188 Food Safety v. Dangerous Food - The Fight for Food Labeling in the 19th Century

The History of American Food · Oct 28, 2026 · 33m

Do your own research is quite the thing to say - but imagine if there were no laws... iand more importantly no regulations around what you could say about what was in in your food, or what your medicine does.

All the research in the world would do you no good if anyone could say anything - and there were no repercutuions for simply making things up. This was the landscape in the 19th century, and from it grew our first laws on food purity and food and drug safety. They were vague, hard to enforce and full of holes, but for the first time there were consequences for selling strawberry jam with…