The Waxman Report by Henry Waxman; Joshua Green

Author:Henry Waxman; Joshua Green
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: POL006000
ISBN: 9780446545679
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-07-02T10:00:00+00:00

RESIGNED TO THE IMPENDING LABELING STANDARDS AND LIMITS on health claims, the food industry returned to the issue of preemption. Undermining Proposition 65 was, of course, out of the question; but disparities between FDA and state labeling standards remained a costly headache, from which manufacturers now sought relief. Whenever state requirements differed from federal standards, companies had to tailor their packaging to a niche market. Rectifying this struck me as a reasonable enough request. With the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act poised to supply the information consumers needed, the patchwork of state standards was no longer a necessary bulwark.

But reaching compromise required more than just winning me over. First in the House, and later in the Senate, a series of obscure region-specific obstacles had to be overcome to placate lawmakers or industries that might block a deal. Most people imagine Congress as grappling over weighty matters of state, but it is not always so. Our first challenge was Vidalia onions. Unbeknownst to me, these pungent little bulbs, a vital component of certain popular Southern cocktails, are often sold in liquor stores. Roy Rowland of Georgia did not think it fair that liquor stores, which do not offer much in the way of foodstuffs besides Vidalia onions, be required to post food labels solely to apprise their clientele of the nutritional merits of cocktail onions. We granted an exemption.

The next hitch was small mom-and-pop vegetable stands, which couldn’t easily comply with the proposed labeling standards. These, too, earned an exemption.

The Senate demands seemed similarly arbitrary, though important to rectify given a senator’s ability to stop a bill. One of the many federal-state disparities was the legal standard for what constitutes maple syrup. The FDA required a product to contain at least 80 percent maple syrup in order to be labeled as such. But Vermont, which regards maple syrup in the same way Germans regard beer, had a standard of 100 percent that was evidently a matter of ferocious state pride—Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont threatened to block the legislation unless an exception were made for Vermont maple syrup. We relented to avoid that sticky situation.

A trickier impasse was whether dietary supplements would be subject to the bill’s constraints on health claims. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, home to many of the largest supplement manufacturers, insisted there be separate—and more lenient—standards, since claims to prevent or cure disease are the primary reason most people take dietary supplements. Here we were not willing to concede because supplements were largely unregulated and in many cases posed a real danger to users’ health. To save the bill, we agreed to insert a provision that directed the FDA to adopt a standard and procedure for evaluating and approving claims on dietary supplements, and to issue a binding recommendation one year after the law’s enactment.

The most vexing problem, however, turned out to be candy. To prevent unscrupulous manufacturers from burying information in microscopic type, the bill stipulated that nutrition labels must be a certain size. A box of Milk Duds could simply print the label on the outside of the package.

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