Something You Should Know - How Simply Eating Dinner Killed A Lot of People & The Real Reason You Have Your Job

Episode Date: November 18, 2019

Where do you go when you have to come up with a creative idea? The shower is a favorite spot. And a lot of people like to sit in silence for inspiration. However, there is another place you might want to try that seems to be even better in helping people generate creative ideas. This episode begins by revealing this surprising location which is probably just down the street from you. https://www.fastcompany.com/3013437/dialed/the-strange-scientific-connectionbetween-coffee-shops-and-creativity  When you ask people why they go to work every day, many of them will likely say it is for the money. While that is true for some, it is not true for most people according to Barry Schwartz, a professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and author of the book Why We Work (https://amzn.to/2D37VXv). Listen as he explains why it is that people find a lot more value in work than a paycheck – even if they don’t realize it. And how organizing your work in certain ways can make it far more rewarding. If it feels natural to stay up late – you are probably a genuine night owl. Scientists have proven there are difference in the brain between night owls and those who are not. Those difference are both good news and bad news for night owls and I will explain exactly why. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sleep-newzzz/201311/how-will-you-sleep-tonight-its-in-your-genes It is hard to imagine that simply sitting down to dinner could be a life-threatening experience. But in the late 1800s it really was in many parts of the U.S. Listen as I speak with Pulitzer prize winning author Deborah Blum who reveals how eating store bought food back then made a lot of people sick and many died. What is so fascinating is there was noting illegal about it. There was no crime. Deborah reveals how this happened and how one man made a huge difference in changing the rules of food safety – and as a result may be one reason you are alive today! Deborah is author of the book The Poison Squad (https://amzn.to/32WGTeA). This Week’s Sponsors -Native Deodorant. For 20% of your first purchase go to www.nativedeodorant.com and use promo code SYSK -LinkedIn. For $50 off you first job post, go to www.LinkedIn.com/podcast –Airbnb. To learn more about being an Airbnb host visit www.Airbnb.com/host -Upstart. See how low your interest rate is at www.Upstart.com/something Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, I'll tell you a place you can go to find creative inspiration. Also, most food you buy today is safe. But not that long ago, it wasn't safe at all, and your ancestors were lucky to have made it through alive. The standard belief now is that food, just sitting down to your daily

breakfast, lunch and dinner, was one of the ten top causes of death in the United States in the 19th century. So why would that be? Plus, what you need to know if you are a night owl. And your work is important, no matter what your job, and it's necessary to make it rewarding and satisfying for you. We spend half our waking lives at work, and it's necessary to make it rewarding and satisfying for you. We spend half our waking lives at work, and it's an incredible waste of a human resource for people to spend half of their lives in places they don't want to be doing things they don't want to do, especially when it's not necessary. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast.

And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal

changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts.

And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. So when you have to come up with a creative idea, maybe it's a business idea, or you have to write a paper for school, or come up with a theme for a party, whatever it is, you probably have a process or a ritual you go through to come up with ideas. And if you do, you may want to add to that ritual going to a coffee shop. Why?

Because of the noise. Researchers have found that the level of noise that matches the bustle of a coffee shop, which is around 70 decibels, spurs more creative performance than, say, the quiet of 50 decibels or the distracting volume of a blender, which is about 85 decibels. It turns out that silence is good for focus, but not so good for creativity. That noise level gives your thinking what's called processing disfluency. That is a slight difficulty in your experience of processing information. That little wrinkle, that slight difficulty, rankles your thinking in a way that spurs more creative ideas.

