Do you remember where you were when the federal government decided, after three and a half decades of quiet deliberation, that maybe Americans shouldn’t be eating a confirmed carcinogen in their strawberry milk? I was at a dinner party in Cleveland Park, holding a glass of something pink my friend Eliza had handed me with the confidence of a woman who has never once in her life read an ingredient label.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, meaning the announcement, not the drink. “They finally banned it.” Eliza is a very smart woman. She runs a nonprofit that I cannot, for legal and personal reasons, describe more specifically. And yet here she was, toasting the Food and Drug Administration for catching up to a scientific consensus that predates the first Bush administration. I smiled. I sipped. I thought about what else we are being asked to applaud lately.
Let us review the timeline, because nobody else seems willing to. In 1990, the FDA banned Red Dye No. 3 in cosmetics, having concluded — their word, not mine — that it caused cancer in laboratory rats. You could not, after 1990, legally put this substance on your face. You could, however, continue to put it in your child’s birthday cake, your maraschino cherries, your pink-frosted animal crackers, and roughly four thousand other products aimed with laser precision at the under-ten demographic. This was the official policy of the United States government for thirty-five years.
I am just asking questions. But I am asking them loudly.
At the same dinner party — and I swear I am not making this up — I found myself cornered near the cheese board by a lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, because he has worked for enough administrations that the term has stopped meaning anything. He told me, with the weary smile of a man who has been paid to know better, that the dye ban was “a layup.” A layup. That was the word he used. Meaning: easy, obvious, politically costless, the kind of thing you do when you want to look like you are doing something without actually inconveniencing anyone with money.
He is, of course, correct. And that is precisely the problem.
Because if banning a dye the government itself declared carcinogenic in 1990 is a layup in 2025, what exactly have we been doing for thirty-five years? Whose grandchildren were we protecting? Whose campaign donors were we not? My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has a historian’s unsentimental relationship with paper trails, tells me the FDA’s own scientific record on this dye has not meaningfully changed since the Reagan administration. The chemistry did not evolve. The rats did not file an appeal. What changed is that someone, somewhere, finally decided the political cost of saying no to the confectioners’ association was lower than the political cost of saying no to a generation of parents who have learned to read labels on their phones in the cereal aisle.
This is not a victory. This is a confession delivered thirty-five years late, wrapped in a press release, and handed to a press corps that will dutifully describe it as a win for consumer safety. A win. As though the score were tied.
I am old enough to remember when a federal agency admitting it had allowed a known carcinogen into the food supply of American children for a third of a century would have been a scandal. Hearings would have been held. Someone, somewhere, would have resigned — not in disgrace necessarily, but in the old-fashioned sense that public servants used to occasionally feel shame. Instead we get a triumphant tweet from the commissioner and a photograph of a smiling pediatrician in a lab coat, and the conversation moves on to whatever phone app the Chinese are now using to steal our recipes.
Eliza, to her credit, pushed back when I said this. She told me I was being cynical, that progress is progress, that the perfect is the enemy of the good. These are the phrases well-meaning people say at dinner parties when they would prefer not to examine the machinery that produced the outcome they are celebrating. I told her I was not being cynical. I was being literal. The government poisoned us on a schedule set by lobbyists, and now the government would like a round of applause for stopping.
And here is what I cannot stop thinking about, the question that followed me home in the cab and is following me still. If Red No. 3 was the layup — the obvious one, the cost-free one, the one everybody in the room agreed on decades ago — then what is in the cabinet marked HARD? What substances, what approvals, what quiet accommodations are sitting on some regulator’s desk right now, waiting for the politics to get easier? What will our grandchildren ban in 2060 and congratulate themselves for? What are we drinking tonight that some future commissioner will, with great fanfare, decide we should not have been drinking?
I do not know. Nobody at the dinner party knew. The bipartisan lobbyist knew, I suspect, but he was already at the coat closet.
I am, as always, just asking. But a country that needs thirty-five years to act on its own science is not a country with a regulatory problem. It is a country with a nerve problem. And the nerve, I regret to report, is not growing back.