[sunpar]

I actually think most of the governmental functions in this article worked quite well. Told another way, a firm in the marketplace for pasta found that a competitor was out of regulation with their product, and they found a person in congress who could press a slow-moving and ineffective agency to do better at doing their job: enforcing said regulations.

That's exactly what you want your elected representatives to do: listen to their constituents and act accordingly to ensure a fair outcome according to the law. Note that no laws were changed in this to favor one company over another, if anything the previous state was one in which the company in question was profiting from shipping out-of-regulation product, perhaps at decreased cost compared to in-compliance firms.

The rule itself can be debated, but in general I find that a law specifying in exact numbers what a product should contain in order to qualify for a label to be a very good law. It's exact, it's measurable, and it's achievable by all. Fair and equal enforcement should make it a good regulation.

If you say "well you don't need this law, it's over-regulation", that's a good argument -- I'm not sure I have an opinion on that. On one hand, I think Standard of Identification make a lot of sense, but I also know that drawing the lines can be a very delicate art form (what makes a pasta noodle vs. a ramen noodle? What makes champagne vs. sparkling wine? And so on)

Edit: Also, I think a lot of this could be dealt with better by an FDA that has a good communication arm. "We found this company to not be compliance with existing law and took it off the shelves" sounds a lot better than having the company get to print saying "Seems like a hold up by the FDA"

[kqvamxurcagg]

Not sure how much experience you have working with business or government but what you'll find is that large corporates will have 'access' to regulators and legislators who can legislate or enforce on their behalf. The senior people will know each other and get things moving.

Medium sized businesses (up to $100m revenues) will find it very difficult even getting a response. Even getting their attention is a competitive advantage for large corporates.

So when you read a story and think things 'worked quite well'. It's just an example of selectively applying laws & regulations, which were only introduced to keep out competition and protect entrenched interests. That's why large corporates love regulations, it protects their entire business model and imposes significant costs on new entrants.

[throwaway0a5e]

What do you think "access" looks like?

There is no "big pasta". There's like a handful of companies[1] that make it all. I'm sure the execs all own yachts but if you were to compare executive fleet displacement it's more of a Venezuelan navy than a French navy. They can't just call up their lobbyist who's already scheduled to golf with a congressman every other weekend and tell them to bring it up on their next trip. Only the Googles and the Exxons of the world have that kind of access.

What really happens is the some company notices that "hey, those other people are doing X and they're not supposed to, I'm losing money because of it. Then they call up the congressman in their district and say "I employ people in your district and pay taxes and I am getting screwed because morons who you have oversight over are not doing their jobs, make them do their goddamn jobs" but in nicer words and with situation specific details. And then the congressman's aid writes an email to someone that explains the situation and asks the relevant people to please take a look at it again.

The law might be stupid and the complaint might be petty but it's better than living in a world where state and federal legislators don't try and solve their constituents problems with government. For every stupid pasta beef there's a dozen more legitimate complaints that cross the desk of whichever staffer is doing constituent relations. My point is that the process of getting "access" to one's congressman is not really as nefarious as people make it out to be.

>Medium sized businesses (up to $100m revenues) will find it very difficult even getting a response. Even getting their attention is a competitive advantage for large corporate.

This hasn't been my experience but I suspect that it's going to depend a lot on the political optics of the specific industry relative to the representative.

[1] Check out this handy list and research the companies if you don't believe me. https://ilovepasta.org/membership/membership-directory/ Many are owned by larger brands but they are not particularly big businesses themselves. These are on the order of The Office sized companies.

[rat87]

> They can't just call up their lobbyist who's already scheduled to golf with a congressman every other weekend and tell them to bring it up on their next trip.

I think you're vastly underestimating the impact of lobbying and overestimating the cost

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/708195702

Tax Professor wants to try to get a policy (automatically filled out tax returns for CA state taxes)he thinks will be good for the public passed.

He gets nowhere.

Hires a lobbyist at a discount

> BANKMAN: They gave me a deal because they thought it would be kind of fun to work for this crazed professor.

> VANEK SMITH: They were working for you, just you?

> BANKMAN: Yeah. They were working for me. And so the normal price, I think, would have been $140,000 to get Mike's services. But he gave it to me for only 35. So I paid 35,000, I believe.

Got a lot closer (opt in automatic filling) despite massive opposition from anti tax groups and tax prep software lobbyists

[imajoredinecon]

Reading that transcript actually left me thinking the system worked okay in this particular case, even though it led to a bad (in my opinion) policy outcome. The money bought access, not results: in the end, the legislators who voted against largely it did so because of personal belief the policy was bad or because of political pressure from an important campaign group (+), not because of money from Intuit (and it didn't take too much in absolute terms---$140K at full price---to equalize the lobbying power of a single-person pet project with that of a multibillion-dollar company with a strong vested interest in seeing the legislation defeated).

(+): I'm not personally a Grover Norquist fan, but he's influential because a lot of Americans really don't like taxes, and the argument that people will be more opposed to taxes if they're more burdensome does seem internally consistent.

[pstuart]

Nobody likes taxes, and Norquist just makes it more painful. Ideologues are jerks.

