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Comment by throwawayboise | Hacker News Reader

Does "Europe" have an abundant surplus of infant formula that they are prepared to export? A lot more mothers breast-feed in Europe, formula feeding is rather uncommon so why would one expect that inventory is available to send somewhere else?

And then you have the mother in Tennessee who gets a can of German-labeled formula powder, with mixing instructions in metric. Is she going to add the correct amount of water? Or are we going to re-label it? Who does that? Who checks it? How long will it take?

I don't think this is the simple answer it appears to be.

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Being from Paris and living in The bay area, a lot more women breastfeed here than in France. Even in the countryside of France, where my extended family is, few women breastfeed.

Please let’s not make blanket statements about Europe vs USA.

Clearly, European countries will be touchy about exporting baby formula. Also, the food regulation being widely different, I’m not sure how easily one could import european baby formula

> Clearly, European countries will be touchy about exporting baby formula.

Formula will have to be labeled in English (and possibly French or Spanish) to not violate EU Export Regulations.. No one got upset about bulk exports to China, shipping direct consumer containers was OTOH illegal.

Certainly, since this would be the first food Americans have ever imported from Europe, there is no framework for Imperialization of nutrition labels, since no one has ever done it before in the history of ever. Congratulations you found a show-stopper!

Of course EU producers who package food for export label it accordingly. However what Reason seems to be implying is that we just load up some cargo planes with pallets of surplus formula that are apparently not needed in Europe and bring it to the USA under some kind of "emergency" order.

It can’t be that hard to add a label on top of the existing label.

In fact, a lot of somewhat shady spice packets you get at asian groceries in the bay area have a crummy paper sticker with english labeling over the Indian/Chinese/... original label.

If this can happen for spices, why not for baby formula ?

I think that this is a case of noone wanting to take the risk of eventually someone selling some product that is expired or otherwise bad with relaxed labeling/... rules. I can understand it, too, from a biz POV.

I think the government needs to provide some sort of indemnification to importers/distributors/groceries. If the tradeoff demands it – 'X babies die/get sick because of malnutrition b/c missing baby formula' vs 'Y kids die/get sick because of bad baby formula.'

X/Y are just hard to pin down.

> If this can happen for spices, why not for baby formula ?

Surely this shoupd be bloody obvious? Like asking - if you can import dried fruit, why cant you import donated blood?

The task is translating from metric to imperial and German or Dutch to English.

Once. This will take someone an hour, someone else will spend thirty minutes proofreading it. Tell you what, two people take thirty minutes to proofread it, just to make you comfortable.

How do you expect this task to fail? Compare and contrast the failure modes of importing blood and translating a nutrition label for me, please. If it's so bloody obvious.

These are fair points. I suppose I was giving Reason the benefit of the doubt about the EU being interested in selling some type of surplus. Certainly not a forgone conclusion, as you pointed out. The most potent critiques of libertarian thought often rest their case on the world as it is, not as the libertarians imagine it to be.

I did a cursory googling and you are correct that formula feeding is less prevalent in Europe. TIL. My only knowledge was that, anecdotally, I know several expats that prefer EU formula for their kids. This jived with my general sense of more stringent EU regulation around food safety.

The most potent critiques of libertarian thought often rest their case on the world as it is, not as the libertarians imagine it to be.

Isn't that equally true for critiques of progressive thought?

Yes.

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