That pie-consensus excepted, the exhibition's subject - government's role in America's diet and food safety - has been a fierce battleground more often than a walk in the garden, Victory or organic.
So it was instructive, in the days leading up to the latest round of Republican presidential debates, to take in the 100-year-old photos of seized caches of frozen contaminated eggs, images of Vesuvian ketchup bottles, and field notes from a nascent breed of government inspectors ("food police," had an honorable ring back then), one documenting the death of a child from toxic candy.
If there was a favorite whipping boy in the debates, besides the omni-convenient Barack Obama - it was "regulation," preceded typically by honorifics on the order of "nit-picking" and "job-killing."
The Archives' exhibition ranges far wider, to be sure, than its chronicle of the "food frights" that inspired the protections of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The walls are alive with botanical studies painted by Agriculture Department artists, 1925-vintage posters urging home-gardening, and the adventure story of a globe-trotting government "food explorer" named Frank W. Meyer, whose name would forever attach to a lemon he brought back from China.
But for anyone doubting the need for robust government regulation - especially when the public gullet is being assaulted - the exhibition is a persuasive primer. (Note to tea party skeptics: Imported tea, historically bulked up with fillers to increase weight and mask off-flavors, had already been regulated for 24 years by 1906.)
Making the case - and contrasting with brighter images - are images from the darker side of the food landscape at the dawn of the last century.
