Tony on 11/5/2006 at 16:08
Quote Posted by demagogue
Can we allow the State to prohibit a food as dangerous when there's no solid scientific evidence, but there's plenty of suggestive evidence on the margins that make even the scientists a little concerned and wary. *They* won't eat it, they certainly won't let their baby daughters eat it ... but does that mean they can stop their neighbors from eating it?? The WTO won't let them go that far.
You're looking at it wrong. Instead of saying, "They won't eat it, they certainly won't let their baby daughters eat it, but does that mean they can stop their neighbors from eating it?", you should say, "They won't eat it, they certainly won't let their baby daughters eat it, but does that mean they can stop the companies from flooding the market with it?"
Banning foods that "may" cause cancer isn't targeting the people buying them, it's targeting the unscrupulous companies that don't care if it hurts someone and knows that most people have no alternative.
demagogue on 11/5/2006 at 16:33
Ah, interesting ... let's see, a comment like that's getting straight to the heart of the whole purpose of soft-paternalist/technobabble health regulation. So let's think about the difference between the "people buying them" and the "companies exploiting the stuff". I'm willing to meet you half-way on this:
Ostensibly, if a person *wants* to take the perhaps imaginary risk for all the benefits this carrageenan stuff gives, a liberal-democratic system should allow him. And by the same token if a company finds that consumers really benefit from the stuff, who is the State to say it knows *better* what people want. Seriously, the State doesn't do the market reserach, what does it know, and it's in the company's interest to do the health studies before hand so they don't incite a consumer revolt, and anyway they usually know the science better than the gov't does. As long as the stuff is safe (GRAS, generally regarded as safe, as they say), that's what the gov't cares about.
(and to put this into context, let's review what the "benefits" of carrageenan are, so BR/Convict have an idea what they're really suggesting in supporting a ban:
Quote Posted by wiki on carrageenan
For example, they can be used in:
Desserts, ice cream, milk shakes, sauces - gel to increase viscosity
Beer - clarifier to remove haze-causing proteins
Pates and processed meat - Substitute fat to increase water retention and increase volume
Toothpaste - stabilizer to prevent constituents separating
Fire fighting foam - thickener to cause foam to become sticky
Shampoo and cosmetic creams - thickener
Air freshener gels
Shoe polish - gel to increase viscosity
Biotechnology - gel to immobilize cells/enzymes
It's a strong intuition that when people see grey, watery: dessert, beer, meat, toothpaste, shampoo, that's been on the shelf more than a *day* it looks nasty and would make them nauseous, and of course I'm sure they'd like their fire fighting foam to
work. Seriously, this stuff is at the heart of what we by (perhaps trained) intuition think of as "edible" food at stores. So not only am I not so sure that companies are just going to roll over on the studies you admit aren't very scientific, but more than that, the millions of people that really think grey, watery food is disguisting and would rather take the "imaginary risk" to have food that actually looks digestable.)
So the thinking is, given that there are good reasons to let companies do what they want and consumers get what they want (as long as we know nobody is getting hurt in the process, remember you can't just assume that sort of thing in advance or we couldn't eat anything) the State should have a good *reason* to stop
both the person choosing the stuff if that's what he likes and the company from producing it. For better or worse, liberal societies have chosen "science" to largely do that job (I quoted that not to be an ass, but because I mean a particularly narrow understanding of science, that favors the big scale, 10 year epidemological studies that really clinches the case, and not just some guy with a white coat saying "x").
Also, I mean "science" as opposed to, e.g., Putin's decision to ban Ukranian wine because he can't stand its president's face, the Orange Rev, etc ... so you see, we could do a lot worse than "science", ok yeah, Russia's health minister said Ukranian wine was "really dangerous", and they just figured that out now, and they "inconvienently" misplaced the studies that show why, but sometimes you have to say a duck is a duck.
You're suggesting people are going to buy whatever is on the shelf and assume it's safe because it's there, and there's no good reason to trust the companies as long as they can hide any risk to avoid a consumer revolt. And of course, that can all be true and it's still a problem. You might say, we can put labels on the food, but the problem there is where do you stop. Does every food product have to have a 50 page dossier attached? And even with a few choice labels, then people are going to
assume a food is unsafe (even a GRAS food), and science and the State can't really say that it is. I mean, there may be a hypothetical risk buried into
every food if you dig deep enough, where do you draw a line if not with scientific notions of real harm on humans? It's not a question I presume to have an easy answer to, but it's a problem that we have to struggle with because the alternative (a short list of State sanctioned foods, god imagine the potential for abuse there, or just arbitrary reasons to ban foods because we don't like a producer's face) are much worse.
RarRar on 11/5/2006 at 18:40
Quote Posted by TheGreatGodPan
He didn't specify what exactly the gasses were. It could be rather harmless (this would fit with his fine bill of health afterward) but just smell really bad. Perhaps despite how scary the name sounds it is legal to do this in England.
I remembered the name: (
http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/methylenechloride/index.html) Methylene Chloride. Classified as a known carcinogen (but what isn't nowdays), but I'll tell you it most certainly was a LOT worse than bad smelling--it would burn your skin. It wasn't liquid form, that is, it was in a barrel and heated until it became a gas. There was a duct over the barrel but we didn't wear any kind of breathing protection. We did wear arm-length gloves, but sometimes they only served to keep the gas nice and close to your skin for a good long time. Looking at a few websites, it was probably all administered according to the codes of the time. I wouldn't be in the same building with the stuff nowdays though.
There were four of us high schoolers. Sometimes when we'd be working the late shift we'd hear someone or other scream from someplace on the other side of the room. That would give us a chuckle. It would mean either somebody got their hand caught in the drill again or there was another Methylene Chloride "incident." It all sounds rather Dickensian I know, but it wasn't as bad as it sounds. We had fun at that job, probably because we didn't know any better.
It was a pretty miraculous substance, actually. Dip the scratched, fogged and pitted plastic in for about a second and have it come out shiny, new and clear as pure water.
