I should start this by noting that I'm not a guy who uses or injests a lot of food dyes. I outgrew Froot Loops and other "radioactive" cereals in my childhood, don't drink Kool-Aid or alcopops or bug juice, and usually pass on brightly decorated cakes that appear to be from Wal-Mart or the like. Maybe a bit on birthday cakes--and I guess with six kids, three sons-in-law, and a grandchild, I eat a bit of that--but all in all, I'm probably in the bottom quintile for use of food dyes.
However, I am bothered by the Trump administration's attempt to ban a bunch of them. The reason is simple; it does not appear that they've done the necessary scientific and regulatory work to establish that there is indeed a statistically significant risk. Now for food dyes, that's no big deal--OK, no Froot Loops, and Kool-Aid needs to use beet juice for its color. Whatever, and kids might learn to eat real food without garish colors being added to the mix. In itself, probably a net win.
What is significant is that the broader perspective that chemicals can be banned without a serious look at whether or not they pose a hazard, and that means we're talking about pesticides (including mosquito repellent), herbicides, fertilizers, and a lot more. It would nationalize and worsen one of California's nastiest laws, Proposition 65, whereby if a chemical causes cancer in any concentration, no matter how ludicrous that concentration is in real life, it will be labeled with "may cause cancer." In this case, however, it goes well beyond Proposition 65 in actually banning those chemicals from use.
To draw a picture of what the impact might be, typical maize/corn yields a century ago were about 40 bushels per acre, whereas today's combination of hybrids, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides have yields up around 200 bushels per acre. So if RFK Jr.'s approach to food dyes is applied broadly, we have a situation where we could seriously crimp the amount of food available to feed us, and with no overall health benefits.
No comments:
Post a Comment