Melanie Benesch

So secret grass is when you as a company determine that your ingredient is safe and

And then you just use it in food and you skip telling the FDA altogether.

So you don't have to tell the FDA.

It's a voluntary notification.

So the makers of TerraFlour never went through door number one.

They never filed a food additive petition.

They never went through door number two.

They never notified the FDA that their ingredient was grass.

They just made their own determination in secret, never told anyone and started marketing it.

And then it got used in food and presumably made a lot of people sick.

In some ways, I worry more about the chemicals that we're using where we don't understand the risk yet.

And those risks aren't going to show up for a long time.

If you have these long-term effects that only come from eating an additive over time, maybe it's being used in multiple different foods, and then 30 years from now,

your risk of cancer is increased or you end up having reproductive problems.

Tying those kinds of chronic health effects back to something that you've been eating and maybe eating inconsistently, that is a much more difficult chain to recreate.

Sometimes there's hundreds of different chemicals that go into making that fragrance. And what exactly those chemicals are, are all protected by trade secret. And so because we often do not know what those constituent ingredients are, it's just hard to say that those ingredients are safe.

Sometimes there's hundreds of different chemicals that go into making that fragrance. And what exactly those chemicals are, are all protected by trade secret. And so because we often do not know what those constituent ingredients are, it's just hard to say that those ingredients are safe.

Sometimes there's hundreds of different chemicals that go into making that fragrance. And what exactly those chemicals are, are all protected by trade secret. And so because we often do not know what those constituent ingredients are, it's just hard to say that those ingredients are safe.

The FDA has indicated that they are going to ban formaldehyde, but we haven't seen a proposed rule. We don't know if and when that's coming out, but those are products to avoid.

The FDA has indicated that they are going to ban formaldehyde, but we haven't seen a proposed rule. We don't know if and when that's coming out, but those are products to avoid.