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Now welcome to the award winning BestOfAleft podcast with Cups Today from the Center for Public Integrity, the David Pakman show, the Young Turks, Calcarspen, Democracy Now, and last week tonight with John Oliver.

In 2008, when an Australian food manufacturer wanted the US federal government stamp of approval on the company's new ingredients, regulators said no, but go inside many American supermarkets and you'll find products containing them on the shelves.

So how do new ingredients get from the lab to your dinner table? When companies create new food additives to improve their products texture, taste, appearance, or to send their shelf life, they have two choices.

The Food Additive Highway is a gridlock route marked by government potholes. Traffic here is policed by the US Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency that regulates 80% of the nation's food supply.

Companies traveling this path must submit their food additives to extensive review, then the FDA may issue its formal approval.

This journey can take years, even decades to complete, so it's no surprise that companies often take an alternative route.

This road is paved by a legal loophole that hinges on what counts as a food additive.

Changes to the law in the 50s created this two-lane system where anything generally recognizes safe or grass travels down a much smoother road to market.

These grass ingredients are not considered food additives, and effectively get a pass to the fast lane.

This grass clause means companies can determine on their own that what they're adding to our food is safe.

Then it's up to the company to inform the FDA if they want to. That's right.

Companies have no legal obligation to tell the FDA what they're putting in our food, but if they do decide to pull in for inspection, they could get the FDA OK, which makes them more attractive to potential distributors.

But what if the FDA doesn't like what it sees?

Take loophole. It's a lagoon from the same family as peanuts.

It's often used in Mediterranean cooking, it can also be ground into flour and used in gluten-free food.

In 2008, when George Weston Foods told the FDA that they'd certified the use of loophole-based flour, protein, and fiber and food is safe, regulators at the FDA disagreed.

It found that people with peanut allergies could suffer life-threatening reactions to loophole ingredients.

FDA officials said ingredient labels listing loophole wouldn't be enough to protect consumers.

The regulators refused to agree that the ingredients were generally recognized as safe.

So George Weston Foods withdrew the notification, but other companies skipped the FDA checkpoint altogether.

The Center for Public Integrity found products containing loophole on supermarket shelves.

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