Sesame allergen labeling law has unintended effect: sesame in more foods | Hacker News Reader

Sesame allergen labeling law has unintended effect: sesame in more foods

fox9.com

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> Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.

How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy.

Because people have food allergies, and should have a right to know whether or not the food they're consuming has been cross-contaminated by allergens?

How did we end up in a place where the companies aren't putting the cross-contamination ingredients in the ingredients list, and instead put them in a non-standard warning label.

But article states something else - a company can't say "this product might not be safe for people with food allergies", they can still be sued. So the only thing left for the company is to actually intentionally put the alergen in and they say "this product is 100% not safe for people with food allergies". The end result is the decrease of alergen free food.

This is it. The labeling isn't the problem it's the extra processes and cost required to eliminate the potential for any cross contamination. This problem, cost and liability goes away by just adding the ingredient.

Why was the disclaimer "this product might not be safe" added, though?

And why did the courts decide it was not binding/not enough to protect from liability?

It seems the kind of thing a lawyer would want on pretty much every product. Then the courts would respond by making it null.

IDK if this is what happened, but then the problem would be harder...

I don't understand why they can't just label the product as "might contain sesame"? Why do they need to change the recipe when it sounds like a labelling change would do the job?

When you have life-threatening food allergies, "may contain" is the same as "does contain."

I suddenly developed two dozen food allergies at age 30 after a lifetime of eating whatever I wanted. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. Out of all the numerous ways in which it's horrible, seeing "may contain" on the ingredients list of a food that, based on the ingredients I can confirm it has would otherwise be fine, is one of the most soul-killing.

What do you mean you can confirm it? What if it's made in a factory with various conveyor belts, and some dust from one could get into another?

I just mean that the ingredient list is otherwise fine. It's completely ruined by "may contain something that you're allergic to."

Yeah, I've been seeing "this product was manufactured in a facility that processes food containing tree nuts" for over a decade now.

That doesn't bother me, even with a severe almond allergy I've rolled that dice many a time and it's been fine. The problem is "may contain tree nuts." Like, okay, does it or doesn't it?

What's even worse is the ingredient "spices." Which spices? Even smelling mustard can send me to the ER, but basil is one of my favorite foods.

How these kinds of not-even-half measures are legal is beyond me.

"spices" is the worst. are they worried that someone is going to steal their recipe if they happen to list all the ingredients?

But there are also those of us whose issues aren't life threatening.

Something like sesame should be labeled, but they should permit the "made in a facility that uses <x>" type labeling. I'll take a chance on such things because I know that at worst I'm in for an unpleasant day and it's very unlikely to even do that--my reactions are dependent both on dose and frequency. "Contains sesame"--I'm not touching it. "Made in a facility that uses sesame"--I wouldn't care.

Besides, their definition of "contains" is flawed, anyway. They're obsessed about what the manufacturer puts in, but as far as I can tell there are no rules at all about listing what they fail to take out. Occasionally you see the origin of certain materials listed but that's rare. I've had several encounters with situations where the failed-to-remove ingredient has been an issue for me, but the only cross-contamination I've ever had an issue with was pretty blatant (Chinese wok cooking typically does not wash between dishes. It's hot enough that this isn't a disease threat and such cooking is active enough that there will be no issue of stuck-on food--thus for most purposes this is fine. However, it's just asking for cross contamination between dishes.)

They also permit my #1 nemesis: "artificial flavors". I have no idea which ones I'm sensitive to because they're not individually listed. (Lest you think I'm one of the chemical-phobic nuts, my #2 nemesis is "natural flavors".)

> But there are also those of us whose issues aren't life threatening.

...yet.

My allergy to mustard used to barely register. It still scores near the bottom on my skin prick and IgE blood tests. And yet, over the past few months, it's evolved where if I'm even in the same room as someone eating mustard, I begin to go into anaphylaxis. Food allergies are absolutely absurd and you can't trust them to stay the same.

My reaction doesn't class as an allergy. There's no danger of anaphylaxis, the only way it could be life-threatening is if I had no choice of food (and that would be because of malabsorption, not the reaction itself.)

I see. From the sounds of one of your prior comments, I assume you have an intolerance to something such as food dyes?

Regardless, most of my allergies aren't life-threatening. I still don't eat them, because the reaction can ruin a day or more of my life at a time. It's tremendously disruptive.

What we’re talking about is erasing the granularity between “sometimes contains” and “does contain”. “Sometimes” doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about dosage or frequency. It just means sometimes.

According to the article, that's not good enough for the FDA. As for why the FDA says it's not good enough, I don't know.

>Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.

Because that label doesn’t meet the requirement for the law.

It's a bad law.

Let’s say a bottle of water had the following label:

“This product might not be safe for people sensitive to dysentery or cholera.”

Would you drink the water? It might not give you cholera. Of course not, no one should drink that water.

The label feels like a cop-out on the part of the food manufacturer. Either it’s safe or it’s not. If someone takes their chances and gets cholera, the statement has passed responsibility on to the consumer.

This is a silly analogy, cholera or dysentery aren't safe for anyone. But the vast majority of people handle sesame just fine.

There is a big difference. Sometimes trace cross-contamination occurs, just how it goes.

It’s not silly. For the people who have no food allergies the label is meaningless, and for those who are allergic they have to treat it as if the allergen is definitely there. Trace contamination doesn’t tell you anything about the dose.

They can still say it, but it's vague enough to have essentially no meaning. So it makes sense that this meaningless statement wouldn't somehow absolve them from all responsibility for only including the ingredients on the label.

Can't they just write "contains sesame" without actually adding any sesame? Then they will be sued by sesame lovers, I see.

Because if I can just right "this product might not be safe for people with food allergies" on a package and not have to worry about legal consequences, why wouldn't I? Magic anti-lawsuit boilerplate on every box!

Because then people with those allergies won't buy your product. And you want people to buy your product. So if you're sure that the allergens are not in your product, then why would you tell people with those allergies not to buy it?

> How did we end up in a place where the companies aren't putting the cross-contamination ingredients

Isn't it because it's not an explicit ingredient but a risk of trace contamination? I'm not sure that an ingredients list with a bunch of "might also contain ____" items at the end.

