The History Of Food Modification

Food is essential to human survival. It provides the proteins, carbohydrates, fat, fiber, vitamins, and minerals needed to stay alive, grow, and stay healthy. Food also serves other social and re­ligious functions. Seder meals, birthday dinners, awards banquets, wake buffets, and other food-related functions bring people together for a host of cultural purposes. In some fundamental ways, the role of food in human society...

From Smoked Mastodon to Salt Pork

Questions about the value and safety of different categories of food are especially difficult to answer because people have been modi­fying foods almost since the dawn of civilization. In fact, without certain types of food modification, the human species might never have survived on Earth. By far the most common and oldest type of food modification used by humans is food preservation. Imagine, for instance, a com­munity...

Food Additives: Advances and Challenges

Various additives help preserve food, but humans have been add­ing chemicals to foods for many centuries for reasons other than preservation. Spices have long been used as food additives not only because they may retard the rate of decay but also because they improve the flavor of food that is bland or that has, in fact, already begun to spoil. Additives have also been used to enhance the color of food, reflecting the common...

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...

Harvey Washington Wiley (1844-1930)

Convincing legislators to pass the nation's first food and drug laws required extraordinary efforts from many concerned and informed individuals. Near the top of that list was Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, Chief Chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1882 to 1907 and the first Chief Administrator of the Food and Drug Administration from 1907 until 1912. Wiley was born in a log farmhouse near Kent, Indiana, in 1844. He...

Paul Karrer (1889-1971)

One of the greatest developments in food modification technology dur­ing the 20th century was the synthesis of vitamins, which could then be added to foods. A major figure in this work was the Swiss chemist Paul Karrer. Karrer was born in Moscow on April 21, 1889, of Swiss parents living in Russia at the time. He attended the University of Zurich, from which he obtained a Ph.D. in 1911. After a brief period spent at the...

Advances and Issues in Food Laws and Legislation

The problem was that chemists knew almost nothing about the existence or chemical structure of vitamins. Then, in a flurry of activity, that problem yielded to the efforts of a handful of researchers, including Karrer, from a variety of countries. Once these structures were known, chemists were able to begin the process of finding ways to synthesize them so that they could be mass produced as food additives. In 1931, Karrer...