Assuring food safety in this "New Era of Smarter Food Safety" and with the increasing use of whole genome sequencing provides many new challenges for food safety professionals. While these challenges are many and multi-faceted, it is helpful to look back to the "old" era of food safety, to some of the foundational concepts in the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act that are still in force today. In this article, the authors focus first on one of many important legal terms that is extremely important and often misunderstood: adulteration.

While the fatal poisoning of more than 100 people with sulfanilamide sweetened with diethylene glycol occurred nearly 85 years ago, the herculean mobilization of federal, state, and local inspectors to retrieve product and prevent more deaths is as vital a lesson today as it was then.