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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV in iHeartRadio this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who's simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. Join your host, Josh and Chuck on the Super Popular podcast packed with fascinating discussions on science, history, pop culture and more episodes that ask, was the lost city of Atlantis Real? I don't know. Is birth order important? I don't know. How does pizza work? Well, I do know. Bit about that see? You can know even more, because stuff you should know has over 1500 immensely interesting episodes for your brain to feast on. So what do you say? I don't want to miss the stuff you should know. Podcast you're learning already. Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ohh, behind the ******** is the podcast you're listening to right now. I'm Robert Evans, the host. We we talk about bad people, tell you all about them and today my guest Matt Lieb, who is a a comedian and also mine, Liebling. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's that's cute. Your name is Matt Lee. Mine. Liebling. Kind of, yeah. Kind of belief is is German for love, you know? So it's like I, you know, some people call me Maddie. Love, Maddie love ohtel. They're full. Yeah. Big Papa L like, these are all like, I would like people to. No one's actually done it yet, but if you want to call me Maddie. Love, big Papa L You know, the love, Maddie, whatever you want just to, you know, ******* call me nice names. Yeah, well that's what this podcast is. This is the show where I say nice things about a random guest. Yeah, Umm, if you want the show where I say cruel things about a random guest, just just stick around for another half hour and I'm going to make Gilbert Godfried cry. What's so specific? Robert, no, I love Gilbert. Anyone who has the courage to get up on stage the day after 911 until James about 9:11 is a hero. He wasn't the true hero of 911 because he was Gilbert Godfried firefighters and Gilbert Godfried Fried again. Yeah. Matt, before we get into it, because the topic today is just gonna blow people away. You wanna, you wanna plug anything right now? Oh yeah. Well, I do a the Only Sopranos podcast. It's a rewatch podcast. So The Sopranos called pod yourself a gun. So, yeah, you should, you should check that out if you like The Sopranos. Even if you don't like The Sopranos, you know, it's just. It's just a good time. And pod yourself. A gun is legally the Only Sopranos podcast. If you hear another one, call the ATF. They regulate that and they'll go shoot those people's dogs. Yeah, no, that's a hey, that's what the ATF does. What do you want something really? Their job. I know. I don't like that vibe. I know it's not cool that that's their job, but it is. It is their job. Yeah. Yeah. No, there's some people think there's this other Sopranos podcast, but that's a that's like a deep fake. So don't ****. With that, yeah, that's the deep state trying to trick you. Exactly. That's a siop to get you to to like a, you know, the wire instead. But yeah, it's really just a stealth the wire podcast. Exactly. And **** that show this is about. The **** that ****. Yeah. Hell yeah. Also, I do a movie podcast called The Film Drunk Fraudcast. Both of those are with Vince Mancini, who is my co-host and Pod Life Partners. Now, is he at all related to boom boom Mancini? He I I doubt it. But it's it's possible. Pretty good. Warren Zevon. Song about boom. Boom Mancini. Yeah, kill the guy all. Vince Mancini is also the name of Sonny Corleone's ******* son in Godfather part three. So that's very fun. Lot of mafia tians with this. Speaking of mafias, you know what else is an unaccountable group of dangerous criminals? Matt? The police. Well, yes, this is a long time coming back. But but. But this is even worse than the police met today. We're talking about the arch ******* of them all, the FDA. Ohh ****. Yeah, that's right, ************. The Food and Drug Administration. That's right. That's who we're. We got two parts on the FDA this week, you know, that's right. Literally this is. Did not know I was coming in here expecting. Listen, we've talked about Nazis. We have talked about Nazis. We've talked about Doctor Oz, we've talked about it. People who, you know, the created the Boy Scouts and touch all amateurs, all amateurs. Reinhard Heidrich ain't got **** on the Food and Drug admin. OK, that might be going a little far. Excited, I thought. Yeah, we, we, we, we make a lot of fun of the FDA. And I've always found, like, goading them into violence funny because they're kind of like the most milk toast three letter agency the government has, right? The FBI is like, terrifying. The ATF is this big drunken, bloodthirsty frat boy. The CIA kills entire governments. And meanwhile, the FDA can't even, like, ban people from drinking bleach in a timely manner. Like, it takes years to be like, oh, we probably shouldn't let people give their kids bleach water. Yeah, they just do press conferences. They're like, stop. Yeah guys, this is bad for you. Ohh, just schoolmarm. But the reality is that that kind of like amiable toothlessness is is a front that hides an agency as corrupt and deadly as any part of the US government. In fact, probably has greater societal harm in a lot of ways than most. Our friends at the FDA may have a have a body count that might might shock you. But before we get into that, we should spend some time talking about the world before the FDA. Because this is not just as simple as stories. Like, government agency does bad things. It's actually like, it's like an Anakin Skywalker story of this, like, great hero who rises up and then crumbles. The FDA is the Anakin Skywalker of three letter agencies. ****. So today we're gonna like, lead up to them becoming a Jedi and the next episode they wind up falling in the lava planet. Ohh ****. Yeah, I hate Joe. I love that **** man. That's great. And and well, well, well. We'll we'll try to figure out throughout this who? The Obi Wan Kenobi of the. FDA, because that's actually I I think I may have it, but I'm getting ahead of myself. But seller family, well, yeah. Once Upon a time people foraged, trapped and hunted for food generally in that order of like amount of calories gained, right. We developed methods of preservation over time. You know, stuff like you'd salt your meat and you could make like a jerky, you could even like even if you're a hunter gatherer, you could do that in a cave or something. You would smoke certain things, you know and as as as time went on, more foods. You get better at preserving stuff, and we also get better at, like, trading. And so more foods began to travel greater and greater distances. But the extent to which most foods could actually go geographically was very limited, right. You couldn't, you couldn't take mangoes from one place to a place like 1000 miles away, you know, 809 hundred years ago. Very well. You could take, like, the seeds. Maybe you could grow them. But like, mangos don't last all that long, you know? Yeah, they go bad fast. So a lot of stuff like, that's why some of this stuff became, like, so prized because if you could manage to get it to, like, the Emperor or something, it was a gift that was really valuable. You couldn't get stuff to travel nearly as far as you can today, which meant that, like back for most of human civilization, people ate pretty locally by default, right? There was trade and like spices and stuff that keeps well. But like most, food was grown or whatever, hunted, trapped, whatever, pretty close to where you lived. Now, when the Napoleonic Wars kicked off in the early 1800s, our boy nappy offered a bounty to any inventor who could figure out a cheap, quick and effective way to preserve food and quantity. Right, because you you still have this problem in the 1800s of like. We can kind of salt meat. We can bake these like ****** really hard biscuits, hardtack, and stuff that, like, we'll keep for a while, but like most stuff, doesn't keep well and like scurvy's a problem. Vitamin deficiencies are a problem because if you're like, on the March, or if you're usually not on the March, but like you're posted up and fortified and like the winter, it's like, well, how do you get everyone? Maybe you don't have a lot of food available in the winter, so either you're going to be like foraging from the local area or stealing from people, or you have a lot of famines caused because an army will camp out suddenly and they'll take all the food and the surrounding area. Yeah, so Napoleon's like, I have a lot of war I want to do and I don't want to be limited by the fact that we're **** at preserving food. So somebody figure out a way to do this and Napoleon does this with a bunch of stuff. He's a very like forward thinking. He's pretty smart dude. And this this bears fruit very quickly. In 1809, a French Brewer named Nicholas Appert realized that food cooked inside a glass jar and sealed didn't spoil. If you put whatever kind of food or something in a glass jar, you stick in some salt or some spices you cook it at for a while. It'll stay good for, I mean, really for years in some cases, and only they were that good at them. But it'll stay good a hell of a lot longer. Is this dude who invented Pickles? Not quite, but this is the guy who started the process of inventing canning, and the French state was unable to master the art of