The Poison Squad


Book Description

A New York Times Notable Book The inspiration for PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film The Poison Squad. From Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Deborah Blum, the dramatic true story of how food was made safe in the United States and the heroes, led by the inimitable Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who fought for change By the end of nineteenth century, food was dangerous. Lethal, even. "Milk" might contain formaldehyde, most often used to embalm corpses. Decaying meat was preserved with both salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical chemical, and borax, a compound first identified as a cleaning product. This was not by accident; food manufacturers had rushed to embrace the rise of industrial chemistry, and were knowingly selling harmful products. Unchecked by government regulation, basic safety, or even labelling requirements, they put profit before the health of their customers. By some estimates, in New York City alone, thousands of children were killed by "embalmed milk" every year. Citizens--activists, journalists, scientists, and women's groups--began agitating for change. But even as protective measures were enacted in Europe, American corporations blocked even modest regulations. Then, in 1883, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemistry professor from Purdue University, was named chief chemist of the agriculture department, and the agency began methodically investigating food and drink fraud, even conducting shocking human tests on groups of young men who came to be known as, "The Poison Squad." Over the next thirty years, a titanic struggle took place, with the courageous and fascinating Dr. Wiley campaigning indefatigably for food safety and consumer protection. Together with a gallant cast, including the muckraking reporter Upton Sinclair, whose fiction revealed the horrific truth about the Chicago stockyards; Fannie Farmer, then the most famous cookbook author in the country; and Henry J. Heinz, one of the few food producers who actively advocated for pure food, Dr. Wiley changed history. When the landmark 1906 Food and Drug Act was finally passed, it was known across the land, as "Dr. Wiley's Law." Blum brings to life this timeless and hugely satisfying "David and Goliath" tale with righteous verve and style, driving home the moral imperative of confronting corporate greed and government corruption with a bracing clarity, which speaks resoundingly to the enormous social and political challenges we face today.




Poisons in Our Food


Book Description

With reference to India.




Poisoned


Book Description

NOW A NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY From Jeff Benedict, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tiger Woods and The Dynasty, Poisoned chronicles the events surrounding the worst food-poisoning epidemic in US history: the deadly Jack in the Box E. coli infections in 1993. On December 24, 1992, six-year-old Lauren Rudolph was hospitalized with excruciating stomach pain. Less than a week later she was dead. Doctors were baffled: How could a healthy child become so sick so quickly? After a frenzied investigation, public-health officials announced that the cause was E. coli O157:H7, and the source was hamburger meat served at a Jack in the Box restaurant. During this unprecedented crisis, four children died and over seven hundred others became gravely ill. In Poisoned, award-winning investigative journalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author Jeff Benedict delivers a jarringly candid narrative of the fast-moving disaster, drawing on access to confidential documents and exclusive interviews with the real-life characters at the center of the drama—the families whose children were infected, the Jack in the Box executives forced to answer for the tragedy, the physicians and scientists who identified E. coli as the culprit, and the legal teams on both sides of the historic lawsuits that ensued. Fast Food Nation meets A Civil Action in this riveting account of how we learned the hard way to truly watch what we eat.




How to Prevent Food Poisoning


Book Description

All the information you need to protect yourself and your family From salmonella to deadly E.coli, from hepatitis-infected berries to mad cow disease, millions of people all over the world are getting sick from food they've eaten. How can you be sure the food you prepare for your family is safe? How can you protect yourself when eating out? What do you need to look out for? How to Prevent Food Poisoning gives you the facts, figures, and information you need to safeguard your family's health. From the many different causes and complications of food poisoning to workable guidelines that are practical and easy to follow, this unique guide gives you everything you need to select, prepare, and store food without risk or worry. Here are the right ways to: * Be sure the food you're buying is safe * Prevent food contamination in your home * Transport and store food properly -- including leftovers * Eat safely in restaurants * Reduce germs in the kitchen.




