20 Everyday Foods That Secretly Poisoned People Throughout History

In 1925, William J.A. Bailey began selling Radithor, water that had been laced with radioactive radium, as a panacea for any ailment. Industrialist Eben Byers guzzled more than 1,400 bottles between 1925 and 1930. Yes, more than 1,400 bottles of radioactive water. The radiation in the stuff devoured his jawbone, dissolved his blood, and created abscesses in his brain. He died in 1932. The Wall Street Journal wrote in a 1990 retrospective about him: “The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off.” His death prompted the government to at last begin regulating tonics like his.

When Europeans first encountered tomatoes in the 1500s to 1700s, they called them “poison apples,” and avoided them for centuries. The English herbalist John Gerard’s 1597 Herball helped cement the myth. But the truth was, there was no danger in eating a ripe tomato. The danger came from the acidic tomato juice sitting on the pewter plates, leaching lead into the food and causing cramps and death. Talk about blaming the wrong thing!

In October 1858, the Bradford confectioner Joseph Neal was trying to bulk up his sugar with plaster of Paris. But when he placed an order with a druggist’s assistant, the man made a mistake and supplied 12 pounds of arsenic trioxide. When Neal’s employee, James Appleton, mixed it into peppermint candies that were then passed on for sale to the street vendor William Hardaker, known as Humbug Billy, each of his lozenges contained well above a fatal dose. Over 200 people fell ill, and at least 20 died. It took two years before Britain’s first law against food adulteration, the practice of adding inferior or potentially harmful substances to food, was passed.

When bootleggers John Harris and Harry Gross wanted their contraband, Jamaica Ginger, an alcoholic medicinal tonic often called “Jake,” to pass a Treasury density test in 1930, they replaced the ginger solids with an industrial chemical called TOCP, a plasticizer used to keep plastics flexible. TOCP is a neurotoxin that destroys the nerves controlling the hands and feet. Some 30,000 to 50,000 Americans became permanently paralyzed, a condition that became known as “Jake Leg.” The scandal ultimately pushed Congress toward the passage of the Food and Drug Law of 1938.

Chemist Harvey Wiley recruited healthy young men in 1902 to eat meals spiked with common food additives, among them borax, which was often added to rotting meat and butter to cover up their odor. It was quite literally an experiment in seeing what their bodies could tolerate. These young men developed severe headaches, stomach cramps, and kidney problems, though none of them died. Wiley’s published findings would eventually help to secure passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.

Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, died of milk sickness in 1818 in Indiana. Milk sickness was caused by white snakeroot, a plant that cattle eat without much effect, but its toxin, tremetol, gets right into the milk and butter. When humans consume it, they get sick, vomit, shake, and die. For a hundred years, doctors rejected the idea that white snakeroot caused milk sickness, until chemist James F. Couch isolated tremetol in 1928.

In 1775, a chemist named Carl Wilhelm Scheele developed a bright green dye made of copper arsenite. In the mid-1800s, it was being used by confectioners, marketed as “Mint Green,” to make their sweets and cake icing vibrant shades of green. Unlike Bradford’s accident, however, this arsenic was used intentionally by candy-makers. The prettier the sweet, in this case, the more suspicious you probably should have been. Dr. Arthur Hill Hassall tested London sweets for the medical journal The Lancet in the 1850s, finding massive doses of arsenic, which helped drive an anti-dye movement in the public health community.

For hundreds of years, Europeans suffered from limbs turning black and minds disintegrating. They called the condition St. Anthony’s Fire and thought the culprit was a curse. The real culprit was a fungus called Claviceps purpurea, which grows on rye. When ingested, the fungus releases powerful toxins that can lead to gangrene, convulsions, hallucinations, and delirium. The first documented instance of ergotism, the poisoning caused by eating ergot-contaminated grain, occurred in Xanten, Germany, in 857 CE, and the condition continued to plague people for centuries. One notable outbreak crippled Peter the Great’s army and horses near Astrakhan in 1722.

Treasury rules during Prohibition called for industrial alcohol to be denatured, or deliberately made undrinkable, frequently with methanol, so it could not be used to make liquor. Some bootleggers failed to completely strip out the methanol before selling the illicit liquor to the public. Others would simply dilute their moonshine with it. The liver converts methanol into a form of acid that can cause blindness, coma, and even death. In the 48 hours around Christmas 1926, 31 people died in New York. The city’s chief medical examiner, Charles Norris, made sure that the city heard the news.

The livers of polar bears and bearded seals are full of vitamin A, hundreds of times more than the safe dose for humans, so eating one leads to headaches, vomiting, and brain swelling. When Arctic explorer Willem Barentsz and his crew got sick after eating bear liver in 1597, vitamin A was later identified as the culprit. When the famous Antarctic explorer Xavier Mertz ate husky dog livers instead (no polar bears in Antarctica!), he too became ill with vitamin A poisoning and died in 1913. The Inuit have always known not to eat it.

