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Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

Are you seriously confused why governments regulate what can be put in food and sold to the public?

Here's a classic for you, one of the early incidents which lead to this kind of regulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_Bradford_sweets_poisoning

Here's some more contemporary links:

https://food.ec.europa.eu/safety/food-improvement-agents/add...

https://food.ec.europa.eu/safety/food-improvement-agents/fla...

Which includes an answer to your question: "The procedure for authorisation of a flavouring substance is common to the one established for food additives and enzymes under Regulation (EC) No 1331/2008."

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The fact that something called "flavouring substance" is a thing makes me shake my head.

>Are you seriously confused why governments regulate what can be put in food and sold to the public?

Are these the same regulators that allowed Olestra to be used? sidebar--just to check the spelling of Olestra, I used the Mac's force click dictionary access: "Origin 1980s: from (p)ol(y)est(e)r + the suffix -a." WTF? Seriously? We dropped some letters from polyester and called it food ingredient?

Yeah, sounds like some "regulations will save us" doesn't work as expected.

As I can't find when olestra products were sold in the EU, the answer seems to be “no”. Don't hesitate to prove me wrong though.

Sure, the EU definitely seems to be better about what it considers food. The United States of Greed definitely needs to do better. I'm constantly flabbergasted at what is considered edible and passes as food in the US. The fact that being required to put on the package the words "anal leakage" doesn't immediately stop someone from using it as an ingredient just shows how little corp food cares about what it puts into the "food products" it manufactures/sales.

>Here's a classic for you, one of the early incidents which lead to this kind of regulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_Bradford_sweets_poisoning

I don't see how said regulation would have helped in this case, the shop owner simply mistook fake sugar for arsenic, it's not like he decided to sell arsenic-flavored candies.

Correct. He was selling candies filled with (what he thought was) gypsum. Yum.

(He didn't mix up the sugar with arsenic. He mixed up the gypsum.)

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