And that is something you should know. If you have a job, have you ever asked yourself, why do you have a job? Or more importantly, why do you have that job? Off the top of your head, you probably would say, well, you have that job to make money. But it's probably more than that. In fact, it's probably a lot more, according to Barry Schwartz. Barry is a professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and he's author of a book called Why We Work. Hi, Barry. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

So, why is this important? People work for whatever reason motivates them. Maybe it's a paycheck, maybe it's something else, but people work for a reason, and everyone has their reason, and that's the end of the story. So why put this all out on the table and discuss it? There's a deep, long-standing ideology about human beings and work, which is that people don't want to work. They're basically lazy. We work for pay. If we didn't need the money, we wouldn't work. If the pay wasn't good, we wouldn't work. End of story. So it's not a question that people ask. The trouble is, this assumption that we all make is false. And it's not just false for the sort of knowledge class, the professionals who want meaning and engagement and satisfaction. It seems to be

pretty much true across the board. People want to feel like they've accomplished something at the end of a work day, that they have some control and discretion over what they do, that they can use their intelligence. But all that's basically been written off in the way we've organized work over the centuries. Well, could it also be the case of some people feel one way and other people feel the other way? Well, there's no question that that's true, but I think most people think that it's a handful of elite people who want more from work than just a paycheck.

And the rank and file, the rest of us, it's just about the pay. And I think that they should probably flip the percentages. Most people will work harder than they have to if you give them the opportunity to get some meaning out of what they do. And there are a handful of people, no doubt, for whom it's just about the paycheck. But we've organized work as if that's true of everybody. And it even seeps into the professional class, right? We basically are bribing teachers with bonuses and tenure and stuff like that to get high test scores out of students, and taking it for granted that they're not interested in being excellent teachers.

All they're interested in is getting a thicker pay envelope. But so what? Well, there are two so what. Okay, go ahead. One so what is it turns out that when you give people work they're eager to do, they do better work. Which means that companies that have enlightened workplaces are more productive and more profitable than companies that don't. And it's striking. This fact is almost incontrovertible across all kinds of industries, and yet most workplaces fail to take advantage of the benefits they would get if they created workplaces where people wanted to be. That's one thing. The second is we spend half our waking

lives at work, and it's an incredible waste of a human resource for people to spend half of their lives in places they don't want to be doing things they don't want to do, especially when it's not necessary. So I think it's a big deal. But a lot of people are finding that what they want to do or what they've always done or what they're good at doesn't need to be done anymore. I'm not – this is not – my book is not the answer to all problems with respect to the workplace. It's certainly true and sad, and I don't think we have a clue what to do about it, that people are being technologized out of their jobs.

And I think this is a massive problem for the long run. It's different from, you know, the car replacing the horse and stuff like that, because I think, you know, the computer has really displaced the most essential aspects of human beings in lots of areas. And I don't know how we're going to solve this problem. But that's not, you know, as I say, I can't solve every problem. Well, you should. You really should. All right. Well, as soon as we get off the phone, I can't solve every problem. Well, you should. You really should. All right. Well, as soon as we get off the phone, I'll work on this problem. Yeah, would you?

So given what you have said, what should we be doing differently? Well, there are several things. One, we need to restructure work so that we actually show respect for and confidence in the workforce. Give them discretion instead of giving them scripts to follow. Let them exercise some autonomy. Give them opportunities to learn and grow on the job. And most important, try to show them that what they do is meaningful. And what I mean by that, more specifically, is that what they do actually makes somebody's life better.

That's the single most important driver of the satisfaction we get out of our work. And in the book, I talk about hospital custodians whose job, you know, sort of the lowest of the low in the hospital hierarchy, and their job description has lots and lots of tasks, none of which mention another human being. And yet, in a study of hospital custodians, they talked about how much satisfaction it gave them to interact with patients and their families, make the patients a little bit less afraid,

make the families a little bit more comfortable, and they took advantage of every opportunity they had to do that, even though not only was it not a part of their job descriptions, but if they got caught, they probably would have been reprimanded. So I think that, and why did they do it? Because they valued being part of an enterprise whose purpose was noble, curing disease and easing suffering. And they wanted to play their role in that enterprise and got great satisfaction from

doing it. And yet many, many employers you hear say, well, when we try to give people that kind of freedom and that kind of, you know, they screw it up. Well, I think that there's no question that that sometimes happens. When you give people discretion, you increase the chances that they're going to make mistakes. It's just that I think that what we have now is basically settling for mediocrity. You can't design the ideal system that works flawlessly, and you can just plug people into it like cogs in a machine. So you come up with some system that basically gets you mediocre,

and mediocre is better than horrible, but it's much worse than what's possible. There's a famous example of when Toyota took over a General Motors manufacturing plant in California 30 years ago, and they didn't change the workforce, but they changed the organization of work. They flattened the hierarchy. They encouraged teamwork. This was the worst General Motors plant in the entire world, and they turned it into a plant that was just as efficient and just as high quality as the Toyota plants in Japan without changing any of the personnel, just by giving people more of a sense of responsibility over the task. So this happened 30 years ago.

