From the wiki: "By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products which had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, the mascara Lash lure, which caused blindness, and worthless "cures" for diabetes and tuberculosis. The resulting proposed law was unable to get through Congress for five years, but was rapidly enacted into law following the public outcry over the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent."

I believe I've heard that the FDA was actually beneficial for capitalism as consumers would entirely avoid certain products out of fear, making it difficult to sell even legitimate goods.

That's not true:

They exist because pure unadulterated capitalism WILL kill you, not would.

It wasn't chalk, it was borax. And that was because it neutralised the sour taste of turned milk.

Safety regulations are written in the blood of those who died from unsafe practices.

Someone somewhere recently pointed out that fascism tends to rear its ugly head every 100 years because everyone that experienced it last time has to be dead before it can happen again.

Americans specifically have had it generally good for so long that anyone incapable of picking up and absorbing information from a history book, which is most Americans, simply don't know how bad it used to be. So they fucking sleepwalk into fascism or allowing regulations to be rolled back.

You'd think that having a written language to chronicle all our mistakes would ensure that we moved forward without repeatedly making those mistakes, but the catch is the majority of people have to read the fucking words for that to matter.

Welcome to The Jungle, we play dirty games.

Food safety costs a lot, so fuck the FDA

-Food companies, basically.

Vote with your dollar! If tainted baby formula kills your kid, simply refuse to buy that brand anymore!

My favorite "we had to regulate this" is coal mining. You see, the larger a coal mine tunnel, the more work and time it takes. So smaller tunnels will be more profitable. So in some places they preferred smaller women and children, so they could make make smaller, easier tunnels. This one I only ever found one source on, but supposedly one mine owner noticed that snags on clothing were slowing things down in the narrow tunnels so he insisted on sending them in nude. Nothing more capitalist than naked coal mining children.

they used to put brick dust in chocolate bars, and sawdust in bread

edit: heck, they just caught someone recently intentionally putting lead in ~~applesauce~~ cinnamon that was used in applesauce, which has been used off and on as a sweetener since at least ancient rome, where a bunch of people went crazy and died from consuming a sweetener made by boiling grapes in lead pots

What Conservatives would like us to forget is that many regulations are written in blood.

Good ole

Eventually we Canadians won't even have to boycott American agricultural products, they just won't be able to sell them to us because they won't pass our safety requirements.

Damn, just five minutes ago I saw this link shared in another thread:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swill_milk_scandal

🤢🤮

It took us well over a century to establish some sort of framework that makes such horrors almost impossible, but no, regulations are bad 🙄

Same for workers btw. And cows. It's not just about food security. That's just easier to sell to a thoroughly egoistic constituency.

Everyone who wants to remove food regulations should just be shot. I'm so tired of these absolute fools that slept through 10th grade history trying to take us back to the gilded age.

safety rules and regulations are usually 'written in blood'.

Same logic with antivax people.

It was so much worse than just chalk. Additives included plaster of Paris, lead, cow brain, and fucking formaldehyde

But RandLover1988 on YouTube told me businesses have to sell good things otherwise competitors will come in and they'll go bankrupt, unless there are too many regulations and too much socialism, which is why he got banned for saying the N-word on YouTube. /s

Whenever a corporation does something good (for example, make a charitable donation) rest assured it’s been calculated that the positive PR will make it financially worthwhile.