The American Chamber of Horrors

How a public exhibit led to the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act

During the early 20th century, Americans were inundated with ineffective and dangerous drugs, as well as adulterated and deceptively packaged foods.

A cosmetic eyelash and eyebrow dye called Lash Lure, for example, which promised women that it would help them “radiate personality,” in fact contained a poison that caused ulceration of the corneas and degeneration of the eyeballs. An elixir called Banbar claimed to cure diabetes as an alternative to insulin, but actually provided no real treatment and caused harm to those patients who substituted this for effective insulin therapy.

Food producers short-changed consumers by substituting cheaper ingredients. Some products labeled as peanut butter, for instance, were filled with lard and contained just a trace of peanuts, and some products marketed as “jellies” had no fruit in them at all. Unscrupulous vendors even sold products to farmers, falsely promising they could treat sick animals—in at least one case, a product called Lee’s Gizzard Capsules killed an entire flock of turkeys instead of curing them.

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Comments

Upton Sinclair was right.

The purpose of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" was to expose the plight of immigrant workers, but most readers never got around to that part of the book because they focused on the intimate details of the meat packing industry. Chapter 14 (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/140/140-h/140-h.htm) is highly instructive but I don't recommend reading it before a meal (or immediately afterward). This helped pass the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 which, while subject to the limitations the authors describe here, was at least a good start. https://www.loc.gov/rr/news/topics/purefood.html uses the phrase "human guinea pigs" to describe the situation at the beginning of the 20th century.

The exhibit cited in the article (https://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/History/VirtualHistory/HistoryExhibits/ucm…) is highly instructive. Here is a clever scam that did not involve a single word of false advertising: "Egg Noodles have slightly more nutritive value than other marketed dried pastas and were slightly more expensive. An enterprising manufacturer tried to convince consumers that his pasta was actually egg noodles by packaging them in yellow cellophane to give them a yellow tinge that would have let a consumer distinguish between egg noodles and pasta." (The product was however labeled honestly as plain noodles.)

This one dates back to Greek mythology (Trick of Mecone), in which Prometheus urged mortals to deceive Zeus by putting a layer of snow-white fat over gristle and other wastes, and gristle over the best meat, and inviting Zeus to pick his own offering. "Veneered Chicken Was a deceptive packaging scheme that was typical of the time. The more expensive white mean was placed in this jar in a thin outside layer that disguised the fact that most of the contents included dark meat." Watch out for this trick today, in which vendors display salads with a thin layer of chicken and cheese on top, but which are mostly lettuce.

And even the 1938 reforms are apparently not enough to protect us from everything, as shown by the popularity of colloidal silver. https://nccih.nih.gov/health/silver "The FDA also warned in 1999 that colloidal silver isn’t safe or effective for treating any disease or condition."