If governments are bad, people are much worse. How often do you test your food for lead? How often have you “done your own research” on whether your toaster will explode if you plug it into the wall? And what happens if your neighbor doesn’t do their own research and burns both of your houses down?

Unless consumers have the financial means to test everything, it’s not reasonable to expect the burden of consumer protections to fall on consumers. Consumers shouldn’t have to test all of their food for every possible contaminant.

Additionally, this doesn’t address harms which companies know they are creating but consumers don’t. Companies will lie and cover up the damage they cause, and pollute the information ecosystem with propaganda which confuses the issue. People used to think cigarettes were good for them.

What you're describing is a fundamental problem of centralization at scale. Consumers shouldn't need to test their food for lead because their food is grown locally and isn't highly processed. Consumers shouldn't be tricked by companies lying about and hiding damages causes by them because consumers should be dealing with companies at a scale they can actually understand.

We don't need big governments to save us from cigarette companies because people don't know better. We need consumers saying to hell with cigarettes because they just need to roll a bit of dried tobacco leaves if that's what they're going for.

We lost the scale of our lives in favor of convenience, marketing, and greed. Governments can't fix that.

That doesn’t solve the problem. Even if you’re dealing with a local farmer, are you testing their food for all of the dozens of contaminants which could be there? No.

And more importantly, you can’t deal on a local level for the most part. It’s not possible. You mostly purchase products from national or multinational brands, so good luck getting any consumer protection from them. If poisoning customers lets the CEO buy a longer yacht for his house in Cyprus, he will do that.

You're still imposing industrial agriculture problems on smaller scale local ag.

The contaminants used in industrial farming generally come down to two main areas, poisons and fertilizers for the growing period and preservatives for the shipping/warehousing process.

Local farmers wouldn't be at the same scale and may very well not need to spray their fields with the same chemicals during the growing cycle. At a minimum, they're local and anyone buying their food that cares can come right out and see how the farm operates, meet the farmer, etc.

All of the preservatives and packaging could be skipped entirely if you as buying local. When the food doesn't need to handle weeks or months of storage and shipping you simply don't need all of that.

> You mostly purchase products from national or multinational brands

My while point is they if consumers cared we could just story doing this. Sure, it'd be less convenient and we wouldn't have products like iPhones or modern cars, but in the context of getting rid of the use of plastics and PFAS those kinds of products go away anyway. It boils down to the fact that we care about the idea of PFAS but we aren't actually willing to give up the novelty and convenience of all the products those chemicals allow for.

When I look for evidence of small farms using fewer chemicals, I see the opposite. Random example in China where smaller the farm, the more chemicals: https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/overuse-fertilizers...

And we're supposed to regularly drive out to farms to monitor their use of chemicals? You'd have to spell that scenario out to me because it sounds ridiculous and rather naive. For example, all of us who eat food also have our own jobs and lives to worry about, and we can't spy on every producer of every good we consume, though I'm not even sure what the spying accomplishes.

Tell me what this stakeout looks like and what kind of info it's going to gather.

Sounds like something we'd offload to a representative, authoritative body...

You'd have to really stretch the definition of chemicals here to find any used on my own farm. Same goes for the farm we have a CSA membership with while we get our own produce setup built out.

I have visited the farm we get our CSA from a few times, but not often at all. Its much easier than you might think to meet the person growing your food and have a feel for them as people, their farm, etc. They do also often update on their own website and email newsletter, though again I don't really feel the need to watch them like hawks.

I don't think its much of an investment to actually meet the people making one's food if that really matters to them. Granted finding local farms isn't always easy and I'd love to see more people start, but would you really rather blindly trust a massive public corporation driven entirely by profits and almost certainly buying off the regulators meant to keep up safe in such a system?

So the best alternative to government regulations is to go back on hundreds of years of economic development and only purchase products you have personally vetted every part of the supply chain for. No one has time for that. Other than Amish people, I don’t know of anyone who lives like that.

And again, this ignores the other two glaring issues I mentioned previously: that individuals are not equipped to properly assess the supply chain; and regulations also protect you from your neighbors’ use of dangerous products.

> So the best alternative to government regulations is to go back on hundreds of years of economic development and only purchase products you have personally vetted every part of the supply chain for

You don't have to go back hundreds of years or vet every part of the supply chain to recognize when a product is wrapped in plastic. Hell, you can effectively assume that all produce in a chain store was sprayed heavily with chemicals and that all meat approved by the USDA was sprayed with bleach and is full of stress hormones due to the way animals are processed.

All I have been arguing for the whole thread is for individual consumers to make decisions that can have a direct impact on what products are produced and what aren't. Are you arguing that consumers should just buy whatever is there and wait for the government to fix it from the top down?

> regulations also protect you from your neighbors’ use of dangerous products.

There's nothing wrong with that when your neighbor's choice is infringing on your rights. I agree that's a reasonable use of government regulation if the damage caused is clear.

Yeah we need a government takeover of the Better Business Bureau. Only government bureaucrats are qualified to test things. Credit scores, too. Has to be government. Let's throw in a social credit score too so that consumers know who to trust on an individual basis

Its ridiculous to have a free market decide whether we want to have PFAS or not. Free markets are premised on rational agents making decisions for themselves. But I can't decide to live in a PFAS-free world by myself. I can't de-risk my son from autism, cancer and whatnot by just not buying PFAS products even if I would have a reasonable choice to do so. PFAS is everywhere, its in the rain, in our food, in the soil, in the air we breathe, and it will be there for thousands of years. From next to 3M's factories to Antarctica, there is no spot on earth that isn't polluted by PFAS.

I'd say lets have a vote. Do you want to risk autism, cancer, infertility and whatnot for nonstick pans and all the other wonders of PFAS? If the majority doesn't, it will get a global ban.

You absolutely can chose to not add any if those chemicals into your life. Of course you can't control the rain, though you can control your food to a great extent.

If people care enough to decide not to use products that contain PFAS, the environmental exposures would disappear pretty quickly. More importantly, if its even possible for governments to effectively coordinate a cleanup process that job would be much easier if consumers pitched in by first using their individual power to drastically reduce the contaminants being added into the system.

> I'd say lets have a vote. Do you want to risk autism, cancer, infertility and whatnot for nonstick pans and all the other wonders of PFAS? If the majority doesn't, it will get a global ban.

That doesn't require a vote at all. Bans are only useful when we have to leverage the power of the state to force people to do something they don't want to do. If consumers agree that nonstick pans have all those risks and they aren't worth it, they stop buying nonstick pans and companies stop making them.

Even if we wanted the ban route, who enforces it? The UN? Some new global government? Or a unanimous agreement by every government in the world, including those who's economies are partly supported by producing the nonstick pans?