Wormy Apples and the First Spray Residue Scare by Samuel Walmer
Consider the term “wormy apples”. To those of us born since World War II, this amounts to a mythic expression; perpetuated in the language and as a cultural icon but having practically no point of reference in daily experience. Today, the likelihood of encountering a worm in an apple is so remote, the phenomenon has been declared illegal by our government.
But for our parents, and their parents, and for many previous generations this term referred to a common occurrence in everyday life. As often as not when dealing with apples, they encountered the distinctive evidence of apple worms’ presence: a pinhead sized hole, usually at or near the calyx (flower) end of the apple, surrounded by “frass” or excrement. Inside, the flesh around the seeds was likely to be brown and gooey. This was rot getting started.
Depending on how far gone it was, the apple may have been too rotten to be used; certainly it would not keep would as long as we would expect it to today. The larvae might still be there, chomping away, growing and building energy reserves toward the day when it left its hole for the first time and sought out a dark, secure hiding place to build its cocoon.
Our ancestors’ response if there was a knife handy, was to cut the damage away. No knife, and it was bit out and spat on the ground. Any worm was severed or stomped, and the rest of the apple eaten or used in cooking. Not too long ago then, wormy apples were taken for granted. It was the “good” part that was meant for humans.
The worm in a wormy apple is the larvae of the codling moth. The codlin in codling moth refers to a type of apple which was recognized as a favorite of the appleworm as early as the 16th century. As the insect is nowhere mentioned previous to that time, it is thought to have arrived in the West about then, having originated in Asia Minor. (Though this last may be only a good guess, based on the determination that its favorite foods–apples, pears, quinces, and walnuts–all originated there.) As commerce spread favorable varieties around the world the worms went along, and by this century infested apples wherever they were grown.
The moth is a small, innocuous creature, about 7/10ths of an inch across with wings spread. Its mottled, brownish-grey coloration blends well with the bark of a mature apple tree, the only variation being a touch of gold near the wing tip that may twinkle in the afternoon sun as females emerge from hiding on the orchard floor and spiral up toward the treetops. There, they lay pinhead-sized eggs resembling clear droplets of water on the leaves and fruit.
The larvae when it hatches, is 2-3 mm long and creamy with a black head. Immediately, it seeks out a white fruitlet and digs into the core where it sets up housekeeping for the next three to four weeks, keeping its entry route open for waste disposal, and providing ready access to rot spores thereby. The codling moth is the only commonly occurring member of the order Lepidoptera that spends its larval stage in the core of the apple.
Codling moths do well wherever apples grow and thrive where apples grow best. Especially, this has been true in the state of Washington. Here, environmental conditions make for an appleworm paradise in which as many as four broods of moths can be produced a year, where back east there is only one. The little moth loves the hot, sunny summers that come with the desert climate, and finds the cool, dry nights ideal for breeding. There are few natural predators to check population growth as in the East, and little competition from other pests. When Washington became number one in apple production around the start of this century, the insect became the country’s premier fruit pest.
But even with the disparate conditions, east and west, the problem was serious nationwide, and kept getting worse as the century progressed. In 1905, worm damage was anticipated in anywhere from 50 to 80 per cent of the commercial crop. By 1925 a study found 100 per cent of the apples in an untreated orchard had worm “stings” by mid-August, and this in New Jersey where experimenters only counted 200 or so over-wintering cocoons per tree trunk. In the Pacific Northwest, they might find as many as 2000.
Efforts at control had started with the beginnings of commercial fruit growing. Natural methods were first to be widely publicized and applied. In the late 1800s, scientists at Cornell and in New Hampshire demonstrated the immense impact birds had on moth populations in the East. At the same time, Washington State College searched for a practical control program using parasites, and predator insects with a taste for codling moth were being released in California before 1925.
As early as 1855, growers were told to wrap burlap around crotches of their trees as hiding places to concentrate cocoon-builders in one spot so all could more easily be destroyed come winter. By the twenties, trunks were being scraped, orchards swept clean, packinghouse yards and buildings scoured, and special steam chambers built to sterilize boxes, all in the effort to reduce natural hiding places for chrysalids. Growers tried luring the moths in for electrocution with bright night lights; trapping (to the tune of 500,000 moths over four years in one orchard, resulting in no less damage than in a comparable orchard without traps); and “getting them soused” on hard cider. Boys were paid up to 2 cents per apple to thin off stung fruit by hand.