Another Person’s Poison


Book Description

To some, food allergies seem like fabricated cries for attention. To others, they pose a dangerous health threat. Food allergies are bound up with so many personal and ideological concerns that it is difficult to determine what is medical and what is myth. Another Person's Poison parses the political, economic, cultural, and genuine health factors of a phenomenon that dominates our interactions with others and our understanding of ourselves. For most of the twentieth century, food allergies were considered a fad or junk science. While many physicians and clinicians argued that certain foods could cause a range of chronic problems, from asthma and eczema to migraines and hyperactivity, others believed that allergies were psychosomatic. 'This book traces the trajectory of this debate and its effect on public-health policy and the production, manufacture, and consumption of food. Are rising allergy rates purely the result of effective lobbying and a booming industry built on self-diagnosis and expensive remedies? Or should physicians become more flexible in their approach to food allergies and more careful in their diagnoses? Exploring the issue from scientific, political, economic, social, and patient-centered perspectives, this book is the first to engage fully with the history of a major modern affliction, illuminating society's troubled relationship with food, disease, nature, and the creation of medical knowledge.




Swindled


Book Description

Bad food has a history. Swindled tells it. Through a fascinating mixture of cultural and scientific history, food politics, and culinary detective work, Bee Wilson uncovers the many ways swindlers have cheapened, falsified, and even poisoned our food throughout history. In the hands of people and corporations who have prized profits above the health of consumers, food and drink have been tampered with in often horrifying ways--padded, diluted, contaminated, substituted, mislabeled, misnamed, or otherwise faked. Swindled gives a panoramic view of this history, from the leaded wine of the ancient Romans to today's food frauds--such as fake organics and the scandal of Chinese babies being fed bogus milk powder. Wilson pays special attention to nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and England and their roles in developing both industrial-scale food adulteration and the scientific ability to combat it. As Swindled reveals, modern science has both helped and hindered food fraudsters--increasing the sophistication of scams but also the means to detect them. The big breakthrough came in Victorian England when a scientist first put food under the microscope and found that much of what was sold as "genuine coffee" was anything but--and that you couldn't buy pure mustard in all of London. Arguing that industrialization, laissez-faire politics, and globalization have all hurt the quality of food, but also that food swindlers have always been helped by consumer ignorance, Swindled ultimately calls for both governments and individuals to be more vigilant. In fact, Wilson suggests, one of our best protections is simply to reeducate ourselves about the joys of food and cooking.




The Poisoner's Handbook


Book Description

Equal parts true crime, twentieth-century history, and science thriller, The Poisoner's Handbook is "a vicious, page-turning story that reads more like Raymond Chandler than Madame Curie." —The New York Observer “The Poisoner’s Handbook breathes deadly life into the Roaring Twenties.” —Financial Times “Reads like science fiction, complete with suspense, mystery and foolhardy guys in lab coats tipping test tubes of mysterious chemicals into their own mouths.” —NPR: What We're Reading A fascinating Jazz Age tale of chemistry and detection, poison and murder, The Poisoner's Handbook is a page-turning account of a forgotten era. In early twentieth-century New York, poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Science had no place in the Tammany Hall-controlled coroner's office, and corruption ran rampant. However, with the appointment of chief medical examiner Charles Norris in 1918, the poison game changed forever. Together with toxicologist Alexander Gettler, the duo set the justice system on fire with their trailblazing scientific detective work, triumphing over seemingly unbeatable odds to become the pioneers of forensic chemistry and the gatekeepers of justice. In 2014, PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE released a film based on The Poisoner's Handbook.




Forging a Poison Prevention and Control System


Book Description

Poisoning is a far more serious health problem in the U.S. than has generally been recognized. It is estimated that more than 4 million poisoning episodes occur annually, with approximately 300,000 cases leading to hospitalization. The field of poison prevention provides some of the most celebrated examples of successful public health interventions, yet surprisingly the current poison control "system" is little more than a loose network of poison control centers, poorly integrated into the larger spheres of public health. To increase their effectiveness, efforts to reduce poisoning need to be linked to a national agenda for public health promotion and injury prevention. Forging a Poison Prevention and Control System recommends a future poison control system with a strong public health infrastructure, a national system of regional poison control centers, federal funding to support core poison control activities, and a national poison information system to track major poisoning epidemics and possible acts of bioterrorism. This framework provides a complete "system" that could offer the best poison prevention and patient care services to meet the needs of the nation in the 21st century.




