Hacker Cinema
The Poison Squad
2020 · Film · documentary · 120 min
Directed by John Maggio
The story of government chemist Dr. Harvey Wiley who, determined to banish dangerous substances from dinner tables, took on the powerful food manufacturers and their allies.
5 positivefrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
Mentioned in the article, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 has an interesting history. It came about due to the work of Harvey Washington Wiley who used healthy volunteers to test and document the effects of then used preservatives like borax and formaldehyde. The volunteers were called "The Poison Squad". There's a PBS documentary about them: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8jbub8
Yes.
I recommend watching The Poison Squad documentary which digs into the reasons the FDA was formed in the first place. The meat packing industry used to sell a lot of spoiled food containing chemicals unsafe for human health.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuukM9OY-is
So, I'm outing myself as a book nerd (read a lot during quarantine), but I also recently enjoyed The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum which covered the creation of the FDA during the end of the 19th century and a few of their first BIG wins were getting formaldehyde, borax, arsenic and lead out of milk, canned meats and other products on the market.
I was surprised in that book of how much the F in the "Food and Drug Administration" was initially involved in enforcement. Nowadays we mostly think of them for regulating drugs and medical devices (or, at least, that's what I think of them as doing!) however initially a lot of their enforcement powers were to prevent fraudulent labeling and unsafe additives in supermarket foods.
The part in the book where the US Army was feeding the troops fighting the Spanish American War canned beef embalmed with formaldehyde was rather disgusting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_beef_scandal
Also, if you don't like reading here's a PBS documentary covering the same info in the book: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squad/
In absence of good, hard, scientific evidence of effects above and beyond placebo, I’m gonna go with “Cos it’s easy to bottle and it’s easy to sell”.
And profitable too, I have no doubt. Thanks to Orrin Hatch, US supplement peddlers don’t even have to prove their products are safe, never mind effective:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Supplement_Health_and_Education_Act_of_1994
I bet the oft-reviled Big Pharma (who, amusingly enough, are some of the biggest manufactures of supplements too) just wish all their products could enjoy such lax standards of regulation. Meanwhile, to everyone else, I wholeheartedly recommend The Poison Squad:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squad/
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/312067/the-poison-squad-by-deborah-blum/
PBS just aired an American Experience episode based on the book: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squad/