Uncle Sam Expects You to Test Your Food!

 

Prior to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, the government did not regulate the contents of food, drugs, or cosmetics, nor did they require companies to provide an ingredients list. As a result of the government’s lax product safety policy, the responsibility to differentiate between a pure and a tainted product fell upon American consumers. Due to the fact that women were in charge of purchasing groceries for their households in the nineteenth century, they automatically acquired the task of analyzing food products for adulterations.

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Left: What’s Really in Your Food?, from http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/life/ purefooddrug.htm

In the nineteenth century, food companies substituted expensive ingredients for cheap fillers, such as sawdust and animal remains, in order to generate a larger profit

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​Analyze Your Food With Ease {Textbook Required}​
 

In order to determine if the food she purchased was pure, a woman had to conduct a variety of chemical tests. However, since very few women were granted access to a scientific education, companies felt confident that the average women could not discover​​​ their products’ adulterations. Richards’s circumvented this display of male power by publishing several manuals on the process of chemically analyzing food, such as Food Materials and Their Adulterations (1886) and “The Housekeeper’s Laboratory” (1895). Even though Richards hoped her guides would reach the women who were not able to directly participate in one of her fields, her decision to use technical scientific terms greatly limited her audience (7, 10). ​



Left: Ellen Richards’s Makeshift Kitchen Laboratory, from The New England Kitchen Magazine 3, (April 1895): 12.

In 1895, Richards complied a list of chemicals every woman must have on hand.​