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FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

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Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#271

Post by shiroiushi »

isoprophlex wrote: post #253
NaOH wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren’t food prep areas when it comes to manufacturing at this scale. There are silos, storage tanks, essentially duct work to transport ingredients from bulk storage to production, and large-scale machinery which is designed to minimize exposure to the environment and people while in use. That’s putting aside the equipment and facilities used to acquire ingredients or store products after production. Yes, all o…

> These are factories where product assembly happens to involve edible parts. And looking at the picture of the """bread""" at the start of the article, it shows. That's not bread, that's an industrial product.

Yes, almost all food these days is an "industrial product" at some point in the pipeline. That's the reality of living in an industrial society and not an agrarian one.

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#272

Post by shiroiushi »

lisper wrote: post #218
doctor_eval wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t answer for sesame, but my kid has an allergy to a specific nut, that we discovered after mum picked baby up after handling said nut, leaving bright red welts on their little body. No ingestion required. Subsequently, immunology department, skin prick tests to identify the specific culprit, “risk of anaphylaxis” posters, and an Epipen - with risk factor based on the size of the reaction, in millimeters, to the…

Thanks.

Yep: instead of a bunch of downvotes, that was exactly the right kind of response to your question. Those of us who don't have these kinds of allergies (or kids with them) would have no clue about this kind of thing, and that response summed it all up very well.

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#273

Post by Tomte »

Ekaros wrote: post #256
Tomte wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ISO clearly needs to get their act together and start standardizing cross-language insult verbiage.

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#274

Post by portaouflop »

john_the_writer wrote: post #267
jjallen wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a scale difference. If you're making bread product for a million people you have a massive factory.. And nuts be there

Of course, everything weird and whacky about the US can be explained because it’s just so much bigger - you wouldn’t understand coming from such a tiny country.

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#275

Post by marshray »

stoperaticless wrote: post #270
marshray wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say "every last molecule", I said "visible particulates". Nice attempt to straw-man though.

Not a straw man if you look at the spirit of the argument.

Yes, that's exactly what strawmanning is:

"Ignore the stated argument, discuss my weaker mischaracterization of it instead."

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#276

Post by shiroiushi »

buildbot wrote: post #261
Ekaros wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Finland it is insult, mostly for mentally crazy woman... Think of the not exactly bright blond women in tv shows and like.

That’s likely a USA cultulareism that was imported? Or did english steal that word?

It's had that meaning in the USA for decades, so Finnish probably borrowed it. The US doesn't get much exposure to Finnish media.

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#277

Post by kgwgk »

bsder wrote: post #264
kgwgk wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In the case where someone ran the sesame buns on third shift it very much wasn't a rounding error afterward. 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 w…

> In the case where someone ran the sesame buns on third shift it very much wasn't a rounding error afterward.

If it is a rounding error compared to the level that you find acceptable now it was a rounding error compared to the level that you find acceptable now.

If 1% plus epsilon is acceptable and you can buy it now, 0% plus epsilon was surely acceptable and you could buy it before.

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#278

Post by Asooka »

umvi wrote: post #34

At this point it seems like it might be more effective to mandate the opposite: labels that indicate that the product is allergen free for X class of allergen. That way the default (no label) = might contain allergens, and the presence of the label guarantees your safety. Companies that take allergen cross contamination seriously can tout the label (and win the business of the allergic), companies that don't won't re…

The whole problem is that putting any sesame in might kill somebody with a severe enough allergy. There should be some gradation to the labelling, because "contains absolutely no sesame" is extremely hard at industrial scale, but "certified to contain less than Xg of sesame per 1kg of product" would be pretty easy to test and still useful for people who don't die from ingesting a single grain.

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#279

Post by ammo1662 »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #101
gumby wrote: post #24

FWIW Bimbo (a Mexican company) is the largest baking company in north america -- when you go to the typical grocery store almost all the baked goods will be from Bimbo regardless of the label ( https://bimbobakeriesusa.com/our-brands )

As a Mexican, I'm still salty with Bimbo because I went to Spain, and they sold there better, bigger Bimbo-brand sliced bread than here, including varieties without crust. It takes guts to keep the brand name in English-speaking contries, though. > The name was formed as the combination of the Disney Bambi and Dumbo films names, which were the favourite movies of Marinela, Lorenzo Servitje's daughter. Later, the foun…

Actually, Bimbo has an official Chinese brand and company name "宾堡". The "宾" means guest while the "堡" means castle or fort. "宾" sounds like "bin" in "Bing" and "堡" sounds like "bo" in bottle or boom (not exactly, hard to pickup a word sounds exactly the same). It is a meaningless word which has basically the same pronunciation with "Bimbo".

As for bread "面包"，"面" means powder of wheat or products made by that. "包" means something looks like a bag, or has some fillings inside. Just not so meaningless. And "面" sounds like "me" in "mean" plus "an" in "and". It is not the same like "宾堡".

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#280

Post by stoperaticless »

zuminator wrote: post #236
underseacables wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it says it on the label, and you're allergic to it, then you shouldn't eat it. This doesn't harm consumers at all.

If there's no way to disambiguate "actually contains allergen X" and "almost certainly doesn't contain allergen X," then rather than being extra-cautious, eventually consumers may come to carelessly disregard the warning text, assuming (correctly) that it most likely falls under the second case. The harm ensues when the heuristic fails.

That I feel is on the consumer as business just does a full disclosure.

The business discloses, what was added as ingredients, and what contamination is possible. (Because production line is shard or similar)

What more do you want?

I guess results of regular random testing could be put online.

Forbid using same knife to slice different things is another thing to be done.

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