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Episode #55: FDA: Born out of Lies that STILL Affect You Today · Beyond Labels Premium

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Between 1880 and 1905, there were over 100 food and drug bills proposed in Congress, and they were all defeated.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because there wasn't enough public outcry.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a big enough problem for these congressmen to be able to pass these because consumers weren't behind it.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Alright?
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: That all changed when two men collided.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: The first man was Dr.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Harvey Wiley, another Republican.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: He was the head of the Bureau of Chemistry.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: The Bureau of Chemistry would later become the FDA.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so he was the head of this Bureau of Chemistry that would become the FDA.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Wiley was given$5,000 by Congress to study adulteration.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: He created what we call the poison squad.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: This was where he tested the effects of those five chemical preservatives that I just mentioned as well as colorings.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: He tested those on healthy men for over a five-year period.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, he would lace the food with these chemicals in increasing dosages and he'd feed it to the men.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't use consent forms, they didn't test it first on animals or do any lab testing, and there's no medical oversight.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, several of the men got so sick that they couldn't even function anymore.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at the FDA's record, this is what the FDA says.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: But he stopped each unconventional experiment after many of his volunteers became sick.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: So then, so Wiley concluded from this um five-year study that um every chemical that he tested should be banned.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but actually only formaldehyde ended up being banned.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the result of this was Wiley did cause alarm among citizens, but it still wasn't enough for them to get this federal regulation over our food supply until a second man came on scene, and that was, of course, Upton Sinclair.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And as we probably all know, we had to read this book in high school, most of us.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: He wrote The Jungle.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: The jungle led to an attack on meat, and this was a historic moment in the history of the United States because this was the first full-fledged government offensive against a food group.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, everybody.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Beyond Labels Podcast with yours truly, Joel Salatin, and my great, lovely, and educated sidekick, Dr.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: Cena McCullough.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Today we're gonna we're gonna dig into history a little bit.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know about you, but uh I find it really really uh helpful to understand the beginnings of things.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and we we live in fast-changing times for sure, but we also are all um we have a problem with myopia.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we have short memory spans.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we think that wherever we are today, well, we've always been this way.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't realize a lot of times that the things that we're dealing with, especially on this Beyond Labels podcast, the things we're dealing with, a lot of them are very, very recent.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, our our country, even the world, did not uh uh deal with these things until extreme recent times.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And one of those is the institution of the Food and Drug Administration.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the Food and Drug Administration, it's not that old.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so today we're gonna go into Cena's um under uh especially Cena's uh understanding to delve into how it got started and look at the beginnings of the food and drug administration.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: It hasn't been here forever.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, maybe it won't be here forever, but uh, but it certainly has it certainly hasn't been.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people have lived uh around the world for a long time without a food and drug administration.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, Cena, uh, enlighten us a little bit on the foundations, the the why, uh and the when and the why it developed.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, this is one of my favorite topics, as you know.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, my whole first book was centered around the history of our food supply.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason why I think this is so important is because what we're gonna lay out for you today is the lies and manipulation and deception upon which the FDA was built, so that you can see it from the beginning, from its inception.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then as we move along in future episodes of this podcast, we're gonna expand upon that and show you how these tentacles of deception um have just grown in our food supply.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole purpose is so that you can free yourself from this system, right?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Educate yourself so you can free yourself.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so if you go back to the US Um Um Food and Drug US Food and Drug Administration, their website, and you look up when and why was the FDA form.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, this is from the FDA themselves.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is what they say.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Though the FDA can trace its origins back to the creation of the agricultural division in the patent office in 1848, its origins as a federal consumer protection agency begin with the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so one piece of legislation birthed the FDA.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: According to the FDA, this law was the accumulation of about 100 bills over a quarter century that aimed to rein in the long-standing serious abuses in the consumer product marketplace.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that's the FDA's perception of what was going on in the food and medicine marketplace that warranted the complete takeover of our food supply.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: So this was a takeover of the food supply by the federal government.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was centralizing our food supply.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this this this was this was in response to the um to snake oil.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's what they're saying.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, so let's let's walk through that and show you the really let's that's their picture.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's paint the truth.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we've all we've all seen seen it.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: We've all seen these old uh you know, Western movies where the you know where the the medicine man comes into town and and he's got his you know little uh Aunt Sally's uh backache ointment, whatever.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and it it that that is so much a part.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: I I I can hear I I can hear uh you know, back through this podcast, I can hear people saying, Well, man, I'm you know uh those were that was the wild west of of uh whatever medicine and and claims and remedies and all that, and all those shysters and those charlatans and all that, you know.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: I can hear that coming back.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: So help us help us uh un help us um understand this.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I want you to remember this.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: The FDA came about from passage of one bill, and it came about out of fear.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was a fear that was generated by three things a poison squad, a progressive president, Theodore Roosevelt, and a book.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so to set the stage, here we go.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: In the late 1800s to early 1900s, we had the Industrial Revolution.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: And this is when we experienced rapid changes in our food supply, right?
