A Pretty Penny

A company that wants to put a new chemical in American food does not have to tell anyone. Under a rule finalized in 2016¹, a manufacturer can convene its own experts, declare an additive “generally recognized as safe,” and start selling — notifying the FDA is voluntary². By one count, companies have quietly self-certified about a thousand substances the agency has never seen³. Of the roughly ten thousand additives in the food supply, the FDA has never reviewed the safety of an estimated three thousand⁴.

That is why the American pantry still holds chemicals its trading partners abandoned decades ago. Potassium bromate⁵, a possible carcinogen banned across the European Union and the United Kingdom in 1990, is still permitted in US flour. Brominated vegetable oil⁶, barred in Britain in 1970, was not revoked by the FDA until 2024. Titanium dioxide⁷, which the EU banned as a food additive in 2022 after its scientists could not rule out damage to DNA, remains legal in American candy.

The pace of correction is its own indictment. The FDA revoked Red Dye No. 3 in January 2025⁸ — under a 1960 law barring cancer-causing colors — but gave companies until 2027⁹ to comply. States moved faster: California banned four additives in 2023¹⁰, and in 2025 West Virginia barred seven dyes from school meals¹¹. The administration’s own “Make America Healthy Again” report, in May 2025¹², counted more than 2,500 additives in use and named several as concerns — then largely left the fixing to voluntary phase-outs and a proposed rule that, a year on, had still not taken effect.

The unexamined chemical is only half the story. The other half is what happens when a chemical does harm and the person harmed goes looking for someone to answer for it. That door is being closed.

On June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2, in Monsanto v. Durnell, that federal pesticide law bars a person from suing a manufacturer for failing to warn¹³ about a danger the label left off — so long as the label matches what the Environmental Protection Agency approved. The case was brought by a man who blamed the weedkiller Roundup for his cancer. Justice Kavanaugh wrote for the majority that the claim was preempted; the dissent said the ruling left the plaintiff “without a remedy.”¹⁴

The Court finished what the states had started. North Dakota¹⁵, in April 2025, became the first to write into law that an EPA-approved pesticide label is a sufficient warning; Georgia¹⁶ followed weeks after a jury there ordered Bayer to pay $2.1 billion in a Roundup case. Similar bills moved through a dozen more statehouses¹⁷ in 2025 and 2026, and a version nearly rode the federal farm bill.

The campaign has an author. The bills are promoted by a group called the Modern Ag Alliance, founded by Bayer in 2024¹⁸, that presents itself as a farmers’ coalition. Bayer spent heavily to pass them — more than $1.8 million in Tennessee in a single year¹⁹, hundreds of thousands more elsewhere — while working to cap a liability it had bought.

It bought that liability with Monsanto, and Roundup with it, for $63 billion in 2018²⁰, two years after the World Health Organization’s cancer agency called the weedkiller’s active ingredient “probably carcinogenic.” (The EPA disagrees; that split is the ground the whole fight is fought on.) By early 2026 the company faced some 65,000 pending lawsuits²¹ and had set aside around $16 billion²² against them.

In February 2026 Bayer proposed a $7.25 billion class settlement²³ — payouts from a few thousand dollars to $165,000 — to close the book on future Roundup claims. Between the settlement, the state shields and the Supreme Court, the cost of the harm is being fixed at a number the company chooses, and the courthouse door is being shut behind it.

So the two halves meet. What goes into the food is decided, increasingly, by the people who sell it, and reviewed by almost no one. What comes out of it — the illness, the claim, the day in court — is being closed off by law. The chemical is unexamined going in and unanswerable coming out. The bill for that arrangement does not disappear. It moves — onto the people who eat, and get sick, and pay. Who pays, and who profits, is the last chapter.