2 weeks Ago By Tom Riese
A bipartisan Pennsylvania House bill on food allergy safety authored by two Allegheny County lawmakers could see a floor vote this week. State House members Natalie Mihalek (R-Upper St. Clair) and Arvind Venkat (D-McCandless) introduced the bill this year requiring restaurants to post food allergy information about menu items and train employees on safety.
Those are precautions many establishments already take, but so far state law hasn’t required them. “Recognizing that food allergies are an epidemic ..
. how can we make it so that people can more safely enjoy restaurants, enjoy takeout without having to worry about exposures?” said Venkat, who is also an emergency physician. Some 33 million Americans — or one in ten — have food allergies, he added.
“That’s an extraordinary number.” And food allergy prevalence is “expected to grow exponentially over the next decade,” Mihalek told WESA. The most common foods that cause serious allergic reactions are nuts, milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, peanuts, wheat, sesame seeds and soybeans, according to the FDA.
FARE, a food allergy education and advocacy group, found the number of children with food allergies more than doubled between 1997 and 2021. It’s an upward trend the group expects will continue. This is not the first time the House has considered the measure.
Last session, a similar bill cleared the House with all Democrats in support and roughly half of Republicans in opposition. The Senate didn’t discuss the bill before the end of session in November, where it died at the end of the legislative term. But it is moving again, at least in the lower chamber: The bill passed the House Agriculture and Rural Affairs committee last week, 20-6 .
(Committee vice chair Rep. Emily Kinkead and committee member Rep. Mandy Steele, both of Allegheny County, also voted in favor of the bill.
) A vote on the measure by the full House could come as soon as Wednesday. During discussion in committee, Mihalek and Venkat tried to assuage concerns of some Republican colleagues before the committee vote. Both Stephanie Borowicz (R-Clinton) and Joe Hamm (R-Lycoming) had questions about whether the bill would impose more red tape on small business.
National food chains, Borowicz said, “most of them are already doing this,” while Hamm said he worried that missing allergens in a dish could open up restaurants to lawsuits. Thanks to uniform guidelines from the FDA, Venkat said “This legislation would make that a relatively automated process” for restaurants to protect against litigation. Pennsylvania already updates its food code based on FDA recommendations, he added.
Mihalek on Friday laid out the bill’s odds of passing the Republican-controlled Senate. “There was a contingency, particularly on my side of the aisle, that just thought ‘It's government overreach,’ but we didn't do the bill in a silo,” she said, noting that the measure had the support of a large restaurant and lodging trade association. Mihalek told WESA other food safety legislation is coming this session.
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