canning and quantity, right? They figure out that this works, but it's like figuring out how to make the seals right, and how to get like, it's a process. We're not as good at glass then as we are now. So, like having glass that can stand because you have to, like, I do a lot of canning now. A good friend of mine taught me how, and it's you have to like basically boils a can with food in it for like 20-30 minutes. You know? So like the glass, it takes a while to make glass that can reliably stand up to that even the day some of it's gonna break. So it's a process. I totally relate to that every time I try to can. Yeah, you know, I just can't. I'm as as a fellow canner. I, you know, it's just. I get it, dude. Hard. It's hard. It's hard. It's hard to do if you're like trying to make an armies. With the food and and preserve it. So they figure out that this works, but it doesn't really get the the French government doesn't get good at it in time for Napoleon to to stop to to like not lose his wars, right? And it would have helped. Like the whole Russian campaign having like good camdenton food might have really helped out, you know? Really would have like that. Could have been it could have been a game changer. It could have been a game changer, man. But yeah, you know, **** that's. But obviously, like, now that the the basic idea is understood, the process gets more and more developed over kind of the early to mid 1800s, and it spreads all throughout Europe. As soon as other nations realize this is possible, a lot of resources get developed into like canning and then tinning food. The Portuguese are like the best at Tinning. In fact, if you if you wind up in like Lisbon, ever, which is a beautiful city, the airport has like these stores that are just hundreds of different kinds of weird. Canned foods. Like stuff you've never seen canned, because that's like Portugal's ****** ******* thing is canning. Particularly like seafood, they're the most proud of just canning. Different ******* weird. This is just calling canners. Yeah, we just put some dirt in the can, put some dirt in it, just we could put nobody can stop us. We pretty much put anything in a can, dude. Yeah, yeah, and these are this, this, these developments, and canning and tinning are a huge part of. Why the last? Because the biggest wave of European colonization is the 1800s. Right. That's like the when stuff really starts to go huge outside of, like, you know, north and and and Central America and like the, the scramble for Africa and stuff and a lot of like the colonialism in in in Asia starts happening in this. And camdenton food is a big part of what makes that possible. It's a big part of like, why these guys we've talked about on the show, these explorers in Africa and whatnot, right for like Leopold are able to do what they're able to do because they're able to take, you know, a lot of what they need with them and keep it in the jungle heat. So cans aided. Like global colonialism. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's hugely important being able to, like, reliably have the nutrition you need and take it for a significant period of time. That's a. That's very important. I never even considered that. Yeah. Yeah. So Nicholas Appert had stumbled upon Canning, but he didn't really know what the time, what he was doing. And today we called the process that he kind of helped to discover pasteurization. And this is again heating a liquid to 120 to 140 degrees for about 20 minutes. Pasteur in the the. The the guide that the pasteurization comes from actually, like, figured out what pasteurization was and like, scientifically, what was going on. And he did this in the 1850s. Well, he was actually trying to preserve wine. So 1850s, Pasteur discovers pasteurization, which people already kind of knew about, but he's like the guy who figures out scientifically what's going on and his name on it and slapped his ******* name on it. That's right, but he's just trying to preserve wine. It takes another 20 years before a German chemist figures out that the same process. Could work on milk, which at the time was filled with salmonella and tuberculosis. We will talk a lot about how ****** ** milk was in the that's like half of this episode. Milk was a ******* nightmare back in the day. Like, I I don't give a **** like, however much you like Lovecraft, cosmic horror, nothing is scarier than milk in the 1870s. Why it is drink it. If it was, it was like. That's a great question, Matt, because it sounds like a nightmare. Everything was just so gross back then. Yeah. Yeah. They're like, listen, one out of four of these main courses is gonna kill you anyways. Might as well add some milk to it. Yeah. So the Germans figure out that you can pasteurize milk in, like, the 1870s. Obviously, milk is not the only thing you can pasteurize, but that that's when that gets figured out. But pasteurized milk doesn't really hit the US in quantity until the 30s. So there's like a 60 year. Where we can, but we aren't. And this is the story of why so in 1899, Harvard microbiologist Theobald. Myth discovered salmonella, which obviously had existed for a long time and been killing people for a long time. But he figures out, like, why people are dying from milk. And he suggests, like, hey, we should pasteurize this stuff. The Germans have figured it out. It's very easy. You just have to heat this **** up for a while. Yeah. And there's this immediate panic by the American Pediatric Society, who as soon as this guy is like, we should be pasteurizing our milk. They're like pasture. Heated milk will give babies scurvy. It robs it of nutrients. Don't do it. Was there like, a reason, like, why would they give a ****? Or are they just saying the pocket of big, you know, raw milk, you hear it a bunch like that, like cooking vegetables, steaming vegetables, you lose some. I'm sure you do lose some nutrients. I don't think it's enough to have any meaningful impact on diet. And I think it's that kind of thing. We're like, yeah, it's fine. Like, maybe there's a little less nutrition, but there's also no salmonella, and that's probably a bigger problem for the baby. That's the best trade off. Hmm. Maybe. Is there notoriously vulnerable to dying? Yeah, that's what everybody says about they're so easy to kill. Oh my God, don't every time I start, like, easy, dude, easy. If I wanted to, I could kill, like, many babies in a row. I absolutely. I'm not a monster. But yeah, I could do it. But it's good to know. It's good to know, you know, sometimes I just, like, walk past a park and go, like, I could take you all if I need it, if I needed to, you know, if I needed to. If the chips were down. Yeah, anyway, so there's this immediate, like backlash against pasteurization, which is mainly due to like the expense. It's gonna cost money. To do this, they're gonna have to retool the milk producers. You'd have to retool your whole production line to allow for pasteurization. Now, obviously, pasteurization would also allow milk to last a lot longer. You can keep it good for a **** load longer if you pasteurize it. So a logical person might say, like, hey, yeah, you're gonna spend more money retooling your production lines, but you'll get to keep your milk for longer and it'll all work out in the end. But the milk companies are just like, no, it's gonna cost us money. Like, **** that ****. We don't want to stop having our cow juice dumped into a bottle that a guy then sneezes a mouthful of chewing tobacco into before that half acidly sealing and leaving in the hot sun. So they resisted pasteurization, but they were really open to better at ways to preserve milk. They just wanted it to be cheaper than pasteurization was going to be. In 1896, Doctor John Hurdy, a former professor from Purdue, formally endorsed the use of use of formaldehyde as a good food preservative. Now that sounds like we're going to say some like quack Dr **** it's actually not that ****** **. A whole lot of foods you eat everyday contain formaldehyde. There's formaldehyde and pears and apples and like all crustacean that. All crustaceans that we eat in mushrooms, they've all got some amount of formaldehyde in them. It's it's fine. It exists in because it preserves things like generally when you're looking at like fruits that last longer on the shelf, it's because there's some formaldehyde in them. We're not shooting them into that. It's just like a thing that occurs in nature. So Doctor Hurdy realizes this, and he's like, well, clearly even though like this stuff can be toxic in quantity, tiny amounts of it can be fine. And so he proposed using a very small amount, 2 drops of formalin. And formalin is like 40% formaldehyde, 60% water, so just two drops of very diluted formaldehyde per pint of milk. So that's a suggestion. If we do, if we put in a tiny amount, it'll make the milk keep a lot longer and it won't be toxic. They'll still have ohh well. Will it still have salmonella though, I mean. Uh, yeah. I mean, potentially, yes, that doesn't, it does not cure the salmonella part. Now, that said, like, the longer you leave it out, the more risk of a lot of bad things happening. So it does make it a lot safer. But so he's like, hey, a tiny amount of formaldehyde can help your milk last longer on the shelf. The milk producers, big businesses, all they hear is, oh, there's a way to make our product last longer and we should just pour as much of the **** in there as we possibly