Free Don't Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley

I had a lime allergy and could never figure out why Coca-Cola made my throat itch, I would be grateful to him. Yet when I picture Harland Sanders in his kitchen apron, adding a pinch of this, a pinch of that, I can’t help but mourn the death of the secret-recipe ritual. The problem is, I am the problem. Those with food allergies are the patron saints of the fight against secret ingredients, and Congress has acted in our name.
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    As food sellers increased their investment in prepackaged products during the twentienth century, we lost the ability torun down the street and double-check whether the baker had brushed his breads with egg that morning. Bread went from having four to fourteen ingredients, including any number of chemical derivatives designed to increase its shelf life. The markers of a modern kitchen included the pull-tab soda, the TV dinner, and other containers designed to rob foods of their organic shape and provenance.
    In Ralph Nader’s introduction to
The Chemical Feast
, a 1970 critique of the Food and Drug Administration authored by regulatory affairs attorney Jim Turner, Nader issued a clarion call for transparency in the labeling of commercial foods. “Food is the most intimate consumer product,” Nader observed. So why is it, he asked, that we know more about what goes into a can of dog food than about what goes into our own bellies?
    By the mid-1970s, the FDA provided suggested guidelines for labels describing products in terms of basic nutritional values: protein, fats, carbohydrates, and so on. Some companies chose to obey these guidelines in response to an increasing popular interest in good health. After all, this was the beginning of the era of Richard Simmons (real name: Milton Teagle Simmons), whose rise to fitness guru fame was preceded by stints as a New Orleans pralines vendor, a New York advertising executive, and a Beverly Hills maître d’. Take that unholy combination of vocational skills, add a costume of candy-striped dolphin shorts and Swarovski-crystal-dotted tank tops, and voilà! A nation was inspired to run like hell. And count calories as they ran.
    Labels that we take for granted today were not institutionalized until the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, the year I turned ten. What had been voluntary becamemandatory: disclosure of nutritional values, including saturated and unsaturated fat, sugar, and sodium, on all manufactured foods and the top-twenty selling fruits, vegetables, fish, and shellfish at any given grocery store. Meat, poultry, and egg products were addressed in 1993 with legislation coauthored by the Department of Agriculture.
    Because much of the consumer activism was driven by concerns over scams related to the burgeoning diet-food market, the act focused on standardizing definitions for terms such as
low, lean, lite
, and
reduced
. Some notable exemptions to the labeling requirements were made for foods that weren’t seen as contributing to the rapidly expanding waistlines of the masses. These included some infant formulas, mom-and-pop products with less than $500,000 in retail sales each year, and “spices, flavorings, and colors.”
    This last exception did not raise much objection at the time. Making collective declarations of something like “Cajun spice” seemed like a pragmatic nod toward minor ingredients. A set of measuring spoons doesn’t include the measurements for a pinch, a dash, or a smidge. Similarly, an exception was made for incidental additives and processing aids. These loopholes would soon become troublesome.
    By 1996, the FDA issued an “Allergy Warning Letter” after receiving a number of reports “concerning consumers who experienced adverse reactions following exposure to allergenic substances in foods.” The culprits? Just to name a few: “natural flavorings” wherein the flavors included butter; a “processing