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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
SPEAKER_10: Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And we're just Stuff You Should Know-ing it, doing some Stuff You Should Know kind of stuff on the Stuff You Should Know podcast.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah. Uh, yeah. Hey, can I make a couple of quick announcements? Oh boy, is it a correction about me?
SPEAKER_10:
No, that's in listener mail.
SPEAKER_10: Okay.
SPEAKER_17: Uh, just a couple of quick things. Uh, firstly, I have had my front tooth implant redone. So the next, uh, roughly 80 episodes might be a little lispy here and there.
SPEAKER_17:
SPEAKER_10: Can you say sibilance?
SPEAKER_17: Sibilance. It's actually more Fs. Can you say fibilance?
SPEAKER_10: Sibilance.
SPEAKER_17:
Yeah, sometimes air just shoots out of that little tooth hole. Uh, tooth, the TH at the end, that's problematic. So you know, here we are again everyone, uh, and bear with it and I appreciate your support.
SPEAKER_10: Uh, you can't even tell Chuck. Like had you not said something, maybe one person would have noticed. I think it's fine.
I appreciate that.
SPEAKER_17:
Well, yeah.
But you'll hear, some words will stand out. The other quick one is just for this episode, massive COA trigger warning. Any vegetarians or vegans or really anybody who is just grossed out by gross food stuff, this is chock full.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, if you find the human body and the stuff it can do odious to, you might want to just be prepared.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: All right. So I'm ready. Um, yeah, because we are talking about what things were like before America started regulating the meat that we bought and ate. Uh, and it turns out it was a total free for all until then. But it was really just kind of nestled in a short period. You know, where like the second industrial revolution happened and all of a sudden everybody moves to the cities and you can't buy your bacon from the guy down the street anymore or make your own milk or whatever. You have to buy it. And so these companies sprung up to supply that stuff and they started cutting corners immediately. Yeah, it's the American way time and time again.
SPEAKER_17: We've seen, uh, from the very beginning, corporate interests, uh, corporate lobby all in the
name of profit. And this isn't just us railing. This is the history of the United States.
SPEAKER_10: Yes, for sure. Most of them are advertisers on stuff you should know too. Probably so.
So, so people needed this stuff and they filled a void. Like it was a necessary thing that they were doing. But the problem is because there's zero regulation, I mean none. Um, like, like there was an author named, um, Deborah Blum and she wrote the poison squad colon one chemist single minded crusade for safety at the turn of the 20th century.
SPEAKER_10: And um, she said that there was nothing that could be done to food that was illegal because
there were no food safety laws. It was, there was nothing you could do aside from kill your customers.
And even then you, you might just get some bad press and everybody's like, oh well it happens.
SPEAKER_17:
Yeah.
I wonder if it was because they just assumed that these new corporations would just sort of deliver food the right way. Or I just wonder if it was naivete. I mean eventually it was obviously stuff started coming out as we'll see in this episode.
And Congress, you know, bows down to the donors as they still do today.
SPEAKER_17: But I just wonder what they thought at first.
SPEAKER_17: Just like, no, this is great. And then, you know, they're supplying more food and I'm sure they're doing it right.
SPEAKER_10: My take on it is because this is like set largely in the Gilded Age that there was a general like hands off approach. Like, hey, this business is zooming this economy into the stratosphere and we don't want to interfere with it. And I'm sure they're going to do the right thing anyway. Yeah, that's a good point.
SPEAKER_10: So that's my take. I think that it was a combination of not really realizing that we needed regulations because we never needed them before. And then not wanting to meddle with this red hot economic engine that was flaming just with so many flames.
SPEAKER_17:
Yeah, flames on the side of your face.
So I guess we should start with milk, huh?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, why not? Because it was pretty bad stuff.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah, it was. Pasteurization had been around for a long time. It was invented in the 1850s, but they didn't get on the widespread pasteurization of milk
till about the 80 or so years later.
So if you went and bought your milk, you know, I think the understanding for a lot of people is like, oh, well, back then you would buy your milk from the local dairy.
And it was that's way better just to get it fresh from the teat like that.
And that was not true because this milk was nasty. It was killing babies.
SPEAKER_17: Four hundred thousand babies a year from drinking bad milk.
SPEAKER_10: In America alone, that's not a global stat. That's just in the United States.
SPEAKER_17:
Yeah, unbelievable.
SPEAKER_10:
Yeah, it is. It is. It's nuts that everybody's like, yeah, this just happens. But I guess people just thought that's what happened when you drink milk sometimes, or I don't know what the thinking was.
SPEAKER_10: But a guy named John Newell Hurty, H-U-R-T-Y, he became the chief health officer of Indiana in 1896. And we should say by this time, just kind of to give it some context, the pure food movement, which was a progressive movement in the 19th century, along with like temperance, abolition, it had really kind of started to gain steam. So this guy wasn't laying the groundwork, but his work was very noteworthy. But he became the chief health officer of Indiana, and he immediately started investigating the state's dairy farms and found what they were doing is what was killing, you know, infants who were being fed cow's milk.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah, it was because it was cow's milk that was watered down so they could stretch profits, but it was watered down. It's not like they had some beautiful filtration system from a Poland spring.
Right. Actually, I don't even know what a Poland spring is.
SPEAKER_10: It's a specific spring. It is. Ironically, not in Poland. I had a feeling.
