This post was written by Claire D’Mura, a research and reference specialist in the Library’s Science Section.
Looking through the cupboards of our kitchens, we have come to expect to find certain information on the labels of our foods. Calories, nutrient contents, company information, sell-by dates, and (sometimes lengthy) lists of ingredients – we generally can accept that the information we find is true and the food conforms to the law. It’s a newsworthy headline when it doesn’t. But that wasn’t always the case. At the turn of the 20th century there were no labels and no laws requiring manufacturers to identify the ingredients in the food they produced or ensure those ingredients were safe for people to eat. Consumers could not know for sure what was in the packaged food arriving at the grocery store, and nobody was at the factory to check it.
It was the Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914) and the nation’s food supply was changing fast. Food could be transported farther and processed faster and cheaper, and scientifically developed ingredients, such as oleomargarine and saccharin, made new foods possible.
Food manufacturers continually found new ways to fleece the public for greater profit, with deceptions as varied as milk being watered down and re-whitened with chalk or glucose syrup being sold as honey or maple syrup. Fraudulent products included deodorized rotten eggs; “strawberry jam”, which was made with apples, glucose syrup and timothy seeds and colored with coal tar dye; and a myriad of miracle cures with mystery ingredients ranging from the useless to the dangerous.
It took some time for the public to become aware of such deceptions, and even longer for anything to be done about it. As early as 1820, Frederick Accum had published his work, A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons…, which uncovered food adulterations found in foods in Britain. In this publication, Accum raised the alarm about frauds, such as pepper mixed with sweepings from factory floors, and cheese contaminated with lead, and explained the methods used to detect such fraud. The book was wildly popular in Britain and was released in the United States the same year. It also stirred up such ire that Accum retreated to his birthplace, Berlin, for the remainder of his life.
Accum’s treatise was the first major publication to get the attention of the public regarding the need for food laws, but it was certainly not the last. Progress was slow. Britain passed its first food laws 40 years after Accum’s treatise, in 1860, and the United States lagged another 46 years after that.
It wasn’t for lack of trying however, as, between 1880 and 1906, more than 100 bills were proposed in Congress. Meanwhile, individual states began implementing their own food regulations, creating a patchwork of rules, which complicated interstate commerce.
The federal-level bills that were repeatedly submitted to Congress were extensive omnibus bills, meant to be applied broadly to many kinds of food and drugs. The complexity of this approach meant many trips back to the drawing board as various industry groups and lobbyists took issue with one piece or another of the legislation. Meanwhile, the public grew weary of the constant mounting toll of injuries and deaths from contaminated foods and dangerous mystery medicines, so support for legislation grew. The growing movement needed a leader, and it found one in the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Chief Chemist, Harvey Wiley.
Harvey Wiley had been working at the USDA since 1883, investigating the safety of food preservatives. His most notable investigations started in 1902, when he undertook a series of experiments to determine the safety of 6 ingredients: borax, salicylic acid, formaldehyde, saccharin, sodium benzoate and copper sulfate. For each trial, 12 volunteers, all spry young men who would become known as the “poison squad,” were given increasing amounts of the ingredient in question and observed for adverse health effects. For some of the trials, subjects became sick, but all recovered. Based on his experiments, Wiley became fervent in his cause to ban these ingredients, which he deemed unfit for use in food.
Wiley was a charismatic speaker who was able to galvanize disparate groups, bringing together women’s clubs who wanted food safety, and manufacturers with the common interest of increasing trust in industrialized food and simplifying requirements for interstate and international trade.
Also instrumental in furthering the cause of food regulation were journalists, who published shocking exposés on deplorable conditions in factories. The most influential of these investigative pieces was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Sinclair worked undercover in meatpacking plants in Chicago and published serialized reports in the newspaper Appeal to Reason in 1905, which were later combined and published as a single work.
In this volume, Sinclair described the awful conditions immigrants faced when working in meatpacking factories with a fictionalized account, following Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus. While Sinclair’s intention was to call attention to the human suffering faced by immigrant communities, the public fixated on the unsanitary conditions depicted in the factories. The descriptions caught the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt, who had personally felt the effect of unsavory manufacturing practices. In 1898, Roosevelt fought in the Spanish-American War and witnessed firsthand the effects of the “embalmed beef” scandal, in which troops were sickened by poorly preserved meat, which had been procured from several Chicago meatpacking companies. Still, Roosevelt wanted proof, so he commissioned two investigators to corroborate Sinclair’s graphic descriptions. The investigators reported that conditions were at least as bad as Sinclair had reported. After that, Roosevelt put greater pressure on Congress to pass food laws.
In June of 1906, the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act (ch. 3915, 34 Stat. 768), passed through Congress and was signed into law by President Roosevelt, to go into effect on January 1, 1907. It was the first federal legislation to prohibit false or misleading statements on food labels, and enforcement of the act was given to the USDA’s Bureau of Chemistry, led by Wiley. The law primarily focused on labeling, in the belief that with the proper information, the regular person could make informed decisions.
Among the act’s stipulations, a food would be considered adulterated if “it contain any added poisonous or deleterious ingredient which may render such article injurious to health (p.770)” or “if it consists in whole or in part of any filthy, decomposed, or putrid animal or vegetable substance…(p. 770)”.
It was the Bureau of Chemistry’s role to decide how a product would be analyzed and what would be considered a violation. The inspectors, chemists, bacteriologists and microscopists studied one product class at a time, analyzing foods from store shelves, visiting factories to observe manufacturing conditions and prescribing what changes needed to be made to be in line with the law. The fight for food legislation was just the beginning of the story. Figuring out how the law would be enforced, and how to handle the violations the Bureau would find is a story for another post…
Learn more about the Pure Food Movement from the Library of Congress collections:
- Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906: Topics in Chronicling America: A guide for researching the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and related topics in the Library’s digital historical newspapers collection, Chronicling America, this guide includes links to selected relevant articles.
- Made at the Library: The Chemistry of Fear with Jonathan Rees: This 52 min. recorded book talk with author Jonathan Rees discussed his then recently published biography, “The Chemistry of Fear: Harvey Wiley’s Fight for Pure Food (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) and was recorded in November of 2022 and sponsored by the Library’s Manuscript Division.
- Harvey Wiley Letter to President Coolidge on Enforcement of the Pure Food and Drug Laws to Protect Consumers from the Anna Kelton Wiley Papers
A selection of books about food adulteration and the pure food movement:
- Accum, Frederich. A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons. (1820). Primary source. Available digitally at HathiTrust.
- Blum, Deborah. The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. (2019)
- Cohen, Benjamin R. Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food. (2019)
- Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. (Sustainer’s Edition, 1906). The Double Day 1906 printing is available digitally at HathiTrust.
- Wilson, Bee. Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee. (2008)
Selected manuscript collections related to the Pure Food Movement available at the Library of Congress:
- Harvey Washington Wiley papers: available onsite
- Photographs from this collection are in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Bureau of Chemistry Activities, ca 1883-1912 collection, Prints and Photographs Division
- Theodore Roosevelt papers: a digital collection
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