[nobody9999]

>Nobody likes taxes, and Norquist just makes it more painful. Ideologues are jerks.

Not nobody. I'm one of the ones who agrees with (purportedly) Oliver Wendell Holmes[0].

[0] "I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization." Source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/13/taxes-civilize/

[kqvamxurcagg]

It's small relative to other industries but its still a multi-billion dollar industry. Each of the largest companies will have PR agencies, personal contacts within the FDA, revolving door of staff between the FDA and the corporates, positions on standards committees, board members who have spent a life time in food safety governance. I'm sure many of these manufacturers are the largest employers in some congressional districts so it wouldn't be a surprise if they managed to get a congressman to write the FDA to focus attention on this. The same complaint from a small company will never get the same attention.

My point is that their scale and resources gives them access. A competitor breached a pointless regulation [1] from the last century which has prevented their product from being sold for a year. If one of the large corporates breached that regulation, they would have been able to quickly agree corrective action with minimal supply chain disruption.

[1] Many of these food regs are designed to enrich staple foods that were the main source of nutrients for low income families. That's just not an issue anymore and just prevents (high quality) imports.

[sunpar]

This food regulation is not really based on health or nutrients or anything like that, nor is it pointless. It stems from an effort to define what can be marketed as a pasta noodle vs. other similar yet different products, like ramen noodles.

There are similar regulations that define, for example, what is a whiskey and what isn't.

Sure X amount of Y substance vs. X-epsilon amount will always look ridiculous on the face of it, but ultimately there needs to exist some line and some definition.

[veilrap]

I don't find this argument particularly convincing.

Am I drinking "sparkling wine" or "champagne"? Honestly, why should I care, I just care about how much I like the product and how much it costs.

I'm for regulation around areas about product safety, but this seems to not be what's going on here.

[JohnBooty]

    Am I drinking "sparkling wine" or "champagne"? 
    Honestly, why should I care, I just care about 
    how much I like the product and how much it costs.

I think you are seriously underestimating the utility of walking into a store, seeing a product labeled as XYZ, and being assured that it meets some reasonable definition of XYZ without having to do a bunch of research and/or testing on your own.

Packaged food is an extremely cost-sensitive product category to put it mildly. There is tremendous pressure on these companies to shave off every penny they can when it comes to production costs.

I strongly suggest that we do not want to see what might happen if the FDA didn't enforce some kind of minimum definitions for various categories.

For a sneak peek of the probable outcome, you can learn about the history of adulterated food products: https://www.google.com/search?q=history+of+adulterated+food

[milesvp]

I tend to agree with you but you might find this more common than you realize. I’ve noticed in my lifetime products I like change their recipes. I’ve also seen products once labeled as ice cream now labeled as frozen dairy dessert. I’ve seen this type of thing in lots of different products. Not just ice cream. And I’m not convinced anything changed legally in many cases. Usually I suspect it was to reduce costs.

It’s now something I actively look for on packaging when a product gets a new look.

[throwaway0a5e]

> but its still a multi-billion dollar industry

There's 330 million people in the US. Everything the average person spends six dollars a year on is a multi- billion dollar industry.

>Each of the largest companies will have PR agencies, personal contacts within the FDA, revolving door of staff between the FDA and the corporate, positions on standards committees, board members who have spent a life time in food safety governance

Think about how many people someone will work with and befriend over a lifetime. You're pretending that's a high bar when it's a low bar.

>The same complaint from a small company will never get the same attention.

You should go to the NPA's website (linked in TFA, you have exolymph's comment to thank for prompting me to look it up), go to the membership directory and start looking up these pasta companies before you run your mouth. While many of the companies are wholly owned subsidiaries or larger more mainstream food brands but none of them seem to exceed the BLS definition of medium sized. If the FDA enforcement action unfolded the way we are all assuming it is then that would seem to indicate medium-smallish companies do have their legislator's ear (or they just tipped off the FDA directly and then just kept following up until the FDA was annoyed enough to do something).

Edit:

Here's Medallion Foods, Virginia Park foods which seem to be among the biggest (ballpark estimate based on facility sized and value of what's in the parking lot) and one in Montana that I thought was cool because they had the street named after them. All these companies seem to have their office location the same as their manufacturing location so it's kind of hard to get a sense of scale.

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.0889449,-122.3631175,3a,75y,...

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0173065,-117.3829804,3a,75y,...

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5168777,-111.2619547,3a,75y,...

> A competitor breached a pointless regulation[1] from the last century which has prevented their product from being sold for a year.

>[1] Many of these food regs are designed to enrich staple foods that were the main source of nutrients for low income families. That's just not an issue anymore and just prevents (high quality) imports.

The last century was 20yr ago. HN would be out for blood if someone was caught importing completely functional catalytic converters or bicycle helmets that didn't meet some irrelevant to performance nuance of the law. HN is sympathetic in this case because the product in question is an upscale-ish pasta. If regulations on some ingredient were being manipulated in a way that was only affecting production of cheap lite beer we'd be reading through several hundred snarky comments about how this is a good thing.