Poison Foods of North America


Book Description

This book is one of a kind with analysis of near 8000 records of foods tested in Canada for glyphosate by Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA recently. Tests cover foods from over 60 countries, the bulk of which were foods produced in Canada and the United States, followed by India and China. No other country has conducted this many tests on food for glyphosate and no other analysis exists on this data as of now.North American foods are most contaminated by glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup weed killer, the most used herbicide in the planet.The book is over 300 pages long, with over 70,000 words, and more than 300 tables. The data is sorted in chapters, on glyphosate in food according to country of origin, and separately as per food types, such as grains, beans, flour, lentils, fruits, vegetables, and ready made meals, organic and gluten free foods. A lot of raw data figures are included.Attention is given to foods produced in North America, which contribute a bulk of the samples, followed by foods from India and China and a comparison between them. Some of the findings were as expected while some are totally unexpected, and often shocking.Here are a few examples:1) Canada and USA produce the most toxic foods on the planet, with regard to glyphosate contamination.2) Within North America, Canada produces foods with significantly higher levels of glyphosate.3) Within Canada, the west is where one can find more glyphosate contaminated foods than from other regions within Canada. Western Canada is ground zero, for finding nasty foods.5) Cleanest of food suppliers are Peru, Thailand, France, South Africa, Mexico, and China. China apparently exports cleaner foods than what locals consume inside China. For example, imported foods from China, averaging 3 ppb contamination, is 28 times cleaner than foods produced in the US, and over 45 times cleaner than foods produced in Canada.6) Foods imported from Mexico is 70 times cleaner than Canadian foods and over 40 times cleaner than foods originating in the United States.7) Conventional foods desiccated by glyphosate is far more contaminated with glyphosate than roundup ready GM crops.8) Out of the main cereals, rice is about the only one that is more or less without any glyphosate, except for some rice and rice-products produced in North America.9) Lentils and chickpea (garbanzo) produced in North America, as well as foods made with these ingredients are highly contaminated with glyphosate.10) Although soy flour may contain high glyphosate, tofu made out of soy has none.11) Wheat bran produced in Canada has an average of around 2,500 ppb of glyphosate in every sample.12) Organic foods are much better than conventional foods, but are not completely free of glyphosate. Gluten free foods are a mixed bag since some of them are high on glyphosate content, while others are clean.The author maintains that as long as safety data based on which glyphosate was approved for use in agriculture is kept out of reach of the public, and as long as independent verification of the results is denied, there is no proof that glyphosate is safe at any level of contamination. This book is meant to be a useful guide for people that have already reached a conclusion that glyphosate is an unwanted chemical to be in their food and would rather have a tool that helps them avoid it in their selection of foods to buy and eat.Retired EPA scientist Dr. Vallianatos wrote a review on Huffington Post:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tainting-the-cornucopia-of-north-america_us_58decd30e4b0ca889ba1a5cf




The Poison Eaters


Book Description

Washington Post Best Children's Book Formaldehyde, borax, salicylic acid. Today, these chemicals are used in embalming fluids, cleaning supplies, and acne medications. But in 1900, they were routinely added to food that Americans ate from cans and jars. In 1900, products often weren't safe because unregulated, unethical companies added these and other chemicals to trick consumers into buying spoiled food or harmful medicines. Chemist Harvey Washington Wiley recognized these dangers and began a relentless thirty-year campaign to ensure that consumers could purchase safe food and drugs, eventually leading to the creation of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, a US governmental organization that now has a key role in addressing the COVID-19/Coronavirus pandemic gripping the world today. Acclaimed nonfiction and Sibert Honor winning author Gail Jarrow uncovers this intriguing history in her trademark style that makes the past enthrallingly relevant for today's young readers.