Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

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Deborah Blum: And a modern America would go, What is that vampire milk? And we wouldn't touch it. But back in the day, it was like a miracle of science. But the other really interesting thing about that is people knew formaldehyde was poisonous, right? So the dairymen would put this formaldehyde in the milk and they would call it something like Rosaline.

They actually called it Rosaline, as if they were adding a little floral scent to the mouth. So, even if there had been labels, there was no evidence of what they were doing.

intro: Everybody's gotta eat. And nobody likes getting sick. That's why heroes toil in the shadows, keeping your food safe at all points, from the supply chain to the point of sale. Join industry veterans Francine L. Shaw and Matt Ragushi for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule, don't eat poop.

Don't eat poop.

Matthew Regusci: Hello. Hello, Francine. Hello, Matt. And we have a very special guest. We have Deborah Bloom. She has written a book called Poison Squad. It's actually one of my favorite food safety books that there is, but we will let Deborah introduce herself, talk a little bit about her book. And then we're here at the IEHA conference, right?

There's a lot of acronyms here. IEHA.

Francine L Shaw: FDA. Retail.

Matthew Regusci: Yeah. FDA conference. And we are going to be, we're interviewing a bunch of people, but Deborah is our first. Because she's just that awesome. So Deborah, why don't you give us a little bit about yourself, talk a little bit about your book, and then you just gave an amazing speech.

So maybe talk a little bit about that. And then we have a ton of questions for you.

Deborah Blum: Sounds great. So I'm a longtime science journalist, uh, but I specialize in toxicology. I've been writing about poisonous things in everyday life is how I think about it for about the last 15 years. And so I got into that thinking about homicide, worked my way to food safety, which is the Poison Squad book, in a kind of not Your predictable path kind of way, right?

I was thinking about I kept seeing a reference to this poison squad And of course, I thought what is this like a murder community, right? Is this like an organized killers the poison squad? They're out to get you wherever you go And so when I started looking into it though, it turned out to be this really insane very early 20th century public health experiment In which a food chemist at USDA literally starts poisoning his co workers, is the way I like to describe it.

And I thought, as a journalist, why would he do that? We do all kinds of interesting things as scientists. I'm the daughter of an entomologist. Entomologists are known for their weirdness in other ways, right? Not necessarily going out and killing people. But I was like, why would he do that? And that led me to really becomes the spine of this story, which is, What does the world look like when we don't have any regulations at all?

What do food and drink and medicine look like when no one is holding anyone to a safety standard? So the book really starts in the 19th century where there's nothing, and then it allows me to look at how hard it is to get consumer protection, especially in a country like the United States, which remains resistant, I think, but was insanely resistant.

to actually getting in the business of protecting consumers about the turn of the 20s. So all of those issues are really interesting to me, and that's what the book is about.

Francine L Shaw: So I listened to your presentation. It was phenomenal. It was absolutely phenomenal. And one of the things when you first started speaking that really resonated with me was when you showed the picture of what you thought food was like at that time.

And I'm looking at that picture and I'm thinking, well, wasn't it? Because that's my vision too, because I'm thinking it's all wholesome and nutritious and with the plates of all this homegrown food from the farm and the home baked bread. And I'm like, Why, exactly what did it look like? And you start talking about what the food was like and all the problems with food fraud.

And at that point you had my attention, I'm like, holy crap. So heavy metals and arsenic and you're talking and I'm thinking as you're talking, okay, so what's changed?

Deborah Blum: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, and can I put that in a little bit of perspective?

Francine L Shaw: A hundred percent. Because I usually jump right in and Matt's, okay, so this is what we need to talk about.

Matthew Regusci: I say all the time, like context, the context.

Deborah Blum: So I had exactly that same, I always think of it now, like pink cheek, healthy Americans picking the apples off their trees. They're homemade, beautiful bread, not realizing, of course, that the flower had gypsum in it, and that the pesticide used on apples at that time was arsenic laced, just to give a couple of And a lot of borat.

And a lot of, well, like, the compound boron became, we see it Not borat. They used to call it borax, so you're close, right? But it's if you go to the grocery store now and you're looking at the 20 mule team borax, that's what we're talking about. That was hugely popular in the food supply. It was so popular that when this experiment I was telling you about started, that was the first thing they looked at because just in everything, there was actually a great menu of the American diet that was done by a food chemist in the Dakotas, South Dakota, I think.

Very progressive state at the time and he did how many times does the average citizen eat borax? And it was like five times a day So if you could imagine yourself going into the cleaning products division and buying your box of 20 mule team borax and say yeah I'm just gonna have a couple of teaspoons of this cleaning product with my lunch dinner snack out, you know supper everything That's what it was like.

So I started looking at this. I didn't expect it. One of the people my editor at Penguin Press works with is Michael Pollan, who does a lot of don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't eat kind of stuff, or your grandmother wouldn't recognize. And I finally went to my editor. I'm like, I'm writing this book for Michael Pollan, who doesn't know what he's talking about.

My grandmother was eating crap, right? I want to make it. And I think, like in the introduction to the book, I actually talked about the kind of rose colored lenses way we tend to look at food in the past. So a lot of the book for me was an investigation into that. How bad was it? And it's a case study and there's no regulation.

I'm a company. I can do whatever I want. And what I really want to do is make a lot of money. And I don't have to tell anyone what I'm doing because at that time, in addition, we have regulations that require labels, what's in food. They didn't have that either. Second point, whatever it is, I can pretend it's something else, right?

And so you start getting this insane level of fraud that I talked about in the talk, right? With coffee being full of dirt and charred bone and Spices like cinnamon being full of brick dust. Of course, that could be true today, but for all we know, but it was really standard then and, and ground coconut shells, right?

And even the big national companies were grinding up coconut shells. There was a great, I didn't talk about this in the talk, but the U. S. government in the early 20th century did a sting on McCormick in which they snuck out to a dock and sprayed all the coconut shells that McCormick had imported with quinine.

And they started looking for quinine in the pepper, and it was loaded with quinine, right? And so there's actually this fabulous court case, it's like the U. S. government against 400 cases of pepper, in which they went back and they made McCormick pull that pepper back and put the good stuff out. find them and stuff once we got into regulation.

But before that, they just did it. And so I'm looking at that landscape in which food is incredibly fraudulent and then incredibly dangerous, right? Borax was the mildest of the things really that went into food at that time.

