The last time the government worked was when it tried to protect peanut butter

The Question

Hold on—why do you hate the Food and Drug Administration?? —Julie

The Answer

I mentioned in this past week’s newsletter that it had to do with the FDA and peanut butter. And look—I would not get worked up about a historical event for no reason. I suppose there are libertarians who “hate the FDA” because they hate all government; that is not what I’m talking about. The real problem with what happened to the FDA about 50 years ago when it tried to regulate peanut butter is that it became a microcosm for many events and choices that have happened since, events and choices that have a direct impact on our current level of stress and overwhelm and even despair.

In our modern times, the agency is very bogged down with regulating medicines, drugs, and supplements, and food is perpetually neglected. Overall, food regulations are relatively loose, and it’s not a hard argument to make that our food system as it relates to public health is not in amazing shape. Food companies get a lot of leeway in what they bring to market, with relatively little concern given to the impacts of their products over the long term. The FDA has plenty of regulations in place, but it generally doesn’t act very quickly, and has been hamstrung for a long time in managing our food supply.

But why does it work this way? Why are we, the consumers, expected to fly blindly in the marketplace, praying that we are not being tricked by companies making the things we buy, trying to “do our own research” until our eyes dry up and fall out?

It begins with JFK

The year was 1962 when John F. Kennedy issued a special message to Congress about the growing tensions of consumers, consumption, and the consumer product market. “The march of technology--affecting, for example, the foods we eat, the medicines we take, and the many appliances we use in our homes--has increased the difficulties of the consumer along with his opportunities; and it has outmoded many of the old laws and regulations and made new legislation necessary,” he wrote. “The consumer typically cannot know whether drug preparations meet minimum standards of safety, quality, and efficacy. He usually does not know whether one prepared food has more nutritional value than another; whether the performance of a product will in fact meet his needs; or whether the ‘large economy size’ is really a bargain.”

JFK described several consumer rights: the right to safety, to be informed, to choose, and to be heard. “Too little has been done to make available to consumers the results of pertinent government research,” he wrote. As part of this initiative, he called upon the FDA to “expand its Consumer Consultant Program which… now provides valuable information directly to consumers on product trends, food standards and protection guides.”

In other words, JFK laid the problem squarely with the interchange between consumers, the government, and companies making products. The problem was not whether companies were lying about whether the “large economy size” was more economical than the regular, non-economy size, such that government could or should assert its authority and bring the corporation to heel for misleading the public; the problem was that the government was not finding out this information and relaying it to the consumer quickly or legibly enough.

Oh. Uh? Well—moving on, I suppose.

And then came the peanut butter

Even before all of this happened, the FDA was doing its best. In 1959,[^1] it issued a “proposed standard,” or agreed-upon regulatory definition, of peanut butter. At the time, this was not a wildly unusual thing for an agency like the FDA to do—it had done the same for breaded shrimp. Words need to mean things. In this case, the FDA proposed that any product labeled “peanut butter” should be made of at least 95 percent peanuts, and could also contain salt.