alt Hacker Newsit's weird how they say "One TOR exemption that allows the rocket fuel chemical perchlorate to be used in grain bags..." as well as the article they link to https://blogs.edf.org/health/2019/01/11/fda-perchlorate-in-f... focusing on it being a rocket fuel component
i guess it sounds scary? but it almost implies rocket fuel is somehow involved in grain transport lol. the real reason for its use i guess is to control static electricity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#:~:text=control-,s...
this is like that one time people came to my school to talk about vapes, and one of their talking points was "vapes can contain formaldehyde, and formaldehyde is used to preserve dead specimens/tissue samples" ; they did not get my issue with the lack of causal reasoning in that argument :P
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Or for another example (that's not mentioned in the article), saltpeter and ammonium nitrate can be used in rocket fuel too, but saltpeter has been used in food for thousands of years and ammonium nitrate is one of the most common fertilizers.
When I lived in California I saw one of those prop 65 cancer warnings on a loaf of bread.
Apparently burning toast can generate trace amounts of acrylamide.
This was enough to convince me a subset of these people are complete lunatics.
Overexposure to Dihydrogen Monoxide kills around 300,000 people a year, and it's used in a number of culinary and industrial applications. Yet there have been NO serious attempts to regulate it, and it isn't even classed as hazardous waste.
I agree the framing is poor, but is the chemical actually safe? The article contained convincing claims that it actually does cause harm.
Still, six months after it published its data, the FDA reapproved perchlorate for use in super sacks. Advocates say the agency used flawed science and manipulated the data. The FDA wrote that there was no meaningful increase in perchlorate across all the 250 foods it measured. But critics countered that the problem was not in all the food – the problem was in kids’ cereal.
The FDA largely ignored the cereal findings, and mostly does not consider endocrine system harms when developing regulations, said Tom Neltner, a former scientist with the EDF who is now director of the Unleaded Kids non-profit. He helped lead litigation over perchlorate, which was ultimately dismissed.