While it may be hard to believe that in the nineteenth century, formaldehyde was placed in milk to preserve it — it was, and it killed scores of children, even thousands from this chemically “improved” milk. And that’s not all as our guest, Pulitzer Prize winner Deborah Blum tells us. The industrialization of food production was all the rage and meanwhile Americans were paying the price, being poisoned regularly — from butter being made edible with borax, and coffee containing sawdust dyed dark with lead-based dye. Blum's new book is jThe Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.
