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Regardless of one’s political persuasion, there are a few basic tasks that most citizens would consider to be “essential” functions of government, and food inspection counts among them. Publicly mandated inspections served various functions over the decades: to prevent fraud and establish confidence in the marketplace, to ensure orderly marketing through quality assessment and grading, and to protect consumers from potentially hazardous or unsafe products. From milk to meat, fertilizer to fruits, inspections of food and other agricultural commodities became a widely accepted—and important—function of governments well before the twentieth century. 1 Even in the infamous “America First” budget of 2017, which proposed billions in cuts across a swath of nonmilitary government programs, the Trump administration proposed a “fully funded” Food Safety and Inspection Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). 2
Food inspectors have worked through government shutdowns and global pandemics; inspection is unquestionably “essential work.” Yet citizens frequently disagree over what inspection should mean, who should carry it out, and how they should accomplish that task. In “The Fox Guarding the Henhouse,” I analyze the prospects and limits of business self-regulation in food safety inspection through a study of the growth and development of the American poultry industry. Drawing on archival records, original field interviews, newspapers, periodicals, and government documents, I show how the debate over how to achieve “safe” and “inspected” chicken influenced not just the laws and regulations but also the organizational structure of firms, the nature of market competition, the trajectory of technological innovations, and even the biology of meat-type chickens. The project also reveals how an emerging system of international trade affected post-1945 developments in U.S. law and policy, and how American business leaders worked alongside regulators to reshape global standards at the turn of the twenty-first century.
The dissertation begins in the mid-1950s, when an unlikely coalition of consumer advocates, organized labor, and a nascent poultry industry mobilized their congressional representatives to establish mandatory government inspection of poultry products in interstate commerce. This broad consensus around the need for “government inspection” of food products only deepened in the 1960s, as the capacity, effectiveness, and even the major players in the consumer movement changed dramatically, in a transition from “second wave” to “third wave” consumerism. 3 Within...