. But whatever Heinz was

doing, people seemed to dig it. In just a couple of years, they went from selling 5 million bottles a year to 12 million. And although a lot of ketchup brands, honestly, it tastes pretty much the same these days, Heinz still dominates. So here is this thing that so many of us eat, every single day, that farts out of squeeze box. and doubles as fake blood and is sometimes confused for a vegetable, a condiment as American as diners and fast food. That started off in East Asia and used to be fish sauce. Catchup.

So remember that song that I mentioned earlier? That rhymed Poison Squad with Grusome Wad. It's called Song of the Poison Squad, and it was written by someone named S.W. Gillian. We just couldn't let the world exist without a copy. So here you go. Oh, we're the merriest herd of hulks that the world has ever seen. We don't shy away from you. Rough on rats or paris green.

We're on the hut for toxic dope that's certain to kill. But tis a tricky, lucid thing and knows we're on its trail for all the things that could kill. We've downed many a gruesome wad. We're still gaining a pound a day for we are the poison squad. Science Diction is hosted and produced by me, Johanna Mayer. Our editor and producer is Ella Fetter. We had additional story editing from Nathan Toby. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with help from Danya Abdul-Hamid.

Sound design and mastering by Chris Wood. Daniel Petersman is our composer, and they wrote the excellent version of the song of the Poison Squad that you just heard. We had research help from Cosmo Bjorkenheim and Adebe Rodriguez Benitez. We read two super interesting books for this piece. The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum and The Language of Food by Dan. Jaravsky. Nadia Ortelt is the coolest, wisest, most gracious chief content officer a podcast could ask for. That's pouring it on a little thick. Mmm, ketchup as fish sauce. Think about that next time you're squeezing it on your hot dog.

Thank you, Johanna. Just one last thing. We really want to know what you think about science diction. So help us out by taking a survey at science friday.com slash word survey. Thanks so much. And we'll see you next time.