Dr. Harvey W. Wiley

Imagine having chemicals such as borax for lunch.  Well if it wasn't for Dr. Harvey W. Wiley you would be eating borax in your PB and J.  If you like not being poisoned with chemicals, thank him, since he was the one who indeed changed that!

Back in the day our food was packed with lots of harmful chemicals like formaldehyde, borax, and copper sulfate (a common pesticide). Formaldehyde was packed with meat to appear fresher. So was borax.  Copper sulfate was used to make peas bright green. You see back in the day lots of people would eat canned food because it was cheaper. There were no labels or ingredient lists on the food.  You could be chewing on a rubber boot and not even know. Think about that.

This is how dangerous formaldehyde https://www.safetysign.com/products/9778/osha-formaldehyde-may-cause-cancer-signThis is where Dr. Wiley comes in.  If you don’t know who he is, he is just the best, underrated hero in history.  He knew these chemicals SHOULD NOT, I repeat, SHOULD NOT be in our food. He didn't sit on the couch crying, instead, he worked hard to get them out of our food.  He was a chemist. He wanted to run a hygienic lab trial to test the effects of the chemicals on the human body. He got the chemicals in a breeze but getting the bodies was the hard part.  The first twelve members of the poison supper club were brave volunteers from the department of agriculture. They were to eat the poison for six months.

Every day the poison would change.  You could be eating a spoon full of borax and think it formaldehyde.  The volunteers didn’t know what poison they ate every day. If I was them, I would sneak in a bag of chips and not eat the food. Anyhoo a dinner at the poison supper club might look like this: applesauce, soup, turkey, canned string beans, sweet potato, white potato, chipped beef, bread and butter, coffee, rice pudding and a little borax.  He took notes on all the crucial things that the chemicals did to the human body, like upset stomach, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and kidney damage. In 1906 the first food regulations were passed. Thank god!!!! This then led to the making of the F.D.A. Now who’s your hero?

Dr. Wiley is a true hero.  Without him we would be having a hard time getting all those chemicals out. Now you can wake up knowing that the ingredients in your food are safe.  They might not be healthy but they are safe. This man is a hero to all that don’t want to have kidney damage. He was brave in enough to actually test chemicals on humans.   He is a very brave smart man who saved lots of lives.

this video shows just how hard he workedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJsQNGw17kk