09/05/2026
🎧On my run today, I listened to a fascinating podcast today about Dr Harvey Wiley and “The Poison Squad” in America and honestly… it completely challenged my assumptions about food in the “good old days”.
I think a lot of us imagine our grandparents or great grandparents naturally ate much healthier, more wholesome food than we do now.
But some of the things added to food back then were unbelievable.
People could end up eating:
• chalk in bread
• watered-down milk
• toxic colouring in sweets
• copper sulphate used to brighten pickles and canned vegetables
• borax added as a preservative in meat and milk
• salicylic acid in foods and drinks
• sulphites used to disguise food going bad
• benzoates added to preserve processed foods
• even formaldehyde used to preserve milk and meat
And most people had absolutely no idea.
Dr Wiley became famous because he started exposing how dangerous some of these practices were.
He even recruited volunteers to eat foods containing common preservatives and chemicals so he could study the effects on the body. Newspapers nicknamed them “The Poison Squad”.
What I found really interesting though was this:
We sometimes talk now as though rules, regulations and laws are automatically a bad thing.
But so many of the protections we have today only exist because people were harmed in the past.
Not just with food.
With medicines.
With working conditions.
With child labour.
With unsafe housing.
With pollution.
With dangerous products.
With financial scams.
A lot of today’s laws were written because at some point somebody got exploited, poisoned, injured or lied to.
And Britain had very similar food scandals too.
In Victorian times, foods were regularly tampered with to make them cheaper or more visually appealing. A doctor called Arthur Hill Hassall exposed a lot of this in the 1850s after examining foods under a microscope and finding widespread contamination and adulteration.
That became a real turning point.
It helped lead to some of the first proper food safety laws in Britain because society finally realised:
we cannot always rely on
businesses or systems to regulate themselves.
Of course modern systems are not perfect- Far from it.
But listening to that podcast made me stop and appreciate how many invisible protections surround us every day now that previous generations simply did not have.
Perhaps the real takeaway is this:
Our wellbeing is influenced every day by what we consume.
Not just food but stress, information, pressure and noise too.
🙋♀️How will you take care of your body and mind today?