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: People began to trade farm life for city life, and our diets changed accordingly.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: We went from farm fresh foods predominantly to now incorporating more processed and canned canned foods.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of cooking all of our own food, we began to rely on others.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: And this was when we began to separate from our food supply.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: There were no labeling laws at the time.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: So if you wanted to participate in that system and buy food that somebody else made, processed and canned, you had to blindly trust the company.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: And there were inferior foods at the time that were mislabeled.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, honey, you could find honey that was made from glucose, brown coloring, and a dead bee inside of it, right?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, to a more extreme case would be sometimes there were colorings added to some candies, that those colorings were poisonous.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: So there were inferior food on the market and there was mislabeling.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: But the point is, it wasn't a big enough deal for consumers to care at that time, right?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's and so let me get into that in just a second.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Companies also began using preservatives at that time that were not tested.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, like benzoic acid was used to cure and preserve meat, some salicylic acid was used formaldehyde, sodium benzoate, that was used to prevent tomatoes from rotting, and copper salts that were used to make faded vegetables appear green.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: So there were preservatives being added and there were mislabeled foods.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: But between 1880 and 1905, there were over 100 food and drug bills proposed in Congress, and they were all defeated.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because there wasn't enough public outcry.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: That all changed when two men collided.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: The first man was Dr.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Harvey Wiley, another Republican.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: He was the head of the Bureau of Chemistry.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: The Bureau of Chemistry would later become the FDA.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so he was the head of this Bureau of Chemistry that would become the FDA.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Wiley was given$5,000 by Congress to study adulteration.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: He created what we call the poison squad.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: This was where he tested the effects of those five chemical preservatives that I just mentioned, as well as long as well as colorings.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: He tested those on healthy men for over a five-year period.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, he would lace the food with these chemicals in increasing dosages and he'd feed it to the men.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't use consent forms, they didn't test it first on animals or do any lab testing, and there's no medical oversight.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, several of the men got so sick that they couldn't even function anymore.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at the FDA's record, this is what the FDA says.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: But he stopped each unconventional experiment after many of his volunteers became sick.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: So then, so Wiley concluded from this um five-year study that um every chemical that he tested should be banned.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but actually only formaldehyde ended up being banned.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the result of this was Wiley did cause alarm among citizens, but it still wasn't enough for them to get this federal regulation over our food supply until a second man came on scene, and that was, of course, Upton Sinclair.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: And as we probably all know, we had to read this book in high school, most of us, he wrote The Jungle.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: The jungle led to an attack on meat, and this was a historic moment in the history of the United States because this was the first full-fledged government offensive against a food group.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and let's and let's point out that Upton Sinclair was actually a com he was a socialist, he was a socialist, and the book was really, he he was so disappointed in this book, Cena.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: He he won he wrote a book about the abuse of workers in these big Chicago meatpacking plants.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: He wanted outrage against exploitation of workers, but as he talked about the exploitation of workers, uh, and and and people found out that fingers were in their hamburgers and and you know, and and pieces of human flesh, um uh the outcry, instead of being against uh against the worker abuse, uh outcry was against the uh the meat issue.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: It had had a completely opposite effect from what uh Upton Sinclair imagined.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: He was a socialist and he was trying to garner support for socialism and trying to overthrow capitalism.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll walk you through that, but like you said, it had the opposite effect.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: So let's walk, in case the listeners aren't aware, let's walk them through that and they'll see what you're talking about by the absolute opposite effect.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so the jungle was a rally cry for socialism.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: And almost like an afterthought, Sinclair wrote a few pages about diseased, rotted, contaminated meat products.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: He said things like they were treated with chemicals to masticane, stench, and flavor, and then they were mislabeled and sold to Americans.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: He alleged that um meat packers would process diseased animals into the meat when inspectors weren't looking, that rats ran around on the meat, and that workers were urinating next to the meat and coughing on it when they had they had tuberculosis.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then he even alleged that sometimes they'd fall, the workers themselves would fall into the vats of lard and be rounded up and sold to Americans in food.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: So you could imagine the outrage by Americans, right, that this elicited.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: And Sinclair is famous for saying something like he tried to strike at the hearts of Americans and he hit their stomachs, right?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: So he this was the opposite of what he wanted to do.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: But the outrage was so severe from the public that it forced Congress and the president of the United States to act and to act quickly.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: The American Medical Association also got involved.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and remember that name because when we talk about the birth of our medical system, the American Medical Association is a huge player.