The plant was successful for 30 years. It closed a few years ago. And it's an example of how assuming the worst out of your employees is going to get them to give you the worst, which is what General Motors had been doing. Well, that's a great example, and proves the point, and yet there's an awful lot of resistance to making those kinds of changes. There's huge resistance, and I think part of it is that we've absorbed this ideology that's almost 300 years old, that people are basically lazy and can't be trusted. So that's our default. That's our starting point. The other

thing, I think, is that managers are reluctant to give up control, because one of the things that might happen is that people above the managers discover you don't need the managers because it turns out the people on the floor can do the job perfectly well without being micromanaged. So you're right. People are very reluctant to make these changes. The sense I get is that if you want to know what companies to buy stock in, you should look at the 100 best places to work and forget about everything else. If you've got a company that people want to work at, it's almost overwhelmingly likely that you have a very successful company.

And you'd think by now everyone would have learned this little secret, but apparently not. Well, and not everybody can get on that list of most desired-to-work-at companies. No, that's right. And not all of them are these high-flying, high-tech, high-visibility places. There's a place called the Container Store. I don't know if you've ever shopped in a container. You buy containers.

You buy things to put your stuff in. And the workforce there is just unbelievable. They know their product line. They're unbelievably helpful. They're cheerful. They really feel like their mission is to enable you to succeed in your shopping trip, whatever that might be. It's just, you walk in there, it's like almost nowhere else you've ever been. So it doesn't have to be Google to be a place that people want to show up every day. I'm speaking today with Barry Schwartz.

He is a professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and his book is called Why We Work. People who listen to something you should know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more.

A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial.

And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. So Barry, it's interesting when people talk about the best places to work. It's always the same companies. It's Microsoft, it's Google, Southwest Airlines. It's always the same usual suspects. Yeah, that's right. Look, but these are very high-visibility companies. So it isn't that Google is a great place to work

that makes it so high-visibility. As it turns out, it is a great place to work, although Google has its own problems with encouraging people to maintain a decent work-life balance because people just work so damn hard, and then they end up getting burned out. You do hear about these places, but they're not the only places. And I want to emphasize that you don't have to be Google and have infinite money

so you can give people free food and free dry cleaning and free everything else. You can be a much more prosaic neighborhood place and still instill in your workforce this sense that we're all in this together. We are serving a noble purpose, even if it's only in a small way making our customers' lives better, and we trust you and respect your opinions. And when you have something to suggest, we listen. And all of a sudden, you've turned your workplace into a place where employees want to be.

So why do you think, and maybe you've had this discussion with people, why do you think people push back and say, well, that's great for some people, but that wouldn't work here? I think people are afraid to relinquish control. There's a kind of hero worship of the, quote, lean and mean organization. You come into a place where it seems to be inefficient. You start, heads start rolling. You fire people. You impose these metrics. You insist that people meet these standards, and you fire the bottom 10% anyway. And this is our corporate hero. The data suggests that people who run their organizations in this way don't succeed. But nonetheless, these are the people we lionize. These are the people we hold up as models of what it takes to be a successful leader of a large company. There are certain falsehoods that just die hard, and this is one of them.

Well, and you're trying to change that. That's the hope. And, you know, if 1.7 million people buy my book, we will have transformed the workplace. And your life. That too. Seven million books would be a nice little payday for you. It would be very nice. But you don't do it.