Matthew Regusci: And one of the things I loved about the Poison Squad and This doctor was literally just, like you said, poisoned his employees, but he was poisoning really healthy, fit people.

And he wasn't quite sure, he had a hypothesis that really healthy, strong, athletic males eating Borat all day long, every day for a month or however long it went, They would start getting sick and quit, and they did, and it showed one of the things I loved about it. We talk about it a lot on our podcast, and so I'm, I run the certification body for Clean Label Projects, so we do analytic testing and stuff like that, and heavy metals are ubiquitous.

They're everywhere, right? But a lot of heavy metals, over a long period of time, racked up, is not good for you, right? And so what I loved is, in your book, he comes with that thesis that A little bit of borax probably isn't too bad, but a lot of borax builds up on each other on a daily basis. And this is not good.

And nobody really was thinking about that. And like you were saying, like it was in almost everything as a preservative, right? That's exactly right. So the preservatives were compiling up and how much can the human body take before they get sick? He really proved that fairly consistently that yeah, it's not good.

Deborah Blum: Yeah, that's such a good point because that part of what you did is so forward looking. Today we talk about low dose toxicology and these very tiny, minimal, repeated exposures. And anyone who is doing low dose toxicology, when I first started really writing about poisonous things, one toxicologist said to me, you're all focused on, because I was homicide, on the acute dose.

You have to think about these little doses and the incremental effects, right, and take a look at that. He was doing that back at the 19th and early 20th century. And the amazing thing about that, I want to give him full credit for this. He's a really, I love difficult, impossible, obsessive people, because it's difficult, impossible, obsessive people who make the difference, right?

He was one of those. It wasn't like you read about him and you think, man, you would be fun to hang out with at any given moment. But he was so committed to this and he saw that additive problem as a huge deal. And you see him even in, like, some of his early reports to the USDA, right? We're talking about the USDA doing all the food testing at this point.

There's no FDA, there's no anything, no EPA, no nothing. It's just the USDA. They are the nation's chemists, essentially. And he's going in his reports and he's saying, Just remember that people eat these repeatedly. And some of them are children, so this dose is going to be a lot worse for them than it is going to be for a full fledged adult.

And so he starts out by saying, could we just put labels on things, and then he gets to the point we're talking about, and one of the things to remember about that was that study that he did, the Poison Squad study, Is that there was really no decent human exposure toxicology or public health work at the time, one of the things I did when I was working on this book, I'm like, okay, well, what did we actually know about borax?

Or what did we actually know about? Formaldehyde, or what is the record on salicylic acid? Salicylic acid, as we know, is related to the thing that goes into aspirin that makes your stomach bleed. It was a hugely, it does other things, it relieves pain, but it also causes bleeding of the stomach lining. It was a widely used preservative, especially in beer and wine in the United States.

And in fact, the United States permitted it and Europe didn't. That hasn't changed that much either, right? So in Germany, they would make beer, they would load it up for the stuff that went to the United States, but they wouldn't have it in any of their own beer. Right. Are you serious? Right. And so everyone Particularly during World War I.

Yeah. Everyone knew that we would just accept everything. So he's really looking at that cumulative effect. But the number of studies is so minimal. There was one I was looking, I want to say at formaldehyde, I'm like, so where's the data on formaldehyde and how dangerous it is? And there's like a scientist who said, well, I was home and there were my neighbor had a couple of kids.

They were spending the summer there because they had some kind of health issue. So I gave them a little bit of formaldehyde to see how they handled it. And that would be the study. You actually see those kinds of studies, the systemic. Take a body and compare, a body of subjects and compare them to another set of subjects.

That was horrible. Hardly being done at that time. It was incredibly new and they were putting formaldehyde in milk and stuff like that, right? That's exactly right. Yeah, I love to talk about that. Can I talk about

Francine L Shaw: 100? I was gonna ask you about that. Matt's flight was late, so he was in a late arriver.

Matthew Regusci: But I read your book.

I read your book a couple times, so I was like, This is awesome.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah. So, yeah, that blew my mind from out of hiding. No, what the hell? Anyway, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah.

Deborah Blum: So, I actually, if you can love a story of an industry poisoning people, this is one of my favorite

Matthew Regusci: stories. Okay. I got to read some of the other books.

So, you write about murders and stuff? I enjoy those, too. Right? So, I'm going to say

Francine L Shaw: that I have family members that were Undertakers, and you're talking about formaldehyde in milk and I'm like, Oh my God,

Deborah Blum: it's just so incredible. So what I was saying in the talk is during the Civil War, formaldehyde became the go to embalming agent.

It had been arsenic, right? But formaldehyde was even better and the Germans had synthesized it super cool. They could stack corpses up like cordwood. They didn't rot. Everyone was like, wow, this totally preserves thing. And one of the problems for milk at that time, there's no pasteurization, right? So, bacteria are everywhere.

And there's really not very much refrigeration unless you have money. So milk rots all over the place. So the dairymen have this sort of light bulb moment where they go, Hey! There's formaldehyde. It preserves corpses. I bet it would preserve our milk. And so they start putting it in milk.

Matthew Regusci: And we're talking about, when we say dairies, I, people have this, like, ideal vision of a dairy in Wisconsin, right?

And, like, the cheeseheads, and, you know, we're talking about Like in your book, you go into detail explaining these dairies as basically in New York City or in the cities, some dark alley corner, there's four or five cows barely surviving and they're milking. And so just the environment alone that these cows are in are cesspools of bacteria.

And so, yeah, the milk shouldn't last a day, let alone a week.

Francine L Shaw: We're not talking clean udders with milking systems and

Matthew Regusci: it was utterly dirty,

Francine L Shaw: utterly.

Deborah Blum: Yeah. So in the cities they had what they called swill milk dairies where they would take refuse from distilleries and just feed it to the cows because it was so cheap.

And the, and the cows actually would get to the point where their teeth would rot out from there. They're just disgusting. But, but even in dairies and in states like Wisconsin, there was no expectation or standards of cleanliness. Right. We were barely talking about germ theory at that point anyway. And so no one cleaned anything.

And one of the things I talked about with milk is that dairymen would often water down the milk and they just go and they'd get it out of the local pond or the swamp. There was this Indiana case in which the family brought their milk into the public health department because it was wriggling. It was full of horse air worms.

