emeritrix<p>Interview with Deborah Blum, "the woman who literally wrote the book on the history of US food regulations. In 2018, she published “The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the 20th Century,” a fascinating and occasionally harrowing account of how the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906—which led to the establishment of the FDA—came to pass."</p><p>excerpts: </p><p>There's no way for us to keep track of all this information. I worry that we are going to see uninspected factories put out really bad stuff, uninvestigated outbreaks piled on uninvestigated outbreaks....</p><p>As a country, we tend to suffer from what I think of as regulatory memory failure. We don't have a sense of what things were like before regulations went into play. Most Americans don't really have a sense of what the environmental landscape of the United States looked like before the EPA, for instance. Instead, we demonize regulation, when often we're really talking about consumer protection. And when we're talking consumer protection, we're talking about protection for every American citizen. But until you have those kinds of universal standards in place, the people who suffer the most are going to be the people who can't afford the good stuff....</p><p>I'm out of patience with American individualism. Either we're in this together and we're a community, or we aren't. And I want us to be a community. I've been quoting Orwell recently. You know, the famous line from Animal Farm, “all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others”? I don’t believe that for a minute. I wish we could get on the page of saying that on some level, we are in this together, and we take care of each other....</p><p>Trump is forever talking about people and their good genes. You forget that when we protect the least of us, we protect all of us. Even if we don't want to be, we are actually in this together. Eugenics is just garbage anyway....</p><p>When I was hanging out with the food safety people at the FDA, the staff appointees—which our president would call the deep state—would talk about all the times they had moved to do some kind of safety thing for food and been overruled by the political appointee who was best friends with someone in industry. The forces that weakened the Pure Food and Drug Act as soon as it passed–we see those same forces today. American industry has done a world-class job of demonizing the word “regulation" . . . . </p><p>When Wiley was working to try to get the Food and Drug Act passed, and it kept failing, one of the Congressman he worked with said to him, flat out, you'll never get this passed until the American people stand up and say, we want this. I'm not arguing that we should be hamster-on-a-wheel type informed consumers, exhausting ourselves, researching everything we eat and drink. There's no way to do that. But I am saying that we do make a difference when we stand together....</p><p>When we talk about fundamental individual rights, one of them is the right to be safe and protected in your everyday life. You know, there's that clause in the Constitution, “promote the general welfare.” What does that mean? It means protect us in our everyday life. We have the right to expect our government to do that. We have the right to go out and put together a sandwich and have it not kill us. That's a fundamental right, and the country is stronger when that right is in place. </p><p>Every person matters. Our government should protect us in an every person way, and we should stand together in an every person way. . . . It's like one drop of water. You put all the drops of water together, you get a wave. Be the wave, right? That sounds so hokey when I say it, but I think that's where our power is. This is a good time for us to know that, and to use it.</p><p><a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/FoodSafety" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FoodSafety</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Eugenics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Eugenics</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/CollectiveAction" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>CollectiveAction</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/History" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>History</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/USpol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>USpol</span></a></p><p><a href="https://buttondown.com/theswordandthesandwich/archive/how-to-not-get-poisoned-in-america/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">buttondown.com/theswordandthes</span><span class="invisible">andwich/archive/how-to-not-get-poisoned-in-america/</span></a></p>