¹ Busch, Lawrence, “Food Standards: The Cacophony of Governance,” Journal of Experimental Botany 62, no. 10 (2011): 3247–50CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

² Benjamin R. Cohen, Pure Adulterated: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food (Chicago, 2019).; Frohlich, Xaq, “The Informational Turn in Food Politics: The US FDA's Nutrition Label as Information Infrastructure,” Social Studies of Science 47, no. 2 (2017): 145–71CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

³ Allison Loconto and Lawrence Busch, “Standards, Techno-Economic Networks, and Playing Fields: Performing the Global Market Economy,” Review of International Political Economy 17, no. 3 (2010): 507–36; Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star, Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life (Ithaca, NY, 2009).; Nils Brunsson and Bengt Jacobsson, A World of Standards (Oxford, 2000).

⁴ JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy, Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 (Baltimore, 2019).; Lee Vinsel, “Virtue via Association: The National Bureau of Standards, Automobiles, and Political Economy, 1919–1940,” Enterprise & Society 17, no. 4 (2016): 809–38.

⁵ See, for example, Stigler, George J., “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 2, no. 1 (1971): 3–21Google Scholar. For a critique of Stigler's account of margarine, see Miller, G. P., “Public Choice at the Dawn of the Special Interest State: The Story of Butter and Margarine,” California Law Review 77, no. 1 (1989): 83–131CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ On the different types and uses of standards, see Andrew L. Russell, Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge, U.K., 2014), 18; Lawrence Busch, Standards: Recipes for Reality (Cambridge, MA, 2011).

⁷ Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003), 23–24.

⁸ Fitzgerald, Deborah K., “World War II and the Quest for Time-Insensitive Foods,” Osiris 35 (2020): 293CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Helen Tangires, Movable Markets: Food Wholesaling in the Twentieth-Century City (Baltimore, 2019); Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York, 1990); Mira Wilkins, “When and Why Brand Names in Food and Drink?,” in Adding Value: Brands and Marketing in Food and Drink, ed. Geoffrey Jones and Nicholas J. Morgan (London, 1994), 15–40; Nancy F. Koehn, “Henry Heinz and Brand Creation in the Late Nineteenth Century: Making Markets for Processed Food,” Business History Review 73, no. 3 (1999): 349–93.

¹⁰ Duguid, Paul, “Information in the Mark and the Marketplace: A Multivocal Account,” Enterprise & Society 15, no. 1 (2014): 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stanziani, Alessandro, “Negotiating Innovation in a Market Economy: Foodstuffs and Beverages Adulteration in Nineteenth-Century France,” Enterprise & Society 8, no. 2 (2007): 375–412CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ See, for example, “Manufacturers’ Brands Benefit from AMS Shield on Labels,” Food Industries (May 1941): 43–44.

¹² Identity standards were one of several types of food standards developed at the time. Others included quality standards, such as USDA grades, and fill standards, which regulated the shape and consistency of fill of packages. Austern, H. Thomas, “Food Standards: The Balance between Certainty and Innovation,” Food, Drug, Cosmetic Law Journal 24, no. 9 (1969): 450Google Scholar. See also Kara W. Swanson, “Food and Drug Law as Intellectual Property Law: Historical Reflections,” Wisconsin Law Review 2011, no. 2 (2011): 331–95.

¹³ On reputation interdependence, see Timothy D. Lytton, Outbreak: Foodborne Illness and the Struggle for Food Safety (Chicago, 2019), 237–38, 334–35. Others describe food standards as evidence that “co-regulation” has become a common mode in food safety governance. Marian Garcia Martinez, Andrew Fearne, Julie A. Caswell, and Spencer Henson, “Co-regulation as a Possible Model for Food Safety Governance: Opportunities for Public-Private Partnerships,” Food Policy 32, no. 3 (2007): 299–314. See Edward J. Balleisen, “The Prospects for Effective Coregulation in the United States: A Historian's View from the Early Twenty-First Century,” in Government and Markets: Toward a New Theory of Regulation, ed. Edward J. Balleisen and David A. Moss (Cambridge, U.K., 2009), 443; Ashton Wynette Merck, “The Fox Guarding the Henhouse: Coregulation and Consumer Protection in Food Safety, 1946–2002” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2020).

¹⁴ William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1992).; Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley, CA, 1998).

¹⁵ Susanne Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 144.

