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

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

#571

Post by moregrist » Sat, Jun 29, 2024, 7:20 PM UTC

LorenPechtel wrote: post #539

moregrist wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And how does this farce of a rule help you child? Not at all! 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 thou…

Honestly, the rule has been helpful to my family. We now clearly know whether a product contains sesame or not. Previously, it wasn't always listed, or had vague potential cross-contamination warnings, which are hard to parse.

So, in my eyes, it's not a farce of a rule at all.

> 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.

Dude, chill. You must not read labels looking for sesame when you buy bread.

There are manufacturers that make sesame-free bread. I buy it regularly from normal supermarkets in the normal bread section.

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

#572

Post by neuralRiot » Sat, Jun 29, 2024, 8:34 PM UTC

Viliam1234 wrote: post #512

radicality wrote: post #477

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…

> 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.

The only goal is to avoid lawsuits, that’s why in every product there is a warning, a car owners manual used to contain lots of useful info, even timing belt diagrams and ignition advance angles, now they are just a “warning encyclopedia”. We are a litigious society and that’s what we get for that.

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

#573

Post by int3 » Sat, Jun 29, 2024, 9:00 PM UTC

daemin wrote: post #555

int3 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People can develop allergies during their lifetime, it's not just something that you're born with. Sure, but the likelihood of that is low enough that insuring against that isn't worth it for most people > But my message was about the general principle of insurance being the very thing your comment was against. The situation where the vast majority of people pay some cost of which only a few need to utilise. No, th…

Insurance only works if the majority pay but only the minority get paid. Anything else and you risk not getting paid if the event occurs.

Nope. Assume you have insurance with a one-time fee of $X. It insures against a single kind of event that happens with 60% probability, and pays out $1.6X. So the majority of people are likely to have the event happen to them. The EV of the cost to the insurer is then $1.6X * 0.6 = $0.96X, so the books are expected to balance.

Obviously I'm ignoring variance in this calculation, but you can easily adjust the numbers to give a margin of safety.

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

#574

Post by Gormo » Sat, Jun 29, 2024, 9:09 PM UTC

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 Prop 65, and while we can all say "oh the law is bad" the real problem is _corporations are lazy_.

I mean, I'd definitely say that laws that are obviously incompatible with the incentive structures clearly present in real life are indeed bad laws.

Everyone is lazy -- or, more to the point, everyone has finite resources to allocate to their pursuits -- and expecting corporations and consumers to incur exorbitant costs in order to ensure optimal resolution to every possible edge case is neither reasonable nor realistic.

The problem isn't that "corporations are lazy"; the problem is that some people unaccountably expect them to be otherwise.

> 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 us the products are dangerous, because they know we don't really have a choice.

But we do indeed have plenty of choice. There are a ton of options for getting high-quality food and other products that go through lots of extra steps and give consumers much more granular information about how they were produced and what's in them. Those options are just much more expensive, and many people are perfectly happy to make the choice to use products that may e.g. increase a particular risk from 0.001% to 0.002% in order to avoid paying twice as much for it.

One note, however: it's impossible for food not to include allergens, as people can develop allergies to essentially anything. Encumbering access to food products that provide nutrition and pleasure to the vast majority of people in order to eliminate the responsibility of a small fraction of the population to exercise care over their own consumption choices is ethically dubious, to say the least.

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

#575

Post by Gormo » Sat, Jun 29, 2024, 9:21 PM UTC

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…

> The article says they estimate 33M people in US to have food allergies which sounds insane to me.

33 million is only about 10% of the population, and the phrasing in the article makes me suspect that there may be some disingenuous motte-and-bailey argumentation going on here -- the definition of "food allergies" applicable to the 10% claim might be vastly more expansive than the one applicable to "life-threatening allergic reactions".

Unfortunately, since the article doesn't reference any independent fact-checking for these claims, and just quotes not-necessarily-disinterested sources verbatim, it's hard to validate any of it. All in all, it's very poor-quality journalism.

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

#576

Post by Gormo » Sat, Jun 29, 2024, 9:23 PM UTC

1oooqooq wrote: post #565

Nasrudith wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

good point, butpropositions don't get created in a vacuum

Nothing happens in a vacuum, least of all government interventions into society.

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

#577

Post by Gormo » Sat, Jun 29, 2024, 9:31 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #395

konschubert wrote: post #390

Earlier 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?

Well, first, not everyone is a Millian utilitiarian who evaluates ethics in relation only to abstract aggregations of people. I'm all for helping actual, real-life individuals to have greater means to provide for their safety, but less inclined toward programs aimed to optimize statistical metrics applicable to a vast aggregation of mostly unrelated people without accounting for variation in interests, values, and choices among the actual individuals they aggregate.

Secondly, how do you know a measure like this even does provide for a "safer population" in that aggregated sense? What if it successfully prevents a few extreme allergic reactions on the part of the small handful of people that both have severe allergies and refuse to take responsibility for exercising care in their own consumption choices, but does so at the cost of making food overall less available and more expensive, such that a far greater number of people, especially the poor and marginal, begin to experience malnutrition?

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

#578

Post by Gormo » Sat, Jun 29, 2024, 9:34 PM UTC

immibis wrote: post #556

practicemaths wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBF laziness is the natural order to the universe. Ain't nothin doin more than it has to.

Yeah, but corporations are paid lots of money to not be lazy.

No, they're not -- they're paid lots of money to satisfy the demand that actually exists in the market.

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

#579

Post by LorenPechtel » Sat, Jun 29, 2024, 9:40 PM UTC

moregrist wrote: post #571

LorenPechtel wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how does this farce of a rule help you child? Not at all! 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 thou…

Honestly, the rule has been helpful to my family. We now clearly know whether a product contains sesame or not. Previously, it wasn't always listed, or had vague potential cross-contamination warnings, which are hard to parse. So, in my eyes, it's not a farce of a rule at all. > If there was an adequate market for sesame-free bread you would already see it. Nothing is stopping a manufacturer from opening a sesame-fre…

If you have a deadly allergy a cross-contamination warning means don't eat it. They aren't hard to parse at all.

You got slightly clearer labels, a lot of people went from being able to eat it to not being able to eat it.

I will admit that I do not look at bread labels--all bread falls into the unpleasant reaction category for me.

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

#580

Post by pvaldes » Sat, Jun 29, 2024, 11:00 PM UTC

crabbone wrote: post #450

mgkimsal wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thos…

> if you want to prevent cross-contamination, you will need separate set of everything

A company could do everything right and still would risk to be destroyed by an angry employee or plain boycott from a competitor. The only safe move is to stop making an everyday product with such legal risks.

Specially if is a niche product for a small number of potential clients. The reward of selling a few buns more does not worth the headache.