The warning is pretty easy to spot when it's supplied.

The change in the law makes that insufficient to eliminate the liability. It isn't a matter of labeling but the cost of eliminating any possibility of cross contamination.

Right, I'm not saying it absolves the company, just that putting it in the ingredients list isn't helpful or honest, either.

New labeling law doesn't fix anything here.

How is it not honest? It's not helpful, but it seems perfectly honest (assuming the product actually contains the ingredients listed.)

If I see sesame in an ingredients list, and I discover that really means “we don’t deep clean the oven conveyer after cooking sesame products”, I think I’d feel at least a little tricked.

That's not what it means in this case. In this case, it means that "we intentionally added some otherwise-not-needed sesame to the product, in order to comply with this law and the truth-in-labeling laws."

It also means they don’t feel confident enough in their cleaning process and would prefer to add cost to their manufacturing process than to ensure clean machines

I'm pretty sure the producers involved understand their costs better than you or I and have concluded the optimal outcome is to add an epsilon of sesame cost than a multiple of that of additional decontamination cost.

In this specific hypothetical, sure.

Or it could mean the conveyor next to it uses lots of sesame oil and they can’t guarantee every single particle stayed in that belt.

Or it could mean the conveyor on the other side of the factory is and they don’t want to risk it.

Nobody knows the specific reasoning a company has for adding it in unless they had insider info from the company itself. Everything else is pure speculation.

Have you ever cleaned up sesame seeds? The article's "remove all the sand" analogy is exactly on point - they're tiny and get stuck tight in every available crack. No normal cleaning process is going to remove all of them.

Companies can’t just put it in the ingredients list, that would also be illegal. They need to actually add it to the product.

Well now they are clearly labeled as containing the allergen, people can steer clear of these products! Seems like a win.

This sucks. As someone with a mild to moderate peanut allergy, I’ve been able to gladly eat whatever “may contain peanuts” food that I want, but with laws like this, it’ll cut off a huge portion of what I can enjoy. All my friends with severe peanut allergy never ate these foods to begin with, so it’s not helping them either.

Why can’t the government just let us decide what risks we want to take? I’m sick of this shit. I don’t need the government to regulate which port is on my phone or the direction I wipe my ass or the snacks I can eat. Just let me freely live in peace goddamnit.

Exactly, I was sarcastically replying to the parent comment who still defended this change. I feel your plight and I hope this can be reverted to some degree.

But you do need the government to mandate that allergens are accurately reported on packaging. Without government regulations on food packaging, some of your friends with severe peanut allergies would be dead now, because most manufacturers would not label trace amounts of peanut contamination.

It sounds like this law was very poorly written, in that rather than pushing manufacturers to a) be more careful about cross-contamination and b) accurately label, it pushes them to deliberately add sesame to the foods.

This is not because government "interference" in food is fundamentally bad; it's because this law is very poorly written.

The problem is that "may contain sesame" is not a legally valid excuse for containing sesame, but "does contain sesame" is. And the part about "may contain X" not being an excuse comes from existing precedent, not from the new law.

The new law could presumably have changed that, though. (And it does seem like something of an absurd precedent to me.)

Right, in fact I’m not sure why the new law is even causing this. The interpretation of the labeling law which now includes sesame is that it only applies to intentional ingredients. As far as that’s concerned, no label at all is fine.

Separately, the good manufacturing practices rules say that cross contact risks should be limited. But the FDA mentions there may be some cases where this is impractical and a may contain label “might” be acceptable. They don’t say what those are, and they don’t explicitly require a label either, because that is not a labeling law.

So consumers can’t really be sure if cross contact is a risk or not.

Plus, so many foods list what they "may contain" traces of X, but never really quantify how much of a trace. Which actually may be a good thing about intentionally adding sesame, because at least it makes the amount consistent.

I was allergic to peanuts as a kid, way back before it was cool, and didn't know why M&Ms gave me a mild version of the burning sensation and nausea I would get from eating peanuts. Later it turned out, famously, that non-peanut M&M shells contain some "reprocessed" material from the peanut M&M line. (And still do as far as I can tell.)

Nothing else with the "may contain" label has ever given me trouble! But I still get nervous that I'll find out 2 hours into a bike ride that I just fueled up on an extra peanutty "may contain" Clif bar.

Now I'm concerned about sesame. I can eat hamburger buns just fine but I discovered sometime in my 20s that sesame noodles make me sick, and the last time I was at a Korean restaurant my face puffed up just from the air.

So, oddly, one positive of the trend described in the story is that if processed food X lists sesame as an ingredient, and I can nibble on it and then eat the whole thing without getting sick, then I know whether or not I can eat that food, because it's presumably made with a consistent amount of sesame every time. Whereas with a "may contain" label, I'm never really sure if some batch might have lots of sesame and I just tested a non-sesame batch.

> Plus, so many foods list what they "may contain" traces of X, but never really quantify how much of a trace. Which actually may be a good thing about intentionally adding sesame, because at least it makes the amount consistent.

I mean, they don’t usually… know? They know that the assembly line for product X is physically near an assembly line for product Y that contains peanuts, and so X may have some peanut particulate floating through the air and landing on it. It would be a different amount of particulate at different times of day, different humidity, etc; and so different individual bars of product X could end up with different amounts of trace contaminants. (Almost always none, since they do try to avoid these effects; they just can’t guarantee that they’ve been successful, or that they’ll be successful in perpetuity.)

Or alternately, if the manufacturer is a job-shop (produces different things for different customers, retooling between each job) then they can’t guarantee that they’ve cleaned out a perfect 100% of traces of previous job materials out of their assembly line when they start up a new production run. (The theoretically perfect way to solve this is to have separate job-shops that only deal with jobs containing allergen X — but with the combinatorial number of allergens, and a shop having to dedicate itself to only processing a particular combination [A, B, not-C, not-D], that’s mostly impractical.)

They don't know, but we can be pretty confident that it's no more than a trace.

If eating the wrong thing can kill it makes no difference, "may contain" is the same as "contains". However, if eating the wrong thing will simply mess up your day "may contain" is a very different thing than "contains".

