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Lax regulations allow food products onto US grocery store shelves with ingredients that are banned in Europe. | Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group/Getty Images From the financial squeeze of inflation, to recall after recall, and actually getting out the door, going to the grocery store can sometimes feel like an insurmountable task. Adding to the stress is something else on the mind of Vox reader Sommer. When she’s shopping for food, she finds herself wondering: Why are there different ingredients, additives, and dyes in products like candy corn and ranch dressing?  “How is America allowed to feed us certain products that are harmful and banned in other countries?” she asked us. “Don’t you all care about us?” That’s the subject of this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s go-to hotline for all your questions.  What some people may dismiss as a fixation of “granola moms” is actually a legitimate concern, says Melanie Benesh, the vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, an organization that scrutinizes agricultural practices. The impact many of these chemicals have is chronic: They accumulate over time, after a lot of tiny exposures. For example, the whitening agent titanium dioxide in soups and dairy products can build up in the body and even damage DNA.  European countries take a much more precautionary approach to additives in their food, Benesh says. “If there are doubts about whether a chemical is safe or if there’s no data to back up safety, the EU is much more likely to put a restriction on that chemical or just not allow it into the food supply at all.”  In the US, we’re more likely to see action at the state level. California banned four chemicals in 2023: brominated vegetable oil, Red Dye No. 3, propylparaben, and potassium bromate. This year, lawmakers in about a dozen states have introduced legislation banning those same chemicals and, in some states, additional chemicals as well. But federal oversight has been limited, constrained by priorities, authority, and by a lack of resources. There’s a new deputy commissioner of the FDA’s Human Foods Program, and there is some hope among advocates that could lead to changes in the administration’s approach. We reached out to the FDA, and a spokesperson said the agency needs more funding to expand its food oversight: “Prioritization and drive can only take us so far, and our current budget constraints will limit the number and speed of assessments.” Why do things operate differently in the US? And what does that mean for our food? We answer these questions in this week’s episode of Explain It to Me. Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Benesh, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545. How does approval for food ingredients work here in the US? We are also supposed to have a precautionary approach here. The legal standard is something called reasonable certainty of no harm. This includes acute harms, but also chronic harms. Like, “is this going to increase my risk of cancer if I eat it every day for the next 30 years?”  When did these rules get put into place? How did they come to be?  World War II was a period of rapid industrialization and the rise of convenience foods and frozen dinners. Lots of new substances were introduced into the food supply. The FDA realized that they didn’t really know much about these chemicals, and couldn’t assure Americans that they were safe.  The FDA created what was meant to be a premarket approval process, meaning that the FDA looks at the chemical before it can ever be used in food, before consumers are ever exposed to it in their food. They created this system in 1958, but they did not include a “lookback provision” for foods already on the shelves. So we have a lot of chemicals that just haven’t been looked at and haven’t been given a meaningful review in decades.  The other fundamental and, I think, frightening problem with our food chemical system in the US is that today most new chemicals coming onto the market aren’t being looked at by the FDA at all. Why is that? When Congress wrote the food chemical law, they included an exception for things that are generally recognized as safe, or GRAS.  This was intended to be a narrow loophole, an exception for things that truly have general recognition of safety: things like spices or vinegar or flour or table salt. Rather than the FDA expending the time and the resources to do a full risk assessment of those chemicals before allowing them to be used in food, they could just say these are generally recognized as safe.  What has happened over time is that loophole has really swallowed the entire process. [EWG] did an analysis in 2022, where we found that 99 percent of new food chemicals were exploiting this GRAS loophole. The FDA has created a voluntary notification process, so companies make this determination on their own whether the food qualifies for GRAS exemption, either through their own internal scientist or they can contract with an outside panel. It is up to them whether or not they want to tell the FDA that their chemical is GRAS.  Why does America deal with this so differently? Why are other countries more precautionary and we’re not? One issue we have is that a lot of programs at the FDA, particularly drug programs, are funded by industry user fees. So they have to pay a fee if they’re trying to get a product approved by the FDA or registering it with the FDA. There’s no equivalent user fee for food chemicals. The FDA has a resource issue, and Congress has not appropriated the amount of funding that the FDA needs to do these chemical reviews.  But I also think there has been a degree of inertia. I don’t think that there has been enough pressure on the FDA to take these food chemical reviews more seriously. A lot of leadership at the FDA — the former FDA commissioners, current FDA commissioners — have really come from more of a drug background than a food background. Sometimes the F in FDA is referred to as the “silent F.”  Interestingly, the underlying law — the 1958 law — is a pretty good law. It’s not an issue of authority; I think it’s an issue of resources. But should that stop them from proactively identifying chemicals, taking a hard look at chemicals? No. And we have petitioned the FDA to look at particular chemicals, so that’s a good starting point. Do you think anything will change?  There have been some changes in the last couple of years, I think, in response to a couple of pretty scathing exposés on the FDA food program. They did reorganize their food program, which took effect October 1. There is now an Office of Food Chemical Safety. The FDA recently had a public meeting about starting up a food chemical reassessment program where they would go back and look at food chemicals.  There are things happening. I think there is a growing awareness within the agency that this is a problem. The new deputy commissioner for human foods is someone named Jim Jones, who was in charge of the pesticide review program and other chemical review program at the EPA for a long time. He understands chemical issues in a way that a lot of leadership at FDA historically has not. Bringing Jim Jones in is a really good step and very hopeful.

