On March 10, 2025, Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., promised to close the “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) loophole that allows dangerous food additives to enter the marketplace without premarket safety testing. This could mean GMOs, given a blanket GRAS exemption in 1992, might finally be safety tested as food additives!

Genetically modified foods should have been regulated under Congress’s 1958 Food Additives law. This would have required each new GMO to go through a rigorous premarket review to be approved or rejected based on scientific evidence, but in 1992, the George H.W. Bush Administration’s Food & Drug Administration exempted GMOs from the law by declaring them “generally recognized as safe.” GRAS was meant for common, pre-1958 processed food ingredients like sugar and gelatin. It should never have been used to give a free pass to a new technology that would put things in our food we’d never eaten before.

President Clinton’s FDA struck an even greater blow to food safety in 1997, when it began allowing manufacturers to secretly determine that a substance is GRAS–without seeking the FDA’s approval or even notifying the agency! After that, the FDA only reviewed GRAS determinations that companies voluntarily chose to submit to the agency; it didn’t keep track of GRAS determinations companies made but did not inform the FDA of.

According to FDA regulations, the GRAS status of a substance must be reconsidered as new scientific information emerges, but a U.S. Government Accountability Office investigation published in 2010 found that “the agency has not systematically reconsidered GRAS substances since the 1980s”–and it hasn’t done that since.

That same 2010 GAO report concluded that engineered nanomaterials were entering the food supply as GRAS substances without the FDA’s knowledge. In 2014, the Obama Administration’s FDA issued guidance stating that engineered nanomaterials weren’t GRAS, but that didn’t get nano ingredients off the market.

In 2016, President Obama’s FDA issued a Final Rule on Substances Generally Recognized as Safe where it affirmed the Clinton Era policy of not requiring manufacturers to submit their GRAS determination to the agency.

Ending the practice of secret GRAS self-determinations is important, but it isn’t enough. Over the next several weeks, we’ll be highlighting each of the genetically engineered, synthetic, nanotech, and synbio Frankenfoods that entered our food supply through the GRAS loophole and demanding that Sec. Kennedy take these substances off the market unless and until they successfully complete the food additive review.

This Week’s GRAS Action: Tell Sec. Kennedy, Ban Roundup Ready Crops!

Engineered to withstand the direct application of Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup, these were the first GMOs to be exempted from regulation through the GRAS loophole.

In 1996, Roundup Ready soy was planted; in 1997, cotton; in 1998, corn and canola; in 2008, sugar beets; and in 2011, alfalfa. When farmers didn’t rush to buy the expensive, patented seeds, Monsanto‘s seed monopoly allowed it to force them to by taking all the non-GMO seeds off the market. Its devious plot to increase its pesticide sales worked. Roundup quickly became the most-used agricultural chemical of all time, one of the health consequences being an explosion in non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma among pesticide applicators and farmers.

To learn more about the systemic effects of Roundup Ready crops, watch the documentary Into the Weeds that follows groundskeeper Dewayne “Lee” Johnson’s fight for justice against Monsanto (now Bayer) while suffering a debilitating and terminal illness. Johnson’s case was the first to go to trial in a series of lawsuits involving tens of thousands of plaintiffs claiming Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup, or its industrial counterpart Ranger Pro, contributed to their cancer. The film covers this groundbreaking trial.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Sec. Kennedy to Ban Roundup Ready Crops!