¹⁶ Pawley, Emily, “Cataloging Nature: Standardizing Fruit Varieties in the United States, 1800–1860,” Business History Review 90 (Autumn, 2016): 405–429CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ See Stoll, Fruits of Natural Advantage; Freidberg, Fresh; Anna Zeide, Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (Berkeley, CA, 2018).

¹⁸ Spellman, Susan V., “Trust Brokers: Traveling Grocery Salesmen and Confidence in Nineteenth-Century Trade,” Enterprise & Society 13, no. 2 (2012): 302CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ On food standards in Europe, see Spiekermann, Uwe, “Redefining Food: The Standardization of Products and Production in Europe and the United States, 1880–1914,” History and Technology 27, no. 1 (2011): 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A good example of pushing out the competition is different color codes in competing standards for oranges developed by grower cooperatives in Florida versus California, discussed in Ai Hisano, Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat (Cambridge, MA, 2019), 96–124.

²⁰ This 1906 act did adopt standards for drugs, requiring manufacturers to follow standards set in the United States Pharmacopoeia and the National Formulary.

²¹ Harvey Washington Wiley, Foods and Their Adulteration: Origin, Manufacture, and Composition of Food Products; Infants’ and Invalids’ Foods; Detection of Common Adulterations, and Food Standards (Philadelphia, 1911), 614; See Cohen, Pure Adulteration.

²² Uwe Spiekermann identifies Austria's Codex Alimentarius Austriacus as the first systematic effort by a government to codify food standards. Spiekermann, “Redefining Food,” 17–18.

²³ Ohio winemakers, for example, contested USDA wine standards that ruled out “amelioration,” or adding sugar and water to wine, but allowed other techniques used by California producers. Ventimiglia, Andrew, “‘Deceptions Have Been Practiced’: Food Standards as Intellectual Property in the Missouri and Ohio Wine Industries (1906–1920),” Enterprise & Society 22, no. 2 (2021): 530CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ Ivan C. Miller, “State Regulations Steal Food Markets,” Food Industries (Aug. 1939): 444–48, 471.

²⁵ Zeide, Canned, 114.

²⁶ The committee was composed of nine people: three from the USDA, three from the AOAC, and three representing the Association of Food and Dairy Control Officials. Albert K. Epstein and A. L. Israel, “How to Establish Standards under New Food Law,” Food Industries (Sept. 1938): 488; Suzanne White Junod, “Food Standards in the United States: The Case of the Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich,” in Food, Science, Policy and Regulation in the Twentieth Century: International and Comparative Perspectives, ed. David F. Smith and Jim Phillips (London, 2000), 170; Roy W. Lennartson, “What Grades Mean,” Yearbook of Agriculture (1959), 344–52.

²⁷ The exception was a butter quality standard established by a congressional act in 1923, which stated “butter” was understood to mean “containing not less than 80 per centum by weight of milk fat.” H.R. 12053, Pub. L. No. 519, 42 Stat. 1500, c. 268 (4 Mar. 1923). Municipal and state public health standards for dairy products have a long history that goes well back into the nineteenth century. Atkins, Peter J., “Sophistication Detected: Or, the Adulteration of the Milk Supply, 1850–1914,” Social History 16, no. 3 (1991): 317–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Austern, “Food Standards,” 451.

²⁹ Edward Eugene Gallahue, Some Factors in the Development of Market Standards with Special Reference to Food, Drugs, and Certain Other Household Wares (Washington, DC, 1942), 98.

³⁰ Cohen, Pure Adulterated.

³¹ Swanson, “Food and Drug Law,” 355–65.

³² This example was provided in David F. Cavers, “The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938: Its Legislative History and Its Substantive Provisions,” Law and Contemporary Problems (Winter 1938): 29.

³³ Singerman, David Roth, “Inventing Purity in the Atlantic Sugar World, 1860–1930,” Enterprise & Society 16, no. 4 (2015): 780–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berenstein, Nadia, “Making a Global Sensation: Vanilla Flavor, Synthetic Chemistry, and the Meanings of Purity,” History of Science 54, no. 4 (2016): 399–424CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Veit, Helen Zoe, “Eating Cotton: Cottonseed, Crisco, and Consumer Ignorance,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 18 (2019): 397–421CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Rioux, Sébastien, “Capitalist Food Production and the Rise of Legal Adulteration: Regulating Food Standards in 19th-Century Britain,” Journal of Agrarian Change 19, no. 1 (2019): 64–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁵ Cohen, Pure Adulteration, 16.

