Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2022
This article looks at the implementation of food standards of identity by the U.S Food and Drug Administration from the 1930s to the 1960s, a period in the FDA’s history wedged between the “era of adulteration” of the early twentieth century and the agency’s turn to “informational regulation” starting in the 1970s. The article describes the origin of food standards in the early twentieth century and outlines the political economy of government-mandated food standards in the 1930s. While consumer advocates believed government standards would be important to consumer empowerment because they would simplify choices at the grocery store, many in the food industry believed government standards would clash with private brands. The FDA faced challenges in defining what were “customary” standards for foods in an increasingly industrial food economy, and new diet-food marketing campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s ultimately led to the food standards system's undoing. The article concludes by looking at how FDA food standards came to be framed cynically, even though voluntary food standardization continued and the system of informative labeling that replaced FDA standards led to precisely the problem government standards were intended to solve.
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20 This 1906 act did adopt standards for drugs, requiring manufacturers to follow standards set in the United States Pharmacopoeia and the National Formulary.
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22 Uwe Spiekermann identifies Austria's Codex Alimentarius Austriacus as the first systematic effort by a government to codify food standards. Spiekermann, “Redefining Food,” 17–18.
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31 Swanson, “Food and Drug Law,” 355–65.
32 This example was provided in David F. Cavers, “The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938: Its Legislative History and Its Substantive Provisions,” Law and Contemporary Problems (Winter 1938): 29.
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38 Quoted in Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 103. Economists came to refer to this as the problem of “information asymmetry,” when buyers did not have continuing transactions with sellers and had incomplete knowledge of the product purchased. Ippolito, Pauline M., “Asymmetric Information in Product Markets: Looking to Other Sectors for Institutional Approaches,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 85, no. 3 (2003): 731–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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44 Tedlow, New and Improved, 53–55. For a historical discussion on the relationship between branding and power struggles over value in supply chains, see Paul Duguid, “Brands in Chains,” in Trademarks, Brands, and Competitiveness, ed. Teresa da Silva Lopes and Paul Duguid (New York, 2010), 138–64; Teresa da Silva Lopes, Global Brands: The Evolution of Multinationals in Alcoholic Beverages (Cambridge, U.K., 2007).
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48 “Expanding Food Markets by Quality Standards,” Food Industries (July 1929): 434.
49 Zeide, Canned.
50 L. V. Burton, “Why A B C Grades Won't Work as Well as Descriptive Labels,” Food Industries 6 (Dec. 1934): 543–44; Zeide, Canned, 109–24. On the consumer politics of the National Recovery Administration, see McKellar, Susie, “‘Seals of Approval’: Consumer Representation in 1930s America,” Journal of Design History 15, no. 1 (2002): 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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52 Many believed the government's consumerist policies on grading and standardizing consumer goods were a communist strategy to make consumers distrustful of business. A 1941 report by the Association of National Advertisers, The Movement for Standardization and Grading of Consumer Goods, argued such regulations would be the first step toward “government ownership and operation of all business enterprise.” Cohen, Consumer's Republic, 60. For a contemporary assessment of debates over the NRA and AAA, see Campbell, Consumer Representation.
53 McKellar, “‘Seals of Approval,’” 8–9.
54 Robert Lynd, “The People as Consumer,” in Recent Social Trends in the United States, vol. 2 (New York, 1933), 857–911.
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56 R.S. McBride, “Developing Informative Labels,” Food Industries (September, 1934): 392.
57 Charles Mazzola, “Grading Food by a Descriptive Method,” Food Industries (May 1930): 214–15; L. Charles Mazzola, “How a Formula for Descriptive Labeling Was Developed,” Food Industries (Aug. 1930): 340–44. Nadia Berenstein describes how food researchers came to develop standard “flavor profiles” in the 1940s and 1950s using psychometric methods and trained taste panels. Companies saw the objective authority of these “taste communities” as a less expensive and more reliable alternative to consulting consumers. Berenstein, “Designing Flavors for Mass Consumption,” The Senses and Society 13, no. 1 (2018): 25, 31.
58 McBride, “Developing Informative Labels,” 392.
59 For drugs the main change was the requirement of premarket testing for drugs. This would create a substantial difference in the regulatory scrutiny of drugs versus foods. Product classification between the two became a significant dimension to how the FDA policed product markets. Xaq Frohlich, “The Rise (and Fall) of the Food-Drug Line: Classification, Gatekeepers, and Spatial Mediation in Regulating U.S. Food and Health Markets,” in Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment, ed. Angela N. H. Creager and Jean-Paul Gaudillière (New York, 2021), 297–329.
