https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-can...0vpavpqmbm5&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink Is Candy Healthier Than Spinach? A chocolatier in San Francisco laughs at the nanny state. By John Masko May 5, 2024 at 4:52 pm ET San Francisco ‘WARNING: The cocoa beans that we use to make our chocolate can expose you to cadmium, which is known to the State of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm.” I can think of few better encapsulations of the crushing state and municipal regulatory burdens San Francisco businesses face than this preposterous warning. But it’s the second half of this placard, which I saw last week at an upscale chocolate maker called Dandelion Chocolate, that gives me hope for the future of a city I love. California’s now-ubiquitous Proposition 65 warnings stem from a 1986 state ballot initiative originally intended to protect clean drinking water. Like many well-intentioned environmental initiatives, Proposition 65 developed into a nanny-state Hydra that forces businesses to slap health warnings on everything from seaweed to clothing. These labels, necessitated by the threat of class-action lawsuits, must be posted whenever a product might contain trace amounts of any of several hundred dangerous chemical compounds listed by the state. A Proposition 65 warning can be required even if there is no scientific evidence that anyone has been sickened by consuming a given product—chocolate, for instance. While a Consumer Reports study in 2022 found that popular chocolate bars contained more than California’s recommended allowable doses of cadmium and lead, no research has linked eating chocolate to a higher risk of birth defects or metal toxicity. Dandelion Chocolate started its warning by covering its legal bases, as all California businesses must. But then, in smaller print further down, things got cheeky: “Cadmium is a naturally-occurring component in soil, and many plants take it up as they absorb nutrients, which is how it gets into our cocoa beans. According to the CDC, cadmium is commonly found in vegetables, and in relatively high concentrations in leafy greens like spinach. The law won’t allow us to say much more about how the tiny trace amounts in our product will affect your health, but if you want to reduce your exposure to cadmium generally, you might consider eating fewer leafy greens.” In this short paragraph, I saw something I had almost never seen before. During the two years I lived in San Francisco and on many visits since, I had often seen businesses—straining under the city and state’s regulatory and tax burdens—react with acceptance, a sigh or even an exasperated roll of the eyes. But with laughter and open ridicule? With the sarcastic suggestion that customers worried about chocolate bars should instead eat fewer vegetables? This was entirely new. This wasn’t mere frustration, but the anger of a San Francisco business tired of being asked to behave like an obedient child in the face of overbearing authority run amok. Historically, there are few surer signs of cracks in the authoritarian edifice than humor. A rising taste for satirizing the regulatory state shows not only declining public faith in the justice and correctness of government authority, but also declining fear of speaking out against it. In San Francisco—one of America’s most countercultural yet blindly obedient cities, one of its most socially licentious and yet economically repressed—some faint, long-stifled laughs are beginning to be heard. It might be my own wishful thinking, but when it comes to my favorite West Coast city, I need all the hope I can get. Mr. Masko is a freelance writer based in Boston. Appeared in the May 6, 2024, print edition as 'Is Candy Healthier Than Spinach?'.
