Next Friday, a week today, marks an anniversary the food industry should mark with fear and much trepidation. In Miami on July 8th 1999, a Florida court jury found tobacco companies responsible for the health consequences of smokers. As evidence mounts of the health consequences of packaging products containing BPA and other plasticisers, the world’s court rooms could find major food producers in the dock.
Unlike what happened in Florida, the defendants would not be foreign-owned multinationals, but could be domestic food brands that have given us all warm fuzzies for generations, if a group of women are found to have been childless because of the bisphenol A content of canned foods. The ‘healthy’ water phenomenon could also become no more than a nostalgic reference to the past if endocrine disruption is as bad for our reproductive health as lead researchers think. New Zealand wine, global promoters of screw caps, could go the same way.
Not that those who promoted our sauvignon blanc as the best white wine since Liebfraumilch, the Brits, will be happy with their lot if the food industry’s obsession with lowering economic costs while increasing public health risks is proven in court. First to pay will be generations of British taxpayers whose government, against the evidence, closed down Jamie Oliver’s healthy school food programme and resumed the delivery of junk food to primary school children.
If you think this is all just a scare, consider the comparisons with tobacco. Research from the 1920s onwards accumulated against tobacco as a principal cause of lung cancer and other diseases. A counter research war was waged by the tobacco industry in its own research labs and in institutions funded by tobacco companies, presenting numerous ‘studies’ that showed no negative health outcomes for smokers.
This week we have a group of leading public health researchers pointing out the only support for the dose-related safety on BPA and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals comes from outdated and industry-funded research. They claim, with considerable scientific credibility, that the risks of continuing to allow BPA in the food chain are too high.
In the case of tobacco it was Jeffrey Wigand, a scientist at tobacco producer Brown and Williamson, who finally blew the whistle by testifying that his company and others were concealing research results that showed the health costs of smoking. This was made into a movie featuring Russell Crowe, so the case is well known.
The immediate cost of that event was the Miami decision, which came a year after big tobacco had thought it had settled its public debt by agreeing to a full and final settlement with the US government. Florida’s court, and subsequent US and national court decisions, have upheld the Miami decision and the ongoing payouts for health damage to consumers has forced tobacco to find markets in third world countries – places without strong legal protection for their communities.
This week, Kellogg recalled 28 million cereal units from the supply chain and retailers in the US after evidence of food poisoning from a new packaging compound used in its liners.
Endocrine disruption doesn’t make you vomit immediately, but the evidence is mounting that it does save women from morning sickness. If you are in the food business, better make sure you know the facts about endocrine disruption, or you may need to learn them for the court.
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