221–230 of 605 posts
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.
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This story is about companies erring on the caution and labeling them with things like sesame even if they like don't contain it. The cost of proving it is sesame free and fines if they are wrong are not worth your business.
When companies install a handicap ramp in their business, it also incurs a cost. I don't blame the bread companies for their choice, and I'm in the minority now left with no choice but to boycott, and that's fine, their finance team likely said my dollars don't impact their bottomline, and they're likely correct. I also understand that a handicap ramp is likely considerably cheaper than retrofitting a manufacturing f…
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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…
> If my child ingests sesame, they go into anaphylactic shock and without an epipen administered in minutes they will die. Please excuse my skepticism, I am asking this out of a genuine desire to become better informed: how can you possibly know this? Unless you happened to have an epi-pen handy the first time your kid ever ate a sesame seed, which seems unlikely, then if this were true would not your kid have died t…
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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…
I think this is a sham and the FDA is overstepping. 0.2% of the population have sesame allergies. Maybe its higher the recent numbers I saw from a government study gave this number.
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Math doesn't check out.
> If you hosted an event of 500 people, you could expect around 10 people to have a sesame allergy.
Same.
> 65,000 [...] ~1,300
Again.
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This is about sesame. Last year or so, the FDA changed the rules about sesame as an allergen. Some bakeries then decided to just slap "may contain traces of sesame" on everything so they didn't have to pay the cost of actually ensuring there's no cross-contamination. This has significantly harmed consumers who are actually allergic to sesame. Now there's effectively no way to know if a baked product will actually con…
The other (cheaper) alternative is to deliberately add sesame flour, which some bakeries are doing, according to the article. So what do you think is better: 1. Label bread with the "may contain" label. Meaning, truthfully, that people with severe sesame allergies shouldn't eat it. 2. Add sesame flour and then add a "definitely contains" label. I think #2 is much worse from a "significantly harms consumers" perspecti…
If you have a mild sensitivity, the added sesame may be below your threshold. Now you know that the sesame is controlled so you can always buy the product.
The problem is that the people with severe allergies expected that the new FDA rules would have manufacturers significantly retool to avoid cross contamination. Everybody with two brain cells to rub together predicted that they would absolutely not retool and would just add trace amounts of the contaminant.
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The other (cheaper) alternative is to deliberately add sesame flour, which some bakeries are doing, according to the article. So what do you think is better: 1. Label bread with the "may contain" label. Meaning, truthfully, that people with severe sesame allergies shouldn't eat it. 2. Add sesame flour and then add a "definitely contains" label. I think #2 is much worse from a "significantly harms consumers" perspecti…
That's not necessarily true. It depends upon the severity of the allergy and the percentage of people with mild vs severe allergies. If you have a mild sensitivity, the added sesame may be below your threshold. Now you know that the sesame is controlled so you can always buy the product. The problem is that the people with severe allergies expected that the new FDA rules would have manufacturers significantly retool…
If you can buy the product with the added sesame you could also buy the product without the added sesame, could't you?
Nothing changes in that case - while in other cases the added sesame creates a problem. It doesn't improve the situation for any consumer (leaving aside pricing).
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They are saying to play by the spirit of the rules instead of working the ref on the letter of the rules. But businesses could give a fuck about anything other than their current margin. Putting it another way, the FDA put forth a regulation intended to make the lives of a certain group of people better, and the response was to figure out how to not bother with that.
If producer A just puts sesame in their products, and that means they can undercut producer B who spends the money to comply with the spirit of the regulation, producer B goes out of business because their expenses are higher. So what do you expect would happen? Consumers like cheaper rather than higher prices, this isn't a new thing.
This seems overkill. We should want to encourage food manufacturers to list all possible contaminants.
The driver should be to give people with allergies the information they need to know whether they can eat something safely. Allowing companies to list every possible contaminant regardless of how likely it is to be in a product doesn't help anyone. It just leads to the "contents may be hot" problem on a coffee.
The FDA pushes back, as people with allergies shouldn’t be completely shut out from all baked goods. But I suspect they’ll have to tackle the root of the problem and better economically incentivize the control of the allergens if this is the desired outcome, since it seems the market is speaking and it’s saying there’s a problem with just saying “label the food better.”
All of that said, I don’t quite see the answer if the cause is just greed. Maybe in that case the bigger stick is warranted.