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SAN ANTONIO
MEDICINE

The History of Food

Safety in America:

A Tale of Deceit, Scandal and Poison

By David Alex Schulz, CHP

From milk to meat, we assume food from vestigation into the quality of the food sup-
the market represents sanitary production, plied to his troops, accusing the military of
quality ingredients, truth in labeling, and if feeding his men “embalmed beef.”
not, healthful nutrition at least—not poison. While standard practice at the time to pre-
This complacency comes only at the end of serve canned meat with formaldehyde, the
hard-fought battles … and the war is not over. army sought the Department of Agriculture
Indeed, it was a postmortem of the Spanish- Chemistry Division to analyze a can of corned from public knowledge is dramatically docu-
American War that brought the nation’s beef that left a 19-year-old private convulsing mented in Deborah Blum’s “The Poison
abysmal state of food preparation and adulter- and a day later, dead. “The analysis showed Squad” (2018, Penguin Publishing Group).
ation into sharp focus. At the dawn of the that the contents of the can had been saturated Blum recounts the single-minded focus of
20th Century, the War Department was ac- with the neurotoxic metal lead, which had ap- Agriculture Department Chemist Harvey
cused of killing more soldiers than did the parently seeped out of the container itself. Wiley in his obsessive pursuit of the landmark
enemy, poisoning with tainted food. The Lead was also found in his body.” Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and the bat-
army’s commanding general called for an in- The fight to keep “poisons sold as food” tles resulting from its implementation.

32 SAN ANTONIO MEDICINE • May 2021