1927 | Consumer Protection
Consumer Protection
The U.S. Department of Agriculture establishes a separate Food and Drug Administration (initially the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration) to enforce laws that have been enacted since 1907 (see medicine [Sherley Amendment], 1912; Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, 1938).
Your Money's Worth by economist Stuart Chase and Peoria, Ill.-born engineer F. J. (Frederick John) Schlink, 35, states: "We are all Alices in a Wonderland of conflicting claims, bright promises, fancy packages, soaring words, and almost impenetrable ignorance." Schlink has spent several years with the National Bureau of Standards, whose analysts test products before the federal government will buy them; he wonders why private citizens do not have the advantage of such testing (see Consumers' Research, 1929).
England has an epidemic of ergot poisoning from contaminated flour.