Most people assume grocery store food has been independently tested and safety-approved. A lot of it hasn't. In many cases, the FDA relies on the company's own safety data to decide whether a food is safe, not independent testing.

Take Carnation Sweetened Condensed Milk. Two ingredients: milk and sugar. Then the warning  "Contains bioengineered products" but doesn't say which ingredient. It's the sugar, btw,  from bioengineered sugar beets. The question is: why would they need to bioengineer sugar beets?

This happens across the food aisle. Campbell's soups carry the same vague disclosure. Some brands make you scan a QR code in the store just to find out what's actually engineered.

It gets bigger than crops. Lab-grown "cultivated" chicken and salmon are already legal to sell in the U.S., no long-term safety testing required. A produce coating called Apeel is already on much of our fresh fruit, can't be washed off, and has never been independently tested long-term. Apeel's own safety filing discloses trace heavy metals, arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury. The company says they're below FDA limits, but those limits are numbers Apeel wrote itself, and the FDA never independently tested a single sample to confirm them.

And it's not slowing down. USDA is right now deciding whether to add wheat, dry beans, golden rice, and a genetically engineered purple tomato to the bioengineered foods list.

I'm a retired Air Force veteran and small business owner from Texas. I wrote a bill to fix this.