Author: Sarah Sorscher, Director of Regulatory Affairs, Center for Science in the Public Interest
If you’ve ever plucked a shiny red apple from a tree, turned it over, and seen juicy bugs crawling around, you know how safety advocates felt when Rep. Kat Cammack, R-FL, announced a draft bill titled the “FRESH Act,” which promises “FDA review and evaluation of safe, healthy, and affordable foods.”
While promising to strengthen food safety, there are two big rotting bugs at the heart of this bill. In other words, it is a provision that would broadly block state food safety policies while weakening current FDA authority for premarket safety review of substances used in food.
The bill includes an industry-backed preemption provision that would broadly eliminate state protections “related to the use, labeling, sale or marketing” of food or dietary supplements. These efforts take exact aim at recent advances on the state’s food policy, including new bans on hazardous chemicals, heavy metal testing requirements, limits on sales of harmful dietary supplements to children, and the release of new allergens and nutritional menus. While this extreme preemption language will hurt consumers, it’s a huge win for big food companies, which launched a multimillion-dollar effort last year to broadly preempt state safety and labeling laws.
A preemptive version of the FRESH Act would be disastrous for food safety, much of which is regulated by state and local health and agriculture agencies. Congress and the FDA have so far failed to implement meaningful chemical safety reforms, leaving state lawmakers to shoulder the responsibility. For example, the New York Legislature recently passed a bill requiring notice and scientific substantiation for claims protected by a federal GRAS loophole.
The FRESH Act does not close the GRAS loophole but replaces GRAS with artificial turf. Despite its title, this bill does not require FDA premarket review of new food chemicals. In fact, it would perpetuate and, in some ways, even expand a current loophole in federal law that allows food companies to introduce new food substances without submitting safety data for FDA review.
The bill does this by forcing the FDA to make decisions in secret through a review panel paid for by the food industry. One of the industry panelists is the Fragrance Extract Manufacturers Association, an industry-funded group specifically mentioned in the bill. The FDA will only have limited oversight of these industry panels, which are vague accreditation bodies that are not entirely clear from the current draft bill.
American consumers broadly support strengthening food chemical safety laws and would welcome meaningful solutions. But the bill’s core provisions won’t make us safer. Instead, it weakens consumer protections by weakening the FDA’s oversight of new food chemicals and preempting state laws.
There is something profound about a bill that promises to leave “review and evaluation” of safe foods to the FDA, but leaves actual safety decisions to the food industry.
Combine this with preventing states, counties, and cities from carrying out their historic role of protecting the health of their citizens, and this policy starts to really stink.
