The nature of bans makes it pretty difficult to specifically name items that I feel banning them was a disservice :-)
But here's an example: Cannabis. Why? There's now tremendous evidence that the ban was misguided, and that there are very real medicinal properties that benefit the human body and help control inflammation. When banning it (and making it a schedule 1 substance) research was severely hampered and in many cases halted.
Banning ingredients for food is a very specific kind of ban. I'm against the war on drugs, but I'm totally for banning strongly psychoactive ingredients from food - cannabis should be a controlled substance.
Many people consume cannabis specifically as an ingredient in food. But at a broader level I think it's unproductive to limit categories to "banned in food" v. "banned", since that's a very arbitrary distinction. Also:
> but I'm totally for banning strongly psychoactive ingredients from food - cannabis should be a controlled substance.
That reads to me as contradictory. banning != controlled substance
Banning in food = you can't sell food containing the substance as normal food. Nobody would prohibit you to mix it into your own food and eat it, though. So, the substance's uses are controlled, but it's not banned :)
Many of these food tech choices are the difference between more starvation and high enough yield to feed poor people. If we farmed the way we did 100 years ago, there would be mass starvation. The yield just isn’t there.
The FDA faces the same ethical dilemma every time they decide on new drugs. A slow approval process is literally letting people suffer and die in exchange for trials with more certainty.
The old FDA food guidelines that shape what schools are allowed to feed children are a perfect example of the stupidity of legislating based on poorly understood food science. “Carbs are good, fats are bad!”
Low sodium guidelines because “salt kills people!” also turned out to be pretty stupid in retrospect.
If the cause of starvation were under-production, I’d sympathize with this argument. But given the amount of food waste in Western countries, I’d say the real issue is one of distribution or access. Producers make production efficient not in order to feed the poor, but to increase margin by lowering the costs of production.
Growth hormones exist to make the agriculturist more money, they don’t help feed a war torn country.
If the priority of these systems were solving hunger, we’d disincentive meat and dairy production and incentivize high nutritious vegetarian production.
When we’re dumping corn into salmon feed, sugars, and vehicle fuel, I can’t fall for the idea that food is constrained by supply.
The cause of starvation is lack of food available at a given price point.
Producers make production efficient to capture more of the market at the lower price points on the demand curve. There aren’t enough rich people to pay for thick margins at a large scale in the food industry. The only ones with large margins are the organic farmers selling to rich people.
Growth hormones exist to make chicken much faster, which means much cheaper chicken for consumers and to make the chicken raisers more money. If it weren’t cheaper, people wouldn’t buy more of it and it likely wouldn’t be worth the investment.
Here’s a thought exercise, why do you think sellers of factory chickens outsell free range chickens by orders of magnitude? If the only difference was margin and not price, nobody would buy the factory stuff.
Nobody is starving who is able to buy food on the world market. People starve in Yemen because there are guys with AK47s between them and the nearest functional port.
But here's an example: Cannabis. Why? There's now tremendous evidence that the ban was misguided, and that there are very real medicinal properties that benefit the human body and help control inflammation. When banning it (and making it a schedule 1 substance) research was severely hampered and in many cases halted.