Food and its adulterations

Hassall, A. H., Lancet, (Reports of the Analytical Sanitary Commission) 1851-1854 Food and its Adulteration, London, 1855 Adulterations Detected, London, Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1857. 

The attitude of the Federal Food and Drug Administration revolves basically upon two sections of the federal law Section 402(a), A food shall be deemed to be adulterated if it bears or contains any poisonous or deleterious substance... or if it bears or contains any added poisonous or added deleterious substance which is unsafe within the meaning of Section 406. The applicable portion of Section 406 is Any poisonous or deleterious substance added to any food, except where such substance is required in the production thereof or cannot be avoided by good manufacturing practice, shall be deemed to be unsafe for the purposes of the application of Clause 2 of Section 402(a) but when such substance is so required or cannot be so avoided, the administrator shall promulgate regulations.. .. ... 

Tennessee s Department of Agriculture prohibits the use of DDT because its Food and Drug Law considers a food adulterated if it may have become contaminated. This is possible, it is alleged, when DDT is used. Knoxville s Health Bureau, on the other hand, permits the use of residual sprays, provided the food is protected from contamination, and the food must be pure and wholesome. ... 

A revision of the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act, passed in 1938, added several provisions that impacted the food industry. Among those provisions were authorized factory inspections and the authority for court injunction to the previous seizure and prosecution actions (Janssen, 1992). Adulterated food was now defined as Sec. 402, A food shall be deemed to be adulterated if it consists in whole or in part of any filthy, putrid, or decomposed substance, or if it is otherwise unfit for food, or if it has been prepared, packed or held under unsanitary conditions whereby it may have become contaminated with filth, or whereby it may have been rendered injurious to health. The importance of the whereby clause is the concept that a food product need not be contaminated physically to be considered adulterated, but has been exposed to conditions that may have resulted in contamination of the food. This situation is vastly different from that which existed at the time the 1906 Food and Drug Act was passed. 

The Pure Food and Drug Act prohibits interstate commerce in adulterated drugs but requires the government to prove a product is unsafe before removing it from the market. 

More recently, enantiomer ratios have been used as evidence of adulteration in natural foods and essential oils. If the enantiomer distribution of achiral component of a natural food does not agree with that of a questionable sample, then adulteration can be suspected. Chiral GC analysis alone may not provide adequate evidence of adulteration, so it is often used in conjunction with other instrumental methods to completely authenticate the source of a natural food. These methods include isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS), which determines an overall 13C/12C ratio (Mosandl, 1995), and site-specific natural isotope fractionation measured by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (SNIF-NMR), which determines a 2H/ H ratio at different sites in a molecule (Martin et al 1993), which have largely replaced more traditional analytical methods using GC, GC-MS, and HPLC. 

Until the twentieth century, cannabis was a legal product in every state. It was an accepted medication for a variety of conditions, and a frequent ingredient in patent medicines. In 1906, the Pure Food and Dmg Act forbade the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors, including those containing cannabis. The law put most patent medicine manufacturers out of business. 

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