Just how do monarch butterflies connect to the industrial food system?

That same industrial agricultural system has operated for decades under a set of rules most people have never heard of. The FDA’s GRAS designation, short for Generally Recognized as Safe, was designed to allow common, well-understood substances like salt and vinegar to be used without lengthy approval processes. Over time it became something else entirely, where companies can self-certify that any ingredient is safe without notifying the FDA at all. Today, nearly 99% of new food chemicals enter the market this way, according to a 2025 analysis by the Environmental Working Group. At least 1,000 substances have been added to America’s  food supply without the agency’s knowledge. 

And now, Americans are consuming a very long list of ingredients unique to American food. Potassium bromate, a dough strengthener found in more than 100 U.S. bread products, is banned in the EU, the UK and Canada as a carcinogen. Ractopamine, fed to U.S. pigs in the weeks before slaughter to produce leaner meat, is banned in more than 160 countries, including China, Russia and every EU member state. Red Dye No. 3, a petroleum-derived synthetic dye used in candy and baked goods, was banned by the FDA last year — 35 years after it was already banned from cosmetics.

Some of the contamination bypassed the regulatory system entirely. In 2022, researchers Valentina Notarstefano, Antonio Ragusa and their colleagues published a study detecting microplastics in 75% of breast milk samples tested including polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, particles small enough to cross biological barriers that took millions of years of evolution to build. No manufacturer added them to food, but they are the residue of our materials economy (much of which contains our food) that has produced 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic since 1950 and recycled about 9% of it, the rest degrading into particles that are now, among other places, in the first food that passes from mother to baby.

The industrial food system did not set out to accumulate microplastics in breast milk, or collapse the monarch population or add carcinogens to bread. It has always optimized for yield, shelf life and cost, and simply externalized everything else. And now, we are paying for it with our health, the quality of our soil, billions of missing pollinators and more.

Tiny shifts are happening. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has directed the agency to explore closing the GRAS self-certification pathway. California’s Senate Bill 54 requires plastic producers to reduce single-use output and fund cleanup. While none of this reverses 70 years of industrial food policy, it is the painfully slow beginning of a correction to acknowledge that convenience is perhaps not more valuable than life itself.

In the meantime, common milkweed thrives in a pot — butterfly weed, Asclepias tuberosa, does well in a 14-inch container on a sunny porch, and monarchs will find it. California native plants, replacing the water-intensive lawn that still covers most front yards in this county, support the ecosystem those yards once were and many local water utilities, including Cal Water, offer rebates of up to $3.50 per square foot to help cover the conversion to drip irrigation and drought-tolerant plantings. Organic, locally grown food removes demand from the supply chain that produced the ractopamine inventory, and growing even a small portion yourself organically puts fewer pesticides into your body and takes something out of the industrial food system entirely.

None of this changes what is already in our soil, or what has already been passed to our children. But the caterpillar I discovered over the weekend found the one milkweed plant I seeded last season. It found exactly what it needed to survive and grow the monarch population, and that is not nothing. A future pollinator.

Annie Tsai is chief operating officer at Interact and three-time author, leads community engagement and learning for Moms in Tech, and is a city and county commissioner, among other things. She can be reached at: media@annietsai.co.