It would be very nice. I have no illusions, however. But you don't do it for a paycheck because that's not who you are. But my point is, I'm not saying I don't do it for a paycheck. This is a mistake. It's not like you're either an angel and money's irrelevant or you're a devil and it's only about money're either an angel and money's irrelevant, or you're

a devil, and it's only about money. People wouldn't work if they didn't get paid. I'm not disputing that. And I won't suggest that it won't feel good if, you know, I can contribute more to my grandchildren's looming college tuition bills than I'm able to now. I'm not pretending that people don't have to make a living. Of course they do. But we've taken that one piece of motivation that people have for work, and we've made it the only piece. You know, when you're at a party and you're talking about with somebody about some other person who you both know, and somebody says he's in it for the money, this is not a description. When people say he's in it for the money, this is not a description. When people say he's in it for the money, they're making a judgment.

There's a word that's omitted that's implied he's only in it for the money. And we don't think particularly well of people who are only in it for the money, even if they make a lot of money. So I think that we all kind of understand that, you know, full human beings aspire to more than big bank accounts. And if that's all you're after, then there's something defective about you. And if you organize works, that's the only thing you can possibly achieve, then you're going to become just that kind of person who's only in it for the money, because there's nothing else there to get. Well, and I, you know, it occurred to me too, that, you know, people have a sense of this, anybody

who's done volunteer work or whatever, where it isn't for the money, and there's still a great deal of satisfaction and reward that can come from that, sometimes even more than work, has nothing to do with money. Absolutely so, and there's a lot of research that shows if you get people to volunteer and then you pay them, you make them less likely to volunteer. It's important to them that they're not doing it for the money. If I ask you to help me load a couch onto a van, you'll say, sure.

You know, you're engaged in a social transaction. You're doing somebody a favor. If I tell you I'll pay you $20 to help me load this couch onto a van, you'll say, sorry. Got something else. Got somewhere to be. you I'll pay you 20 bucks to help me load this couch onto the van, you'll say, sorry, got something else, got somewhere to be. So, you know, this kind of study has been done several times in lots of different contexts. It matters to people that they see themselves as the kind of people who are not in it solely for the money. I think that's right. Well, as you said in the beginning, there is this theory, I think you're right, that it permeates people's thinking that we work for the money, that it's for the paycheck, and that if we didn't have sense that you're doing something that's really very satisfying and probably part of human nature.

Barry Schwartz has been my guest. He is a professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and he's author of the book, Why We Work. You'll find a link to his book in the show notes for this episode. Thank you, Barry. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong. Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we

have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. In the late 1800s, and this is going to sound so unbelievable, but in the late 1800s, one of the most dangerous things you could do in some places in America was sit down and eat dinner.

And this is so interesting to me because we've talked about food safety before on this podcast and how generally our food supply is pretty safe. But that was not the case in the late 1800s. Here's a quick snapshot of what happened. People were moving from rural areas to towns and cities thanks to the Industrial Revolution. When people lived in rural areas, well, they grew their own food, or they at least knew where it came from. But when they moved to the city, they got their food from food stores, and the food stores got their food from food

companies, many of which did all kinds of things to the food to increase their profits. And some of what they did to the food to make it last longer made people sick, and in many cases, killed them. Eating bad food was a big cause of death in some parts of the country. And here's what's so fascinating. There were no laws against it. Food companies could do anything they wanted to the food, and if you died, too bad. Tough luck. That's a shame. But there was no crime. Then along came a guy named Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who was a chemist, and he is one of the people partly responsible for changing the system. You've probably never heard of him, but without him, who knows, you may not even be here today. Because if it

weren't for him, maybe one of your ancestors would have been killed by a dinner they ate back then. Anyway, Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has researched this problem and Dr. Wiley and wrote about it in a book called The Poison Squad. And it is such, to me anyway, such an important part of our history that hardly anybody knows about. Hi, Debra. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, it's great to be here, Mike. So go ahead and add to what I've already said to help paint a more vivid picture of what it was like back then. So I'm really going to take us back to the 19th century because it's such a fascinating

moment in the sort of the history of food safety and because it was such a complete shock to me when I realized how bad it was that you know we've tended at least I certainly bought into this kind of mythology of the happy pink cheeked healthy Americans with their creamy, foamy, untainted milk and fresh produce. And that was really not true unless you lived on a farm, say. For most people who were working people, they got their food at grocers, and it was food, as I came to realize, before we had any federal regulations on safety standards or quality standards or even putting information on labels about what was in your food. And so the food was often insanely fraudulent or even dangerous in some fundamentally troubling ways.

