Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shawn Woods... now my hero youtuber!
What does this mean?
Mousetrap Mondays.. I am afraid of cancer causing mice.
FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
441–450 of 605 posts
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> What more do you want?
That the labeling disambiguate "made in a factory that makes sesame products" and "actually contains sesame." What we now have with "may contain" could be either and everyone is worse off
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#443I guess bakeries will now actually add a tiny bit of sesame to everything, seems easiest.
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “No contaminants” does not seem realistic even in a cleanroom. If the contaminants don't enter the room or touch the equipment, it's quite realistic. It's weird how many people buy into the silly "why are we forcing industry to do this impossible thing?" train of thought even though the thing is clearly not impossible (and it's been shown to be a self-serving lie on the part of some industry players). We're talking…
So each factory is purpose built to its ingredients OR you pray you don't get thrown in jail because a crumb of sesame was missed in the deep clean and some dysgenic child had an asthma attack? What's weird is you pretending your model of the world is tied to reality when all it is tied to is ideology. Make bullying legal again.
> So each factory is purpose built to its ingredients
I'd reject the idea that it's impossible to prevent bits of stuff from moving from one part of a factory to another, such that the only solution is to build a whole new factory.
> you pray you don't get thrown in jail because a crumb of sesame was missed
Does it seem to you like America overzealously applies criminal law in the interest of food safety? Do you have any examples of that you'd like to share? Something else seems more accurate: when a problem is discovered and it's widespread enough to represent a danger, companies - usually voluntarily - issue a recall with a description of the risk.
> What's weird is you pretending your model of the world is tied to reality when all it is tied to is ideology.
I honestly have no idea what you are talking about.
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a really counterproductive way to try to understand problems like this. No one is trying to do anything evil. Every step is individually quite reasonable and well within ethical bounds. The issue is that you can produce systems comprised solely of reasonable and ethical decisions that nonetheless yield an outcome that every actor would describe as bad. That is a useful way to interpret this situation and othe…
The bad outcome can be yielded in a very short number of steps. If perceived and not acted upon, what is that? How long must it go on until we say "No, this is evil."?
> If perceived and not acted upon, what is that?
It’s a coordination problem.
> How long must it go on
They can last indefinitely at immense cost.
> until we say "No, this is evil."?
Call it evil for as long as you want, especially if you’d prefer it remain unsolved. When you feel like solving it, a different framing will be much more useful.
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#446Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#447My 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 is the same issue as Prop 65, and while we can all say "oh the law is bad" the real problem is _corporations are lazy_. Instead of making sure their products are safe, they just say everything is unsafe, because they know consumers will become numb to it. Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer, but instead of taking the time to make sure of that, companies just tell…
If the law doesn’t take into account human and corporate behavior, it’s not a good law. It may ultimately be the corporation’s “fault” but that doesn’t change the fact that the law created perverse incentives.
I hear the same argument for the GDPR laws that have resulted in annoying cookie banners everywhere. Sure, it’s technically the website owner’s fault for spying and adding a shitty banner, but… those banners didn’t exist until the law was created.
We need better laws that more wholly account for human behavior.
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Non US) On almost all food labels that I've seen for the last decade or so I've seen disclaimers like "this product is made in a factory that processes $ALLERGEN" Usually $ALLERGEN is "tree nuts".
Sure, that's the sort of thing that the FDA were complaining about. From TFA: > FDA officials acknowledged Tuesday that statements that a product “may contain” certain allergens “could be considered truthful and not misleading.”
The "may contain" line is not the part that the FDA takes issues with. From the source complaint:
> The Brownberry brand Whole Grains 12 Grains and Seeds RTE bread loaf product is misbranded for a similar reason; the product label includes walnuts, almonds, and hazelnuts in the ingredient and “Contains” statements; however, these nuts are not ingredients in the formulation of the product.
Emphasis on "Contains", which is a separate line on the packaging from the "may contain" line.
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#449My 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.
Safest from a corporate liability perspective, not from an inadvertently killing kids perspective. What you're suggesting is precisely what substantially all brands did with sesame, and it's why my family stopped eating hamburgers and hotdogs for several years...because we were literally unable to buy buns that would reliably not kill my daughter. The bread situation was almost as bad. We eventually found 1 brand available at 1 store and were able to feed her sandwiches once again. Now it wasn't much of a risk for our family because we understand how deadly allergies can be and we read ingredients carefully. But for kids whose parents are less careful, some of them die, particularly when there are zero safe options and you don't know if manufacturers are really adding the allergen or just saying they do for legal reasons(both were common). And it sounds like you may be referring to the common belief & research around early/small dose exposure helping kids avoid/outgrow allergies, but what's often lost in those conversations is that it sometimes works, and sometimes makes the allergies worse or even kills you, and nobody has the faintest clue why or which will happen to you. That's why the research generally includes allergen+medication, because the medication is necessary to avoid accidentally killing some percentage of the patients.
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know what the margins on bread are, but I would bet that they are tiny since this is a competitive market. Meaning that this kind of medical-lab-style cross contamination protocol will either raise the cost of the product or reduce the variety and choice.
> Meaning that this kind of medical-lab-style cross contamination protocol will either raise the cost of the product or reduce the variety and choice. If the result is a safer population, why wouldn't we want this?
I worked in two commercial bakeries: Angel and Berman in Jerusalem. The first mostly makes sandwich bread, the other one mostly makes pastry.
This will be probably relevant to answering your question: if you want to realistically prevent cross-contamination, you will need separate set of everything, that is, a separate room with mixing bowls, separate ovens, and, well... the same employees won't be going between those two rooms, so, you need to hire more people to man more equipment.
I was hired into both of these bakeries as a non-skilled labor who was paid minimum hourly wage. Baking bread isn't a particularly luxurious business. It's out there with agriculture, where margin of profit is very low, and your only hope is scale. Also, you cannot really increase bread consumption by baking more bread. The market is easily saturated. So, by forcing a bakery to, essentially, split in two, hire extra workers and install extra equipment, while in the end they'd not be able to sell more product is going to be very expensive. Maybe not even affordable.
Now, consider that a very small minority of people buying bread care for it not being accidentally contaminated with sesame seeds, and your non-allergic bread will either have to cost ten times more than normal, or it won't be made at all. Needless to say that people with allergies will, likely, not want to buy overpriced bread. They might just not eat bread at all, if that's so dangerous.