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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

#511

Post by floxy »

dialup_sounds wrote: post #411
floxy wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>when you go to the typical grocery store almost all the baked goods will be from Bimbo regardless of the label Are those those the only brands they produce? I only recognize 3 of those brands, and I can't even be sure I've ever eaten more than one of those. Maybe they are big only in certain regions?

The store brand(s) of a given grocery store is typically made by Bimbo. "Almost all baked goods" is a stretch, but easily 50% of your bread aisle space is Bimbo. Flowers (Wonder, Nature's Own, etc.) is maybe 25% after that.

Is this age of big data, is there a way to quantify this? Like the knowing the annual number of loaves of bread produced by Bimbo, vs. the total number of loaves?

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

#512

Post by Viliam1234 »

radicality wrote: post #477
quietbritishjim wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer These things are not comparable. While adding sesame to everything to circumvent a law is certainly not fair, it is a reasonable ingredient to some products (whereas mice that give us cancer is, at the very least, not a goal). I like sesame buns! And, for young children, it's actually quite important to expose them to a range of al…

I’m European, and have been living in the US for a number of years and in Europe before that. It’s like some alternate reality here in the US, where peanuts, bread, and shrimp are out to kill a large part of the population. The article says they estimate 33M people in US to have food allergies which sounds insane to me. I fully agree on exposure to these allergens when young. Have your child eat wide variety of foods…

It seems like a cultural difference, that in America, corporations are trying to comply with the laws in the most malicious ways, and most customers get angry about the laws rather than about the corporations. Which of course, removes any incentive for the corporations not to act obnoxiously.

Sometimes it doesn't even seem to make sense. For example, one might think naively, that if a website reacts to the law by throwing tantrum and displaying the most annoying dialog ever invented (which by the way actually isn't GDPR compliant), they would just hurt themselves, because their readers would move to different websites. Yet somehow they don't, and other website adopt the same annoying dialog. I am confused, because this isn't how free market was supposed to work.

Could you list the allergens, please? No we won't, because f--- you!

Well, now you have to list the allergens, or you get punished. Okay, so we will list all allergens in the world, including the ones our products don't contain, because f--- you!

Then we update the law so that you also get punished for listing made up allergens. Okay, so we will add as many allergens as we can to all our products, because f--- you!

Always choosing the most aggressive way to comply with the letter of the law while going completely against the spirit.

Meanwhile, in the deep jungles of Eastern Europe where most people laugh at the very idea of a law, if a product contains an allergen, the producers write "this product contains this allergen"; if the product does not contain the allergen, they write "does not contain this allergen"; and if they are not sure, they write "this product may contain this allergen". Sometimes with an explanation like "we are not adding it on purpose, but we process the allergen for some other products in the same factory, so maybe some small amounts accidentally get there".

People should travel a lot, to learn that things that are considered impossible at one place are often considered trivial at some other place.

EDIT:

Half of the comments in this thread is like "stupid law, this is what you get for making laws, clearly the lawmakers never heard about unintended consequences", and the other half is like "in my country (different countries in different comments) this problem does not exist, producers simply label their products honestly".

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

#513

Post by causality0 »

maxerickson wrote: post #209
causality0 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a legal duty to not poison people by telling them there aren't allergens in their food when there might be. You don't have a legal duty to create a hypoallergenic product line. Regulations exist to protect your rights, not make your shopping experience more convenient.

Oh, great, people are living up to their legal duty, I'm so proud of them and totally won't think they don't give a shit about other people if they do the cheapest thing that satisfies the regulation.

If they did start adding small amounts of the ingredients in question, admiration for their malicious compliance would make me more likely to buy their product, especially if it's also the cheapest. They have two options: acknowledge that perfect isolation is an unrealistic goal for their facility, or put aside some money for a legal fund for when their unlabeled food eventually kills someone.

