Dr. Marion Nestle, longtime NYU professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health, with additional faculty roles at UC San Francisco and Cornell, is best known for analyzing the intersections of food, politics, and health, often exposing how government policy, corporate lobbying, and food industry marketing shape what we eat.
Preempting the GRAS loophole: not a good idea
One of the reasons for Monday’s rally at the Supreme Court (see Monday’s post) is the food industry’s efforts to be able to continue to use whatever additives it chooses, without regulatory oversight.
A press release from the Environmental Working Group warns: ‘FRESH’ and Affordable Foods Act is rotten to the core.
This refers to a a draft bill introduced by Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) designed to preempt all state food chemical laws.
States have been passing inconvenient laws banning food dyes and chemicals. The industry want this to stop.
According to the EWG’s analysis, the bill would do things like this (and more):
- Allow new food chemicals linked to cancer and reproductive harm to be considered “safe.”
- Retroactively approve all food chemicals currently considered generally recognized as safe (GRAS).
- Allow new chemicals to be added to food if the FDA does not respond to a GRAS notice within 90 days.
- Allow new chemicals reviewed by industry-funded expert panels – including the flavor industry’s notorious “expert” panel – to be automatically GRAS and used in food immediately.
Under the “GRAS loophole,” which Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, has vowed to close (this has not happened yet), chemical companies – not the FDA – decide whether a food chemical is safe. For new chemicals, companies submit a GRAS notice to the FDA, and the FDA responds with a “no questions” letter.
As an EWG analysis found, since 2000, almost all new chemicals – nearly 99% – have come onto the market through the GRAS loophole.
The system is already inadequate; this act would make it worse (here’s my contribution to this discussion from more than a decade ago).
Helena Bottemiller Evich says in Food Fix: Food industry quietly advances its preemption push in Washington
Right now, preemption is becoming even more critical for industry because MAHA groups and consumer advocates have been having a ton of success in state legislatures. In many cases, the industry is actually getting creamed outside of Washington.
She notes that the New York legislature has just required companies to publicly disclose any additivies they self-determine to be GRAS (it also bans Red 3, propylparaben, and potassium bromate in the state).
This kind of action makes the food industry long for federal preemption.
Secretary Kennedy and the MAHA movement have promised to fix all this. Will they be able to?
Stay tuned.
The post Food Industry Pushes Federal Bill to Expand GRAS Loophole and Override State Additive Laws appeared first on Food Politics by Marion Nestle.
Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, which she chaired from 1988-2003 and from which she officially retired in September 2017. She is also Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. She earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been awarded honorary degrees from Transylvania University in Kentucky (2012) and from the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College (2016). In 2023, she was awarded The Edinburgh Medal (for science and society).