can. Right. And to to talk about how this went, I'm going to quote Deborah Bloom, who is like. The ******* expert on this, specifically this **** writing for Smithsonian Magazine quote so dairymen began increasing the dose of formaldehyde, seeking to keep their product fresh for as long as possible. Chemical companies came up with new formaldehyde mixtures with innocuous names such as iceline or preserve allene. The latter was said to keep behind. Yeah, 4 milk died. The latter was said to keep a pint of milk fresh for up to 10 days. And as the dairy industry increased the amount of preservatives, the milk became more and more toxic. Herdy was alarmed enough that by 1899. He was urging that formaldehyde use be stopped, citing increasing knowledge that the compound could be dangerous even in small doses, especially to children, but the industry did not heed the warning. In the summer of 1900, the Indianapolis News reported the deaths of three infants in the city's orphanage due to formaldehyde poisoning. A further investigation indicated that at least 30 children had died two years prior due to the use of the preservative, and in 1901, Herdy himself referenced the death of deaths of more than 400 children due to a combination of formaldehyde, dirt and bacteria in the milk. Another analysis calculated that there was so much raw **** in milk that the citizens of Indianapolis consumed an estimated 2000 pounds of poop per year. What the ****? So it's not just the formaldehyde, but they go hog wild. They're just dumping it in there. It's very funny. 2000 pounds of **** per year by the city of Indianapolis. I mean, just like straight there's they're just there. The Doo Doo is in the milk. They're **** in the milk now too. Oh, there's always been **** in the milk, buddy. Man, well, I don't know if you've ever had, like, livestock, but they're not. They get **** gets everywhere. They they poop and they not, they don't like. It's like you've seen that pig poop balls image. Like, ohh yeah, my favorite image animals that get poop on them and they don't really care about it that much. And sometimes that means poop's going to get in the milk, especially if you're keeping them in like a really dirty, horrific feed lot where like the **** piles up to their ankles. Yeah, sure. And we'll talk about the conditions these cows are kept in because oh boy, Matt. Are you going to enjoy that gigantic Doo Doo bath? Let's hear about it. Dude. I'm excited now with so this, this guy Hurdy who had been like, yeah, a little bit of formaldehyde might help and then was like, immediately horrified by what the food industry was doing. He becomes an advocate for reform within the legal system to stop this stuff. And as a result of his lobbying, Indiana passes a pure food law in 1899, which should have made the adulteration that, as we already said, went on well past 1899 very illegal. But this keeps going on because the law was kind of. It was more of an aspirational law than a real law because they were like, this isn't allowed, but they were also like, we're going to spend $0.00 to stop this. Like, we will not check on you. We will not enforce this. Like, yeah, we don't have the resources to stop the formaldehyde milk from spreading, but we just wanna let you know. Not cool, buddy. It is kind of my ideal situation for drugs where we keep them illegal, but we also make it like fire all of the police and and DEA agents so that nobody can prosecute you. Forward. And then you can still feel cool when you do drugs, right? Yeah. That's that's the ideal. That's the sweet spot, baby. Yeah. You convince children not to do heroin until you turn certain age and, you know. And. Yeah. 13. Exactly. Yeah. That's the age at which your brain. The age in which you can have fun. Yeah. Certain amount, right. Yeah. You know? Yeah. A little bit. A little bit goes a long way. It's like that. That's why they used to give babies medicinal children's medicinal heroin, you know, good times. Good. That's why our grandparents were all. Healthy, yes. So chill about everything. That's why they spent their whole lives withdrawing love. Our grandparents, yes. So the year after that law gets passed in in Indiana, Hardee's lab analyzes a pint bottle of milk that was handed to them by a family. And the family, like, buys some milk for their baby. And they notice that, as they describe it, the milk appears to be wriggling. Ohh ****. You like this one, man? So I don't even have to do like a chemical analysis. I'm like a big milk drinker, so this is gonna **** me up like I just I enjoy a glass of milk and a banana. It's my one of my favorite little snacks. It it turns out that what happened was that the dairyman had cut his milk because he he wanted to make it go longer like heroin, and he cuts it with stagnant water. And there there was a worm colony in the stagnant water and so many larva breed in the milk that it's just. Like a kind of soggy mass of writhing large larva, the milk they fight for their baby. No, it's got extra protein. It's called moving milk. It just don't worry. Move. Milk. Ohh. You got some of that still milk, huh? Yeah, yeah, all that. Yeah. Still milk is right. I happen to love my child. I want them to get the extra nutrients real babies have. Have a it's like we call it a milkshake. Cause it shakes. This is the origin of the milkshake. Some poor ************ was eating cereal when this episode started. Ohi know. Ohh, bad time. Absolutely. Cereal. So Indiana, obviously we've been focusing on because Doctor Hurdy was there and he gave a **** about this. This is happening every state in the Union, right? This is everywhere. Everywhere that there's a city. At least. I think people who live in rural areas probably have access to healthier milk because they're getting it directly from the cow. They're probably better conditions for the cow. They're not, you know, buying it from somebody who's going to mix in the pond water filled with ****. It's the city milk. That's just yeah, it's it's yeah. And thus the milk that the most people are drinking is is ******* poison milk. Now, in the 1880s, one group of researchers had analyzed like, this is happening all over the US and and in New Jersey. There's a case from the 1880s where these researchers analyzed random samples of milk, and they they found what they described as liquefying colonies of bacteria and numbers so great that they gave up counting. Like, they're just like, this isn't even worth it. Like, a lot. This isn't milk. This is just just bacteria. This is pure bacteria. Yeah. They have eaten all the milk. There's none left for the babies. Yeah. And and in all of these cases, this again happening everywhere and the reason everywhere is that there's there's no such thing as health standards, really. A couple of states like any and have tried to pass laws. There's usually no enforcement and in most places there's just no laws about what you can do. And yeah, a lot of, like, aware of the adulterants and, like, the poisonous stuff gets in is when the milk dealers cut their **** with various chemicals now. And this is kind of like, you know, drug dealers today will cut like cocaine with a little bit of baby powder or fentanyl. Yeah. Yeah. And the fentanyl answer for milk usually, well, the baby, I'll say the baby powder like, the, the, the, the least harmful way generally to cut it was that they would add water. And the standard ratio was one pint of water for every quart of milk now. They also skimmed the cream off the top of the milk, right? Because they're trying to make as much money as possible, so they don't want you getting extra cream. They're gonna use that. In order to hide it, they have to adulterate it so it looks right. So for the color, because this is kind of pale blue color, they pour in plaster of Paris and chalk. So that's good, yeah. And yeah, listen, on this podcast I was expecting, they poured in pure ***. Ohh wait, it gets worse because that just fixes the color match. They haven't, they? They've skimmed the cream off, right? You don't want people to know you've skimmed the cream off, so you have to fake a layer of cream on top. And what's what looks most like cream? No come straight. Come. No, no. Liquefied cow brains. Ohh bro, there's other things that look like cream. There's other things I guaran cow brains on that ****. It is extremely funny. That is no longer kosher milk. I'm sorry. Of course, sometimes they'll, they'll put cause it gives it has a little bit of a yellow colour. They'll put a little bit of lead in there too, just to make it look quite, you know, right to deepen and serious. Yeah, of course. You gonna put a little bit of lead in there? Makes it sweeter too. A little bit of antifreeze, you know, they put lead in. That doesn't even count as bad because let they put, they're putting lead in everything. Yeah, get enough of the lead was just part of it. It was like you had your salt shaker and you with vitamin L and then you had, yeah, vitamin L lead shaker. ******* a, dude. So milk was not alone or exceptional in its tendency to be adulterated among foods of the day. It's kind of the most shocking example out of that a lot of the time. But food sellers, grocery stores, like food manufacturers, they're doing it with everything. And to make that point, I'm gonna quote from Deborah Bloom again, this time writing in her wonderful book, The Poison Squad quote. Fakery and adulteration ran rampant, and other American