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

#514

Post by Viliam1234 »

hot_gril wrote: post #499
bigyikes wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

GDPR is the dumbest recent law I can think of. Even if a website has no intent to track users, it's way too hard (aka expensive) to tell if you're compliant without slapping on a banner.

> it's way too hard (aka expensive) to tell if you're compliant

How hard is it to figure out whether you place cookies on other people's computers or you don't? Even if you can't read your own source code, you could simply install a new browser, visit your website, and then check the cookies on that browser. I don't think it's GDPR that is dumb.

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

#515

Post by mrweasel »

Jiro wrote: post #469
mrweasel wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like the actions of a psychopath to be honest. I struggle to comprehend that someone would care that much about profit that they would intentionally introduce a "contamination", rather than ensuring a correct labeling and clean environment, making their product safe to consume to those with certain allergies.

Ensuring a "correct labeling and clean environment" is really expensive. I mean, really expensive. It's not going to be practical.

I quite frankly question if that is true. A family member is allergic to eggs, as in "he will die if eggs have been near food he consumes". Local bakers have absolutely no issue producing cakes and bread for events when he asks and the prices difference is negligible.

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

#516

Post by paulddraper »

Miner49er wrote: post #372
thworp wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

This is not the case at all. 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).

Gluten free foods are 50% more expensive, and far more restricted in availability.

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

#517

Post by sangnoir »

robertlagrant wrote: post #465
sangnoir wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No.

Why are you mentioning them, in that case?

I was asking parent if they thought those items were over-regulation on the basis of the heuristic they provided, without offering any opinion of my own.

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

#518

Post by hot_gril »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #514
hot_gril wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR is the dumbest recent law I can think of. Even if a website has no intent to track users, it's way too hard (aka expensive) to tell if you're compliant without slapping on a banner.

> it's way too hard (aka expensive) to tell if you're compliant How hard is it to figure out whether you place cookies on other people's computers or you don't? Even if you can't read your own source code, you could simply install a new browser, visit your website, and then check the cookies on that browser. I don't think it's GDPR that is dumb.

Cookies alone don't make you non-compliant, it's what you (or anything embedded on your site) do with them. You can also be non-compliant without cookies, but that's not fixable with a banner.

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

#519

Post by LorenPechtel »

postmodest wrote: post #384
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 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…

This is the same issue as 65--setting an unreasonable standard and then blaming business when the standard isn't met.

It used to be that when companies produced products in the same facilities that produced products on the allergen list they would label them as "may contain". Not something they added, but not something they promised it did not inadvertently contain.

A company is free to produce products in facilities that do not also process the standard allergens but to do so will be more expensive and few people want to pay the extra cost for something which is of no benefit to them. If you're not allergic to sesame it does not matter if there's a bit of sesame in your food.

The whole food labeling thing is being taken to excess. The FDA is going bonkers about what companies are or are not adding, while there's no requirement for documenting what impurities might remain. As far as I'm concerned the FDA can take their labeling rules and shove them where the sun doesn't shine.

Instead, put a QR code. It comes up with a page that lists what they intentionally added (no generic categories--I know I don't have issues with all "artificial flavors" but I do with some. And "natural flavors" comes in a close second), what cross-contamination is likely and for any refined product what the raw material was that it came from and to what degree it was purified. In addition to the human-readable form it also contains a standardized representation meant for machine parsing. Scan the code with an appropriate app and it flags anything on the list that it has been told to flag.

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

#520

Post by s1artibartfast »

hot_gril wrote: post #509
s1artibartfast wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of the point. There very well could be nothing wrong with that food bowl and someone slapped a label on it for no reason at all. Literally without meaning.

But most bowls don't have P65 labels. I only see those at very cheap places like Daiso. What gives?

That's kind of the point.Daiso may just have a corporate policy of slapping a label on all of their import products for Customs inspection. That doesn't mean it's any more dangerous than the $100 Bowl bought at farmers market or West Elm with a leaded glaze but no warning.

My point is that both over and under use of the labels is so rampant that you can put very little trust in them.

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