The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s campaign for ‘pure food,’ or food that is natural, whole, and minimally processed, has deep roots in American politics. A previous ‘pure food’ campaign lay the groundwork for the creation of the FDA. The current campaign may end up sabotaging the agency.
A long series of food scandals in the late 1800s led to the introduction of roughly 100 pure food bills in Congress before the Food and Drugs Act finally passed in 1906. The first widely reported scandals centered on adulterated milk. Children were sickened by “swill milk” from sick cows fed only on distillery wastes. Children were sickened and killed and consumers scammed by milk distributors cutting their product with unclean water and adding chalk, flour, and calf brains to mimic the appearance of milk. Other outbreaks of illness and death were linked to the addition of formaldehyde to milk to kill bacteria.
Safety was a paramount concern, but so was fraud. Consumers buying strawberry jam, for example, expected to get something made from strawberries not, as was often the case, a concoction of apple scraps, glucose, coal-tars, and grass seeds. So was fairness in trade. Honey farmers should compete with honey farmers, not with glucose factories.
Calls for action gained strength when Harvey Wiley, chief chemist at the US Department of Agriculture, added his voice to them. Wiley emerged as a leader of the pure food movement in the 1890s. He focused his work on the study of food adulteration. Press reports called his team “the Poison Squad” for exposing the risks of health of adding chemical preservatives such as formaldehyde to processed foods. He called them “adulterants.”
The Food and Drugs Act, which President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law on June 30, 1906, prohibited the adulteration and mislabeling of foods and drugs.
The MAHA movement resurrects long-simmering concerns about adulterants and promotes the consumption of natural whole foods. Some of Robert F. Kennedy’s actions as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services echo the concerns that led to the passage of the Food and Drug act 119 years ago, such as his pressure on food manufacturers to stop using oil-based dyes and his order investigate ending the Generally Regarded As Safe (GRAS) process that manufacturers routinely use to add chemicals to food without safety testing.
The FDA has banned two common food dyes since Kennedy took office, and is asking companies to stop using six others. In March, he ordered the agency to investigate ending the GRAS process.
Yet, promises to deregulate industry and cut spending threaten to do more harm than the above efforts do good. The administration already cut programs that bought fresh food from farmers for schoolchildren (the Farm to School Grand and the Local Food for Schools programs). Additional cuts to SNAP, popularly called “food stamps,” will push lower income consumers away from fresh foods in favor of cheaper, ultra-processed foods.
Layoffs have hit the modern successors of Wiley at the National Institutes of Health and over 3 thousand employees of the FDA, which raises questions about how the FDA can police food adulteration when they no longer have the research to know the latest tricks to look for nor have the staff to do the looking.
More specifically, Kennedy also wants to cut back regulation of dairy farmers and reduce enforcement of limited regulations that prohibit manufacturers of vitamins and nutritional supplements from making health claims without evidence, and that runs directly against the core reasons Congress passed the Food and Drug Act nearly 120 years ago. Pure food? Not for milk. Honest labels? Not anymore.