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Counterculture: Concerns
Appears in
Published 2004
Despite increases in production and decreases in prices, concerns about food processing had been expressed since the 1930s, and they intensified during the postwar years. Arthur Kallet and Frederick Schlink, for example, wrote 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics (1932), exposing practices of the nation’s food manufacturers that the authors believed were dangerous to consumers.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was responsible for guaranteeing the safety of the nation’s food supply, but the understaffed agency was unable to keep up with the deluge of chemicals and additives entering the nation’s food supply. In 1958, after eight years of discussion by the Delaney Committee, Congress passed the Food Additives Amendment, which required manufacturers of new food additives to establish their safety. Under this new law, however, manufacturers and the laboratories they hired conducted the testing—a system open to concerns about conflict of interest. The Delaney clause prohibited the approval of any food additive shown to cause cancer in humans or animals, regardless of dosage. But the new legislation grandfathered in existing chemicals, and without testing, the FDA published a list of almost two hundred additives “generally recognized as safe.”