This is an election about elections.One of the two leading candidates in the race, Donald Trump, has not only demonstrated a long-running skepticism of rule of law; he is also the only president in American history to attempt to remain in office after losing an election. This election is a test: Can the American public resoundingly reject a man who has not merely been a chaotic extremist but has also attacked the American system of republican government itself?Less than four years ago, this question would have seemed preposterous—not because Trump’s antidemocratic impulses were any secret, but because they seemed to have ended his career. Trump summoned supporters to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, the day that Congress was set to certify the election’s results. Then he instigated an assault on the Capitol, during which insurrectionists waged hand-to-hand combat against law-enforcement officers and sacked the seat of American democracy. They hunted for Speaker Nancy Pelosi and talked of hanging Vice President Mike Pence. Trump sat by for hours, watching the chaos on television and refusing to intervene.As the nation learned in the days and weeks after, the violence was only the climax of a long-running effort to steal the election. Even though Trump’s advisers understood that he had lost the election, he attempted a paperwork coup, pressuring state election officials to “find” votes and conjuring fake slates of electors to submit to Congress.[David A. Graham: Trump isn’t merely unhinged]By January 7, it seemed like it was all over for Trump. Even Senator Mitch McConnell, one of the canniest operators in American politics, thought so. “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” he told a reporter. Polls backed that up: Americans were intensely repulsed by the riot, and they blamed Trump. He was banished from social-media platforms and, it appeared, public life.I warned on January 7 that the horror of the previous day would be whitewashed, but I had no idea how successful the effort would be. The road to impunity began with McConnell and his House counterpart, Kevin McCarthy, who had also fiercely criticized Trump. McCarthy traveled to Mar-a-Lago to make amends. McConnell, hoping that voters would do the work of banishing Trump without him having to take any personal risks, flinched from an impeachment conviction that could have barred Trump from running. For other Republicans, espousing election denial became a litmus test.President Joe Biden’s new attorney general, Merrick Garland, was determined not to appear too political, and the Justice Department was painfully slow to bring charges against Trump in connection with his election subversion; to this day, he has not been tried, and if he wins the election, he probably never will be.[David A. Graham: The paperwork coup]Trump exploited all of these failures to plot his comeback. Richard Nixon was forced to resign for offenses that paled in comparison with Trump’s. Even so, as Elizabeth Drew wrote in The Atlantic, Nixon devised a secret yearslong plan to restore himself to semi-respectability. Trump, by contrast, has shown no remorse, has not gone away, and stands a good chance of becoming president once again. He’s done so while embracing January 6. What he once insisted was a false flag by leftist agitators he now celebrates as patriotic and justified.So now the matter is before voters, every other safeguard having failed. Trump has abandoned none of his election denial. He has refused to acknowledge that Biden is the rightful president, despite Biden having won a resounding victory. Trump has discredited Americans’ faith in their own democracy, with consequences that will last for generations. He’s spent the past few weeks seeding doubt about another American election, even though he might win it.Democracy is a tough idea to get one’s arms around. It’s abstract, and until recently, it felt so deeply embedded in life in this country that, despite its failures, it could be treated as a given. When voters decide whom to support, they understandably sometimes focus on the more urgent questions directly in front of them—matters such as their standard of living, their rights, and their social structures. But the essence of the American system is not which path we take on these issues, but the procedures by which we decide. That fundamental idea is being put to the test today.

