The US Food and Drug Administration rejected a legal petition demanding it set limits on Pfas in food, the agency said.
The Tucson Environmental Justice Task Force, which in November 2023 filed the legal petition, had asked the FDA to check for up to 30 Pfas compounds in produce, fish, eggs, milk and bread and scaled back the request in 2025 to seek advisory thresholds for PFOA and Pfos in seafood and milk.
The FDA rejected the revised petition and said it plans to set nonbinding "action levels" rather than legally enforceable "tolerance levels," adding there is "insufficient evidence to support [TEJTF's] request." The agency said action levels do not require contaminated food to be removed from shelves while tolerance levels make it illegal to sell food contaminated beyond a set threshold.
Pfas are a class of at least 16,000 compounds most frequently used to make products water-, stain- and grease-resistant, and they have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems; they are dubbed "forever chemicals" because they can persist for thousands of years in the environment and are designed to be indestructible.
The FDA conducts limited annual testing and in 2019 adjusted its methodology so it will only catch what consumer groups say are extremely high contamination levels and ignore relatively low to moderate levels; that change reduced the number of contaminated food samples the agency reported from 182 to 78. "Imagine using a radar gun to detect speeding in cars, but then manipulating the radar so that it only detects speeding in cars going over 100 mph," Brian Ronholm wrote in Consumer Reports after the FDA announced the change.
The Environmental Protection Agency has found food is the biggest source of Pfas exposure, recent FDA testing found 70% of seafood samples contain the chemicals, and independent milk testing found Pfas in 12% of 50 samples, including extremely high levels in Whole Foods and Kirkland Signature brands.
Independent testing has also found meat and crops produced on farms that use sewage sludge contain high levels of Pfas, some state agencies have ordered contaminated food and milk taken off the market, and independent studies found high levels in blueberries, kale and beer; EPA testing of seafood found the chemicals in all but one sample. The levels of the Pfas compound gen X consumed by eating 10 blueberries grown near a Pfas plant in North Carolina were found to be equivalent to drinking a liter of water with levels above the federal limit, and an analysis of FDA and EPA fish testing data by the Environmental Working Group found eating one serving of U.S. freshwater fish contaminated with median Pfas levels could be equivalent to drinking highly contaminated water every day for a month.
Sandra Daussin, an attorney for the Tucson Environmental Justice Task Force, called the FDA decision "disappointing" and said, "If it's important enough to regulate in water then we need to regulate it in food – that's a no-brainer." The group is planning to sue and ask a court to order the FDA to set thresholds.
There had been hope regulators under Robert F Kennedy Jr would take the threat more seriously; Kennedy leads the "make America healthy again" (Maha) movement, of which eliminating toxic chemicals from food is a cornerstone.