261–270 of 605 posts
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And in German, Bimbo is a very racist and insulting word for people with darker skin. Pretty close to the n-word in America.
In Finland it is insult, mostly for mentally crazy woman... Think of the not exactly bright blond women in tv shows and like.
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>Now there's effectively no way to know if a baked product will actually contain sesame You are catastrophizing. It remains the case that any baked product that doesn't have "may contain traces of sesame" on the label must by law be free of traces of sesame. And if no producer chooses to produce such a product, then it is because the number of people who want it is quite small (or the costs of complying with regulati…
No one wins by some percentage of the population having to bake their own bread. If these facilities cannot keep unwanted visible particulates like sesame out of their products, how can they keep dirt and bacteria out? This regulation is not only good for people allergic to sesame, it's a brown M&M test. I see value in it.
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It's the market being efficient. Markets solve everything, yay!
Markets respond to regulation, and are distorted by it. It's not a problem with the market.
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The manufacturer will dial the measured sesame so that it will be large enough that "cross contamination" will be a rounding error. It's fairly easy to get something below a reasonable threshold--run a batch or two without the contaminant and throw them out. After that, the background levels will be below the added ingredient measurement.
> The manufacturer will dial the measured sesame so that it will be large enough that "cross contamination" will be a rounding error. Sure, the "completely uncontrolled" amount present before - in the "may contain sesame" situation where it was not added as an ingredient - was a rounding error. That's why if you can buy the product now you also could do it before.
It's not just "adding sesame". It's also going to be things like "specifying the amount of time to run disposable product on the line to get below specified threshold".
It's about consistency. Maintaining documentable 0.001% contamination is much, much harder than maintaining 0.1% contamination.
There is no winning this battle via penalties. If you don't want sesame contamination, you have to make the economics worthwhile. Or simply ban sesame, but you're going to get major pushback on that.
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> It was a clear and flagrant abuse of the "may contain traces" mechanism. The bakeries caused harm for consumers as a way to avoid the coats of doing business safely. In the exact same way that every product ever invented may cause cancer in California, I assume? This is a problem with the FDA, not the companies. Give a dog a long leash, they're going to use the slack.
Companies aren't dogs, companies have obligations that they need to fulfill and they're choosing to neglect them.
Can company choose to produce sesame products? (I assume: yes)
Can company choose solely sesame products, without doing sesame-free stuff? (I assume: yes)
If new regulation comes along, and business deems new requirement is unacceptably high, can it pivot to a different market where it can reuse same investments? (I assume: yes)
Law can be flawed. (Because people definitely are)
Maybe it can be improved? E.g. require random testing, and then say there are 7 seeds in every 100000 of pies.
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It's closer to: FDA orders bakers to list allergens. There are stiff penalties if you are allergenic but don't list the allergen. So? Bakers look at their production processes and determine there's a chance that enough allergens get into the product due to cross contamination to list it on the label, just in case. FDA doesn't like it. They expect the bakers to fix their cross-contamination issues at great expense to…
The only way to fix cross-contamination issues is to have a different production facility for every possible combination of allergens. Which is insane. I worked in a factory that packaged food, if one product contained an allergen, there was no way you could guarantee that a tiny amount of that allergen wouldn't get into some amount of the next product on that production line. No way. Not any possible way. You can cl…
Bread is flour, water, yeast, and heat. It feeds people. It's easy to make anywhere you have those things, which is... almost everywhere.
It doesn't require production lines or manufacturing facilities or packaging or even freight. All those things are artificial contrivances, and if they make it hard to practically address concerns like allergens, then maybe they're not a viable approach to providing foodstuffs after all.
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No. That market is too small to target. Overregulation is affecting consumer choices.
It’s over regulation to everyone who doesn’t have sesame allergies. It’s lifesaving to those that do. Somehow bakeries in Switzerland are doing just fine with sesame being a declared allergen and keeping them separate but American ones just can’t be bothered to handle a life threatening ingredient thoroughly carefully.
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No. That market is too small to target. Overregulation is affecting consumer choices.
It’s over regulation to everyone who doesn’t have sesame allergies. It’s lifesaving to those that do. Somehow bakeries in Switzerland are doing just fine with sesame being a declared allergen and keeping them separate but American ones just can’t be bothered to handle a life threatening ingredient thoroughly carefully.
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It’s over regulation to everyone who doesn’t have sesame allergies. It’s lifesaving to those that do. Somehow bakeries in Switzerland are doing just fine with sesame being a declared allergen and keeping them separate but American ones just can’t be bothered to handle a life threatening ingredient thoroughly carefully.
You need to judge over-regulation as it relates to society as a whole.
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> how can they keep dirt and bacteria out? They can't. It's statistically impossible. Even operating theaters and clean rooms can't keep every trace bit of dirt or bacteria out. All anyone tries to do is reduce the incidence to below a meaningful threshold. If the requirement is: either eliminate every last molecule of every offending substance, or use a label that the offending substance may appear in trace amounts.…
I didn't say "every last molecule", I said "visible particulates". Nice attempt to straw-man though.