371–380 of 605 posts
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Don’t know the actual stats but (UK here) lots of people who make bread at home use a dedicated bread machine
It is still an small oven, not a cooking pot .. (some bread you can also make in a pan, but you cannot cook bread in my understanding)
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The food manufacturer is supposed to follow GMP and prevent allergens for being in foods they shouldn't be in.
"Prevent allergens" means a 100% certainty that there are no trace amounts. This would require clean-room conditions for the entire factory, deep cleaning everything (including the inside of machinery) between each batch, and doing similarly extreme things across the entire supply chain. How do you think this will be financed?
It's done for gluten free foods. Gluten free foods have to be under 20ppm to be called GF, and there are many gluten free foods out there. Even some made on the same equipment as gluten containing foods (just cleaned thoroughly).
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It's not forced to serve markets. They are just not allowed to say their products contain sesame when they don't. They are mislabeling their products, and the FDA's job is to ensure products are labeled accurately.
I am not sure which is why I think its a confusing spot. From the article... - "FDA officials indicated that allergen labeling is a “not a substitute” for preventing cross-contamination in factories." - "some companies began adding small amounts of sesame..FDA officials said that violated the spirit, but not the letter, of federal regulations" Hence my open ended question, how do you legally and with the spirit of th…
I think this is a sham and the FDA is overstepping. 0.2% of the population have sesame allergies. Maybe its higher the recent numbers I saw from a government study gave this number.
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sesame: 0.7 million
FARE citation: https://www.foodallergy.org/sites/default/files/2020-06/FARE...
US Population: 341mm
341 * .002 = 0.682mm
Some rounding errors but I think math stands.
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> If my child ingests sesame, they go into anaphylactic shock and without an epipen administered in minutes they will die. Please excuse my skepticism, I am asking this out of a genuine desire to become better informed: how can you possibly know this? Unless you happened to have an epi-pen handy the first time your kid ever ate a sesame seed, which seems unlikely, then if this were true would not your kid have died t…
There are kits now with allergens that you can feed your kid to test for this kind of thing[0]. The idea is that you have them eat it in the parking lot of a hospital and see what happens. [0] https://readysetfood.com/products/stage-1-2-bottle-mix-in
Here's the thing: if there really are kids out there who will drop dead within minutes of eating a sesame seed, surely some of them will discover this the hard way, i.e. by accidentally consuming a sesame seed and dying. But not once have I ever heard a news report about a kid dying this way, and I can't find any data on how many people die this way. I also can't imagine any reliable way that one could possibly learn that your allergy is so severe that a sesame seed will kill you without having at least some people actually die.
All this leads me to suspect that the belief that sesame seeds are potentially deadly in small doses might not be solidly grounded in facts.
Product idea: Allergen slurry. A tasteless/colorless paste containing all known allergens. Put a tiny drop in every batch of product (or at least claim to) and you can slap on an omni-label dissuading anyone and everyone who has even seen an allergist.
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It's only lifesaving if you want to risk your life. If I have a deadly allergy I'm staying away from certain food groups and am not going to leave my health in the hands of some crappy labels. Have something else other than bread. That's how many people I know with allergies deal with it and it seems the most reasonable approach. In this day there's so many different foods to eat, its easy to have variety without ris…
It's not like sesame is used only in baked products. Sesame is used in various candies and desserts, as a seasoning for meat, fish, vegetables, even in drinks. I'm not sure if you can eat healthily by excluding all categories of food where sesame might theoretically appear.
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Don’t know the actual stats but (UK here) lots of people who make bread at home use a dedicated bread machine
It is still an small oven, not a cooking pot .. (some bread you can also make in a pan, but you cannot cook bread in my understanding)
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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.
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…
The safest thing to do is to actually add the allergens to some degree and then warn people.
If it says “may contain” then I’m fine. If it’s listed as an ingredient then I can’t risk having it.
For people who can’t have any at all you’ve not improved the situation but at the cost of making it significantly worse for people with a mild reaction.