If you’d like a horrifying, easy to read, and very bluntly presented look at the state of food production before we passed these regulations the first time, I recommend Deborah Blum’s excellent book The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, about the creation of the Food and Drug Act and the Food and Drug Administration (that is, the FDA) responsible for enforcing it. I particularly encourage you to consider the lengthy discussion about the types of additives which were commonly added to jams and jellies, and the types of fruit that were used when possible, and contemplate how this might apply to cherry pie filling.
Consider here also the benefits to a corporation of making the frozen cherry pie crust “especially thick”: pie crust, especially if it’s not very good pie crust with the bare minimum of fat you can get away with from the cheapest possible source, is miles away cheaper than actual fruit is. We have the rules regulating the thickness of crust in order to allow consumers to know that when they buy a fruit pie, it is in fact recognizable as the product we refer to as a fruit pie, and not an extra-thick Pop Tart. You’re still allowed to make and sell Pop Tarts, of course, you just can’t call them cherry pies and claim they’re just what Grandmother used to make by hand and toast on the open fire.
Mind you, when you go searching for extra context (WaPo link), you find that this cherry pie specific regulation is something of a low-hanging fruit:
If you’re wondering why the FDA would bother with a rule change on something so minor in the midst of a pandemic that is sapping much of the agency’s attention — without even having been directly asked to in 15 years — here’s a possible explanation. According to MacKie, the rules governing frozen cherry pies are often used internally at the FDA as an example of the kind of outdated, slow-moving mind-set the agency is struggling to overcome. The cherry pie rules were seen as a “poster child” for inefficiency, he said.
Removing them, then, might be as much about symbolism as it is about the box of cherry pie you find in your supermarket freezer aisle.
That being said, of course, the bakers’ arguments against it are:
“It’s that prescriptive mentality that makes it so difficult to adapt and modernize and innovate and improve,” says Robb MacKie, president and CEO of the American Bakers Association, who notes that the rules were put in place decades ago and that their origins aren’t even clear.
Though it hadn’t specifically petitioned to remove the cherry-pie regulations since 2005, the group has long argued against them, noting that the agency doesn’t regulate other kinds of pie (there’s no similar passage governing apple pies, for example), nor does it prescribe rules for non-frozen cherry pies.
The bakers’ group has also contended that the FDA shouldn’t set quality standards for pie, or really, anything else. Consumers should be able to buy more cheaply made pies if that’s what they like, the group argues, and besides, it says, really bad products probably won’t last long in the market.
“Standardization of quality is not properly a function of government in a democratic society,” the organization wrote to the FDA in 1997.
This is precisely the argument made by many of the food manufacturers producing food products which were actively harmful to the health of consumers both in the 1880s and today. The problem is that food is necessary for survival, ad copy is very good at lying to people, and if you are very poor in both money and time, you are quite easy to exploit. The free market, then, is not truly free unless everyone has sufficient resources to evaluate the quality of products without incurring significant costs for doing so. The bakers’ group explicitly is hoping you don’t notice this and claiming that because this regulation might be a little unfairly specific (why regulate cherry pies and not apple pies?), that’s a good reason to do away with many regulations, all the regulations that consumers will let them get away with without complaint.
And anyway, are these regulations really so onerous? Why don’t we think apple pies should require that the fruit only contain so many blemished apples, or that customers shouldn’t be protected from buying an apple pie that’s all cheap crust and no filling even though it’s called a pie on the carton? Why do we think it’s a crime if we insist that frozen cherry pies have to have cherries in them and not a cooked-down mass of acorns, apple pomace, and other pulp byproducts from other products mixed with liberal helpings of artificial cherry flavor, sugar, and food dye, but it’s not a crime if you leave the food dye and the round bits out and call it apple pie instead?
