You highlight past efforts but we talk about now - there is no reason US shouldn't have same or better food safety standards than say EU or Switzerland, if consumer safety and health is priority. But reality is a far cry from that and everybody knows that. We talk about baseline, not premium products that most population doesn't buy, ie how safe are the cheapest things that are legally sold in given market.
The reason is simple - food lobby, pushing for example HFCS everywhere despite everybody knows how damaging it is to health, for decades. But half of US grows corn. I am sure there are few categories where US leads but that's not overall trend.
It goes deeper, much deeper, see Boeing 737 Max and global loss of trust in FAA, that was just too big to fail corporation pushing through regulation like knife through butter, until SHTF repeatedly and they couldn't keep blaming foreign pilots for incompetence anymore.
US is simply much more corporate friendly rather than population friendly compared to say Europe, be it employee protection, general food safety, fines to corporations etc.
> there is no reason US shouldn't have same or better food safety standards than say EU or Switzerland, if consumer safety and health is priority.
This is the crux of my point though, everything is relative and composed of trade-offs. A more strict standard is not necessarily better.
We know mercury is toxic and builds up over a lifetime: why is it acceptable to sell any fish which is known to aggregate mercury? Why not only allow extremely low mercury fish?
We know red meat has some carcinogenic effects: why not ban its sale, or only allow species of animals with less of this effect?
> We talk about baseline [...] how safe are the cheapest things that are legally sold in given market.
This is the other side of that trade-off here. Everyone wants access to products. We could reduce the risk of basically any product by increasing its cost.
A very reasonable heuristic for regulators might be "Find an acceptable risk point at which further risk reduction would not warrant the marginal increase in cost". Another reasonable heuristic might be "Minimize risk at all costs: if the market can't bear the product, so be it". Another reasonable heuristic might be "Label all risks, then let individuals sort things out".
We're focusing on the first one here, but we accept the others in different cases: the second applies more to medical testing, the third to items like tobacco and alcohol.
I'm all for reducing the risks that we can reduce -- nobody is arguing against keeping turpentine out of your juice.
My whole point is just that we can't look at two acceptable safety limits, see one that's more stringent, and then conclude that it's a better regulation.
The reason is simple - food lobby, pushing for example HFCS everywhere despite everybody knows how damaging it is to health, for decades. But half of US grows corn. I am sure there are few categories where US leads but that's not overall trend.
It goes deeper, much deeper, see Boeing 737 Max and global loss of trust in FAA, that was just too big to fail corporation pushing through regulation like knife through butter, until SHTF repeatedly and they couldn't keep blaming foreign pilots for incompetence anymore.
US is simply much more corporate friendly rather than population friendly compared to say Europe, be it employee protection, general food safety, fines to corporations etc.