Should some additives be banned from food?

Regarding the latest evidence suggesting food additives harm children’s health, Tom Watson says this:

Until junior Watson was able to tell that not all food on the end of a small blue plastic spoon was the same, I’d not fully appreciated just how poweful ‘E’ number stories are.

I can guarantee that whatever is being discussed in the world of politics today, the only issue that parents with young kids will be talking about is whether drink X or yoghurt Y will be in or out of the weekend shopping trolley. And then they’ll be talking about how they can persuade junior that an alternative product is the new favourite.

I find myself becoming much more ’statist’ in matters of children’s policy. Every time I pass a McDonalds sited next to a Toys ‘R’ Us or endure TV adverts whilst watching ‘Sponge Bob Square Pants’, I turn into Victor Meldrew.

Talking about libertarians, Tyler Cowen quotes this:

This is the other thing I don’t get about small government types. You protest so vociferously that government takes choices away from you. But a whole lot of choices are BORING. If I never once think about car bumper safety standards for 25mph crashes, I will never miss it. I do not want to carefully match my car safety standards to my most likely driving patterns and save two grand in the process. I would not enjoy that process. (Perhaps you would, and you would rather have the money.) I’ve never been a comparison shopper or a meticulous consumer. Maybe my model of the individual is too biased by my experience. But I don’t want to figure out how much coliform bacteria I can tolerate on my spinach, given my health…

…*I can hear you already: “But you are FORCING me to take that deal too.”. Yes. But right now our system FORCES me to comparison shop. Either way, someone gets FORCED to do something, and I don’t see a justice interest on one side or the other. Absent a justice interest, we might as well just go with the system that creates the most utility overall.

I suggest a compromise. People should be allowed to sell food (and other products) thatthe government says is unsafe, but if they do so, they should have to say so clearly in big letters on the label, the way cigarette packets look now. So a bottle of fizzy drink might have to have a message like this:

WARNING

UK government scientists say the additives in this product are harmful to children.

That way everyone wins. People who don’t want to have to check the details of every product they buy can just choose the government-approved ones. And people who prefer to check out the details themselves can do so.

An idea along the same lines is Robert Hanson’s one of would-have-banned stores:

Paternalism is policy intended to benefit some people by limiting their choices, like a parent who stops a kid from playing in the street. Examples include laws requiring professional licensing and product safety features, or banning risky buildings, food, drugs, and financial investments.

A warning is usually a feasible alternative to a requirement or ban. Parents could just say “Playing in the street is a very bad idea,” and if the kid believed them, the result would be the same as a ban. Similarly, governments could just tell us that certain doctors or drugs are unsafe, instead of outlawing them.

Now one can imagine inefficient warning systems, such as having to go look up each drug at some badly organized government website. But we can also imagine no-fuss government warnings: let anything the government would have banned be sold only at special “would have banned” stores, whose customers pass a test showing they understand that regulators disapprove.

Another aspect is this: if an additive harms children’s health, it probably doesn’t do a lot of good for adults’ health either. There doesn’t seem to be a good reason for having many of them — I don’t need my food to be brightly coloured, nor do I have any requirement for fizzy drinks to have a shelf life measured in years — so it’s probably best to do without.

Artificial organism can make proteins

A number of groups of scientists are trying to build artificial organisms.

One team is led by Dr Giovanni Murtas, at the Enrico Fermi research centre at Roma Tre University. They are using the “bottom-up” approach of putting together lots of simpler molecules to make a cell. Recently they have got their proto-cell to make proteins:

To the untrained eye, the tiny, misshapen, fatty blobs on Giovanni Murtas’s microscope slide would not look very impressive. But when the Italian scientist saw their telltale green fluorescent glint he knew he had achieved something remarkable – and taken a vital step towards building a living organism from scratch.

The green glow was proof that his fragile creations were capable of making their own proteins, a crucial ability of all living things and vital for carrying out all other aspects of life.

The achievement is a major advance for the new field of “synthetic biology”. Its proponents hope to construct simple bespoke organisms with carefully chosen components.

Dr Murtas, at the Enrico Fermi research centre at Roma Tre University in Italy, and Pier Luigi Luisi aim to build a living thing from the bottom up. “The bottom-up approach has the possibility of creating living systems from entirely non-living materials,” said Tom Knight, an expert in synthetic biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Italian team’s advance is to make simple cells which are essentially bags made up of a fatty membrane containing just 36 enzymes and purified ribosomes – microscopic components common to all cells which translate the genetic code into protein. The primitive cells are capable of manufacturing protein from one gene.

The team chose a fluorescent green protein found in jellyfish because it was easy to see, using a microscope, when the protein is being made. “We are trying to minimise any system we put in place for the cell,” said Dr Murtas. “We can prove at this point that we can have protein synthesis with a minimum set of enzymes – 36 at the moment.” He hopes the project will teach him about the earliest stirrings of life in Earth’s primeval slime some 3.5bn years ago.

(link from Slashdot)

How to get people to study science

Norm Geras writes:

If there’s a long-term decline in the number of pupils studying science, is it a good idea trying to remedy this by making science exams easier? The Royal Society of Chemistry doesn’t think so.

Nor do I.

It benefits society the more people understand science. If exams are dumbed down, and as a result, more people study science, there will be more people with science GCSEs, but each of them will know less science. But that doesn’t help society; we need people to have a greater understanding of science not a lesser.

Managing groups of people is in principle very simple: to decide what you want people to do, and what you want them not to do, and you provide incentives for them to do the things you want, and disincentives against doing the things you don’t want. This principal holds whether you’re managing a small number of people within an organisation, or managing a whole country. (Of course, the devil’s in the details).

In this case you might ask how do you incentivise kids to take science at GCSE and A level? Well you could stipulate that science exam passes count for more than non-science subjects for getting in to university, or you could offer a bounty for each science GCSE or A level passed, or you could say that every child in a year at a school gets a rewards for each child in that year who passes science exams (this might encourage a co-operativre spirit). Or you could try other incentives — no doubt some would work better than others, and it’s hard to tell in advance which would work best.

But if the government isn’t prepared to provided incentives for school students to study science then they are giving out a message loud and clear that they don’t think it is important for science to be studied. And every speech they give saying the opposite is, without incentives, a lie pure and simple.