By Xaq Frohlich
What exactly is the purpose of a recipe? Much has been written about the important role of recipes in passing knowledge across generations, building communities, serving as an expressive media, and functioning as scripts that discipline the untrained cook or promote a companies’ product.
But what happens when the idea of “recipe” is used to regulate mass-produced foods? This question was at the heart of a dramatic shift in U.S. food regulation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) when in 1973 it introduced a food standard of identity for “mellorine” – a frozen dessert that replaced dairy fat with vegetable fats. The 1973 Mellorine standard signaled a reversal of decades of federal food policies and ushered in a new era in the marketing of novel industrial foods.1
The FDA’s food standards system began with the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA), which charged the FDA with creating “standards of identity” for processed foods. Regulators likened FDA standards to recipes, noting, “The government has had difficulty in holding such articles as commercial jams and preserves and many other foods to the time-honored standards employed by housewives and reputable manufacturers.”2 The housewife’s recipe here symbolized wholesome, honest, and authentic food. FDA standards would protect consumers from “economic adulteration” – the practice of substituting cheaper ingredients in some industrial foods without informing buyers.
As the FDA began issuing standards of identity, it faced a fundamental challenge: What is a “time-honored” recipe for an industrial food? There were clear differences between how one bakes pies at home and how food manufacturers baked thousands of pies on an industrial scale. Companies and regulators would clash over whether definitions of conventional foods should incorporate new trends in food processing and new additives with unknown safety profiles.
The FDA soon grappled with an even more difficult question: how does one apply “time-honored” standards to regulating foods that had not previously existed? In 1941, for example, it created a standard for margarine, which had grown in popularity during World War II. Companies that created nonstandard foods were compelled to label them “imitation,” implying they were inferior to the “authentic” standard products.
A prime example of economic adulteration the FDA system was intended to prevent were “filled milk” products – dairy products reconstituted with non-dairy fats, often vegetable oils. The dairy industry lobbied hard against them, leading to the Filled Milk Act of 1923 and subsequent court decisions that effectively banned interstate sales of filled milk products. Mellorine, an ice cream substitute using vegetable oils instead of dairy fat, was an example of this. It was introduced into the U.S. market in the 1950s, but its sales were limited to only specific states, since it was prohibited by filled milk laws from interstate commerce.3
However, in the 1950s and 1960s, scientific understanding of nutrition was evolving, particularly around fats and heart health. The “diet-heart thesis” began to gain traction, suggesting that diets high in saturated fats (common in dairy products) might increase the risk of heart disease. This led to growing interest in low-fat and vegetable-oil-based alternatives to traditional dairy products. The FDA found itself in a difficult position. Its food standards system, designed to protect consumers from adulteration, was now potentially hindering the development of products that might offer health benefits.
The agency’s stance against “imitation” products was increasingly at odds with emerging nutritional science and changing consumer preferences, and the food industry became more vocal in its criticisms. In 1963, the food industry journal, Food Processing, ran a series of opinion pieces about the “imitation controversy,” inviting legal and industry experts to explain weaknesses and inconsistencies in the FDA’s approach to imitation foods. The articles included striking political cartoons that satirized the FDA’s imitation label as outdated and a barrier to product innovation, joking about the irony of having to market “superior imitation margarine.” Just three years later a court ruled against the FDA’s seizure of a safflower-based “imitation margarine,” sold as Demi.4 Demi had been developed to capitalize on popular interest in the diet-heart thesis and new markets for low-saturated fat foods. Companies were now seriously exploring the feasibility of marketing imitation products as better than standard ones. Even the dairy industry was beginning to recognize the appeal of dairy substitutes.
In 1973, the FDA made a pivotal shift in its approach, introducing new rules for voluntary nutrition information labeling intended as a shift away from setting food standards. In a highly symbolic move, the FDA also published a standard for mellorine, signaling its openness to non-traditional, novel foods designed with health considerations in mind.
The FDA’s “recipe” for mellorine read like a technical specification for a frozen dessert designed to accommodate the flexibility of modern food technology and new dietary trends. It gave precise measurements for key nutritional qualities like fat and protein content, and included detailed instructions for fortification, pasteurization, and labeling. The ingredients it listed, “milk-derived nonfat solids,” “animal or vegetable fat,” “nutritive carbohydrate sweetener,” and unspecified “flavoring ingredients,” were deliberately generic and non-specific to allow for a wide variety of company recipes and to protect their trade secret formulas.5
The mellorine standard represented a fundamental change in how the FDA viewed its role in food regulation. Rather than rigidly defining what foods should be, the agency was now focused on ensuring that consumers had accurate information about the foods they were buying.
This shift had several important implications. It opened the door for a wide range of new, reformulated foods. It changed the notion of what makes a food “authentic” or “pure.” It placed more emphasis on labeling as a means of consumer protection. It reflected a more nuanced understanding of public health, acknowledging that sometimes, non-traditional formulations might offer health benefits over “natural” products.
This new approach was not without critics. Some worried that it would lead to a proliferation of highly processed, artificial foods. It encouraged “nutritionism,” narrowly reducing food to its nutritional values, which scholars such as Gyorgy Scrinis have recently criticized as favoring processed foods over traditional ones.6 Others argued that the FDA’s focus on labeling instead of strict standards placed too much burden on consumers to understand complex nutritional information.
Despite these concerns, the FDA’s pivot away from rigid food standards and towards informational regulation has largely persisted to this day. Indeed, the FDA recently revisited its standard definition of “milk” to include plant-based alternatives, like soy and oat milk, that in recent decades have grown in popularity. The mellorine standard marked the beginning of an era where foods were increasingly seen not as fixed, traditional recipes, but as collections of ingredients and nutrients that can be modified and optimized for the latest consumer trend.
Xaq Frohlich is Associate Professor of History of Technology at Auburn University, and author of From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age (UC Press, 2013), a history of food policy at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from food standards in the 1930s to informative labels today.
- Xaq Frohlich, From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age. University of California Press, 2023. ↩︎
- R. A. Merrill, and E. M. Collier Jr., “Like Mother Used to Make: An Analysis of FDA Food Standards of Identity,” Columbia Law Review 74 (1974): 561. ↩︎
- George J. Caspar, “The Legal Status of Vegetable Fats in Frozen Desserts,” Food, Drug, Cosmetic Law Journal Vo. 13, No. 5 (May 1968): 302-324. ↩︎
- H. P. Milleville, “The Imitation Controversy. How FDA’s Stand on Imitation STIFLES New Product Development,” Food Processing 24, no. 10 (October 1963): 73, 74. Michael Markel, “Imitation Controversy III. Faulty framework of the present law,” Food Processing 24, no. 12 (December 1963): 66. ↩︎
- “Mellorine, Establishment of Standard of Identity,” Federal Register Vol. 39, No. 144 (Thursday, July 25, 1974): 27128-27130. ↩︎
- Gyorgy Scrinis,“Sorry, Marge.” Meanjin-Carlton 61, no. 4 (2002): 108–15. Gyorgy Scrinis, Nutritionism: The Science and Politics of Dietary Advice. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. ↩︎