In the late 19th century, the government chemist Harvey Washington Wiley proved several shocking suspicions about the American food supply: Milk was routinely thinned with dirty water, coffee contained bone, ground pepper was full of dirt, cocoa was packed with sand and cayenne was loaded with brick dust.
The findings turned Wiley into a crusader for food safety, and by 1906 Congress finally agreed that regulations were needed. With the passage of the Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act, the United States created the framework for a federal system to test ingredients, inspect food factories and recall unsafe products.
This system has been criticized as seriously underfunded and often overcautious. But it has prevented a return to the fraudulent and poisonous food supply of the 19th century, which one historian called the “century of the great American stomachache.” That is, until recently, when the Trump administration began to unravel that safety net.
Since President Trump’s inauguration, his administration has been chipping away — sometimes quietly, sometimes with great fanfare — at food safety programs. In March, two Department of Agriculture advisory committees that had provided guidance on fighting microbial contamination of food as well as meat inspection protocols were shut down. The agency also expanded the ability of some meat processors to speed up production lines, making it more difficult to carry out careful inspections.
The administration also delayed a rule that would have required both manufacturers and grocery companies to quickly investigate food contamination and pull risky products from sale. At the start of April, thousands of federal health workers were fired on the orders of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; among them was a planned 3,500 at the Food and Drug Administration, a move that Mr. Kennedy welcomed as a “revolution.” Consumer watchdogs and others described it as safety blood bath.
It’s probably too early to be quite that hyperbolic. The food safety officials and consumer advocacy experts I’ve talked to are still trying to assess the full extent of the damage. But they see warning lights starting to blink. The F.D.A. has already indicated that it will conduct fewer food and drug safety investigations because of its greatly reduced staff. Spending limits imposed on government agencies are also so tight that it’s unclear if the remaining researchers will be able to purchase food to be tested.
While Mr. Kennedy has loudly promised a better regulation of food additives, he’s quietly undermining the ability to do that work. As an example, the latest round of cuts decimated the staff of a laboratory dedicated to testing for bacteria and toxic substances in food, such as heavy metal contamination.
Many experts now believe food poisoning outbreaks will spread farther and last longer. If too many precautions are removed, then there’s a real chance that we’ll rediscover how dangerous a less regulated food system can be. It takes only a brief look back at the 19th century to realize what that means.
Not only did Wiley and his chemists find widespread fraud in the food supply, their work also helped reveal a routine use of poisons. Red lead was used to make Cheddar cheese more orange; arsenic was used to color candy and cake decorations green; the toxic embalming agent formaldehyde was used to preserve milk. So many children were sickened or killed by formaldehyde that by the 1890s, newspapers regularly reported on “embalmed milk scandals.” All of this food adulteration was legal, of course.
Frustrated by the resistance of both industry and industry-funded congressional leaders, in 1902, Wiley began a study, nicknamed “The Poison Squad” by the press, in which young U.S.D.A. workers were knowingly fed a diet that included doses of potentially dangerous additives. Their resulting illnesses received widespread national coverage, heavy with references to poison in the daily diet.
Public outrage was rising when the writer Upton Sinclair, in 1906, published a notably gruesome novel, “The Jungle,” that focused on the unregulated and filthy practices of the meat industry. It was a proverbial last straw, the book leading to passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Food and Drugs Act that same year.
Since then, America has strengthened those early and basic protections, gradually modernizing the F.D.A. with passage of the 1938 Federal Food, Drugs and Cosmetic Act and other updates, including most recently, the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act, which focused on preventive measures, such as testing irrigation water on farms. We’ve also been repeatedly reminded why we need those protections: Accidental contamination and malfeasance in food processing are still relatively common.
One of the cases that prompted the 2011 law, for instance, involved the Peanut Corporation of America, which kept its peanut butter profitable by skimping on cleaning costs and failing to report its bacteria-infested operations to F.D.A. inspectors after testing showed the presence of salmonella. The resulting 2008-2009 salmonella outbreak killed nine people and sickened hundreds in almost every state. The cover-up led to the company’s president and two others being sent to prison.
More recently, the U.S.D.A. investigated a listeria outbreak that killed 10 people and spread to 19 states, and traced it to a Boar’s Head deli meat plant in Jarratt, Va. Inspectors had found filthy conditions, including mold and dead insects; the company shut down the plant in September. And this year? The U.S.D.A. has issued a recall for more than 200,000 pounds of liquid egg products that appear to be contaminated with a cleaning solution. The F.D.A. has flagged stones in candy, a potential botulism-causing toxin in juice, and undeclared allergens, such as nuts, in salad dressing.
The United States clearly still needs the safety systems that were so painstakingly built over the last 120 years, and to make them better and stronger. The labs and scientists and inspection teams that have been recently lost should not only be restored but expanded. And the mistakes of the 19th century should stay firmly in the history books.
Deborah Blum is the author of “The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” and directs the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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