In 1927, bats were all the rage, as a grower pronounced the flying mammals “the greatest discovery that has ever been made for the industry.” A Texas scientist even developed an artificial bat roost which stood “thirty-five feet in the air, is twelve feet square, and contains dark hanging spaces, a maternity ward, and hibernating spaces. It was reported that bats found codling moth such a “delectable morsel” as to have the potential to rid mankind of the scourge forever.
But the search continues to this day for a method of wiping out the insect for good. In the meantime, growers turned to chemicals in the hope of maintaining reasonably low levels of infestation. The first inorganic poisons to provide effective control at reasonable cost to farmers were various forms of arsenic. These were available starting in about 1890.
By the mid-twenties, the material of choice was lead arsenate, a by-product of the iron smelting process. The idea was to coat all plant surfaces with a potent enough layer of arsenic that when a worm began chewing its way into its chosen fruitlet, it would become immobilized, then die, without doing any damage.
Growers were constantly reminded that an area left unsprayed “the size of a man’s thumb” could cause them serious economic hardship, because this left enough space for a worm to gain entry to an apple, and once inside she was protected from further applications. Every moth reaching maturity was the potential parent of hundreds and even thousands more, given the many broods before harvest. To be sure the layer of poison remained intact, growers were advised to spray seven to ten times per season.
But as chemical control came to be nearly universally applied, the moths began to show resistance to the poison, and soon damage levels were once more on the increase. In response, experts could only advise more of the same: “thoroness, thoroness, thoroness…spray each tree ’til it’s white”… with a chemical long known to be toxic to man in the tiniest amounts. Each season, more fruit came on the market than last bearing a visible layer of spray residue. As consumers found out what the coating of fine white powder was, concern mounted.
By the 1920s, public outcry in the eastern markets roused health officials to some sort of action. Their first move came in Aug. 1919, when the Commissioner of Health for Boston dumped several carloads of pears out of California, on the grounds that they were dangerous to health. The Food and Drug Administration’s Insecticide Administration immediately fired off a letter to packers of apples and pears, urging that they wipe their fruit clean before shipment.
In 1920 Boston threatened further seizures and feds responded with a new educational campaign about the need for wiping. Boston followed through in 1921, tossing a carload of Yakima apples. So FDA men personally visited farms, jawboning for clean fruit, but making little headway convincing growers to add another job to their already frantic harvest schedules.
As the FDA awoke to the problem, other fruits and vegetables came under closer scrutiny. In 1921, poisonings in a Los Angeles nursing home were blamed on celery tainted with arsenic. A pair of fatalities in New Jersey in 1925 were thought to have been caused by bad peaches, (though this was later shown not to be the case). In general, awareness of food safety was increasing in this country right along with the level of spray residue on the apples coming to market.
But it was in Great Britain that consumers and public health officials had become most sensitive to arsenical contamination. This had come about as the result of a horrible outbreak of poisoning in 1900. In that one year, six thousand people in Manchester had gotten sick, and seventy eventually died in a mysterious epidemic. A Royal Commission was appointed to investigate, and after studying the case for three years, reported that the cause had been “…arsenic in sulphuric acid used to hydrolize starch and invert sugar” to be used in brewing beer.
To prevent a recurrence, the Commission recommended a tolerance be set for the arsenical content of foods at 1/100th of a grain per pound of solid, or per gallon of liquid. This then became the official standard for Great Britain. Given the magnitude of the tragedy in Manchester only two decades before, the British consumer was understandably concerned about the powder on the American apples she brought home from market in the 1920s. Her complaints brought pressure to bear on Parliament to do something.
Parliament responded by turning up the heat on regulators. In June 1925, the Minister for Public Health was called before Commons to discuss spray residue on fruit. He reported: “The matter has been under the observation of my department for a number of years, but the quantities of arsenic which had been actually found on apples exposed for sale had been so minute as not to justify the institution of special restrictive measures.” Despite his assurances, the Minister got the message and ordered more action in the field from his inspectors.
By this time, around sixty percent of the apples exported from the U.S. each year were going to Great Britain. As these began to attract what U.S. fruit men felt was undue attention, they grumbled that it came not in response to the coating of spray increasingly present but was the result of malicious rumors spread by their English counterparts in an effort to regain some of the market they had lost to the smarmy Yanks. The situation had been further aggravated, this view held, by idle bureaucrats with nothing better to do, and “condemnitory articles in the public and trade press”.
