The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Introduction

The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Century is a work of historical nonfiction by American writer Deborah Blum. Blum is a Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist and author of six books. In July of 2015, she became the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she is the founder of Undark, and online magazine examining topics in science and medicine.

The Poison Squad was published on September 24th, 2019, by Penguin Books. In 2020, it was adapted into a documentary with the same title by the award-winning series American Experience, produced by PBS. This guide refers to the first edition hardcover version of this work.

Content warning: The content of this guide contains brief descriptions of conditions inside slaughterhouses at the turn of the 20th century, as well as descriptions of exploitative manufacturing tactics which endangered, actively harmed, and occasionally resulted in the fatalities of consumers, including children.

Summary

In the late 1880s, chemist and physician Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley is appointed Chief Chemist at the United States Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry. The products offered by the newly minted food manufacturing conglomerates in America bear little resemblance to the pure, natural foods Dr.