FDA Denies Petition to Ban All Phthalates in Food Packaging

Take plastics for example, they're as acutely non-toxic as you can get you're not having any readily measurable adverse health outcomes from handling it, touching it, and even consuming foods directly in contact with it. And yet there are still things we would have missed even if we adopted this whitelisting approach. We would have never captured the problem of microplastics that we see today, the mechanical and chemical breakdown of plastics in the environment leading to far higher consumption and presence of it in our bodies could not have realistically been studied or predicted even if we took a whitelisting approach.

Now you have to consider what the effects of whitelisting everything would mean for productivity and progress. Imagine how much more everyday things would cost if plastics had to be whitelisted before being allowed in any products. Even now knowing about the existence of microplastics, it isn't clear that the effects they have decisively outweigh the benefits of plastics.

Because someone makes a lot of money when they are illegal.

Same goes for the legal drugs. Someone makes a lot of money when they are legal.

This balance is key to solving many of our societal problems, but we tend to completely black-and-white ignore it.

Carbon compounds, meanwhile, are practically endless and there's no one quality you can point to and say "that, that right there is the problem, ban that part". Piecemeal bans won't work.

And that wasn't an edit, it was there from the beginning.

Yes—the "actions of man" might have been to create a different, also-useful-for-that-purpose lead compound, if they thought they could get away with it without someone putting a stop to it more or less immediately, just for the fact that it had lead in it. The trouble with many of these compounds is we can't point to a single easy-to-prove thing they have in common, like the presence of lead, as the cause of the harm—so you're left either testing for harm before the novel compound is included in products, or endless piecemeal bans with harm occurring at every step until, if we're fortunate, industries luck into compounds that are both the most economical and least-harmful of the remaining non-banned options.

I make absolutely no claim to the contrary.

> They are demonized by proxy because they are inextricably linked.

That's like demonizing computer manufacturers because computers are inextricably linked to cybercrime. (cue someone bringing up a real-world example of exactly that, I'm sure)

Is it really so hard to fight the herbicide and pesticide usage itself that's doing the harm that attacking the entire concept of GMOs is necessary in some way? If the use of such chemicals was disallowed in the first place, there'd be no incentive to use roundup-ready crops.

The only things that I can think of that fighting against the GMOs in general instead of against herbicides and pesticide usage directly gets you is a target that's easier to scaremonger against from what I've seen.

It bothers me because it's dishonest. The problem isn't the GMO crops. The problem is companies dismissing customer harm in the face of increased profit. Fight the usage of the chemicals. Fight the companies harming their customers for a buck. Heck, fight the specific usage of roundup-ready crops. Leave GMOs as a concept and a field out of it.