[Ed. Note: On Friday, the Petrie-Flom Center, the Food Law and Policy Clinic (a division of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation), the Food Law Lab, and the Harvard Food Law Society (with support from the Top University Strategic Alliance and the Dean’s Office at Harvard Law School) co-sponsored a conference at HLS called “New Directions for Food Safety: The Food Safety Modernization Act and Beyond.” This week, we will be sharing a series of blog posts from the event, and video will follow shortly.]
By Ching-Fu Lin
On February 21, a group of scholars gathered at HLS to discuss new directions for food safety and challenges to the implementation of the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The conference featured a keynote speech delivered by Peter Barton Hutt, who is commonly recognized as the food and drug law expert in this country.
Hutt is a senior counsel at the Washington, D.C. law firm Covington & Burling. He also served as chief counsel for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 1971 to 1975. Hutt has taught a full course at HLS on food and drug law for over 20 years and has co-authored an influential casebook in this area.
Bringing in his expertise in the historical development of food law, Hutt began with what he called “still the best statute” from the English experience in 1266. At around that time, the English Parliament codified some early regulatory statutes (assizes) that prohibited the sale of any “corrupted wine” or of any meat, fish, bread, or water that was “not wholesome for Man’s body.” These laws continued to (with amendments and supplements) be of reference power in England until 1884. As articulated by Hutt, it would be sufficient for the FDA to do what it needs to do even when we take the core principle “not wholesome for Man’s body” and get rid of the entire rest of the food law.
Hutt then turned to another landmark development in the history of food law. In 1820, Frederick Accum, a German chemist working in England, published Treatise on Adulteration of Food and Culinary Poisons. The treatise had an immediate impact worldwide and triggered the modern development of food regulatory statutes in the United States and Europe. Indeed, the languages used in such statutes (such as prohibitions against adulteration) are reflected in the design of the 1906 and 1938 legislations in the United States.
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