products as well. Honey often proved to be thickened colored corn syrup and vanilla extract, a mixture of alcohol and brown food coloring. Strawberry jam could be sweetened paste made from mashed apple peelings laced with grass seeds and dyed red. Coffee might be largely sawdust or wheat. Beans, beets, peas and dandelion seeds scorched black and ground to resemble the genuine article. Containers of pepper, cinnamon or nutmeg were frequently laced with a cheaper filler. Materials such as pulverized coconut shells, charred rope, or occasionally floor sweepings flower routinely contained crushed stone or gypsum or gypsum. As a cheap extender, ground insects could be mixed into brown sugar, often without detection, their use linked to an unpleasant condition known as grocers itch. We've all had a little bit of groceries. A little bit of that grocers. That's right, you're eating too many bugs in your bread chip cookies. And now I got grocers edge from the bugs. European governments, especially those of Germany and Great Britain, had been far quicker than the US government to recognize and address problems of food adulteration. In 1820 a pioneering book by chemist Frederick Akum titled a treatise on Adulterations of food and culinary poisons had aroused widespread public outrage when it was published in London. Akum minced no words. Our Pickles are made green by copper, our vinegar rendered sharp by sulfuric acid. Our cream, composed of rice powder or arrowroot and bad milk, are comfy is mixed of sugar, starch, and clay. And, colored with preparations of copper and lead, our ketchup often formed of the dregs of distilled vinegar, with a decoction of the outer green husk of walnuts, and seasoned with allspice, he wrote. They had allspice back then. Ohh yeah, they conquered the world for all spice. They did three or four genocides just to get their hands on all spices. Delicious. That's not an exaggeration. Yeah. And it gets worse. With the candy industry, confectioners often turn to poisonous metallic elements and compounds. Green came from arsenic or copper, yellow from lead chromate, cheerful rose, and pink tones from red lead. In 1830 an editorial in The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, complained that millions of children are thus daily dosed with lethal substances. But the practices continued, largely due to business pressures on would be government regulators. By mid century, though, casualties were starting to mount in Britain. In 1847 three. To his children fell seriously ill after eating birthday cake decorated with arsenic tinted green leaves. Five years later, 2 London Brothers died after eating a cake whose frosting contained both arsenic and copper. In an 1854 report, London physician Arthur Hassell tracked 40 cases of child poisoning caused by penny Candies. Three years later, 21 people in Bradford, Yorkshire, died after consuming Candy accidentally laced with deadly arsenic trioxide accidentally because the confectioner meant to mix in plaster of Paris instead, although he had noticed. Workers falling ill while mixing up the stuff. The business owner had put the candy on sale anyway. He was arrested and jailed, as was the pharmacist who mistakenly sold him the poison in place of plaster. But they could not even be convicted of any crime. Britain had no law against making unsafe or even lethal food products. Jesus Christ, you ******* insane. Insane. Pouring arsenic into candy. Kids are dying left and right. It's like it when it's green. What's green? Something more poisonous. Please get some more poison in there. That's too. And the color, it's so insane. I just love they killed 21 people with bad candy and then the cops are like, it's not illegal. You can put as much poison in candy as you want. It's it's not. Actually in the rule book you're 6 do this. There's nothing in the rules that says Candy can't be arsenic. Yeah, listen, if you write a law that says I can't poison children for profit, I'll gladly abide by it. ******* a dude, it is the perfect. And in in England's credit again. This is like the 1830s forties, like. England, Jeremy. A lot of Europe, like, bans a lot of this **** but everything we've talked about keeps going in the US. They're throwing arsenic and lead and candy. They don't give up **** in the United States, right? This is the land of the *** **** free. We can do whatever we want. I ******* like one of the amendments. Should be my right to eat arsenic. That's green is a damn right, Matt. That's why I'm starting a new bakery. These cakes will kill your children. Yes, these cakes will in fact kill your children. But they'll die free, you know? They would die cucked by the medical establishment who says children can't handle arsenic. 5 year olds just saluting on a cot in the ICU. You know who else likes to salute 5 year olds while they're dying in the ICU? The sponsors. Hmm. That's right. That's right. Matt leap. Yeah. That's why they do it. That's why they they sell all these products. They have time for their real passion, saluting dying children who are poisoned by lead cake. All right, here we go. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month and now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that for anyone who hates them who are poisoned by lead cake. Alright, here we go. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family and at Mint. Families start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. From behind now, a word from our sponsor better help if you're having trouble stuck in your own head, focusing on problems dealing with depression, or just you know can't seem to get yourself out of a rut, you may want to try therapy. And better help makes it very easy to get therapy that works with your lifestyle and your schedule. A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals, no matter how big or small they happen to be. So if you're thinking of giving therapy a try, better help is a great. Option it's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at anytime. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. If we don't help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we can't save chimps, forests or anything else. And that becomes very clear when you look at poverty around the world. If you're living in poverty, you can't afford to ask as we can. Did this product harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals, like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people? And so alleviating poverty is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, we're back. Back. So in the United States, for basically the whole 1800s, every attempt to impose any kind of like national food safety standards is a there are all these attempts are opposed vigorously by the big businesses who made a lot of money selling lead candy and formaldehyde milk, for example, Massachusetts lawyer George Thorndyke Angel gave a big speech in 1879 to the American social Science Public Health Association, where he read through a list of commercially. Old foods that had been found to include parasites and brands of butter and cheese that had been found to be nothing but processed animal fat angle accused food producers of being a threat to both rich and poor and compared them to pirates, robbing people of their good health. Angle mailed copies of a speech to newspapers around the country, which forced American grocer, a major trade publication, to take aim at him as a sensationalist, doing a disservice to consumers, although they did concede that it was bad when milk and candy killed children. So, like, look, it's bad that kids keep dying. This guy is this guy is not like out. This guy's out of his mind. This guy is biased. Alright? And listen, yeah, I have grocers itch. Who doesn't? OK, look, we all wish kids would stop dying, but at what cost? That's what we the people putting lead in your children's food. Ask. Listen, you can either have a crying baby or a baby with a one in five chance of dying from this lollipop. Which would you prefer? Yeah, what do you want? You want milk that kills your kids? What, milk? That's $0.03 cheaper, huh? Yeah. Come on, man. How much are those kids worth for you, anyway? It's supply and demand here, buddy. So angles argument, though, was convincing to Congressman Richard Beale from Virginia. He put forward legislation federally to ban all Interstate commerce and chemically altered foods, and it's wild to think about how different that, like, it would have gotten appealed at some point, right? Because you just couldn't have a society like ours with that law on the books. But it never it never gets made. It dies in committee, not even saying like. At the time, certainly would have been a good thing. There's that would have it wouldn't have aged well, but it doesn't even get off the ground floor. And of course, that Bill was not the only thing that died in committee. Shitloads of kids were still being offered by poisonous foods. It all got bad enough that the United States Congress district decided to take a break from edging the tip of the national **** into overseas colonialism. And in 1902, they funded the very first controlled trials of human food toxicity. These tests would be carried out by the US Department of Agriculture's. Chemistry squad, which was headed by a guy named Harvey Washington Wiley, now Wiley's pretty dope. He may be the Obi-wan of our story. He'd gotten his start in food science in 1881, when