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food safety
'Win for Public Health' as FDA Bans Carcinogenic Red Dye No. 3 in Food and Drinks
"At long last, the FDA is ending the regulatory paradox of Red 3 being illegal for use in lipstick, but perfectly legal to feed to children in the form of candy," said one advocate.
Jan 15, 2025
It's been used to color everything from candy to soft drinks to even watermelon—but after decades of knowing that it causes cancer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is finally banning erythrosine, popularly known as Red Dye No. 3, in foods and beverages.
Red Dye No. 3—commonly used to color maraschino cherries, fruit cocktails, toaster pastries, sodas, seasonal candies, cough syrups, and many other orally consumed products—has been known to cause cancer in animals since the 1980s. It has been banned in cosmetics since 1990. Manufacturers have until January 2027 to remove the toxic additive from products subject to the ban.
"This is exactly the action we need to see from the FDA."
"Because the FDA failed to uphold its legal obligation to fully ban cancer-causing additives, Red 3 remained permitted in foods, supplements, and oral drugs more than 34 years later," the Center for Science in the Public Interest said in a statement Wednesday. "That changed on January 16, 2025, thanks to a color additive petition filed by CSPI in 2022."
CSPI called the ban "a win for public health."
"At long last, the FDA is ending the regulatory paradox of Red 3 being illegal for use in lipstick, but perfectly legal to feed to children in the form of candy," Dr. Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said in a statement. "The primary purpose of food dyes is to make candy, drinks, and other processed foods more attractive. When the function is purely aesthetic, why accept any cancer risk?"
In addition to CSPI, numerous other groups and activists including the Center for Food Safety, Environmental Working Group (EWG), and Food & Water Watch (FWW) had petitioned the FDA for the ban.
"We wouldn't be celebrating this historic decision today without the relentless leadership of public health champions like Michael Jacobson and others who took up this fight decades ago on behalf of consumers," EWG president and co-founder Ken Cook said in a statement hailing the ban. "We all owe a debt of gratitude to Michael and the other early leaders who pushed the FDA to remove toxic chemical ingredients from the nation's food supply."
FWW senior food policy analyst Rebecca Wolf said that "this move by the FDA is long overdue, but represents a step in the right direction for consumer safety from harmful, cancer-causing chemicals."
"This is exactly the action we need to see from the FDA," Wolf added. "If the incoming FDA is serious about food safety and system reform, they should build on this win by endorsing scientifically sound policies and regulatory changes that Food & Water Watch has supported for years. These include ending the GRAS loophole that companies use to pollute our food system, removing antibiotics from animal feed, and supporting a ban on harmful chemicals in food."
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Vote Like Your Child’s Health Depends on It
For anyone hoping that a Trump administration might “Make America Healthy Again,” as RFK, Jr. has insisted, evidence makes clear that Trump’s entire record completely contradicts these important goals.
Oct 31, 2024
Every parent voting in the November 5 U.S. election should ask themselves: How will this presidential election affect my child’s health?
Concern is rising about the avalanche of toxic chemicals in our kids’ food and environment—and recently these issues gained more attention amid Bobby Kennedy, Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign for former U.S. President Donald Trump.
While RFK, Jr. speaks of the need to end “corporate capture” over government policy (indeed a serious problem), enforcement of food and drug safety protections plummeted under Trump.
Regardless of one’s political stance, people are right to be concerned about the proliferation of harmful chemicals linked to serious health impacts, from cancer to ADHD. But, there’s a big elephant in this room: Project 2025, the right-wing policy platform crafted by many top former Trump administration officials for the deeply conservative Heritage Foundation. While Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, evidence shows the right-wing platform will guide Trump’s policies if he’s elected in November.
The Heritage Foundation agrees, claiming that “during Trump’s last term, he embraced two-thirds of their policy proposals within his first year in office.” In 2022, Trump said of the Heritage Foundation’s plans: "They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do."