And if I learn I react to product X so be it, I simply don't eat X.

The problem is that there is a (sadly) large group of people who believe that its the governments job to right every wrong that there ever was, fix any and every inequality that exists, and smooth out any randomness that exists.

In other words - control, control, control.

To me, the most important question is: how did we end up in a place where there are so many food allergies and we still do not understand the reason for the increase? Is it better diagnosis? Early exposure to allergens? Lack of early exposure to allergens? Some evolutionary advantage to having an allergy? (I doubt that, but it is plausible).

It is not settled science, but one hypothesis is the hygiene hypothesis, which proposes that exposure to certain microbes at a young age is important for the development of a healthy immune system. By over sanatozing our environment, we prevent exposure of young children to those microbes, leading to the increased prevelence of allergies.

Note that the most important of these are intestinal worms, helminths. The other would be bacteria.

Respiratory viruses, by contrast, are not on the list. It is instead chronic presences in the body which may modulate immune response and avoid allergies.

(You said nothing wrong but the name itself is confusing)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

Do you mean that a certain amount of helminths is beneficial for our health? Is this just during childhood or is helminth infestation beneficial the whole life?

Maybe helminths shouldn't be called parasites then, since they somehow bring benefits to us? Like, there's some degree of mutualism

The whole thing is debated and I’m not sure we have a clear answer. As of yet public health authorities are not recommending helminths, and they cause a lot of problems too

Correlation to having a dishwasher to food allergies.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25713281/

> The risk was further reduced in a dose-response pattern if ... the family bought food directly from farms.

This kind of content is not acceptable on HN.

Interestingly, age of introduction is also important. For a long time the advice was to delay introducing allergens. It turns out that that increased the chance of being allergic to the thing.

Anecdata and all but my food allergies as a kid were a lot more severe than after puberty. On the other hand I'm pretty sure I could eat a few things as a toddler that I couldn't anymore in/after elementary school. It's really weird.

My son has multiple severe nut allergies so I’ve gone from having zero awareness to having too much.

Allergies are fascinating bc they are a continuum and random.

Continuum from…

zero symptoms if you eat the protein in the nut and just a positive blood test…

all the way to…

cannot be in same room as nuts if they will have a reaction that constricts their ability to breath.

They are also random in that your outcome can be wildly different each time.

The result imo is that drs who detect any food allergy, let’s say the child has a slightly swollen lip after eating sesame will run labs on blood and skin and get some real positives and some false positives.

Next they say not to eat anything the person is allergic to in order to prevent a life threatening allergy.

If no blood or skin tests existed this person may go through life mainly avoiding the food bc it’s uncomfortable, but never think of themselves as allergic to X.

Net result is that people with allergies are safer now, but the % of people we know have allergies has increased.

As a side note, if you are reading this as a parent with a kid with a recently discovered food allergy, please note… it totally sucks, but… you will adjust over time to the higher workload and constant label reading, hang in there.

Thank you for your reply and best wishes to your family! I know it can be a bit of an intrusive question, but how do people discover that children have a particular allergy? Do you get an epipen the same moment you have a newborn, just in case? Do you try some small amount or potentially cross contaminated food just to test? Do you discover it randomly and hope there is going to be enough time to get to ER? I have been lucky not to have it for myself, or a child, but how did you know?

Our son had skin issues (eczema) before he was old enough to eat solid foods. Eczema and food allergies are correlated so we fed him small amounts of peanuts and he had a crazy reaction. We were lucky he didn’t end up in er first time, but swollen lips, changed “voice” for weeks etc.

For anyone reading this, there are safer ways to test for peanut allergies than feeding someone peanuts, especially because peanut allergies can kill. I'm reminded of this: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/11/26

Depends on the country, but some have a recommended list of foods to expose your kid to when they start eating solids. For example https://www.allergy.org.au/patients/allergy-prevention/ascia...

Epipen? No. But if I didn't live around the corner from the hospital, I'd probably test peanuts and shellfish while parked next to one : - )

That wasn't common when/where I was born, but then again, the cuisine there/then was more limited so I'd be exposed to most allergens naturally within the first year. (And face "I've never seen a prawn and I'm 20 - am I allergic to them?" later)

> Net result is that people with allergies are safer now, but the % of people we know have allergies has increased

Percentage of kods who are left handed has increased after we stopped beating them at school into being right handed.

Fun fact: This latest round of medical hijinx got me 5 new food allergies!

My 13 month old son is allergic to everything. Eggs, diary, tree nuts, lots of fruits including avocados. Obviously peas and peanuts.

I don't need rules that encourage adding allergens to foods that previously "contained traces". My wife and I know how sensitive he is to every allergen and if we need to avoid traces (hazelnuts) or not (milk)

But you do presumably need rules which tell you whether a given item contains traces of allergens, right?

Yes. But this new rule from the FDA says such labeling isn't sufficient.

Edit - Replied to the wrong comment

Curious - when did you introduce (or not) those foods to him? When/how did you discover the allergy? Could you walk us through this?

I wasn't going to write it now because it's Christmas Eve; but I have a moment to type this.

Back story:

My wife and I are super old school when it comes to food. Organic as much as possible, processed very little. We spend a lot of time preparing meals. Our daughters pack home made meals to school.

Our kids were all breast fed until 12 months, no formula. We introduce foods at six months, thereabouts, with "real" food. No baby food. No cereal. We make our own baby formula from a wide assortment of vegetables and meats. Each soup has at least five different vegetables, and there are three different soups so about 15 different veggies a week.

We are also not shy introducing "dangerous" foods. Eggs, in particular, are one of our favorite foods and we introduce it at around six months. We "juice" (squash the fluids out) fillet mignon to give mix it into a squash purée as a starter food (for bioavailable iron, since we don't do cereal).

We're not "real" Americans so peanut butter is not a staple. But we'll introduce it early on. We're careful, but not shy.

My son:

My son has never had a dangerous reaction like anaphylaxis. He reacted to eggs early on, around 7 months. We noticed certain foods gave him hives and we'd avoid them.

When he turned 12 we wanted to introduce milk so my wife could stop breast feeding. He reacted poorly and the nurse in the phone suggested we take him to the hospital. Therefore we did a test and he's allergic to everything.

