Paul Walker retweetet
In Praise of Being Told What We Can’t Eat
I used to find European regulations mildly embarrassing. The endless directives, the committees, the solemn deliberations about cucumber curvature. It seemed like a continent-wide exercise in missing the point.
Then I looked at what was actually in my food.
More than 10,000 chemicals are permitted in the American food supply.
Nearly 99 percent introduced since 2000 were approved not by the FDA, but by the food industry itself. 
Companies writing their own permission slips, essentially. The GRAS loophole, created in 1958, allows manufacturers to self-certify that their ingredients are safe. The EU has no equivalent.

The results are specific. BHT, used to extend shelf life in cereals and crackers, is banned in Europe over endocrine disruption concerns – which is why you will never find Wheat Thins here. 
Bovine growth hormone, linked to elevated cancer markers, is injected into American dairy cows and banned across the EU. Standard American milk contains it unless the label says otherwise.
Potassium bromate, a probable human carcinogen, is still used in American bread. 
This is not accident. Three of America’s biggest lobbying firms work for the food industry. Pepsi alone spends nine million dollars a year on lobbying. Incentives, working exactly as designed.
Europe chose the precautionary principle. Prove it is safe before it goes in. America chose the reverse. Things are safe until enough people are harmed to prove otherwise.
Throw in the right to repair, universal charging cables, and food labels a human being can actually parse – and what emerges is not bureaucratic overreach. It is a regulatory culture that decided to represent the person eating the food rather than the company selling it.
Critics can call that excessive. I call it civilization.
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