Arguments criticizing the FDA often seem to weirdly ignore the “F.” For all I know food safety regulations are radically overzealous too, but if so I’ve never noticed (or heard a case for) this causing notable harm.
Overall, my experience as a food consumer seems decent—food is cheap, and essentially never harms me in ways I expect regulators could feasibly prevent (e.g., by giving me food poisoning, heavy metal poisoning, etc). I think there may be harmful contaminants in food we haven’t discovered yet, but if so I mostly don’t blame the FDA for that lack of knowledge, and insofar as I do it seems an argument they’re being under-zealous.
Criticizing FDA food regulations is a niche; it is hard to criticize ‘the unseen’, especially when it’s mostly about pleasure and the FDA is crying: ‘we’re saying lives! Won’t someone thinking of the children? How can you disagree, just to stuff your face? Shouldn’t you be on a diet anyway?’
But if you go looking, you’ll find tons of it: pasteurized cheese and milk being a major flashpoint, as apparently the original unpasteurized versions are a lot tastier. (I’m reminded of things like beef tallow for fries or Chipotle—how do you know how good McDonald’s french fries used to taste before an overzealous crusader destroyed them if you weren’t there 30+ years ago? And are you really going to stand up and argue ‘I think that we should let people eat fries made with cow fat, because I am probably a lardass who loves fries and weighs 300 pounds, rather than listen to The Science™’?) There’s also the recent backfiring of overzealous allergy regulations, which threatens to cut off a large fraction of the entire American food supply to people with sesame & peanut allergies, due solely to the FDA. (Naturally, of course, the companies get the blame.) Similarly, I read food industry people noting that the effect of the ever-increasing burden of FDA regulations is a constant collapse of diversity, as everyone converges on a handful of safe ingredients and having to outsource to centralized food processors who can certify FDA compliance; but how would you ever see this browsing your local Walmart and looking at the colorful labels at the front? (Normal people do not spend much time reading the ingredients label and wondering why everything seems to be made out of the same handful of ingredients, starting with corn syrup.)
Those are great examples, thanks; I can totally believe there exist many such problems.
Still, I do really appreciate ~never having to worry that food from grocery stores or restaurants will acutely poison me; and similarly, not having to worry that much that pharmaceuticals are adulterated/contaminated. So overall I think I currently feel net grateful about the FDA’s purity standards, and net hateful just about their efficacy standards?
The ‘Food’ and the ‘Drug’ parts behave very differently. By default food products are allowed. There may be purity requirements or restaurant regulations but you don’t need to run studies or get approvals to serve an edible product or a new combination. By default drugs are banned.
I think the FDA is under zealous about heavy metals and other contaminants. But the FDA does a decent job of regulating food. However the ‘drug’ side is a nightmare. But the two situations are de facto handled in very, very different ways. So its not obvious why an argument would cover both of them.
Have you ever visited a country without zealous food safety regulations? I think it’s one of those things where it’s hard to realize what the alternative looks like (plentiful, cheap, and delicious street food available wherever people gather, so that you no longer have to plan around making sure you either bring food or go somewhere with restaurants, and it is viable for individuals to exist without needing a kitchen of their own).
What countries are you imagining? I know some countries have more street food, but from what I anecdotally hear most also have far more food poisoning/contamination issues. I’m not sure what the optimal tradeoff here looks like, and I could easily believe it’s closer to the norms in e.g. Southeast Asia than the U.S. But it at least feels much less obvious to me than that drug regulations are overzealous.
(Also note that much regulation of things like food trucks is done by cities/states, not the FDA).
Mexico and Chile are the most salient examples to me. But also I’ve only ever gotten food poisoning once in my life despite frequent risky food behavior.
Strong agree that the magnitude of the overzealousness is much higher for drugs than for food.
Basically, because food is a domain where there are highly negative tail effects, but not highly positive tail effects, conditioning on eating food at all, and thus it’s an area where you can afford to be restrictive, and this is notably not the case for medicine, where high negative and positive tail effect effects exist, so you need to be more lenient on your standards.
I think one exception may be salmonellosis. In USA, you get 1.2 million illnesses, 23000 hospitalizations, and 450 deaths every year. To compare, in EU, selling contaminated chicken products is illegal, and when hundreds of people get sick, it becomes a scandal.
