Funranium (AKA Phil Broughton): There’s a nigh infinite number of books to be written about the early decades of the FDA. Every claim of “The market will fix it because consumers will demand clean/safe $ITEM” only works if: 1) The market provides such a thing, despite monopolies. 2) It actually is and not marketing bullshit.

There’s a nigh infinite number of books to be written about the early decades of the FDA. Every claim of “The market will fix it because consumers will demand clean/safe $ITEM” only works if: 1) The market provides such a thing, despite monopolies. 2) It actually is and not marketing bullshit.

WE remember the convenience pitches, but sanitation/hygiene/health pitches were VERY common at the time: Our Brand Won't Kill You Thanks to SCOTUS we'll find out empirically, again, which brands of food will kill us.

God we’re going to have so many people rushed to emergency rooms in the coming decades over food & product safety levels dropping to “if we get sued then we change”

More than we already did.

Worse, you'll get the products that won't kill you right away, but have enough horrible things that they give you cancer in ten years...

*makes notes to start teaching home cooking, gardening, and canning classes. Advertising line: Less likely to kill you than storebought!"*

But just think of the boom in the mortuary sector of the economy! /s

I tell you what, sitting in the UK where the rivers run w/sewage, schools and hospitals collapse, and apartment buildings burn down bc of lack of regulation made it even harder to read the ruling. bc it'll be us now, having tossed one of the quiet wonders of the world, US regulatory agencies : (

What we’ve been seeing lately with raw milk, despite the threat of H5N1 infection in it in *addition* to all the other nasties it can carry, suggests that an alarming fraction of consumers will not, in fact, demand it.

Well, those that do won't demand it for long.

Reading Upton Sinclair's "The jungle" was pretty enlightening for me... 🤢

An awful lot of vegetarians were made that way.

I seem to recall hearing that he was very upset - he wanted everyone to be upset about the conditions of the *workers*, not the food...

Yes

3) The link between vector and harm is obvious enough to identify.

30 years later "but seriously, now Brand X new formulation won't kill you we promise"

“The Strip-Ease Story”

Oh, a building that was half occupied by the paint stripper maker, and half by a dry cleaners. ...........

Yes—and consumers can’t verify that something’s *actually* clean/safe/pure. I can’t test the spices for lead or confirm that my multivitamins do contain everything the label says. I can only detect problems after I‘ve been harmed (and still might not know which product was at fault)

God this shit is nightmarish for folks like me who have unusual food/chemical allergies. I already struggle when a brand randomly changes how they make something, or stops making an item that I can use. Hell, half the reason I can't have Citric Acid is modern CA is made from MOLD and not disclosed!

Worse, the combination of effectively eliminating the statute of limitations on suits over regulation means you are going to get a whole bunch of "new" corporate entities suing. Who wants to start making Thalidomide?

I mean... This guy was running for Senate six years ago, currently heads the NJ GOP, and still sells it today. www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/n...

A G.O.P. Senate Candidate Highlights His Drug Industry Career. Should He? (Published 2018)www.nytimes.com The race for Senator Robert Menendez’s seat has proved competitive in deeply blue New Jersey. His Republican opponent, Bob Hugin, built his career in the pharmaceutical industry.

Indeed, the Chinese tainted baby formula scandal was only a few years ago, and the 'market solution' was foreign imports (hence a shortage in the US)

There was a 1950s-1960s vintage book on this for kids that I had… probably somewhere in my parents’ house decades later… but I’d like to find a copy again.

Yes, tapping the Deborah Blum sign again: bsky.app/profile/karl...

@deborahb.bsky.social has a terrific book (also made into a PBS documentary) about this sort of thing that I never tire of recommending: 📗 bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century a book by Deborah Blumbookshop.org A New York Times Notable Book The inspiration for PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film The Poison Squad. From Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Deborah Blum, the dramatic true stor...

Also, 3) if consumers have accurate information (complete information about products, no distortion from antivax propaganda, etc) And 4) if there's no severe trade-offs to the preferable products like price or accessibility

It seems very few people are aware that nearly all regulations exist in response to things that actually happened, not speculation of things that could happen...

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