• @[email protected]
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    1392 months ago

    People tend to forget the Food part that the Food and Drug Administration take care of. Here’s milk before 1906:

    Finally, if the milk was threatening to sour, dairymen added formaldehyde, an embalming compound long used by funeral parlors, to stop the decomposition, also relying on its slightly sweet taste to improve the flavor. In the late 1890s, formaldehyde was so widely used by the dairy and meat-packing industries that outbreaks of illnesses related to the preservative were routinely described by newspapers as “embalmed meat” or “embalmed milk” scandals.

    sauce

      • @[email protected]
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        582 months ago

        When people claim the free market will fix things, the thousands of examples that lead to 99% of regulations are why those people should be laughed at and told to shut the fuck up.

      • Possibly linux
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        262 months ago

        You should read the book “The Jungle” as it is part of the early investigative journalism and contains very specific details that will make you want to vomit

      • @[email protected]
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        132 months ago

        Oh, there’s more fun in the article.

        They also faked the look of rich cream by using a yellowish layer of pureed calf brains. As a historian of the Indiana health department wrote: “People could not be induced to eat brain sandwiches in [a] sufficient amount to use all the brains, and so a new market was devised.”

        “Surprisingly enough,’’ he added, “it really did look like cream but it coagulated when poured into hot coffee.”

      • @[email protected]
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        92 months ago

        Well I mean yeah. Because their constituents have the educations of gerbils in cages. They believe whatever slopp is spoon-fed to them by their propaganda arm, Faux News. And then when the bad things happen, the blame it on a liberal conspiracy and their idiots will lap it up and vote them back into office over and over and over again.

    • DominusOfMegadeus
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      92 months ago

      Apparently it sends your immune system into maximum overdrive, which feels great. For a while.

    • Possibly linux
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      22 months ago

      They used to have people paint on radium with there mouth. Those people ended up losing there jaw and teeth so there would just be a bunch of mutilated skin left

      • @[email protected]
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        152 months ago

        Kinda close… women painted lume on clock dials and arms. They were told the luminous radium paint was safe and they used their lips to put a point on the paintbrushes they were using. The same companies that told them it was safe pushed the dentists and doctors seeing the effects attribute it to STDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls has a really good summary.

        • @[email protected]
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          42 months ago

          And the most damning part of all imo: “the owners and the scientists familiar with the effects of radium carefully avoided any exposure to it themselves. Chemists at the plant used lead screens, tongs, and masks.”.

          The plant owners definitely knew that they were killing people, there should have been murder charges imo.

      • qprimed
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        2 months ago

        welp, if/when things go south in november and we get a new american god king, the executive decree eliminating the FDA brings all this back, right? gotta look for silver linings and all that jazz.

        “one night brand cough syrup - you wont even remember you had a democracy!”