It was common in the 1800s for people to consume milk containing formaldehyde, meat preserved with salicylic acid and borax, and “coffee” filled with ground up bones and charred lead.
The U.S. was really slow to the food safety game. There were regulations in Europe and in Canada before we actually took this up. There was just an incredible amount of 19th-century U.S. resistance to the idea of the federal government, as someone said, becoming the “policeman” of your stomach. And so that whole American ethos of “nobody tells me what to do,” individual rights, all of those things really played into it, as well as enormous industry resistance.
Lead in water makes the water taste sweet. My guess is that they charred lead dust to make it look grey/black and then used it as artificial sweetener.
The carbon comes from another source and sticks to the metal, you’ve probably already seen examples irl. If you burn something in a steel pan on the stove, then there will be black residue (char) left sticking on the pan. A burnt electrical outlet is another case, there the carbon comes from the plastic.
Make America Great Again!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sordid-history-of-u-s-food-safety-highlights-the-importance-of/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swill_milk_scandal
and many more…
edit: wait, charred lead?
Lead in water makes the water taste sweet. My guess is that they charred lead dust to make it look grey/black and then used it as artificial sweetener.
Thanks. I wonder how it’s even possible to char a metal.
The carbon comes from another source and sticks to the metal, you’ve probably already seen examples irl. If you burn something in a steel pan on the stove, then there will be black residue (char) left sticking on the pan. A burnt electrical outlet is another case, there the carbon comes from the plastic.
Thanks for the cast iron pan comparison, I think I get it now.