The History of
Poison in American Food
Key Words: FDA & Safe
Key Words: Organic & Food
Public interest and awareness of food safety and quality has waxed and waned over the last century.
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The graphs below indicate how many times two key words were used near eachother in all of the TIME Magazines published in that decade.
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This is an indicator of how popular these topics were at different times.
The graph above shows how often the words "Organic" and "Food" appeared within four words of eachother in TIME articles since the 1920s. Frequency peaked in the 1970s (specifically 1971) with 15 such articles and 1.10 instances per million words, and again in the 2000s with 13 articles and 2.02 instances per million words.
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The peak in the 1970s corresponds with the introduction of Organic certification, and controversy over DDT and cancer-causing artificial sweeteners.
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The peak in the 2000s corresponds withe passing of the Final Organic Rule, which mandated that products claiming to be organic must be certified by an accredited organization.
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The graph above shows how often the words "FDA" and "Safe" appeared within nine words of eachother in TIME articles since the 1920s. Frequency peaked in the 2000s with 8 articles and 1.24 instances per million words.
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The peak in the 2000s corresponds with the FDA's assessment in 2003 that dairy and meat products from animal clones were "likely safe" for human consumption.
AWARENESS