The simple act of cooking, scientists have found, causes acrylamide to develop naturally in carbohydrate-rich foods. Frying, baking, roasting or otherwise cooking at high temperatures releases the organic chemical.
California officials say some warnings might be inevitable.
"We are trying to move responsibly, but we have to work within the requirements of this law," said Joan E. Denton, director of California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. "Some businesses [that] have acrylamide in their food may be required to notify customers."
Proposition 65 is the reason California has so many warning signs -- in bars, hotels and parking garages, in the packaging of products such as video game joysticks and fishing rods -- that advise of possible cancer risks.
State and local prosecutors have sued numerous companies to enforce the law. More often, private lawyers have done so. Indeed, the law, which has sparked an estimated 20,000 legal claims, has given birth to a cottage industry of toxic lawsuit experts. There are newsletters and conferences dedicated solely to the law's arcane details.
The many critics of Proposition 65 predict that the pending decision on acrylamide will finally make a mockery of environmental health labeling, resulting in warnings so common that they will be rendered meaningless. To make that point, a skeptics' organization, the American Council on Science and Health, announced plans to sue Whole Foods Market, saying the supermarket chain should post warnings because some of the organic bread it sells contains acrylamide.
"It's absurd to see these warnings at libraries and supermarkets and hardware stores. When you have too much information, and it doesn't discriminate, it does not inform," said Henry Miller, a former U.S. Food and Drug Administration official who is a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. "We live in a world of chemicals. So it is not surprising that there are all manner of chemicals -- natural and man-made -- in our bodies."
David Roe, a co-author of Proposition 65, gently laughs off claims that his creation will lead to warning label chaos in California. On the contrary, he said, history has shown that, when faced with the threat of labels, companies will devise creative ways to clean up their products -- which was the law's intent.