SPEAKER_17:
So they weren't using that, of course. They were using like the farm's pond water, which was disgusting. It was stagnant. At one point, like he literally held up a bottle of milk from Indiana and saw actual worms inside of it.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_17:
Isn't that awful? Live worms.
SPEAKER_10: They were moving. Yeah, and that wasn't all he found. He found insects, hares, blood, pus, cow manure. He estimated that just the residents of Indianapolis ingested about 2,000 pounds of cow manure every year just from the milk they were drinking. Yeah, that's collective.
SPEAKER_17: Not each person, of course, but that's still a lot of cow poop.
SPEAKER_10:
I think you would OD on cow poop if you ate that much.
SPEAKER_17: Or maybe it would make you into like a superhero.
SPEAKER_10: There was another really gross one that Dave turned up. I think it was originally in an Atlantic article about the early days of milk. But one of the things that they would do, so like if you thinned milk with water, it was very clearly thinned. It didn't look like milk. It was bluish gray. So they'd put like chalk or flour or plaster of paris in.
SPEAKER_10: Not great, but still, it gets much worse. You also, when you got a bottle of milk, expected the cream to still be there on top. The cream rises to the top, as they say, right?
SPEAKER_10: Well, if you've been watering down your milk, there probably isn't much cream left in it.
But you need to put that cream back in there, something that looks like it. So they said, aside from stagnant pond water, what else do I have on the farm that's basically free, that I'm not using that I can use for this?
Oh yeah, these little calves that I'm slaughtering and selling as veal, I could use their brains and puree it because it has kind of a creamy texture and that will stand in for the cream that I'll put on top of the watered-down milk that I'm selling in the bottle.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah, so that is a horrifying thing to hear with human ears.
SPEAKER_17: We should point out, it wasn't like everybody was doing that. This is like an example of, you know, who knows?
SPEAKER_17: It could have been one farm. But what they did find out, what was being used widespread and just sort of with regularity in the industry, was using formaldehyde to preserve milk, pre-pasteurization, which is,
SPEAKER_17:
you know, we all know it's an embalming chemical used for dead bodies to make them last longer. And this was literally killing babies. If you were a kid in Indianapolis in an orphanage, or actually anywhere in the United States, they didn't have baby formula back then. You can listen to our episode on, did we do one just on baby formula?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, one on formula and one on the breast.
SPEAKER_17:
I think, oh, that's right. I thought there was two on the breast, but it was two total.
That wasn't trying to be funny there.
SPEAKER_10: Well, it was hilarious.
SPEAKER_17:
They would, you know, you would get cow's milk as a little baby in an orphanage. So, it would, you know, it would kill a kid very quickly if you're drinking formaldehyde.
Right, yeah.
SPEAKER_10: It doesn't take much for a little infant, right? And it's apparently one of those things I read that it will just kill you like almost immediately if you ingest the right amount. So, it's not good. And even if it doesn't kill you right away, it's not a pleasant way to die. And again, 400,000 babies a year were dying in the United States just from bad milk. So, it was definitely more than just one dairy farm in Indiana. It was a widespread problem, right?
SPEAKER_17: Oh, absolutely. So, you know, that's hero number one. Hero number two also comes to us from Indiana.
SPEAKER_10: Wait, wait, before we move on, you got to tell him that great quote from Dr. Herdy.
SPEAKER_17: Oh, I thought it was kind of smarmy. Sure. I guess he had the right to be smarmy. A reporter asked if formaldehyde in milk was dangerous and he said, well, I guess it's all right if you want to embalm the baby.
SPEAKER_10:
That didn't strike me as smarmy. That's pretty smarmy. Is it smarmy?
SPEAKER_17: For the 1920s or whatever.
SPEAKER_10: I guess, but he's saying like that's what the milk producers are doing. They're embalming babies.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah, I just, I don't know. I thought a man of science would say it is extremely dangerous.
SPEAKER_10: I see. You know? I see. Yeah, I get you.
SPEAKER_17: Thank you. So, still a hero. A little smarmy maybe, but a Hoosier hero. It's nice of you to spare him.
SPEAKER_17: The second Hoosier hero that's coming in is a gentleman named Dr. Harvey Washington Wylie. In the 1880s, he got a bee in his bonnet about the problem with food. He was a boiler maker, a professor there at Purdue.
SPEAKER_17: And then the USDA, the fairly new USDA said, all right, we're going to start a Bureau of Chemistry
and you're the guy that's going to run it.
SPEAKER_10: Right. He was, he essentially dedicated his entire adult life and career to fighting for, like, making the American food market wholesome, essentially. Like, that's what that guy did. And he actually had a bit of the showman in him. He had a huge ego, apparently. Most of the people who we're talking about today had enormous egos and they rubbed up against one another. And even though they didn't like one another, most of them, they still managed to work together to effect real change, which is kind of a cool little hats off to everybody.
So one of the first things that Dr. Wylie did when the USDA hired him to run the Bureau of Chemistry, which apparently was a new department at the time, this is in the, I think the 1880s or the late 19th century at the very least, he started testing syrup and jam and all sorts of stuff. I'm not quite sure if he was doing it to compare because he was actually researching corn syrup at the time to find out if this was actually okay to use as a food. Because there was a, that whole pure food movement was like, hey, I don't know what we're putting into our food to preserve it. Like, we didn't used to do that 10 years ago before everybody moved to the city. I'm not sure how I feel about this. So Dr. Wylie's job was to find out if these things were actually harmful or if you could use them. One of the first things he found out was that most of the maple syrup and the honey, like 90% of the honey was fake. There wasn't a drop of honey in it.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah, it was corn syrup. They would flavor it a little bit with maple for the syrup.