Project 2025 would threaten our children’s health, our food safety, and the environment in many disturbing ways. The right-wing Republican platform takes a wrecking ball to crucial protections from toxic pesticides and other harmful chemicals, and undermines consumer food safety, and access to child nutrition and clean air and water.
While RFK, Jr. speaks of the need to end “corporate capture” over government policy (indeed a serious problem), enforcement of food and drug safety protections plummeted under Trump, who appointed an unprecedented number of industry lobbyists and executives to key high-level positions, worsening this corporate capture.
Endangering Food Safety
The food we consume every day is often laden with toxic chemicals that harm our health, particularly for children who are developing their minds and bodies. Project 2025 would make our food supply more unsafe and unhealthy by giving Big Food, Big Ag, and Big Chemical corporations free rein to maximize profits and cut regulatory corners at the expense of our kids’ well-being.
By aggressively deregulating pesticides and chemicals, Project 2025 would allow far more toxics in our food supply, air, and water, putting our children in harm’s way. This would include rolling back vital, hard-won protections from highly toxic pesticides like dacthal (linked to irreversible harm to unborn babies’ developing brains) and PFAS, aka, “forever chemicals”—linked to kidney or testicular cancer, and damage to the liver and immune system—which the Biden-Harris administration recently addressed.
While Kennedy stresses the need for consumer protections and labeling of GMO products, Trump gutted these protections in his first term, prompting a lawsuit by farmers and conservationists.
Project 2025 dangerously calls for removing federal inspection for meat and poultry processing plants, leaving required inspections up to the states, which vary widely and often provide meager protections for consumer health and safety. When we’re seeing massive recalls of tainted chicken and outbreaks of E-coli illnesses from fast food, the last thing consumers need is less protection from our federal government.
This Trump-allied policy blueprint also urges the undermining or even outright elimination of the USDA’s science-backed Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), which have been improved in recent years to address diet-related health crises. These vital guidelines are intended to ensure that the billions of taxpayer dollars spent on federally supported feeding programs, like school meals, align with scientific nutritional guidance.
Also troubling is the Project 2025 plan to further deregulate GMOs in our food supply, including removing hard-won GMO labeling requirements that protect our right to know what’s in our food. Slashing consumer protections on GMOs and food labeling should worry everyone, particularly supporters of RFK, Jr.’s “MAHA” campaign for Trump. While Kennedy stresses the need for consumer protections and labeling of GMO products, Trump gutted these protections in his first term, prompting a lawsuit by farmers and conservationists.
Slashing Child Nutrition and Healthcare
Equally disastrous are Project 2025’s plans to slash government food assistance to low-income and working-class people through SNAP (once known as “food stamps”) and the Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC), which provides critical nutrition for millions of children. This Republican plan also seeks to eliminate the Head Start program, which served 833,000 children in 2022, and universal free school meals that provide food security to millions of children.
Cutting school meals for kids in need would cause serious harm. As First Focus on Children explains, Project 2025’s cuts to food assistance “would significantly increase hunger for millions of children, spike nutrition-related diseases, and eliminate the safety regulations on baby formula.” If implemented by Trump, Project 2025 would eliminate healthy school meals for 20 million American children in lower-income schools.
Eliminating and Gutting Environmental Protections
Regulations protecting clean air and water are critical to our health. Project 2025 would harm our kids’ health by demolishing vital environmental protections that help keep our water and air clean, and diminish our exposure to toxic pesticides and chemicals. Project 2025’s calls for gutting the EPA including eliminating legal and regulatory enforcement and compliance offices, curtailing environmental review, and diminishing scientific credentials for EPA science advisors. Project 2025 also aims to severely weaken the Endangered Species Act and reduce the influence of EPA science on whether pesticides are approved for use—opening the door to many more toxic pesticides that could harm our health and environment.
According to former Acting Deputy EPA Administrator Stan Meiburg, “Project 2025 is just full of recommendations that would essentially eviscerate EPA. They would turn it into a shell of what its true mission is.”
