Packaging and Tracing of Food

Food is a basic human need, and in the 21st century, food comes from a variety of sources. The requirements to package and trace food start with maintaining a level of security and safety standards for those who consume the food that is sold in grocery stores, convenience marts, fast food restaurants, and other dining establishments. For those who are responsible for buying and cooking the food served in their households, or purchasing food from an eating venue, knowing the origin of that food and nutritional content is very important. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), there are 76 million cases of food-related illnesses reported every year, with 300,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths. Under the current registration system, food producers are supposed to inform the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) how to contact them when there are problems, including a contamination outbreak of a food-borne illness. Based upon these statistics, the history of packaging and tracing food is critical to understanding the complexity of these two processes.

Prior to the late 1800s, the federal government took absolutely no responsibility for food safety, including the packaging and tracing of food. However, the federal government was forced into action by journalists reporting on the most visible aspects of the food supply system of that day: stockyards and slaughterhouses. Their reporting led to the 1890 Meat Inspection Act, which authorized the inspection of salt pork, bacon, and pigs intended for export. This legislation helped maintain U.S. markets abroad, as previously, Europe refused to buy U.S. exports for fear of the safety of those products.

Many of the modern packaging and tracing of food legislative requirements can be linked directly to a book describing the social conditions of meatpacking work and business-related conditions of the United States around the turn of the 20th century. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, originally published in 1906, is the starting point for most discussions or research into the packaging and tracing of food within the United States. Although a fictional account of the meatpacking and company towns that were populated with immigrants, the account described many real issues, including the lack of oversight on packaging and tracing of meat and meat products.

The Jungle led to the passage of two significant laws concerning food, one of which was the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. This legislation led the federal government to have the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) conduct inspections of all meat and meat products. However, this act limited the ability of the Bureau of [Page 454]Animal Industry to regulate meat safety, and made it difficult to conduct oversight of microbial pathogens. It also established that the USDA could only regulate in the slaughterhouse. No visits to the farm of origin were allowed, and once meat left the processor, it could not be recalled.

The other law was the Pure Food and Drug Act, passed the same day in 1906. This was the first federal law enacted by Congress prohibiting the interstate transportation and sale of adulterated food. This act allowed the USDA's Bureau of Chemistry (which later would become the FDA) to collect samples of food and food products to determine whether they were adulterated or mislabeled. The bureau could not block sales even if it found the label of the product to be unsafe or mislabeled. In spite of these limitations, the act made food producers responsible for the safety of their products and assigned to the government the role of enforcement. Eventually, the FDA was organized in 1930, then transferred out of the USDA in 1940 and incorporated into the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Later, the Pure Food and Drug Act was superseded by a more stringent Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. Other acts followed in 1957 and 1968, which required the USDA to inspect most chickens and turkeys sold to consumers.

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