The Poison Squad

by Deborah Blum

  “More than 90 percent of local meat markets in the state were using chemical preservatives and in nearly every butcher shop could be found a bottle of Freezine, Preservaline, or Iceine,” he reported. “In the dried beef, in the smoked meats, in the canned bacon, in the canned chipped beef, boracic acid or borates (products of the borax industry) are a common ingredient.” In almost every food product Ladd analyzed he found unlabeled industrial compounds that had never been tested for safety, although some were known toxins. “Ninety per cent of the so-called French peas we have taken up in North Dakota were found to contain copper salts.” Baked goods were often loaded with “alum,” a salt of aluminum and potassium, used as a preservative, in baking powders, and to whiten bread.

  Ladd was particularly critical of what bottlers were passing off as “catsup” or “ketchup.” (The spellings were already interchangeable.) It was often unrelated to the well-known tomato product. The cheapest of these sauces were frequently made from unwanted pumpkin skins and rinds, stewed, dyed red, and spiced up with vinegar and a little cayenne or paprika. Or ketchup was a soup of “waste products from canners—pulp, skins, ripe tomatoes, green tomatoes, starch paste, coal-tar colors, and chemical preservatives, usually benzoate of soda or salicylic acid.” The North Dakota food chemistry analysis, which Ladd would issue in full the following year, revealed that 100 percent of ketchups were rich in coal-tar dyes, preservatives, and waste products. He also found similar problems in a range of other products, reporting “one hundred percent adulteration” of jams and jellies, 88 percent adulteration of canned corn, and 50 percent of canned peas. And the list went on.

  Ladd sent newspapers around the state details of every adulteration finding that he’d uncovered. In response, the National Biscuit Company (later renamed Nabisco) had its legal department engage in an expensive long-distance phone call, suggesting that he tone it down. Ladd, as the local papers gleefully reported, responded by losing his temper. His secretary reported hearing his shouting: “By God, no Eastern lawyer is going to tell me what we can eat out here in North Dakota!”

  Ladd’s friend and colleague South Dakota food chemist James Shepard, meanwhile, had launched a similar campaign for a food safety law. To showcase the problem for state residents, Shepard created and publicized a daily meal plan to illustrate the seep of industrial chemistry into the average dinner. His menu, Shepard announced, was such that “any family in the United States might possibly use”:

  BREAKFAST

  Sausage: coal-tar dye and borax

  Bread: alum

  Butter: coal-tar dye

  Canned cherries: coal-tar dye and salicylic acid

  Pancakes: alum

  Syrup: sodium sulphite [then the spelling of sulfite]

  THIS GIVES EIGHT DOSES OF CHEMICALS AND DYES FOR BREAKFAST.

  DINNER

  Tomato soup: coal-tar dye and benzoic acid

  Cabbage and corned beef: saltpeter

  Canned scallops: sulfuric acid and formaldehyde

  Canned peas: salicylic acid

  Catsup: coal-tar dye and benzoic acid

  Vinegar: coal-tar dye

  Bread and butter: alum and coal-tar dye

  Mince pie: boracic acid

  Pickles: coppers, sodium sulphite, and salicylic acid

  Lemon ice cream: methyl alcohol

  THIS GIVES SIXTEEN DOSES FOR DINNER.

  SUPPER

  Bread and butter: alum and coal-tar dye

  Canned beef: borax

  Canned peaches: sodium sulfite, coal-tar dye, and salicylic acid

  Pickles: copper, sodium sulfite, and formaldehyde

  Catsup: coal-tar dye and benzoic acid

  Lemon cake: alum

  Baked pork and beans: formaldehyde

  Vinegar: coal-tar dye

  Currant jelly: coal-tar dye and salicylic acid

  Cheese: coal-tar dye

  THIS GIVES SIXTEEN DOSES FOR SUPPER.

  “According to this menu,” Shepard announced to his state’s newspapers, “the unconscious and unwilling patient gets forty doses of chemicals and colors per day.”

  But the additives were so little studied that even concerned scientists like Shepard and Ladd could only guess at what risk they might pose. There were some animal studies on these new food additives, but they were limited at best. One standard approach involved making a solution of residues from food and drink products and injecting that solution into rabbits. If the rabbits didn’t die within minutes, food manufacturers would declare the material to be nonpoisonous and safe for human beings.

  Wiley had long worried about this lack of guidance, lack of dosage limits, lack of basic information. If Americans consumed multiple doses of untested compounds in every meal with no assurance of their safety, he thought, then government officials like himself were failing them. The only way to fix that, he’d decided, was to devise some real public health experiments. And the most direct way to get the information would be by using human volunteers. So that same year, 1901, he asked Congress to fund a study that he described as “hygienic table trials.” His plan was to sit people down at “hygienic” tables—by which he meant a clean and carefully controlled setting—and feed them precisely measured meals. Half of the diners would eat fresh, additive-free dishes. The others would receive specific doses of a chemical preservative with each meal. The diners were not to know who was consuming what. Wiley and staff would monitor the health effects, if any, from these diets.