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Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris walks onstage as she arrives for a campaign rally at Michigan State University’s Jenison Field House in East Lansing, Michigan, on November 3, 2024. | Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images This summer, when it seemed increasingly likely that President Joe Biden would drop out of the 2024 race, a pair of questions dominated media coverage and political punditry. Should Vice President Kamala Harris succeed him as the Democratic nominee? Or was there a better candidate out there who could put up a tougher fight against Donald Trump? Some in the party floated the idea of a mini-primary. Ultimately, that open process never happened — Harris and her allies moved quickly to secure the delegates needed to clinch the nomination before the convention, no one stepped up to challenge the vice president, and the Democratic base quickly rallied behind Harris. Since then, there have been, broadly speaking, two ways to view how her presidential campaign has unfolded. One is more skeptical about how Harris has fared. Here she is, running against a twice-impeached, historically unpopular, convicted felon former president – and it’s still a toss-up. Another view offers a more charitable interpretation of the Democratic campaign. After an aging, historically unpopular incumbent president badly damaged his party’s hopes of winning, Harris clawed her side back into a competitive race. She mostly restored the levels of support her party needs among nonwhite, college-educated, and young voters, while holding together a coalition that spanned from former Vice President Dick Cheney to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And she did it as the standard-bearer for an incumbent political party at a time when one of the only hard-and-fast trends of world politics is that ruling parties are being punished in the post-Covid inflationary period. Here’s the case for each perspective. The case that Harris is fumbling The contention that Harris should be performing better is predicated on what some see as the unique awfulness of Donald Trump. With Biden out of the race, it’s now Trump who is the historically unpopular presidential candidate, whose campaign’s ground game is virtually nonexistent, who has been consistently outspent by the Democrats, and whose closing weeks have been filled with chaos and late-breaking scandals. The argument that Harris has underperformed tends to rest on two different charges: that she has played it too safe and that she has played it too vague.  The “safe” charge relates to her perceived pivot toward the center to court moderates and disaffected Republicans. Progressives argue that this has cost her support and energy from the political left. Her embrace of Liz and Dick Cheney, for example, recently reignited criticism from the anti-war left and speculation that it could backfire with Arab American voters.  The same critique has been made regarding her stance on Gaza. Harris’s refusal or inability to distance herself from the Biden administration’s position, with the exception of a few nods to Palestinian suffering in speeches and on the debate stage, has lost her support from the left flank. Zooming out a bit, critics point out that Harris’s centrist pivot on the campaign trail reflects a bigger problem: that Harris has never been clear about why she wants to be president, what she actually believes in, or where she stands on certain policies. She’s avoided explaining changes in policy positions and avoided talking to the press, opting instead for friendly settings, alternative media, or influencers and content creators on social media.  Just this week, an Axios report offered the latest instance of Harris’s avoidance strategy: When asked about Harris’s stance on 12 policy matters she had previously supported — like ending the death penalty at the federal level, eliminating the Senate filibuster, or providing reparations to Black Americans – the campaign declined to comment. And so, on the eve of the election, Harris remains neck-and-neck with Trump — whose favorability ratings are now the highest they’ve been since he left office, despite millions spent in advertising against him. The case that Harris is beating expectations The more positive assessment of Harris’s campaign holds that, given where Harris started and what she’s facing, running neck-and-neck is a feat, not a failure. As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn has written, the national environment in general is one with all the ingredients for a Republican landslide and a conservative cultural rebuke. Americans really dislike Joe Biden. They are upset with the direction the country is heading. Republicans have an edge in national party identification. And Republicans tend to have an edge on most of the issues that seem to matter to voters, specifically the economy and immigration. Gallup recently framed it this way: “Nearly all Gallup measures that have shown some relationship to past presidential election outcomes or that speak to current perceptions of the two major parties favor the Republican Party over the Democratic Party.” That dynamic is true around the world for parties in power. Voters have been consistently punishing incumbents in nearly every democratic election held this year largely because of dissatisfaction with both pandemic response and the ensuing economic crises brought on by inflation and rising global interest rates. That was true for the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, which was swept out of power in the summer; in South Africa, where the African National Congress party lost its majority for the first time; in France; in Japan; in Germany; in India (to a degree), and most recently, in Botswana. To the north, Canada’s incumbent Liberal Party is mirroring much of the last year of American politics: the party has been trailing the Conservative Party in polling for months, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing similar internal pressure to step down before his party heads for electoral disaster in a little less than a year.  It’s also not clear that there was any position Harris could take on Gaza that wouldn’t cost her support from some part of the Democratic coalition. Some of Harris’s moves appear to be paying off. Yes, she has moved her platform to the right on the issues where Trump has an advantage — crime and immigration — while moderating or compromising on others. But that has, in turn, opened up a big-tent ideological coalition. Her focus on personal freedoms (predominantly abortion rights) and democracy has given her a significant boost among Democratic partisans and moderates. In the final polls of the cycle, Harris has managed to largely wipe out Trump’s advantage on the economy and make inroads with those who view immigration as a top concern: The final PBS/Marist poll, for example, found Harris and Trump tied on the question of who voters think would better handle the economy.  And among subgroups, she’s leaned into the gender gap, increasing the levels of Democratic support among women voters to a historic margin, while restoring levels of Democratic support among young voters and nonwhite voters that Biden was drastically underperforming among. Additionally, she’s done that as she boosted her favorability ratings into the positive single digits when those started nearly as bad as Biden’s when the president was at his lowest this summer. All told, Harris’s defenders see a candidate who, despite an unfavorable national environment, has given her party a chance — a far better situation than Democrats found themselves in when Harris took over the nomination just a few short months ago.

