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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Here's the current California Prop 65 list. It's... extensive.

https://oehha.ca.gov/media/downloads/proposition-65//p65sing...

I don't think this means as much as the headline makes it sound like. In the State of California, alcoholic beverages are also carcinogens requiring warnings.

California cognitive dissonance: the science suggesting carcinogenicity of acrylamide, which is present --- in significant amounts --- in most cooked food and especially roasted meat and potatoes, is far firmer than the science suggesting that glyphosate is a human carcinogen. It'll be awhile before California Prop 65's a bag of potatoes, though, won't it? but see below, where it turns out I'm wrong about this

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Yep. Just a clarification: supermarkets, restaurants, bars, and coffee houses already have a single sign warning about cancer-causing agents per Prop 65. The "bag of potatoes" in your example would not have to be individually labeled. The Prop 65 warnings are basically invisible to Californians because they are literally posted everywhere food is sold.

If everything has a warning on it, what's the point?

At the point where you're putting a blanket warning on grocery stores: there is no point.

They might as well just start labeling the things that don't cause cancer, just like the little Kosher symbols on food.

Lawsuits. Giving lawyers something else to sue about.

Except it was the citizens who explicitly and separately vote for this one, and explicitly chose to allow suing over it.

They tried to do the same thing with GMO labeling, which would have had an identical result (lawsuits and everything being labeled GMO no matter whether it was or not) Thankfully, it lost the vote.

Who are 'they,' exactly? Lawyers are citizens too, and more than capable of employing PR agencies and lobby groups. It's not like propositions just pop out of the collective will of the citizenry; being voted on and confirmed by a majority is just the last step after some lobby group has already successfully waged a publicity campaign.

While I'm sure that wasn't the intent, the net result is .. you're not wrong about that.

The proposition was perhaps a good idea that was horribly executed. The idea is to get companies to stop using potentially dangerous chemicals, so the proposition required that companies give a warning if they use any of a set of chemicals on a certain list. Which might be okay, except it has several problems:

* Private citizens are able to initiate civil enforcement and collect penalties; it's not limited to regulatory agencies. Which virtually guarantees that enforcement is going to be about milking money rather than trying to actually reduce harm.

* There's no consideration for dosing, anywhere. So a potential trace contamination is considered as equal a violation as dumping vats of the stuff in the public water system.

* The requirement for listing a chemical is .001% of causing cancer of 70 years. That is a ridiculously low bar, which means many low-risk chemicals are going to be swept up.

* There's no danger for excessive labelling, and the labels remove the liability for violations.

Taken together, it's a recipe for companies to just slap the warning on everything.

>The proposition was perhaps a good idea that was horribly executed. [...] There's no danger for excessive labelling, and the labels remove the liability for violations.

Well, there's that old saying: "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." -- supposedly Abe Lincoln

https://www.google.com/search?q=The+best+way+to+get+a+bad+la....

was perhaps a good idea that was horribly executed.

This describes some rather large fraction of laws, period.

It also describes California's entire proposition system!

The point is for everything to have a warning on it, to obscure the actual dangers. (At least, if to wasn't, you'd expect the groups that pushed Prop 65 to realize the problem and push for a fix.)

Exactly. Eat at your own risk. Live at your own risk.

> The Prop 65 warnings are basically invisible to Californians because they are literally posted everywhere food is sold.

I just don't know what to do with the information on those signs. They are posted outside my apartment, at my work's garage, at Fry's... if I actively heeded the sign's warnings I would have to leave California I guess.

They are at Starbucks. I really don't know how to interpret these things because they have no details. They don't say which item is known to cause cancer, so I'm standing there adding sweetener and thinking "should I not add sugar? Or cinnamon?". It is doing more harm than good at this point.

I really want a t-shirt saying in bold letters "This person contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer."

Quick Google search: https://www.zazzle.com/ca_prop_65_t_shirt-235283992142706565

I'm not particularly fond of the front; saying people who vote for something are all morons is unecessarily polarizing. This one's better:

http://www.cafepress.com/mf/9264497/proposition-65-t-shir_ts...

You can't go into a building in California without seeing a sign warning about carcinogens, so you tune them out. I have no idea how you're supposed to know if there's something truly dangerous.

The California Prop 65 signs are the brick and mortar equivalent to "this site uses cookies" notices online. As soon as every store/site has them, it is the same as no store/site having them.

I just bought a bag of chips (from Costco in Maryland) that has a known-in-the-state-of-California warning about acrylamide.

Wow. I stand corrected.