the Indiana State Board of Health asked him to look into honey, Maple syrup, and other sweeteners. And his findings were that, in short, like a lot of the people buying these things are not, in fact, buying these things on most of them, like a lot of the Maple syrup and honey in the market, just like corn syrup. They would sometimes even make like a fake wax honeycomb and dip it in the corn syrup. That it looked like you were getting real, honey. Nice. And and realizing that like, oh wow, like people going to the grocery store have no ******* clue what they're getting. Like they have. They don't have a *** **** idea what they're actually buying because there's no requirement that they tell people what they're buying and actually deliver it on it. And this kind of radicalizes Wiley and he'd like, like spends the rest of his career trying to stop this now. Nature a write up I found in Nature magazine describes his new job at the USDA quote widely. Recruited young, healthy men as Guinea pigs, starting with civil servants. They signed liability waivers and agreed to take part in hygienic table trials, eating free but strictly prescribed meals in an experimental kitchen in the USDA's basement in Washington DC an excitable press dubbed them the Poison squad, and they're trying to figure out, like, what things are bad for people. They're also trying to just, like, gain a real understanding of, like, nutrition and like, what works, what preserves food. No one had really this hadn't been done, as pieces of this had been done in an organized way. But, like, this is the first time that our governments like we should. Really? Like, figure out what this stuff does to people, right? Yeah. Like in a controlled setting gives some people some lead and just, you know, and drop a couple you don't know with that point, right? Like, it is like, we laugh about it, but, like, the Romans put lead in ******* everything because they didn't realize it. Like, it was bad for him, right. So you had. And at this point, we're starting to get some understanding of that. But, like, a big part of it is this, and there's a lot of very brave people who are like, yeah, try **** on me. We should know if this is killing people. So give it, give it a shot, put it in me. Thanks, guys. Dude. Yeah. You really. You took one for the team here. You're like, I'll eat pretty much anything. So just, like, hook it up. Dude, I don't give a ****. Throw it in me. Who gives a ****? Yeah, I'm drunk. Yeah, I ain't gonna live that long anyway. It is the 1890s. I made it to 20. You know, I'm an old man. I am dead inside already. Feed me some more of that brain. My earliest memory is Sherman's March to the sea. I'm done. So that brings us back to milk. Now, under President Grover Cleveland, Wiley's chemistry division started digging into The Dirty world of big dairy. There was a lot of money in dairy, particularly since milk was seen is like the best thing to feed small children. The milk industry had been happy to cut corners for profits for quite some time, and I want to talk a little bit about swill, which is the kind of milk that most people in cities are drinking through. Like most of the mid to late 1800s, even some of the early 19. Was it branded swill? No, that's just what everyone called it, and we'll explain why in a second. So Deborah Bloom describes this swill as quote like making swill as quote the practice wherein distillers, liquor distillers housed dairy cows and stinking urban warehouses where each animal was tethered immobile and fed on the spent mash or swill from the fermentation process used in making whiskey. So we have all these grains and **** for like whiskey for beer too. I'm sure they do it with that we're you like boiling all this grain for forever in order to like make the thing that you then ferment, right? Mm-hmm. And once you boil anything for a while. Like, like all of this great and stuff. It doesn't have any real nutrition anymore because you've like boiled it to get all of that out. That all goes into the thing that you're making. That's why it's flavored and ****. So the cows that are fed on this stuff are like dying their entire lives. They're horribly malnourished, their bones are very soft because the swell they're eating isn't food anymore. So like all of these animals, by the time they're adults have all of their teeth brought out. They live very short lives. They're malnourished. Bodies only produce milk for a short period of time. And the milk. They make, which is what all these poor kids are drinking doesn't really have any nutritional value because, again, the cows aren't eating anything with nutritional value, so they're just like making coloured water in a lot of cases. God, one pediatrician at the time wrote. I have every year grown more suspicious of distillery milk wherever I have seen a child, presenting a sickly appearance. Loose, flabby flesh, weak joints, capricious appetite, frequent wretching and occasional vomiting, irregular bowels with the tendency to diarrhea and fetid breaths. So like. People are aware of this also the the fact that it's called distillery milk should keep you in on. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to go to the same place for my bourbon and my milk. Yeah, exactly. It's like, ohh, we sell cocaine. Ohh. We also sell fair trade coffee. It's like, I don't think. I don't think that's fair trade. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think. I mean, I'm sure it was a fair trade for somebody. Someone got a good end of the deal for sure. Yeah. Our sponsors, the scene. Aloha Cartel felt pretty good about that trade. Well, so the swill milk industry was eventually reformed. But that industry just yielded to the formaldehyde doping that we've already covered. By 1904, doping had formaldehyde milk had spread to New Jersey, where one doctor blamed a surge in child deaths on the substance. In New York City, 20,000 deaths of children under 2 per year were blamed on poisoned milk. Formaldehyde wasn't even 20,000 kids a year in New York City dying from bad milk. Yeah, like. That's ******* wild. That is so many dead children. That is an insane amount of it's like at some point you have to go like, wouldn't this like in like just shooting them sees, like would kill less. I mean, it just leads me to believe that this is the time. It's like, ohh yeah, a lot a lot of children die. Some of it's milk poisoning, some of it is from the slide that's made of razor blades that we have at every park. Like this is that's an yeah, were you. We're strapping kids to the streetcars to act as mirrors. Like, we have all sorts of ways of killing kids. It is New York in 1902, and we're just, like using their bodies as chimney sweeps. I mean, they die. They they for sure die. Yeah. They're very easy to kill. So, yeah. And and formaldehyde was not even necessarily the biggest threat in milk. Most of the deaths due to poison milk in New York, particularly in like, 1902, are probably as the result of a typhus epidemic that gets spread through tainted milk because that's a big cause of typhus outbreaks. It's like milk. Wiley and Hurley were among the learned advocates who urged the government to take action. Everywhere they looked, Americans were being tricked into consuming things that weren't food. And of course, a **** load of babies were dying. Regulations keep being proposed, and they are fought tooth and nail every time by food manufacturers. So by the time the early 1900s runner roll around, a handful of journalists set themselves to the task of, like, exposing what's happening here, often with the direct help of guys from the chemical division. So, like, these reporters are kind of working with Wiley and his men. And one of these journalists is Henry. Driving Dodge, who adopted poison milk, as his cause in 1904, Deborah Bloom writes. Dodge had learned from a friend in the US Senate that manufacturers were prepared to spend more than $250,000 to defeat any regulations, and had already made major contributions to the campaigns of senators considered friendly to the cause. No wonder the proposed food legislation was going nowhere, he wrote. The Senate does not indulge in balling opposition to the bill. Oh no. Its weapons are much more effective and more deadly. It lets the bill die. The American government. Concluded would rather protect wealthy business interests than protect the American people. I mean, not a thing people today would understand. No, no, no, no, no. Thank God that's changed. I mean, we can all be grateful for that, but no, I mean, like 200,000 dollars, 250,000, which is like 4 or $5 billion. Exactly. Like to fight the just just boil the milk. Yeah, just boil the *** ****. It's not hard. You are putting so much money into not boiling the milk. It's just it's ridiculous. Not like we're asking a lot, you know? Really the least you could do with the milk. Hey, maybe we don't need to have 20,000 babies a year die in New York City. I will. Anybody? Anybody money to keep fire away from my milk? Hmm. God, it's ******* amazing. Geez. So obviously this is an outrage and should really **** people off. But the American people, as is often the case, had a lot going on right around this time. And while there were isolated eruptions of outrage when, like a tainted meat kin tin would kill some soldiers, this happens around the time of the Spanish American War. A bunch of soldiers get sick from, like, bad meat or like, whatever, a spoiled