The History of
Poison in American Food
The history of the use of poisons in American food dates back further than the existence of the United States itself, but public awareness and concern over resultant health implications has only been a predominant concern since the start of the 21st Century.
Today in America it is commonplace for food producers to add trace amounts of poison to food before selling it to the consumer. These chemicals are often added to kill microorganisms, but they are harmful to people too.
Some of the more well known poisons commonly found in food today are formaldehyde and sodium cyanide (which are combined to make the ingredient EDTA in Mountain Dew), petroleum (used to make Red 40), and arsenic (commonly added to rice and rice products). But food hasn’t always been this way.
For most of human history food was just made out of, well, food, without dangerous chemicals. This website explores when poison became such a common ingredient in food, and why.
The perceived need for modern chemical preservatives arose with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, which reached the Americas around the year 1750.
As more and more people left their farms in the countryside to work instead in large factories, cities became more and more crowded.
These new city dwellers had neither the land nor the time to grow their own food. All of a sudden there was a large demand for food that could be sent to and sold in the cities, and stay “fresh” longer so it wouldn’t rot before the consumer got the chance to eat it.
A hundred years later, the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution answered everyone’s prayers.
New chemical pesticides allowed for higher crop yields in the countryside, which meant farmers were able to meet higher demands for food.
These pesticides and preservatives also prevented the food from rotting during the long journey from the farm to the truck to the city to the market to the consumer’s kitchen to the consumer’s dinner plate. At first these poisons seemed like a miracle.
Unfortunately, the use of chemicals in food was largely unregulated. It was common for people to die from eating crops that contained too much pesticide.
In 1903 a group of young men formed the Poison Squad. These volunteers ate foods treated with different kinds of chemical preservatives and then recorded which ones made them ill and which ones didn’t.
It was around this time that the Food and Drug Administration as we know it really began to take action to protect consumers.
In the following decades the FDA struggled to keep consumers safe without strangling the growth of the agricultural industry. It began to require chemical companies to prove that their products were safe for human consumption and that their usage be reported on food labels.
The FDA was largely successful in making food safer, but it still had some failings. In 1925, a family in London was badly poisoned by American apples that had been treated with arsenic. For a time the British government considered banning American fruit.
For much of the twentieth century the FDA seemed to be doing its best to protect the American people.
In 1958, for example, the Delaney Amendment banned all additives that were found to cause cancer in animals or humans.
But as time went on the loyalties and effectiveness of the FDA became increasingly questionable.
Despite the Delaney Amendment, many food additives linked to cancer were approved for use.
The FDA and the United States Supreme Court found themselves staffed by former lawyers, chemical engineers, and other employees of major agricultural chemical companies.
These biases resulted in dubious court rulings and suspected bribery.
In 1993 the FDA approved Monsanto’s recumbent bovine growth hormone (rBGH) for use.
FDA official Dr. Margaret Miller participated in the approval process of the drug, despite having previously worked for Monsanto as a chemical engineer. FDA official Dr. Suzanne Sechen also participated in its approval, despite having previously conducted studies funded by Monsanto and studying under one of Monsanto’s university consultants.
To prove that rBGH was safe for cows and humans, Monsanto conducted an unpublished study on 30 rats for 90 days.
While this laughable study was sufficient for FDA approval, it was not sufficient for Health Canada’s (the Canadian FDA) approval. Fearing rejection of their product, in 1998 Monsanto offered Health Canada a $2 million bribe, which they rejected along with the dangerous artificial hormone.
Such incidents went largely unnoticed by the general public until the very late twentieth century and early twenty-first century.
The Organic Food Movement gained a significant amount of momentum in 1990 with the passage of the Organic Foods Production Act, which laid the framework for organic food as we know it today—food that is most often free of poison.
Since then the organic food industry has been on the rise.
As more consumers make informed decisions about what they eat, more and more farmers and companies are responding with healthy products that don’t contain toxic chemicals.
The history of poison in American food is still being written, by us, one day at a time, every time we eat.
PRESENTATION