FRESH Act is a rotten apple
By 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 and turned it over to find it teeming with juicy worms, you know how safety advocates felt when Rep. Kat Cammack, R-FL, released a bill called the “FRESH Act” promising “FDA review and evaluation of safe, wholesome, and affordable foods.”
While promising to strengthen food safety, the bill relies on two big rotten worms: provisions that would largely block national food safety policies while weakening the FDA’s existing authority to review the premarket safety of substances used in food.
The bill contains industry-backed preemption provisions that would largely eliminate state protections “related to the use, labeling, sale, or marketing” of foods or dietary supplements. This effort directly targets recent advances in state food policy, which include new bans on harmful chemicals, heavy metal testing requirements, restrictions on the sale of harmful dietary supplements to children, and new allergen and nutrition menu disclosures. This extreme preemption language will hurt consumers, but is a major victory for big food companies, which launched a multimillion-dollar effort last year to far outpace state safety and labeling laws.
The preemption version of the FRESH Act would be catastrophic for food safety, much of which is regulated by states and local health and agriculture agencies. Congress and the FDA have so far failed to implement meaningful chemical safety reform, leading state lawmakers to take up the mantle. For example, in recent days, the New York legislature passed a bill that would require notification and scientific substantiation for claims now protected by the federal GRAS loophole.
The FRESH Act does not close the GRAS loophole, it replaces GRAS with astro-turf. Contrary to its title, the bill would not require FDA premarket review of new food chemicals. In effect, it would make permanent, and even in some ways expand, the current loophole in federal law that allows food companies to introduce new food substances without submitting safety data for FDA review.
The bill accomplishes this by requiring the FDA to approve decisions made in secret by review panels paid for by the food industry. One of those industry panels would be the Flavor Extract Manufacturers Association, an industry-funded group specifically named in the bill. The FDA will have limited control over these industry panels, a vague accrediting authority that is not fully clarified in the current bill.
American consumers largely support strengthening food chemical safety laws and would welcome meaningful solutions. But the fundamental provisions of this bill do not make us safer. Instead, they weaken FDA oversight of new food chemicals and preempt state law, undermining consumer protections.
There is something deeply rotten about a bill that promises to put the FDA in charge of the “review and evaluation” of food safety, but puts the real safety decisions in the hands of the food industry.
Add to that preventing states, counties, and cities from fulfilling their historic role of protecting the health of their own citizens, and this policy really starts to stink.
