Meat Inspection Act
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| Long title | An Act making appropriations for the Department of Agriculture for the fiscal year ending June thirtieth, nineteen hundred and eight. |
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| Acronyms (colloquial) | FMIA |
| Nicknames | Agricultural Department Appropriations (1907) |
| Enacted by | the 59th United States Congress |
| Effective | March 4, 1907 |
| Citations | |
| Public law | 59-242 |
| Statutes at Large | 34 Stat. 1256 |
| Codification | |
| Titles amended | 21 U.S.C.: Food and Drugs |
| U.S.C. sections created | 21 U.S.C. ch. 12 § 601 et seq. |
| Legislative history | |
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| Major amendments | |
| Wholesome Meat Act of 1967 | |
The Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1907 (FMIA) is an American law that makes it a crime to adulterate or misbrand meat and meat products being sold as food, and ensures that meat and meat products are slaughtered and processed under sanitary conditions. These requirements also apply to imported meat products, which must be inspected under equivalent foreign standards. USDA inspection of poultry was added by the Poultry Products Inspection Act of 1957. The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act authorizes the FDA to provide inspection services for all livestock and poultry species not listed in the FMIA or PPIA, including venison and buffalo. The Agricultural Marketing Act authorizes the USDA to offer voluntary, fee-for-service inspection services for these same species.
The original 1906 Act authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to inspect and condemn any meat product found unfit for human consumption. Unlike previous laws ordering meat inspections, which were enforced to assure European nations from banning pork trade, this law was strongly motivated to protect the American diet. All labels on any type of food had to be accurate (although not all ingredients were provided on the label). Even though all harmful food was banned, a few warnings were still provided on the container. The law was partly a response to the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, an exposé of the Chicago meat packing industry, as well as to other Progressive Era muckraking publications of the day. While Sinclair's dramatized account was intended to bring attention to the terrible working conditions in Chicago, the public was more horrified by the prospect of bad meat.
The book's assertions were confirmed in the Neill-Reynolds report, commissioned by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. Roosevelt was suspicious of Sinclair's socialist attitude and conclusions in The Jungle, so he sent labor commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds, men whose honesty and reliability he trusted, to Chicago to make surprise visits to meat packing facilities.
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