milk batch would kill a whole kindergarten worth of kids. There's like, all there's outrage in bursts, in spurts, but it's very decentralized and scattered, and because of this, the massive meatpacking. Dairy industry. These huge corporations and like conglomerates that have formed around this stuff are able to bribe and bully their way out of any kind of real regulations. One of the things that leads that actually changes this, that, like, really is a huge factor, is a book called the Jungle by Upton Sinclair, which I'm sure most people are at least broadly familiar with. Upton went undercover for months in a Chicago meatpacking neighborhood, and his vivid recollections of what he saw there were first published in serial form via a socialist magazine named Appeal to Reason. When it was republished as a book in 1906, huge numbers of Americans were confronted with scenes like this. And I'm going to read from Upton Sinclair's the Jungle. There were cattle which had been fed on whiskey malt, the refuse of the breweries, and had had become what the men called Stearly, which means covered in boils. It was a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splatter foul smelling stuff onto your face. And when a man sleeves were smeared with blood, his hands steeped in it, how was he ever to wipe his face or to clear his eyes so that he could see? Jesus Christ, they're just ******* blood pinatas yeah they're like boil and pus and blood and it's all getting over the meat right because you can't see and it's all over your hands. It's all over your knife and you're like you're processing this if you're we we we slaughter and process animals semi regularly where I live. And if you're doing that like one of the key you don't even want like the hair of the animal when you skin it to touch the meat cause it can spoil you you you wanna be very careful otherwise it makes it nasty and they're just like you pop them like some puss is just like you're marinating. Man, get it in there. No, just more nutrients. It's more nutrients. Don't worry about the smell, it's got a lot of vitamin P. Ohg it's good stuff. So Sinclair had meant to reveal to people that the work in stockyards and meatpacking facilities was unconscionably inhumane, both to the humans working there and the animals, right? He was. He was upset about, like, the treatment of all of the living things in this nightmare system. Yeah, that's not what America really cares about. The real impact that the jungle has on on public opinion is that it scares people about how ******* filthy their food is, right? Sinclair later said, quote I aimed at the public's heart. And by accident, I hit it in the stomach. Honestly, I I'd like to pretend like I'm any better, but no, I'm not. Like, *******. I didn't stop eating chicken Nuggets until someone showed me the green the the pink goo that it's made out of and you love goo. I lasted a year and then I was like, Nah, I could eat the goo. And then I went back to chicken Nuggets. So yeah, someone figure out how I can just get the raw goo. I'd like to just have that as a shake in the morning and, like, yogurt. Knock down some Pingu. Yell. Go leave it out in the sun a little bit so it gets good nature. What, so, like, when it's thick? Yeah, great. Pink goo in my. You know what? I think if I just mix that 5050 with bourbon, that that would be all the nutrients I need. That's like, that's that's my Soylent. We call it that dirt. That's your Soylent. That's why. That's a performance beverage, Sophie. Yeah, exactly. In the morning, you throw a couple of shots of espresso in there, too. You're good to go. I'm doing keto. And then you branded it and I went, oh, that's how you get that keto body. That's true. The brand immediately makes it fun. Yeah, and I'll eat it. That's that's gonna be my new Soylent. Sophie, figure out find find us a sponsor who will make my meat, coffee, bourbon shakes and sell them as a performance beverage. You know who these are? Good Boris truckers. That'll get you the right amount of drunk, awake and vomiting to really do those long haul drives. Yeah, you can get it all done in one go. Literally one mouth movement. In out immediately. And look, schools waste a lot of time cooking food, my meat slurry, bourbon beverage, everything a child needs all to both to both be nitrified and to keep quiet. Because there's a lot of, there's a lot of bourbon. Their little bodies can't handle that much. You know, we call it sleepy time. Shake meat. It's very good. Yeah. Just keep him quiet. You know what? You're just warehousing them. Really? That's what all all we're doing anymore. It's called 5 loco. It's even more loco. From the previous look, they barely breathe on it, so it's pandemic safe. So it's worth noting that when the jungle was published as a proper book, like, Outside of Like a magazine thing, when it finds its publisher, the publisher insisted on sending a copy of the manuscript to the Chicago Tribune. And they're like, hey, here's the book we're publishing. It's making some pretty shocking claims. You guys are journalists. Why don't you investigate these claims and like, render and opinionist whether or not it's accurate, right? Which, if journalism exists, is a responsible thing for a publisher to do, right? Here's the thing. It is 1906. Upton Sinclair is the first person who's ever done a journalism in the United States. You know. So I'm going to quote again from the Poison squad by Deborah Coyne. Journalism is just for going to war with Wayne. Yes, that's what it was intended to do. That's a point to get people to agree to a war with Spain. This book isn't about Spain at all. Quote Tribune editors responded with a two dozen page rebuttal of the packing house descriptions alarmed page and Doubleday. His publishers called Sinclair to their offices, but Sinclair promptly began picking apart the tribunes critique. For instance, the paper had denied that the tuberculosis bacterium could survive on walls or floors of the packing rooms. Sinclair pointed out that the germ could indeed survive on those surfaces and couldn't transfer to anything that touched them. He brought medical studies to prove it, as well as other evidence to back up his story. He further noted that the paper's owners were obviously. Friendly with the meat Packers and sided with them. In fact, it would turn out that the newspapers management had not assigned a reporter to study Sinclair's claims but instead passed the task on to a publicist who worked for the meatpackers. Nice. Yeah. So there's the newspaper goes right to the people that he's investigating is like, is this you guys would have write a thing for us about this? It's like, so I need you guys to write something that says not uh and just every time he says, Yahya, you just gotta right now I would write it, but you would not believe. The amount of war with Spain, we got adjusted. We got a lot of war with Spain. There's so much Spain left and we gotta nip that **** right in the bud. Yeah. Also, I'm a little bit busy because all, all of my children are in the hospital for milk poisoning. You know that old thing, you know babies. You know babies. So I can handle their milk. The New York Times goes on to note quote about a month after the jungle was published, the White House started receiving 100 letters a day demanding a federal cleanup of the meat industry. Roosevelt invited Sinclair to the White House, then ordered a federal investigation. Sinclair took every opportunity to harangue the beef trust, as the meat packing industry was known, and sent a stream of telegrams to the White House demanding reform. Roosevelt soon tired of Sinclair's outspokenness. In a note to the author's publisher, the President wrote. Tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country. For a while. Ohh Teddy, I love it. What a what a *****. But but they do. This actually gets some **** done from from Teddy's credit, he's part of **** starting to get done here. The the pure Food and Drug Act is passed. Well, it's introduced into Congress in 1905, the same year that Sinclair puts out the first version of the jungle and it but in early 1906 when the book version comes out, the the Act is stalled. And it's so stalled that Harvey White. But Wiley, who's the main impetus behind the book, starts trolling people out of, like, hopelessness, right? And he is, he kind of is the first guy to use Twitter, he said. He settles into a strategy of writing protest letters to newspapers and magazines about the ads they had for different snake oil, medicines and tainted foods. He wrote this to the Washington star. I have read with regret, and your issue of Monday, January 29th, of the probably fatal illness of Buck Ewing, the celebrated catcher. Ewing, a former star player and manager for the New York Giants, was diagnosed with Bright's disease. Which is a blood vessel inflammation in the kidneys, and it it killed people pretty fast in those days. Widely noted that like, hey, you're talking about how sad this is, but you've previously published an article about Doctor Kilmer Swamp Root and claimed that it clears bright disease. And he's like, I keep a bottle of it near me all the time. Because you've you've assured me that it works. So why don't you just tell this guy? You know, my chemists say it's nothing but alcohol and turpentine with a couple of spices. But if you're worried about Buck Ewing, why don't you tell him to take this stuff? It should cure