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It's crazy that we're doing "innocent until proven guilty" with food additives. Should be the other way around. What's the risk/benefit? You can see how crazy

• threeseed 4y ago
  It's not crazy. It's economics and politics. Food manufacturers are a powerful lobbying group and additives make a significant difference to profitability.
  • fumblebee 4y ago
    If, in this context, we're defining crazy as disturbing and unpalatable, then I struggle to see how "Food manufacturers are a powerful lobbying group and additives make a significant difference to profitability" _isn't_ crazy. The statement is factually accurate, but wow-oh-how messed up is it that by means of lobbying, they have the power to harm consumers to increase profits. (And no, I know this phenomenon is not limited to the food lobby)
    • me_me_me 4y ago
      they are both right and wrong at the same time and also in the same camp on untested food adjectives People and language are not math.
• sanitycheck 4y ago
  > What's the risk/benefit? Freedom, baby! Within a few years we'll have that same freedom to consume whatever toxins we desire in post-Brexit Britain too.
  • another2another 4y ago
    I look forward to _not_ having that freedom unsuspectingly foisted on me.
  • aembleton 4y ago
    How many more years? Taking their time given all they'd have to do is remove legislation; not develop new ones.
    • sanitycheck 4y ago
      The relevant Bill is in The Lords, nobody ever said government is nimble. Also, we don't have the much-anticipated US trade deal yet and the public appears to slightly prefer safe food to Freedom so the political pressure to rush anything through isn't there.
• a2800276 4y ago
  I believe part of the problem is that it's difficult to draw the line defining what an "additive" is. Any sort of spices, ferment, baking powder, food coloring (even traditional coloring like beet juice or squid ink) could be considered additive. A lot of these things have been traditionally used for centuries. And otoh just because something has been used traditionally does guarantee its safety.
  • beezlewax 4y ago
    Who cares what the line is? That's just semantics. Every food ingredient should be baseline safe for normal consumption "additive" or not.
    • quickthrower2 4y ago
      But guilty until proven innocent is what being suggested here, so you would need to check thousands of different compounds in say coffee and run trials on them all individually?
      • aperson_hello 4y ago
        And to pile on, many of those thousands of compounds are already known to be toxic and/or carcinogenic at high levels.
        • Spivak 4y ago
          This Starbucks is known to the state of California to cause cancer.
          • aperson_hello 4y ago
            To be fair, that specific warning is (probably) due to a different carcinogenic food additive: heat
      • Volundr 4y ago
        Unless you are making your coffee out of an chemical soup instead of coffee beans it would be sufficient to run trials on the beans.
• Semaphor 4y ago
  But it’s not as if the US just allows everything, I guess there are still some hurdles to clear? Anyway, for benefits, in the EU Allulose and Monk Fruit (non-nutritive sweeteners) are still not permitted after several years (for monk fruit, not sure about the state of allulose), afaik there is no sign of danger, but they are also not proven safe enough.
  • ororroro 4y ago
    There was no hurdle other than not killing people in an overt way. It was grandfathered in.
• goodpoint 4y ago
  > It's crazy that we're doing "innocent until proven guilty" with food additives. Should be the other way around. Absolutely NOT. Chemicals don't have human rights, obviously. Treating something as untrusted/dangerous unless proven otherwise is safety 101.
  • smolder 4y ago
    I think you read the opposite meaning of what they wrote.
    • goodpoint 4y ago
      Sorry, my bad!
• boomboomsubban 4y ago
  >It's crazy that we're doing "innocent until proven guilty" with food additives. Should be the other way around Even this story doesn't say that were doing that. >(FDA) said all food additives require "pre-market evaluation" and "regulations require evidence that each substance is safe at its intended level of use before it may be added to foods." You can argue the evaluations aren't strict enough, but saying we're doing "innocent until proven guilty" isn't true.
  • mlatu 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • rfrey 4y ago
      > the FDA is perfect and changing them in any way, shape or form would destroy THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT Absolutely nobody said anything of the sort, and I'm not sure what your goal is in caricaturing the position of people with somewhat different opinions than you.
