Taste and Power: the flavouring industry and flavour additive regulation

The concepts and methods used by regulatory agencies worldwide to assess the safety of flavouring additives were designed by and for the flavouring industry. They embody, and embed in routine regulatory practice, the industry’s commercial interests in minimising the costs of regulatory oversight and the risks that the market for its products might be restricted. First sketched out by US flavouring company scientists in the early 1960s, the approach required almost no experimental data, and was highly permissive, relative to both our knowledge (and lack of it) about chemical toxicity, and to the ways other kinds of food additives are regulated. Our distinctive ‘realist constructivist’ analysis illustrates how the industry’s approach was also antiscientific, unscientific because it served to discourage scientific investigation of important aspects of the phenomena it purported to evaluate, and because it relied on hypotheses that lacked any evidential basis. The approach was first used to assess flavourings in the USA, where the industry was allowed to design and run its own regulatory regime. In all other regulatory jurisdictions, the industry’s approach was rejected; expert advisors argued that it was incompatible with mandates to protect consumer health. Yet, the approach eventually prevailed everywhere. It did so in large part because of the collective refusal of the flavouring industry over three decades to provide the experimental data that had been requested by the regulatory authorities.This has been a form of regulatory capture, which was triggered by a remarkably effective tactic of non-cooperation with demands for data.