Should I be worried about Prop 65 warnings?

I purchased a box of noodles from a local Asian market and noticed that the back had a warning label on it: “This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.” How concerned should I be about this?

There are a few issues to untangle: The bearing California has on products being sold in Philadelphia; the nebulousness of a California state law that dates to 1986; and food safety concerns at a time when imported foods have faced recent stops at our border and synthetic food dyes are potentially being banned by the federal government.

The other week, I stopped by Hung Vuong Food Market on Washington Ave. and picked through numerous products, including dried noodles from Japan, Vietnam, and Korea; bamboo chopsticks, laundry detergent, cleansing wipes, and porcelain cups from China; and jars of paste from Vietnam and from China — shrimp and sesame, respectively. The California warning label appeared on all of them.

The label, known by the shorthand of Proposition 65, is the product of the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, which requires businesses in California to warn consumers about potential exposure to chemicals that can cause cancer, birth defects, and other reproductive harm over one’s lifetime. The initial list contained 775 chemicals, but it has since expanded to more than 900.

Prop 65 labels are found on everything from bear-proof locks to all of Disneyland. That includes an enormous range of foods, from protein powder to tinned seafood, and on goods produced both domestically and internationally. What’s crucial to understand, especially with respect to imported food, is that the presence of the label does not necessarily indicate the presence of chemicals found on the Prop 65 list.

It’s simply too onerous for most companies to test their products for hundreds of chemicals. So they don’t, and apply the label as a catch-all. “It’s very expensive to test for 900 chemicals,” said food labeling and ingredient expert Kara Nielsen, who is based in San Francisco. “They might test for the worst ones, like lead. But it’s easier and cheaper to put the label on there rather than figuring out what needs to be done.”

But why are Asian products with California-specific labels being found in Philadelphia? Nielsen explained, “A lot of Asian products are imported into California, where this rule is in place. Companies are not going to have two different labels for different parts of the country, so in some ways, it’s easier to just put the [Prop 65] label on.”

They are frequently on goods imported to the U.S. from Asia. That’s not because Asian products are more likely to contain those chemicals. Their importers simply have different labeling practices. They more frequently slap the Prop 65 label onto their products as a catch-all approach to American litigiousness, as one Asian food importer explained in Vietnamese cookbook author Andrea Nguyen’s newsletter.

Food safety concerns have long been tackled piecemeal in the US.

You may recall the kerfuffle that Red 3, a petroleum-derived synthetic food dye, raised this year when it was banned in January and even the disappearance of Filipino ingredients off the shelves of Philly’s Asian markets at the end of last year, setting off panic buying in Filipino communities dependent on items like Jufran banana ketchup, due to an FDA-imposed import alert that automatically stops “high-risk” items from getting past the border.

Prop 65 warnings are not bans. They’re merely a precaution that Asian importers are taking to prevent lawsuits.

There is nothing that makes imported Asian food products with Prop 65 warnings more or less dangerous than anything else we are consuming from any grocery shelf. All this to say: Don’t worry too much about them.

So you can buy the udon noodles without worrying too much about the Prop 65 label, but there are far more food safety issues beyond Asian imported pantry products to worry about.

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