[HN Gopher] Food Colorants Before Aniline Dyes (1991) [pdf]
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Food Colorants Before Aniline Dyes (1991) [pdf]
Author : noleary
Score : 31 points
Date : 2024-10-31 06:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (acshist.scs.illinois.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (acshist.scs.illinois.edu)
| t43562 wrote:
| This sort of thing has always seemed to me to be the ultimate
| example of why we don't rely entirely on competition and the free
| market to provide us with "the best deal".
|
| How can you know if your yellow sweets are coloured with lead
| chromate? How could you know all the millions of things you need
| to know about possible dangers so you can evaluate if some
| product that's 10% cheaper is actually not going to kill you?
|
| It's only regulation and government interference that can make it
| manageable for the consumer.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>How can you know if your yellow sweets are coloured with lead
| chromate?
|
| Well because if they are then eventually someone will get sick,
| they will sue the company, the company will have to pay
| millions in damages, and it will have to stop using lead in
| their sweets, which will scare every other company away from
| trying to do the similar thing /s
| altruios wrote:
| I had a lengthy reply before I saw the /s...
|
| Poe's law strikes again! There are in fact people that think
| like that, and have to be lead by the nose to waters of
| wisdom with the hopes of drinking a small bit.
| mapt wrote:
| Clearly the legal system has broken down (been deliberately
| broken), and the regulatory system has simultaneously
| broken down (been deliberately broken), so somebody's going
| to have to get a little creative relative to the norms that
| they were raised with, if they want to continue to actually
| have a society rather than a Lotka-Volterra equation.
|
| The impetus towards revenge killings and blood debts
| successfully deterred malicious actions through most of
| human prehistory and even much of history. With the trend
| towards corporate consolidation, each CEO's exposure is
| actually pretty huge when "their actions result in the
| death of others". All that's necessary is a well-armed
| grieving family member and a social narrative that
| actually, yes, this is how we do things. All we're missing
| is the narrative.
|
| And the geeks actually have the narrative. Cyberpunk is
| just the most aspirational dream of occasional justice that
| can exist within the confines of the America Reagan built,
| in the post-liberal corporatist society.
|
| >> The personal, as everyone is so fucking fond of saying,
| is political. So if some idiot politician, some power
| player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those
| you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The
| Machinery of Justice will not serve you here - it is slow
| and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the
| little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures
| of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you
| want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it
| personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message
| across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken
| seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And
| make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being
| considered dangerous marks the difference - the only
| difference in their eyes - between players and little
| people. Players they will make deals with. Little people
| they liquidate. And time and again they cream your
| liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal
| execution with the ultimate insult that it's just business,
| it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life
| and that it's nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it
| personal. - Takeshi Kovacs, Altered Carbon
| K0balt wrote:
| Ah, the wonders of the free market!
|
| Fortunately, we saw a solution to the problem of dead
| customers just a day or two ago right here on HN!
| https://repaer.earth/
| encoderer wrote:
| It's a lot easier to kill a person than to kill a company.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| We are seeing that in Sinaloa right now - El Mayo is out of
| commission, but there's money to be made in fentanyl, cocaine
| and avocado.
| wahern wrote:
| In theory you would have independent, private organizations
| which people trusted to inspect manufacturing facilities and
| review products. In the U.S., those types of organizations
| existed before modern Federal regulations. For example, United
| States Pharmacopeia (USP) or Underwriters Laboratories (UL),
| both of which were founded in the 19th century. Both of those
| organizations still exist and their role has actually been
| incorporated into law.
|
| > It's only regulation and government interference that can
| make it manageable for the consumer.
|
| I would disagree with such a strong statement, but for various
| reasons I would agree that a purely private approach probably
| wouldn't be able to achieve the current degree of consumer
| safety in the U.S., though in less militantly individualistic
| societies perhaps it could. (Note that "the government", as in
| the police state, and institutions of social governance are not
| the same thing.)
| pascoej wrote:
| I know it's somewhat unpopular because of many things are labeled
| with insignificant quantities or are treated as a fact of life,
| but Prop 65 has to be my favorite ballot proposition.
|
| I would rather know what potentially harmful substances are in
| something and decide if it's acceptable than not be told at all.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Prop 65 threshold for level of harm is two orders of magnitude
| below any effect level (not the harm level, effect) which I'd
| argue creates so many false notices of harm that most people
| simply ignore them eroding trust in the government.
|
| Indeed the level is so low that under the law, the daily
| recommended dose of vitamin A for pregnant women would need a
| notice saying it caused birth defects. They had to ignore the
| law and add a caveat for vitamin A since _not_ taking it causes
| birth defects.
|
| If they didn't pick an arbitrary threshold, ignoring scientific
| consensus on what dose makes the poison, it would have been far
| more successful.
| pampa wrote:
| I think there was a prop 65 warning on a box of kreg pocket
| screws (or was it the jig?).
| Suppafly wrote:
| It might be your preference but prop 65 warnings have basically
| taught an entire generation that safety warnings are
| meaningless and can be ignored, which is presumably the
| opposite of the desired effect.
| throw0101a wrote:
| For a history of the first artificial (clothing) dye, see Simon
| Garfield's book _Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour That
| Changed the World_ :
|
| * https://www.simongarfield.com/books/mauve/
|
| * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/580291.Mauve
|
| * https://archive.org/details/mauvehowonemanin0000garf
|
| It's a few years old now (2000), so I don't know if there's a
| newer/better 'full-length' laymen treatment on the topic:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Perkin
| redprince wrote:
| Mentioned in the article, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 has
| an interesting history. It came about due to the work of Harvey
| Washington Wiley who used healthy volunteers to test and document
| the effects of then used preservatives like borax and
| formaldehyde. The volunteers were called "The Poison Squad".
| There's a PBS documentary about them:
| https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8jbub8
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(page generated 2024-11-01 23:01 UTC)