This week’s announcement from the Food and Drug Administration declaring that tara flour is “generally not recognized as safe” and illegal to use could spell hope for a broken food system that enables unchecked chemicals and food additives to be put into America’s food products.
The FDA’s determination about tara flour comes two years after almost 500 people were sickened from consuming the ingredient in Daily Harvest’s French Lentil + Leek Crumbles. At least 39 of those people had their gallbladders removed.
Tara flour is a new plant-based protein ingredient made from seeds of the South American tree Tara spinosa. The FDA’s announcement about it wasn’t unexpected, because preliminary data following the outbreak pointed to this as the likely source of illness.
“This FDA report is consistent with the findings from our own root cause analysis that led us to discontinue the use of tara flour in mid-2022,” a spokesperson for Daily Harvest told Fast Company when asked for comment.
But at least one food safety expert hopes that the FDA’s determination offers a sign that the agency will take a closer look at other food manufacturers’ chemicals and ingredients.
“This is encouraging,” says Brian Ronholm, former deputy undersecretary of food safety at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the current head of food policy at Consumer Reports. “So hopefully they’ll be able to continue to do this type of work because I think, ultimately, they’re going to be concerned by what they find.”
A broken system for deciding what’s safe
Currently, food makers are not required to submit to the FDA any data demonstrating their safety of additives under the secret “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, loophole, which allows companies to self-certify that chemical additives and ingredients used in food are safe. Over the past several decades, the agency has lacked the willingness and funding to perform such post-market assessments on ingredients.
Yet today, 75% of America’s food is processed, filled with a laundry list of artificial and chemical ingredients.
“There has been no way for consumers to know the safety of these chemicals because there’s zero transparency with the industry,” says Ronholm. “It’s primarily a voluntary system.”
When Congress passed the GRAS law in 1958, lawmakers assumed that the FDA would review the data, but as more ingredients began hitting the market, it became too overwhelming for the agency. It ultimately allowed food and chemical makers to decide for themselves that foods were safe.
Lawmakers are also concerned about what’s going into American food products. U.S. Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts and U.S. Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, both Democrats, recently introduced bills that ensure “toxic free foods” and close the loophole for industry self-policing of food safety.
States are also taking action. A proposed bill in New York would require companies to post safety information to the state’s Department of Agriculture and Markets, giving consumers and scientists access to the data to check a company’s assumptions.
“It’s a process that tries to call companies’ bluff,” Ronholm says.
California already passed the California Food Safety Act, which bans the use of four food additives, including red dye No. 3, while another proposed state measure would ban artificial food coloring in public schools. Other states, including Pennsylvania and Illinois, are following suit with similar food safety measures.
For its part, the food industry is shifting more focus toward creating minimally processed and clean ingredients. At least 75% of consumers say they’ll pay more for a clean label. Food companies are working to remove chemical additives while preserving shelf life, and in the past two years 8 in 10 manufacturers have reformulated clean labels.
“Ideally,” Ronholm says, “companies don’t want to put unsafe products on the market and destroy their brand, but you do have to question how diligent they are in the process.”