Food Legislation in the United States

People expressed concern about the adulteration of foods rather ear­ly in American history. For example, in 1641, the General Court of Massachusetts passed a law specifying the size and cost of a loaf of bread. Any baker who violated the provisions of the act was required to destroy his or her complete stock of bread. Similar provisions were made to ensure that butter was not being adulterated by dairy workers.

As in England, however, it was not until the mid-19th century that more vigorous efforts to adopt legislation on food adulteration began to appear. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln appointed the first chemist to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He was Charles M. Wetherill (1825-71), a student of the great German chemist Justus von Liebig (1803-73). Wetherill began an active program of chemical research, analyzing the chemical composition of foods, fertilizers, pesticides, and other agricultural substances. His first project fo­cused on the use of grapes for wine making. One question he asked was whether the addition of sugar during the wine-making process could be thought of as adulterating the wine. He decided that it could not. When the Food and Drug Administration decided 46 years later that sugar was to be considered an adulterant in wines, it only high­lighted the difficulties in making such decisions.

Toward the end of the 19th century, two major trends in the United States emphasized the need for federal control over the man­ufacture, processing, and distribution of foods and drugs. First, the way Americans obtained their food began to change dramatically. Second, remedies known as patent medicines hit the markets.

In rural 19th-century America, most families either grew and raised their own food or they purchased it from a nearby source. As the nation became more industrialized, that pattern changed. Farms, ranches, and dairies became increasingly mechanized and industrialized. They transported their produce to large cities, per­haps hundreds of miles away, where they were sold days, weeks, or even months later. This system not only required a much greater use of food preservatives but also encouraged the development of new kinds of foods: Foods with "improved" flavor, color, ease of prepa­ration, and other qualities were designed to appeal to increasingly sophisticated and busy urban consumers. Many of the issues that Accum had raised in Great Britain in the 1820s began to reappear in the new American system of food preparation, distribution, and sale. In some common methods of food adulteration practiced at the time, dairies thickened cream with additives (often, calf's brains), sellers added mineral oils to salad oils, cheap cider was converted to "red wine" with the addition of lead coloring, boric acid was added to sponge cakes, dust and arsenic were added to cocoa, and sand was added to brown rice and brown sugar to increase their bulk.

The late 1800s also saw the introduction and rapid growth of a patent medicine industry in the United States. Patent medicines are nonprescription drugs that are usually protected by a trademark and whose ingredients are not disclosed to the general public. By 1900,

Dr. Guertin's Nerve Syrup is an example of the patent medicines that became popular in the late 1800s with promises of curing a broad range of diseases and disorders. (National Library of Medicine)

newspapers and magazines were filled with ads for products such as Kick-a-poo Indian Sagwa, Warner's Safe Cure for Diabetes, Hamlin's Wizard Oil, Godfrey's Patent Chloride of Ammonium Inhaler, Dr. Shel­don's Magnetic Linamint, Mother Graves Worm Exterminator, and Dr. Williams Pink Pills for Pale People. Manufacturers of these prod­ucts promised relief from virtually every disease and disorder known to humans. A product known as Vitadatio, for example, promised to relieve consumption, kidney troubles, bladder troubles, diabetes, piles, cancer, insomnia, nervous debility, epilepsy, ringworm, sci­atica, poverty of blood, wasting disease, indigestion, gall, Bright's disease, stricture, rheumatism, gout, eczema, and all other diseases of the blood and skin. Users of the product were promised that they would "get cured of the leprosies of malignancy, and . . . by virtue of renewed vigour, enjoy life in a rational reasonable manner." Patent medicines were, however, almost entirely without any demonstrated medical benefit except for the pain-relieving and euphoric effects produced by the opium, morphine, heroin, cocaine, and/or alcohol that was often their active ingredient.

