“Make America Healthy Again” — I read that on a hat in the checkout line. The hat said fight the toxins. The FDA just told the toxins to stay.
The Tucson Environmental Justice Task Force filed a legal petition in November 2023 begging the FDA to set real limits on PFAS forever chemicals in food. The agency blew the six-month legal deadline, scaled down the ask, and last week said no. The FDA under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the man who built a political movement around cleaning up American food — rejected a petition to limit the most persistent, cancer-linked, birth-defect-causing chemicals in the food supply. Kennedy’s HHS runs the FDA. He answers for it.
The FDA’s own testing found 70% of seafood samples contain PFAS. Independent testing found it in 12% of milk samples, including Whole Foods and Kirkland brands. EPA says food is the biggest exposure route. The agency’s response: it plans to set non-binding “action levels” that don’t require contaminated food off the shelves. Tolerance levels — the kind that make it illegal to sell poison food — are off the goddamn table.
And here is the part that should make every mother in America want to throw a brick through a window. In 2019, the FDA changed its testing methodology mid-study and watched 182 contaminated food samples shrink to 78 on paper. A former USDA deputy under secretary called it the equivalent of rigging a radar gun so it only catches cars going over 100 mph. They did not test better. They tested less, on purpose, and the fuckers know it.
PFAS gets into your kid’s blueberries, milk, fish, and bread through pesticides, food packaging, sewage-sludge fertilizer, and contaminated water. The chemicals are designed to be indestructible. They cause cancer, birth defects, immune damage, kidney disease. Eating ten blueberries grown near a PFAS plant in North Carolina is the equivalent of drinking a liter of contaminated water.
Kennedy wears the hat. The FDA does the work. Eat shit, Bobby — your grandkids drink this milk too.
Source story: the source story.