his thing right away. In fact, I'll send him a copy of your paper and let you know what he says. And he dies, like, very shortly thereafter. I love the idea that someone was just like, alright, we got this Bright's disease. Let's try swamp root. That swamps are dark, right? What defeats the bright. Yeah, you gotta you gotta knock that bright out with some dark. What's darker than a swamp? What's darker than the swamp? People still dying? Ohhh, well, whatever. It's a clever ad campaign and he does this like, there's this malt coffee which contains no actual coffee. It's pure barley, but it advertises itself as having real coffee flavour and he sends a letter to the newspaper advertising them being like, how can you have real coffee flavor with anything but coffee? Isn't that the only thing that can have real coffee flavor? It's just quote tweeting tastes like ****. It's really just twittering. Yeah, you know who else loves Twitter? Hmm. The products and services that support this podcast. They are all reply guys for the same K pop band and it gets very sexual, actually, with all of our sponsors, very sexual replies to this K pop band. It's good. Good. Yeah. If we know one thing, it's the K pop people. They're very normal online and they love to be sexualized. That's actually the motto of. Very normal online and we love to be sexual. Am I? Am I sleeping? Yeah, you should believe that. Ohh, here's some ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying. Or for a family. And it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month, and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet. Very happy at Mint mobilcom slash behind now a word from our sponsor, better help. If you're having trouble stuck in your own head, focusing on problems dealing with depression, or just you know can't seem to get yourself out of a rut, you may want to try therapy, and better help makes it very easy to get therapy that works with your lifestyle and your schedule. A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals, no matter how big or small they happen to be. So if you're thinking of giving therapy. Try better help is a great option. It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time when you want to be a better problem solver therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind. Better help from behind. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Anything, particularly young children out into nature so that they can experience it and take time off from this virtual world of being always on your cell phones and so on. And get the feel of nature so that you come to be fascinated, then you come to want to understand it, and then you come to love it, and at that point you want to protect it. And then we'll come to the sort of healthy world that I envision as a good future for us. And the rest of life on this planet. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Now we're back. So while he was hectoring sketchy newspaper owners in print, Wiley and his poison squad had gathered together the sum of their years of study into America's endless variety of **** foods. And this is like, while they're trying to pass this act because they they put all this information together to try to, like, convince Congress we should do something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We gotta stop eating poison and poo. Yeah, we we really gotta deal with all of these dead babies. Yeah. So *******. Step one of a society no more eating the poison poo. Yeah, no more eating the poop milk. Step 2, maybe less warm milk. Not none. Not yeah, just less so. This passage from Deborah Bloom's book sums up the case that Wiley and his scientists made to Congress for every food product the chemistry division could point to a trick involved in its manufacture. Doctors continued to worry over reports of grocers itch as side effect of the deceptive process of grinding up insects and passing the result. Office Brown sugar, sometimes live life, survived the process. Beer, which most consumers have imagined to be derived from malted barley and hops, was often made from a cheaper ferment of rice or even corn grits. So-called aged whiskey was often still routinely rectified alcohol diluted in coloured brown, as widely had found 20 years earlier at Purdue, corn syrup was widely still used as the basis for fake versions of honey and Maple syrup. Many manufacturers argued that they had to fake products to stay competitive. Detroit canner Walter Williams of Williams brothers. Describe the making of his highland strawberry preserves. The Jam was, he said, 45% sugar, 35% corn syrup, 15% apple juice made from discarded apple skins, some scraps of apple skin and cores, and usually one or two pieces of strawberry. The strawberries cost him, he added. Many compare up. Yeah. It's it's it's cost a lot of money to get those two strawberries you got. Those two pieces of strawberries are really putting me out of house and home. Mini comparably priced preserves were just glucose apple juice and red red dye and Timothy seed added to simulate strawberry seeds. If we could sell peer goods, I would be pleased, Williams insisted. I believe they should be labeled showing their ingredients and showing the quality of the goods, but as there was no law setting setting such standards, and as he had to compete with less scrupulous canners, there was no way for him to stay in business. Unless he cut costs to match. Wiley testified that about 5% of all foods were routinely adulterated, with the number being much higher, up to 90%, in categories such as coffee, spices and food products made for selling to the poor God. Of course, if your food is for poor people, it is not food. It's not food. It's it is not food. We just ground up some dirt. Yeah, this is the sawdust pizza that I've used in my made every three weeks we mix some sawdust, and with ****. You can't tell the difference between that. That bread. The same ground. You know, she doesn't know the difference. The ground is what we call a natural place. It's ****** from the bars, so there's lots of barley in it. Well, they're poor bars, so it's just ground up rice meal. But, you know, sometimes I just shove a bar of soap into the mouth of a port to see if they live for another week. That's nice, clean, spotty, and it's delicious. So widely solution to all of this horror is the pure Food and Drug Act, and it's hard to see this as anything unreasonable. But the grocery meat packing. Canning companies threatened by the bill had to find a way to make it unreasonable and the time honored tradition of shady rich ********. They decided to smear Wiley since his data was impeccable. They went after him for hating freedom. Dudley and company. Yeah, baby, that's how you do it. Yeah, that's how you do America. That's how you do it, man. Our freedom to yeah. Poor people. Sawdust. It's extremely funny. Deadly and Co canned goods used the grocery world magazine. Publish editorials attacking Wiley as the nation's janitor, which it's hard to make that seem. He wants to clean things up. Yeah, yeah, that's an insult. It's just like, well, you know, ******* janitors always going around. He's like those guys who stop us from living in our own ****. Exactly. So I'm trying to wipe my *** mom. I like it like this. The idea is that he was a busy body policing the American stomach and again attacking freedom. During one industry event where Wiley meets with food company representatives, he's accused in person by the owner of a cannery for wanting to be dictator of the food industry, Mr Stalin trying to stop us from putting sawdust in the bread and **** in the whiskey. Falling over here it was just like ohh I don't like when children die from poison milk. Well he doesn't want to look at this mother. **** what does he think he is desire trying to stop kids from dying from milk? Ohh, man. Yeah, much of this, this is amazing because, like, it's just it's so America. It's so American. It's so American. More American. You can't be more American than people literally spending like, the equivalent of millions of dollars to just be like, I gotta feed them the poison. I gotta do it. I don't care if that this is costing me more money than taking the poison out. And guess what? Freedom. I love it. You love to see it. We love to see. We've always been the same. Yeah. Now, Wiley was not purely concerned with food here or with, like, the raw ingredients that people generally consider food. And in fact, as this law came closer and closer to passing, he was increasingly getting in, getting involved in something that had become a source of substantial profits for the biggest players in the industry. Wiley was now obsessed with the use of new and experimental preservatives on various foodstuffs. Now, some of them were like what we've talked about based on formaldehyde, like freezing, but there were a whole. A bunch of other different not all preservatives, new food additives. This is the period in which people start to adulterate food when you first processed meats, and these companies are putting stuff in for flavour and to preserve it, and there's no regulation for any of this at this point, and this is really concerning to Wiley. The Poison squad describes the birth of the subset of the chemical industry, and a paragraph that you may recognize some of the names from. In addition to preservatives, companies develop synthetic compounds to make food production cheaper. The