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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

I get reliably downvoted for suggesting this, but we need vastly better labelling across the board. We give companies a lot of leeway when it comes to selling things to put in and on our bodies without us, owners of said bodies, having any way of finding out what the hell is in their products, or where they came from, or how they were processed. It absolutely baffles me how everyone doesn't want considerably more information and transparency about our foods and cosmetics.

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> I get reliably downvoted for suggesting this,

Your comment was heavily upvoted.

Please drop these off-topic distractions from your HN comments, especially bits about upvoting and downvoting, which are such a common source of meta-noise that the site guidelines specifically exclude it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I would be massively in favour of adding a QR Code that details as much as possible (without giving away trade secrets if that is possible) where and how something is sourced and then adding how it was processed. Much like you get a track and trace with a package.

Who cares about hiding trade secrets if those trade secrets are "just a pinch of mercury" or some other nefarious chemical.

Just thinking ahead here for some possible pitfalls why companies would be against it.

Unfortunately I just see anything that they don’t want to disclose (because it’s harmful) to become a trade secret

Then mandate a label that clearly states there are unknow ingredients that the manufacturer refuses to list.

On any ingredients list, that should be assumed when there is a vague ingredient like "Artificial Flavors".

Industry plainly lists potassium sorbate, sorbic acid, and sodium nitrite, which are known carcinogens.

On top of that, the packaging matters: PET is a phtalate which is an endocrine disruptor.

They are going to be against it anyway.

In principal, known toxins (when at anything even close to toxic doses when used normally) should be just not allowed in consumer products in the first place.

In practice, people like their alcoholic drinks and don't understand why that by itself is enough to require the Californian proposition 65 "substances at this location are known to cause cancer" sticker.

The good news is that the FDA sets "acceptable levels"[1] in food, for things like animal feces, insect infestation, mold, rodent hairs and filth, maggots, and so on, beyond which enforcement is mandatory. The bad news is they are nonzero.

1: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/insect-rodent-filth-in...

>The bad news is they are nonzero.

Especially with mold, zero is very very difficult to attain.

That's a pretty clever idea. I like it! There is limited package space on items, this would allow producers to document a whole lot of info and allow consumers immediate access.

The idea actually comes from when I followed CJ Chivers (expert on weapons and war correspondent) A lot of his work is done by gathering spent munitions on the battlefield and then tracing it back to its source. The life of a weapon and munitions is usually well documented (and can go back decades!)

This exists in Europe - it’s catchily called ECHA SCIP. You can search by EAN at https://echa.europa.eu/scip-database

Pretty cool.

But fairly, limited:

> Articles containing substances of very high concern (SVHCs) on the Candidate List at a concentration above 0.1% weight by weight (w/w)

EWG has something that’s a lot better than nothing: https://www.ewg.org/skindeep/

They also have an app that can scan UPC codes.

I knew I'd find EWG mentioned here, they're fantastic. Thank you for posting.

I think you forget that most people don't have basic competency with even their phones. Most have no clue how to scan a QR code.

It's still an improvement over the status quo.

People have the capacity to learn and scanning a QR code once you’ve seen it done once is pretty straightforward. during covid QR code menus replaced physical menus in NY for most restaurants. People complained (i don’t particularly like them either) then adapted.

Different strokes for different folks and all that but I'm a bit of a picky eater and love being able to unambiguously mark what I don't want on my food on the ordering web apps some restaurants use now. On the other hand those places that have the QR code link to nothing but a PDF menu are just annoying.

Those people wouldn't be able to interpret the data anyway. You forget that most people don't have basic competency in science, and basing decisions on that data would be extremely difficult to start with.

Your proposed requirement would have a nice side benefit of making supply chains much easier to trace for other purposes (e.g., why are some shelves bare in my grocery store).

I'd want a carve out for home "manufacturers" that sell less than the US median wage per year in product. They should be able to just display the QR codes cut out from the packages of their ingredients rather than creating their own QR code infrastructure.

Indeed, supply chains, or a webcam to the free range chicken eggs perhaps. Lots of options to make things a bit more transparent.

Close, https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ and https://world.openbeautyfacts.org/, by the same association. Crowd-sourced databases that you can query scanning the barcode using their app.

The quality and availability of the information you can find varies greatly, but it's very easy to contribute. You won't find much that is not already written on the label though.

> I get reliably downvoted for suggesting this, but we need vastly better labelling across the board

These companies shouldn't be able to use these ingredients in the first place, labels or not. It's not our job to read lists of 30+ ingredients and their wikipedia entries to know if we're at risk or not

This is of course an ideal, but in our brutal reality corporations owe no moral obligation to the society they are profiting from. They are only driven by capital and brand propagation. Sometimes a moral approach is taken as a compromise, to continue operating in peace, etc. We are left with defending ourselves as best as possible and sometimes the onslaught is too much, as indicated by multitudes of lawsuits and entire legal industries rising out of corporate negligence.

Corporations are human constructs; they exist in whichever reality we create for them. You don't have to give in to their demands. They have to give in to ours.

For non religious people, the ones who don't believe in the invisible hand, regulations could take care of that, although given the current dynamic we're getting further from that by the day

That’s why regulation exists.

Who will regulate the regulators then?

For what it's worth there are people working on this problem! I work for one - https://choosefinch.com/ - which is a Chrome extension that scores products on amazon.com (and other retailers soon!) for, among other things, harmful compounds.

"Ignorance is bliss" is safe, zero-effort, and anxiety-free - until it isn't.

And when it isn't - both the "not just a river in Egypt" and "blame some handy & culturally appropriate boogeyman" strategies are popular and low-effort. And usually enjoy widespread social support.

Ahh....low effort sound bite boogyman legislation. Reminds me of Florida.

I 100% agree. It blew my mind that vanilla extract is not extracted from vanilla, and they're allowed to label artificial vanilla as vanilla extract because real vanilla extract tastes different, and people are already used to the other flavor matching the name. There are tons of examples and loopholes like this.

This. The artificial vanilla extract tastes far better than the natural.

I tire of being the fool buying expensive tasteless natural organic foods and spices!

I have a friend who gets irrationally angry about stuff like this. “People should just do their own research!” I’d like to think I’m of above average intelligence and I have no idea how I would ever go about verifying the safety of every item I buy for my family. It’s just not feasible. What if, instead, we have a group of people who enforce safety standards and we can place some trust in them to help keep us all safe?

Why not both? Mandating companies maintain a comprehensive list of ingredients, processes, countries of origin, etc, that is readily available to the public does not prevent agencies from also enforcing standards.

> It absolutely baffles me how everyone doesn't want considerably more information and transparency about our foods and cosmetics.

People do want that, which is why organic food is rising in popularity, why vegan cosmetics are a thing... the problem is politicians are bribed by big industry influence to not regulate too hard.

"This product is known to the state of California to cause cancer" : so what?

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