And I'm happy to give you a better sense of that or some examples of that, if you like. Please do, because I don't think people understand. I certainly, until I looked at the book, would have never thought that literally you were taking your life in your hands sometimes, eating food or drinking milk that you would buy at the store. I mean, it's, yeah, so examples would be good.

It's interesting because I was down talking, I gave a talk at the FDA earlier this fall, and they said that, you know, the standard belief now is that food, just sitting down to your daily breakfast, lunch, and dinner, was one of the 10 top causes of death in the United States in the 19th century. So why would that be? Well, there was a lot of crazy bad stuff in unregulated food. And to give you a couple of examples, for instance, flour was often extended with or mixed with ground stone or ground gypsum, which we use in wallboard, which would have then contained some asbestos. Coffee was quite often not coffee at all. You would buy a can of ground coffee. It would contain anything from charred bone to burnt rope to coconut shells dyed dark with actually a lead dye, a black lead dye.

Cinnamon and spices of that kind of color were filled with brick dust. And so you had this panorama of kind of fraudulent food. I found this funny, but I don't think they did at the time, but there was a condition in the late 19th century known as grocer's itch. And so a lot of people would go to the grocery store or to the farmer's market, and there would be big barrels of produce or products from coffee beans to flour to sugar that would be sort of dippered out for you, and you would get it hand-delivered, essentially. So grocers' itch related to the fact that for brown sugar,

manufacturers had discovered that if they ground up insects, they could extend the brown sugar. But the problem was they didn't always kill the insects, and so grocers would reach into the barrel of sugar and end up with, oh, they were chewed on by lice and other things that were crawling around, and then people would eat those as well. So you had all of this kind of curious and sometimes dangerous fraud. Mostly it was just cheating, right? But sometimes it was really dangerous.

And then you had other things, which is the late 19th century. We're in this period, it's the rise of industrial chemistry, which is the rise of the modern era of chemistry. So all of these new compounds are being synthesized in laboratories. They're super cheap. They're much cheaper than anything you can get in nature, right? And so you start finding, you know, coal-based dyes to color food rather than vegetable dyes, or you start finding all kinds of additives and preservatives. Refrigeration was not very good back then. Food tended to rot. Right. And since refrigeration was so poor back then, talk about how dairy food

was, milk in particular, would be targeted to try to make it last longer. Dairy men of the 19th century sent it out with water and recolor it with chalk or plaster of Paris, you know, on the same line as what we're talking about with some of these other cheats. But they also don't really care where they get the water, so some of the water comes from ponds or even swamps, and it has worms in it, and it's full of horrible bacteria, which makes it rot more quickly and makes people

sick. And then you see the rise of these new industrial chemicals, and one of them is formaldehyde, which was the beloved embalming agent of the Civil War, right? Super cheap, thousands of corpses, formaldehyde becomes a rock star of preservation in the 19th century. And so dairymen think, well, you know, if it's so good at preserving bodies, how about if I just put it in milk, right? And it worked. I mean, the thing I want to give formaldehyde credit for, it's a great preservative. You can actually find ads in the 19th century, buy our, you know, our special milk, and you can just leave it on the counter, and it'll keep for weeks, which today we would go, you, but back then it was like a miracle of science, and the only problem was formaldehyde's really poisonous. So the things

that were being done to food, to milk, and to other foods, spices and all this. On what scale was it being done? Are there just a few cases, or is this wide? How big a problem was this? Yeah, that's a good question. With formaldehyde, it was very widespread, right? You'd get these preservatives called rosaline or preservaline. No one ever said formaldehyde. And dairymen would put them in