They would flavor it like whatever fruit, I guess, for jam.
I'm not sure what they flavored it with for honey.
SPEAKER_10: I don't know either. Like, how would you take a bite and be like, this is honey, I guess. I don't know.
SPEAKER_17: But that was just sort of a jumping off point where he was like, well, wait a minute. If they're doing this to honey and maple syrup, we need to start looking into other things.
SPEAKER_17: And he started to learn about formaldehyde in foods.
Borax, which is a cleaner, you know, like boric acid cleaner under the brand.
I think it was a brand, wasn't it?
SPEAKER_10: Borax? I think it was like 20 Mule Team Borax.
SPEAKER_17: Oh, that kind of thing? Was the name, that was the name of the brand.
SPEAKER_17: But he started realizing this stuff was in our food. He got obviously pretty upset about it and goes to Congress. And Congress is not interested in passing anything because as you will see, just like,
SPEAKER_10:
SPEAKER_17: you know, the things that go on today, the food lobby was strong and rich and powerful. And Congress sat on their hands.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, that author Deborah Blum also said that like there was no political will, not just because they were in the pockets of like the food producers. They, a lot of them most certainly were. And basically all of them were getting money from them at the very least. But that also, if you introduced one of these bills, you were like a crackpot. You were a quack. You were, you had no idea. Right. You had no idea what it meant to like be in the business world. You were just a dummy. That's how these things were reviewed. And I think something like 100 or something, I think like more than 100 bills were introduced in just within a decade or so. And only like eight or nine of them managed to get passed.
SPEAKER_09: That's how looked down upon the idea of food regulation was at the time.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah. So Wiley is a pretty smart guy. Like you said, he's kind of had a little bit of showman quality to him. So he got together an experiment, also sort of a PR stunt.
In 1902, he took 12 government clerks and put them in housing in the basement of the
Agricultural Department building there in DC. And they were exposed to what they called hygienic table trials, where half of these young men were secretly fed formaldehyde, borax, sodium benzenate, all kinds of nasty chemicals like the stuff that was going in food.
SPEAKER_11:
And it was conveniently leaked to the press.
SPEAKER_17: And Dr. Wiley, they were called the Poison Squad. And Dr. Wiley was dubbed Old Borax.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. So he actually became a national figure. Like people, just the average American knew about him. If you read the newspaper, you probably were familiar with Dr. Wiley. Old Borax.
SPEAKER_10:
Old Borax. And we talked about him and the Poison Squad in the, I think, the Does the FDA Protect Americans episode. Yeah. Just kind of briefly. But I mean, that whole book that Deborah Blum wrote was about Dr. Wiley and the Poison Squad and the work he did.
SPEAKER_10: And Wiley definitely deserves a lot of credit. He gets less credit than he probably should get because around that time, people started to kind of look at Teddy Roosevelt, as we'll see, as the person who really got the legislation pushed through. But it probably would not have happened when it did without Dr. Wiley. But in addition to Dr. Wiley, there was also Teddy Roosevelt and another guy, a muckraking journalist, a socialist named Upton Sinclair. And those two are considered to be some real driving forces behind food regulation in America.
SPEAKER_17:
Absolutely.
You know what that means?
SPEAKER_10: It means that it's time for a message break.
SPEAKER_17: No, it means I'm going to go try and find a tiny chiclet to shove into my tooth hole.
SPEAKER_10:
You should just switch the colors once in a while.
SPEAKER_17: Aaron Cooper has my flipper.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, yeah, that's right, man. Quite a gift.
SPEAKER_17: I don't think it would fit now anyway. OK, so don't feel bad, Coop. Just keep keep praying to that thing every night and it'll be OK.
SPEAKER_09: It's so weird.
SPEAKER_17:
All right, we'll be right back.
SPEAKER_18: We had a big affair over the land. It was called Mal Evans. We got loaded. And I was coming back on the plane and he said, will you pass the salt and pepper? And I misheard him.
SPEAKER_16: I said, what? Sergeant Pepper. This scene is a bit of a mystery. I think it's a bit of a mystery.
I think it's a bit of a mystery. I think it's a bit of a mystery. I think it's a bit of a mystery. I think it's a bit of a mystery. I think it's a bit of a mystery. I think it's a bit of a mystery. This season, we're diving deep into some of McCartney's most beloved songs.
SPEAKER_18: Yesterday, Band on the Run, Hey Jude, and McCartney's favorite song in his entire catalog. Here, there and everywhere. Listen to season two of McCartney, a life and lyrics on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_14: Up next, we're getting some breaking news. There's so much news happening around the world that we're somehow supposed to stay on top of.
SPEAKER_14: And with the constant flood of information coming at you, it can feel impossible to make
sense of it all.
That's why we launched The Big Take.
It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio that turns down the volume a bit to give you some space to think. I'm Wes Kosova.
Each weekday, I dig deep into one important story and talk about why it matters.
You'll hear from Bloomberg's journalists and analysts around the world and the people at the center of the news that affects all of us.