Causes:

Who knows?

Maybe because he's a COVID baby.

Maybe its because my wife was super stressed while pregnant (we bought a house, moved, and figured out two day cares in the span of three months).

Maybe because of a very stressful "vacation" when he was six months.

Maybe its our city's industrial history.

Maybe its genetic.

Maybe its the luck of the draw.

Solution:

Deal with it, ultimately.

Luckily we are pretty food obsessed and we dont mind spending time/money cooking. So far we're:

Diary:

- Since my son is not allergic to breast milk, my wife will breastfeed for another year at a rate of about seven times a day. She's also pumping.

- We knew donkey's milk is similar to humans'. We tried it and he seems ok w/ it. Hard to find though. And pricey (with intl. shipping $100 for 2 L worth of powder)

- I researched bioavailability of calcium and found out that bok choi has a lot of bioavailable Ca.

Eggs:

- Not much you can do here. 25% of kids allergic to hens' eggs are not to ducks, but the odds aren't great. I figured that eggs of birds furthest away from chicken would cause less problems. Therefore I have found out a research paper that proposes that Emu eggs should be ok since they lack the proteins that cause allergies.

But where do you find emu eggs? There's a place in the US that grows emu and he's willing to sell us one to try out, but they wouldnt ship it and its a 10 hour drive.

Fermented foods:

My wife is Balkan and swears by yoghurt, I agree. We found coconut yoghurt without tree nuts.

General nutrition:

We're leaning heavily on fish and meats and making sure anything he eats doesn't bind to nutrients blocking their availability.

Result:

The pediatrician commented that: "he's growing pretty well for someone with so many allergies" so I guess thats a win.

On the other hand, this week we're bouncing in and out of the ER with respiratory distress - Dr. figures, given all his allergies, he has asthma.

Wow. Thank you for taking the time to write all of this. I had seen studies that theorized the increase in allergies is due to introducing potential allergens much later in life, but it doesn’t sound like that was the case for you. So sorry for your son; that sounds extremely stressful for all. Glad for him you’re so on top of it. He’s lucky to have such attentive parents. Merry Xmas.

Thanks, but its not that bad. I just wrote it all down in case it helps someone else in the future.

Many parents I know have it much worse than us, including a couple whose kid is facing 20 years in jail.

Merry Christmas!

My youngest child is allergic to soy. The upside is that we're eating better food at home, the downside is that we basically can't eat anything but home cooked food, and then you must be careful because they shove soy into everything anymore. If it isn't allergen labeled, I just assume it has soy in it these days.

Ooh I know! By cross-contaminating for a long time without consequences. People fight for these disclosures for a reason.

If you convince people it makes you fat, you will see sesame-free products next to gluten-free products. Gluten-free is for hot thin people, allergens are for broken disposable people.

We’re in this place because one factory can produce food that will reach millions of people. The odds that a homemade food stand accidentally gives a stray peanut to a consumer with a deadly allergy are low. But the odds of a mega factory with poor QC doing it are high.

> The odds that a homemade food stand accidentally gives a stray peanut to a consumer with a deadly allergy are low

The odds per food item consumed are higher for small food businesses that aren't as easily forced into absurd clean-room manufacturing. This analysis makes no sense.

Lawsuits pay relative to revenue, though. So it's more a matter of existence than proportion.

I'd be much more afraid of the homemade food stand.

> How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy.

One theory is there's a certain class of pharmaceuticals that induces autoimmunity disorders. These drugs aren't observed for medium or long term effects such as autoimmunity disorders, despite the fact they operate directly on the immune system and there's a growing body of evidence they do indeed induce autoimmunity.

Spoiler alert: that class of pharmaceuticals is, according to the theory, vaccines.

So if you investigate this you are anti-vaxx and, by association, probably racist.

People dying

bureaucracy strikes again!

> How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy.

Wtf is this. The problem is the opposite.

How did we end up in a place where one simple food 'may contain' one million ingriedients where its being made in a giant factory, not a kitchen.

My mother has a lethal allergy to shrimp and crab. Do you have shrimp and crab in your kitchen or not? its a basic question. If we go to a coffe shop the anawer is no. We go to a british pub, answer is no. In fact for 90% pf establishments the answer is no, we have no shrimp on the menu at all.

If you handle every ingredient under the sun in one giant factory, that's your fault. I you put weired additives like shrimp-derives food colorings, thats again your fault. If you put gluten into chocolate bars, even thought it's not suppose to be there, and you call something bread even though it cannot be legally called bread in france and you loose a lawsuit because your chicken nuggets contain less than 50% chicken, thats again on you.

This is an underrated comment. This is a problem of ending up in a world where our food is mass-produced in factories. Food should be cooked in kitchens, not be manufactured in factories with contaminants blowing around. You should be easily able to know what's in your food because you wash it off and put it there when you cook it. There is a federal limit on how much rodent hair, feces, maggots, and mold can be in your food when it comes off the assembly line and it's non-zero[1].

1: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/insect-rodent-filth-in...

People buy mass produced because it’s way cheaper

I just watched a video of a candy cane assembly line that made thousands of canes per hour.

If I had to pay a small shop to make that candy cane, I honestly wouldn’t. I don’t have the kind of money for the little things that I may want but not super bad

Of course, you could argue for a lifestyle where you just appreciate a small set of things but it seems people like experiencing more things in life than fewer

It's a chicken and egg problem.

Does industrial production of cheap food make people choose cheap food, or would people rather cook but they only have time and funds to afford the cheap food?

Similar to the agricultural revolution, material need outpaced free lifestyle choices. Nobody chose, either the workers or the factories, but it's where we are.

And when you live in a world with 8 billion people, that’s a lot of food to sell.

There is probably some middleground

The beef is with ingridients, not automation per se.

> If I had to pay a small shop to make that candy cane, I honestly wouldn’t.

Would that be such a bad thing, though? How many candy canes can someone reasonably eat in one holiday season?

You can give them away and make someone day’s better though

This is living in a fantasy world. You’re not feeding 330M people in the US without factory automation handling most of the work.