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: So they were also a player in the formation of the FDA.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: They threatened to march on the offices of the congressional leaders if they didn't act immediately.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so what happened was Congress did pass a bill, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and it led to the creation of the FDA.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: This act prohibited the manufacturer or sale of adulterated foods and drugs.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: It was crafted by Dr.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Wiley.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it was accompanied by a second bill, because even though they passed this Pure Food and Drug Act, there was no provision in it for the meat inspection, right?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: So the whole problem that the Americans were outraged about, it wasn't even taken care of in the Pure Food and Drug Act.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: So they used it to push through this first piece of legislation, which literally out of that one document of birth, the Federal Food and Drug Administration.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: Then a progressive Republican in Congress proposed this second bill called the Meat Inspection Act.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And this bill said that a federal inspector had to be present in all meat packing houses at all hours of operation.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: It also said the government could inspect meat that was sold across state lines.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we can get into that if you want another episode.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this is unconstitutional.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: So this might be a good episode, um, another episode to talk about the federal food and drug association uh is actually unconstitutional.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but this with the passage of these bills, this was the moment when the veil came down over our eyes and we washed our hands of our responsibility of our own food.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: Even the New York Times at that time declared, quote, the purity and honesty of the food and medicines of the people are guaranteed.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to ask, was it really guaranteed?
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: Was the food safer?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so um at the time, the what they what the government implemented to inspect the food was the poke and sniff method.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: So they would take a rod, they would poke meat, and then they would smell it to see if it smelled like pathogens, which obviously there's huge errors involved with that method.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then what they would do is they would take the same rod and they would poke the next carcass of meat and smell it.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then they would poke the next carcass of meat and smell it.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: So it's actually been estimated that they sickened countless peoples just from this poke and sniff method.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: But the most comical part of this is that according to the USDA themselves, this poke and sniff method, it was the centerpiece for their inspection programs until the 1990s, right?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, like they couldn't come up with anything better.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: But but this is kind of the comical part for me.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: So we people would sit back.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: Propo proponents of this are like, oh, this was so great.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody got what they wanted, you know.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Americans got the federal oversight that they were screaming for.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Wiley finally got his Pure Food and Drug Acts passed because he had been battling for a quarter of a century on this.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: President Roosevelt, he was happy because he gained more control over corporations, right?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: He was a progressive.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: And as you mentioned, the meat packing companies were thrilled, even though this would put more regulation on them.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: They were thrilled because they knew this law favored big meat industry.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: See, meat sales were cut roughly in half after the jungle was published.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: And having a federal government inspector on site at all times raised consumer confidence.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: So meat sales climbed, and the new regulations stomped out the smaller competitors.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: So it's helped these meat companies create a monopoly.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, the taxpayers paid for these government inspectors, right?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then, as you mentioned, Upton Sinclair, people are like, oh, he must have been thrilled, right?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: He was not.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: He he actually um was very upset.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: He ended up being used by that very industry that he actually hated.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and and and Cina, but I I I really want people to understand this is so this is like foundational for this whole podcast thematically, that within six months, six months of Upton Sinclair publishing The Jungle, the meat sales of the seven, there were seven large meat packers in the U.S.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: at that time, seven of them, and their sales dropped 50%, half in six months.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, they were facing, they were, they were, they were going bankrupt.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now, two things about that.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, where did people go for their meat then?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: They went back to their local butcher, they went to their neighborhood, their little neighborhood uh uh, you know, abattoir, their little the the community outfit, um, who at that time were losing market share to these big, you know, fancy uh places that were able to advert, you know, Swift and Armor and these, you know, these big outfits.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so um, so there was a there was a mass migration of market share away from these big operations back to the little community operations.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: If if there had been no uh uh meat inspection uh uh uh uh law, who knows what what would have happened at that point, we might have, we might have never gone the industrial food route.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: It it would have completely refreshed, re-energized.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: It would have uh uh for sure, it would have done several things, but but certainly it was a a catalyst to the know your farmer, know your food, eat local, um, you know, back in 1905, long before the know your farmer, know your food thing of, you know, of modern days.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, that that was a huge thing.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: The second thing was to appreciate the power of information in the marketplace.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: When people have information, they change buying habits.