Ultimately risk is dependent on alternatives, and if the alternative is "your baby starves to death" then bespoke formula made by the diary down the street sounds pretty good.
The FDA didn't exist until 1906: what do you think people did before then? My great-grandparents were subsistence farmers who if you told them that infants were at risk of starving in 2022 would have looked at you funny, because if they weren't breast-feeding they would have just given their babies some milk from their cows with whatever extras the local midwife suggested. None of which went through a multi-million dollar clinical study.
I agree that as the sphere of influence for companies to do harm increased the punishment for doing harm ought to have increased. I simply think that instead of trying to regulate the how of food production the government should have focused on punishing people who did harm. As it is all the government can do is regulate the "how" because it largely is incapable of punishing harm, because those who do harm will claim that because the government didn't tell them to not do the thing that caused harm they can't be held responsible.
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was passed due to legitimate poisonings of the food supply: imagine if we had simply executed everyone who had knowledge that was happening and warned everyone who wasn't involved "if you do this from now on this is the punishment". How might things be different?
Ultimately risk is dependent on alternatives, and if the alternative is "your baby starves to death" then bespoke formula made by the diary down the street sounds pretty good.
The FDA didn't exist until 1906: what do you think people did before then? My great-grandparents were subsistence farmers who if you told them that infants were at risk of starving in 2022 would have looked at you funny, because if they weren't breast-feeding they would have just given their babies some milk from their cows with whatever extras the local midwife suggested. None of which went through a multi-million dollar clinical study.
I agree that as the sphere of influence for companies to do harm increased the punishment for doing harm ought to have increased. I simply think that instead of trying to regulate the how of food production the government should have focused on punishing people who did harm. As it is all the government can do is regulate the "how" because it largely is incapable of punishing harm, because those who do harm will claim that because the government didn't tell them to not do the thing that caused harm they can't be held responsible.
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was passed due to legitimate poisonings of the food supply: imagine if we had simply executed everyone who had knowledge that was happening and warned everyone who wasn't involved "if you do this from now on this is the punishment". How might things be different?