{Photograph} courtesy of Library of Congress.
Today, ice-cream controversies have a tendency to be fairly delicate: Jeni’s or Ice Cream Jubilee? Marionberry or mint chocolate chip? However again within the early twentieth century, chilly treats had been a severe scorching matter, and a bit spot in DC was on the middle of the battle over frozen desserts. Owned by a confectioner named Joseph J. Bischof, the institution at 1339 H Avenue, Northeast—right now house to the Pie Store—discovered itself the goal of the federal authorities’s ire.
On February 24, 1910, an eclectic group of federal bureaucrats, scientists, and ice-cream producers crammed into the crowded DC Police Court docket on the nook of Sixth and D streets, Northwest. In line with the federal government, Bischof’s ice cream was truly not ice cream in any respect, and he was being prosecuted underneath the Pure Meals and Drug Act of 1906, the primary nationwide consumer-protection regulation. DC well being officers and the Agriculture Division’s Bureau of Chemistry—precursor to the Meals and Drug Administration—had spent years investigating the sanitary circumstances of ice cream within the nation’s capital. Now the federal government hoped to make use of the brand new statute to safe convictions that might spotlight and punish unsafe meals practices.
Main this effort was a person named Harvey Washington Wiley, who ran the Bureau of Chemistry. Though the San Francisco Chronicle on the time referred to as him “a midsummer bore” for attacking a dessert that made “life endurable to so many thousands and thousands in every recurring summer season,” Wiley wasn’t some sort of anti-joy zealot. In a approach, he was an Anthony Fauci of his time, besides fairly than battling Covid, he led a marketing campaign towards harmful meals. Like Fauci, Wiley was continually within the information. Papers across the nation branded him “Uncle Sam’s chemist,” “America’s gastronomic mentor,” and the “janitor of the individuals’s insides.”
As spring arrives following one other pandemic-ravaged winter and Washingtonians’ ideas flip towards ice cream, it’s value trying again to a time when these treats had been fairly perilous—and when authorities efforts to enhance their security modified the way in which we eat.
Born in a log farmhouse close to Kent, Indiana, in 1844, Wiley fought as a Union soldier within the Civil Conflict, then earned a number of levels, together with an MD, earlier than accepting a professorship in chemistry at Purdue College. In 1883, he was chosen to guide the Division of Chemistry (it turned the Bureau of Chemistry in 1901), which on the time researched matters comparable to sugar manufacturing that tended to not seize the general public creativeness. Wiley had developed a selected curiosity in meals adulteration—the observe of surreptitiously including cheaper different elements to merchandise—and was keen to make use of his new perch to make America’s meals much less harmful.
Nonetheless, there was an enormous drawback: A nationwide regulation defending meals security didn’t exist. The primary invoice designed to fight meals adulteration was launched to Congress in 1879, however it failed. It took one other 27 years and 190 payments earlier than Congress lastly handed a regulation—thanks, largely, to Wiley’s efforts.
With a purpose to change the principles, Wiley first wanted to persuade the general public that meals security truly mattered. From 1902 to 1907, he presided over a sequence of experiments with a group of younger males the press dubbed the “Poison Squad.” This courageous band of take a look at topics consumed deliberately adulterated meals to find out the affect of generally added substances comparable to borax and salicylic acid. Members of the squad reported signs affecting their urge for food, digestion, and general well being. From a scientific standpoint, the experiments weren’t notably rigorous. There was no management group, for one factor, and doses of adulterants had been increased than usually discovered within the wild. Even so, press protection of the experiments made Wiley a nationwide sensation, and assist grew for federal food-safety legal guidelines.
Wiley used this wave of acclaim to push the Pure Meals and Drug Act of 1906, which he was instrumental in crafting. In contrast to earlier efforts, the invoice truly handed, and it was signed into regulation by Theodore Roosevelt. The laws lastly made it a criminal offense to promote adulterated or mislabeled meals, and the Bureau of Chemistry—and subsequently Wiley—was answerable for imposing it.