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: They do.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, this idea that, well, people will only change if we have a government agency is simply not true.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: If people have information, they do have personal agency, they're not just you know robots and automatons, and and they actually do uh you know uh work in this.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: And the and the the third thing I'll just say about this is realize that at that time the perception, the perception is all this developed, and and as Cena said, you know, you said you know, the AMAs marching on Washington, you got all this turmoil going on.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, at that time, seven companies controlled half of the U.S.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: meat market.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: Seven controlled half, and they were called monopolists, oligarchs, you know, uh industrialists, and there were they were demonized, uh, like they controlled everything.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: Seven companies, 50 50% of the American meat market.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: Today, today, three companies control 80%.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I just want you to just pause a minute, think about that.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: 120 years ago, seven companies.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Controlled half and were considered monopolistic and oligarchs.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: Today, three control 80%.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: And people had the audacity to say, well, that's the free market.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: Listen, we have not had a free market ever since 1905.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Up until then, we pretty much did have a free market.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: But once the government intervened, we we lost our free market.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: And what happens when you lose free markets?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: You end up where we are a century later, with not seven competitors controlling half, you end up with three or four controlling 80%.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's where you end up.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I I wish I could screen that on the house top of every house top in America for people to wake up and understand that government intervention in the marketplace never big government never never bigger government never creates smaller business.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: Bigger government always creates bigger business.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: That is so fundamental to market understanding.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it's exactly what developed with the FDA.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: What a great, great uh uh history lesson, Arcina.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: So go ahead, uh keep moving on this, on this, on the theme that so we've now we've got the we've got the meeting uh we've got the meat inspection act, we've got poke and sniff.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: So so now what?
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so and this is the best start part of the story for me, but I want to add to what you just said.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's so important what you're saying.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: And if people think, oh, well, this happened back in 1906, this meat inspection act, so you know, like it's it's antiquated, it's outdated, doesn't affect me today.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: We we all know now about the Amish farmer, right?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Who who they're trying to shut him down because why he's not going through their channels of this meat inspection.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: That program that they're saying he is not abiding by started from the meat inspection act.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: Still applying these today.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: It trickles down all the way to us now, it's affecting us now, it's affecting potentially how we're gonna be able to procure our own food of choice.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it does apply to you.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but back to the story.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: So this was the most fascinating part for me.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: So if if you heard the story so far, you might be thinking to yourself, well, we did need a federal um oversight, right?
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: We did need the FDA to be birthed because look at what Sinclair is describing was happening in these meat processing plants.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, take this into consideration before you come to that conclusion.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Local, state, and federal agencies were already inspecting meat for at least a decade at that time.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: And there was little or no complaints, actually, about these meat packing companies.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: In addition, around 2 million visitors went to the meat packaging plants each year.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody complained.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, they didn't have social media, of course, but surely if 2 million people visited every year and they saw even a little bit of the horrors that Sinclair reported, people, word would get out, people would know.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the most important piece for me.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: Sinclair, or one of the most important pieces, Sinclair never actually went to the meat packaging houses to investigate them himself.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is a lie.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: You will hear this and read it on all these websites of people who are promoting the FDA.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: He did not even pretend that he went and visited them.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: He also didn't even pretend that he verified these um secondhand accounts that he wrote about.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: He also said he didn't derive them from official records.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: He relied on the hearsay of others and on his own imagination.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: And now, President Roosevelt himself, right, even though President Roosevelt wanted to gain control over the corporations, he didn't trust Sinclair.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: Roosevelt actually called him, quote, unbalanced and untruthful.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: So President Roosevelt launched two investigations into the meat packing industry.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: One group of people went and they concluded that Sinclair was lying.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: They called him an atrocious exaggeration.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: They said it was willful and deliberate misinterpretation of fact.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: So then President Roosevelt sent a second group out, two other two men to go and investigate.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they said, oh no, Sinclair's claims are truthful.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is what's happening.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: So what does Roosevelt do?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: Who is he going to believe?
