Yesterday's Chip Paper

In the basement kitchen of the Department of Agriculture, 12 young men sat down to a meal laced with poison, an event that would occur three times a day for the next 18 months. This is the incredible story of Dr Harvey Washington Wiley and the Poison Squad, tasked with the experiment of finding out just how bad food preservatives were for the humans. This voluntary undertaking would lead to the formation of the Pure Food and Drug law and subsequent food regulation across the world. But the experiment wasn’t without its setbacks, from a member who couldn’t lose weight to the tragic (though perhaps not surprising) death of one of its participants. Pioneering hero or callous killer? You decide with the latest episode of Yesterday’s Chip Paper. Also this week, a slight overreaction from one newspaper reader on some flowers stolen from his garden, and possibly the most gloriously disappointing poem in the short history of this podcast. Yesterday’s Chip Paper is a fortnightly(ish) history podcast that takes true st