³⁶ Cesare Silla, The Rise of Consumer Capitalism in America, 1880–1930 (Milton Park, U.K., 2018), 27.

³⁷ Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 348.

³⁸ Quoted in Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 103. Economists came to refer to this as the problem of “information asymmetry,” when buyers did not have continuing transactions with sellers and had incomplete knowledge of the product purchased. Ippolito, Pauline M., “Asymmetric Information in Product Markets: Looking to Other Sectors for Institutional Approaches,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 85, no. 3 (2003): 731–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Ruth deforest Lamb, American Chamber of Horrors: The Truth About Food and Drugs (New York, 1936), 177.

⁴⁰ Tangires, Movable Markets, 2019.

⁴¹ Persia Campbell, Consumer Representation in the New Deal (New York, 1940), 107–8; Jessie Vee Coles, Standards and Labels for Consumers’ Goods (Berkeley, CA, 1949), 29.

⁴² Thomas K. McCraw and Richard S. Tedlow, “Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan, and the Three Phases of Marketing,” in Creating Modern Capitalism, ed. Thomas K. McCraw (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 269.

⁴³ Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics, 33; Tedlow, New and Improved.

⁴⁴ Tedlow, New and Improved, 53–55. For a historical discussion on the relationship between branding and power struggles over value in supply chains, see Paul Duguid, “Brands in Chains,” in Trademarks, Brands, and Competitiveness, ed. Teresa da Silva Lopes and Paul Duguid (New York, 2010), 138–64; Teresa da Silva Lopes, Global Brands: The Evolution of Multinationals in Alcoholic Beverages (Cambridge, U.K., 2007).

⁴⁵ Porter, Glenn, “Cultural Forces and Commercial Constraints: Designing Packaging in the Twentieth-Century United States,” Journal of Design History 12, no. 1 (1999): 25–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ Tedlow, New and Improved.

⁴⁷ Historians, for example, have shown how large meatpacking companies invited government inspections required in the 1906 Meat Inspection Act as strategy to exclude smaller regional competitors and thereby confer an advantage on established national firms. Mary Yeager, Competition and Regulation: The Development of Oligopoly in the Meat Packing Industry (New York, 1981).

⁴⁸ “Expanding Food Markets by Quality Standards,” Food Industries (July 1929): 434.

⁴⁹ Zeide, Canned.

⁵⁰ L. V. Burton, “Why A B C Grades Won't Work as Well as Descriptive Labels,” Food Industries 6 (Dec. 1934): 543–44; Zeide, Canned, 109–24. On the consumer politics of the National Recovery Administration, see McKellar, Susie, “‘Seals of Approval’: Consumer Representation in 1930s America,” Journal of Design History 15, no. 1 (2002): 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵¹ Burton, “A B C Grades,” 543.

⁵² Many believed the government's consumerist policies on grading and standardizing consumer goods were a communist strategy to make consumers distrustful of business. A 1941 report by the Association of National Advertisers, The Movement for Standardization and Grading of Consumer Goods, argued such regulations would be the first step toward “government ownership and operation of all business enterprise.” Cohen, Consumer's Republic, 60. For a contemporary assessment of debates over the NRA and AAA, see Campbell, Consumer Representation.

⁵³ McKellar, “‘Seals of Approval,’” 8–9.

⁵⁴ Robert Lynd, “The People as Consumer,” in Recent Social Trends in the United States, vol. 2 (New York, 1933), 857–911.

⁵⁵ Coles, Standards and Labels, 82.

⁵⁶ R.S. McBride, “Developing Informative Labels,” Food Industries (September, 1934): 392.

⁵⁷ Charles Mazzola, “Grading Food by a Descriptive Method,” Food Industries (May 1930): 214–15; L. Charles Mazzola, “How a Formula for Descriptive Labeling Was Developed,” Food Industries (Aug. 1930): 340–44. Nadia Berenstein describes how food researchers came to develop standard “flavor profiles” in the 1940s and 1950s using psychometric methods and trained taste panels. Companies saw the objective authority of these “taste communities” as a less expensive and more reliable alternative to consulting consumers. Berenstein, “Designing Flavors for Mass Consumption,” The Senses and Society 13, no. 1 (2018): 25, 31.

⁵⁸ McBride, “Developing Informative Labels,” 392.