Well, you can, if you want to pay 3x for your food because of the lack of scale and increase need for manual labor.

No thanks.

Raw ingredients will always be cheaper than food produced in a factory. If not in monetary cost then in the cost to your health.

Of course raw ingredients are cheaper but nobody eats raw ingredients?

most people cook at home? When I buy a whole chicken, or a piece of beef, it doesnt say 'may contain nuts'?

What does factory-produces proccessed food have to do with this?

You're comparing very different things.

One thing is not having shrimp and crab in a kitchen that doesn't cook seafood.

Quite another is not having sesame at a bakery. Sesame is an incredibly common ingredient in most types of breads. I doubt there are many bakeries, whether "factory" bakeries or just corner bakeries, that don't have some bread with sesame, because of how popular it is.

So their choice is either to get rid of sesame entirely, or have to declare it on everything.

> How did we end up in a place where one simple food 'may contain' one million ingriedients where its being made in a giant factory, not a kitchen.

I think we got here this way:

one billion for the first time in 1804;

two billion in 1927, 123 years later;

three billion in 1960, 33 years later;

four billion in 1974, 14 years later;

five billion in 1987, 13 years later;

six billion in 1999, 12 years later;

seven billion in 2011, 12 years later;

eight billion in 2022, 11 years later;

Note that the last six billion happened so fast that probably during your mom’s lifetime

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_milestones

Population of Ireland today is 5 million, less than in 1941 when it was 6.5 million.

How does population growth on another continent affect food production in Ireland?

Food production has undergone similar changes regardless of population

> A former corporate CEO has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for selling food that made people sick. Two other executives face jail time as well. These jail terms are by far the harshest sentences the U.S. authorities have handed down in connection with an outbreak of foodborne illness.

> The outbreak, in this case, happened seven years ago. More than 700 cases of salmonella poisoning were linked to contaminated peanut products. Nine people died.

> Investigators traced the contaminated food to a factory in Georgia operated by the Peanut Corporation of America.

> The outbreak, by itself, was not unprecedented. There have been bigger, and deadlier, outbreaks of foodborne illness.

> But the emails that investigators found at the Peanut Corporation of America set this case apart. Some of the emails came from the company's CEO, Stewart Parnell.

> "Stewart Parnell absolutely knew that they were shipping salmonella-tainted peanut butter. They knew it, and they covered it up," says Bill Marler, a food safety lawyer who represented some of the victims.

> Before and during the outbreak, company executives assured customers that their products were free of salmonella when no tests had been carried out.

> When tests did turn up salmonella, company executives sometimes just retested that batch, and when it came up clean, they sold it.

> In one memorable email exchange, when Parnell was told that a shipment was delayed because results of salmonella tests weren't yet available, he wrote back, "Just ship it."

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/21/442335132/pe...

https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/2009/peanut-butter-2008-2009....

I dunno, maybe by respecting the rights and well-being of consumers?

Authoritarianism.

As someone with a plethora of food sensitivities that still gets hard dinged by hidden corn or wheat gluten contamination hidden under a surreptitious "food starch" label in the ingredients list -- it does matter. Yes, the amounts in ppm contained in starch taken from that food are enough to cause issues. Sometimes them even being on the same machines/equipment is enough for it.

Weirdly enough, food sensitivities and awareness seems to be rising. There are a few good things in the world to me as a result -- Wegmans has gluten free General Tso's chicken that I can have (and gluten free Sesame Chicken -- and both are great if expensive!)

There's so many ways that allergens sneak into food. Aldi's allergen sensitive products for example are a horrendous one for me -- I'm reactive to nearly every major allergen and some cost saving measure or another means it ends up sneaking in.

Thankfully the world is becoming kinder to people like me, but it is a pretty penny for things off the store shelf that approach the comforts of yesteryear while I could have those things.

I hope that helps. I've fallen many times victim of the logical trap of wondering why in the world special provisions exist for a small part of the population until I have to be a part of that population (not by choice) to understand why. It's still hard for me for some of the provisions I don't understand, but having had my bacon saved by a few of them (metaphorically) in the past, I think helped me commit to needing to understand them.

I say this as someone who's gotten "food zoinked" far too many times to count. If I completely purge my stomach in a nearby bathroom I can make the next 3 days more mild, usually, but sometimes it's too late and the reaction has begun.

That's why we're so weirdly picky about it as a country. And I'm glad for it, I think it's truly worth the effort, and it's a thing I feel very positive and relieved about, in the climate today where so many people are left behind in other places. I truly believe it's a good thing.

Much love to you all and Merry Christmas <3 :))))))))))))))))

Classic perverse incentive failure.

Most famous example is called the “cobra effect.” In the 1800’s some towns in India had a problem with cobra infestation, so the governement offered a bounty for dead cobras.

People started farming cobras to collect the bounty.

Eventually too many dead snakes were being turned in, so the government stopped paying. As a result, the newly made “cobra farmers” just released all the cobras on to the streets, doubling the population.

Is it, though? By making disclosure a requirement, the market for sesame-free items is highlighted and elevated. It may find a profitable niche or it may not, but consumers are now better able to choose.

Allergy labeling is likely a bit like support for people with disabilities: We regulate because the market doesn't work in these cases. The number of people who require accommodations are smaller than the value to make accommodating their needs profitable, so we use regulate because it's the right thing to do.

To be clear, we do it through the government because it’s otherwise inefficient: it imposes a bigger collective cost on society than the benefit to the individuals. Whether “it’s the right thing to do” is a moral construct. European countries, for example, have much narrower requirements for accommodation of people with disabilities than the ADA.

Though maybe more pertinent, the EU has required sesame allergen labeling since 2003.

The basis of the (edit: theoretical) free market is full information for all participants, which requiring more information on the label is helpful for. The problem here is they won't allow "may contain traces of X" as a valid acknowledgement, despite being easy to understand.

> The basis of the free market is full information for all participants,

It’s not, and in fact it is opposite of truth. The reason, for example, why free market economy works better than centrally planned one, is precisely that obtaining full knowledge is impossible, so it is impossible to effectively centrally plan, whereas in market economy, each individual contributes their own private knowledge that is unavailable to other people, through participating in market and communicating it through price mechanism.