Which, because the milk had been watered from the pond behind the dairy farmer's place, right? So the dairy farmers were not particularly trying to do clean work. So there was all this bacteria anyway, without pasteurization and without refrigeration, but then they added to it, like, really filthy water and filthy conditions.

So formaldehyde killed all that bacteria. It was like this miracle dairyman. You can actually go in the, 1880s. And there's these ads, buy my milk. It'll sit perfectly on your table for two weeks without rotting. And a modern America would go, what is that vampire milk? We wouldn't touch it. But back in the day, it was like a miracle of science.

But the other really interesting. thing about that is people knew formaldehyde was poisonous, right? So the dairymen would put this formaldehyde in the milk and they would call it something like rosaline. They actually called it rosaline as if they were adding a little floral scent to the milk. So even if there had been labels, there was no evidence of what they were doing.

They'd ratchet it up. Hey, a little worked. I'll just put more. And so you got what I was, again, what they called embalmed milk scandals. You see them. It's in headlines all across the United States. I gave an example of one that was in Kansas, but all over the U. S. that you would see these embalmed milk scandals because children were dying across the United States.

Formaldehyde's horrible. It's really poisonous. You can look at some of the newspaper cartoons of the time and they've got like demons coming out of bottles of milk related to this formaldehyde poisoning. It's And yet, even when kids died, 400 children died in Indianapolis alone in one summer, no prosecution, no laws against it, right?

It's completely legal. You can look back at it in this kind of, what were you thinking? Why? But people did not want to tell businesses what to do and businesses did not want to be told what to do. So you had this incredible standoff.

Matthew Regusci: Wow.

Deborah Blum: Yeah, it's just horrifying, right?

Matthew Regusci: Yeah. And so can you go into, so what you saw in the past when you did the history and how laws changed, what was the kind of the catalyst that actually made laws change in the United States and then going off on a tangent, what are you seeing today in terms of food laws and consumers expectations and stuff like that?

So I love history repeats itself. Yeah. And I'm feeling like we're in that world right now with the science that we have, but I would love for you to just explain that history turns into the laws and then where we are today.

Deborah Blum: So a lot of our brilliant regulatory movements in this country are driven by scandal.

If you look at Silent Spring and the EPA, if you looked at the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, which followed the laws I was looking at in 1938, there was a huge scandal about poisonous cough syrup. If you looked at the amendments, I'm still thinking food, but the dye amendments of the mid 20th century that followed a scandal in which people, children were being poisoned by certain of the food dyes at the time and so forth and so on.

So when we finally get the first consumer protection regulations in the country and that's the meat inspection act and the food and drug act of 1906, there's like an ongoing simmering crusade. That's also true, right? The scandal is like the tipping point that pushes you over to the actual event. So you had Wiley and many.

State food chemists and food safety officer. They had been advocating for this. There was a, I think it was like a three acre exhibit of horrible food at the St. Louis fair. The meet me at St. Louis world's fair had almost three acres of. Horrible poisonous food and fraudulent food on exhibit. People were really stirring this up, and then there had been efforts in Congress to try to do some kind of regulation.

All of them have been shot down mostly by the food industry and the legislators they paid off. This will remind you of today to some extent, right? But what finally happened is the poison squad experiments really got people revved up. And if you look at the coverage of those, newspapers are now saying people are eating poison, which they hadn't been before.

Right, cookbook authors are writing about how dangerous food is, and the poison squad experiments themselves become this kind of there's minstrel shows and songs and poems and all of this popular culture that starts exploding about your food is killing you. Right? And yet. What really pushes it over is a book by the writer, Upton Sinclair, looking at the packing house.

It's a novel that uses the meat packing houses of a Chicago as a backstory that he meant to be about the plight of the worker. There's a famous line from him. I aim for America's heart and hit it on the stomach. Right? He meant that to be. About the plight of the workers. He's

Matthew Regusci: a socialist and he wanted to write a book about the plight of the workers and get the socialist party to go up and he didn't do anything for socialism, but he definitely did something for our food supply

Deborah Blum: because he actually went to the packing houses and did undercover reporting and journalism.

So he had incredible details about how bad it was. Right? And the interesting thing about that book is that when his publisher His New York publisher, Doubleday Page, was so worried about it, they sent their own fact checkers out there. Their fact checkers came back and said it's worse than in the book.

And then when the book came out, Roosevelt sent fact checkers, and their, his fact checkers came back. And it's so crazy, because the packing houses knew they were coming, right? And did some kind of superficial polish, but their report was so damning that Roosevelt eventually was able to use it as leverage.

Well, he published parts of it. He got in a standoff with Congress. He said, if you don't give me a meat inspection app, I'm going to publish this report. And Congress said, up yours, right? You're not paying us, right, basically. And so then he actually had part of the report published in the New York Times.

And it's just horrifying details, animals falling in latrines and being sent out into the potted ham and just really disgusting stuff. And so so many contracts got canceled with the meat suppliers that they then said, okay, we want a Meat Inspection Act. And so the 1906 Meat Inspection Act passes in June.

And in this kind of tidal wave of fury about the state of the food supply that's building up for years, the Food and Drug Act also passed. And there's good reason to start regulating drugs, right? That's not the focus of what I do, but the unregulated state of pharmaceuticals in this country was insane.

Matthew Regusci: Like the snake oil salesmen that we always hear about.

Deborah Blum: That's right. Or I would mention medicated soft drinks, you know, it's, that's my favorite one. Coca Cola. Coca Cola, but 7 Up. Yeah.

Francine L Shaw: Yes.

Deborah Blum: Most people don't know that, but 7 Up was an upper, they put lithium in it, so they called it 7 Up because it picked you up in seven different ways with the different medications that were in the drug.

Half of

Matthew Regusci: our, half of the population. Adults in the United States just drink 7 Up with their lithium.

Francine L Shaw: It's never gone away at all. And it just talks about the cocaine infused wine. And I'm like, Oh my

Deborah Blum: God. Isn't that insane? Vin Mariani, blessed by the Pope. It's like such a weird time, but those laws pass and they are paradigm shifts, right?

That to me, that is so important because these two laws that just have to do with food safety, basically. Right. They laid down the precedent for the U. S. government to do consumer protection, everything that follows, EPA, OSHA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, all of that is based on the precedent in which the government says yes, right?