Public concern about the new food-processing systems and the plague of patent medicines eventually led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. It was the first federal legislation in the United States dealing with foods and drugs. The act had three major outcomes. First, it created the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and made it responsible for evaluating all foods and drugs intended for human use in the United States. Second, it defined a category of drugs that could be sold only by prescription. Finally, it required manufacturers to list ingredients of any potentially addictive drug or medicine (such as the patent medicines) on the product's label.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 had some valuable immediate effects: It dramatically reduced the manufacture and sale of patent medicines. But it had relatively little effect on the changing methods and systems by which food was produced, processed, and distrib­uted. Food sellers continued to develop ways to modify natural foods to increase their sensory appeal, to improve their health benefits, to increase their shelf lives, and to make them more attractive in other ways to consumers. Indeed, these trends continue to the present day and food chemists still constantly look for new ways to manipulate foods to increase their market appeal.

For all its weaknesses, the Pure Food and Drug Act has remained the cornerstone of U.S. regulations on food safety for more than a century. The U.S. Congress made a number of changes and additions to the act on a few occasions, most notably the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act (FDCA) of 1938, which extended and expanded the 1906 legislation and specifically prohibited interstate commerce in adulterated food.

By the mid-20th century, yet another change in the food industry began to emerge: the manufacture of synthetic foods, products that contain few or no natural foods of any kind. Anyone who has read food labels carefully has encountered such foods. For example, what food product contains the following list of ingredients: corn syrup solids, vegetable oil (partially hydrogenated coconut or palm ker­nel, canola, hydrogenated palm, soybean, cottonseed, or safflower), sodium caseinate, dipotassium phosphate, mono - and digylcerides, artificial flavor, and annatto color? (The food product is non-dairy creamer.)

None of this discussion is to suggest that all methods of food pro­cessing are undesirable. Indeed, food-processing techniques have made significant strides to increase the nutritional value of foods, as well as to make them more appealing to consumers. Perhaps more importantly, food additives have been used to prevent and control a variety of nutritional disorders.

An example is the disorder formerly known as goiter. In the mid-1920s, Dr. David N. Marine, Sr., and his colleagues in Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia studied this condition. Symptoms include a swelling at the base of the neck, which can become as large as a grapefruit, mental retardation, low IQ, deafness and/or mutism, stunt­ed physical growth, and reduced resistance to disease—conditions that can, in extreme cases, lead to death. Pregnant women who develop goiter are likely to miscarry.

Marine and his colleague found that the addition of small amounts of iodine to a person's diet reduced the risk of the disorder essen­tially to zero. Goiter today is more commonly referred to as iodine deficiency disorder, or IDD. IDD develops when a person's diet lacks an adequate amount of the mineral iodine.

As a result of his studies, Marine became convinced that "[s]imple goiter is the easiest of all known diseases to prevent. . . . It may be excluded from the list of human diseases as soon as society deter­mines to make the effort." Iodine, used as a food additive, could pre­vent the illness. By 1924, people in many parts of the United States could purchase "iodized salt," ordinary table salt (sodium chloride; NaCl), to which had been added a small amount of potassium iodide (KI). Within two decades, the percentage of American households using iodized salt had reached 75.8 percent, and IDD had largely been eradicated in the United States. That percentage has remained essentially the same since the 1950s in the United States. By con­trast, IDD remains a serious health problem in many parts of the world where availability of iodized salt is limited.

Iodine is only one of many vitamins and minerals now added routinely to foods in the United States. The vitamins thiamine (vita­min B1), riboflavin (vitamin B2), and niacin (another B vitamin) are added to flour, breakfast cereals, rice, cornmeal, and egg products; vitamin A is added to a number of dairy products, such as skimmed and evaporated milk, milk products, and margarine; iron is added to infant formulas, meat and meat products, egg products, and foods designed for people with special nutritional needs; and zinc is added to breakfast cereals, egg products, infant formulas, and plant-based beverages.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 laid the legislative and regu­latory groundwork for the monitoring of foods in the United States. The act made some important strides in protecting the American public from the worst excesses of food adulteration. At the same time, food chemists continued to develop new products for the food industry. Some of these products, such as nutritional additives, sig­nificantly improved the quality of food available in the nation. Other advances in food chemistry, however, had less beneficial effects on food quality.