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

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541–550 of 605 posts

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

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How are real businesses selling bowls with leaded glaze and no warning? Not referring to a farmer's market but something like West Elm. If they're getting away with this, then yeah, the law is broken. If Daiso is just over-using the label, maybe they shouldn't do that if they want to sell bowls.

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

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

it's almost like if corporations could pay politicians to turn good laws into garbage laws, uh?

The numbering scheme was a hint: there were no politicians involved with a ballot initiative. This is what demagoguery combined with direct democracy get you.

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

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we're saying what, in an era of atomic scale manufacturing it isn't possible to design a manufacturing line that segregates macro-scale ingredients? I've spent time in pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities. They don't routinely floof active ingredients between capsule lines. Corraling shit the size of a sesame seed is trivial in comparison. So yeah, this is still bullshit.

It’s entirely possible, all you need is a separate factory to make products for 0.3% of the population, in every geographical region you bake bread in. The reason they aren’t doing it is cost, not practicality.

Aren't the two basically synonymous? Cost is a proxy for the amount of effort put into it.

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

#544
post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooking involves boiling. Liquids bubbling. Baking is more of a evaporation. And the german definition of cooking in the narrow sense is defined like this, but in a broader sense apparently usable for everything with preparing meals. And I never used a rice cooker, so no idea how to classify that ..

If cooking involves boiling, what are you doing when you put a steak in a hot cast-iron pan? To the rice cooker point, I'd argue that an oven uses a heating element of some form (electric coils, gas flame, wood fire) to heat the air in a closed environment, and the air transfers heat into an item. In contrast, a rice cooker uses a heating element to directly heat a metal pot, and the metal pot transfers heat into an…

Well, technically there is usually bubbling going on, when making a steak, but would you "cook a steak" in english?

In german you would not, one would roast it. (but we have 2 words, roasting "rösten" on the bbq and "braten" would be in a pan. But a "Braten" would be in an oven.)

Kind of not that consistent (like it usually is with natural language).

In general I think those terms were invented, before there were things as a rice cooker.

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

#545
The label for Wonder Bread indicates it doesn't have sesame seeds. If you stick to good old American white bread, no problem. It's the bakeries that produce that artisanal multi-grain hippie bread that have sesame all over the place.

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

#546
post #16

I used to work in a cookie factory, we often made products for private brands and in some recipes we purposefully added eggs so that it would appear as an ingredient and not "may contain traces of".

Vegans hate this. Always happens with milk powder.

Not just vegans, lactose intolerant people too (of which there are many).

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

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mean this: > 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.

The devil is in the details: whose "bang", whose "buck", and who gets the say when the subjective threshold is met?

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

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thr…

> because their readers would move to different websites. Yet somehow they don't, and other website adopt the same annoying dialog.

I’m a minority on this most likely but if a website does this, I close it, unless my life depends on it which it rarely does. The same if a website has so many ads that it blocks the content and I don’t have adblock. Life is too short for these games.

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

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean this: > 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.

The devil is in the details: whose "bang", whose "buck", and who gets the say when the subjective threshold is met?

Yes. Of course. Although you're talking now about the thing I said, and not the much vaguer thing you thought was detailed enough to believe it excluded wheelchair ramps.

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

#550

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…

And that's why we have insane laws. Because of people saying stuff like "our food shouldn't contain allergens" and spewing vague nonsense about evil profitmongers, while enabling demagogues who promote insane schemes built to inflame ignoramuses, like prop 65.

Virtually anything can be an allergen, and a lot of chemicals, given enough concentration and bad luck, can lead to cancer or birth defects. So ignoramuses demand laws that mark any chemical that can be reasonably thought of harming anyone in any circumstance possible in theory, and then blame corporations when the outcome is disastrous.

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