We actually see part of our job is setting safety standards and protecting American citizens in their everyday life. The law's not perfect, obviously, in any way, but it lays down the foundation for everything that follows. So we have the law.

Francine L Shaw: My problem is apparently we have a problem enforcing it. Yes.

Which brings us to today, right? Which brings us to death. Yeah. Because as you're up there talking, when I'm listening to this, and this is so much about what our podcast, I feel like sometimes it's about is. You said, and I believe this is a quote, beef killed more soldiers than the Spanish did. One of the gentlemen.

In the Spanish American War, that's right. And I immediately thought, Borsad. Yes. Because it's, and here we are.

Deborah Blum: And food's still killing people, right?

Francine L Shaw: Yes. Despite the fact that we have.

Deborah Blum: This law is now, what, almost 120 years old, 1906, right? So we're in, it's 2024, we're almost 100 years, more than 100 years out, 120 years out almost, right?

So why haven't we fixed all this, right? Why are we, are people still getting sick from food? Why when we have regulations on the books, are we just not damn enforcing them in the way that I think we should? That's part of it for me. So that law got updated in 1938, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act that created the FDA, right?

And then we have other things like the Delaney Clause and FSMA, the Food Safety Modernization Act and all of, also driven partly by scandal, right? I can't remember how many millions of pounds of hamburger were recalled before they passed that act. And there was the peanut corporation. Cause that

Matthew Regusci: FSMA happened in end of.

The first decade in the 2000s, right? Like I think 2008 would pass to think somewhere around the 2007, 2008. So the jacket box was in 93. Then there was a bunch of other, and then that continued, right? E. coli through beef up until the end of the nineties. And then. Then it was a series of outbreaks in lettuce and onions with hepatitis.

And then spinach. Romaine.

Deborah Blum: Yeah, I was thinking lettuce. Yeah. Sprouts all over the place. All over. Yeah.

Matthew Regusci: Sprouts. Yes. Big time. And so then it was, you're, you're right. It was just like a series of cascading events. And then. The big Jensen Farms one happened with Listeria and yeah, every decade we have a huge Listeria problem.

Deborah Blum: There was a book, I have a very treasured third edition copy of it or something that was published in the 1930s called 100 Million Guinea Pigs, you know it? No. Ah. And so it was as the authors were Callot and Schlenk who eventually went on to form the Consumers Union and Consumer Reports. But they wrote this book, A Hundred Million Guinea Pigs.

They were advocating for the law that became the 1938 law in which they just said, look, and there were a hundred million American citizens then. So like, we're the guinea pigs. Right. The government and corporations allow us to be the guinea pigs in this big experiment and they decide things are unsafe when we get sick or we die.

And if you read that book, we've come a long way since the 1930s, thank God. But some of the things they're looking at, you're like, how in the world would anyone have put anything that big? Poisonous into cosmetics or into food or into drink at that point. They wrote another book later called to eat, drink and be wary, which you could publish today as well.

So we have over a century of theoretically improved regulation, right? We have over a century of better and better science. Part of the stuff that underlines FSMA is we can measure this down to very small levels. We have these great detection measures. Let's put them into place. Let's put them into place in a farm to table kind of way.

We just don't do it, right? We've got the rules in place, but we don't fund them. Certainly went way backwards in the Trump administration. All of that kind of disappeared, right? So it's been rebuilding it since but the FBA's inspection program is like Insanely underfunded, right? We know we don't fully fund the research because if you look at something like the toxic substance control inventory It'll tell you everything that we don't know anything about we just know it's poisonous The manufacturer has put it in there as a toxic substance that we know anything about it.

Nope

Francine L Shaw: And not only is it underfunded, but I regularly have auditors and inspectors that say to me, well, we're told that regardless, we're not allowed to shut them down.

Matthew Regusci: The FSIS reports for done by the Virginia inspectors for Boar's Head, for instance, there's 40 pages, 69 infractions. They just couldn't shut that place down and you're like, how bad does it have to be to shut them down?

Francine L Shaw: This isn't just manufacturing and processing. It's happening in retail too. And it's what the hell has to happen before we lock doors. This is like when you see this stuff happening, we need to start shutting places down. I don't care if it's retail. I don't care if it's manufacturing. If people's lives are at risk, lock the doors.

Because what

Deborah Blum: comes first here, what comes first here is people's lives. That's the point of all of this, right? It's just an. Absolutely infuriating that we're not saying, of course, it plays out in other ways, but I don't think we put a, so part of it is we have good regulations. We don't fund them. We don't enforce them.

I've been to the FDA a number of times since my book came out, and I'm not ratting anyone out when I hope when I am saying that I've had talked to people there who say, well, we were going to take this action, but the political appointee shut us down, right? Because. There are political appointees at the top of the FDA, and they're not necessarily, you're on the street consumer, they're more connected to industry.

And so that influences some of those acts, and it probably happens at the state level too, I just, I've talked to people about it at the fed. How many

Francine L Shaw: people have to get sick and die? Before we start to take this more seriously and I understand because I've done inspections when I wrote the book, the first person that hired me didn't realize I was as qualified as I was and the first year and I've talked about this a lot, I shut down 20 percent of the restaurants in the town and I got a lot of pushbacks like I was threatened, somebody threatened to shoot me more than once and it was like, I was told, do you know who this owner is?

Do you understand what you're doing here? Well, I do, but do you also understand who's going to get sued if somebody gets sick? You know, I'm, no, that we need to close them down. There's like multiple infractions here. No, we need to close them. And this is the person that's hired me that's saying this. It's, I don't care.

And I got a cease and desist from the restaurant. Did you realize? You can't do this with a health inspector. They're like, what, what the hell is the matter with you? That's a great story. You can't do this. Yeah, from their attorney. No, no, that's not the way it works. Part of this is because the person before me was not doing their job at all.

When I first, I was so excited about having this opportunity, right? And I truly went in there with, talk about risk. Colored glasses, like just being able to make a difference and I'm showing up and they're like, well, you're going to have to make an appointment or no, we just signed the paper or, and all the, and I'm just like, this can't be real.

This stuff, I was so naive. And I didn't think these things, yeah, I'd heard stories, but I didn't think these things really happened. And I did this for three years. And this, well, I read that book, these things that my mind was just blown with the things that the number of times I had to get police escorts, the number of times that my life was threatened, just crazy.

