Historians have long credited the unlikely alliance of Roosevelt and Sinclair for passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Perhaps one-third of the butter for sale wasn’t really butter but rather all sorts of other things - beef tallow, pork fat, the ground-up stomachs of cows and sheep - transformed into a yellowish substance that looked like butter. Beef hearts and other organ meats were processed, canned and labeled as chicken. Children’s candy was routinely colored with lead and other heavy metals. Ground-up insects were sold as brown sugar. In their absence, the free market made it profitable to supply a wide range of unappetizing fare. In 1906 the United States was the only major industrialized nation without strict laws forbidding the sale of contaminated and adulterated food.

Roosevelt had distrusted the meatpacking industry for years, angered by the putrid meat sold to the Army and served to his troops during the Spanish-American War.

The president was Theodore Roosevelt the socialist was Upton Sinclair and the two set aside their political differences to discuss an issue of great mutual concern: food safety.Ī few months earlier, Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle” had created public outrage about the sanitary conditions at America’s slaughterhouses. In April 1906, a Republican president of the United States met privately with a notorious socialist at the White House. THE POISON SQUAD One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century By Deborah Blum 330 pp.

The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum