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Is It Safe?
BPA and the Struggle to Define the Safety of Chemicals
By Sarah A. Vogel UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95420-5
CHAPTER 1
Plastic Food
Babies are not just little adults. This simple observation explains why the Beech-Nut Company, a manufacturer of baby foods, voluntarily chose to conduct safety tests of pesticide residues in its products. According to a company representative, its tests considered "prenatal, environmental, physiological, and structural [factors]—which may cause a baby to react to food residues in a manner different from the adult." As a reason for Beech-Nut's tests, the representative pointed to the pesticide DDT and evidence that its "estrogen-like" qualities negatively affected sexual development in young animals. Given the vulnerabilities of babies, the company established a near-zero tolerance for DDT in its products. These statements sound contemporary, but they were made more than fifty years ago at a congressional hearing on the risks of industrial chemicals in the food supply. The company bore the costs of and responsibilities for testing; in the early 1950s, the federal government required no premarket safety testing for the hundreds of new chemicals transforming food production in America of the sort that was required for new drugs.
Beech-Nut and other U.S. private food producers were essentially managing the potential risks of human exposure to hundreds of new industrial chemicals without any roadmap or rules. This came at a high price, at least for Beech-Nut, which spent thousands of dollars developing and conducting tests. The company was in a bind. On the one hand, consumers were demanding greater assurance of the safety of baby food, while on the other hand, the company's competitors found Beech-Nut's actions "hysterical." And so in the early 1950s, a Beech-Nut representative came before members of Congress to ask that the government fix this problem by setting tolerance limits or safety standards for all pesticides.
By the early 1950s, innovations from the Second World War, such as DDT and new plastic products such as Saran Wrap, were rapidly entering commercial markets. The speed and scope of commercial use of pesticides and plastics, specifically those derived from an abundant and cheap supply of petroleum, brought tremendous change to the American economy and environment. The petrochemical industry—the integration of the petroleum and chemical industry—had become the critical building block of a booming consumer economy. It promised abundance, ease, and prosperity, but it also introduced unprecedented hazards into the environment and into the human body.
A decade before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) popularized the dangers of pesticides, a small but vocal collection of consumers, scientists, and sympathetic politicians raised serious concerns about the long-term health impacts of pesticides, plastics, dyes, and many other classes of petrochemicals (derivatives of oil created when making gasoline) increasingly making their way into the American food supply. Over the course of the 1950s, Congress debated the need and, by the end of the decade, the scope of reforms to the 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act to address new chemical hazards. The questions that emerged in these legislative debates considered how the state would manage and mitigate the seemingly inevitable risks of the new petrochemical age. What defined a chemical's safety if use and exposure were integral aspects of an advanced technological society? Answering this question shaped the political and scientific contours of debates in chemical policy for the next half century.
THE PETROCHEMICAL REVOLUTION
The 1950s marked the beginning of an unprecedented economic boom in the United States. The stable provision of cheap oil provided the foundation for this economic and material transformation. Securing a cheap and reliable oil supply required several elements: exploration of and investment in domestic reserves, government pricing controls—supported by administrations from Theodore Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter—and development of stable relations with oil-producing countries. In The Prize, a history of oil, Daniel Yergin argues that by the 1950s a new "petroleum world order" had emerged that secured a steady supply of cheap oil to the burgeoning American consumer economy. As world oil prices fell, domestic consumption grew rapidly—from 5.8 million barrels per day in 1949 to 16.4 million per day in 1972.
With the end of gasoline rationing in 1945, American drivers hit the road. Americans owned twenty-six million cars by the end of the war, and only five years later that number had nearly doubled. As the cold war heated up, the federal government continued to expand military contracts that had driven production during the war, thereby allowing the military to maintain its position as a major purchaser of U.S. goods and services. The expansion of the defense industry created new jobs, and government policies kept inflation and prices low, in particular the price of gasoline. In 1956, Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act, which allocated millions of dollars to the expansion of the interstate highway system. Cheap and available gasoline, cars, and highways spurred the development of suburban communities, many of which were financially supported by the government through the Veterans Administration (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs) and the Federal Housing Administration's loans and tax incentives, developed to meet housing needs for returning soldiers and their families.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the petrochemical industry experienced a growth rate "two and a half times that of the gross national product." Although some petrochemicals were produced from coal and petroleum during the interwar period, it was the investments and expansion of the major U.S. petroleum companies in the 1940s and 1950s that transformed the industry. As Peter Spitz remarks in a business history of petrochemicals, "Regardless of the fact that Europe's chemical industry was for a long time more advanced than that in the United States, the future of organic chemicals was going to be related to petroleum, not coal, as soon as companies such as Union Carbide, Standard Oil (New Jersey), Shell, and Dow turned their attention to the production of petrochemicals." The vast supply of petroleum generated a cheap and ready source of petrochemicals. Chemical companies and oil producers began investing in value-added products made from petrochemicals, such as plastics, pharmaceuticals, and pesticides, and started to generate markets for these new products. In this way, supply drove demand and created new markets for goods. For example, large-scale direct foreign investments in agriculture in the 1960s created much-needed markets for Jersey Standard's pesticides.