So I understand why, and some inspectors are hesitant, and then we're told that legal doesn't support them. And this is from government regulators, that legal doesn't support them, that they're told they can't shut these places down. Somebody somewhere has to make a difference. It's got to start somewhere.

I think,

Deborah Blum: yeah, well, it starts with people like you who make a difference. And I think some of it, again, going back to the Wiley era is eventually the way to public opinion and public awareness and public fury forced some of this change. And so part of what's important is what you're doing, which is getting the word out there.

So people are aware of this. A lot of people don't know this. They don't have a clue. They don't see all the behind the scenes kinds of agreements that if you spend any time with a, you know, well, that hasn't changed, right? That was true in 1906. And that's true now, right? The other part of it, though, is that we have really good regulations.

There's also some really big holes in the protective measures we have. So I'm thinking about food supplements and dietary supplements and vitamins and all of the things that you're just like. Is this real? Is it not real? I'm forever saying to people, quit taking that. Quit, but don't go on the internet and hear that you're going to save your life with turmeric.

That's just crap.

Francine L Shaw: Well, and people don't realize that a lot of that stuff isn't even regulated. Yeah. They don't know. No. So they're just out there taking all this crap and they have no idea it's not even regulated. No, they

Deborah Blum: make an assumption that we're actually protecting them when in a lot of cases this is a very leaky net.

And people don't realize.

Francine L Shaw: Leaky, it's got gaping holes, water's pouring out. Good luck holding that water. Right? So. That boat's sinking.

Deborah Blum: And yet, I do want, I feel like I have to say this. So in the 19th century, food was one of the top 10 causes of death. Is that true today? Probably not. No. No, it's not. So let's give ourselves some credit.

Our regulations are not perfect. I wish we did things more like Europe did in a number of cases and were a little more precautionary, right? Um, But the fact of the matter is we have these things. We have people like you who go out and do the inspections and call places out. Not that the Boris had story is a perfect story, but then after a while we catch up and we actually do take action.

And those guys are going to get clobbered with police. They already are. Yeah. So, we have our civil litigation, sometimes it's more effective even. That certainly I think was true with Chipotle. Chipotle just got hammered with civil litigation after their issue.

Matthew Regusci: And also a 25 million fine by the government as well.

That helps too. Which was a pittance compared to what they make. Oh, 100, or compared to all the civil litigation as well. It was a pittance. It was a drop in the bucket. But,

Deborah Blum: yeah. But for the government, not too bad. Yeah.

Francine L Shaw: So. And again, there's a lot of companies out there that do a fabulous job and we would be wrong.

I'm sorry to not say that. And there's certainly people that dedicate their life to food safety and do a fabulous job as well. So, we don't want to not acknowledge that. I feel like that always has to be in there, right? Not everyone is evil. Not everyone is a bad actor. It does. It does. We have a long way to go.

But I know a lot of people that dedicate their lives to doing the right thing and trying to make a difference. So, it would be wrong to make it sound like it's a whole big bad deal. And yet, I think it is

Deborah Blum: okay for us to say. But we haven't come far enough. We're not saving enough. People are dying. People are dying.

People are getting sick. Millions of people are getting sick in the United States every year from food related illness. And we only hear about the really bad ones. Yes, that's We only hear about the extremes. Yes, exactly right.

Matthew Regusci: I say all the time that there are, on one side of the spectrum, the consumers that go and they get the cheapest food possible, right?

They just go and they'll, they just need calories. They're going to go get the cheapest food possible. And then you have the consumers that are like the Michael Pollan. They want the, they want the cheapest The whole food, the best possible, they don't care the price, the most expensive as long as it's the best

Deborah Blum: and he can afford

Matthew Regusci: it and they can afford it.

Right? Yeah. And so and everybody kind of land somewhere in that spectrum. But regardless of where you are on the quality of the and the price of the food, everybody that consumes it doesn't want to die. Yeah, they could all agree on that one thing.

Deborah Blum: I'm not sitting down here and hoping that this dish will kill me.

Nobody feels that way, right? And I think the other part of this is we're forever saying, Oh, be an informed consumer. It's impossible. There is no way for a single american consumer. To track all of the things we've just been talking about versus, uh, nonetheless, every other contaminant in the world. We need to do a better job of telling this story, right?

Francine L Shaw: Well, and you said this during your presentation, nor do they know where to look. We are way more educated than the average consumer. We know where to look. We know where to find it. We know what to look for. The average consumer doesn't have a clue.

Deborah Blum: No, and it's interesting because I got really interested in the subject of arsenic contamination of rice when.

I was working for the New York Times. I actually wrote a piece called The Trouble with Rice, right? Rice is the number one source of arsenic in the U. S. diet because it's a plant that really loves to pick heavy metals, so cadmium or arsenic are the two things. And it's regulated in other, China regulates rice, arsenic in rice.

We don't. They were going to, but then the Trump administration killed that. Right. So I've written about this so many times. I'm like, everyone in the world should know, but people don't, right? There's a so bombarded with information about so many things, right? They just can hardly hang on to it at all.

This is me saying, I don't know how to fix this. I think we keep telling the story over and over again. And we figure out what are the parts of the story that really have to be repeated. It's actually something we talk about as journalists, right? In our, how do you counter misinformation? You tell the truth.

And you tell it over and over because the people who are going to put out bad information are going to say that over and over again. So one of the few things we can do is say, okay, maybe I've heard this before, but tons of people have not tons of people. I'm not, I'm just going to keep saying it. Some people are, and we're going to start moving this forward.

Does that make sense?

Matthew Regusci: It totally does. In fact, I would love for you to talk a little bit more about the story about that lady who wrote the cookbook and how many copies that she sold and how influential you talk about in the book that it wasn't like she went out of her way to create this cookbook to change the philosophy of the American wife and mother, but she totally did.

And so it's just, I think. It's a great story. Be really powerful example of how just normal people could do amazing things.

Deborah Blum: Yeah, because we're really talking about this in our everyday life. And that to me is the most important. We're not talking about some amazing abstract thing. These are compounds and situations that run through our lives every day.

Those decisions that have to be made every day. So one of the people I wrote about, I actually went to the cookbook library at the Library of Congress. and had them pull for me all the cookbooks that reference adulterated food or poisonous food. And the person who really stood out for me was Fannie Farmer, who was

Matthew Regusci: Fannie Farmer.