Rank and file growers never would be persuaded that lead arsenate could be toxic to consumers at the rates they were using it. After all, the government still recommended the poison for use against the codling moth. Besides, they ate these apples themselves–fed them to their families all the time–and the spray never bothered them. Even if the material was not entirely benign, they were certain it was all removed in the course of harvesting, packing, and shipping–the small amount remaining on fruit after a normally rainy year, that is.
But 1925 was not a normally rainy year, at least not in south-central Washington around the town of Kennewick. The country thereabouts had been caught in a drought for over a year when harvest began, the first week in September. About mid-month, a shipment of Jonathon left the packinghouse of the J. W. Peters ranch and headed by rail to San Francisco to be loaded on the steamship Berengerie, bound for London by way of the Panama Canal. Upon arrival in early October, the Peters shipment was split among local retailers.
As the apples from Kenniwick made their way into London kitchens and bellies, a nightmare came to pass that was to permanently effect the way apples were grown and marketed half a world away. Two people in the Hampstead district of the city got sick after eating J. W. Peters apples bearing high levels of lead arsenate spray residue.
This should not have been so bad in itself; there had been enough of these incidents that the industry felt confident it could keep the could lid on a new one. But times had changed, and the nightmare would come after the poisonings were reported to Dr. H. E. Cox, Public Analyst for the district.
Public Analysts were watchdog government chemists– the people ordered to crack down on arsenic by the Minister of Public Health. Whether or not Cox had anything better to do in October of 1925, it seems he was ready to pounce on American apples showing high levels of spray residue.
Samples were acquired from several shops in the district. When tests found arsenic present at three to fifteen times the permissible limit, charges were brought against two of the fruiterers involved. The sellers’ only defense was that if they had known there was arsenic on the apples, they would never have bought or resold them. They entered guilty pleas, and paid fines amounting to $25 and $100. The two consumers who had reportedly gotten sick, never appeared, nor were they identified by name.
There was a second round of samples. On seven out of nineteen, arsenic was found in excess of the limit. All apples involved were Jonathon from the U.S., all were assumed to have come from the Peters shipment. More shopkeepers were hauled before magistrates, and more fines came down.
In his report, Dr. Cox regretted having to use local retailers as scapegoats for a problem the cause of which was thousands of miles to the west, but this was the only procedure available, he said, to “draw attention to the trouble”.
He also took the opportunity to score underappreciated scientists everywhere when he lamented that…”the opinion of the Public Analyst was not always asked for, nor when obtained, acted upon”. As the news of Dr. Cox’ revelations spread across Great Britain, it was used a cudgel to take out all the frustrations of the young industrial age on the uppity Yanks. Stories in the papers became increasingly strident. Especially, concern was voiced (a la Meryl Streep in the 1980s), regarding the most innocent of consumers, little children, as most likely to be struck down for being the least likely to wipe fruit before eating.
Vicious cartoons and sarcastic take-offs on apple advertising blared the awful tale of the poisonings. Promoters had been running an ad campaign based on the slogan “Eat More Fruit”. Just before the Hampstead incident, they had added: “…and keep fit”. Editorial writers had tremendous fun with this unfortunate coincidence, mocking the hapless Yankee growers and their British agents. Pressure mounted in Parliament for an embargo against further American shipments.
So the nightmare when it came, was one of public relations. Cox’ action had indeed drawn attention to the trouble. His opinions would now be acted on to an extent most scientists can only dream of.
The bad press and threatened embargo terrified industry leaders in the U.S. Certainly, if Great Britain refused to allow importation of American apples, the Continent would not be far behind, and altogether, Europe was absorbing 20 percent of Washington’s crop in 1925. The effect on prices from dumping that quantity of fruit on the domestic market would have been disastrous. Worse, it was assumed that once banned for contamination, American apples would be burdened with a stigma from which sales would never recover. The Yanks went to work on damage control.
Furthermore, the foreign agents began touting an official line according to which the vast majority of American growers were “alarmed at the result of their spraying policy”. Indeed, this problem had arisen only as the result of a “few black sheep too lazy to take reasonable precautions”. Peters’ shipment was an anomaly– sprayed late, and from a particularly dry sector where rains had not been adequate to wash the fruit naturally.