See, for example, Thomas Sowell’s “Knowledge and Decisions”, which is precisely about this point, or for more classic reference, Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society”. Again, to reiterate, the entire point of market economy is that nobody has full knowledge.

Perhaps I'm sloppy with my terminology, but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition seems to agree more with my statement than yours.

Perfect competition can never exist. There is no scenario where market participants (which make the market) will each have perfect knowledge and act perfectly upon that knowledge.

Along with sometimes being smart or hard working, people are also sometimes lazy, dumb, irrational, careless, destructive, and so on. The point being, there is a wide variety and they bring their messy contributions to the market, which makes for a very messy market. There can never be perfect anything. It's not even a good theory, it's garbage, it would only work in a simplistic simulation with no chaos.

Perfection competition theory is incorrect, badly flawed in a similar manner, as the efficient market hypothesis [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis

Neither this or the GGP is remotely an argument that less information makes for a better market, though.

This is just an assumption of a mathematical model, not “the basis of the free market”. That’s like saying that the basis of the behavior of gases is the fact that the atoms are perfectly round and perfectly bouncy balls.

...because the warning was not valid.

It was being slapped on everything to a)be lazy about not actually having allergens get into food because b)it fooled consumers into thinking that the disclaimer meant they weren't liable for allergens in food.

And as usual with these nice simple narratives, there's no evidence this actually happened (and compelling evidence that it didn't):

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/pmjrdg/is_th...

That link is the neatest answer I have read in ages - this whole story could easily become a hour long tv show

Something very similar did happen though, during the "Great Hanoi Rat Massacre" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre#Hirin...

Reminds me of that people who are 3D printing firearms and parts to sell off at gun buyback programs [1][2]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/11/new-york-gun... [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/akee4e/someone-made-dollar30...

Reading your link, the bounty was real actual thing that happened, it's that the farming of snakes isn't something that was proven to be happening. The link actually says that deaths increased due to an unintended consequence of the bounty system, just for different reasons than is usually mentioned.

The post says deaths in _houses_ increased due to snake habitat destruction that drove them there. It suggests that could be because of snake death awareness raised by the bounty system, but that feels a step too removed to call it an "unintended consequence".

It's not due to a perverse incentive regardless, though, which is what the original anecdote is supposed to exemplify.

One imagines that the goal was to decrease deaths of people regardless of whether they're inside or outside of houses.

Seems somewhat par for the course. As the article notes, many other foods have intentionally added allergens as well, presumably to move the needle from 'may contain allergen X' to 'definitely contains allergen X' and shed some legal liability?

I was excited to be able to eat more commercially-produced foods without wondering if it had sesame or not. Ah well. I guess rather than wondering, I now _know_, my food is contaminated, which might be better?

Small restaurants have ignored me about my allergy, which TBH worries me more, given the false sense of safety.

Now, I just hope for my family's sake if a restaurant kills me, that they're huge and it's their fault.

if you have a deadly allergy like that, is eating at small restaurants really worth risking your life?

Try saying no to eating out for 6 months every time and see how it feels. Every time your buddy wants a beer, your sisters birthday, after work celebration dinner for a late evening.

You don't understand, it's not necessarily as simple as "if I eat out, I die." there are manageable risks with probabilities weighted against being alone again and missing out

Try not being able to afford eating out.

Why don't you just stop eating at restaurants and/or take appropriate steps to protect yourself?

I _promise_ you people with allergies know about this "tactic."

What all you who suggest it fail to empathize with is that it's the only option most of the time. being completely removed from the social scene of eating out is extremely alienating, and eating out is very common especially for young adults.

So you concede, you look up the menu online ahead of time, decide "hey this probably looks safe, I can risk it"

Boom, you accidentally eat something you didn't account for, try not to make a scene in front of your friends and the other patrons, go out to your car take Benadryl and pass out. Night over.

Very sad stuff, but nonetheless I have zero interest in subsidizing your social preferences (either through regulation or litigation costs). Lots of people live good lives without going to restaurants all the time. Have a barbecue or something.

the stick you want to take with where you tax money goes is an ADA protected disability?

I hope society doesn't feel the same way about your needs when they inevitably arise

edit: reduced the tone.

Bring back personal responsibility, I'll deal with my needs and problems, I suggest everyone does the same.

If your reaction is personal outrage at me rather than considering the issue at hand, you are probably too emotionally involved to form a useful opinion.

I'd be curious about your thoughts on regulations that solely pertain to providing available information to consumers. For instance, a regulation saying "If any of your recipes in this facility use sesame, mark that on your product" seems both incredibly feasible and incredibly valuable for people trying to determine how to manage their needs (e.g. what to serve at the suggested barbecue)

I can empathize with thinking that trade-offs that incur a high overhead might be super onerous to comply with, but simple information-based laws which just provide consumers with information that businesses already have on hand seems incredibly easy to comply with, no?

For example, in this case a "produced in a facility that handles sesame" label seems like it'd be a huge accommodation win without extremely minimal overhead for businesses.

For what you're describing, it's important to understand how the FDA and the laws are set up. As things are, package labeling is required for consumer packaged foods. The FDA inspects those facilities. That would seem like a good environment for your suggestion.

But there are other food businesses the FDA inspects that aren't subject to the labeling requirements. For example, this could be a local wholesaler, like a producer of pastries that supplies area coffee shops. That wholesaler will have maybe brought a daily box full of muffins to the coffee shop, whose staff then moved them to a display case.

Those situations have no labeling requirements, and no matter how much information is shared by the producer, nor how often, the café staff as a whole can't be trusted to get it all correct. I don't say they "can't be trusted" because that's an unwise procedure—and it is that—I say it because my business may as well be that local pastry producer.

Just order a glass of vodka. No sesame and social success guaranteed.

(Edit: Never mind, I phrased my question poorly and I'm not sure how to pose it better. I was trying to figure out how one would avoid this scenario where restaurants just say "yes" to every potential allergen to avoid mistakes - like with food labels - if the goal is to have allergic people be able to find places to eat at.)

In Spain (and I think in all of the EU) every item in every menu in every [law-complaint] restaurant has a list of allergens. This is clearly not unrealistic to do, as demonstrable by the fact that many places do it.

