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The Food Additive Loophole Is A 1958 Gentleman's Agreement And We Are Still Trusting It
Nearly seventy years ago, Congress wrote an exception into the Food Additives Amendment. If a substance was generally recognized as safe by qualified experts, it required no formal approval. The assumption, charming in its way, was that the experts would be cautious and the companies would be honest. We now read that the agency proposes to widen that opening, permitting certain compounds into our food provided only that they are not carcinogenic. I confess I find the standard remarkably modest. Refraining from poisoning a man outright is a low bar for dinner. I taught undergraduates for forty years and observed that the young are not careless with rules so much as confident that someone else is keeping watch. They are mistaken. The watch has been delegated to the watched. I offer this as opinion, not chemistry. But the architecture of the thing is plain to anyone who reads the statute. If you disagree, tell me what, precisely, you believe is being checked, and by whom.4