Bans

Food bans are federal, state, and local laws and administrative regulations that prohibit the production, sale, purchase, or consumption of certain foods. Though relatively unknown one hundred years ago, food bans have become increasingly widespread in the United States over the last forty years.

The movement to ban certain foods has coincided with the rise of the consumer protection, animal rights, food safety, and environmental movements over this same period. As a result, food bans find their bases in myriad underlying principles, take many forms, and prohibit a wide variety of foods. Food bans stretch from farm to table and target nearly every link in the food chain, including farmers, restaurateurs and chefs, grocers, and consumers and home cooks. Furthermore, food bans often take aim not just at an end product—in the form of a given food—but features attendant to that food like advertising and marketing, agricultural production, and food ingredients.