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very convenient and easy to handle. Housewives could save time in the kitchen, preparing dinner in minutes instead of hours. The popularity of packaged foods sold by large manufacturers soon tempted fraudsters to cash in. They began underselling the brand-name foods through “short-weight packaging,” putting smaller amounts of food in the same size packages as the brand name products and selling them for lower prices. Horrific reports of unsanitary meatpacking plants, poisonous dyes and preservatives contaminating foods, and worthless quack remedies claiming to be cure-alls were some of the problems that spurred the government to get involved. In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, the first federal law prohibiting producers from using untrue or deceptive language on food labels. This move led to the creation of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). That same year, the Meat Inspection Act was passed, requiring inspection of all red meats sold across state lines. Then, in 1913, the Gould Act (also called the “Gould Amendment”) required all food packages to have the “quantity of their contents plainly and conspicuously marked on the outside of the package in terms of weight, measure or numerical count.” In an interview with the website Food Dive, FDA historian Suzanne Junod said that “the focus in the Progressive Era [1890–1920] was on preventing consumer fraud. . . . The idea was to protect the consumer from fraudulent and dangerous ingredients.” The 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act After World War I, there were many new scientific breakthroughs in the area of food and nutrition. A lot of vitamins weren’t even discovered until the 1920s, which was the period when the FDA began focusing on nutrition and the roles that vitamins play in health. By that time, it had become obvious that vitamins

Chapter 1: The Roller Coaster History of Food Labeling in the United States

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