You have to refrigerate eggs in the us while you don’t have to in the EU because of FDA regulations about washing the eggs.
There’s a strain of pro-sugar and anti-fat policies in regards to food for which the FDA shares some of the blame. Through that they might have contributed to the obesity crisis.
It’s possible that the regulations on farmers markets reduce the amount of farmers markets (which might be central to lower obesity levels in France and better health).
When asked to compare French regulations for farmers markets with the US regulations, Claude told me:
Overall, while both countries prioritize food safety, the French system tends to be more flexible for small producers and traditional methods, whereas the US system is more uniformly applied regardless of scale. The French approach often allows for more diverse and traditional products at markets, while the US system provides more consistent safety standards across diverse regions.
You likely could argue that the FDA shares part the blame for the obesity epidemic by setting bad incentives for low-fat and high fructose corn syrup foods while at the same time making it harder for farmers markets to actually sell healthy food.
Apart from that you do have people who oppose forced labeling of GMO products which is also an FDA rule.
I think there may be harmful contaminants in food we haven’t discovered yet,
Do you see microplastics as “harmful contaminants that haven’t been discovered yet”? It would be possible to have regulations that limit the amount of microplastic in plastic drinking bottles but those currently don’t exist.
I’d be interested in an article looking at whether the FDA is better at regulating food safety. I do expect food is an easier area, because erring on the side of caution doesn’t really lose you much — most food products have close substitutes. If there’s some low but not extremely low risk of a chemical in a food being bad for you, then the FDA can more easily deny approval without significant consequences: Medicine has more outsized effects if you are slow to approve usage.
Yet, perhaps this has led to reduced variety in food choices? I notice less generic or lesser-known food and beverage brands relative to a decade ago, though I haven’t verified whether my that background belief is accurate. I’d be curious also for an investigation in such an article about the extent of the barriers to designing a new food product; especially food products that aren’t doing anything new, purely a mixture of ingredients already considered safe (or at least, considered allowed). Would there be more variety? Or notably cheaper food?
Arguments criticizing the FDA often seem to weirdly ignore the “F.” For all I know food safety regulations are radically overzealous too, but if so I’ve never noticed (or heard a case for) this causing notable harm.
Overall, my experience as a food consumer seems decent—food is cheap, and essentially never harms me in ways I expect regulators could feasibly prevent (e.g., by giving me food poisoning, heavy metal poisoning, etc). I think there may be harmful contaminants in food we haven’t discovered yet, but if so I mostly don’t blame the FDA for that lack of knowledge, and insofar as I do it seems an argument they’re being under-zealous.
Criticizing FDA food regulations is a niche; it is hard to criticize ‘the unseen’, especially when it’s mostly about pleasure and the FDA is crying: ‘we’re saying lives! Won’t someone thinking of the children? How can you disagree, just to stuff your face? Shouldn’t you be on a diet anyway?’
But if you go looking, you’ll find tons of it: pasteurized cheese and milk being a major flashpoint, as apparently the original unpasteurized versions are a lot tastier. (I’m reminded of things like beef tallow for fries or Chipotle—how do you know how good McDonald’s french fries used to taste before an overzealous crusader destroyed them if you weren’t there 30+ years ago? And are you really going to stand up and argue ‘I think that we should let people eat fries made with cow fat, because I am probably a lardass who loves fries and weighs 300 pounds, rather than listen to The Science™’?) There’s also the recent backfiring of overzealous allergy regulations, which threatens to cut off a large fraction of the entire American food supply to people with sesame & peanut allergies, due solely to the FDA. (Naturally, of course, the companies get the blame.) Similarly, I read food industry people noting that the effect of the ever-increasing burden of FDA regulations is a constant collapse of diversity, as everyone converges on a handful of safe ingredients and having to outsource to centralized food processors who can certify FDA compliance; but how would you ever see this browsing your local Walmart and looking at the colorful labels at the front? (Normal people do not spend much time reading the ingredients label and wondering why everything seems to be made out of the same handful of ingredients, starting with corn syrup.)
