I am not well versed in EU regulations regarding foods, aside from a recent experience in Iceland which boils down to the Fanta example. That and the fast food chains that we view as ubiquitous in the US were either sparse or did not exist in Iceland. We did not go in the one we saw, so I do not know if the menu was different or not, like one might experience in Japan.

Any thoughts I could share are my own concerns and opinions based on my experience and observations of the food and health industries in the US. It might be best if someone more expert on comparing the regulations between the two regions chimed in.

I mentioned the bread example because that's what started it for me during the Covid Pandemic isolation. I got bored and decided to learn to make bread, but did not have much to work with, so I found really simple recipes. Bread, as it turns out, only needs water, flour, salt and yeast to come out tasting absolutely delicious to the point where a loaf does not last long enough in my house to go stale. When I compared that to industrialized bread (both off the shelf and from the ersatz "bakeries" found in some of our large grocery chains), I was curious then horrified to see the amount of ingredients in those products that offered no discernible nutritional value and existed only to make the product more shelf-stable or more addictively appetizing. I say this as a person who grew up eating Wonder Bread, which I absolutely no longer consider to be "bread," but more of a sponge-cake.

From there, my wife and I started really looking at the products we were consuming and realized that we did not really know what was in 90% of them. We were just trusting the manufacturers and regulations to keep us safe, because that's what we're supposed to do as good consumers, right? It was alarming, to say the least, and even more alarming is the fact that this is not a new fight in the US, dating all the way back the late 19th/early 20th century. When the driving force behind regulation is profit margins, the rules for evaluating risk to the population start to move around in uncomfortable ways, but because of marketing and branding, we're taught at pretty early ages to trust these companies, sometimes even wearing their symbols as a badge of identity.

I'm never going to be one to say "Food company X is trying to kill us!" because that does not make good business sense. I've said it before on HN, but I'm not convinced that a lot of this regulatory slack and the declining qualities of our food is meant to intentionally harm us, but more born from the short-sighted thinking that allows executives to say something like "well, nobody has died from chemical X in product 1, yet, and chemical X can displace some of the more expensive chemical Z, so, maybe we can increase the amount a bit to bolster our profit margins?" Then they do it, quietly, and nobody dies, so they do it again...and a again. Longitudinal studies are cast aside in favor of only focusing on immediate results.

And so, we have things like canned pulverized Parmesan cheese that contains sawdust as a filler, which might arguably be harmless, but being robbed of product for the same price as the old version should also spark our inner consumer to go "hey, wait a minute..." even if we ignore the possible long term heath effects on the population as a whole. Our term for this now is shrink-flation, but it's definitely a very old tactic. This became another driving force behind my wife and my decision to try and set aside time each week to make certain products. We know what we are getting for our money, we know what to expect, and we know what is going into each one. Do we still buy other soaps or get the occasional shelf-stable pie? Yes, of course. But is our consumption of these items has plummeted to a last resort of convenience or just a rare treat.

Sorry, this turned into a blog post and I'm still skipping a lot of the nuances in my thoughts on this matter so pardon any disjointed structure in my narrative.

In the end, the lesson I learned can be summed up as _pay attention_. Read the labels, do the homework, and decide as best you can with the information you have at the time. We vote with our dollars, so spend them wisely.