And we do it in plain English.
Listen to The Big Take on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen.
I'm Jason Flom and you're Maggie Freeling.
SPEAKER_02: Hey, Jason.
SPEAKER_08: Every day we learn about another person who shouldn't be in prison.
SPEAKER_19: 58 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. So glad you're home. If you want to be part of this work, listen to Wrongful Conviction, the podcast where
SPEAKER_02: we hand the mic to innocent people to hear their stories. How do you send someone innocent to prison?
SPEAKER_07: Listen to new episodes of Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling and Jason Flom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_17: All right, so we left off with quite a teaser that a gentleman named Teddy Roosevelt and a socialist writer named Upton Sinclair would change the course of America. And boy, did they. A little background on Teddy Roosevelt, just because it really applies here to how he got sort of swept up and all this to begin with. But he was a soldier. He led the Rough Riders and the invasion of Spanish-held Cuba.
And the reason that is important to this story is because that invasion and that whole war was a lot of Americans died, but not from the battle itself. I think about 400 Americans died in combat, but about 5,500 died from disease, from malaria and dysentery and typhoid. So President McKinley, after the war, started just a big military commission to investigate what it was like to be a soldier and all these awful conditions. And that very key to this story included the food that they ate.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, because there was, at least among the people who had fought in the Spanish-American war, there was this awareness that the roast beef, especially the canned roast beef, that had been delivered as rations. Yeah. Yeah. You're walking a fine line just even attempting canned roast beef, right? It better be good. This was so not good. It was like it would make you immediately start vomiting, according to Teddy Roosevelt. Yeah. They called it embalmed meat because it was clearly rotted, but then they'd added formaldehyde. This wasn't even like, okay, this is fresh meat. We're going to add formaldehyde. They would put the formaldehyde in after it was rotted to try to counteract the rot. You know, to bring it back to life.
SPEAKER_09:
SPEAKER_10: Exactly. To Frankenstein it up.
And they found that when you ate this stuff, it didn't matter what you did to cook it or anything like that. It would just make you throw up or just start pooping your pants like almost immediately. And Teddy Roosevelt and all of the other veterans of the Spanish-American war were pretty miffed about this. So when Roosevelt got the chance to go testify before Congress, he was the governor of New York by this time, about that beef, that tinned beef, he definitely took the chance or took the opportunity.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah. He called that canned beef a disgrace to our country and also had a little testimonial
description.
SPEAKER_17: When the cans were opened, the top was nothing more than a layer of slime.
It was disagreeable looking. That's pretty oddly and nasty.
Sometimes we stewed it with potato and onions, but I could have eaten my hat stewed with potato and onions rather than the beef. Nearly all the men sickened after eating it.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. Isn't that gross?
SPEAKER_17: Yeah. And, you know, like you said, by this time, I mean, he was already a war hero, but governor of New York, he has, you know, some clout all of a sudden.
SPEAKER_10: For sure. Yeah. He was fairly well known, well known enough that when McKinley stood for reelection in 1900, he chose Teddy Roosevelt as his running mate. Yeah.
He was still young. I think he was 42. Less than a year into the second McKinley administration, McKinley was assassinated
SPEAKER_10: and died.
And so suddenly Teddy Roosevelt, the vice president, is president and he became the youngest president in history. JFK was 43. Roosevelt was 42. And it's really weird. It's one of those moments in history where the right person happens to be in the right place to really make things happen that seemed intractable before. Yeah.
And I don't know enough about Teddy Roosevelt to fully sing his praises, but from what I can tell, just the brief stuff I've read about him researching this, he was a really interesting, level-headed dude, at least as far as balancing the interests of the United States went.
SPEAKER_10: Dare I say that? Well, he was, he figured big in the foundation of our national parks.
SPEAKER_17: That was a big part.
SPEAKER_10: But also, in this specifically, he saw a very important need that needed to be filled, which was the meat producers, but the food producers in general, the meat producers in particular, needed regulating. They were doing some nasty stuff, he found out. And he went to Congress and was like, make this happen. If you don't make it happen, I'm going to basically expose all of you who are in the pockets of this beef trust, as they call it, the big five beef producers, which included Armour, Swift, and Libby, who are all three still around, making meat in the United States.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah. But, you know, his hands were even as president tied by Congress in the lobby, until that
SPEAKER_17: is, our final hero of the day comes along, a gentleman named Upton Sinclair, like you
said, a hardcore socialist, and a writer who wrote the very, very famous book, The Jungle,
SPEAKER_17:
about, well, most people, if they've never read The Jungle, probably say, yeah, it's
about exposing the meat packing in Chicago, right?
SPEAKER_17: But 14, I'm sorry, 15 pages really covered that meat packing disgust that we are going
to have to talk about. So just get ready. The book was really about an immigrant worker who comes to America and is sort of just, you know, stomped on by capitalism, because, again, he was a socialist and this was his cause.