sweetener saccharin discovered in 1879 at Johns Hopkins University cost far less than sugar and quickly replaced it as it cost saving. Alternative flavoring agents such as laboratory brewed citric acid or peppermint extracts, could be used in drinks and other products instead of fresh lemon juice or mint, again saving costs and again crowding the farmer out of the supply chain. The pioneering and just industrial chemist Charles Pfizer, who had founded his New York Pharmaceutical company in 1849. Now also produce Borax, boric acid, cream of tartar and citric acid for use in food and drink. They loved putting Borax and **** like doses so high it would kill people. It was great. Chicago's Joseph Bauer, whose liquid carbonic company produced the pressurized gas used in the fizzing drinks of soda fountains, had become so interested in artificial sweeteners that in 1901 he had invested in a new business in Saint Louis, the Monsanto Chemical Company, to produce saccharine in large quantities. Saccharine production had also launched the Hayden Chemical Works of New York City. 1900 although that company also branched into the preservative market, producing salicylic acid, formaldehyde, and sodium benzoate for use in food and drinks. The food and drink market also attracted Herbert Henry Dow, founder at age 31 of the Dow Chemical Company in Midland, MI. Dow Admin, a chemistry student at the Cast Institute of Technology in Cleveland. Oh yeah, he so he creates Dow Chemical Company in 1997. So yeah, all of these guys, this is where they get their start, like shooting **** into food. And no, Wiley's not wanting to, like, not saying we should ban all this. He's not some sort of like. The fanatic, but he's like, we should know what these number one people need to know if these are in their food, right? Like you should have to tell people, I'm not gonna say you can't put citric acid or sodium benzoate in food, but people should know, right? Like that's that we should be doing that. And also we should figure out if this stuff like the the food, the people putting this in food should be showing that it's not harmful like they they should be funding research to make, which as we'll talk about becomes problematic, right? But it is a good idea that like, well, we can't just start. Shooting the stuff into food, we should know what it does right now, the people who are. And there's a lot of scientists who are like, not like, we don't need to be doing this. Like, the preservatives stopped the food from spoiling. Do we need to study what else they do? We know how bad spoiled meat is. And they do have a point in this. Where it's like, well, we know it's this ****** killing so many kids a year. Like, do we care if they get sick 40 years later? Right, like, which is like 40 years. That's the entire lifespan of a human. They'll be fine. Yeah. It's like, you gotta take the good with the bad. Here, I I understand the little bit of it, where they were just like, hey, listen, they're not getting the foodborne illnesses and, you know, yeah, they're skin is like, orange now. And one of their lungs fell out. But like, like, whatever, they're alive. Unlike all those kids who drink them, wear milk. Exactly. Harvey Wiley was not particularly good at the give and take compromise nature of politics. He was too much of a scientist. And yeah, so he's he. One of the reasons this law has trouble passing, a lot of people argue, is that he's not willing to kind of like, give any back. And he's he's as. Adamant about, like, wanting strict laws about preservatives as he is about, like, what we should be pasteurizing milk. Right? And there's a good point to being, like, no, pasteurizing milk is like, get that done first, right? It's more of a priority to do this ****. Yeah. And so in the end, the pure food law only passes because Upton Sinclair's book causes this national outrage, which prompts Teddy Roosevelt to champion the bill personally. And it passes. The pure food law was the first major victory in the war to ensure Americans actually knew what the **** they were eating. And cheap food. You actually ate food as opposed to pure poison in a sax? It was followed in night. Yeah, just a completely like self-inflicted wound like this war that we created on ourselves. Ohh good, it's very funny. Yeah. Now the pure food law was the first major victory in the war to ensure Americans actually like, yeah again had any idea what they were eating. It was followed in 1938 by the passing of the food, Drug and Cosmetics Act which. Established the Food and Drug Administration for the first time. So that's when the 19381906 we get the pure food law, which lays the groundwork for the FDA. The FDA comes into being in 38 and initially when it started, it's funded entirely by taxpayer money, right? And it is invested with the, you might say, sacred authority to protect US consumers from the businesses making their food. This is a Titanic step forward and it cements an into the Wildcat era of tainted milk, fake coffee, arsenic and lead riddled. Andy it's a huge deal now. A lot of that stuff had started to get started to get fixed in 1906, obviously. But 19 making the FDA is a huge move forward and a very good it's it was absolutely necessary. I want to establish before we tear it down in the next episode. We had to have something like this, like you could not it. I don't care how much of a ******* libertarian is. You can't let that state of affairs go on the market. We have proved the market cannot correct itself with this, right? Yeah. It's just so much cheaper to feed people poison. Weirdly enough, the market would rather spend more money on continuing the poison trade rather than. Love poisoning people they love can't stop them. You can't stop them. You can't stop a guy from poisoning is is all of the people. He's feeling good for him. So, you know, the FDA starts as a a beautiful, necessary thing. And then in the 1980s, about a century after Doctor Wiley's journey began, the bright dream of the Food and Drug Administration began to go terribly wrong. But, Matt, we're going to talk about that in Part 2. You got any huggables to plug? Oh, sure, sure. I don't know if she's on the gram, I assume. So she's on the gram. She must be right. Amateur. Also like my Twitter. I do not have a gram. I used to have a blue check mark, but I got it taken away on Twitter and I hope to get one on your blue check mark away on Twitter. Did cause I pretended to be the New York Times oht. Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah. You're not allowed to do that, apparently. But it was a great post. It was. You know, I mean, I do love that for you. Like what I love. I think my favorite example of that issue. It's the lady from I think you should leave. Who did the. The I can't get enough wine like that that, that sketch. She's been in a few of them, but she did. It was like when Oreos did some sort of pride month thing. She pretended to be Nilla wafers using her check mark and was like Nilla Wafers. We don't like bisexual people. You're not allowed to eat our cookies. Something like that. It was very funny. Ohh, and that's why she's not on Twitter anymore. I love it. Nilla wafers taking strays from. People. That rule I should note, people are going to give a **** every because they do every time. We, like, make jokes about people dying at 40. Obviously, the way lifespans work is that so many kids died as babies once. If you made it to an adulthood, you had a pretty good chance of at least making it to like 50 or 60, right? A lot of people made it to their 70s. Yes, that's true. It's funny to joke about people dying at age, like being old at age 30 back then, because look at a picture of a 30 year old from the 1890s. They look like you're ******* grandpa. Like covered in soot. They have just taken his out. It is permanently embedded. Fill it in their body, all of their extremely funny how sick and dying everybody was back in the day. Well, you know, they they just society that loved poisoned milk. What can you do? It was a whole world of people exactly as healthy as Jair Bolsonaro, just constantly getting their doodoo backed up and being like, well, I got you and **** out of their noses because there's so much poop in the milk. I gotta go to the hospital again, but first I gotta run by this emu and see if he'll punch me in the throat. Ohm ohm boy so yeah find Matt Lieb on Twitter. Also, I have a fiction novel, my book after the Revolution. You can find it for free as an ebook at arbook.com, but it's also available for pre-order through AK Press. If you order now you will get a signed copy. So just Google AK Press after the Revolution pre-order my book, it'll come out in May and you'll get it signed. AK Press after the revolution. Google it and you'll find the pre-order page. I'm pre ordering it right now and we have a a. Behind the basket, live stream show with so much to plug. **** OK with prop on January 17th? OK, get tickets at momenthouse.com/yousure can. It'll be a good episode probably. I haven't written it yet. I will. I think so. That's you. Probably. I might even have an episode written. Great. Alright, just swing it dude. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Speaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's SPREA. Ker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. La monster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. 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