Food and Drug Regulation After 75 Years

THE FOOD and Drugs Act that Theodore Roosevelt signed into law on June 30, 1906, both grew out of and anticipated a partnership between medicine and government in the continuing and evolving effort to protect the public from unsafe and misbranded food and drugs. The first general law against adulteration of food in the United States was adopted by Massachusetts in 1784. More than a century was to go by, however, before the US Congress adopted a comprehensive law authorizing federal regulation of food and drugs and making it illegal to manufacture or offer for sale food or drug products that were adulterated or misbranded. Industrialization and urbanization vastly changed food production and distribution practices in the latter half of the 19th century and gave rise to both the need for and the ability to process food for shipment and storage. Questionable and often clearly dangerous practices were all too