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Making Food Standard: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Food Standards of Identity, 1930s–1960s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2022

Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2022

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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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48 “Expanding Food Markets by Quality Standards,” Food Industries (July 1929): 434.

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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.

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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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76 See, for example, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Read the Label on Foods, Drugs, Devices, and Cosmetics and Household Chemicals (FDA Publication No. 3 Rev. 3, Washington, DC, 1961), National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD.

77 Federal Security Administration v. Quaker Oats Company, 318 US 218 (1943).

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81 Austern, “Food Standards,” 443–46.

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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.

86 Tedlow, New and Improved, 99–106, 110.

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.

90 George P. Larrick, “Report on Quackery from the FDA” (paper delivered to the AMA/FDA National Congress on Medical Quackery, Washington, DC, 6 Oct. 1961), 6, binder “FDA Speeches,” Hutt Archives.

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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.