Source: https://m.openjurist.org/340/us/593
Timestamp: 2020-02-20 15:34:54
Document Index: 352259391

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 304', '§ 334', '§ 334', '§ 403', '§ 343', '§ 343', '§ 8', '§ 401', '§ 341', '§ 341', '§ 403', '§ 343', '§ 343', '§ 403', '§ 401', '§ 403', '§ 403']

340 US 593 62 Cases More or Less Each Containing Six Jars of Jam v. United States | OpenJurist
340 U.S. 593 - 62 Cases More or Less Each Containing Six Jars of Jam v. United States
340 US 593 62 Cases More or Less Each Containing Six Jars of Jam v. United States
71 S.Ct. 515
95 L.Ed. 566
62 CASES, MORE OR LESS, EACH CONTAINING SIX JARS
OF JAM et al.
Argued March 5—6, 1951.
The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act authorizes the United States to bring a libel against any article of food which is 'misbranded' when using the channels of interstate commerce. Act of June 25, 1938, § 304, 52 Stat. 1040, 1044, 21 U.S.C. § 334, 21 U.S.C.A. § 334. The Act defines 'misbranded' in the eleven paragraphs of § 403. 52 Stat. 1047—1048, 21 U.S.C. § 343, 21 U.S.C.A. § 343. The question before us is raised by two apparently conflicting paragraphs.
One of them, subsection (c), comes from the original Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. Act of June 30, 1906, 34 Stat. 768, 770—771, § 8 (first paragraph concerning 'food,' and second proviso). It directs that a food shall be deemed 'misbranded' if it 'is an imitation of another food, unless its label bears, in type of uniform size and prominence, the word 'imitation' and, immediately thereafter, the name of the food imitated.' The other, subsection (g), was added to the enlargement of the statute in 1938. It condemns as 'misbranded' a product which 'purports to be or is represented as a food', the ingredients of which the Administrator has standardized, if the product does not conform in all respects to the standards prescribed. The Administrator has authority to promulgate standards when in his judgment 'such action will promote honesty and fair dealing in the interest of consumers'. § 401, 52 Stat. 1046, 21 U.S.C. § 341, 21 U.S.C.A. § 341.
1. By the Act of 1906, 34 Stat. 768, as successively strengthened, Congress exerted its power to keep impure and adulterated foods and drugs out of the channels of commerce. The purposes of this legislation, we have said, 'touch phases of the lives and health of people which, in the circumstances of modern industrialism, are largely beyond self-protection. Regard for these purposes should infuse construction of the legislation if it is to be treated as a working instrument of government and not merely as a collection of English words.' United States v. Dotterweich, 320 U.S. 277, 280, 64 S.Ct. 134, 136, 88 L.Ed. 48. This is the attitude with which we should approach the problem of statutory construction now presented. But our problem is to construe what Congress has written. After all, Congress expresses its purpose by words. It is for us to ascertain—neither to add nor to subtract, neither to delete nor to distort.
2. Misbranding was one of the chief evils Congress sought to stop. It was both within the right and the wisdom of Congress not to trust to the colloquial or the dictionary meaning of misbranding, but to write its own. Concededly we are not dealing here with misbranding in its crude manifestations, what would colloquially be deemed a false representation. Compare § 403(a), (b), (d), 52 Stat. 1047, 21 U.S.C. § 343(a), (b), (d), 21 U.S.C.A. § 343(a, b, d). Our concern is whether the article of food sold as 'Delicious Brand Imitation Jam' is 'deemed to be misbranded' according to § 403(c) and (g) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938.
4. By §§ 401 and 403(g), Congress vested in the Administrator the far-reaching power of fixing for any species of food 'a reasonable definition and standard of identity'. In Federal Security Administrator v. Quaker Oats Co., 318 U.S. 218, 63 S.Ct. 589, 87 L.Ed. 724, we held that this means that the Administrator may, by regulation, fix the ingredients of any food, and that thereafter a commodity cannot be introduced into interstate commerce which 'purports to be or is represented as' the food which has been thus defined unless it is composed of the required ingredients. The Administrator had prescribed the ingredients of two different species of food—'farina' and 'enriched farina.' The former was an exclusively milled wheat product; the latter included certain additional ingredients, one of which optionally could be vitamin D. The Quaker Oats Company marketed a product it called 'Quaker Farina Wheat Cereal Enriched with Vitamin D,' which did not conform to either standard. Because it contained an additional vitamin it was not 'farina'; because it lacked certain of the essential ingredients it could not be called 'enriched farina.' It was concededly a wholesome product, accurately labeled; but under the Administrator's regulations it could not be sold. We sustained the regulations, holding that Congress had constitutionally empowered the Administrator to define a food and had thereby precluded manufacturers—or courts—from determining for themselves whether some other ingredients would not produce as nutritious a product. 'The statutory purpose to fix a definition of identity of an article of food sold under its common or usual name would be defeated if producers were free to add ingredients, however wholesome, which are not within the definition.' 318 U.S. at page 232, 63 S.Ct. at page 597.
We see no justification so to distort the ordinary meaning of the statute. Nothing in the text or history of the legislation points to such a reading of what Congress wrote. In § 403(g) Congress used the words 'purport' and 'represent'—terms suggesting the idea of counterfeit. But the name 'imitation jam' at once connotes precisely what the product is: a different, an inferior preserve, not meeting the defined specifications. Section 403(g) was designed to protect the public from inferior foods resembling standard products but marketed under distinctive names. See S.Rep.No. 361, 74th Cong., 1st Sess. 8—11. Congress may well have supposed that similar confusion would not result from the marketing of a product candidly and flagrantly labeled as an 'imitation' food. A product so labeled is described with precise accuracy. It neithers conveys any ambiguity nor emanates any untrue innuendo, as was the case with the 'Bred Spred' considered by Congress in its deliberation on § 403(g). See H.R.Rep.No. 2139, 75th Cong., 3d Sess. 5; House Hearings on H.R. 6906, 8805, 8941 and S. 5, 74th Cong., 1st Sess. 46—47. It purports and is represented to be only what it is—an imitation. It does not purport nor represent to be what it is not—the Administrator's genuine 'jam.'