What a great name. Isn't that a great name? I've never heard of Fannie Farmer. Not until I read her book.

Deborah Blum: If you're into like the history of cookbooks, Fannie Farmer is a name, right? But what makes her so interesting and she said, and this is why I think she's such a good example is when Fannie Farmer wrote her cookbook, she was head of the Boston School of Cooking.

And this was at a time when women couldn't go to college for the most part. They couldn't get to college. Colleges wouldn't give them degrees. Wiley actually gave, oh, who's the woman? It's Pennington, who really pushed forward refrigeration. Had gone to the University of Pennsylvania, and they wouldn't give her a degree.

They'd only give her a certificate of graduation. He hired her anyway, and she went on to become, I think they called her the ice lady. She really pushed refrigeration. But anyway, that's a side story. So the cooking schools were a way for women to actually get education, right? They would teach science. If you look at Fannie Farmer's early cookbooks, they're like, let's go through the periodic table.

What is hydrogen? What is oxygen? Let's talk about the composition of water, right? Let's, right? So they actually used those cooking schools as another way to educate women at the time because And if you had a lot of money, you might get into a university and not get your degree. But for most people, there were no universities open to them.

They didn't allow women. And there was no way of getting a post high school education unless you did something like go to a cooking school. So one of the things about people like Fannie Farmer is they saw themselves as educators, right? So when Farmer did her cookbooks and she went on to do a whole series of cookbooks for Karen Feeding of the Invalid and other cookbooks, She was using them as a way of educating women, and you saw that too with Alice Lakey, who was a, an advocate, a woman suffrage advocate who worked with Wiley.

But she also pushed using cookbooks as a way to educate American women about the state of the food supply and food chemistry. So one of the things that I think we don't appreciate today when we're reading the cookbooks of today, we don't look at them and say, wow, this is going to teach me something about the periodic table, or I'm going to understand some basic science, but cookbook authors did that.

And so it's just another reminder women. We're getting their education where they could and it was women who were cooking the meals for the most part at this time period, right? We're talking early 20th century. And so this was an enormously influential way of getting women on board, right? In saying this has to change.

I'm not going to poison my children any longer. Right. I admire that so much, and Wiley, to give him credit, he married a suffragette, right? So he was fairly open minded anyway. But he would go out and talk to women's groups all the time, and he would get dressed in his best clothes, his top hat. This is Harvey Washington, why I don't think I, who was the head of the Bureau of Chemistry at the FDA, and is really the center character in my book, Let's Get Regulation.

But he actually said, we're not going to be able to do this unless we have women on our side. And even though women don't have the vote, because they didn't have the vote, right? They can be hugely politically influential, and they were. And I know that with the food, I want to say it was the Food and Drug Act, you guys.

There were women in, I want to say it was Wyoming, who went to the senator and said if you don't vote for this, we're going to make sure you're never elected again. Even though they couldn't vote, they could organize enough to do that. So, it's also a wonderful portrait of women saying, you know what? Okay, we don't have political power yet, but we have political power and we're going to use it.

We're going to flex our muscles in this way and we're going to educate each other. And I love that about that story. I love that about the people who just don't give up. This matters. We should not be poisoning American citizens. I'm going to take the tools that I have at hand, be it a cookbook or a comedy act or whatever it was, and I'm going to let people know that this matters.

And then we have to continue doing that. We have to continue saying to people, this is where we are today. We need to be better. Let me give you some information that helps you get there.

Matthew Regusci: Right. So when you were doing your research, you said food was the top 10 killer in the United States, which is just absolutely insane.

Bye. There's a lot more about poison in food than death, illness, lethargy, excuse me, lower de lower lifespan, like all these things. Once that food safety act happened, was there a huge change just overall in American lifespan and all that stuff? Is that one of the key factors of then us just going from 40, 50 years life average lifespan to 80?

Deborah Blum: Yes, it was one of the huge factors because we were no longer dragging ourselves down, right? We weren't, people, people don't function that well if they're sick all the time, right? Let's face it.

Matthew Regusci: Like in Africa with malaria and that type of stuff. It's like you see that and it's like, oh man, it's just so painful to, it's sad.

Deborah Blum: So part of it was food, but I think really when there's like a whole complicated public health science story here, and actually this is a great opportunity for me to say at a time that you see these. Weirdly anti science movements going on, right? The American lifespan almost doubled sometime in the 19th century.

It was like in the forties, right? We push it up to 80. Why is that? One is because we make food and drink safer. We make air safer, right? But more than that, we actually figure out germ theory, right? We recognize that milk is full of pathogens and we start pasteurizing milk. That was a huge deal, right? Yeah,

Francine L Shaw: absolutely.

We shouldn't be drinking raw milk. That's 100%.

Deborah Blum: I'm happy to stand on a straight corner and say that any day. We do other things, antibiotics, right? And then there's other things like. Vaccinations, right? Fluoridation, right? Because the health of your teeth can affect your overall body health, right?

Fluoridation is really a big deal for people in a country where there's not adequate dental insurance. Fluoridation becomes a big deal. So you see all of these chemical discoveries and all these scientific discoveries. Some of them require enforcement. Some of them require medical practice. Some of them require public knowledge.

All of these move us forward to where we are today. And it would be a real shame if we stood here in the early 21st century and said, Man, the 19th century is where we want to be, right? The good old days were, right? It was really just one generation

Matthew Regusci: changed everything, huh?

Francine L Shaw: I just want to say there's something about going back rather than going forward and that's all I'm going to say.

Yes. I'm

Deborah Blum: right there with you on that.

Francine L Shaw: So just going to stop right there. So

Deborah Blum: at home, sometimes when this comes up, cause I'm like, you can't tell this on a podcast, I'm like in the room with my husband yelling about going backwards. And he's like stepping back. Cause my mom's just windmilling around. I just miss me.

Yeah. It just makes me sick. It's so mad to move forward to this point and to have this completely fairytale idea of the good old days. And for who they were, they good too, right? The good old days for who exactly? Yeah. Right.

Matthew Regusci: And it depends upon how far you want to go back because. I think urbanization, you talk about it in your book, urbanization was a huge reason at which we had issues with food safety to begin with.

When 90 percent of the population were rural farmers, they didn't have issues with, oh, and they may have had issues with food safety, but it wasn't the same.

Deborah Blum: They didn't have the manufactured food problems that really eventually required regulation. They still had the crummy milk issues. Yes. They had bad water issues.

