Unraveling FDA’s Dangerous Secret: - Companies can self-certify new food chemicals as safe and add them to foods without telling the FDA. New York bill S08615/A9295 would require

“We simply do not have the information to vouch for the safety of many of these chemicals” -FDA Deputy Commissioner for Foods and Veterinary Medicine (2010-2016), Michael Taylor1 FDA does not know what chemicals are in our food While the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does approve a small fraction of new food chemicals, the agency does not require premarket approval, notice, or its own safe. [...] Companies can secretly determine that a new chemical is “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) and add it to foods without informing or submitting evidence to FDA.2 They can even use paid “experts” or their own employees to secretly determine that a chemical is GRAS.3 As a result, food chemicals can come to market with inadequate, biased, or no safety assessment, and the FDA and public may never kn. [...] FDA cannot protect consumers from unsafe chemicals until after they are in our foods Because companies are not required to notify FDA when introducing new food chemicals, the agency is often unable to assess a chemical’s safety until after it is widely consumed and poses a threat to public safety, as demonstrated with the following cases: • Tara Flour: In 2022, Daily Harvest recalled approximately. [...] In effect, this bill prevents industry from secretly self-determining the safety of food chemicals and will enable public scrutiny of food chemical safety –allowing regulators and consumer advocates to spot any instances where no safety review was conducted at all! FDA and state regulators can utilize this database to better regulate food chemical safety. [...] Of course, FDA and consumers in other states would have access to the New York database, making the state a true groundbreaker in this area.