In June 2022, a premium meal from Daily Harvest—backed by Gwyneth Paltrow and Serena Williams—sent hundreds to hospitals with liver damage. The culprit? An ingredient that entered America's food supply without FDA oversight. This wasn't a discount brand cutting corners. This was expensive, aspirational wellness food. And it reveals an uncomfortable truth: the price you pay has nothing to do with safety. From Burt's Bees lipstick testing positive for lead to Fenty Beauty containing "forever chemicals," from the FDA allowing 10,000 food additives it's never reviewed to cosmetics companies hiding toxins behind the word "fragrance"—Americans are paying premiums to be poisoned by the brands they trust most. As regulatory loopholes swallow consumer protection and corporate greenwashing reaches epidemic levels (52% of consumers now recognize it), this investigation exposes how the illusion of "premium equals pure" has become America's most dangerous—and profitable—lie.
Tag: consumer protection
How Federal, State, and Industry Checks Keep Milk Safe During an FDA Lab Pause
Federal officials have paused the Food and Drug Administration’s proficiency-testing program—the twice-a-year audit that checks whether milk laboratories around the country can still hit federally defined targets—while they move the work to a new site. The daily safeguards that actually decide whether a tanker can unload or a production lot can ship, however, remain fully in force. Processing plants continue to screen every load for drug residues, run microbial counts after pasteurization and hold product until results clear. State public-health labs still pull independent samples, can order recalls and feed data to the national residue database. Because those two front-line layers are unchanged, food-safety scientists and regulators agree that the risk to consumers has not increased despite the temporary gap in federal audit rounds.