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62 Industry analysts noted that national manufacturers of branded packaged foods, and chain retailers who were developing generic brands, such as A&P, benefited from the USDA program. Wholesale buyers and jobbers, in contrast, did not because it would reduce competition in markets. Ivan C. Miller, “What's behind U.S. Inspection and What It Involves,” Food Industries (May 1941): 54–65; “Manufacturers’ Brands Benefit.”
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66 R. S. McBride, “The Real Issue in the Sweetener Controversy,” Food Industries (Sept. 1940): 36–37. This decision closed a decades-old debate on the nomenclature of glucose as “corn sugar.” Cohen, Pure Adulterated, 169.
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68 Alissa Hamilton, Squeezed: What You Don't Know about Orange Juice, (New Haven, CT, 2009).
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72 Rima Apple, Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture (New Brunswick, NJ, 1996).
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77 Federal Security Administration v. Quaker Oats Company, 318 US 218 (1943).
78 United States v. 651 Cases . . . Chocolate Chil-Zert (1953), discussed in Peter Barton Hutt, Richard Merrill, and Lewis Grossman, Food and Drug Law: Cases and Materials, 3rd ed. (Sunderland, U.K., 2007), 181–82.
79 C. W. Crawford, “Ten Years of Food Standardization” (paper delivered at the meeting of the Food Industries Advisory Committee of the Nutrition Foundation, 19 May 1948), FDA Record Group 88, General Subject Item 1A, Food Tech, Food Standards, Nutrition Labeling, 1924–78, National Archives, College Park, MD.
80 Richard D. Elwell, “The Top Management Approach to Packaging,” in The Package as a Selling Tool (Packaging Series Number 19, American Management Association, 1946), 3–4.
81 Austern, “Food Standards,” 443–46.
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83 Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics and the Emergence of Supermarkets, 1919–1968 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010), 5; Tedlow, New and Improved.
84 Bettencourt, “Like Oil and Water,” 169–73.
85 Abbott Laboratory's expansion into vitamins in the 1920s proved very profitable. Ernest H. Volwiler, “Editorial: Relationships and Similarities of the Pharmaceutical and Food Industries,” Food Technology (Nov. 1950): 463–66; Volwiler, interview by James J. Bohning, Lake Forest, IL, 18 Aug. 1986, Oral History Transcript No. 0050, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia.
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87 Ted Sanchagrin, “Battle of the Brands: Soft Drinks,” Printer's Ink, 9 Apr. 1965, 21–25.
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89 National Dietary Foods Association, “Consumers Present to Congress Their View of the Consumer Protection Features of the Vitamin Volstead Act,” Washington Post, 30 Aug. 1966, A21.
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96 For a similar argument on the limits of expert opinion in food and diet science, see Steven Shapin, “Expertise, Common Sense, and the Atkins Diet,” in Public Science in Liberal Democracy, ed. Peter W. B. Phillips (Toronto: 2007), 174–93.
97 Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA, 2000).
98 Jimmy Carter, “The President's News Conference,” (March 25, 1979), transcript of speech available online through the UC Santa Barbara The American Presidency Project: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/249337.
99 Humor about food standards is a good example of what sociologists Steve Woolgar and Daniel Neyland call “mundane governance,” subjects that invite considerable passion and populist pushback in the form of ironic complaints about excessive government policing. Woolgar and Neyland, Mundane Governance: Ontology and Accountability (Oxford, 2013).
100 In 1996 the FDA convened a task force to review its food standards regulations. The task force's report did not come out until 2005, and no final changes were ever approved despite continued debates over whether to update or strengthen enforcement for existing identity standards. “Proposed Rules: Food Standards: General Principles and Food Standards Modernization,” Federal Register 70, no. 97 (20 May 2005): 29214–35.
101 Nadia Berenstein, “Clean Label's Dirty Little Secret,” The Counter, 1 Feb. 2018), https://thecounter.org/clean-label-dirty-little-secret/.
102 Joanne S. Hawana, “Food Identity Disputes Continue to Impose High-Profile Pressure on FDA,” National Review, 21 Aug. 2017, https://www.natlawreview.com/article/food-identity-disputes-continue-to-impose-high-profile-pressure-fda; Candice Choi, “What's Yogurt? Industry Wants Greater Liberty to Use Term,” Associated Press News, 25 Sept. 2018, https://apnews.com/article/health-north-america-us-news-business-ap-top-news-ee704f59d0604394ae324d7cc0705a24.