That’s when Wiley went after ice cream. It was a savvy PR transfer: The deal with had develop into fairly widespread attributable to elevated availability of ice and the introduction of hand-cranked ice-cream makers—but it might trigger severe sickness attributable to excessive ranges of micro organism. So Wiley and the District Well being Division joined forces for a citywide investigation of ice-cream producers and sellers. At a lecture he gave in 1907 on the Vermont Avenue Christian Church, Wiley scared parishioners with speak of the hazards of the native hokey pokey, as ice cream offered by candy-cart distributors was identified. “That’s the sort of stuff our kids are permitted to purchase at a penny a cake at recess,” he instructed the viewers, in line with a manuscript of his lecture within the Library of Congress. “No ethics in that. Loads of micro organism however no ethics.”
This wasn’t grandstanding—a number of youngsters in Washington had died after consuming tainted ice cream. Wiley and his Bureau ran checks on native samples, and in early 1908, they knowledgeable the Medical Society of the District of Columbia that they’d discovered a mean of 66 million organisms per cubic centimeter in 300 samples of DC ice cream. An identical pattern of water contained solely about 500 organisms per cubic centimeter, they mentioned. “Nobody needs to run the danger of getting lockjaw by . . . consuming ice cream,” Wiley instructed the Home Committee on Agriculture.
One of many samples collected by Bureau bacteriologists got here from Bischof’s store on H Avenue. Exams revealed that the product contained vital micro organism and didn’t have sufficient milk fats to fulfill the Agriculture Division’s new requirements. It additionally used gelatin as a thickener, which allowed it to sit down out for lengthy durations with out melting, steadily amassing sinister micro organism. Bischof’s practices, Wiley was satisfied, clearly violated the Pure Meals Act.
When Bischof’s trial started in February 1910, issues shortly acquired difficult. The case was to be a take a look at of Wiley’s energy to implement the brand new legal guidelines, however the proceedings slowed down on a surprisingly troublesome query: What’s ice cream? There have been quite a few forms of frozen custard and many various lay definitions, and the Agriculture Division’s requirements had been removed from broadly accepted. Wiley contended that Bischof’s product was adulterated and didn’t qualify, however he admitted that gelatin itself was innocent. The difficulty, Wiley mentioned, was the way it hid the age of the ice cream and thus its potential risks.
The trial lasted simply sooner or later, and on the finish of testimony, Choose Alexander Mullowny issued his verdict: Bischof was not responsible. Within the decide’s view, the Division of Agriculture’s definition of ice cream was simply an opinion and Wiley had no authority to inform Individuals what their desserts should be manufactured from.
Bischof went again to hawking treats on H Avenue. That wasn’t the tip of the story, nevertheless. Regardless of the ruling, the general public was beginning to demand safer and unadulterated meals, and the business had little selection however to reply. Pasteurization and mechanical refrigeration began to develop into customary, and security might even be a promoting level. A DC butter producer referred to as Chapin-Sacks, which had began producing ice cream, started selling its product as a “pure” selection. “The freshest, trendy and scientific tools attainable to assemble is now being put in within the NEW HOME of ‘The Velvet Sort,’ ” the corporate marketed in 1917. (At this time, the FDA has a strict technical definition for which merchandise qualify as ice cream.)
Wiley resigned from the Bureau in 1912 and took a job with Good Housekeeping. Figuring out of a lab, he examined all kinds of client merchandise and wrote articles concerning the risks he found. Below his watch, the journal—which already had a well-known Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval—established a particular seal for Wiley: “Examined and Accredited by the Bureau of Meals, Sanitation, and Well being.” Wiley labored there till he died in 1930 at his house in Kalorama. He’s buried in Arlington Nationwide Cemetery.
In the meantime, the Bischof trial had little affect on ice cream’s exploding reputation. In 1913, three years after the confectioner was acquitted, the Washington Occasions lined DC’s urge for food for it. “In the event you ought to invert the dome of the Capitol, fill it heaping filled with wealthy frozen cream, high it off with a cherry the scale of the gold dome of the Congressional Library, and serve it to the Goddess of Liberty with a silver spoon that might attain throughout Pennsylvania avenue,” the paper advised, “you may get an thought of how a lot ice cream the town will eat this week.”
This text seems within the April 2022 subject of Washingtonian.
