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Lawmakers in Congress refused to crack down on the spread of state bans on additives and dyes in a cautious bill introduced earlier this month, inflicting a new setback on the food industry.
Senator Roger Marshall’s Better Food Disclosure Act aims for provisions that would allow the food industry to “self-verify” whether new ingredients are safe to consume. The self-verification designation, which is generally recognized as safe, has been criticized by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the overall “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
The bill initially included a provision that preempted states from enforcing their own ingredient regulations. However, it was eventually removed after Marshall received backlash from the MAHA community, according to the New York Times.
A growing number of state laws are forcing the food industry to impose bans on additives and ingredients. Some states, such as West Virginia, have outright banned foods containing certain ingredients, while others have moved toward requiring warning labels.
The food industry has begun to make more concerted efforts to combat these state efforts, forming a lobbying group called Ingredient Transparency of America to push for uniform federal regulations. Marshall said in a statement that his bill was introduced in response to “state-led efforts to strengthen our nation’s food safety standards.”
“For too long, the FDA has failed to regulate our food industry to the standards the American people expect and deserve,” Marshall, a Kansas Republican, said in a statement. “We are committed to working with everyone to establish strong national standards for ingredient safety, but we cannot ignore the reality that current federal oversight is inadequate, and states are stepping up to hold both food companies and Washington accountable.”
Marshall’s bill modified the GRAS approval process by requiring companies to submit notifications to the FDA of new chemical uses, which were previously optional. But the bill preserves most of the often-criticized loopholes by allowing companies to automatically receive approval for new ingredients if the FDA doesn’t review them after 180 days.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a leading critic of the GRAS loophole, also noted that Marshall’s bill makes it more difficult for the FDA to remove unsafe chemicals by requiring the FDA to enact new regulations before removing ingredients from the list.
“This bill is like a lobster trap: Chemicals basically get in easily, but banning them requires an enormous process that will make it difficult for an exhausted FDA to take effective action,” CSPI Director of Regulatory Affairs Sarah Sorscher said in a statement. “This bill is not meaningful chemical safety reform.”