milk or butchers would put them in meat, and you pretty much were guaranteed of formaldehyde in your daily diet no matter what. And so you find in the late 19th century both embalmed milk scandals and embalmed beef scandals, and particularly the embalmed milk scandals, which popped up in cities around the country, were referring to the illnesses and deaths of children who were drinking milk. And you would see public health departments saying, please don't serve your children milk. It's poisonous, right? So we know that that was very widespread. Some of the other ones, you know, really depended, but if I was going to pick the ones that were very commonly used in the food supply, borax, you sometimes find that now in

the cleaning department of grocery stores, 20-multi-borax, exactly the same thing that was going into food as a preservative. Salicylic acid, which we know from aspirin, and the big risk with that, of course, is too much of it, and it'll cause the lining of your intestinal tract to bleed. That was very widely used, particularly in alcohol, right? Beer, wine tended to have a heavy dose of salicylic acid. Copper sulfate, which is a heavy metal, was used to green canned vegetables. These were really common practices. And so in the case of illness and death, are there numbers? Can we quantify this?

No, I don't think so, because we didn't have a public health service and we didn't have epidemiologists. So the statistic I quoted you earlier that food was considered one of the top ten causes of death in the United States, whereas now if you look at them, you're going to see accidents and cancer and heart disease and those kinds of things. Back then, food was in this very generalized eating-could-kill-you way, right? There's a really great medical historian at the University of Michigan, Howard Markell, and he says that medical historians

generally refer to the 19th century as the century of the great American stomachache because so many people were sickened by their food. So we know that it was responsible for a lot of illnesses and deaths, right? In children, certainly milk with children, hundreds if not thousands of deaths. And then along comes this guy, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, and he, you know, he sounds like a food safety superhero. Where did he come from? Well, I tend to think of him as kind of a holy roller chemist.

He was a chemist from Indiana. He grew up in a very religious and highly moral household. His father was a preacher, but also a conductor on the Underground Railroad. And you see him very early on in college talking about science and the service of good. And he had started out, he was the first chemistry professor at Purdue University when it had a faculty of six. And he went on from there to be the state chemist for Indiana

and analyzing fraudulent food, which they were becoming concerned about at Indiana. And his work there, both as just a food agricultural analyst, he was an analytical chemist, and in fraud brought him to the attention of the federal government. And so in the early 1880s, he goes to USDA and he becomes chief of what is known as the Bureau of Chemistry, which is about a dozen men, and they are the only dozen men in the entire U.S. government who are responsible for the safety of the food supply, because there is no EPA or FDA or any of the consumer protection agencies we know today.

That just wasn't done back then. So he takes this tiny agency. And by this time, the issue of food fraud has started to really bother them. And for the first time in the history of the USDA, they start investigating what's in the food supply. And he does a series of reports. They were called Bulletin 13 reports. And they take apart everything, you know, milk and cheese and candy and cocoa and coffee and spices and bread and meat and vegetables. I mean, a lot of the things I'm telling you come out of Wiley's investigation of the food supply. And they build this damning portrait of the state of modern commercial manufactured food. And that begins to make him, and this is absolutely true about him,

you know, less of a purely objective scientist and more of a chemist who says this has to change. He becomes, in the course of his investigations, starts moving toward being an actual crusader. Do you think that the people who were responsible for tainting this food realized how horrible the damage was they were causing, or were they just trying to, you know, make things stretch a little further and no harm, no foul? I mean, I think it varied.

If you took something like formaldehyde, everyone knew that children were dying, right? And people continued to use it. It wasn't illegal. They weren't charged. So in some cases, you had people who just thought that the additive and the profits that it brought you were worth whatever the cost. In other cases, going back to your question about how many people were really killed and sickened, the science was really primitive. I mean, food safety science is very recent in this country, really starting in the era

of Wiley. People did not know how dangerous these things were. They were almost randomly putting them in the food supply. And because there was no one to say, well, you have to safety test that first, right? Or you have to establish a safe limit first. How much can you actually put in? There was no pressure on the scientific establishment to do this kind of work. So there was almost nothing

there. And I do want to say that except in cases of highly poisonous things like formaldehyde, people might be getting sick, but they weren't dropping dead in the street. So, you know, people gambled on the fact that this was probably safe or safe enough. And that eventually made Wiley, you know, began to find that intolerable, the gamble. The gamble was public health. And when people began to realize that this was a real problem, was it, oh, thank God he showed up, or was there real anger towards him for basically exposing what was more or less a sweet deal up till then? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, certainly on the commercial side, for the most part, manufacturers were absolutely furious and

hated him, right? And during the course of the, I think when he started doing these Bulletin 13 investigations, people didn't really realize the power they were going to have because they didn't know what was out there and what he was going to find. And he didn't either. When he started, he just started increasingly saying, we should label our food, right? Small children are eating this. Elderly people are eating this.

