52 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



PURE FOOD LEGISLATION 



BY ROBERT McD. ALLEN, 

 SECRETARY OF THE INTERSTATE PURE FOOD COMMISSION 



HP HE facts and evils of food adulteration have been overwhelmingly 

 -*- established. They have been published in volume after volume 

 of state and federal government reports, and have been sworn to 

 again and again by competent experts. State courts have imposed 

 fines, and in hundreds of instances manufacturers and dealers have 

 confessed that their food is adulterated, and judgments are entered 

 accordingly. Yet, the evil is so strongly entrenched in business sys- 

 tems that a proposition to put truthful labels on foods and drugs 

 intended for interstate commerce has met continuous defeat for more 

 than fifteen years at the national capital. 



Most of the states have enacted laws to control the manufacture and 

 sale of foods. Some of these laws are good. Others contain bad 

 provisions in an otherwise good law, provisions intended to nullify the 

 law as it may apply to the several practises which food legislation is 

 needed to correct, and such provisions but serve to legalize some 

 adulteration which would have been subject to prosecution at common 

 law. The main principles of the state laws have been well established 

 by the Appellate Courts of the states and by the United States Supreme 

 Court in a long train of decisions. With this backing, some eight or 

 nine of the states are thoroughly enforcing their laws, and, as a result, 

 there is a marked betterment in the food supply coming into such 

 states. 



The State Food Control Officials have an organization known as 

 the Interstate Pure Food Commission. The commission was organized 

 in 1896 for the purpose of bringing about uniformity among the state 

 laws and securing the passage by congress of a law to apply to inter- 

 state commerce. This commission has held annual meetings, and at 

 each meeting resolutions were adopted setting forth urgent reasons 

 for national legislation to supplement the state laws. In nineteen 

 hundred and three at Saint Paul, Minnesota, the commission called a 

 joint meetings of manufacturing interests, state officials and repre- 

 sentatives from the Bureau of Chemistry and the Inspection Divi- 

 sion of the Bureau of Animal Industry of the United States Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture. The manufacturers were given the full privilege 

 of the floor, the discussions were frank, and, as a result of the meeting, 

 the officials were impressed with the fact that in the preservation of 

 the large fruit and vegetable crops much of food adulteration comes 



