A Brief History of Food Safety
This holiday season, let’s be grateful for our current food regulation system. While it’s not perfect, the FDA does a lot to keep us safe and has come a long way over the years.
The first food safety regulations in the United States appeared in the mid-1800s, with the focus being pharmaceuticals. The first collection of standards for drugs in the United States, known as U.S. Pharmacopeia, was put into practice in 1820. This was followed by the Drug Importation Act in 1848, which placed restrictions on foreign drugs containing contaminants. The end of the 19th century gave us laws such as the Tea Importation Act and the Committee on Food Standards.
Many more advances came to food and drug safety regulations in the 1900s. A great example is the Biologics Control Act, also known as the Virus-Toxin Law. This was the first law that implemented federal regulations on biological products such as vaccines in the United States. There were also studies of chemical preservatives and colors to determine their effects on human health, which resulted in Certified Color Regulations.
One of the most important years for food safety came in 1906. Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle caused massive outrage over practices in the meat packing industry. Passages from the book such as “This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat will be shoveled into carts and the man who did the shoveling will not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one” made clear some of the shady practice in place at the time. Later that year, President Theodore Roosevelt introduced the Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act as a response to public concerns about the safety of their food.
The Gould Amendment regulated that ingredients be plainly and conspicuously marked on the outside of the package in terms of weight, measure, or numerical count after a toothache syrup created for teething children was found to contain unlabeled morphine that killed many infants in 1913. In 1927, the Food and Drug (and Insecticide) Administration became a separate entity from the Bureau of Chemistry and was eventually shortened to the FDA in 1930.
The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic (FDC) Act of 1938 included requirements such as showing drugs to be safe, tightening regulations on mislabeling or misleading ingredients, setting safe tolerance levels for dangerous substances, setting standards for identity, quality, and container fill for foods, and authorized inspections and court injunctions. Then in 1944, Congress passed the Public Health Service Act, which regulated biological products and control of communicable diseases.
By the 1950s more laws were passed, such as the Factory Inspection Amendment, which requires manufacturers to have written reports of conditions observed during inspections and analyses of factory samples, and the Food Additive Amendment which prohibits the approval of any food additive shown to induce cancer in humans or animals.
The Thalidomide Crisis led to the Consumer Bill of Rights being passed in 1962, a bill that mandated that consumers have more information to help them make their choices. The Tamper-Resistant Packaging Regulations were introduced in 1982 and still affect many in the food manufacturing industry today. Then in 1988, the FDA officially became an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services. Two years later they introduced the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which required all packaged foods to bear nutrition labeling — Including a food ingredient panel, and serving sizes.
The early 2000s saw food safety shift to a focus on obesity and heart health. In 2004, the Food Allergy Labeling and Consumer Protection Act required food labeling for food that might contain proteins derived from the most common allergens: peanuts, soybeans, cow’s milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, and wheat. The Food Safety and Modernization Act of 2011 allowed the FDA to hold imported foods to the same standards as domestic ones.
As time marches on, more laws will continue to be put in place to help keep consumers safe. As these changes come to pass, QWerks will be there to support your company to not only meet all FDA regulations easily, but to exceed them. Find out how QWerks can help your business today.