Regrettably, most of the crop for 1925 was already in the pipeline on its way to market, but whatever remained in storage would be hand-wiped before packing. Just in case, English retailers were quietly assured that grower organizations would pay their fines if they could prove they had wiped their stock before putting it on display, and still gotten nabbed.
Despite these efforts, the rising tide of vitriol from England made it seem like this time the problem might not go away. A meeting was convened in Washington D.C. in April, 1926 to discuss what to do about it.
This meeting included no fruit growers. Rather, “industry leaders” present were: three chemical company representatives, a public relations man, an agent for an apple-packing machine company, and R.G. Phillips, executive secretary of the International Apple Shippers Association. (This was the closest thing growers had to a national lobbyist, though Phillips and the IASA represented shippers and packers too, whose interests often clashed with those of the actual producers, as we shall see).
By signing on to the final resolution, all promised to back whatever program the USDA might suggest for dealing with the spray residue problem. The chairman, Phillips, wrote a cover letter, summarizing for the first time in the U.S., the events leading up to the crisis and what future actions were in order. This information packet was sent out to prominent growers around the country who were then meant to discretely spread word among their neighbors, of the danger of a British embargo–and its dire consequences–if apples exported from the next crop were not clean.
In Chairman Phillips’ letter he makes it clear that bad publicity was the group’s biggest concern, almost to the exclusion of anything else (this arch-nemesis is mentioned no less than eighteen times in six pages). He concludes: “It is not going to get us anywhere or do any good to waste time arguing as to whether arsenic is poisonous or non-poisonous to humans or to dismiss the subject. What with a statement that persons are unduly alarmed. we must do is to devote ourselves to removing cause for complaint and obviate the appearances of evil. Debate, argument, injunctions, court proceedings, newspaper publicity, etc., can result in nothing but trouble. If we cannot handle this question co-operatively and constructively, I am convinced that it can be so handled, then it cannot be handled at all.”
Middlemen and suppliers at least were willing to concede their sins and get on with the effort and expense of correcting them, without a fight. Their only condition was that the whole thing be kept quiet.
And so an embargo was imposed, not in England on apples, but in this country, on information–a news embargo that would hold into the next decade. Such leaks as got through were so obscure that American consumers would get no idea of the origin, or magnitude of the concern overseas about poison on their fruit.
An attempt to better inform rank and file growers of the severity of the situation, came about at the winter meetings of the Washington State Horticultural Association in December. At the end of his presentation on another topic, the state Superintendent of Horticulture produced a letter from his English counterpart which he proceeded to read into the record. The letter was very clear as to the seriousness of the arsenic problem “to every person concerned in the trade” and was emphatic that no more tainted apples be sent over.
The move obviously caught the Chair by surprise. After being assured that a committee had already been appointed to look into all this, the Superintendent was ushered from the podium, and the subject was dropped without further comment. The following day, word that apples might need to be wiped clean next season appeared in Washington papers, buried in stories about the Hort convention. There was no clue as to why, and papers in the fruit belt never would get around to explaining the origin of the enormous changes that were about to beset the industry.
Three articles would appear in the New York Times–short pieces deep in the business pages, discussing the potential for damage to the industry but providing few details. Little notion is conveyed of the very negative attitude raging in England, other than to mention that sales were off 40-60 per cent.
The most complete account of the incident to appear in the ’20s in this country came in the February, 1927 issue of Gleanings, the trade journal for beekeepers. This group was still smarting over abuse suffered at the very start of pesticide spraying. Then, it had taken twenty years to persuade government entomologists that their hives were being destroyed by man-made chemicals and not some new disease. They remained dubious of growers’ sincerity in their efforts to stop killing bees. Seeing an obvious opportunity for revenge, they printed a spirited diatribe. relating the Hampstead incident in detail. But who, besides beekeepers reads Gleanings?
Phillips’ grapevine did spread the word among growers however, that the English were serious–that they intended to enforce their official limit of .01 grain of arsenic per pound of fruit on the 1926 crop. U.S. officials were set to apply the same standard to fruit sold in this country.
