Harvey Wiley's Poison Squad: Borax Dinners and the 1906 Pure Food Law

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In 1902 Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, chief chemist of the USDA Bureau of Chemistry, began feeding young government employees meals laced with preservatives in the basement of the USDA building, under a congressional appropriation for what he called hygienic table studies. The episode explains the crisis behind it: as Americans moved to cities without reliable refrigeration, producers used formaldehyde to firm up rotting meat, sulfites to restore red color to graying cuts, and heavy condiments to mask spoilage, while patent medicines and infant soothing syrups carried undisclosed opium, alcohol, cocaine, heroin and cannabis. Volunteers signed waivers, ate a pure baseline diet for weeks, and then took borax, benzoate, formaldehyde, sulfites and salicylates in gelatin capsules while every intake and output was measured.

A Washington Post reporter broke the story, the press named the volunteers the Poison Squad, and their motto became only the brave dare eat the fare. Wiley documented nausea, vomiting, cramps, fevers and weight loss. Samuel Hopkins Adams exposed the red clauses that let medicine advertisers cancel newspaper contracts over pro-regulation coverage, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, written to expose labor abuse, hit readers in the stomach instead. Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act on June 30, 1906, a truth-in-labeling law known as Dr. Wiley's Law. Its enforcement through seizures and published notices of judgment set the stage for the agency renamed the Food and Drug Administration in 1930.

• Formaldehyde cross-links proteins, making decaying meat feel firm while suppressing the bacteria that cause odor.
• The 1906 law required drug labels to disclose any of 10 dangerous or addictive ingredients rather than banning them.
• Sales of patent medicines that had to list opium are estimated to have fallen 33 percent.
• In 1909 the government seized 40 barrels and 20 kegs of Coca-Cola syrup over excessive caffeine, and the company later settled and cut the amount.
• Roosevelt sent his own investigators to Chicago, and they confirmed Sinclair's accounts of the meatpacking plants.