In stark contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris has consistently acted to protect our kids’ health.
These policies reflect the same agenda implemented by the first Trump administration, which rolled back more than 100 environmental protections. Numerous reports confirm that the Trump administration pressured EPA officials to back away from environmental regulation and enforcement—allegedly retaliating against EPA scientists who warned about harm from chemicals. As ProPublicareported, “If Trump fulfills even some of the promises made in Project 2025, job security for the whistleblowers—and all EPA scientists—will become much more tenuous.” Mirroring this Trump agenda, Project 2025 “specifically calls for new chemicals to be approved quickly and proposes that all employees whose work touches on policy in federal agencies would become at-will workers, allowing them to be fired more easily.”
For anyone hoping that a Trump administration might “Make America Healthy Again,” as RFK, Jr. has insisted, evidence makes clear that Trump’s entire record completely contradicts these important goals. As president, Trump expanded Americans’ exposures to toxic pesticides and chemicals and gutted our consumer health protections. Meanwhile, the Republican Party platform doesn’t say one word (not even one) about protecting our health from pesticides and other toxic chemicals. Trump’s past and future plans are a continuation of decades-long efforts by Republicans to weaken and often eradicate vital environmental protections.
In stark contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris has consistently acted to protect our kids’ health. After Trump reversed a hard-won ban on the highly toxic pesticide chlorpyrifos, Biden-Harris restored that ban to protect our health. Biden-Harris issued the first-ever drinking water standard for “forever chemicals,” investing more than $1 billion to protect Americans from these deadly chemicals.
When we vote for our children’s health and our own, the choice is crystal clear: Trump and Project 2025 would give corporations free rein to poison our environment and our food. Vice President Harris will strengthen and expand vital protections for our kids, and for all of us.
This piece was first published by Friends of the Earth Action.
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Workers Get Boot as Boar's Head Plant Behind Listeria Deaths Shuts Down
A union statement said the closure was "especially unfortunate" because workers shouldn't be punished for the deadly outbreak, but a deal protecting employees' livelihoods was reached.
Sep 13, 2024
About 500 workers lost their current jobs when Boar's Head on Friday announced the closure of the Virginia meatpacking plant behind a deadly listeria outbreak.
A chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, which represents the workers, said in a statement that the closure was "especially unfortunate" given that the workforce was not to blame for the outbreak, which killed at least nine people nationwide.
The UFCW announced that it had reached a deal with the company to allow the workers to transfer to another Boar's Head facility or receive a severance package "above and beyond" what's required by law.
"Thankfully these workers have a union they can count on to always have their backs," the union statement said.We received some unfortunate news – the Boar's Head plant located in Jarratt, Va. is closing indefinitely, impacting hundreds of workers at the facility. Read our statement: https://t.co/h551b80cF0
— UFCW Local 400 (@UFCW400) September 13, 2024
The outbreak caused nine deaths and 57 hospitalizations, and led to the recall of millions of pounds of Boar's Head deli meat. The company has already been targeted in a number of wrongful death and other lawsuits.
Listeria, a bacterial illness, originated from the Boar's Head plant in the small town of Jarratt, Virginia, as genome sequencing tests confirmed in late July. The company said this week that the contamination had come from liverwurst processing and announced it would discontinue the product.
A 2022 inspection of the plant found that it posed an "imminent threat" to public health, according to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) records released this week. At the time, the plant already had "rust, mold, garbage, and insects on the plant floors and walls," The New York Timesreported.
Sarah Sorscher, a food safety expert at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told the Times that "they shouldn't have allowed this company to keep producing ready-to-eat products, lunch meat that's going to go on people’s tables, when they're seeing this level of violation. Consumers had to die before this plant got shut down, really is the bottom line."
More recent USDA records, which were released in late August, also showed wretched conditions at the plant.
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