FRESH Act is a rotten apple

By Sarah Sorscher, Director of Regulatory Affairs for the Center for Science in the Public Interest

If you’ve ever picked a shiny red apple off a tree and turned it over to find it crawling with juicy worms, you know how safety advocates felt when Rep. Kat Cammack, R-FL, published a draft bill, entitled the “FRESH Act” promising “FDA Review and Evaluation of Safe, Healthy, and Affordable Foods.”  

While promising to strengthen food safety, the bill has two big rotten worms at its core: provisions that would broadly block state food safety policies while weakening current FDA authority over premarket safety review for substances used in foods. 

The bill contains industry-backed preemption provisions that would broadly wipe out state protections “related to the use, labeling, sale, or marketing” of food or dietary supplements. This effort squarely targets recent progress on food policy in the states, which includes new bans on harmful chemicals, requirements for heavy metal testing, restrictions on the sale of harmful dietary supplements to children, and new allergen and nutrition menu disclosures. This extreme preemption language will hurt consumers but serves as a major win for big food companies, which last year launched a multimillion dollar effort to broadly preempt state safety and labeling laws. 

The version of preemption in the FRESH Act would be catastrophic for food safety, much of which is regulated by states and local health and agriculture agencies. Congress and FDA have so far failed to deliver meaningful chemical safety reform, leading state legislators to take up the slack. For example, in recent days, the New York legislature passed a bill that would require notification and scientific substantiation for claims now shielded by the federal GRAS loophole.

The FRESH Act doesn’t close the GRAS loophole, it replaces GRAS with astro-turf. Contrary to its title, the bill would not require FDA premarket review of new food chemicals. In fact, it would make permanent, and even widen in some ways, the current loophole in federal law that allows food companies to introduce new food substances without submitting safety data for FDA review.  

The bill does this by forcing the FDA to rubber stamp decisions made in secret by review panels paid by the food industry. One of those industry panels would be the Flavor Extract Manufacturers Association, an industry-funded group named specifically in the bill. FDA will have only limited oversight over these industry panels, a vague accreditation authority not fully clarified in the current draft of the bill.  

American consumers broadly support strengthening food chemical safety laws and would welcome meaningful solutions. But this bill’s core provisions don’t make us safer. Instead, they weaken FDA oversight over new food chemicals and preempt state law, undermining consumer protections. 

There is something deeply rotten about a bill that promises to put FDA in charge of “review and evaluation” of safe food but hands the real safety decisions over to the food industry.  

Combine that with blocking states, counties and cities from carrying out their historic role in protecting the health of their own citizens, and this policy really starts to stink.