Meat Inspection Act

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The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 is a United States federal law that authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to order meat inspections and condemn any meat product found unfit for human consumption. The law was partly a response to the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, an expose of the Chicago meat packing industry, as well as to other Progressive Era muckraking publications of the day.

The book's assertions were confirmed in the Neill-Reynolds report, commissioned by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. The President was suspicious of Sinclair's socialist attitude and conclusions in The Jungle, and so 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. Despite betrayal of the secret to the meat packers, who worked three shifts a day for three weeks to clean the factories prior to 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, President Roosevelt became a supporter of regulation of the meat packing industry.

The Federal Meat Inspection Act, passed in June of 1906, mandated the United States Department of Agriculture (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, 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 L. No. 59-384, 34 Stat. 768 (1906), (codified at 21 U.S.C. §§ 1-15) (1934) (repealed in 1938 by 21 U.S.C. § 392(a)).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 before slaughter (cattle, sheep, goats, equines, swine, chicken);
2. Mandatory postmortem inspection of every carcass;
3. Sanitary standards established for slaughterhouses and meat processing plants;
4. Authorized U.S. Department of Agriculture ongoing monitoring and inspection of slaughter and processing operations.

After 1906, many additional laws to further standardize the meat industry and the USDA's methods of inspection were passed.

Notes

• Philip J. Hilts, Protecting America’s Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation 51-53 (Alfred A. Knopf 2003).