Growers and shippers formulated a three-part plan to deal with the situation: they would pay (grudgingly) for the major new chore of hand-wiping every apple and pear before shipment; their spray residue committee would be sent to Washington D.C. to lobby for relaxation of the new standard; and, test cases would be brought challenging the tolerance in court. And always, always, no word to the press why all this was happening.
Their plan would fail completely, exacerbating one of the most chaotic harvest seasons ever, as the 1926 crop came in a limb-buster, setting production records that would stand until 1987.
The first hint of trouble came with the legal angle. Growers put all their resources behind a test case in Chicago in which a packinghouse challenged the government’s right to seize a carload of apples for having too much arsenical contamination. The government responded in kind, bringing in their top enforcers to assert their duty to protect the public health. The government won.
The first indication of problems with cleaning the fruit came in August, with the first to be harvested. Bureau of Chemistry inspectors in the East condemned USDA shipments of thoroughly wiped Oregon pears, that had been inspected and approved by USDA Bureau of Entomology inspectors in the West. A “mild panic immediately ensued among apple growers and shippers” as it became clear the residue could not be cleaned off by hand-wiping sufficient to achieve the British tolerance, and they had trees sagging under a crop load the likes of which had never before been seen; all having been sprayed with lead arsenate, all (essentially) of which had to be removed before sale.
The ensuing uproar drew the attention of the Secretary of Agriculture, who changed department policy to require only that pears and apples sold in the U.S. not carry an “injurious level” of spray residue, dropping any mention of a specific tolerance in the domestic market. This raised the Secretary’s stock with his constituents, but it did nothing to help the situation overseas, where all hell was breaking loose.
Going into the ’26 season, considerable time and prestige had been invested to reassure the British that American apples would be free from contamination. Especially, public relations people had touted a new certification program, to be administered by steamship companies. But the very first apples to arrive from the new crop showed unacceptably high levels of spray residue. It was claimed these must have been loaded before the start-up of the program on Oct. 4, staving off disaster, but only temporarily.
Time and again through the 1926-’27 shipping season, foreign trade reps scrambled to control the damage as apples testing as high as four times the legal limit showed up on the docks in Great Britain. That the season was salvaged at all was thanks more to the application of political leverage, public relations skills, and manipulation of officials, than any changes in the way American apples were grown or cleaned. The sustaining hope was that attention would eventually move on to some other crisis and the furor would die down.
This would not be the case, as by one count, over 900 newspaper articles, editorials, and cartoons appeared in the British press, denouncing and lampooning poisonous American fruit. The worst shock came on April 3, 1927 when members of the staff of the House of Commons got sick after eating baked apples that had been prepared in the kitchen of the Parliamentary dining room. Official threats of an embargo were renewed. With all political debts called in, and all leverage used up, it was obvious the next crop could not be exported unless it really was clean.
Another post-season conference was called for February, 1927 in Salt Lake City. This time, growers were indeed present from all apple producing states, and they made their views known in sometimes raucous session. In response, high government officials tried to “clarify the situation with specific regulations no more drastic than necessary.”
Grower views ran the gamut from contrition, to denial. California called for total acquiescence to the British standard in the interest of public health, and (mainly) unimpeded commerce. Colorado on the other hand, broke completely with Chairman Phillips’ advise, and proclaimed the need to “fight any and all tolerance requirements as senseless and unnecessary”. But Colorado’s production was so low, due to a particularly virulent local strain of codling moth, that the state lacked the clout to effect policy.
As the meetings progressed, it soon became clear that the situation had moved beyond clout, anyway. In every official presentation, even from usually affable USDA people the message was adamant: there would be no backing down from enforcement of the tolerance by Britain, and so there could be none on the part of the U.S. Eventually, even the most obstinate regulation-haters could see nothing would come of further debate.
The conference settled on new regulations for spray timing and residue removal, aimed at achieving the British Royal Commission standard. For the first time, the limit of .01 grain of arsenic was accepted in this country, making it truly the “world” standard. All agreed to work together to develop a new system of removal, inspection, and certification, so consumers would be reassured of the healthful benefits to be gained from eating lots of American apples.
The government for its part, promised a massive research effort to find the most efficient means of spray residue removal. Delegates went home to try and bend their constituents to the new religion. It had taken a season, but R. G. Phillips was going to get his way.
