On March 29, California superior court judge Elihu Berle ruled that most coffee sold in the Golden State will have to bear a warning label stating that it may increase the likelihood of cancer. Roasted coffee contains traces of the carcinogen acrylamide, and so Californians, if the ruling stands, must be warned every time they buy a cup of coffee or a bag of beans that they’re risking their lives.
The plaintiff in the case, a busybody nonprofit called the Council for Education and Research on Toxics, argued that roasted coffee beans should be a regulated substance on the basis of Proposition 65, a 1986 state law otherwise known as the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act. The law mandates that businesses with 10 or more employees must disclose the presence of carcinogens and other harmful toxins. Each year the state updates its list of toxic chemicals; the list now boasts more than 800 items and includes many chemicals that have little or no statistical link with cancer.
Some of the chemicals, like bisphenol A (BPA), show up in just about everything. Hence a vast array of products sold in California now comes with some version of the words, “Warning: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.” So if you’re buying bottled water, canned food, potato chips, salmon, cleaning products, or furniture, you’re likely to be met with some version of this fearsome notice. Many businesses—drugstores, hospitals, hotels, banks, parking garages—take the “CYA” approach and post the warning even when they’re not required to.
The result? California’s warning means nothing. Taxpayers have to pay for the labeling regime, but no one’s any safer or better informed.
Of course, the whole idiotic case, now in its sixth year, isn’t about public safety at all. It’s about money. The “council” demanded that coffee makers remove traces of acrylamide from the roasting process, almost certainly knowing that to be unfeasible, then asked the court for fines of up to $2,500 for every person “exposed” to the deadly poison coffee since 2002. In other words, someone had the bright idea to shake down the coffee companies for multimillion-dollar settlement payouts. The firm handling the plaintiff’s suit also managed to shake down potato chip makers several years ago, a similarly regulated toxin having been found in cooked potatoes in trace amounts.
As manifestly preposterous as California’s Proposition 65 is, we think the law doesn’t go far enough. We conferred with a biomedical researcher, an old friend of The Scrapbook, who reminded us that the very act of ingesting food—virtually any food—contributes to human death. The natural process called glycolysis, the body’s way of breaking down glucose, produces a byproduct called methylglyoxal, or MG, and MG is closely associated with a host of deleterious bodily processes—including aging. This produces the counterintuitive outcome that mild malnourishment often leads to longevity.
In other words: Eating and drinking eventually kill you. It follows that every drinkable or edible item sold in California should come with a warning label. And why stop there? The activity of living eventually kills everybody. Be warned!
California court-watchers tell us Judge Berle’s ruling is unlikely to stand. If it’s struck down in the court of appeals, we’ll send him a note of sympathy and a Starbucks gift card.
