Federal Meat Inspection Act

The original 1906 Act authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to inspect and condemn any meat product found unfit for human consumption.^[1] Unlike previous laws ordering meat inspections, which were enforced to assure European nations from banning pork trade, this law was strongly motivated to protect the American diet. All labels on any type of food had to be accurate (although not all ingredients were provided on the label). Even though all harmful food was banned, many warnings were still provided on the container. The production date for canned meats was a requirement in the legislation that Senator Albert Beveridge introduced but it was later removed in the House bill that was passed and became law.^[2] The law was partly a response to the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, an exposé of the Chicago meat packing industry, as well as to other Progressive Era muckraking publications of the day.^[3] While Sinclair's dramatized account was intended to bring attention to the terrible working conditions in Chicago, the public was more horrified by the prospect of bad meat.^[4]

The book's assertions were confirmed in the Neill-Reynolds report, commissioned by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906.^[5] Roosevelt was suspicious of Sinclair's socialist attitude and conclusions in The Jungle, so he sent labor commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds, men whose honesty and reliability he trusted, to Chicago to make surprise visits to meat packing facilities.

Despite betrayal of the secret to the meat packers, who worked three shifts a day for three weeks to thwart the inspection, Neill and Reynolds were still revolted by the conditions at the factories and at the lack of concern by plant managers (though neither had much experience in the field). Following their report, Roosevelt became a supporter of regulation of the meat packing industry, and, on June 30, signed the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.^[6]

The FMIA mandated the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspection of meat processing plants that conducted business across state lines.^[7] The Pure Food and Drug Act, enacted on the same day (June 30, 1906), also gave the government broad jurisdiction over food in interstate commerce.^[8]

The four primary requirements of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 were:

1. Mandatory inspection of livestock before slaughter (cattle, sheep, goats, equines, and swine);
2. Mandatory postmortem inspection of every carcass;
3. Sanitary standards established for slaughterhouses and meat processing plants; and
4. Authorized U.S. Department of Agriculture ongoing monitoring and inspection of slaughter and processing operations.

After 1906, many additional laws that further standardized the meat industry and its inspection were passed.

In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in National Meat Assn. v. Harris, that the FMIA preempts a California law regulating the treatment of non-ambulatory livestock.^[9]

Chronological legislation relative to U.S. Congressional revisions concerning the Federal Meat Inspection Act.

• Humane Slaughter Act
• Packers and Stockyards Act
• Pure Food and Drug Act

• Coppin, Clayton and Jack High. The Politics of Purity: Harvey Washington Wiley and the Origins of Federal Food Policy (University of Michigan Press, 1999).
• Goodwin, Lorine S. The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 1879–1914 (McFarland, 1999).
• Law, Marc. "History of Food and Drug Regulation in the United States". EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. 2004. online
• Law, Marc T. "The Origins of State Pure Food Regulation." Journal of Economic History 63#4 (2003): 1103–1130.
• Libecap, Gary D. "The rise of the Chicago packers and the origins of meat inspection and antitrust." Economic Inquiry 30.2 (1992): 242–262. Emphasizes the role of the big packers and passage of the law that protected them against unsanitary local packing houses.
• Young, James H. Pure Food: Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906 (Princeton University Press. 1986).
• Young, James Harvey. "The Pig that Fell into the Privy: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and the meat inspection amendments of 1906." Bulletin of the History of Medicine Vol. 59, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 467–480.

• Federal Meat Inspection Act, U.S. Food and Drug Administration