Colorado bravely convinced its growers, some of whom had threatened to take a gun to any government man coming around to tell them what to do with their fruit. Their reward for the effort was for commercial apple-growing in the state to go into rapid decline, all but disappearing until after World War II. Ominously, this happened because the codling moth strain in residence was already so resistant to arsenic as to be nearly impervious to its use under the new regulations.
What hurt Colorado was a new requirement that spraying cease earlier in the summer in the hope that, given more time, nature could clean off more of the chemical. Any arsenic left after the wind and rain had done their best was to be removed using technology that had yet to be invented, let alone bought, installed, or tested as to efficient operation.
Spring and summer, 1927 were filled with meetings, warnings, tests and reports, threats and assurances. Trade magazines and government publications for that year were crammed with ads and articles touting new apple-cleaning technology even as it was being developed. Designers pushed a wide range of machines, from simple brush-types; to a “flapper” design said to be inspired by the jazz loving party girls of the age; to the top of the line: a combination washer, brusher, dryer. This high tech model put the fruit through a spray of hydrochloric acid, followed by immersion in a cold water rinse, and air drying.
All were promoted as being effective and efficient. To the beleaguered farmers required to buy them, all seemed expensive. As harvest approached, the official attitude was can-do optimism that the tolerance would be met. But when the first apples of the season came off the new machines, it was clear the official attitude was mistaken. After all the expense and effort, tests showed the fruit was still coated with too much poison.
The problem that was not foreseen on the drawing boards was a waxy film that builds up on apples as they ripen. This combined with the “stickiness” of the lead arsenate, to make for a layer of chemical which was nearly impervious to weather, hand wiping or brushing. It tended to just smear around on the surface of the fruit, rather that come off. The one treatment that was effective was the hydrochloric acid bath, the most expensive option, and late season fruit developed such a thick layer of wax that even acid was not entirely dependable. Besides, it was nasty stuff to have around and was thought to ruin apples for long-term storage.
When the recommended cleaning methods failed yet again, angry growers had to be persuaded once more that government officials could not back down. Poisonous fruit, as defined by the world standard they had all agreed to meet, would not be sold to foreign consumers, and as soon as a few glitches were worked out, not to American consumers either.
For 1928, officials made certification for export automatic for fruit run through hydrochloric. A limit of .025 grain was set for apples moving in interstate commerce. This was to decline every year until the U.S. complied with the world standard.
Entire new industries sprang up to sample, test, and certify treated fruit. Many small growers who had marketed their crops locally found it necessary to join big co-ops for access to the expensive new cleaning technology. But as the tolerance dropped, and enforcement in big apple states like Washington became more effective, some tried to circumvent the process by trucking their fruit elsewhere, and by 1932, neighboring states found they had an epidemic of tainted produce to contend with, sold from tiny roadside stands.
In Montana, state officials saw what was going on but were at first miserably understaffed to police the situation. When it became clear that whole trainloads of suspect apples were being dumped into the state, new funding was made available. The money made it possible for officials to crack down, meeting resistance from stiff-necked growers. But when, in spring of 1933 a little girl died in Billings, reportedly from arsenical poisoning, the growers backed down and the spasm of chemical outlawry passed.
Stiff-necked they may have been, but fruit growers did not want to poison little girls or anyone else for that matter. Their problem, as they saw it, was staying in business, a condition which seemed less likely with each new complication. On top of everything else, by the early 30s it became clear that what had happened in Colorado was happening everywhere: the codling moth was rapidly developing resistance to lead arsenate.
Pleas became more urgent for a new insecticide that would be more effective on worms, yet harmless to consumers. Until it was found, the only tactic scientists could advise against the rising levels of damage was even more arsenic applied more thoroughly. Each year the FDA and USDA threatened to lower the U.S. tolerance toward the world standard. In response, each year an anguished outcry went up from growers, and the threat was rescinded. Meanwhile, research continued.
Then, in 1933, Arthur Kallet and F.J. Schlink, published 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, an exposé of the Food and Drug Administration. In it, the authors examined a variety of common products and processes and showed how consumers were being exposed to high levels of potentially deadly adulterants. The adulterant chosen to demonstrate the danger lurking in the food supply, was arsenical spray residue.
The most damning evidence presented is a detailed report of the Hampstead incident. Here, for the first time, eight years after the fact, the U.S. public was apprised of events which had already significantly effected the contents and costs of the foods they ate, not to mention their health and quality of life in general. As Kallett and Schlink point out, “…we have every reason to be grateful to the British authorities, for before 1926, apples were legally sent to market with any amount of arsenic that happened to remain in and on them, even if it were ten or twenty-five times the safe amount.”
