In this week’s Tigwissel Tuesdays, we look at the dangers of consuming food, pre-F.D.A., as numerous Republican candidates have proudly declared that they would like to dismantle the Food & Drug Administration. As Mitt Romney might inelegantly phrase it when amongst his friends, Americans are too lazy to take responsibility for their own lives and test their own medicine & food themselves! Instead, these leeches upon society feel entitled to have government scientists do the testing for them! Well, with a Republican President and Congress, that come to an end! Every American will be able to taste Freedom! — (even if they can’t taste the germs) — by buying their own lab equipment to test their food, thus putting the American Lab Equipment Industry back to work! (unless they buy at Walmart — that stuff comes from overseas)!

Above, we see one such enterprising & freedom-loving individual, taking responsibility for his own Health, pre-F.D.A., in Frederick Burr Opper‘s front cover Puck magazine cartoon, Look Before You Eat, which appeared on March 12th, 1884.

Click on the above & below pictures, to view the cartoons in detail, and read the text inside them.

Beneath, from the front cover of the January 7th, 1885 issue of Puck, we have artist Joseph Keppler, Sr.‘s take on the pre-F.D.A. selling of adulterated candy, which without any government regulations to stop them, the fine free-market capitalists of the day wisely filled out their candy with less expensive ingredients, such as chalk and a smidgeon of arsenic!

Below, from the same January 7th, 1885 Puck issue, is their editorial regarding the manufacturers & retailers of tainted candy.

Tainted milk. Above, by John Campbell Cory, from his 1920 book, Cartoonists’ Art. Below, from the September 1912 issue of Cartoons Magazine.

Finally, let’s not forget what deadly concoctions were literally sold as medicine, pre-F.D.A., in the below Harrison Cady cartoon, Advertising Pays, from a 1912 issue of Life magazine.

Doug Wheeler

NYPuck NYLife KepplerSr