SPEAKER_10: Right. Yeah. So in the end of the book, the worker who's, I think, only identified as Jurgis, J-U-R-G-I-S, he just keeps getting, like he loses his family, he loses essentially anything good to his life by being ground through the gears of capitalism. And on the other side, he comes out and finds that socialism is the answer and starts dedicating himself to building a socialist paradise or whatever, right? So that was, like you said, the point of the book. But when America read this book, they did not pay any attention to that socialist message at all. In fact, plenty of them ignored the fact that there was an overt socialist message and still read the book and got something out of it. And what they got was those 15 pages of disgusting descriptions of what was going on in Chicago's meat packing district, where essentially all of the beef and pork and I guess sheep, mutton, was processed. This one area. And just where they kept the livestock before slaughter, just when they arrived by train and put them into a pen, just that pen, Chuck, was a square mile big. Yeah.
SPEAKER_17: It was known as Packingtown. And in order to get this information, he went undercover.
He spent seven weeks posing as a worker in this meat packing district, which was, like I said, it was called Packingtown, but it was in the heart of the Union stockyards. And like you said, they would bring in by train. It was the most efficient system on earth for processing animals. Ten thousand cattle, ten thousand hogs, five thousand sheep a day coming in and being processed.
SPEAKER_17: They were doing, I think they were going through 18 million animals a year at this point because
of a very innovative new system called assembly line work, which is, you know, we know what
SPEAKER_17: it is now, but back then it was kind of revolutionary in that they would make one person do one
job and one job only all day long for 12 hours a day and as fast as they could.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. And if you screwed up, the foreman would be like, you had one job.
SPEAKER_17:
Yeah. Don't get your finger cut off and put into a sausage.
SPEAKER_10:
Yeah. So that would happen, right? They would use everything they could from the animal. Apparently there was a widely known phrase that was used there that they used everything about the hog except for the squeal, which is haunting.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah. Well, I want to point out though, like not in the way that like an ethical master chef Right.
SPEAKER_17: wants to use or a hunter that, you know, provides meat for their family, tries to use every, you know, good edible part of the animal. That's a different deal. We're talking about like, you know, grinding up hooves for, you know, filler.
Exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: I'm glad you pointed that out, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_10:
So when he wrote The Jungle, he interviewed, first of all, he witnessed what he wrote about firsthand, but he said, like, I did not, I did not like exaggerate this stuff. This is not me embellishing. Like I witnessed this firsthand and the stuff that I didn't witness firsthand, I interviewed people who witnessed it firsthand. Yeah. And so he's like, the stuff in the book is real, people. And we haven't even really kind of cracked into what was in those 15 pages. I say we do that now.
SPEAKER_10: Should we take a break into it?
I think that's a fine idea, Chuck.
SPEAKER_17: All right. We'll be right back.
SPEAKER_18: One of the best shows of the year, according to Apple, Amazon and Time, is back for another round. We have more insightful conversations between myself, Paul Muldoon and Paul McCartney about his life and career.
SPEAKER_16: It was 20 years ago today. We had a big fair of a land called Malladons.
And I was coming back on the plane and he said, Will you pass the salt and pepper? And I misheard it. I said, what? Sergeant Pepper.
SPEAKER_18: This season, we're diving deep into some of McCartney's most beloved songs. Yesterday, Band on the Run, Hey Jude, and McCartney's favorite song in his entire catalog here, there and everywhere. Listen to season two of McCartney, a life and lyrics on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_14: Up next, we're getting some breaking news. There's so much news happening around the world that we're somehow supposed to stay on top of.
SPEAKER_14: And with the constant flood of information coming at you, it can feel impossible to make
sense of it all.
That's why we launched The Big Take.
It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart radio that turns down the volume a bit to give you some space to think. I'm Wes Kosova.
Each weekday, I dig deep into one important story and talk about why it matters.
You'll hear from Bloomberg's journalists and analysts around the world and the people at the center of the news that affects all of us.
And we do it in plain English.
Listen to The Big Take on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen.
SPEAKER_19: If you want to be part of this work, listen to Wrongful Conviction, the podcast where
SPEAKER_02: we hand the mic to innocent people to hear their stories. How do you send someone innocent to prison?
SPEAKER_07: Listen to new episodes of Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling and Jason Flom on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_10: Okay, Chuck, so we're back. It's time to get into the grizzly details of the jungle. There's some pretty famous stuff in there just because it got out so far and wide. It was a very widely read book and even more widely discussed book because of the disgust that it generated.
SPEAKER_10: But for example, when they created sausage, like Upton Sinclair told everybody how the sausage is made and everybody's like, we didn't want to know, but now we know and we can't unknow it.
SPEAKER_09:
SPEAKER_10: They would grind up moldy sausage that had been rejected from Europe. So it was bad when it got to Europe and then they shipped it back to America and then they used it in the sausage they fed Americans. That stuff would also be mixed in with scraps of meat that had been shoveled off of the floor. Probably a couple of times a day, they would shovel meat scraps and flesh and blood off of the floor, put it into the sausage mixture. That's bad enough that it was on the floor, but the workers frequently had things like tuberculosis and they were spitting bloody, tuberculotic spit onto the floor. So that would get mixed in with the food scraps, the meat scraps that would be put into the sausages. There was a rat problem there. So they would put out poison pieces of bread for the rats. And then when the rats ate the bread and died, they put the rats in the sausage and then for good measure, they put the poison bread in the sausage too. This was just the sausage that they were making.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah, like I get the feeling that there was if there was a poster on the wall of this workplace, it was if it's on the floor, it's in the sausage.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_17:
Tobacco spit. That's probably the best thing you could hope for.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, you'd be praying for tobacco spit. Yeah.
