For as long as there have been food safety laws, there have been people arguing that those laws have been overly stringent and based on nonexistent or overstated food scares. An early example of this was the public response to The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel that depicted working- class life in early twentieth-century Chicago. The book is best remembered for its description of the unsafe and horrific conditions at a canning factory, such as the use of diseased cows in canned meats and tales of men falling into vats and being processed into lard. The public outrage to the practices detailed in The Jungle led to the passage of the 1906 Federal Meat Inspection Act, which established sanitary standards for the meat industry and required the inspection of animals before and after slaughter. However, some critics have questioned whether the fear generated by The Jungle was justified, noting that...