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“Decision desks” use data, statistical models, and on-the-ground reporting to understand which candidate is leading where. | Lorenzo Bevilacqua/ABC via Getty Images Come Tuesday night, millions of Americans will be glued to their TV screens or refreshing their browser windows to see the latest election returns, all in anticipation of a final race call. (Though we might won’t know the next president until days later.) Counting ballots can take a while, but news organizations don’t necessarily need to wait for every cast ballot to be counted before announcing a winner. They’re often able to declare who won without the full returns, thanks to the work of teams colloquially known as “decision desks” — groups of political scientists, statisticians, pollsters, and reporters who use mountains of data, statistical models, and on-the-ground reporting to understand which candidate is up where, and how likely a candidate is to win a given precinct, county, or state.  Given the doubt that former President Donald Trump has sown over the past eight years, both about the election process and the media, it’s worth understanding in detail how the processes of projecting and calling election results work, and why consumers of news should trust those results.  “Remember that we don’t elect anybody,” Anthony Salvanto, who as CBS News’s executive director of elections and surveys, oversees the network’s decision desk, told Vox. “The voters do that. Elections officials are reporting the vote, and what you’re getting from us and the networks is our analysis of what they’ve reported, as well as our first-hand reports from talking to voters.” How exactly do news organizations figure out who’s winning? To figure out who won an election, news organizations like Fox News, CNN, the Associated Press (AP), and others use a combination of data from election officials, statistical modeling, and polling and surveys of voters.  Raw vote counts come in at the precinct, county, and state levels, and these help decision desks both ensure voting is in line with their expectations and to make decisions on tight contests. Those expectations are shaped by statistical models based on history and other voter information, like geographical location, gender, age, and more. This year, there are two main systems that news media will rely on for their projections.  The AP and Fox News use a system called AP VoteCast, which debuted in 2018 and has been used in every national election since. In a shift from past practice, VoteCast doesn’t rely on exit polling, and instead uses large-scale online surveys of registered voters who are chosen randomly from a probability-based sample, in an attempt to get the most accurate information from the most representative sample. A different method is used by the National Election Pool (NEP), which provides data to ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News. The NEP relies on Edison Research to conduct three types of surveys: Election Day exit polls, in-person early voting exit polls, and polls of likely voters to capture data from those likely to vote by mail, Rob Farbman, executive vice president at Edison Research, told Vox. (AP and Fox News used to be part of this group, but left after the 2016 election.) (Decision Desk HQ, a private company that contracts with news organizations including the Economist and The Hill — and Vox.com in 2020 — doesn’t use voter surveys, and instead it relies on a proprietary statistical methodology to project winners.) Each outlet and agency creates their own criteria for interpreting these results.  Sometimes, that can lead to one decision desk getting ahead of the others, like in 2020 when Fox News’s decision desk head Arnon Mishkin called Arizona for President Joe Biden much earlier than any other news source, including the AP, or when Decision Desk HQ called the race far ahead of other experts.  Overall though, when it comes time to make a call, “Our decision team will examine all of the models we are running, consult with the networks’ decision teams, and consider any possible data issues to ensure that the possibility of our call being incorrect is sufficiently small,” Farbman said.  “We generally will not make a call unless we are 99.5 percent confident in the call.” Similarly, the AP doesn’t call an election until “we are confident that there’s no chance the trailing candidate can catch up,” according to David Scott, the AP’s vice president and head of news strategy and operations.  The combination of inputs allows the services to accurately understand who has won each of the around 5,000 elections taking place this year, from the presidential race to local contests and ballot measures. And they can do it quickly, without having to wait on election officials to count each vote. That’s true even in the case of a tight race (like the presidential race is expected to be), though calling those is a bit more complicated.   “If you get a very close race, then you’re looking at where the outstanding vote is, the vote that hasn’t yet been reported, and you’re looking at the kind of places that the outstanding vote is from,” Salvanto, of CBS News, said. “You’re looking at whether it is a mail vote or Election Day vote, if there are any differences in the patterns that you’ve seen by ballot type.” Along the way, news organizations keep viewers up to date as the polls close and votes come in, showing the public the data that’s being used to make the calls is accurate. “We will tell you if our models show that it’s a toss up or that it’s leading one way or the other,” Salvanto said. “We will show you, in real time, where the counted vote is coming in — from which counties, which areas of the state, and where it’s still outstanding, where we know there are registered voters, and we know there are still reports to come, so that the viewer can see the whole picture, the way that we see it.” Of course, these methods aren’t perfect. Very occasionally, news organizations call a race wrong. The most dramatic instance was in 2000, when news networks initially called Florida for Al Gore. Errors do happen — decision desks are made up human beings, after all — but when they do, organizations work to correct them as quickly as possible. Still, mistakes are incredibly rare, so come Election Day (and the days after) you can be confident you’re seeing the real results. 

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