Chemical Additives: Chemical Food Additives in American History

It is against this backdrop of chicanery that all through the history of the United States there have been crusaders who tried to persuade the government to create and administer regulations about food sanitation, purity, and adulteration. In the early 1800s, the first stirrings of a movement to codify and regulate medicines began. From this beginning, more and more consideration was given to food safety and purity, and in 1862President Lincoln created the Bureau of Chemistry, which would later become the Food and Drug Administration. Out of that public concern and the prompting of people in the Bureau of Chemistry, around 1880 serious legislative proposals began to reach the floor of Congress. Not many were passed initially.