RFK Jr. Promised To Clean Up The Food Supply

Can he actually do it?

RFK Jr.’s appointment as secretary of Health and Human Services was never a sure thing. Senators on both sides of the aisle had deep concerns about his view of vaccine safety, and many were appalled by his embarrassing lack of knowledge about the Medicare and Medicaid systems that he will oversee, his refusal to turn away “referral” earnings from anti-vaccine lawsuits, and his embrace of medical conspiracies.

Nevertheless, yesterday, the Senate overcame it all, voting 52 to 48 to confirm him as head of an agency with a $1.8 trillion budget and more than 80,000 employees. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who battled polio as a child, was the only Republican to vote against him. (After the vote, Trump called McConnell a “very bitter guy.”)

The vote had much to do with Republicans’ fealty to Trump, but also with the surprising popularity — to lawmakers, anyway — of RFK’s promise to clean up America’s food system. In particular, ridding us of unchecked food additives that are allowed to “mass poison American children.”

Trump has promised to let RFK “go wild” on health. So it’s now time to ask: What does RFK have the power to do? And will he be able to make good on his promises?

How the heck did we get here?

To understand how RFK Jr. can get additives out of the food system, you first have to understand how they got in there in the first place. Cast your mind back to 1958. Dwight Eisenhower was president. TV dinners had just been invented. America’s food system was changing, moving away from home-cooked meals toward nationally produced convenience foods. Congress enacted the Food Additives Amendment, which gave the FDA authority to review new substances entering the food supply.

The process was supposed to work like this: Food companies would submit a petition for any new chemicals they wanted to add to their products. The FDA would review the additives to ensure their safety, notify the public, and provide an opportunity for public comment. It was a sensible system, not all that different from the one the FDA uses to assess drugs, though the standard here was safety, not effectiveness.

But!! The law provided an exemption for common food ingredients, things like baking soda, oil, and vinegar. This also made sense. No one wanted the FDA wasting its time assessing them when reasonable people could agree they are “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS.

For a while the system worked. The FDA policed GRAS exemptions, requiring manufacturers to file a petition requesting affirmation of new chemicals’ GRAS status. Over time though, the process became more complicated and overloaded. Then, in 1997, the FDA announced that GRAS notifications on new food additives would be voluntary. Food manufacturers would now decide for themselves whether a new substance was safe. And there was no obligation to even let the FDA know what they were putting in foods. In fact, there was a disincentive to alert the FDA about new additives since it could slow down the process and let competitors know about proprietary ingredients.

Peter Lurie, president and executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Science in the Public Interest, summed it up this way: “What happened was that the exception swallowed the rule.”

Indeed. In 2022, an analysis by the Environmental Working Group concluded that nearly 99 percent of all food chemicals introduced since 2000 were greenlighted for use by the food and chemical industry, not by the FDA.

The result is that no one — not even the FDA — really knows what additives are out there. In 2013, a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts concluded that short of immediate serious injury it is unlikely that the FDA could detect a problem caused by chemicals in the food system unless alerted by the food industry.

Nothing significant has changed since then. Last year, FDA officials suggested tackling the problem by developing AI tools to scrape the Internet to figure out what ingredients are being used — a preposterous idea for an agency in charge of regulating food ingredients.

“People don’t believe that companies could be putting additives and chemicals in our products without FDA’s knowledge,” Tom Neltner, who worked for years at the Environmental Defense Fund to close the GRAS loophole, told me. “It’s too much to conceive that in this world where everyone is told the government is all controlling that there would be this gap.”

Where do we go now?

For the record, RFK Jr. isn’t the first to call attention to the FDA’s through-the-looking-glass system of ingredient review. Food-safety advocates have been raising the alarm for decades, including suing the FDA, with no success. (I myself have tried multiple times over the years to sell a story on the insanity of it all and was rejected because it was too in the weeds. Translation: No dead bodies. No story.)

Now, though, additives have the spotlight. And RFK Jr. has a few paths to close the GRAS loophole:

1. He can go to Congress and ask for the original 1958 law to be changed, allowing food manufacturers only one path to approval. This is not impossible; and it seems like an easy win for politicos on both sides of the aisle. The catch? The FDA would need more staff to review every new additive — and to go back and reassess existing ones based on new science. As you may have heard, allocating more money and staff to federal agencies isn’t exactly on brand for the Trump administration. (The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 6 that the White House was planning to cut thousands of HHS workers; the White House denied that an executive order was in the works.)

2. A more likely strategy would be for RFK Jr. to direct the agency to require that companies file a public notification of any new additives they want to classify as GRAS. This way, the agency can review, raise questions, and, if necessary, put a hold on questionable substances. If the agency does its job, this might keep dangerous additives out of the food system. (This, too, might require additional staffing.) At the very least, the government would have a record of what’s out there and not have to resort to scraping corporate websites with AI.

3. RFK Jr. could also light a fire under a new, just-launched review of what the FDA deems the most dangerous additives on the market. The FDA’s list, released last month, includes a rogues gallery of chemicals including arsenic, lead, and mercury — get on it, guys! — bisphenol A (BPA), brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, and titanium dioxide. These are pretty obvious targets. Red Dye #3, which has been linked to cancer in animals for more than 30 years, is on this list, though perhaps in anticipation of Kennedy’s arrival the FDA finally moved to ban it on Jan. 15.

So, that’s what he can do. The bigger question is: What will he do?

Lurie, for one, is skeptical that we’ll see rapid, revolutionary change. After all, aggressive regulation of any kind flies in the face of the anti-regulatory bent of the Trump administration. And the food industry supported Republicans 2 to 1 in the last election cycle.

“If you’re a wonk, you appreciate the idea that big concepts usually come down to small details,” Lurie said. “This is such a good example of it. You can talk about additives in the food supply, and it works in an election cycle. But at the end of the day, you need to deal with the regulatory reality. ”