SPEAKER_17:
If anyone's still listening, you know, obviously potted meats, you know, mystery meat is kind of a funny thing to say these days. But back then it was truly dangerous. It was, you know, organ meats. It was tripe.
This is a quote and it's hard for me to even say this word for because of my tooth and because it's disgusting. But the hard cartilaginous, cartilaginous, cartilaginous, yeah, there we go.
SPEAKER_17:
Hard cartilaginous gullets of beef after the tongues had been cut out was in this potted
meat as well.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, and the potted chicken in particular, it always appears in quotes because it was later determined there was no chicken at all in the potted chicken. It was just like you said, every piece of the animal they could use, not for ethical purposes, but because they could sell it as potted chicken and tell everybody, yeah, it's just ground up chicken. Just eat it and shut up.
SPEAKER_17:
Yeah, so, you know, this is awful. The workers themselves are working in deplorable conditions, 12 hours a day in these disgusting
SPEAKER_17:
rooms doing this stuff, the same job over and over and over, which was a new thing. Like people weren't used to assembly line work, much less like if your job all day is to, I don't even know. I can't even imagine what they were doing.
SPEAKER_10: Skinning, slicing, removing, deboning.
SPEAKER_17:
Yeah, there you go. I made the joke about losing a finger, but they did. They would lose digits. They would lose limbs. This stuff would go into the food.
There were even people that fell into lard bats and boiled alive, and that went into the food.
SPEAKER_10:
Yeah, there's a quote. Well, they went into the lard.
SPEAKER_10: There is a quote that, well, which eventually went into food, you know. Exactly.
SPEAKER_10:
There was a quote from Sinclair that said, all but the bones of them went out into the world as Durham's pure beef lard.
SPEAKER_17: I don't think Durham's is around anymore.
SPEAKER_10: Durham's couldn't survive that one. Yeah. There's another quote from Upton Sinclair that he said, I aimed at the public's heart and by accident, I hid it in the stomach, which is him, yeah, him recognizing that he wrote this book about socialism and everybody just focused in on the really gross food stuff and that even still it affected change. It just wasn't the change he was trying to affect. But he wasn't one of those guys who's like, oh, great, I'm a celebrity either way. I don't care how I got there. He turned out to be like really bitter at everybody missing this message. Like his book was widely read and nobody got it. At least they didn't get it the way that he intended them to get it.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah, this is another good quote. He said that he was made into a celebrity not because the public cared anything about the workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
SPEAKER_10:
Man, that word, you start messing with that word, it gets grosser and grosser.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah, I think tubercular beef should open for diarrhea planet.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, boy. I think you've just come up with a tour.
SPEAKER_17: So this is a very sort of a bombshell book. It was released in 1906 in January, sold 25,000 copies right out of the gate. Just a ton of books back then. It's a lot of books now, as we've learned. Within about five months, it was translated into 17 different languages and eventually became a silent movie as well in 1914.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, like you said, it was a bombshell. Basically, that log jam in Congress that had kept any food regulation bills essentially from passing, this book broke it open. It dislodged all that stuff. And the reason why was multifaceted. In addition to grossing out the public and being like, we're eating this government do something about this, somebody do something about this, you had that public outcry, which is kind of in line with the progressive drumbeat, right?
SPEAKER_10:
You also had a developing drumbeat coming out of the business side because that's where, that's the whole debate was divided between the progressives who were cranks and crazy and didn't understand business and the business side who were like to shut up and eat this stuff, we're trying to make a profit here and get the engine of the United States revving. There was a group in business that was like, hey, we're already following like food safety practices. Totally.
SPEAKER_10: And it's really expensive compared to our competitors who are cutting every corner possible and selling unsanitary products for way lower than we can sell our safe products. So if these guys start getting regulated, we're going to even the playing field. And as a matter of fact, they'll be behind us because they're going to have to play catch-up expense-wise to get to the same level that we're operating at and have been all this time. And I said, catch-up, which is ironic because one of those companies that was already doing things safe was the Heinz company.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah, hats off to the Heinz company, right?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, not just Heinz, but also old Taylor Whiskey.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah. So, you know, there were, it wasn't everyone. And that's a really good point. I'm glad you made it because Heinz probably since that has been saying,
by the way, you know, we weren't a part of all that.
SPEAKER_09: Right.
SPEAKER_17: You know, it should have been called the jungle colon, except for Heinz. So Roosevelt all of a sudden is getting 100 calls.
I'm sorry, not calls. He was getting 100 letters a day, calls. He would have been like, what's happening here? Yeah.
SPEAKER_17:
About food safety. He calls up Upton Sinclair. These guys should not be buddies. And spoiler, they did not end up being buddies. Yeah. It wasn't like some crazy like, you're like this and I'm like this. But, you know, we have a lot in common as it turns out. The only thing they had in common, it seems like, was that they wanted to clean up the food situation in the United States. They didn't trust each other, of course. They didn't really like each other. Of course, Roosevelt did not like a muckraking journalist.
SPEAKER_17: And of course, Sinclair was like, hey, the beef trust is giving you $200,000 for your
presidential campaign, which in the future in 2024, that would be $7 million.
So you're in the pocket of the beef trust, which he denied, of course, because he had
to eat that beef in Cuba.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. He said, Mr. Sinclair, I bear no love for those gentlemen, for I ate the meat they canned for the army in Cuba.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah, comma, but their checks cashed all the same.