"The settlement requires the potato chip producers to reduce acrylamide to 275 parts per billion in three years, a low enough level to avoid a Prop. 65 warning label. That amounts to a 20 percent reduction for Frito-Lay and an 87 percent reduction for Kettle Chips, Brown's office said. Little or no reduction will be needed for most Cape Cod chips, but one product, Cape Cod Robust Russets, will require a warning label, the attorney general said."

from http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Lawsuit-over-potato-ch...

The acrylamide level of the potato increases as it browns. It appears the acrylamide level of these particular chips is therefore unavoidable.

Importantly: you are unlikely to avoid significant acrylamide production in home cooking. It's the potatoes that need the warning, not the chips.

My CIA cookbook begins potato recipes with first blanching them in water prior to roasting, sauté, etc, which is apparently an effective mitigation.

My understanding --- which is casual and mostly comes from Dave Arnold rants on Cooking Issues --- is that acrylamide is produced any time you brown a potato. So: you can eat boiled or mashed potatoes, sure, but if you roast them you're exposed.

This is equally true of meat, and other vegetables.

You essentially can't avoid acrylamide if you cook. Labeling it is silly.

Potatoes are worse than other foods because they have asparagine and starch together.

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/d...

So foods with less starch and/or less protein won't end up with as much acrylamide.

There's other carcinogens generated by high temperature cooking though, for example, https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/d...

I was not aware of the existence of a Culinary Institute of America, and assumed it was the Central Intelligence Agency.

"Why would the CIA have a cookbook..?"

McDonalds in California all have a prominent Prop 65 warning about acrylamide near checkout. Example: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-T_-QObaB0sY/Tts3XPghilI/AAAAAAAAEL...

I haven't seen this in other venues that serve fried potato. I wonder if McDonalds was sued at some point.

The state should find a new scientific threshold to use before issuing these warnings. The items added are so extensive that it renders the designation almost meaningless. You become desensitized to these things.

Why lump wine in with something clearly dangerous like asbestos? (Curiously Serpentine is the state rock).

I have often thought on my flights into California that as soon as the plane crosses the California state line, the pilot should just come on and announce "The State of California is known by the State of California to contain things known by the State of California to cause cancer."

You are exposed to radiation while flying, I wouldn't be overly surprised if California passed a law mandating that the pilot notify passengers that "flying is known to the state of California to cause cancer."

> California cognitive dissonance

I was born here over 40 years ago, and I've lived here since then except for a 15 year stint in the south and midwest.

I love my state; but this place is objectively crazy in a lot of ways.

Maybe that's one of the core ingredients to the many other awesome things here.

> I love my state; but this place is objectively crazy in a lot of ways.

> Maybe that's one of the core ingredients to the many other awesome things here.

California cognitive dissonance. (Nice job setting up the symmetry!)

> In the State of California, alcoholic beverages are also carcinogens requiring warnings.

Well, alcohol is a carcinogen. Why not label it as such?

That was just one example of how everything is labeled a carcinogen there.

Alcohol is a poor choice if you are trying to illustrate over labeling, because alcohol, especially heavy consumption of spirits, has some notoriety as a cause of oral cancer.

http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Cancer-of-the-mouth/Pages/Cause...

I think it's pretty simple to observe that if you're using the same label for ethylene oxide and potato chips, something is wrong with your system.

In fairness, an equally simple observation is that there might be something wrong with your potato chips.

Not that I think CA's level of labeling is reasonable or at all helpful.

No! The problem isn't potato chips; it's cooked potatoes. See the issue? The labels are actually subtracting from your understanding of the risk.

Dosage is important in factoring risk. Problem with prop 65 it doesn't factor in risk at all. Potassium-40 produces ionizing radiation and is present with all sources of potassium. That doesn't mean you shouldn't eat Bananas.

Because labeling everything desensitizes people to the label and distorts risk analysis. Desensitization allows people to overestimate the dangers of some substances, while potentially severely underestimating the dangers of others.

What isn't carcinogenic?

> In the State of California, alcoholic beverages are also carcinogens requiring warnings.

You make that sound like a dumb move, but alcohol is linked to several cancer, and people who drink alcohol need to know that drinking is raising their risk of several different types of cancer.

Whether prop 65 is the right way to do that is another matter.

I think you nailed it by distinguishing usefulness, labeling alchohol and potatoes the same way makes you want to treat one like the other and I don't see how that turns out well.

Not really. Starbucks in CA have Prop 65 warnings listing coffee as as a carcinogen.

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