The Food and Drug Administration is one of the oldest consumer-protection agencies in the United States, and its story begins not with drugs but with a chemist determined to clean up the nation's food.
The Division of Chemistry
The FDA's institutional roots reach back to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Division of Chemistry in the late 1800s. Its crusading chief chemist, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, became alarmed by the era's rampant food adulteration — milk thinned with water and chalk, 'coffee' made of sawdust, preservatives like formaldehyde and borax added to spoiling meat.
The Poison Squad
To prove the dangers, Wiley ran famous experiments in the early 1900s in which volunteers — dubbed the 'Poison Squad' — ate measured doses of common preservatives so their effects could be studied. The publicity helped build public demand for federal food regulation.
The 1906 turning point
That demand, amplified by Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, produced the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. It banned adulterated and misbranded food and drugs in interstate commerce and gave the government enforcement power for the first time.
Becoming the FDA
The regulatory body went through several names before becoming the Food and Drug Administration in 1930. In 1938, after a medicine called Elixir Sulfanilamide killed more than 100 people, Congress passed the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, vastly expanding the FDA's authority — including, for the first time, requiring that new drugs be shown safe before sale. That 1938 law remains the backbone of FDA authority today.
The modern mandate
Over the following decades the FDA's role grew to include food additives, nutrition labeling, medical devices, and more. Its work on the Nutrition Facts label and, later, the added sugars line are direct descendants of Wiley's original mission: making sure people know what's really in their food.