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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

#301

Post by kalleboo »

marshray wrote: post #127
hollerith wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> No one wins by some percentage of the population having to bake their own bread

Doesn't the rest of the population win by being able to buy cheaper bread, at the cost of the affected?

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

#302

Post by Elinvynia »

olalonde wrote: post #196
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how to separate this mindset from one that would have commercial buildings not be required to include elevators and wheelchair ramps. Do you also think that's an unfair burden to put on the roughly-90% of people who are not mobility-impaired? (Not implying any judgement either way, just curious if this is a consistent viewpoint).

> Do you also think that's an unfair burden to put on the roughly-90% of people who are not mobility-impaired? Not op, but I share his view and don't think commercial buildings should be forced to accommodate people who are mobility-impaired.

Then you should hope to never become mobility impaired :)

Remember, we are all just temporarily abled and one accident away from needing accomodation from society.

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

#303

Post by josefx »

NaOH wrote: post #148
forgetfreeman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, this seems like a pretty bullshit argument on the part of manufacturers though. My expectation for a food prep area is that I should be able to safely eat off of any surface. This level of cleanliness should eliminate any contaminants from the environment bigger than airborne dust and given how relatively cheap air filtration equipment is a case could be made there as well. In any case sesame seeds are a hell of…

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…

> There are silos, storage tanks, essentially duct work to transport ingredients from bulk storage to production

How hard would it be to just have a set of sesam free plumbing for specific products? I mean they also manage to keep a separate sewage line, right??

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

#304

Post by kalleboo »

umvi wrote: post #58
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes sense from a practical standpoint, but from a litigative standpoint not having the warning label on those products with allergens exposes the company to liability. I also suspect that if there is an incident, this company might be able to have the government found liable for preventing it from warning customers.

Seems to have worked for gluten, at least. i.e. Consumers look for "gluten free" labelling rather than "This product contains gluten" labelling. If I were the FDA I'd standardize the nutrition label to have a clearly labelled allergen section in which you can reliably use to check that the product is free of X allergen. Of course a naive implementation of this would mean that water bottles and stuff will have a big l…

Gluten free is kind of weird because there's a trend of a "gluten free diet" for weight loss among people without a specific gluten intolerance (my wife was doing this for a while after she saw something on Instagram).

I don't think it would be as popular with a "sesame free diet".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten-free_diet#As_a_popular_...

> In the US, it was estimated that more than half of people who buy foods labeled gluten-free do not have a clear reaction to gluten, and they do so "because they think it will help them lose weight, because they seem to feel better or because they mistakenly believe they are sensitive to gluten."

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

#305

Post by globular-toast »

Jtsummers wrote: post #78
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are some of their brands just pictures of sandwiches?

They're filling out the grid. There are 31 brands (if I counted correctly) which doesn't fill out any grid other than 1x31 or 31x1. They filled it out to 40 because that gives a nice grid at the larger size (4x10) and smaller windows (2x20) while not leaving any empty spaces. If they kept it with 31 there'd be empty space at any reasonable column count (2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Past 4-6 columns it starts getting too busy acro…

In other words, 31 is prime ;)

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

#306

Post by morsch »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #288
morsch wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hilarious to me that it's just a given that bread is made in a factory-like setting as opposed to an actual bakery. They still exist, and some of them just make plain bread, which means they don't handle nuts. I'm sure their product is more expensive, but it's not clean room, vacuum chamber expensive. An ecosystem of centralized, mass production of baked goods is part of the problem, at least.

I'd honestly trust the factory more than the local bakery if a single Sesame seed could kill me. At least at that scale, it'd both have to happen and I'd have to be the one to have it happen for. In a bakery the Sesame seed items would probably be made within 5ft of everything else. >They still exist, and some of them just make plain bread, Honestly have never seen this, every bakery bakes at least something else tha…

Well, I live in Germany, so there's that. And admittedly it's quite rare, here, as well.

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

#307

Post by marshray »

kalleboo wrote: post #301
marshray wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> No one wins by some percentage of the population having to bake their own bread Doesn't the rest of the population win by being able to buy cheaper bread, at the cost of the affected?

Personally, I don't think bread made in a facility that can't control the ingredients is a 'win' at any price.

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

#308

Post by [deleted] »

autoexec wrote: post #55
kayodelycaon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“May contain“ often refers to cross-contamination. For some people small amounts of allergens will not cause a problem.

Which is one reason why some people will be tempted to roll the dice and end up dead or in the ER. It's much better to just know if something is in your food that will kill you. It doesn't help that repeated exposure to an allergen can cause a person's sensitivity to that allergen and the severity of their reaction to increase. Companies who want to sell their products to people with allergies should be required to a…

[deleted]

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

#309

Post by AdamN »

mc32 wrote: post #154
lpolovets wrote: post #117

My understanding is this allergen over-labeling was inspired by the FDA in the first place. https://www.fastcompany.com/90830854/sesame-seed-allergen-fd... From the linked article (from Jan 2023): But sesame does differ in one distinct way from eggs, peanuts, shellfish, milk, and soy: The seeds are teeny tiny and hard to keep track of. This means they’re prone to “cross-contamination,” in food-allergy terms. If you o…

This feels like it’s going the way of prop 65. To be on the safe side, everything gets the label, thus making the label pointless -it no longer helps differentiating things.

That's sort of the boogeyman way it's been interpreted but the other way of looking at it is that those items really are carcinogenic. And it's not the 'give a rate 100x the amount anybody could possibly digest and of course they get cancer' trope either - these really are substances that have cancer risk and they're very common in modern life.

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

#310

Post by L-four »

llamaimperative wrote: post #25
jokethrowaway wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And imagine that it probably happens for every instance of centralisation and regulation in our society - with few people connecting the dots and tracing things back by some well-meaning but clueless bureaucrats

This happens all over the place in private industry too. Nothing unique about regulation or bureaucracy that produces effects like this. If anything, centralization is the best tool to detect and avoid issues like this. Locally, every decision is completely reasonable. It’s only zoomed out that it doesn’t make sense.

Centralization is better for most on average or even mean. Often leaving those on the fringe much worse off.
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