⁵⁹ For drugs the main change was the requirement of premarket testing for drugs. This would create a substantial difference in the regulatory scrutiny of drugs versus foods. Product classification between the two became a significant dimension to how the FDA policed product markets. Xaq Frohlich, “The Rise (and Fall) of the Food-Drug Line: Classification, Gatekeepers, and Spatial Mediation in Regulating U.S. Food and Health Markets,” in Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment, ed. Angela N. H. Creager and Jean-Paul Gaudillière (New York, 2021), 297–329.

⁶⁰ Wesley E. Forte, “Definitions and Standards of Identity for Foods,” UCLA Law Review 14 (1967): 807.

⁶¹ Austern, “Food Standards,” 132–34.

⁶² Industry analysts noted that national manufacturers of branded packaged foods, and chain retailers who were developing generic brands, such as A&P, benefited from the USDA program. Wholesale buyers and jobbers, in contrast, did not because it would reduce competition in markets. Ivan C. Miller, “What's behind U.S. Inspection and What It Involves,” Food Industries (May 1941): 54–65; “Manufacturers’ Brands Benefit.”

⁶³ Busch, Standards, 10.

⁶⁴ R. A. Merrill and E. M. Collier Jr., “Like Mother Used to Make: An Analysis of FDA Food Standards of Identity,” Columbia Law Review 74 (1974): 567.

⁶⁵ Austern, “Food Standards,” 451; Alice L. Edwards, Product Standards and Labeling for Consumers (New York, 1940), 53–55.

⁶⁶ R. S. McBride, “The Real Issue in the Sweetener Controversy,” Food Industries (Sept. 1940): 36–37. This decision closed a decades-old debate on the nomenclature of glucose as “corn sugar.” Cohen, Pure Adulterated, 169.

⁶⁷ Junod, “Food Standards,” 167–88.

⁶⁸ Alissa Hamilton, Squeezed: What You Don't Know about Orange Juice, (New Haven, CT, 2009).

⁶⁹ Boyce, Angie M., “‘When Does It Stop Being Peanut Butter?’: FDA Food Standards of Identity, Ruth Desmond, and the Politics of Consumer Activism, 1960s–1970s,” Technology and Culture 57, no. 1 (2016): 54–79CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁷⁰ Junod, “Food Standards,” 181.

⁷¹ Suzanne White [Junod], “Chemistry and Controversy: Regulating the Use of Chemicals in Foods, 1883–1959” (PhD diss., Emory University, 1994), 112–34; Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf (Boston, 2012).

⁷² Rima Apple, Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture (New Brunswick, NJ, 1996).

⁷³ Junod, “Food Standards,” 182.

⁷⁴ Clare Gordon Bettencourt, “Like Oil and Water: Food Additives and America's Food Identity Standards in the Mid-Twentieth Century,” in Proteins, Pathologies and Politics: Dietary Innovation and Disease from the Nineteenth Century, ed. David Gentilcore and Matthew Smith (London, 2019), 165–68.

⁷⁵ Linda Bren, “Public Affairs Specialists on the FDA's Front Line,” FDA Consumer (Nov./Dec. 2002), 31–35.

⁷⁶ See, for example, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Read the Label on Foods, Drugs, Devices, and Cosmetics and Household Chemicals (FDA Publication No. 3 Rev. 3, Washington, DC, 1961), National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD.

⁷⁷ Federal Security Administration v. Quaker Oats Company, 318 US 218 (1943).

⁷⁸ United States v. 651 Cases . . . Chocolate Chil-Zert (1953), discussed in Peter Barton Hutt, Richard Merrill, and Lewis Grossman, Food and Drug Law: Cases and Materials, 3rd ed. (Sunderland, U.K., 2007), 181–82.

⁷⁹ C. W. Crawford, “Ten Years of Food Standardization” (paper delivered at the meeting of the Food Industries Advisory Committee of the Nutrition Foundation, 19 May 1948), FDA Record Group 88, General Subject Item 1A, Food Tech, Food Standards, Nutrition Labeling, 1924–78, National Archives, College Park, MD.

⁸⁰ Richard D. Elwell, “The Top Management Approach to Packaging,” in The Package as a Selling Tool (Packaging Series Number 19, American Management Association, 1946), 3–4.

⁸¹ Austern, “Food Standards,” 443–46.

⁸² Maricel V. Maffini and Sarah Vogel, “Defining Food Additives: Origins and Shortfalls of the US Regulatory Framework,” in Creager and Gaudillière, Risk on the Table, 274–93.