  He proposed that his human guinea pigs be tough male specimens, “young, robust fellows, with maximum resistance to deleterious effects of adulterated foods.” If such individuals were sickened, he reasoned, then this would be much more of a warning flag than if the test subjects were already considered fragile. “If they should show signs of injury after they were fed such substances for a period of time, the deduction would naturally follow that children and older persons, more susceptible than they, would be greater sufferers from similar causes.” The hygienic table trials, he explained in his proposal to Congress, would address “whether such preservatives should ever be used or not, and if so, what preservatives and in what quantities?” He added that the experiments could also address questions about other additives, such as food dyes. He had no idea what these experiments might find, he emphasized. But he could make a good case for giving them a try. And after all, the lawmakers were eating and drinking these unknown compounds too.

  In March, Congress authorized a grant of $5,000 (about $150,000 in today’s dollars) to, as the legislation put it, “enable the Secretary of Agriculture to investigate the character of food preservatives, coloring matters and other substances added to foods, to determine their relation to digestion and health, and to establish the principles which should guide their use.”

  The sum was only a third of what Wiley had requested, but it was a start. Now he just had to figure out how to launch the country’s first food-toxicity trials involving human subjects. He had no equipment. No supplies, food or otherwise. Nor did he have any test subjects nor any assurance that anyone would sign up to be poisoned.

  He needed a kitchen, a dining room, and a cook. For economy’s sake, and with Wilson’s permission, he decided to build his experimental restaurant in the basement at the Department of Agriculture. The resulting dining room was sparely furnished with two round tables of dark stained oak covered with white tablecloths. Six stiff ladder-back chairs gathered around each table. The china was plain white, the walls painted white and unadorned. Shelving, neatly divided into small cubbies, lined one wall and contained everything from pepper grinders to measuring tools, including a sturdy brass scale for weighing out the food.

  The adjoining kitchen was furnished with cooking necessities and no more. But the area was scrupulously clean and reasonably pleasant. “Cheerful surroundings, good company, and in
general an agreeable environment, tend to promote the favorable progress of digestion,” he wrote. “A reversal of the conditions of the environment have exactly the opposite effect.”

  He wanted the meals to be wholesome, tasty, and dished out on a precise schedule: breakfast at 8:00 a.m., luncheon at noon, dinner at 5:30 p.m., “these being the customary meal-times” for civil service employees. He wanted strictly fresh ingredients with no trace of preservatives. He’d budgeted for roast beef, beefsteak, veal, pork, chicken, turkey, fish, oysters, and an array of fruits and vegetables. Cream and milk were allowed, but these had to be pasteurized to avoid both bacterial infections and unmonitored chemical preservatives. Some canned soups, fruits, and vegetables were also allowed, but only in specially ordered, preservative-free batches from selected manufacturers. “The greatest pains were taken to secure absolute freedom from antiseptics in the whole of the food consumed.”

  The Bureau of Chemistry recruited volunteers by posting an advertisement, circulated to government employees, promising three free meals daily in exchange for participation in the study. As the Washington Post put it, the U.S. government was about to “open, for the first time in history, a scientific boarding house under the direction of Prof. Wiley.” To the professor’s relief, volunteers applied in abundance. Young men, earning perhaps a few hundred a year, struggling to make ends meet in the nation’s capital, saw a chance to stretch their budgets. Wiley, who had lived poor himself, understood that: “They are clerks, working for small salaries, and the item of free board will be a big one to them,” he said.

  The Chemistry Bureau also received a deluge of applications from fascinated citizens around the country: “Dear Sir,” wrote one applicant. “I read in the paper of your experiments on diet. I have a stomach that can stand anything. I have a stomach that will surprise you. . . . What do you think of it? My stomach can hold anything.”

  Two of Wiley’s chemist friends in Ohio wrote in jest to apply for positions. He wrote an amused reply, but one that probably gave them more insight into his perspective than he was willing to allow in public: “You will begin with a diet of borax garnished with salicylic acid—with a dash of alum on the side. You will then have a course in chromatics—beginning with the beautiful yellow of oleomargarine and including the green of the French canned peas. . . . Please report for duty about September 10th. Blanks for wills and coroner’s certificates must be furnished by the guests.” But in actual practice, he and his staff, including the ever-reliable Bigelow, decided to limit applicants to the presumably upright people who had passed the civil service exam, “so they came to us with a good character.”

  For the first round of experimental meals, he lined up twelve young clerks, mostly from the Agriculture Department. He’d wanted to use more but could not afford it. Still, as far as he knew, this was the largest group ever yet used in a human health experiment of this kind. The trial design was straightforward. Each compound would be studied during a six-week period, and the test subjects would be divided during that time into two different seating arrangements. For the first two weeks, those sitting at table 1 would receive untainted food and those at table 2 would be dosed with a given preservative. The scientists would track the health differences, if any, between the two groups.