There's a list of 14 allergens that must be indicated if present.

https://www.lexland.es/en/restaurant-menus-should-indicate-t...

As a parent of a kid with a sesame allergy, I wish it got the same treatment as peanut allergies do. It's common here (Canada) to have a school that will throw your lunch snacks away if they aren't labelled "peanut safe" but will have sesame buns at a school bbq lunch and just tell the kids with sesame allergy to bring their own lunch and avoid touching it.

I don’t know, I feel this is a slippery slope. I don’t want everything to be on the same level of caution as peanuts, let’s look at root cause for this stuff.

Most likely could being an over-sterilized environment during pregnancy or at birth, some chemical in common products, or something else effecting the micro biome or immune system.

It's not a slippery slope. There's a small list of known deadly allergens. Those need to be taken seriously.

Ha it's like saying speed limits are a slippery slope, and we'll trend closer to 0 mph over time. It's not a slope, it's a dial!

I don’t think it’s tremendously slippery, but I do think it’s a slope. It’s hard to imagine the government ever removing an allergen from the mandatory labeling list - if they did, a lot of people who got used to having it would find themselves in more trouble than if it had never been there.

If speed limits aren't, it is just because of the distribution of benefits

With speed limits, almost everyone suffers and almost everyone benefits. Of course, some people are more likely to be walking, and other driving, but it is not a core part of their identity.

Whenever something makes a specific small group much safer and around 100% of the people pay the cost, giving in and making those people safer is a slippery slope. There are infinite such cases, the system points towards more safety because of lawsuits, and careful cost benefit analysis is harder because there is no one person for which cost and benefit are similar -- for some it is just a small cost, for others just a gigantic benefit.

You'll get a small percentage doing a lot of activism and a large majority harmed, but not enough to fight it.

Peanuts, sesame, pineapples, eggs, fish, shellfish. The list may be small but it's varied. Yes, deadly allergies should be taken seriously,and reasonably. Banning entire classes of food for those not allergic seems much.

There's a small list of commonly deadly allergens, but there's a ton of diversity in the population of people, and some people react with anaphylaxis for items beyond the top 8 or 9.

> Asero and colleagues29 recently reported on a series of 1110 adolescent and adult Italian patients (mean age 31 years, range 12–79 years) diagnosed with food allergy based on history of reaction in the presence of positive skin prick test (SPT) or elevated food-specific serum IgE. Anaphylaxis was reported by 5% of food-allergic individuals, with the most common cause being lipid transfer protein (LTP). LTP is a widely cross-reacting plant pan-allergen. Offending food for LTP-allergic patients was most often peach, but included also other members of the Rosaceae family of fruits (apple, pear, cherry, plum, apricot, medlar, almond, strawberry), tree nuts, corn, rice, beer, tomato, spelt, pineapple, and grape. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3440177/#:~:tex...

I'm allergic (not deathly so) to legumes, cranberries and have trouble with wheat as well. Most of the time, I just try to minimize my exposure and live with not feeling well when I get wammied. Cranberries are my worst reaction, the only time I tend to get really nosy is actually BBQ sauce, because many tangy sauces will contain them.

In the end, I don't (and imho, shouldn't) expect the world to put padding on the sidewalk to protect my from myself.

I would be happy if labelling laws included a "Manufacturing facility handles (allergen list). This product may contain trace amounts." as a statement for what there might be trace amounts of in terms of allergens not intentionally part of the product.

It bugs me a bit that if a kid wants a PBJ they no longer are allowed to at school.

Wait, there are schools that don't allow non-allergic kids to eat peanut butter, etc?

Here is a sample requirement:

https://www.stjohnsschool.org/uploaded/Files/Nut_Sensitive_F...

Thanks. I'd seriously take my kids out of schools like that. They shouldn't be scared about their sandwich is breaking "the rules", seems like it would breed low-grade paranoia in kids.

Children are remarkably adaptable, it's usually the parents who are stuck in their ways

Adults have trouble enough to grasp the concept of a deathly allergy to a common foodstuff, let alone kids. I think that's the reasoning behind this kind of ban. Not "breaking the rules" but causing harm to other kids because they don't understand the dangers.

For instance, the following is a news item about a kid in a London school with a dairy allergy who died because his classmates flicked a bit of cheese at him as a joke:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/02/boy-with-all...

A schoolboy with a dairy allergy was left gasping for breath and shouted “I’m going to die” minutes after a fellow pupil flicked cheese at him, an inquest has heard.

Karanbir Singh Cheema, 13, known as Karan, went from “absolutely fine” to unconscious in under 10 minutes after the incident at William Perkin Church of England high school in Greenford, west London, on 28 June 2017.

Karan, described as “so bright he could have been anything he wanted”, died 10 days later at Great Ormond Street hospital.

I can’t believe they unironically recommend replacing peanut butter on sandwiches with Biscoff cookie spread. And as the first option!

All the schools round here in the UK where I live are 'nut-free'.

I’m pretty sure that allowing companies to slip legal liability with a “might contain” which just result in boilerplate for all allergies which isn’t helpful to anyone.

I’m glad your allergies aren’t so severe. But minimizing contact isn’t enough for people who are deathly allergic to peanuts or sesame, where the best case for exposure is an epi-pen shot and a trip to the ER. It’s not so much asking for padded walls as enough information to allow people to live without fear of dying because of something they ate.

Every kid deserves an education without fear of being killed by some other kid’s snack. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for people to just eat their PB&J at home.

Why should they have legal liability in the first place for small amount of cross-contaminated ingredients?

Regardless, listing ingredients they aren’t willing to affirm aren’t in their products is helpful. It identifies products that aren’t for sure safe which is what you want.

> I don’t think it’s too much to ask for people to just eat their PB&J at home.

What's the cost benefit analysis here? That the kid does not get to share the food?

Would touching someone that ate a PBJ be enough to trigger an episode? In what percentage of people?

How can you just say something like that without also stating a model? Without percentages and numbers?

> I don’t think it’s too much to ask for people to just eat their PB&J at home.