Roman winemakers would boil grape juice in lead kettles to create sapa, a thick, sweet syrup used to preserve and flavor wines as well as foods. Roman writers like Pliny the Elder and Columella recommended using lead vessels rather than bronze for making the syrup because they claimed the resulting liquid tasted much sweeter. The acid in the juice reacted with the lead to create lead acetate. Regular drinkers from Rome’s elite ended up dealing with chronic colic, joint disease, and neurological decline. It may not have brought down the Roman Empire, but it did take its toll on many Romans.

In Devon, England, thousands of people had been getting cramps and paralysis for generations, and doctors thought the source was sour apples. In 1767, physician Sir George Baker had laboratory tests done comparing Devon cider with cider from Hereford. Devon cider had a lot of dissolved lead in it because of the lead-lined presses and vats. There was no lead in the Hereford cider. So much for the apples. The orchardists resisted his conclusions initially. The lead apparatus was eventually removed, and the disease disappeared in 1818.

Back in the 1850s, some urban “swill dairies” would feed cows distillery waste called swill, producing milk that was thin and bacteria-rich. The milk would then be enriched with chalk and starch (to make it look rich), as reported in 1858. By the 1880s and 90s, however, some dairies added formaldehyde to the milk to mask its sourness and slow spoilage. The chemical ate away at the digestive tracts of children, contributing to an increase in infant mortality, until the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906.

Canning turns green vegetables brown, so in the mid-1800s, processors began adding copper sulfate, or boiling them in unlined copper pots, to make them appear a vibrant green. According to Dr. Arthur Hill Hassall’s tests published in The Lancet in the 1850s, nearly every London canned pea brand was filled with dissolved copper. Those suspiciously perfect green peas came with a price: they induced stomach cramps, ulceration, and liver damage. By the 1870s, British courts began bringing prosecutions against sellers under the country’s adulteration laws.

In 19th-century Britain, white bread sold at a higher price than dark bread, so millers and bakers would add alum to bleach their flour to make it look white and hold onto excess water for heavier loaves. They also added cheap fillers like plaster or chalk. Chemist Frederick Accum exposed the practice in his 1820 book, titled with a biblical warning: “There is death in the pot.” Working-class children, who ate this kind of bread every day, were suffering gut damage and malnutrition.

Millions of Americans ate “Agene”-bleached, “aged” wheat flour from the early 1900s until the mid-1940s. Agene was nitrogen trichloride, a chemical used to bleach and artificially age flour. A 1946 study by British scientist Sir Edward Mellanby found that Agene-fed dogs suffered epileptic seizures. The seizures were due to a toxic substance formed when Agene gas combined with wheat protein. There was no evidence of an increased incidence of human epilepsy in any population. Despite this, Britain and America prohibited Agene use within a decade based solely on the findings in dogs.

Colonial rum distillers in New England and the Caribbean used lead still-heads and condensers, parts of the equipment used to distill the alcohol, and the hot, acidic vapor leached the metal directly into the finished rum. As early as 1723, the Colony of Massachusetts had prohibited leaded stills. Yet colonial drinkers developed terrible abdominal pain and paralysis that was initially attributed to tropical fruit or a tropical climate. Philadelphia physician Thomas Cadwalader blamed the illness on the lead stills in 1745. Benjamin Franklin later described childhood paralysis from lead rum in a 1786 letter.

When crops failed, the grass pea was responsible for keeping famine-stricken populations alive in parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. The trouble was that while the grass pea can survive a drought, eating it as the bulk of your caloric intake for two or three months can cause irreversible leg paralysis via a neurotoxin called ODAP. A food capable of surviving when almost nothing else could was both a lifesaver and a threat. Spanish painter Francisco Goya painted these paralytic famine victims during Madrid’s famine of 1811-1812. It wasn’t until 1964 that scientists isolated the neurotoxin.

Ackee, the fruit used in Jamaica’s national dish, has been growing on the island since the late 1700s. But eating the fruit before its pod naturally opens can cause violent vomiting, seizures, and even coma, something doctors first wrote about in 1904. In 1954 and 1955, scientists C.H. Hassall and Reyle identified the toxic ingredient as hypoglycin A, which prevents the body from maintaining blood sugar levels. Ripe ackee, from pods that burst open naturally, has always been edible.

Fugu is a pufferfish containing the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin, found in the fish’s skin, ovaries, and liver. Ingestion will paralyze the entire body, but the person will remain conscious. And you can’t kill the toxin by cooking it. It was banned between 1592 and 1598 by Japanese ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi after soldiers died eating it. Japan eventually took a different approach: in 1948, Tokyo required chefs to complete years of licensed apprenticeship before they could legally remove the toxic organs by hand.

This content was created with the help of AI.