      • mlatu 4y ago
        that is a quote from wikipedia. i wanted to display what a papertiger the FDA really is. _begging_ an industry to stop using potentially harmful substances? -.- come on... thats also to show how this is not a case of "not guilty until proven otherwise" the fda wants this to stop but doesnt seem to have any foothold in that attempt...
      • mlatu 4y ago
        your original post did not quote. just wanted to point that out.
  • bryanlarsen 4y ago
    My impression is that "innocent until proven guilty" is what Europe does, and that's what many want the US to switch to. edit: Oops, I typed that backwards, I meant to say "guilty until proven innocent".
• zpeti 4y ago
  It's just not that simple. While I don't want to eat bad food, and I'm thankfully rich enough to be able to choose, food additives and technologies have had an insane impact on the cost of food, and have probably bought quality foods to many many more people. The last 50 years have bought really fast change in the food industry, but it's also reduced the number of starving people by billions in the world. You are definitely going to have collateral damage in that, and some technologies will be harmful over the long run, but you still might save many more years of people's lives by just making the food available. People seriously underestimate just how much disinflation there's been in food prices when compared to the rest of the market. And that actually means there's more food. For everyone.
  • rhaway84773 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • zpeti 4y ago
      > US supermarket shelves are probably the worst in the world. By what definition? I went to cuba 3 years ago and supermarket shelves were empty. Is that better? On a more serious note, I've travelled a lot and $1 menus and such are extremely rare, especially ones with actual vegetables and meat, and this was a big feature of the US only a few years ago (not sure about now with the inflation). $1 menus go a long way in feeding a lot of poor people.
      • q3k 4y ago
        > $1 menus go a long way in feeding a lot of poor people. Right, and then you’re effectively pushing the worst quality, most processed, possibly carcinogenic and likely causing obesity/diabetes food on a group of already vulnerable people. High quality and healthy food should be the least concern to people already struggling to make ends meet. How else do you want to lift them out of poverty otherwise?
      • houseinthesky 4y ago
        I don't think "feeding poor people food that gives them diseases and harms their quality of life" is success. The US could feed people cheaply without using harmful additives. Instead of a $1 McBurger made possible through subsidies, environmental destruction and cancer-causing chemicals we could be eating $1 McChanaMasala or McDal or McLocalSeasonalVegetables. Billions of people around the world eat rice, beans, legumes, root vegetables with small amounts of locally sourced cheese, meats, fruit, vegetables etc. America's poor eat high fructose corn syrup, highly processed wheat, vegetable oil and the meat from cows and chickens raised on unnatural diets in horribly unhealthy conditions. That's not an improvement.
• bsder 4y ago
  Is beet juice magically safer in cured meat just because the nitrate comes from beets instead of from chemistry? Without additives, your bread is hard and stale 24 hours from now. Are you willing and able to go buy bread every single day? The base problem is, as with so many bad modern things, monopoly. There is no alternative I can choose. Without external forces, the system will converge to a single, optimized, industrial scale supplier who will converge to lots of additives. If you don't want that, you have to break monopolies. And you probably have to be very aggressive doing so.
  • not_kurt_godel 4y ago
    I don't see how a monopoly or not changes this much if the additive makes the product more profitable and people aren't generally aware of its existence or potential harm. Why is manipulating a rube goldberg machine of market economics - that will, by definition, still lead to a significant number of people consuming a harmful substance if it even 'works' at all - better than simply banning additives outright?
    • bsder 4y ago
      > I don't see how a monopoly or not changes this much if the additive makes the product more profitable If there is robust competition, I can vote with my wallet. At that point, compromising quality for a fraction of a penny isn't worthwhile to a smaller manufacturer. I would very much like to buy France-level bread every day in the US. I, however, cannot because that tiny producer cannot compete with the monopolies--they can't get volume discounts; they can't automate with industrial processes to the same degree; they have to have retail space; they can't get into supermarkets (which are also monopolies), etc. The US used to have very nice, local bakeries. They have been all wiped out by consolidation.
      • not_kurt_godel 4y ago
        OK, but why should harmful additives be allowed whether the market is monopolized or has competition?
  • 4y ago