The authors make it clear that in their opinion, the FDA had been criminally laggard in its assigned role of protecting the public health. That, until a tolerance of zero was technically or politically feasible, the world standard of .01 grain must be strictly enforced.
Despite criticism from the American Medical Association among others, the book was a huge success. It sold out thirty printings by 1935 and caused sufficient uproar that U.S. officials were compelled to take action. At their annual meeting that year, the American Public Health Association devoted an entire day’s session to arsenical spray residue. Given the furor outside, the recommendations produced were not earth shaking. But in the final discussion period, Dr. Fred W. “Tanner of the University of Illinois made a novel suggestion: “The adequacy or inadequacy of the present tolerance for lead and arsenic should be investigated. Such tolerances should have some relation to the amount which would cause illness when the food is eaten. (emphasis added). This phase has not been investigated to my knowledge. Experiments in which food containing amounts of metal on both sides of the tolerance fed to human beings, if possible, might yield much valuable information. There should be accurate data on which an acceptable tolerance could be based.”
This scientist, at least, was willing to admit that after nearly fifty years of use in agriculture, and a couple thousand years of familiarity with the substance, there remained a fundamental uncertainty: just how dangerous was arsenic anyway? Nobody could say for sure how much of the stuff it took to make a person sick, let alone dead. Before more severe regulations were imposed, science ought to provide the fundamental, objective fact upon which to base them.
Response to the call for definitive experimentation was not immediate. In the meantime, resistance to the use of lead arsenate was steadily increasing in both appleworms and consumer groups. Growers could only attack the worms with heavier doses at shorter intervals between sprays. Zero tolerance advocates like Kallet and Schlink could only pressure government agencies to crack down on abuse.
In 1927, growers in the Wenatchee area had used 2,000,000 pounds of the chemical. By 1937, they were using 7,000,000 pounds on essentially the same acreage. In 1937 government officials seized 338 apple shipments showing residue in excess of regulations. This was up from 137 seizures in 1935 and only 34 in 1936. Finally, with no alternative control methods in sight, researchers turned to the venerable world standard, as a way of breaking the impasse.
Looking back to the Royal Commission’s hearings on the Manchester Beer poisonings, it was found that no effort had been made even then to determine the quantity of arsenic which would induce poisoning in humans. Rather, as the proceedings were being held in response to a terrible public health disaster, testimony came almost entirely from public health officials, paid to err on the side of safety. With calamity fresh in mind, these men felt enormous pressure to block any arsenic from entering the public food supply.
But the chemical was still a necessary component in many processes, so a semantical debate arose over just how much arsenic should be considered none. The question was not how much arsenic can a human safely consume, but: given the technology of the day, when a substance had entered a process, could it ever be said that all had been removed from the final product?
Regulators came to see that it was unrealistic (or, at least imprecise) to set an official tolerance at zero per se. Rather, a limit which was infinitesimally small would have to be declared to be zero, and the figure favored by the majority of experts, given the instruments and procedures available, was .01 grain per pound of solid, and per gallon of liquid. Producers were not supposed to consider this the amount of poison they were allowed to feed to consumers. The panel was determined that they not feed any to consumers.
Officially then, from the earliest attempt at regulation, zero tolerance was the standard. There had been no scientific finding that this was the only safe level of contamination, rather, it was deemed the appropriate response to a horrible crisis.
The world could afford zero tolerance in 1903, but in the middle of the Great Depression, with codling moth damage increasing every year, farmers’ cries for relief from burdensome regulation could not be ignored. In the 1938 federal budget, fruit growers pushed through funding for the first major study of the effects of lead arsenate consumption on a human population. This was to be carried out by the U.S. Public Health Service.
For their guinea pigs, USPHS doctors went to Wenatchee, WA, world capital of apple production and lead arsenate usage. There, for three years researchers closely monitored the eating, working, defecating, mating, and studying habits of 1231 men, women, and children. Subjects were categorized according to sex, age, occupation, and the number of apples consumed daily, and annually, along with the tendency to wipe, wash, or peel them before eating. Samples were taken from every medium with which the spray material and humans might come in contact.
