On June 22, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law SB 25, which requires foods containing any of 44 specified ingredients to display the following warning label: “WARNING: This product contains an ingredient that is not recommended for human consumption by the appropriate authority in Australia, Canada, the European Union, or the United Kingdom.”
Whether a food manufacturer ever need affix this warning to an item for sale remains in grave doubt. The requirement only applies to “a food product label developed or copyrighted on or after January 1, 2027.” Well before that date approaches, the industry’s lawyers are poised to argue “significant issues of concern related to the First Amendment and federal preemption” in litigation that, if necessary, would prevent the law from ever going into effect. It may not be necessary though, since an ambiguous late amendment may have effectively gutted the bill by allowing existing FDA authorizations of the various additives to preempt the warning requirement.
Even writing off SB 25 as a messaging bill, or a cudgel to force more meaningful federal regulatory oversight of food additives, the deferral to foreign regulators is striking. It sends the message that our own food regulatory system is hopelessly broken, that we have to rely on other, more fortunate nations, who have functional governments, to tell us what to eat. The irony is that the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services reportedly called Texas state legislators and “urged the passage of Senate Bill 25.”
You would think Americans could have reliable oversight of our food system, too. We certainly have the money for it. The GDP per capita of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union ranges from $64,888 to $43,206, respectively. It is $85,812, in the United States, nearly twice that of the Europeans. What’s wrong with America?
Many food system experts, particularly those affiliated with industry, would say that America’s food regulations are not that different from those other countries on the warning label. And they have a point. For all of the uproar over Canadian Froot Loops using natural variants of the synthetic dyes used here in the United States, Canadian regulations actually allow red 40, yellow 5, blue 1 and yellow 6—the dyes found in American Froot Loops. For whatever reason, Kellogg’s spares Canadian kids from this particular dietary assault. Likewise, the European Union allows food companies to use the dough conditioner diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (DATEM or E472e), one of the 44 ingredients on SB 25’s list. Indeed, a key pillar of the First Amendment claims against SB 25 is that the “appropriate authorities” abroad have not actually recommended against many of the various ingredients listed in the law.
But many, many other examples point to deep dysfunction in FDA’s oversight of the food system. As SB 25’s list suggests, many, if not most, of the hazardous substances in food serve purely cosmetic purposes. Removing them should hardly spark a food security crisis. But the FDA, and crucially—the agency’s appropriators in Congress—have often failed to prioritize public health over the narrow profit motives of industry.
The result is chemicals in food like titanium dioxide, used to make foods “more visually appealing” and suspected of damaging DNA, or potassium bromate, an oxidizing agent used in baked goods, which may cause cancer. Or my personal favorite, residue of the veterinary drug carbadox.
Carbadox provides a particularly galling example of FDA’s fecklessness. According to recent estimates, over half of U.S. pigs are administered carbadox, even though public health authorities around the world, including FDA, have long recognized that consuming pork products from these animals raises cancer risk. The European Union and Canada prohibited the drug’s use in 1999 and 2006, respectively. Even China has banned the drug. But while FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) initiated action to withdraw approval of carbadox nearly a decade ago, carbadox maker Phibro Animal Health has succeeded in delaying the withdrawal process indefinitely, in part through an aggressive litigation strategy.
Perhaps U.S. pork chops should carry a warning label that reads “Warning: This product may contain drug residues that the appropriate authority in the People’s Republic of China has determined to pose an unacceptable carcinogenicity risk.”
Call me old-fashioned but something about that statement offends my sense of patriotism. Why not instead give FDA food regulators a clear mandate to prioritize consumer safety over industry profits? Why not give agencies like CVM, so easily derailed by the drug companies’ corporate lawyers, the resources and backing to follow through on its determination to pull a drug’s approval, instead of firing 34% of CVM staffers and cutting its budget by over 15%? Why not expand food assistance programs like SNAP and WIC that millions of Americans depend on to afford alternatives to the ultraprocessed foods that will bear these warning labels, instead of decimating them in the disgraceful “Big, Beautiful Bill” oozing its way through Congress?
Texas Senate Bill 25 will bring much needed attention to flaws in our food system, but it will do little to solve them. To help consumers actually eat better, political leaders may need to have a little more faith in America.