[antiterra]

Chastising someone here for ‘running their mouth’ when they are commenting in good faith is not welcome.

No one was ‘out for blood,’ the poster simply made the claim that the inability to lobby effectively is a challenge to smaller companies. That’s exactly why the consortium you listed exists, and is based in DC.

I would guess that, usually, interests align and it most often helps a small manufacturer that ADM (16 bil revenue a year) is in the pasta business. However, if ADM wants to get a good deal on the majority stake of a gluten-free pasta up-and-comer, they likely have a few levers they can pull to create pressure.

[exolymph]

> There is no "big pasta". There's like a handful of companies that make it all.

Uh...

[sunpar]

I think it's obviously true that monied interests will have greater access to regulators and corporations than smaller operations do. We should seek to limit that advantage when possible, but it's doubtful that we can ever truly eliminate it.

Speaking specifically about this case though, it doesn't seem like a big business tossing its weight around, but some large multinational businesses working within existing regulatory and bureaucratic systems to ensure their competitors are not unfairly gaining by flouting the law.

It is akin to an auto company finding another company has saved money by not complying with emissions standards.

[dcolkitt]

> I find that a law specifying in exact numbers what a product should contain in order to qualify for a label to be a very good law.

Good in theory. But it's also likely to slow down innovation or even kill it in its tracks. Maybe a producer wants to mix up the ingredients because they're making a substandard product. But maybe they discovered a way to deliver higher quality or lower price with an iteration on the original. In the long run, consumers will mostly discover the shitty products and stop buying them anyway.

For example if such a law was in place for desktop computers, it almost assuredly would have required x86-compatible CPUs. It's highly unlikely that Apple would made the investment to produce the incredible gains in the M1, if it was forced to market the MacBook Air as "not legally a laptop"

[saagarjha]

It’s a notebook computer, duh

[andybak]

I've never heard a normal person ever use the phrase "notebook computer".

[asveikau]

I am generally a pro regulation type of person, but the article suggests the regulation was meant to block Asian noodles and favor European ones. So whether or not De Cecco bucatini needs the extra few milligrams of iron, while still satisfying EU health requirements, is a relevant question.

[throwaway2245]

> I actually think most of the governmental functions in this article worked quite well.

Having clear [communication of] regulations that food importers could understand, and expect to be enforced in a consistent way that didn't require a lobbying arm, would work a lot better.

[fennecfoxen]

> I actually think most of the governmental functions in this article worked quite well.

Permit me indulge in a minor rant. Not against you, just generally.

A specialty pasta manufacturer in Italy (home of pasta, but what do they know?) can no longer export a specialty pasta (which they sell legally in Italy), because it's marginally under-enriched by US government standards for pasta, and so the consumers in the US, who specifically seek out their favorite food, must go without, and this is ... the system working as intended, indeed, working quite well!

> If you say "well you don't need this law, it's over-regulation", that's a good argument

Ah. The thing is it's not a specific piece of legislation, it's one of those regulations the FDA itself came up with to begin with (Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21 Chapter 1 Subchapter B Section 139.115, if I'm reading it right).

So then, aside from the fact that it's bullshit to begin with, and no one is changing the bullshit, and that everyone is expected to accept the other 114-plus sections times the 138-or-more parts of Subchapter B times all the twenty-plus other titles, and whatever minutiae they may demand... and that broadly we are all expected take this class of thing as simply as The Way Things Are, a perfectly natural consequence of doing business in our world that we dare not question, well, then -- yes, aside from all that, you're quite right, everything is working quite well!

And yet somehow I feel things are broken, and moreover, that if you say something about it, you'll find a dozen people to complain that you're nothing but an eeeevil capitalist who would poison our oceans and black out our skies just to make an extra $3.50 in pocket change, if not simply out of spite generally.

[sunpar]

>you'll find a dozen people to complain that you're nothing but an eeeevil capitalist who would poison our oceans and black out our skies just to make an extra $3.50 in pocket change, if not simply out of spite generally.

I wouldn't be one of those people, trust me. I won't go into what my line of work is, but suffice to say I may actually be one of those evil capitalists.

I DO think this is one of those cost-of-doing-business type of things when it comes to international trade. I think most consumers appreciate that when they go and buy something that labels itself "pasta", it conforms to some standard that we can agree is reasonable. Otherwise, you'll likely have someone who stuffs ramen noodles into a pasta package and sells it to some suckers. And now we all have to always know which are the "real" pasta brands and which are the fakes(yes, that might be easy enough to do, but it's the overall cognitive load of having to do that with every product that should concern us). That's just an example, but that's why the regulations exist.

And you can't just say "well they sell this in Italy, and that's the home of pasta, so c'mon man this can't be right", because Italy I'm sure has like 3x more regulations around pasta selling (a cursory google search shows this is likely true), and any change they make to their regulation will keep in mind the interests of their consumers and their producers. They will not be thinking of American interests when making those regulations.

Finally, it's worth keeping in mind that this one company that was recently restricted for not being in compliance is NOT the only manufacturer of Bucatini, and in fact may not be the largest or best manufacturer either. It's just one company that returned the reporter's calls and had an answer for them.