Originally published on September 9, 2021 (Episode 222)
Introduction
The wrong food can kill you. The right kind of food can help you live longer. Additives are unnatural. Unnatural food is unhealthy food. These are assumptions that many or most of us share today about what we eat.
That we believe eating to be a matter of life or death is in part due to a man most of us have never heard of: Harvey Wiley. Head of the Division of Chemistry at the Department of Agriculture, and later employed by Good Housekeeping magazine, Wiley became an advocate of “pure food.” He got his message out through newspapers eager for copy, and did so with such success that President Theodore Roosevelt once told a complaining businessman, “You don’t understand, sir, that Dr. Wiley has the grandest political machine in the country.”
Jonathan Rees’s new biography, The Chemistry of Fear: Harvey Wiley’s Fight for Pure Food, is not only about Wiley himself, but about scientific progress, the meaning of food and health, progressivism, the bureaucratic state, and the curious intersection of science and publicity.
About the Guest
Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University. He was last on the podcast in Episode 96, talking about the curious history of keeping things cold.
For Further Investigation
Jonathan Rees, The Chemistry of Fear: Harvey Wiley’s Fight for Pure Food (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)
Deborah Blum, The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century—a less critical take on Dr. Wiley
Episode 96 of Historically Thinking: “Cold Matters: The Curious History of Refrigeration”
Listen & Discuss
What do you make of Wiley’s crusade for pure food? Do you see parallels today between his campaigns and contemporary debates about food safety, GMOs, or processed food? Share your thoughts in the comments—and consider forwarding this post to a friend who would enjoy the conversation.
