531–540 of 605 posts
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The psychology of this comment aside, I don't think any country is so small it can't fit a massive factory in it. Unless you're writing from Vatican City, perhaps?
My point was that all countries have big factories but in the US they are somehow unable to make sure no cross contamination occurs. It’s just impossible because US scale /s
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…
But one person's allergens are another's tasty ingredients. I love my sesame bagels. I don't even know what food would remain if you banned all the allergens. Tapioca powder with beef flavors?
Sesame is one thing. It's delicious but probably not a major subsistence food for anyone. Chinese restaurants would miss their sesame oils though.
Next, it's hard enough to ban fish and shellfish. Many subcultures depend on them, especially near major bodies of water.
No tree nuts or peanuts? A lunch staple gone for millions. Jam will be so lonely.
Or wheat. Or milk. Or egg. Or soy? That's the end of breakfast and bakeries and dessert, I guess. The vegetarians will get awfully hungry.
I think at that point, the only thing left to eat would be the regulators themselves. Karma's never been so tasty...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The problem with Prop 65 is that we've delegated plaintiff's attorneys to conduct private enforcement actions. Also that the law requires a warning, but doesn't require an explanation of what the material is, what part of the product contains it, or how you are likely to get exposed to it. As I mentioned elsewhere on this discussion, this is why pure cotton patches now come with Prop 65 warnings (if you might use the…
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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.
There is no penalty for over-labeling. Maybe some lost sales. Not a big deal. But there is a huge potentially downside for under-labeling e.g. people dying. There is an ethic issue here as well even if we ignore money. Also, the production pipeline is not 100% perfect. They produce millions of items each year. Even with 0.001% defect / cross-contamination, it could be troublesome. More importantly, the exec who decid…
Those for whom X is fine/those for whom X is undesirable/those for whom X is deadly.
We used to have three categories:
contains/may contain/doesn't contain.
Draw this as a 3x3 matrix.
Those for whom X is fine don't care, they can eat any row.
Those for whom X is undesirable generally do not care about cross contamination. The risk * loss is low enough not to be important.
Those for whom X is deadly will not eat from the may contain category.
The FDA appears to have declared war on the may contain category. Who wins? Nobody. Who loses? Those for whom X is undesirable who are now no longer able to know that the item is probably fine.
I think they are operating under the fantasy that removing may contains means companies will ensure it isn't there, but that's an expensive endeavor that the marketplace simply doesn't call for.
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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.
The vast majority of cases are trace levels of low risk materials. Never mind that in most cases you're facing a lot more risk from natural materials.
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Are those labels based on periodic random testing or based on risk avoidance? What proportion of these labels are false positives?
Main threats I see are lead and cadmium in some foods from China, also high levels of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide in some foods.
Most everything high on the periodic table is nasty. The few that we willingly associate with are because they are non-reactive enough to not actually pose a threat even if in theory they're harmful. (Consider the use of barium to image the digestive system. They use a form of it that's sufficiently insoluble that you don't get poisoned.)
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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.
> You need to judge over-regulation as it relates to society as a whole.
That doesn't seem to be a heuristic. E.g. "wheelchair ramps are cheap over the lifetime of a building, so it's obvious we should add them" is a good justification of something not being over-regulation - the "bang for buck" heuristic. But the quoted text doesn't contain a heuristic, so we can't judge anything based on it.
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^ This is correct. > (digestive problems vs anaphylaxis) ... and would probably be better classified as an intolerance similar to lactose is misinformation — "digestive problems" and "intolerance" drastically understate the seriousness of celiac disease, and contribute to the educational challenges surrounding the condition. The chronic impact of gluten exposure to a celiac patient include: permanent damage to the sm…
Did I understand it correctly? - Single meal will not kill you. - Continuous use will shorten your life significantly. (Something like smoking then?)
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Hmm I wonder how good the us legal system is if a person insists they fell ill eating a product without a warning label and it goes to a jury trial? There will undoubtedly be a focus on ‘whether you can be 100% sure there was no sesame dust in the air’. Without a perfect vacuum clean room (that doesn’t really exist) you can’t be. As in even if you’re really fucking clean your probably losing the case in the American…
As a parent of a child with a severe sesame allergy, you clearly don’t understand food allergies and how severe they can be. If my child ingests sesame, they go into anaphylactic shock and without an epipen administered in minutes they will die. There are definitely questions of how to best inform consumers that have severe food allergies. But I’ve been really underwhelmed with the dialog here on this. It would be lo…
You think that somehow this will make sesame-free bread. Nope, that's too expensive. They responded to the FDA's garbage by throwing a pinch of sesame in. Apparently some manufacturers didn't manage to throw enough in, or perhaps the detect threshold isn't sensitive enough. Throw that pinch of sesame into enough bread and it might not be detected even though it's there.
If there was an adequate market for sesame-free bread you would already see it. Nothing is stopping a manufacturer from opening a sesame-free bread factory--that is, nothing but a lack of demand.
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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
OK, but surely not everyone does this? 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 rel…
The thing is regardless of the trigger anaphylaxis is anaphylaxis. The severity differs, the mechanism is the same. We can see the distribution of reactions and estimate the number that will be lethal even if we have no examples.
(And I rather suspect that a fair number of the lethal cases don't get diagnosed. I don't believe autopsy will reveal what set it off unless the contaminant is obvious.)