Sick people are eating this. Theyly people are eating this. Sick people are eating this. They really have a right to know. I mean, he started out in that very, let's just inform the public way. But as this portrait of the food supply grew, you started seeing more public awareness, people starting to realize just how risky their food was. And related to that, and certainly driven by Wiley and his allies, more public pressure to quit doing this. And so Wiley was a huge target for the food and drug industry, right? They planted fake stories about him. They infiltrated the Department of Agriculture with their own allies to make his job harder.

You saw, and almost a day didn't pass without some kind of negative, you know, pushback against what he was doing. People were really angry. Isn't that amazing? And when you stop and think about, you know, there are obviously issues with food safety today, but it was nothing there were all of these unanswered questions like, you know, how many doses of formaldehyde are you getting? You know, are you getting above the doctor-recommended dose of salicylic acid? I mean, no one knew any of this. So, you know, I think we tend to suffer in this country from regulatory memory failure, right?

And most people were not around when this was an issue anyway. But we don't think about the fact that what regulation really is is consumer protection. And when you have none, which is the state of food and drink in the United States. No consumer protection, no safety rules. It was really crazy. I mean, really, really crazy. Other people must have been aware of what was going on. And I know you talk about that there were state agencies and other people who were also crusading against this. But weren't there people talking about this?

There were women who wrote cookbooks, which is one of my personal favorites, is that you go back into this period in history, and you have cookbook writers like Fannie Farmer saying, and this recipe calls for cinnamon, but just be aware that the cinnamon could actually not be cinnamon. Or in one case, Fannie Farmer actually wrote a whole chapter on you know if you are cooking for invalids beware of milk right so you see yeah it was really this sort of almost this underground network of women and women's groups wiley you know deliberately

worked with the women's groups because he thought they were such effective organizers. But, you know, in the way that we'll throw around the phrase a tipping point, he brought science to it. So one of the things that he did is he brought the power of these chemical analysis of food in which you could really lay out a case and say, here we have actual evidence that food contains these things. Here we have actual evidence that these things are bad for you. And this is evidence that we need change. And he did that both with those analyses of the food supply and then, of course, with

his famous poison squad experiments, which involved testing these on humans in a very, actually his co-workers, in a very deliberate way. And so that was really the way he was a driver. But, you know, there was beginning to be this sort of coast-to-coast awareness that it was dangerous to sit down and have a meal in late 19th century and early 20th century America, and that, you know, the people who ought to be looking out for you were not. Well, here we are about 120 years later, and it's unimaginable what you're talking about. We can't even fathom that you would go to the store basically taking your life in your hands. It is such an amazing and important story, and I appreciate you sharing it. Deborah Blum has been my guest. The book is called The Poison Squad, and there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes.

Thanks, Deborah. Thank you so much. Good luck with the book. Bye-bye. If you're one of those people who just can't help but stay up late, you're probably a genuine night owl. Scientists have determined that night owls are genetically different than intermediate sleepers and early birds. They studied the brains of all three types and found that night owls tend to have diminished white matter. Now, if that sounds bad, well, it is.

Night owls are also more prone to depression, tobacco use, and problems with cognitive function. Now, the good news. Night owls tend to be more creative and productive than early risers and have more stamina later in the day. They're more analytical and better at reasoning and are more likely to achieve greater financial and professional success than the early-to-bed, early-to-rise types. And that is something you should know. We have a lot of ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts,

but we can always use more, and they really help. So take a moment and leave a rating or review. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager,

but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're

wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes.

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