When the Government Outsources Safety, Families Pick up the Slack

No more fresh raspberries this summer, one of the few foods toddlers reliably eat. Health advisors now say you should cook them in pies and jam to be safe. And that convenient bagged salad? Needs to be replaced with the full head, painstakingly washed. As an economist studying women’s lives, I’ve railed against the unfair division of labor in American households, where women still tend to shoulder the majority of the domestic load despite growing earning power. But in this case, there’s another actor not pulling its weight: the government. Cyclosporiasis, and the attendant time burden for parents that comes with it, can be directly linked to recent pullbacks in the food safety system that has kept us safe for decades.Food safety is a classic “public good”—something that it’s more efficient for the government to provide than for each household to manage on its own. If a chemical is harmful, say BPA in pouch linings, it’s much more efficient for the government to ban it than for each family to have a designated baby food policer reading labels and parenting blogs to find out which brands to avoid. And the government can provide safety at scale that parents cannot provide themselves. ...