Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

> In 2021, two congressional reports found that many popular food products made for babies and toddlers contain significant levels of lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury, yet an action plan to establish voluntary limits by April 2024 appears to have stalled.

The reports show that the FDA has known that we've been spooning poison directly into the mouths of our babies for years (since at least 2019) and still the FDA can't even get voluntary limits on how much poison is acceptable in a jar of "Gerber peas and carrots" put in place. Until companies are held meaningfully accountable for selling dangerous products, these kinds of problems will only continue, but the FDA seems to care more about the corporations than the public.

I'd love to see the FDA continuously going around the country, randomly pulling products off of shelves, testing them, and then handing out massive fines to companies whose products are unsafe or mislabeled. I'd like to see more ways for people to test food products themselves too.

> I'd like to see more ways for people to test food products themselves too.

This is the best way to circumvent the politics and corruption.

The end result still needs to be accountability or else we're just spending money on test kits as an increasing amount of the food we buy goes right into the trash. It also means that those who can't afford all those kits will end up eating harmful products.

This isn't something that can be solved at the consumer level. We need policy here, but in the meantime we should have options to keep our families safe.

No, but easier consumer testing is part of the solution.

I liken this to security: You want layered security.

Right now we have maybe one or two layers of detection at best.

>Right now we have maybe one or two layers of detection at best.

The article is a typical example showing how we routinely have zero to one layer at the most.

Unfortunately these tests are still $100+ per test. Assuming there are tens of contaminants you might want to test for, and hundreds of foodstuffs in a typical pantry, the cost is out of range of a typical American.

I would like to see a government grant for cheap testing methods. Either covid-like test strips which are sensitive enough and can measure 10+ contaminants for mere cents, or a government test centre which will test for free anything you mail to them using an XRF gun (expensive kit, but can test one thing every 5 seconds or so, making the amortized cost very low)

Right. Think $5.00 a test to $20.00 is around the range.

An alternative is to make it easier and cheaper to do a blood/hair test.

Early and inexpensive detection by multiple means is imperative.

> This is the best way to circumvent the politics and corruption.

Maybe in terms of personal responsibility, but definitely not from a societal point of view... It would distort the market by having more expensive baby food tested more often (the people buying more expensive baby food would have the money and the time to do more testing)

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