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What was food like before the FDA?

Formaldehyde, brick dust, lead, and borax once
made grocery shopping a minefield.

We have a tendency to romanticize the past. Think about the food your great grandparents (or even their parents) ate in childhood and you might imagine farm fresh produce, pure milled grains, and pristine meat and dairy. But if they were living in the United States during the mid-to-late 19th century, that vision of food utopia wasn’t likely reality.

Before 1906, there were no federal food safety regu­la­tions in the US. Local gro­cers were a wild west of unlabeled additives, un­test­ed chemicals, and inedible fillers. In the gap between the industrialization of the food system during the mid-1800’s and those first laws dictating what could be sold as food, working class Americans spent decades eating “mostly crap,” says Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer-Prize winning science journalist. In her 2019 book, The Poison Squad, Blum details the origin story of the landmark Food and Drug Act.

As more folks left farm life behind and came to rely on manu­fac­tured food “an enormous amount of food fraud” emerged, Blum tells Popular Science. Nowadays, the overwhelming majority of people continue to pur­chase their food from gro­cery aisles, but the food we buy there is much less liable to make us sick. So, how did we get from that past to our current present? And, with regulatory agencies including the FDA facing enormous cuts, what might the future hold?

Ground Shells, Brick Dust, and Bones

European countries, in­clud­ing Britain, Germany, and France passed food safety regulations about 50 years before the US did. In classic American style, we eschew­ed top-down restrictions and allowed the free mar­ket, free rein. In lieu of federal regulation, there was a haphazard patchwork of state and local laws surrounding certain foods pre-1906. Massachusetts, for instance, passed “An Act Against Selling Unwholesome Provisions” in 1785. But unsafe practices consistently fell through the cracks and into consumers’ stomachs, says Blum. In some cases, food wasn’t food at all.

Pre-pasteurization, milk spoilage and bacterial growth was a major problem. Away from the farm, dairy had to travel farther and keep for longer if people in cities were going to buy it. So, the dairy section became a hotbed of questionable additives. Borax, which you may recognize as a general-purpose pesticide, was used as a milk and butter pre­serva­tive. Formaldehyde (AKA embalming fluid) was also a common milk additive and anti­bac­terial agent. In addition to preserving the milk, formaldehyde also reportedly had a slightly sweet flavor, which helped improve the taste of rot, Blum explains.

All images except the first one are from Google.