Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist who directs MIT's Knight Science Journalism Program, reconstructs the long fight to give the United States a federal food safety system. At the center of the story is Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemistry professor who came to Washington in 1883 to run the Department of Agriculture's small Bureau of Chemistry and stayed for nearly three decades to wage war on adulterated food. American grocers at the turn of the twentieth century routinely sold milk stretched with formaldehyde, beef preserved with borax, candy colored with lead, and 'strawberry' jam made from grass seeds and dye. Wiley's most theatrical tool was the 'Poison Squad,' a group of young volunteers from his department who ate carefully measured doses of suspect preservatives at staff lunches while Wiley documented their illness. Blum places Wiley alongside Upton Sinclair, whose The Jungle exposed the meatpacking industry, and the muckraking journalists and women's clubs who lobbied for reform. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was the result, the foundation of what is now the FDA. The book is also a study of regulatory politics: Wiley spent his career fighting industry pressure and political interference, and Blum draws clear parallels to contemporary battles over food and chemical safety.