Food safety--then and now. A Bicentennial study.

Although this is our Bicentennial year, effective measures to insure food safety date back less than a century. The first efforts toward reform were begun by Accum in England early in the nineteenth century, but they did not bear fruit there--in even a beginning form--until 1875, when Parliament passed the Sales of Food and Drug Act. Legislation came even later in the U.S.--not until the first Pure Food and Drugs Act became law in 1906, largely due to the unswerving efforts for almost twenty years of Harvey W. Wiley. Today, the scientific approach is applied in developing criteria for judging the safety of food and for regulations to insure that healthful, safe food reaches the consumer. Amendments to this law in 1938 and 1958 have further strengthened the protection the public is provided in its food supply. Today, the substances on the "GRAS" list are being examined individually to determine their safety when used in foods. However, the legalistic invoking of absolutes, as in the Delaney Clause of the 1958 amendments, goes beyond the limits of common sense. The challenge is to insure the benefits of science and technology without the loss of basic individual freedom.