The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA’s FSIS) will soon declare Salmonella to be an adulterant in breaded and stuffed raw chicken products.

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, including how to apply new tools and interpret findings obtained with them in the context of laws and regulations that have been around for decades. 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 (21 U.S.C. §331) that are still in full force today. In this article, the authors focus first on one of many important legal terms that is extremely important and often misunderstood: adulteration.