Once upon a time, food was a lot simpler. Bread was made of wheat. Chicken was chicken. You didn’t need a label to know what you were eating.
Today, you need a science degree to understand what’s on the labels of many foods, especially so-called “ultraprocessed foods,” which — sad to say — is where most of us get most of our calories.
You might be wondering how these artificial additives ended up in our food in the first place. The answer comes down to a loophole in federal safety rules.
The “generally recognized as safe” loophole
At the heart of the problem is a principle the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) calls “generally recognized as safe” or GRAS. The basic idea is that the FDA deems it unnecessary to test a new food additive as long as it is “generally recognized as safe.”
Originally, the rule was intended to allow ingredients such as vinegar and common spices into food without testing. But as synthetic ingredients have become more common, GRAS now permits a huge range of new additives.
To make matters worse, the rules allow food manufacturers to declare an additive to be GRAS. They’re not even required (though they are encouraged) to publish their research.
It’s a system that makes it remarkably easy to put a new chemical in the food of millions of Americans without any public determination if that chemical is safe or not.
Dangerous additives
In the U.S., we’ve already seen food additives turn out to be dangerous or potentially dangerous, despite having been used in food products for many years.
For example, Red Dye No. 3 was in use for decades, even though strong evidence suggested that it caused cancer.
Recently, the FDA has made a deal with food producers to discontinue other petroleum-based food dyes, citing the potential health risks.
Some of these products have been in use for almost a hundred years already. Even if these additives are found to be dangerous and taken off the market, that won’t help the thousands or millions of people who have already been permitted to consume them.
Better safe than sorry
How can we allow potentially dangerous chemicals to remain in our food for decades? Right now, it’s easier to introduce food additives to the market than it is to remove them.
As a matter of common sense, we should be cautious about what we put in our food, especially when those additives serve mere cosmetic purposes. We should be carefully examining every additive before permitting its use instead of panicking about whether the food already ingested by millions is unsafe.
When hundreds of new ingredients can go into our food, ordinary people aren’t able to determine whether a food product is safe to eat. That’s why we need our government to look out for consumers, and make sure that food additives are safe before they end up on supermarket shelves.
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