Consumer markets for plastics and pesticides emerged almost overnight. The new suburban garage or kitchen was a veritable chemistry lab, full of new plastic surfaces, new poisons, and new cleaning products. Most notorious, of course, was DDT, used during the Second World War for mosquito control in the Pacific and Mediterranean regions to protect American soldiers against typhus, malaria, and yellow fever. After the war, the pesticide became commercially available to local governments, communities, residents, and farmers, who liberally sprayed DDT in residential neighborhoods and households to control for mosquitoes and other "pests." Many other pesticides, such as endrin, aldrin, and lindane, developed for war efforts, were rapidly introduced into large-scale agricultural production with the promise of raising crops yields and lowering food prices.
New plastics appeared on store shelves: the oven bag, a plastic bag that could be used to cook food at high temperatures; Saran Wrap, developed by Dow Chemical Company, as well as Reynold's polyethylene plastic films, created during the war and used commercially to encase precut meats and hold lunches for the on-the-go modern worker; plastic baby bottles for those long car trips; and Teflon pans that simplified cooking and cleaning. Plastic resins developed during the war to replace scarce tin as a preservative lining in cans (tinless cans) came into widespread use in the packaging of motor oil and food by the 1950s.
By-products of these new products were chemical residues, which began to be found in food and milk supplies by the late 1940s. Low levels of DDT and other pesticides were detected in food and milk; DES, the synthetic estrogen given to animals to increase meat production, appeared in edible tissue; and chemical compounds used in plastic wraps and packaging migrated into cheese, meat, and other foods. The risks of chemical exposure were no longer confined to the industrial workplace or the war front. They appeared in homes and on the dinner table. As traces of pesticides and plastics were contaminating air, water, and soil, the issue of the safety of chemicals in food captured political attention in the early 1950s.
CHEMICALS IN FOOD IN THE 1950S
From 1950 to 1952, the House of Representatives formed a committee to investigate the impact of chemicals in food and held a series of hearings on the topic, led by Congressman James Delaney. A young liberal from the Queens District Attorney's office in New York with strong ties to the labor movement, Delaney first took his seat in Congress in 1944. Delaney's awareness about chemicals in the food supply began with DDT. Not long after the war, a fellow congressman told Delaney the following story. The congressman (whose name Delaney did not disclose) decided to spray his midwestern lakeshore property with DDT. Several days later, being an avid fisherman, he went out on the lake, only to find a disturbing number of dead fish floating in the water. Delaney found the story deeply unsettling and shared it with the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn (D-TX). If DDT could kill the fish in a large lake, what were the risks to Americans' health, given that people were eating food sprayed with the pesticide, and given that the pesticide was showing up in cows' milk? Rayburn agreed to have Congress look into the issue. In 1950, he initiated the Select Committee to Investigate Chemicals in Food Production and appointed Delaney as its chair.
As it turned out, Delaney's involvement proved to be critical. For the next several decades, he embraced issues related to chemical safety and the need for greater governmental oversight of chemical production. He championed new regulations in food and ultimately helped to pass what became his crowning achievement in public office: the 1958 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, or the Food Additives Act. The act expanded federal oversight of chemicals in food and included a short clause, memorialized as the Delaney clause, that prohibited carcinogenic, or cancer-causing, chemicals from the food supply. Delaney spent much of his career defending this clause, which, as soon as it was passed into law, became a source of contentious ideological and scientific debate about the meaning of chemical safety.
