♪ ♪
(utensils scraping)
NARRATOR: "We sit at a table delightfully spread,"
"and teeming with good things to eat.
"And daintily finger the cream-tinted bread,
"just needing to make it complete--
"a film of the butter so yellow and sweet,
"well suited to make every minute a dream of delight.
"And yet while we eat,
"we cannot help asking 'What's in it?'
"The wine which you drink never heard of a grape,
"but of tannin and coal tar is made.
"And you could not be certain, except for their shape,
"that the eggs by a chicken were laid.
"And the salad, which bears such an innocent look
"and whispers of fields that are green,
"is covered with germs, each armed with a hook
"to grapple with liver and spleen.
♪ ♪
"The banquet how fine, don't begin it
"till you think of the past and the future and sigh,
"'How I wonder, how I wonder,
what's in it.'"
Harvey Wiley.
In 1901, government chemist Harvey Washington Wiley
set out to prove that Americans were being poisoned
by an ever-increasing number of new chemical preservatives
secretly being added to their food.
Wiley had been on a public crusade for two decades
to force the government to regulate
the powerful new food manufacturing industry,
when he struck upon a novel approach to raise awareness:
human trials.
SARAH LOHMAN: What Wiley wanted to find out is,
"If you eat enough of this, will it kill you?"
It created public awareness for people
to begin to question what was in their food,
and I think, more importantly,
question these large corporations.
America was definitely the Wild West
for putting all kinds of chemicals into food.
It was completely unregulated.
Any producer could get away with whatever they wanted.
LOHMAN: Before Wiley, there was nobody testing
to see whether something was harmful or not.
NARRATOR: Wiley became the face of the pure food movement
that was sweeping the country,
mobilizing legions of activists
allied in a fight for basic human rights
that came to define the Progressive Era.
LOHMAN: This man's course in life was to make food safe.
Making sure that the poorest among us
could go to the store and get food
that wasn't going to kill them.
NARRATOR: Wiley's controversial experiments
captivated and even entertained the country,
and his volunteers earned the nickname "the Poison Squad."
Their sacrifice helped lead to the passage
of the first consumer-protection laws in American history.
DEBORAH BLUM: The Poison Squad was one
of the most influential scientific studies
of the 20th century.
BRUCE WATSON: This is the first federal attempt
to regulate the quality and adulteration of food.
In a very real way, he's the father of the FDA.
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(liquid bubbling)
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NARRATOR: In 1881,
37-year-old chemist Harvey Wiley
was working in relative obscurity
in the lone laboratory on the campus of Purdue University.
Wiley had become fixated on the analysis of food products,
perfecting techniques for identifying and isolating
their various chemical components.
Earlier that year,
the Indiana State Board of Health had asked Wiley
to examine the purity
of commercially sold honey and maple syrup.
Wiley collected samples from across the state.
Much to his surprise,
his analysis revealed up to 90% of them were fake.
♪ ♪
Most of the jars labeled "honey" were just tinted corn syrup
with a scrap of honeycomb thrown in
to complete the deception.
LOHMAN: At the turn of the century,
people would buy honey, and it was usually corn syrup.
People would buy maple syrup, and it was usually corn syrup.
People would buy jam, and it was usually corn syrup.
You had no idea what was in your jar of jam.
You had no way to know that,
because there was no labeling on these foods either.
BLUM: Wiley takes all of these samples
and finds hugely widespread fraud
across the board in all of these products
and basically comes out and says,
"If this is true in Indiana alone,
"we know it's true everywhere,
"So this is a national problem,
and this is not acceptable."
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Wiley's interest in the new field of food chemistry
was happening at a moment of unprecedented change
in the way Americans ate.
By the late 19th century,
the country was in the midst
of a second industrial revolution.
Great advances in technology
allowed for the expansion of all types of industry,
from steel manufacturing and coal mining
to communication and railroads.
Trains now moved people and produce
at a pace and distance never imagined,
radically re-shaping the American landscape.
No facet of life went untouched
by the great economic transformation,
including the American diet.
Cities swelled
as millions of new laborers began working in factories.
The nation's efforts to feed them sparked a boom
in the new field of industrial food manufacturing.
BLUM: Post-Civil War,
you start seeing a migration to the city
and away from people who were living
in the farm-fresh communities.
So there's more and more people,
more and more food has to be manufactured.
The biggest purely economic development
is the rise of big business.
You get Pillsbury, you get Heinz, Campbell's,
Nabisco.
All these big food companies emerge at this time.
NARRATOR: With industrialization came consolidation.
Midwestern cities grew into major food-manufacturing hubs,
where everything from wheat, corn,
and livestock could be processed.
By 1890, Chicago's Union Stockyards
were processing over nine million head of cattle a year.
(cattle mooing)
And by the turn of the century,
meatpacking behemoths like Swift and Armour
were providing nearly 90% of the country's processed meat.
Rather than moving food
from the area surrounding the city to the city,
you know, you can grow your beef out in the Midwest.
You can process it in Chicago,
and you can bring it down into New York City,
all through railroads at fairly low cost.
ERIC SCHLOSSER: The slaughterhouses of America
created the notion of an assembly line.
When Henry Ford came up with the assembly line for the Model T,
it was inspired by the slaughterhouses in Chicago,
which were applying all kinds of new notions of efficiency
to food production.
NARRATOR: With mass distribution across the country,