Special Episode: Deborah Blum & The Poison Squad

This Podcast Will Kill You

Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts

Health & Fitness, Science

4.8 • 17.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 July 2023

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Oh, to taste the food of the past. Strawberry jam made from farm-fresh strawberries. Milk straight from the cow. Cookies baked with freshly churned butter and brown sugar. Because that’s how it was, right? Everything used to be fresher, more pure, unadulterated by preservatives or additives, right? Our latest TPWKY book club pick shows us just how wrong that notion is. Science journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Deborah Blum joins us this week to chat about her book, The Poison Squad, which tells the story of the fight for food safety regulation in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. In our conversation, Blum rips off those rose-tinted nostalgia glasses and reveals that strawberry jam rarely contained strawberries, milk could include a mix of formaldehyde and pond water, butter had borax, and brown sugar was mostly ground up insects. Until one man, chemist Harvey Wiley, stepped up and spearheaded the campaign for food safety legislation, all of these horrific practices of food adulteration were entirely legal. Tune in to learn what Wiley was up against and some of the tactics used in his struggle, including the wild story of the experiment that gave this book its title.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is exactly right.
0:06.0	Many put their hope in Dr. Serhat.
0:09.0	His company was worth half a billion dollars.
0:11.0	His research promised groundbreaking treatments for
0:14.3	HIV and cancer, but the brilliant doctor was hiding a secret. You can listen to
0:20.0	Dr Death, bad magic, exclusively an ad free by subscribing to Wendry Plus in the Wendry app. Oh, Oh, Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh, and this is this podcast will kill you. Welcome everyone to the latest
1:15.7	installment of the DPW K Y Book Club where our two-read lists grow ever longer and
1:22.2	our appreciation for amazing science
1:24.7	communicators writing these enlightening and entertaining books grows ever
1:29.2	deeper. On a personal note, this miniseries has been an absolute blast to put together with some truly unforgettable conversations about incredibly wide-ranging topics.
1:41.0	And I just really love that I get to do this. So thank you so much to all
1:47.1	you wonderful people for listening and to all these amazing authors for chatting.
1:51.7	Without you this would not be possible. We find ourselves
1:56.2	now in the second to last episode in this mini series, and while I won't list off each book that
2:02.2	we've talked about like I've done in every other
2:04.0	intro because that's a whole lot of books at this point. I will just say again how
2:09.2	much I've loved hearing from you all about these episodes and will happily welcome any other feedback,
2:15.6	favorites, follow-up questions, future book recommendations, or anything else you want to tell me.
2:21.6	Okay, but that's enough podcast business for the time being.
2:25.2	Now let's get into what we'll be talking about today and that is the food of the past.
2:31.8	If I asked you to imagine what food tasted or looked like back at the turn of the 20th century,
2:38.6	I think many of us might imagine an idealized world where tomatoes were plump, juicy, and always ripe,
	...

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