“Baby food!” Mr. Feldman shouted, rising to his feet. He grabbed the list of ingredients, his face flushing red. He was so angry he stammered. “They intend to feed babies potassium chromate and formaldehyde? That’s an abomination. To think of a child who has known nothing but mother’s milk to have his first bite of real food be laced with formaldehyde. Science has run amok! We can’t wait for the law to catch up with it. We must act now. This shall not stand.”

Every instinct urged Gray to stand up and cheer, but he forced himself to remain seated. The war was tilting in his favor, and he must do nothing to interfere.

Annabelle was not so restrained. “Exactly!” she said. “If we can stop one young mother from giving her baby this tainted food, I will consider it worthwhile. Can you help us?”

Mr. Feldman sat back down and folded his arms across his chest. “The better question would be, can you help us? The Department of Agriculture has spent years advocating for purity laws but has never accomplished anything. Why is it left to a ladies’ magazine to lead the charge?”

Annabelle turned to him. “Gray, darling? Perhaps you’d like to answer that.”

He was outnumbered here. These people might think having government inspectors prowling through factories was a better alternative than self-policing, but he wasn’t here to fight that battle today. Passing the laws Mr. Feldman alluded to could take decades, and he wanted the Magruders’ applesauce yanked off the shelves today.

“The government can never hire enough inspectors to stamp out food adulteration in the thousands of factories throughout the land,” he said. “But your magazine can shame producers into policing themselves. People will fight to earn your magazine’s approval, and they’ll cringe at the negative exposure if they try to pass off adulterated food as the real thing. The power of the pen is more powerful than any legislation that is currently snarled up in Washington.”

“Good point,” Mr. Feldman said bluntly. “Let’s get down to work. I want this applesauce to serve as a case study of the abuses in the industry.”

Mr. Feldman’s ten minutes stretched into an hour as he outlined his recommendations to knock the momentum out from under the Magruders’ applesauce. Public awareness among consumers was only one facet of the puzzle. The bigger prize would be to stop the distributors from carrying the product. The Sears Roebuck catalog was sensitive to negative press and would likely stop carrying products believed to be tainted. Grocery stores on the local level would be a harder challenge because the industry was so decentralized, but Mr. Feldman recommended using the power of the trade associations to get the word out.

“Do you have that sort of pull?” Gray asked.