Then something occurred which made the worm turn on its tormentors—the "embalmed beef" incident.
Major-General Miles, backed up by other officers, declared positively that most of the canned beef supplied to our soldiers during the war with Spain was unfit for human food, and that he was convinced that the refrigerated beef supplied was highly deleterious because of the introduction of chemicals for preservative purposes. The court which investigated these charges, while admitting some of the alleged evils, indulged, many people thought, in whitewashing; so the public at last made up its mind that "something was rotten in the state of Denmark."
Particularly was it impressed by the statement that the food supplied to the army was "not different from that generally sold to the public." That admission made people ask themselves: "What, then, are we eating?"
The result was a general awakening and investigation, a countrywide search which revealed the shocking fact that the community was harboring thousands of seemingly respectable citizens who were piling up fortunes by plying the deadly trade of modern Borgias, slaughtering infants and invalids and making even the robust feel uncomfortable most of the time.
The chemicals used were formalin, boric and salicylic acid, fluo-sylicate of ammonium, aniline dyes, and a number of secret compounds that were sold to packers and dealers, enabling them to doctor spoiled meats and other foods in such a way as to deceive the purchaser and consumer into thinking them fresh and wholesome.
To realize the full extent of this nefarious traffic one has to go back to the newspaper reports of the investigations and food tests, especially in the year 1899, after the "embalmed beef" inquiry. I have before me clippings that would fill fifty pages with gruesome details; but a mere peep into this culinary chamber of horrors must suffice.
"The use of antiseptics as preservatives is becoming alarmingly great," declared Prof. A. S. Mitchell, analytical chemist of the Wisconsin Dairy and Food Commission, before the Senatorial Committee on Pure Food Investigation. Among the preservatives he named was a liquid called "freezene," which he said, was almost pure formic-aldehyde, the substance that several chemists at the military inquiry had claimed to have found in the beef furnished the army. It acts disastrously upon the tissues of the stomach, but was often put into the milk and butter supplied to families. Butchers employed freely, especially in "Hamburger steaks," sulphite of soda, which not merely arrests digestion, but is, as another Government expert remarked, practically the same he had used as a medical student to preserve corpses, and later to disinfect houses where smallpox patients had lived.
The New York "Herald" of June 4, 1899, contained a page and a half of exposures, with these headlines:
POISON AND ADULTERATION FOUND IN ALL FOOD PURCHASED BY THE "HERALD." FORTY SAMPLES ANALYZED AND NOT ONE OF THEM WHAT IT PURPORTED TO BE. TEA THAT CONTAINED ALMOST EVERYTHING BUT TEA LEAVES. SOME FACTS THAT EVERY HOUSE-KEEPER SHOULD KNOW. THE CITY AUTHORITIES DO LITTLE.
One of the samples of what was sold as "tea" was "composed of refuse of many kinds—hair, mouldy leaves from everything that grows but the tea plant." Another sample contained "dust, seed-pods, foreign woody stems, and unidentified refuse."