I grew up in the golden age for kids’ cereals, first with Trix from General Mills—introduced in 1954 in three colors: raspberry red, orangey orange and lemony yellow (now also wildberry blue, grapity purple and watermelon), followed in 1963 with Froot Loops from Kellog—also in red, orange and yellow—Toucan Sam style (now also green, blue and purple). Back then nobody worried much about how these manufacturers colored their cereals—artificially or otherwise. However, nowadays a consensus has built up about a “rainbow of risks” caused by synthetic food dyes. Political pressure across the spectrum from Gavin Newsome to Robert F Kennedy, Jr continues to build for banning these presumably harmful additives.

This sets the stage for some interesting history by American Heritage magazine on letting the food industry “poison” us as RFK, Jr puts it. Their Senior Editor Bruce Watson reported in the November/December issue how “many of our first food-safety laws arose after healthy young volunteers became sick when they tried commercial foods containing toxic additives.” These daredevils comprised “The Poison Squad” created in 1902 by Harvey Wiley Washington—who became known as the “Father of the Pure Food and Drugs Act” when it became law in 1906.

“NONE BUT THE BRAVE CAN EAT THE FARE.”

– Sign posted outside the Department of Agriculture building to enlist human ‘guinea pigs’

As historian Deborah Blum noted in her book The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Washington deserves credit for “one of the most significant experiments in the 20th century.” For example, just prior to his crusading work, hundreds or perhaps thousands of children died from milk “embalmed” with formaldehyde.

Not to lessen the current concern over artificial dyes, we can be thankful for the relative safety of our food compared to the fare in the early 1900s. But I do not advocate going back to the days when potential poisons were tested on human subjects. Though I suppose there’s worse things than being tasked with eating large quantities of Trix and Froot Loops, provided, of course, that the milk is not embalmed. ; )