Demanding an entire industry change everything overnight doesn't work. Suppliers have to ramp up production, processes have to be reworked, purchasing contracts have already been set a year in advance.
I don't understand why Americans accept this behavior from corporates. They are basically poisoning people for economic reasons. Why don't they use that extra profit, made over the health of millions, to speed up this process.
Because the USA politicians for the most part do what corporate interests want. When it looked like consumer interests might gain a foothold in 1960-1970s, a member of the US chamber of commerce wrote the Powell memo as a guide to corporate responses to consumer activism, this is still followed by USA corporations and he was appointed to US Supreme Court to put his influence on legal standards for generations. He’s not the first nor the last as traditionally in the USA due to how weak the framers made the federal government originally, a private public partnership is always exalted as the best of both worlds for governance but this leads to regulatory capture we have now without sufficient safeguards. edit: an adjacent comment mentions GRAS,Generally Recognized as Safe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_recognized_as_safe - laws in the USA last forever unless new laws supercede them so this law set in stone thousands of chemicals (including the aforementioned dyes) as safe because they didn't kill anyone quickly in 1958 and companies are free to use those in food - only a handful of items have been removed since then because the FDA is required to scientifically prove harm, unlike how those items got put on the list.
