Fellow Ridiculous Historians, welcome to our classic episode, you know, nowadays in the United States,

if you go to the grocery store, you can be reasonably certain that the stuff you're buying is going to be safe if not super healthy.

Well, and if you know, if it's not, it probably has a giant skull and crossbones on the back or a big warning and so you know it's sort of like

Buyer beware if you're gonna drink drano that's on you and how did we get to this I mean it's normalized now but it wasn't always the case so how did we get to this, I mean it's normalized now, but it wasn't always the case.

So how do we get to this really cool era of food safety?

Oh man, I mean it's, it's, it's, I don't really want to spoil it it but it does remind me of just like a time

before something like the FDA existed and it was just a wild west out there you know in terms of

what ingredients might be in food and medicine and things

that people were consuming on a regular basis. It goes into like ideas of snake

oil, you know, sham remedies and all of that and of course

Poison in the food.

Ah, and what an excellent setup for our protagonist of the story.

We can't wait for you to meet him a guy named Harvey Wiley who didn't think

that conventional safety studies were enough. Wiley went straight to human experimentation.

Oh boy, Wiley and his poison squad,

which also could be a good hip-hop crew name.

Or maybe it's like a poison fan club.

I don't know.

Let's roll the tape.

I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all new podcast,

There and Gone.

It's a real life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar,

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