⁸³ Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics and the Emergence of Supermarkets, 1919–1968 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010), 5; Tedlow, New and Improved.

⁸⁴ Bettencourt, “Like Oil and Water,” 169–73.

⁸⁵ Abbott Laboratory's expansion into vitamins in the 1920s proved very profitable. Ernest H. Volwiler, “Editorial: Relationships and Similarities of the Pharmaceutical and Food Industries,” Food Technology (Nov. 1950): 463–66; Volwiler, interview by James J. Bohning, Lake Forest, IL, 18 Aug. 1986, Oral History Transcript No. 0050, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia.

⁸⁶ Tedlow, New and Improved, 99–106, 110.

⁸⁷ Ted Sanchagrin, “Battle of the Brands: Soft Drinks,” Printer's Ink, 9 Apr. 1965, 21–25.

⁸⁸ “FDA Fact Sheet: Regulations for Foods for Special Dietary Uses,” binder “9.SpecialDietaryFoods5-1967–1969,” personal archives of Peter Barton Hutt, private library of Covington & Burling Law Firm, Washington, DC (hereafter Hutt Archives). On the vitamin proviso label, see Apple, Vitamania, 131–40.

⁸⁹ National Dietary Foods Association, “Consumers Present to Congress Their View of the Consumer Protection Features of the Vitamin Volstead Act,” Washington Post, 30 Aug. 1966, A21.

⁹⁰ George P. Larrick, “Report on Quackery from the FDA” (paper delivered to the AMA/FDA National Congress on Medical Quackery, Washington, DC, 6 Oct. 1961), 6, binder “FDA Speeches,” Hutt Archives.

⁹¹ “FDA Says New Drug Clearance May Be Necessary for High-Level Vitamins,” Food Chemical News, 24 June 1968, 34.

⁹² Michael F. Jacobson, Eater's Digest: The Consumer's Fact-Book of Food Additives (Garden City, NY, 1972).

⁹³ Ramsingh, Brigit, “The Emergence of International Food Safety Standards and Guidelines: Understanding the Current Landscape through a Historical Approach,” Perspectives in Public Health 134, no. 4 (2014): 206–15CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; David E., Winickoff and Douglas M. Bushey, “Science and Power in Global Food Regulation: The Rise of the Codex Alimentarius,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 35, no. 3 (2010): 356–81.

⁹⁴ Loconto and Busch, “Standards, Techno-Economic Networks.”

⁹⁵ See, for example, Ira I. Somers, “Quality Control Problems in Nutrition Labeling,” FDC Law Journal (May 1972): 293, 296–97.

⁹⁶ For a similar argument on the limits of expert opinion in food and diet science, see Steven Shapin, “Expertise, Common Sense, and the Atkins Diet,” in Public Science in Liberal Democracy, ed. Peter W. B. Phillips (Toronto: 2007), 174–93.

⁹⁷ Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA, 2000).

⁹⁸ Jimmy Carter, “The President's News Conference,” (March 25, 1979), transcript of speech available online through the UC Santa Barbara The American Presidency Project: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/249337.

⁹⁹ Humor about food standards is a good example of what sociologists Steve Woolgar and Daniel Neyland call “mundane governance,” subjects that invite considerable passion and populist pushback in the form of ironic complaints about excessive government policing. Woolgar and Neyland, Mundane Governance: Ontology and Accountability (Oxford, 2013).

¹⁰⁰ In 1996 the FDA convened a task force to review its food standards regulations. The task force's report did not come out until 2005, and no final changes were ever approved despite continued debates over whether to update or strengthen enforcement for existing identity standards. “Proposed Rules: Food Standards: General Principles and Food Standards Modernization,” Federal Register 70, no. 97 (20 May 2005): 29214–35.

¹⁰¹ Nadia Berenstein, “Clean Label's Dirty Little Secret,” The Counter, 1 Feb. 2018), https://thecounter.org/clean-label-dirty-little-secret/.

¹⁰² Joanne S. Hawana, “Food Identity Disputes Continue to Impose High-Profile Pressure on FDA,” National Review, 21 Aug. 2017, https://www.natlawreview.com/article/food-identity-disputes-continue-to-impose-high-profile-pressure-fda; Candice Choi, “What's Yogurt? Industry Wants Greater Liberty to Use Term,” Associated Press News, 25 Sept. 2018, https://apnews.com/article/health-north-america-us-news-business-ap-top-news-ee704f59d0604394ae324d7cc0705a24.