It took time, but England’s new food inspection system
worked. Previously common food swindles became rare.
Most food could be trusted most of the time.
North Americans weren’t so fortunate. Both Canada
and the United States struggled with their own food fraud
epidemics. Canada soon followed England’s example, passing
food laws and enforcing the laws with food inspections. Tests
in 1877 showed that there was a lot of work needed to clean
up Canada’s food supply. For example, almost all samples of
cofee, mustard, ginger, and pepper were heavily adulterated
with cheaper substances.
While other countries worked to control food fraud, the
United States allowed fraud to worsen and spread. Unfortu-
nately, American citizens paid a steep price. In the decades
after the Civil War, America’s food supply became just as
corrupt and unsafe as England’s had been, and in the same
ways. Adulterated pepper, cofee, bread, beer, honey, milk—
all the old swindles thrived in the U.S.A.Nation of Fraud
“The theory of our government leaves people to take care
of themselves as much as possible,” explained entertainment
promoter P. T. Barnum. His 1865 book Humbugs of the World
took a hard skeptical look at American food fraud. Barnum
was especially appalled by fake booze. “Adulterating and
imitating liquors is a very large business,” he explained.
“There is very little pure liquor, either malt or spirituous,
to be obtained in any way.” Liquor was faked for the same
reasons as other commonly adulterated foods. The genuine
article was expensive, imitations were cheap, and customers
could not tell the diference. Whenever those things were true,
Barnum knew, “somebody will make and sell that imitation.”
Another problem with alcohol products, Barnum ex-
plained, is that they passed through a lot of hands. Brandy
might be made in Europe, imported to New York by one
dealer, sold to another dealer in Bufalo, then to another
dealer in Chicago, then to an inn that sold it to customers.
The brandy might be diluted with cheaper substances at any
step along that chain, or even diluted several times at several
steps. Worse, the fraudulent ingredients were sometimes
“villainous drugs and deadly poisons.” Barnum concluded
that the “annual loss of strength, health, and life caused by
the adulteration of liquor is truly appalling.”
Tainted liquor was highly dangerous, but America’s dead-
liest food fraud was probably milk. Newspapers repeatedly
exposed the scandal of “swill milk.” Big cities like New York
couldn’t bring in enough fresh milk from farms in the coun-
tryside. Instead, thousands of cows were packed into filthy
overcrowded barns behind beer breweries. The cows were
poorly fed on leftover “swill” grain from the brewing process.70JUNIOR SKEPTIC No. 54 (3232)American Food Swindles
This made them weak and unhealthy. They produced watery,
low quality milk that smelled of alcohol. This was further
watered down with dirty water. Other ingredients were then
added to disguise this concoction as normal, nutritious milk
from farms. Sadly, swill milk was extremely dangerous for
babies to drink.The Long Fight for Change
Swindling continued for decades while the federal govern-
ment did nothing. Then, in 1883, a scientist named Harvey
Washington Wiley became the head chemist for the U.S.
Department of Agriculture. Wiley thought adulteration was
a “disgraceful evil.” His department issued detailed reports
about the fraud problems with dairy products, spices, cofee,
and other foods. For example, Wiley testified to Congress that
“more than half” of honey was heavily adulterated with
cheaper sugar syrup. Wiley even conducted experiments in
which healthy volunteers became sick after eating large doses
of preservatives. He campaigned for years for tough new food
laws. The government still refused to act.
Then a work of fiction unexpectedly shocked the country
into action. Novelist Upton Sinclair worked undercover for
weeks in a meatpacking plant, then described what he saw in
his 1905 book The Jungle. The details were stomach-churning:
filthy factories crawling with germs and rats, sausages made
from rotten meat, and so on. Disgusting!
When President Theodore Roosevelt read the novel, he
immediately wrote to ask Sinclair if these details were true.
Roosevelt vowed that the “evils you point out shall, if their
existence be proved, and if I have power, be eradicated.” He
met with Sinclair, then sent investigators to check the book’s
gruesome claims. Roosevelt found Sinclair irritating, but
refused to “disregard ugly things that had been found out
simply because I did not like the man who had helped in
finding them out.” Sure enough, the President’s investigators
confirmed almost everything Sinclair said.
Roosevelt was fed up. It was time to clean up America’s
food supply! He pressured Congress to pass food laws. In
1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the
Meat Inspection Act. The United States finally had laws to
fight food fraud and make food safe for the American people.President
Theodore
Roosevelt