If you sat down to eat at any point and in any part of the U.S. in the 1800s, nothing on your plate was quite what it seemed.
Your morning coffee? If it wasn’t already mixed with chicory, there was probably quite a bit of sawdust mixed in, with scorched and ground peas, beans, or dandelion seeds for color. The honey in your tea? Sweetened corn syrup complete with wax “honeycomb”. The spices on your table? Finely ground coconut shells, burnt rope, or straight up floor sweepings. The flour in your bread? Mixed with crushed stone, gypsum, or dirt. The brown sugar in your grandma’s cookies? Spiked with ground insects. The scotch in grandpa’s after supper tipple? Poisonous wood alcohol dyed honey brown. The milk in Junior’s glass? Certainly watered down, almost definitely whitened with chalk or plaster of paris, often dosed with a preservative like formaldehyde to keep it “fresh,” and occasionally topped with pureed calf brains to mimic the “cream” on top. The fact that past generations managed to survive their own kitchens was a medical marvel in its own right, and those dark days are only barely behind us.
And indeed, many did not survive their own kitchens, due largely to profiteering companies increasing their margins by adulterating the "foods and drinks" they peddled. At the time, medical science was largely nonexistent; even antibiotics had yet to be discovered. Average lifespan for a man was 46 years; for women, 48.
The materials added into the food supplies certainly did nothing to improve the odds of long-term survival.
In 1883, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemistry professor from Purdue University, was named chief chemist of the agriculture department.
And he was horrified by some of the substances that he discovered while looking into American food supply chains. Thus was born The Poison Squad - volunteers who consumed these foods under (for the times) rigorous examination.
Great moments in American history.
