Deborah Blum

Initial Thoughts: “Deborah Blum’s novel about the fight to develop food safety regulations and the beginnings of the Food and Drug Administration is fascinating if gruesome. To all the people concerned about genetically modified foods, I say that after reading this book, GMOs do not concern me anymore because our food could be SO much worse.”

Now: There are two things I take away from The Poison Squad. The first thing is that there has always been a political party that concerns itself show more more with corporations and corporate profit than with the health and welfare of the citizens of the United States. At the turn of the twentieth century, this party happened to be the Democratic Party. Today, it is the Republican Party. Same issues when it comes to voting on legislation that will help consumers versus help maintain the profits of corporations – and those kickbacks corporations provide members of Congress and senators. The second thing is that corporations never have and will never care for anything other than making the most money as possible, even if it means their products kill people. Working in business as I do, I understand this idea at a fundamental level, but this idea of profit over life struck home after reading all of the ways food manufacturers justified using lethal chemicals or other ingredients in their foodstuffs to make them cheaper to produce but keep consumer prices the same. Formaldehyde. Stone. Chalk. Coal tar. Salicylic acid. Lead. Borax. And these are the items they purposely used. Let’s not even talk about the cleanliness of their manufacturing processes! The whole thing is sickening. And depressing. The optimistic part of me would like to think that we, as a country, are better than we were in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Instead, I read about the decade-long fight Harvey Wiley had to make changes in food production, and I look at the ongoing war regarding healthcare, immigration, women’s rights, transgender rights, etc., and I know that we are no better than we were. Not by a long shot.

The Poison Squad may show how little changes there are on a political front, but it also shows just how many changes there are when it comes to foodstuffs. To my mind, worrying about hormones or food origins pales in comparison to wondering if your food is going to kill you. We joke about first world problems when we complain that something is not farm-fresh or organic, but seriously, milk used to contain formaldehyde. Embalming fluid. It makes all arguments in favor of organic ingredients feel like a joke.

Plus, men voluntarily ingested these toxic ingredients in human experiments because no one knew just how toxic they were to a human. This is not a case of watch factory workers using radium paint and developing cancer later in life. These were men who participated in experiments knowing they would be ingesting an ingredient that may be toxic. I cannot even fathom holding such human trials today, let alone finding volunteers to participate.

The political aspect of the fight for food safety may hit a little too close to home given today’s political vituperativeness, but the down and dirty details about the reasons for the need for food safety are fascinating. The Poison Squad does drag at times, but then you read about the fact that Upton Sinclair toned down those sections of his story regarding the slaughterhouse (and made them more palatable), and you are right back into the horror story that was food manufacturing in the Victorian era. Crazy stuff. It only makes you wonder how or why we as a species have lasted as long as we have. show less

The book has a pretty unwieldy subtitle: "Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York." On the other hand, the subtitle gives you an idea of the amount of ground the book will try to cover. In the early twentieth century, the coroner's office was a place where the highest bidder, rather than science, often determined what went on a death certificate. And if the officials weren't corrupt, they were just ignorant. (The sorry state of medicine in the United States less than show more one hundred years ago would have shocked me if I hadn't already read The Great Influenza.) Not much was really understood about poison, its effects on the body, and how to find signs of those effects post-mortem. Each chapter is titled for the name of a poison, although some poisons do double duty, serving as the heading for more than one chapter.

Enter Charles Norris, appointed chief medical examiner in New York, and his toxicologist, Alexander Gettler. They did the hard work of turning around public opinion on scientific processes used to determine cause of death. They went from being openly mocked on the witness stand to being powerful allies to prosecutors (and occasionally defense attorneys - sometimes the accused really was innocent). Of course, that path wasn't an easy one, and they had to battle not only the public, but all too often the mayors of New York, who remained largely unconvinced that the office was all that useful. Why on earth would they need to get to a crime scene within 30 minutes? Why couldn't they just take a train or a cab and get there when they got there? Why did they need assistants, lab equipment, etc.?

In addition to the actual work done by the forensic scientists, the book covers a lot of what was going on in the time period. And if you know anything about the 1920s, you know that a big part of what was going on was Prohibition. Sometimes the connection between Prohibition and the rest of the narrative is a natural fit, such as when Blum discusses methyl alcohol (used to "denature" alcohol). People were desperate for something accessible and cheap to drink, and they tried just about anything. Methyl alcohol was a popular, if dangerous choice. But even in other chapters that have essentially nothing to do with drinking, Prohibition is shoehorned in. It adds to the atmosphere, but can seem jarring or like the author is sometimes really grasping for some sort of connection. The most interesting chapter to me was probably the one on radium. "It glows, so we'll put it in a drinkable patent medicine so your skin can also have a healthy glow!" Obviously, that didn't turn out very well.

Recommended for: viewers of CSI, people with strong stomachs, fans of Boardwalk Empire, anyone who wonders if the FDA is really necessary.

Quote: "Perhaps, scientists suggested, the health effects of the mineral hot springs came from radioactive elements in the ground. Spas in upstate New York rushed to compete by dropping uranium ores into their swimming pools." show less

this was such an interesting look at how forensic medicine and toxicology got its start and was pioneered by charles norris and alexander gettler (names that really should be well known for their work) in new york. blum wove the history (mostly about the prohibition years) with police cases of the day that showed both how murderers used the poisons to kill their victims, and also how the medical examiner and the forensic chemists used science to solve what happened. these men advanced show more science so far and did incredible work with little resources. i was mostly struck by how their work was done with little fanfare, for the love of knowledge and advancement of the science, how many poor animals were killed to learn all that they were studying, and how dangerous the years of prohibition were.

i didn't know that it was a failed experiment from the get-go but that it lasted 13 years, or that the gov't itself made the dangerous alcohol replacements even more dangerous in order to try to keep people from drinking (even though it only increased the number of people dying from imbibing). i was also struck by how long and painful a death by cyanide is since from movies i was under the impression that it was near instantaneous. (it's not long but maybe 15-45 min, but is brutal).

overall this was a fast pace read of history that she kept interesting with all kinds of police cases and murders, but also chock full of chemistry info and science. really well done. show less

A fascinating read, albeit not one to undertake on a full stomach. Deborah Blum's The Poison Squad recounts the origins of food safety laws in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century U.S. Come for the anecdotes which you will be forced, forced, to read aloud to anyone unlucky enough to be in earshot of you (the U.S. government once sued some barrels of Coca-Cola! It used to be possible, and indeed legal, to buy 42lb barrels of decaying eggs mixed with borax to use in cake show more baking!), stay for the horrifying realisation of how little has truly changed in the battle between those working for food safety and environmental health standards and pro-business capitalists with their eye only on a corporation's bottom line. show less