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: He used the second report to strong arm the Senate into passing the Meat Inspection Act.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, the Senate dutifully complied and they passed the bill.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: But shortly after, that second group of inspect investigators admitted that they had an agenda.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: They admitted that they wanted the new inspection law to be passed.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: And Sinclair actually wrote another book, and he he actually admitted later that that second book was false.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was not based on truth.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: But the so what I'm saying is, in all likelihood, the descriptions that Upton Sinclair described in this book, The Jungle, were not true.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: They were actually, in fact, based on a lie.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: But it didn't matter.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't matter because in 1906, in the court of public opinion, the jungle provided the push that was needed for Americans to accept federal oversight of their food supply.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: And and so the people, I mean, the how profound this is is almost incomprehensible, right?
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: This one law handed control of our food supply over to a federal government.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: We would never get it back.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: Never.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: We would never get it back.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: It would just grow, as you just explained.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it was likely all based on lies, manipulation, and trying to drum up enough fear amongst the American people that we would comply.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: You mean you mean to tell me, Cena, that that um we had we had things like the Russian collusion story, uh clear back in 1905.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: There was still there were politics going on.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there again, I think we we tend to be myopic.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: We you know, we we all you know we look back historically and we do ancestry.com and we do all this stuff, and somehow we we think that that uh whatever people weren't greedy back then, or they weren't selfish, or they didn't lie, or whatever back.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, no.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: They were just as mean and deceitful and greedy and selfish as they are today.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they just had different techniques to do it.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: They used uh they used letters and they use smoke-filled rooms.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: We've all nobody meets in a smoke-filled room today.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: They do Zoom calls, right?
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that's the new smoke-filled room.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: All I'm saying is that that when you start digging into these uh historical um, you know, backgrounds of these things, it is it is just as full of manipulation and and uh um uh calculation and politics as as anything today.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know, so just you know keep that in mind.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it's really, really important to realize that yeah, that that Sinclair uh was essentially at the time and now historically, uh his allegations have been largely discredited as being distortions and an innuendo, innuendo, uh because he was uh he was trying to move an agenda forward, an agenda that was anti, anti-free market, anti-capitalist, and very anti-American.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that ties back into the quote from the FDA that I started this segment with when the FDA said that we got the um the birth of the FDA came about because of long-standing serious abuses in the consumer product marketplace.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: The reason I read that quote to you at the beginning is so that if you're not already doing it, don't take people's word at face value, right?
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because you read that and you read, you read the jungle, and you're like, well, of course, of course, this is serious abuse, and it's been going on forever, you know.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you will be misinformed if you do that.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: You are being lied to.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: The FTA, even right there, is lying to you, right?
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: That is not the true history.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so I know Joel and I know a lot of people don't have the time to go through all this, and that's why we're here is to help you decipher through this and show you, shine a light on the truth so we don't perpetuate these lies to the next generation, right?
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we can turn this ship around and start getting um freedom back, right?
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly right.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so thank you, Cena, for taking us down this historical pathway.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think it's I think it it it arms all of us, the it arms all of us to have the truth and to understand the the historical background because every day at the water cooler, well, I guess we don't stand around a water cooler anymore, you know, but but but wherever we wherever we do happen to gather, um, you know, we we have these conversations.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: And this was just a really quick rundown of the players from Roosevelt to Sinclair to um the MA to the AMA and to Wiley, and to kind of get Wiley, you know, boy, that that's that's a great name for a Wiley.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, we um to get those information.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: So thanks for taking us down this real short historical uh memory lane, and I hope that it's been very helpful to all of you to get beyond labels and beyond the stereotypes, even beyond the assumptions that people have, so that we are well armed uh in our defense of truth and freedom.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for joining us for Beyond Labels.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see you next time.