Regarding "New Yorkers need affordable groceries, not more bureaucracy," lohud.com, Opinion, July 9:
Food giants are working hard to kill a bill that will protect New Yorkers from unsafe and poorly tested food additives — and to do it, they’re pulling on New Yorkers’ heartstrings by claiming it will ruin bagels and pizza.
Earlier this year, the New York Legislature passed the New York Food Safety and Chemical Disclosure Act, which, if signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul, will take two concrete steps to protect New Yorkers from unsafe food chemicals: shining a light on food chemicals declared safe behind closed doors, and banning three chemicals with known health risks.
What will the NY Food Safety and Chemical Disclosure Act do?
First, it closes the loophole in federal law that allows food companies to
introduce new food additives into the food supply by self-certifying safety in complete secrecy. Even the Food and Drug Administration is kept in the dark. Under this bill, companies that use ingredients that have not been checked for safety by the FDA must notify New York state authorities and explain how they determined those ingredients safe, providing all the underlying safety data. All of that information would then be posted in a public database for New Yorkers and others to see. This first-of-its-kind law would finally pull the curtain back on the shady practices that the food industry has used to introduce into the food supply ingredients like tara flour — which sent more than 100 people to the hospital a few years ago — without any federal oversight or evidence of safety.
Second, this bill will prohibit the sale of food containing three toxic additives: Red 3, propylparaben, and potassium bromate. All three of those additives were banned in California in 2023 and have been linked to serious harm.
Why the food industry does not want this NY law
The food industry has fought against this bill every step of the way, and now that it’s one pen stroke away from becoming law, they’re resorting to baseless scare tactics in a last-ditch effort to kill this bill.
Specifically, food industry lobbyists are now arguing that banning potassium bromate, a harmful food additive used in some industrial flour, will change New York’s iconic pizza and bagels for the worse.
That seems unlikely. While industry says this bill will make pizza worse, last I checked, pizza has remained readily available in Italy where potassium bromate has been prohibited for decades. Even in New York, some shops have already eschewed bromated flour. And among manufactured packaged foods, potassium bromate is very uncommon. Of the nearly 450,000 products included in the USDA’s Branded Food Products database, only 594 list potassium bromate as an ingredient.
Moreover, potassium bromate is a genotoxic carcinogen according to the World Health Organization’s expert committee on food additives. That means it causes cancer by damaging DNA. Genotoxic carcinogens can cause cancer at any dose. That means there’s no amount that’s entirely risk free. On the basis of this evidence, WHO’s expert panel concluded in 1992 that use of potassium bromate in flour was not appropriate. Potassium bromate has been banned in the European Union since the 1990s.
The reality is that bakers don’t need potassium bromate to craft the pizza, bagels or other beloved bread products that define New York’s culinary scene. And New Yorkers want and deserve a food system that protects them from toxic additives like potassium bromate and that prioritizes public health over profit. Hochul must deliver.
Thomas Galligan is principal scientist for food additives and supplements at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: NY won't destroy bagels and pizza. We need safe flour | Opinion