Researchers found poison everywhere. When sprayers were being filled, the operator hovered over the batch and stirred by hand as he dumped in the powder, and clouds of dust billowed out. When operating the spray guns, workers dragged 100 feet of pulsating high-pressure hose through waist-deep orchard grass, dripping with fresh solution. Contact with the wet foliage and inhalation of spray drift was unavoidable.
Each tree was sprayed to the point of run-off, and the most thorough job required first climbing up, then standing underneath while directing the stream up into the inside, all the while getting drenched in the ensuing drizzle. Protective clothing of the day amounted to pith helmets, cotton coveralls, leather work boots and gloves.
Performing harvest and thinning operations, workers were constantly in contact with the residue adhering to fruit and leaves. At the packing shed, where each box of apples was handled repeatedly, chemical concentrations were especially high. The washer, the machine developed to clean the fruit, stood out as particularly offensive, its rollers solid white with a layer of poison one-eighth of an inch thick.
Orchard workers were always eating the fruit so close at hand, and many reported extreme laxity in wiping off spray material before doing so. Some were real credits to the industry, consuming much more than the national average per capita, including three who claimed to eat 2000+ apples a year, all coated with spray residue, without the least effort at removal.
Almost half of the test subjects were orchard workers, who spent part of every year in direct physical contact with lead arsenate. It was in their food, permeated their clothing, invaded their lungs, and clung to their exposed skin. In addition, the chemical was found in higher than normal levels in the local air and drinking water, and so turned up in urine samples for everyone else. School children, teachers, ministers, morticians, if they lived in the Wenatchee region, the environment was so saturated, nobody could avoid exposure.
But in the midst of all the alarming clouds of dust and coatings of chemical, researchers were surprised to find that participants tested out as normal, healthy Americans. The only statistical anomaly was higher than average concentrations of lead in the blood of six men and one woman, all orchard workers. Their tests showed a “combination of clinical and laboratory findings directly referable to the absorption of lead arsenate”, but none showed symptoms which would “meet American Public Health Association criteria for lead or arsenic poisoning.”
Amazingly, for the 1231 participants, the levels of heart disease, cancer rates, and respiratory ailments, were all consistent with national averages. Reproductive rates were normal, the children’s school performance satisfactory, appetites within acceptable parameters. After three years, hundreds of tests, and thousands of observations, “no evidence was found that…ill health was more prevalent in this region than elsewhere, or that any cases of chronic diseases had been caused or influenced by lead arsenate exposure.”
An objective judgement could finally be made as to the quantity of arsenic potentially hazardous to human consumption. On the basis of its study, the USPHS would recommend that the government regulations be eased. In 1942 the tolerance for arsenic was raised to .025 grain per pound of fruit. At this level, most of the growers in the codling moth infested North- west could get by with only a minimal washing program, a chore for which nearly all were already equipped. Growers in the East and Midwest could market apples without cleaning at all.
The English in 1942, were not in a position to raise a stink about the new standard, being caught up in World War II. Any fresh produce that made it past the Luftwaffe and U-boats was welcome, even if they had to wash it themselves.
The war also distracted the opposition from mounting an appropriate counterargument. It seems likely that once things settled down, Cox, Kallet and Schlink and their friends would be back, pushing zero tolerance as the only alternative that could be guaranteed safe.
But there was another effect of the war. This arose from the enormous quantity of chemical research done on both sides, much of which is reviled today for exploring use on human beings. One formulation though, was found to be an incredibly effective control for codling moth.
The new chemical was quite potent at rates only 1/10th the amount of lead arsenate growers had been using, and was applied less often. It was so effective, worm damage was reduced from the awful 15-20 percent level it had reached in some orchards, to a very acceptable 1-2 percent. Most important, tests showed that at these low rates, any residue posed no threat to humans. Finally, the long-sought alternative to arsenical compounds had been found.
The new chemical was first tested on apples in 1945, and generally available in 1946. Its name was dichloro diphenyl trichloroethane, better known as DDT. Dr. Paul Muller of Basil, Switzerland, the man who developed its use as an insecticide, would win a Nobel Prize for this enormous contribution to progress.
Almost overnight, DDT replaced lead arsenate in spray programs worldwide. It proved to be so effective, the codling moth was quickly reduced to its modern status as a major pest, but one that is easily controlled.
DDT of course, would present a whole new can of worms.
