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okay we've talked about different ways of preserving food. well some of

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those were early forms of chemical preservation like how covering meat in [mean hanging in a cellar]

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salt partially dehydrates the meat so it doesn't rot so quickly .yeah or how

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putting veggies in vinegar pickles them so they last longer. but in the late 19th

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century new chemical discoveries led to a whole new set of food preservation

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additives. these chemicals and compounds included stuff like borax ,salicylic acid,

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and formaldehyde. if some of those things sound like horrifying things to eat well [man in lab coat sorts chemicals]

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that's because they are. they are indeed horrifying things to eat. you shouldn't.

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well there was approximately zero regulation back in the day so food

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companies stuck chemicals and everything willy-nilly.

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fun-fun-fun. companies didn't even have to list the ingredients. and they didn't

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have to tell the truth about what a food item actually was. oh what an exciting

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time to eat. with every meal consumers were living on the edge. the very act of [man eats chips on the edge of a cliff]

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eating was like competing in the X Games. total lack of government oversight. we

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got products like bread spread which was sold as jelly, but was mostly made out of

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pectin. that is in grass seed. well the next few decades were a series of epic

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battles between government regulations and food companies. being started at [men fight in the street]

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tipping the government's regulatory favour in 1937 when 107 people died from

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a poisonous preservative ingredient in a medicine called elixir sulfanilamide. a

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new federal Food and Drug Act was passed and all the chemical preservatives came

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under closer scrutiny. well today most preservatives in food fall into three

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categories. antimicrobials which killed live things like bacteria and mold,

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antioxidants which stop fats from going bad, and three chemicals that delay the [strawberry and meat give each other thumbs up.]

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natural ripening in vegetables. There is still a lot of controversy about which of

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these chemicals are safe and which are not, but nobody can deny that we're now

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eating grapefruits from Argentina. and when we mean grapefruit well we seriously mean grapefruit.

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right but how did chemical preservatives change food forever?

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well most fundamentally canning and preserving meant that more foods could [man smiles in produce section]

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be processed and sold than ever before. the days of most people being able to go

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to the local market and buy straight from the farmer were over. it also made

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farms much larger. it was generally more efficient for a single farm to produce a

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ton of a certain kind of specific food and then sell it to another company to

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process it. the ability to stop fresh foods from rotting also improved urban [man stands by a stack of corn]

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health especially for the poor. previously it was unlikely that they

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would have had access to fresh vegetables and dairy products, but

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trade-off was that the industrialization of food often came with its own health

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risks. chemicals could prove deadly. and factory conditions were pretty foul. also

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people died of food poisoning way more often. lovely but maybe it was all worth [people laying in front of run down house]

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it for the hmmm-mmm good taste of bread spread, because nothing starts a day like

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jelly made of pectin and grass seed. except maybe pretty much anything

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else. [birds eat a jar of jam]

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