They had some of the really unfortunate dietary habits of the 19th century. One of the things that science has taught us is eat your fruits and vegetables, right? That was a lot of standard lesson back in the day, right?

Matthew Regusci: Because there wasn't as, they didn't have as much access to that type of stuff, right?

There was. A lot of processing of the foods, but it was more home processing as opposed to chemical processing of stuff. Yeah.

Deborah Blum: Yeah. Yeah. So going back to that hall, the pink chick person on the farm, the way we used to at least used to think about the 19th century, those people existed, right? They were just some minority.

Especially in the 19th century. You're right that urbanization drove a lot of this. People moved to the cities, they had factories, they had very little money if they worked in factories, so they were buying this process. Really incredibly fraudulent crowd. And I talked to people even today who are looking at food products and they say, well, adulteration is still a problem.

It's still a huge problem. It totally is. Right?

Matthew Regusci: You're talking about cinnamon, like the lead in the cinnamon. That's exactly right. I shouldn't say was, we were seeing it prop up still right now.

Francine L Shaw: Applesauce. Applesauce. That's right. Apple juice. Just not too long ago. Silk.

Matthew Regusci: And huge in laboratories right now of actually speciation of testing for fish.

And the big huge issue in Ireland and England with the horse meat. And yeah, food adulteration is

Deborah Blum: Food adulteration. I was talking to one of the guys at the FDA when I was down there and he was talking about olive oil, which we all know is hugely And he said that in some of the olive oils that they were seeing coming in for Europe.

They were making them greener with copper sulfate, speaking of going back to the 19th century, and they were actually pulling copper sulfate out of some of those European olive oils because they wanted to make them look like fresh pressed green olive oil, so they greened them up with a little copper, right?

Francine L Shaw: Like olive oil, I'm like, I know you do.

Deborah Blum: I'm like really, and so olive oil is one of the things that I am really careful about. Some of that is a, I can afford to be careful. Right.

Francine L Shaw: You know, and that is such a difference, too, that a lot of people don't even think about. Some people can afford to be, and other people can't.

And that's another shame within our society. Some people can, like you said earlier, afford to, and others can't. And

Deborah Blum: Right. Like I was once talking, I said, well, eat a varied diet, right? If you're worried that there's a contaminant in one thing, just don't eat it all the time. Mix your food up. Variety is the spice of life, right?

That's like a standard common sense advice. And one of the guys I talked to, he said, sure, if you can afford that, right? 100%. Yeah. So, and I thought, yeah, okay, Debra, grow up, right? Not everyone can actually, can even afford to eat a varied diet, right?

Matthew Regusci: Yeah. Or they're like, oh, well, I don't eat Doritos every day.

Sometimes I have Fritos, sometimes I have Cheetos. If it's a Some

Francine L Shaw: days I drink Mountain Dew.

Matthew Regusci: Oh.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah, that's right. Some days I drink Mountain Dew, other days I drink Coke.

Matthew Regusci: Or Sometimes I take my Lithium with 7 Up. And sometimes just right out of the bottle. Okay, so one other question before we go, looking at your crystal ball, where do you see food safety in the future?

Deborah Blum: I think in terms of enforcement of regulations and strengthening of regulations in some of the areas we're talking about, that is going to be election dependent. That's not even a political statement. That's just a fact. Yes. Long term, I think we are continuing to get better at the science. One of the things that I hope that will give us eventually Is ways I know the FDA has looked at some ways to do computer modeling, predictive work that allows them to not inspect everywhere, but calculate out what the major risks are.

I think some of the ways that we're going to build the scientific testing techniques are going to allow this us to do this. It's at a lower cost, more efficient way that probably is going to give us a chance to ramp up.

Matthew Regusci: Do you see consumers driving food safety in the future like consumer drove food safety in the past?

Deborah Blum: Well, you guys probably go out when I go out and I talked to book clubs or other events that I've given about this book in particular that are more general interest books. And I do that. I hear from no one who stands up and says, Well, I completely trust the modern American food supply. This is totally a problem in the past, Debra.

Go ahead and do your little history because mostly people come up and they say, Would you trust this? Would you eat this? And I try to sort my way through going back to my variety of the spices of life thing. What are common sense measures that anyone can take without the specific? People do not trust the food supply.

And I think that's, you know, Across the board, I think that's from people with little money to people with a lot of money. People do not find the food supply particularly trustworthy that eventually gets its own way. And that does put pressure on government and industry. Right? And I think probably industry.

So I have been talking more about regulation. But I think industry also gets fairly aware that people are pulling back on buying products. I'm not shopping here. I'm not buying this. I don't trust that. Right. And some of that is just having a, like I said, we're not perfect at it. Enough of an informed public.

And some of it is, and I haven't seen this. People getting to the point that they're actually angry. For instance, things like the boar's head recall with the really, apparently horrifying factory conditions that led to some of those problems, right? What you don't see is a sort of public outrage fury. At least, I'm not seeing it, right?

I'm seeing more of a, well, this is the standard game, right? We just have to live with this.

Francine L Shaw: So, I was shocked. I read a lot over the weekend on different media. posts about Boar's Head. There was a lot of anger at the government and less at Boar's Head. Why are we not mad at Boar's Head?

Deborah Blum: That is the question.

Francine L Shaw: Why are we not mad at Boar's Head? They're the ones that are producing this and they should have their own standards regardless of what the government does. I agree. They're manufacturing and processing and putting this stuff out there. Yes, the government should have been in there. They should have been in there every day monitoring this and doing their job yet.

Okay. Yes, they are. Clearly, they weren't doing their job. They should have been in there doing their job is where I was going with that. However, Horsehead ultimately had the responsibility of putting out a safe product. It's their factory. Why are we not mad at them? What, what are we missing?

Deborah Blum: That is such a good question because you would get more change at the industry level if people would hold the industry more accountable.

It's easier to be mad at government. I think if it's an American cultural thing, right, let's go to, it's the government's fault. But yeah, they, people should be furious with the company. I think on that,

Matthew Regusci: because I totally agree with you. And as a libertarian, I tend to be like, Just a complete distrust in government in general.

The government is, if they're guarding the hen house, they shouldn't also be with the fox, right? And I felt like this was, they were actually there, right? Where they're not in every facility there, but they are in every meatpacking facility. So we do have Uh, government in every meatpacking facility, they saw all of these things, and it was almost like a collusion.