  They would then switch so that table 1 received the preservative and table 2 was allowed two weeks of recovery. Then back again for a final round of comparison. Critics would later point out, with justification, that two weeks wasn’t sufficient time to measure an effect; that it would have been better to have maintained his control group and test group throughout. Wiley conceded that point. The hygienic table trials weren’t perfect, he admitted, but they had potential to increase understanding of health effects from these mostly untested compounds. Another reason he’d kept the test periods short was to minimize any harm to his young volunteers, who’d been required to sign a liability waiver. “Did you explain that this was a dangerous process?” a congressman would ask later, during a hearing following publication of the first findings. Wiley replied that the volunteers were told about the planned procedure (although he wouldn’t guarantee they understood all the implications).

  The department would not have done the work, he emphasized, if he’d believed at the start that chemical compounds deliberately mixed into American food posed an immediate deadly risk. He’d gone in hoping the materials were safe, and his worst-case guess before the trials started was “that there might be some disturbance to their systems.” (“So,” the congressman would say, “you thought that there was nothing; but you took a release because there was danger of losing life, in a sense.” That, Wiley agreed, was correct.) Test subjects could consume only what was dished out in Wiley’s test kitchen. They had to refuse any other snacks or drinks: “Each individual subject pledged himself to abstain entirely from food and drink not prepared by the scientists in charge of the dining room.”

  As the details of the project became known, newspaper reporters covered the deprivations with a mixture of amusement and horror: “Should they become hungry between meals, they must wait until the official dinner bell rings. If they grow thirsty during working hours, they may watch the water cooler with longing eyes but nothing more. . . . They cannot even drink a friendly glass of beer.”

  The volunteers had to record everything they ate and drank, noting the precise amounts of every portion. They had to record their weight, temperature, and pulse rate before every meal. Twice a week they had to be examined by doctors from the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service. They had to behave in an upright way, to “pursue their ordinary vocations without any excesses and to take their ordinary hours of sleep.” They also had to agree to collect their urine and feces—“every particle of their excreta,” in Wiley’s words—and bring it to the chemistry laboratory for analysis. In retrospect, it seems astonishing that anyone volunteered and that none of the test subjects backed out before the experiment even began.

  Wiley chose the preservative borax as the first additive to test. It was one of the most widely used food preservatives. Further, the few studies conducted thus far on borax suggested that it was relatively, but not completely, benign. Here was a chance to explore the questions raised about its consumption without, he thought, putting his volunteers at too much risk.

  A study published the previous year in which mice were fed varying amounts of borax and boric acid had concluded that in small doses the compounds “have no influence upon the general health of the animals.” Another test with baby pigs had reached a similar conclusion. If the dose was ratcheted up, though, the compound appeared to pose some problems. There was some evidence of a disruption in metabolism; there was the occasional animal that suffered digestive upsets, nausea, and vomiting. There were also some warning signals arising from a few human studies, but those tests were idiosyncratic at best.

  One of them involved a scientist mixing boric acid into his own milk for a couple weeks; he’d felt fine, he said. Another experiment, done in London, had involved dosing three young children with borax and boric acid for several months. Those results were both reassuring and a little puzzling.

  Unlike Wiley, who had carefully explained his choice of sturdy test subjects, the British researchers were vague about the selection process. They had chosen a two-year-old boy, a five-year-old boy, and a four-year-old girl who “was delicate, being convalescent from pneumonia,” leading to some suspicion that they’d merely selected a few children whose parents were agreeable. They had found that borax could cause some temporary nausea and diarrhea but concluded that, in the big picture, “neither boric acid nor borax in any way affected the health and well-being” of the test subjects. That is to say, the three children appeared to be okay at the end of the experiment.

  Meanwhile, John Marshall, a professor of chemistry and toxicology at the University of Pennsylvania, had also dosed himself with borax, and he’d reported some severe diarrhea (“the foo
d escapes without assimilation”) and nausea. But Marshall was interested in acute toxicity and had given himself a hefty dose after being called as a witness in the trial of a butcher accused of using the preservative to restore slightly rotten meat. So, while his self-experiment suggested that a stiff dose of borax produced unpleasant symptoms, it did not predict that most Americans, receiving a daily low-level exposure while consuming products ranging from meat to milk, would become so ill.

  Wiley knew his study plan was by no means perfect either. But he also believed that its design was better than anything else out there. He had a larger study group of subjects, all of comparable age and health. He would be dividing them into two groups for purposes of comparison, a far cry from one man sipping milk or the use of three random children. His tests would continue for longer and look at a greater range of doses. He still thought that he wouldn’t find anything much. But if borax did pose a risk, he also thought he’d have a better chance of finding that out than any work done so far.

  He struggled with the best way to deliver the borax. In the British studies, the vehicle had been milk. As the authors of the experiment with children had pointed out, this made sense because “milk forms such a large proportion of their diet.” Wiley decided to try butter instead; buttered bread and rolls were a staple of the American meal and he hoped they’d be consumed with enthusiasm. He wasn’t worried about the taste putting off his diners. “It is pointed out that an important point of distinction between modern preservatives and the long-established ones—salt, sugar, vinegar, and wood-smoke—is that in the small amounts used they are almost without taste and odor, and their presence in a food product would not be noticed by the consumer unless specifically proclaimed.”