Those are great examples, thanks; I can totally believe there exist many such problems.
Still, I do really appreciate ~never having to worry that food from grocery stores or restaurants will acutely poison me; and similarly, not having to worry that much that pharmaceuticals are adulterated/contaminated. So overall I think I currently feel net grateful about the FDA’s purity standards, and net hateful just about their efficacy standards?
The ‘Food’ and the ‘Drug’ parts behave very differently. By default food products are allowed. There may be purity requirements or restaurant regulations but you don’t need to run studies or get approvals to serve an edible product or a new combination. By default drugs are banned.
I think the FDA is under zealous about heavy metals and other contaminants. But the FDA does a decent job of regulating food. However the ‘drug’ side is a nightmare. But the two situations are de facto handled in very, very different ways. So its not obvious why an argument would cover both of them.
Have you ever visited a country without zealous food safety regulations? I think it’s one of those things where it’s hard to realize what the alternative looks like (plentiful, cheap, and delicious street food available wherever people gather, so that you no longer have to plan around making sure you either bring food or go somewhere with restaurants, and it is viable for individuals to exist without needing a kitchen of their own).
What countries are you imagining? I know some countries have more street food, but from what I anecdotally hear most also have far more food poisoning/contamination issues. I’m not sure what the optimal tradeoff here looks like, and I could easily believe it’s closer to the norms in e.g. Southeast Asia than the U.S. But it at least feels much less obvious to me than that drug regulations are overzealous.
(Also note that much regulation of things like food trucks is done by cities/states, not the FDA).
Mexico and Chile are the most salient examples to me. But also I’ve only ever gotten food poisoning once in my life despite frequent risky food behavior.
Strong agree that the magnitude of the overzealousness is much higher for drugs than for food.
Basically, because food is a domain where there are highly negative tail effects, but not highly positive tail effects, conditioning on eating food at all, and thus it’s an area where you can afford to be restrictive, and this is notably not the case for medicine, where high negative and positive tail effect effects exist, so you need to be more lenient on your standards.
I think one exception may be salmonellosis. In USA, you get 1.2 million illnesses, 23000 hospitalizations, and 450 deaths every year. To compare, in EU, selling contaminated chicken products is illegal, and when hundreds of people get sick, it becomes a scandal.
You have to refrigerate eggs in the us while you don’t have to in the EU because of FDA regulations about washing the eggs.
There’s a strain of pro-sugar and anti-fat policies in regards to food for which the FDA shares some of the blame. Through that they might have contributed to the obesity crisis.
It’s possible that the regulations on farmers markets reduce the amount of farmers markets (which might be central to lower obesity levels in France and better health).
When asked to compare French regulations for farmers markets with the US regulations, Claude told me:
Overall, while both countries prioritize food safety, the French system tends to be more flexible for small producers and traditional methods, whereas the US system is more uniformly applied regardless of scale. The French approach often allows for more diverse and traditional products at markets, while the US system provides more consistent safety standards across diverse regions.
You likely could argue that the FDA shares part the blame for the obesity epidemic by setting bad incentives for low-fat and high fructose corn syrup foods while at the same time making it harder for farmers markets to actually sell healthy food.
Apart from that you do have people who oppose forced labeling of GMO products which is also an FDA rule.
Do you see microplastics as “harmful contaminants that haven’t been discovered yet”? It would be possible to have regulations that limit the amount of microplastic in plastic drinking bottles but those currently don’t exist.
I’d be interested in an article looking at whether the FDA is better at regulating food safety. I do expect food is an easier area, because erring on the side of caution doesn’t really lose you much — most food products have close substitutes. If there’s some low but not extremely low risk of a chemical in a food being bad for you, then the FDA can more easily deny approval without significant consequences: Medicine has more outsized effects if you are slow to approve usage.
Yet, perhaps this has led to reduced variety in food choices? I notice less generic or lesser-known food and beverage brands relative to a decade ago, though I haven’t verified whether my that background belief is accurate. I’d be curious also for an investigation in such an article about the extent of the barriers to designing a new food product; especially food products that aren’t doing anything new, purely a mixture of ingredients already considered safe (or at least, considered allowed). Would there be more variety? Or notably cheaper food?