Meat Inspection Act
Encyclopedia
The Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 (FMIA) was a United States Congress Act that worked to prevent adulterated or misbranded meat and meat products from being sold as food and to ensure 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
Poultry Products Inspection Act of 1957
The Poultry Products Inspection Act of 1957 requires USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service to inspect all domesticated birds when slaughtered and processed into products for human consumption. By regulation, FSIS has defined domesticated birds as chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, and guinea...

. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for all meats not listed in the FMIA or PPIA, including venison and buffalo, although USDA does offer a voluntary, fee-for-service inspection program for buffalo.

The original 1906 Act authorized the Secretary of Agriculture
United States Secretary of Agriculture
The United States Secretary of Agriculture is the head of the United States Department of Agriculture. The current secretary is Tom Vilsack, who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on 20 January 2009. The position carries similar responsibilities to those of agriculture ministers in other...

 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, there were still few warnings provided on the container. The law was partly a response to the publication of Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...

's The Jungle
The Jungle
The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by journalist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel with the intention of portraying the life of the immigrant in the United States, but readers were more concerned with the large portion of the book pertaining to the corruption of the American meatpacking...

, an exposé of the Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

 meat packing industry
Meat packing industry
The meat packing industry handles the slaughtering, processing, packaging, and distribution of animals such as cattle, pigs, sheep and other livestock...

, as well as to other Progressive Era
Progressive Era
The Progressive Era in the United States was a period of social activism and political reform that flourished from the 1890s to the 1920s. One main goal of the Progressive movement was purification of government, as Progressives tried to eliminate corruption by exposing and undercutting political...

 muckraking
Muckraker
The term muckraker is closely associated with reform-oriented journalists who wrote largely for popular magazines, continued a tradition of investigative journalism reporting, and emerged in the United States after 1900 and continued to be influential until World War I, when through a combination...

 publications of the day.

The book's assertions were confirmed in the Neill-Reynolds report, commissioned by President
President
A president is a leader of an organization, company, trade union, university, or country.Etymologically, a president is one who presides, who sits in leadership...

 Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States . He is noted for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his "cowboy" persona and robust masculinity...

 in 1906. Roosevelt was suspicious of Sinclair's socialist attitude and conclusions in The Jungle and so sent labor commissioner Charles P. Neill
Charles P. Neill
Charles Patrick Neill was an American civil servant who raised in Austin, Texas after his family emigrated from Ireland in 1850. Neill graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1897 with a doctorate in economics and politics. He was appointed the United States Commissioner of Labor in 1906 by...

, and social worker James Bronson Reynolds, men whose honesty and reliability he trusted, to Chicago to make surprise visits to meat packing facilities.

Despite betrayal of the secret to the meat packers, who worked three shifts a day for three weeks to thwart the inspection, Neill and Reynolds were still revolted by the conditions at the factories and at the lack of concern by plant managers. Following their report, Roosevelt became a supporter of regulation of the meat packing industry.

The FMIA mandated the United States Department of Agriculture
United States Department of Agriculture
The United States Department of Agriculture is the United States federal executive department responsible for developing and executing U.S. federal government policy on farming, agriculture, and food...

 (USDA) inspection of meat processing plants that conducted business across state lines. 34 Stat. 674 (amended by Pub. L. No. 59-242, 34 Stat. 1260 (1967)) (codified at 21 U.S.C. §§ 601 et seq.). The Pure Food and Drug Act
Pure Food and Drug Act
The Pure Food and Drug Act of June 30, 1906, is a United States federal law that provided federal inspection of meat products and forbade the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated food products and poisonous patent medicines...

, enacted on the same day in 1906, also gave the government broad jurisdiction over food in interstate commerce. Pub. L. No. 59-384, 34 Stat. 768 (1906), (codified at 21 U.S.C. §§ 1-15) (1934) (repealed in 1938 by 21 U.S.C. § 392(a)).

The four primary requirements of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 were:
  1. Mandatory inspection of livestock
    Livestock
    Livestock refers to one or more domesticated animals raised in an agricultural setting to produce commodities such as food, fiber and labor. The term "livestock" as used in this article does not include poultry or farmed fish; however the inclusion of these, especially poultry, within the meaning...

     before slaughter (cattle, sheep, goat
    Goat
    The domestic goat is a subspecies of goat domesticated from the wild goat of southwest Asia and Eastern Europe. The goat is a member of the Bovidae family and is closely related to the sheep as both are in the goat-antelope subfamily Caprinae. There are over three hundred distinct breeds of...

    s, equines, and swine;
  2. Mandatory postmortem inspection of every carcass
    Body
    With regard to living things, a body is the physical body of an individual. "Body" often is used in connection with appearance, health issues and death...

    ;
  3. Sanitary standards established for slaughterhouse
    Slaughterhouse
    A slaughterhouse or abattoir is a facility where animals are killed for consumption as food products.Approximately 45-50% of the animal can be turned into edible products...

    s and meat processing plants; and
  4. Authorized U.S. Department of Agriculture ongoing monitoring and inspection of slaughter and processing operations.


After 1906, many additional laws that further standardized the meat industry and its inspection were passed.
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