SPEAKER_10: Well, he lived up to that quote. He took on the beef trust and he got this legislation essentially passed through, as we'll see. And then just as a side note, you mentioned muckrakers. Apparently, Teddy Roosevelt was the one who inadvertently coined that term. He was giving a speech about, I'm not sure what the whole point of the speech was about, but he was basically railing against journalists to go look and dig up scandal. And he allowed that there's a role that they play in the public forum that's a good role, which is if there's somebody doing something shady, these guys are going to go find out and tell everybody, and that's a public good. What he was saying is even when given the chance to just write legitimate journalism after that, they still go look for scandal and try to cause problems that might not necessarily need, that aren't really problems. And he compared them to a character from Pilgrim's Progress, who is the muckraker, and muck is poop by the way, who had the chance to trade in his muckrake for not a muckrake. And didn't even look up to, didn't even bother looking up, just kept looking down at the muck he was raking. For not a muckrake.
Exactly.
SPEAKER_17: So he doesn't like Sinclair, like we said, he certainly doesn't trust him. He thought that the account in the jungle was, he called it hysterical. So he's like, I'm going to look into this myself.
And by myself, I mean, I'm going to have other people do it for me.
SPEAKER_17: Charles Neal, who was a commissioner of the Bureau of Labor at the time, and an attorney
from New York named James Reynolds would do the same thing. Well, I don't think they posed as workers, but they did the investigation in Packingtown in Chicago. It resulted in the Neal Reynolds report. And basically, I mean, the long story short of the Neal Reynolds report is, by the way,
everything he said was true.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. And it's even worse than he put it in his book. That was the thing. You said they didn't pose as packing workers. The packing companies knew they were coming. And they – That's nuts. Yes. And they were so, like the stuff they were doing was just so bad and entrenched that they still were caught doing all this stuff, knowing that these guys were coming to investigate. So now Teddy Roosevelt has like documentation from two people that he trusts saying, yes, this is actually going on. This is a huge problem and we need to do something about it.
SPEAKER_17:
Should we talk about the bathrooms?
SPEAKER_10: Yes, let's, because we haven't been super gross for a minute.
SPEAKER_17: So like we said, they exposed even worse things in the book, and this is one of them. The bathrooms weren't really bathrooms. Sometimes it would just be a little cordoned off area of the same workroom floor where they're scooping up God knows what to put into the sausage. Yeah. There was obviously no sinks. There were no open toilets. You would just pee in that corner. There was no soap, no toilet paper. And that's when it was just sort of cordoned off. There were also places where it was just nothing. They would just pee where they were so they could keep working as fast as they could. They said the fumes from the urine, I'll just read the quote, hints in some cases,
SPEAKER_17: the fumes from the urine swell, the sum of nauseating odors arising from the dirty blood soaked rotting wood floors, fruitful, yeah, fruitful is hard for me to say, fruitful
culture beds for the diseased germs of men and animals.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, and don't forget, multiple times a day, they scraped up the stuff that had dropped on the floor and put it in the sausage. And I saw a description of those floors that really turned my stomach. They called them spongy.
SPEAKER_10: Isn't that awful? Because they were rotting from spit and blood and urine. And that's what the meat was coming into contact with.
SPEAKER_17:
So it held even more spit. Yeah, it's so gross, too.
SPEAKER_10: Spongy wood is bad enough as it is.
SPEAKER_17: Oh, man. So the other thing they did was said, and by the way, President Benjamin Harris, former president, in 1890, you signed a very weak meat inspection bill that basically put USDA
inspectors at these meatpacking plants. But all they were charged to do was say, well, this cow was healthy before they slaughtered it.
And I'm going back to sleep now. They had no authority to oversee what happened after that point.
SPEAKER_10: Exactly. So even the rejected animals that those USDA inspectors would be like, this one doesn't pass muster, get rid of it. They would get rid of it. And then when the inspector left, they would go back and get it and process it anyway. So there was no actual oversight.
Yeah, even the oversight that was there was just completely undermined. Yeah. So this was bad news for the beef trust and other packers. Something was now going to happen because Teddy Roosevelt had this report. And in addition to the jungle being out in public, he said, hey, I've got this report, Congress. I want some reforms to be pushed through. Make it happen, or I'm going to release this report that I've commissioned that's really going to blow the lid off of this stuff. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10:
And he got cooperation from the Senate. They passed a bill, passed a great bill, and then it started to get blocked in the House. And I think it came down to like two senators or no, two Congresspeople, congressmen who were so in the beef trust pocket that they staged a last ditch effort at stopping these meat inspection bills from going through. And that finally did it for Roosevelt. And he released the Neil Reynolds report. And it just made anybody sticking up for the beef trust look so bad that you just couldn't get in the way of it any longer.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah. And I think someone leaked it beforehand, too.
Didn't Upton Sinclair help leak it?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, supposedly. And I guess Teddy Roosevelt angrily wired Doubleday, the publisher, the actual guy named Doubleday, and said, can you please tell Upton Sinclair to leave the business of running the country to me for once?
That was smarmy.
You see smarm everywhere in all the quotes.