We're paying for the services as consumers, either to the government directly through our taxes or as an extra tax on the cost of the meat itself. And they were there and they allowed it to happen. And so I can see like consumers just having a mistrust of meatpacking facilities or food package facility because of profit driven.

Desire, right? But then the government was there and they didn't do anything and they saw it and the inspector like for me like I feel sorry for those inspectors because day in and day out they were finding something they were finding they were doing their job they were finding things. But they could not shut the facility down.

And so that's where I think people are frustrated. If this is that bad, why couldn't they shut it down? And then taking it one step further, what other facilities out there are that bad? That the government is finding things on that they can't shut down. And that's, I think, where the outrage is, why it's on the government side.

Francine L Shaw: So I know everything that you're saying is true, but what I disagree with is that most people don't know that the government was in there every day doing those. And they don't know that.

Matthew Regusci: True.

Francine L Shaw: Now they do now. We do. They don't. They don't know that there is an inspector in there every day doing that.

Every shift. I know. They don't know that. We do. They don't. Yeah.

Deborah Blum: So someone was telling me, and I don't know what case this was, but one of the things that USDA can do with made inspections if they feel the company's noncompliant. So, do? They just pull their inspectors out of the plant. And then once they pull their inspectors out of the plant, shuts down.

But they didn't do that. So that is a higher up than the inspector decision. The inspectors are making these reports. Someone above them realizes there is a problem. The responsible thing at the government level would have been to say, Tabor said, you have to fix this up or we're shutting you down. And when they say, no, you pull the inspectors and you effectively shut down the plant.

So that's the government action that I could have happened and should have happened that didn't happen. I think part of it too, is that you guys, and I think. This book taught me in ways that it hadn't before and the reporting I've done since, you know, really understand that there is that behind the scenes industry government handshake on almost all of this and the public almost never sees that they're not fully aware of just how tight and this exposes it and they expect the government people in the weirdest way for they expect the government be standing for them, right?

And this says it's not

Francine L Shaw: and how often do we ask our people in Congress? Mhm. And the Senate, like, what do you know about food safety? What do you think about food safety? And I think that needs to be something that we start to talk about with our elected officials. How do you feel about food safety? Yeah.

What do you know? I agree. You know, who is it that you're partnering with?

Deborah Blum: People are getting, millions of Americans are getting sick every year and some are dying. So tell us what you know and what you're doing about. Part

Francine L Shaw: of the problem is that That most people think it's never going to happen to me until it dies, until somebody you love gets sick or dies.

Deborah Blum: Before we got a little bit smarter about things like Salmonella or Listeria or, and you started realizing what we used to call stomach flu was really, right? It was like, everyone was like, Oh, I had the stomach flu. As if there were these weird stomach flu viruses, right? When in fact, that was just basic food sickness, right?

Well, I'm not even sure people have fully connected that dot yet, right? Most haven't. But they actually are getting sick on a regular basis because of this. They don't draw that connection. I have the stomach flu as if it's related to influenza.

Francine L Shaw: We need to show her our Noro man. Oh yeah.

Matthew Regusci: So Francine's been using that Noro man logo with the dude, stuff is coming out of both ends.

Yeah. She's been using that logo for a decade. Noro, man.

Deborah Blum: That is brilliant,

Francine L Shaw: right? I'm so proud of him. He's traveled the world. Should have trademarked him a long time ago.

Deborah Blum: So I tell myself that the more people get this, the more eventually we'll get to a point where, again, people plant their feet as they did and said, enough.

We need the government to stand up and do this. And also we need to hold industry to more account.

Matthew Regusci: 100%. And on my side, over 20 years on industry type of certification inspections and Francine's over 20 years of retail and food service. Only five years. She's not old enough to work that long. And so, yeah, so we both agree that it's the industry that has to change.

There are all these things for the government to do and they have all these lodges like we were talking about. We've just got to see where the enforcement's not happening in full light, and that's what's fascinating.

Deborah Blum: This kind of thing makes me, and I was saying this to some of the other people here, I'm like, I really want to go back to being a newspaper reporter again, right?

It's like there's so many stories that aren't getting told. Yeah, yes. Yes.

Francine L Shaw: I mean, that's, that's one of the reasons that I started doing what I do is, I was at the Food Safety Summit. Baltimore, the last year, and that was the year of the riots in Baltimore. Interesting fact. And like, I was retail, and I was the only person at the Food Safety Summit that year that had a booth that was retail, at that time, retail.

We weren't being talked about at the Food Safety Summit. And I just felt like a fish out of water. And I had the opportunity that year to talk to Hal King and Darren Dettweiler. First time I'd ever met them, honestly didn't really realize they were like the, you know, power figures that they were when they were both so kind and had such an impact on me.

And I've said this a million times, and I consider both of them friends at this point. And I did some research after I got home and I thought, I need a bigger platform. That is what I want to do and did some research and started putting wheels in motion and

Deborah Blum: here I am. So back to your question, how do we make things change for the better? We have people like you. We get the word out. We let people know that there are these issues. We don't quit talking about them. Eventually we get change. It's never as fast as I want it to be. I've come to accept that sometimes you get revolution by inch.

Matthew Regusci: What a great saying, revolution by inch.

Deborah Blum: But I'll accept that if we eventually get there.

Matthew Regusci: Yeah. Just bringing that back. Just like you don't want incremental poison to it. End up being a huge toxicology issue, but if you're going to make change, incremental change over a long period of time is still change one step forward, even if sometimes

Francine L Shaw: it's

Matthew Regusci: better, right?

Awesome. Very good. And

Francine L Shaw: it will, it will. It takes time. A little bit of time.

Matthew Regusci: Well, thank you so much for your time. This was a great conversation. Awesome. I've been wanting to talk to you about this since I read it like a few years ago. And yeah, so it was good to read it again before this interview. And I love the stories.

And anybody who is interested in this conversation will absolutely love your book. Again, it is Poison Squad, and it's by Debra Bloom. And Debra, thank you so much for your time today. And we have some advice for you. And that is don't eat poop.

Francine L Shaw: Yes. A huge fan. Huge fan. Thank you. That's the best advice I've gotten all day.

And

Deborah Blum: I'm really honored to be on the podcast. I'm a huge fan.

Matthew Regusci: Thank you so much.