Wiley himself credit the club women of the country for turning the tide of public opinion in favor of the 'pure food' bill,' FDA historian Wallace Janssen wrote in 1981. Led by activist Alice Lakey, these women formed an unstoppable crusade of lobbyists. Wiley tapped into a network of powerful support: millions of American women who feared for the safety of themselves and their families. Wiley’s official role was to support scientific developments to help farmers, but his passion was to make America's foods and medicines safe. But there was resistance from within: One of the most powerful advocates of food and drug regulation was Harvey Wiley, who served as head of the USDA's Bureau of Chemistry. It didn't help that manufacturers had a significant influence on Congress through aggressive lobbying. The federal government largely took a hands-off approach to food and drug safety at this time. Many patent medicines ended up relying on large quantities of morphine or cocaine to give users a high instead of actually healing them. Using spices or additives, canners could mask the taste of expired meat and other substandard ingredients. Naturally, manufacturers began to exploit this ambiguity. This industrialization put a new veil between consumer and product: Besides artful labels and hyped slogans, there was no way of knowing what a product really contained. Meanwhile, 'patent medicines' started being sold in catalogs for a variety of ailments.

Inventions like canning allowed foods to last long enough to be shipped around the country, and sit on store shelves for extended periods. That law's origins stem from a decades-long fight for the government to regulate food.Īs the Industrial Revolution swept America, the production of food and medicine became a large-scale enterprise. The FDA got its start with the passage of the country’s first major food and drug safety bill, the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. (Meat, poultry and eggs fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture, while tap water falls under the purview of the EPA.) How it came to be

The FDA conducts this regulation through the rules it issues, and employs more than 14,000 people to inspect food and drug production and conduct research into new technologies for inspection. These include consumer products that emit radiation, such as microwaves and sunlamps, and even tobacco products and pet and livestock food and medicines. Overall, the FDA estimates that it regulates roughly $1 trillion worth of products annually. But who’s doing all that vetting? What it does For most Americans, the phrase “FDA approved” serves a seal of trust: It means that the product in your hands-whether it’s a tube of lipstick, an insulin pump or a condom-has been deemed scientifically, medically and nutritionally sound. We’ll start with the Food and Drug Administration, which exists to ensure the safety of America's food, cosmetics, drugs and medical devices. Most of the spotlight has been on the Environmental Protection Agency, which underwent a hearing this week titled “Make EPA Great Again” that laid out a controversial bill seeking to limit the scientific data the agency can use to create regulations. But there are plenty of other science-focused agencies that regulate issues critical to Americans’ health and well-being.Īs fundamental changes come to some of these agencies, it’s worth looking back at how they originated and what they actually do. In the past month, the Trump administration has already started to reshape the alphabet soup of federal agencies that regulate Americans’ food, air and water.

Pure food and drug act