SPEAKER_17: I see smarmy people. So this resulted in two things, the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, and then eventually the Pure Food and Drug Act, which outlawed the sale of any altered, adulterated, mislabeled
foods, drug, medicine, or liquor, became known as Dr. Wiley's Law or the Wiley Act,
SPEAKER_17:
in tribute to Dr. Wiley.
SPEAKER_17: That was not the creation of the FDA, though. That would come along a little bit later.
And like you said, we have a great episode on the FDA.
What year was that, though? 1927?
SPEAKER_10: 1930.
SPEAKER_10: The Bureau of Chemistry was part of the USDA until 1927.
SPEAKER_17:
All right. So then finally, in 1930, we get our FDA.
SPEAKER_10: And then finally, in 1938, after FDR came into office, the federal government was the agent, the FDA was finally given real teeth to actually regulate stuff. It was kind of nominal for a while until the late 30s.
SPEAKER_17: You got to say real teeth right now?
SPEAKER_10: Sorry, man. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that as a slam. That's all right. Well, if you want to know more about this really interesting period in history, go research Upton Sinclair, Teddy Roosevelt, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, read The Jungle, do all that stuff and just see how grossed out you can get before you vomit.
And since Chuck laughed at vomit, that means it's time for listener mail.
SPEAKER_17: Yeah, I read this. It's an email about our live show in Seattle. And I read this as sort of a, hey, here's what you get at a stuff you should know show because we've got the cities lined up.
We haven't announced on sale dates or anything, but I think we can probably say what cities we're going to, right?
SPEAKER_10:
Yeah. Yeah, I think it's pretty much in the bag.
SPEAKER_17: All right. So we're going to hit Chicago, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis.
All the Appolises.
SPEAKER_17:
And then where are we going in the Northeast this year?
SPEAKER_10: In the Northeast, we're doing DC.
SPEAKER_10: We're going to do Boston. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: We're going to do New York City. We haven't been to in a while.
SPEAKER_17:
Yeah, it's been a minute since we've been to New York. And then we're going to finish out the year in Durham, North Carolina, and our final show
the year in Atlanta, like we like to do.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, that's the schedule as it stands now. And it's pretty close to baked. Close enough that we're willing to say this in the hopes that we don't have to edit out of town.
SPEAKER_17: That's right. So I read this because this is a little taste of what you can get here. And this is from Mary Benedict, a grandma to a grandson.
And they went to the show together. Oh, this is a great email.
SPEAKER_17:
It was. Hey, guys, been listening for about 10 years. I'm a huge fan and retired teacher.
I introduced my grandson to stuff you should know.
And he too has become a devoted fan.
So for Christmas, I gave him tickets to the live event in Seattle.
He was thrilled.
SPEAKER_17: We went to the show. Absolutely loved the experience. The topic was fun.
You two are as great as you sound in your episodes as the questions move forward.
So we do a little Q and A at the end.
Surprise, surprise if you haven't been to a show.
So as the questions move forward toward the end, you declared one final question, which would have left my grandson at the mic.
I was repeating to myself, please, please see that he's a kid. Please see that he's a kid.
And Chuck did exactly that. You asked him how old he was, as well as the girl behind him. Both were 14. You apologized to the other side and let the two young people talk with you.
Please know what a remarkable moment that was for my grandson, a euphoric life experience and memory. So thank you.
I also want to share my appreciation for how kind you were to all the people in Q and A.
You always asked a question about them or thoughtfully commented on personal things
they shared with you.
That level of compassion and kindness is extraordinary.
And my regard for you both rose even higher.
And lastly, Josh, thank you for your vulnerability sharing that you need to avoid the news right
now for your well-being.
You demonstrated strength and emotional intelligence to everyone present.
And thank you for modeling great life strategies.
Are you familiar with highly sensitive people? You may not be one, but I am and my grandson is as well.
It is a character trait, not a problem.
And that would make a fantastic topic for a podcast. For sure.
Sorry this ran long, but in the world where people are quick to point out what's wrong.
Mary, we love you. I believe it's important to tell people what they are doing when they are doing great things
and you two are doing great things. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_17: That is wonderful. That is Mary with an I, Benedict and Mary's grandson.
So thank you both for coming.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, thanks a lot. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, the life strategy example I'm setting is avoidance.
SPEAKER_17:
No, avoiding the news is not avoidance. If you, it's true.
SPEAKER_10: If you want to be like Mary and her grandson and come to one of our shows, we will eventually put the information and links and all that for tickets up. And in the meantime, you can get in touch with us by email at stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com.
SPEAKER_03:
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
SPEAKER_01: And me, Saida Garrett, for a stitch of inspiration and pearls of laughter. Subscribe now on the iHeart Radio app and Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_05: Hi, everyone. I'm Jackie Goldschneider from The Real Housewives of New Jersey. And I'm Jennifer Fessler, also from The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Welcome to our new podcast, To Jersey J's. We are going to have lots of fun on this podcast while we discuss what it's really like to be a real housewife and all the drama that comes with it. Follow us as we navigate family, friendships, and even her enemies.
SPEAKER_04: Listen to Jersey J's on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
SPEAKER_12: It's Rachel Leviss, host of the new podcast, Rachel Goes Rogue. This podcast is about choosing my own path and standing in my power. I have been involved with one of the biggest scandals in reality television history. We're going to get into all of it, the good, the bad, the ugly. I've been keeping secrets for far too long, and I just want to come clean. Listen to Rachel Goes Rogue on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
