Melanie Benesch

If you are introducing a food or drug that has like heroin, cocaine, alcohol in it, you have to disclose those things.

Why did you say heroin right now?

Because there was no regulation.

So people were just putting whatever in foods.

This applied to food and drugs.

But I mean, Coca-Cola famously contained cocaine.

Oh, Coke.

I feel like we have this mythology around, you know, Halloween candy being bad or poisoned.

And it's very much an urban legend.

Except in 1950, it really happened.

This is a great law.

It is a good system.

It is a very high safety standard.

But there was a problem.

The law is written in such a way that approving a food additive is comparable to writing a new regulation, which is a lot of work for the agency.

Companies start getting frustrated by how long it's taking.

So companies started thinking, is there another way?

This is exactly why the grass exemption was created in the first place, because why would the FDA spend a lot of time reviewing the safety of a banana before saying you can make a banana muffin and sell it to consumers?

The FDA can look at that and say, how much of this are you using?

This chemical looks kind of similar to this other chemical that we know is a carcinogen.