What troubled Congressman Delaney in the early 1950s was the tremendous lack of understanding about what new chemicals entering the food supply were doing to public health and the agricultural environment. At the time of the hearings, chemicals were known to inadvertently contaminate food as they leached from new plastics used in food packaging, as pesticide spraying left residue on crops, or, in the case of DES, as the chemical migrated into animals' edible tissue. Chemical preservatives, coloring, and emulsifiers were also increasingly being intentionally added to foods to enhance their color and texture as well as to extend their shelf life. The scope of Delaney's hearing considered all manmade chemicals in food—whether their presence was intentional or unintentional. In 1952, Delaney's committee reported that the FDA listed 704 chemicals in use in food production, of which 428 were considered "safe."
The paramount problem, Delaney asserted in an article in American Magazine, was the profound inadequacy of existing food law—"a tragic legal joker that permits us to become a nation of 150,000,000 guinea pigs guilelessly testing out chemicals that should have been tested adequately before they reached our kitchen shelves." While his rhetoric was aimed at waking up the public, or perhaps frightening the housewife in order to build political support for reform, his fundamental premise was sound. The FDA had only very limited authority under the 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act (an amendment of the nation's first food safety law, the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act) to set tolerance levels on "unavoidable poisonous substances," which included lead arsenate and Paris green, two inorganic pesticides. In the intervening years, the number of pesticides, preservatives, additives (including feed additives), and chemicals used in food packaging had exploded, as had their production levels, and there existed no requirement for testing these substances' safety before they came onto the market.
Food safety was an issue for which Delaney could find political support from his constituency in Long Island. It was a middle-class, consumer issue, and at the height of the cold war, when fear of nuclear war and the spread of communism strongly influenced foreign and domestic policies, it was also a politically moderate issue. Moreover, drawing consumer attention to "poisons" in the food supply did not collide with more politically sensitive issues of worker health and safety or, by association, the labor unions. Food safety was about consumer safety, and it affected congressmen and Long Island housewives alike. The target for legislative reform was the 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act.
In 1906, rising concerns about food quality in the wake of reports about the unchecked adulteration of foods by substances of unknown risks or benefits had precipitated passage of the Progressive-era Pure Food and Drug Act. Publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in 1905, which described in vivid detail the horrendous working conditions in the meatpacking industry, generated considerable public attention to the problem and the political motivation for the passage of the law. While the book was a strong critique of industrial capitalism, the Pure Food and Drug Act dealt with the safety of food per se, not the working conditions of industrial factories. The law prohibited foods with "any added poisonous or other added deleterious ingredient which may render such article injurious to health" and placed the burden of proving a substance was poisonous on a government agency: the Bureau of Chemistry, within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This authority was later transferred to the Food, Drug and Insecticide Administration, created in 1927 and renamed the Food and Drug Administration in 1931.
The first amendment to the law, the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, which was passed as part of New Deal reforms in 1938, expanded the power of the FDA to regulate labeling on food, cosmetics, and drugs and to seize dangerous products. The political impetus for the bill's passage was the tragic case of Dr. Massengill's Elixir Sulfanilamide, a liquid form of a sulfa drug that contained a toxic solvent, which reportedly killed over hundred people. "The policy tragedy of elixir sulfanilamide," as Daniel Carpenter explains, "established the basic lesson that undergirds gatekeeping power in American pharmaceutical policy. In the absence of a regulatory sentry at the border between drug development and market, this lesson says, people will be harmed, and massively so."
As it related to the FDA's oversight of food safety, the 1938 law upheld the absolute restriction of poisons from the food supply, permitted the agency to develop lists of approved ingredients, and provided authority for seizure of unsafe foods. The law also extended regulatory authority over medical devices and cosmetics and required premarket approval for drug safety. The New Deal policy held that in the absence of regulatory oversight the market would not act alone to protect the public's health. The burden of demonstrating that a substance presented a "reasonable possibility of harm to consumers" fell onto the agency itself, not the regulated industry. The 1938 law did not give the FDA the authority to require that a company notify the agency when it planned to use a new additive. Nor did it require that industry undertake toxicity testing. With the deluge of new petrochemicals in the late 1940s and 1950s, the agency was quickly overburdened. It could not require that companies provide it with any information, but at the same time it bore the heavy burden of ensuring that chemicals on the market would not harm consumers.
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Excerpted from Is It Safe? by Sarah A. Vogel. Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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