Totally get that. Others do think that's too much to ask though, and I'm sure there are cases where you'd disagree with their "not too much to ask" in return.

I didn't say boilerplate for all allergies... I specifically stated, that the mfg should list allergens the facility handles, but aren't ingredients. That warning should be sufficient to state that it may not be safe for the allergens in question.

I'm sure actually adding allergens to food and labeling them is a much better solution after-all.

Why, because nobody is going to make 10 mfg facilities each avoiding a different singular ingredient.

Kids need extra protection since they can’t weigh risk and don’t understand how the world works. So I understand if my daughters can’t have peanuts in elementary school if their classmate has a real allergy.

But policies go above and beyond that now. They bar peanuts even if nobody has an allergy. Other places bar peanuts for self identified allergies (which cannot be confirmed 90% of the time by a doctor). That’s just bad policy driven by litigation fear.

My wife has been allergic to Sesame for as long as she can remember. It's always a struggle not only because it is less known than peanuts, but it's also very easy to hide it in all sorts of foods -- intentionally or accidentally.

> a school that will throw your lunch snacks away

What is the reason to that?

The current treatment of peanut allergies is already an over-reaction.

My brother was deadly allergic to even trace quantities of peanut products as a child. Nonetheless, we routinely ate peanut butter sandwiches and peanuts at home, never mind school or the many other spaces a child occupies, and it was never an issue. Reasonable precautions were sufficient to eliminate all practical concern and it didn’t require sterilizing the environment of all peanuts. This was easy and effective, same as with other kids with dangerous allergies. The only incident I can remember involved some Korean food that used peanut oil, and he knew it contained peanut the instant he put it in his mouth. He was quite capable of avoiding peanut products on his own.

Banning everyone from eating peanut products anywhere in the vicinity of someone with a peanut allergy is just another example of pathological safety-ism. And it goes far beyond actual deadly allergies now, we accommodate all manner of imagined hyper-sensitivities “just in case” with no rational or pragmatic consideration of the risks and costs.

they are not imagined and you anecdata of one demonstrates nothing.

anaphylaxis is highly individualized and can change within an individual over time.

It's also not necessarily just about preventing anaphylaxis but general food anxiety as well as alienation from a cultural and social staple of sharing food together. Most people will never understand the secondary effects of anaphylactic food allergies, no less CONSTANTLY downplay then as you did with your brother.

I know this sibling downplaying is very possible because my partner has MCAS, which causes random allergies to pop up like whack a mole. Her family caused her very much grief as a child but she developed strong coping mechanisms and it's similarly capable of "managing what she eats." However I am one of very few people who truly understand how completely alienated she feels because of it. The primary concerns (death by anaphylaxis) are bad but very infrequent. The secondary effects of social alienation are constant and boundaries are always being pushed even by close friends and family

> not necessarily just about preventing anaphylaxis but general food anxiety as well as alienation from a cultural and social staple of sharing food together

I see, moving the goalposts to an even less defensible argument. Sharing food together doesn't mean eating the same thing. By this reasoning, we should all be forced to eat the lowest common denominator of least offensive food for everyone. If one person is vegan, we should all be vegan. If one person can't eat any nightshade vegetables (a common allergy), none of us should eat nightshade vegetables. Same for dairy, shellfish, etc. The set of foods all humans can comfortably and traditionally eat is approximately the empty set. This sounds like the very definition of a culturally and socially enriching experience around food!

You don't speak for my brother and he'd likely mock someone trying to "white knight" his eating experiences or suggesting his peanut allergy caused profound alienation. We all eat different things based on preferences, never mind allergens. Do people feel alienated and anxious because they can't handle spicy food but other people can? There is a ubiquitous food that I can't eat (for reasons unrelated to allergens) but never once did I feel alienated because of it, even though people tease me about it.

If people are intentionally being assholes about it, the issue is them being assholes and has nothing to do with the food. If one person is hyper-sensitive about what other people eat, the answer is therapy for that person, not changing the world to accommodate their hyper-sensitivity.

Imagine you have a school age child. If there were a 100% chance that they would be served arsenic at school you would probably keep them home. If there were a 0% chance, you would send them to school.

What "%" risk that your child would be poisoned do you find acceptable?

In this analogy though, is 99% of the population able to eat and digest arsenic without a problem?

If so, I think the reality that needs to be dealt with is that there are going to be a lot of situations throughout their life where people are going to be serving arsenic. It sucks to be in that situation, but it's something that child will need to be taught to take into account (even if accommodations can kick that can down the road for now.)

If arsenic is poisonous for everyone in this analogy, then I have a lot bigger problems with this school than the lunch menu.

My point is that there is a scale and if you think about it not as a binary, but as a gradient, you might be more understanding of school administrators who are trying to create a safe learning environment for hundreds of kids.

Yes, if there is a substance that's poison for one kid, they'll need to learn to take precautions. And if there's a substance that's poison for all, it should be banned from school meals. What if it's 10% of kids? 5%?

Food allergies are common these days.

Arsenic is an essential micronutrient with a toxicity profile similar to selenium (another essential micronutrient). Arsenic is sufficiently available in diets around the world that deficiency isn’t going to be a thing unless you go out of your way to aggressively remove it from the water supply.

Your attempt at an analogy was clumsy and nonsensical regardless. They aren’t serving poison at schools. Sugar would have been a better example.

My point is to think about risk as a scale. There's no need to be pedantic about the analogy.

Would you send your child to school if there was a 1% chance that they would be served something that would put them in the ER? .5% chance?

If you were a school administrator, would you serve food that could put 3% of the student body in the ER? 6%?

> The current treatment of peanut allergies is already an over-reaction.

The current treatment of peanut allergies affecting people older than infants/toddlers is probably not an overreaction to the situation created by the fact that for a period until very recently (and maybe still now, as there is some social inertia), the attempt to prevent exposure in infants/toddlers was an overreaction, that produced a much greater number of very severe allergies than otherwise would have existed.

Another absurdity is food containing prop 65 warnings like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/ramen/comments/zb9xu8/p65_cancer_wa...

We shouldn't be doing either of these things. It wasn't a serious problem 20 years ago when kids would bring whatever allergens to lunch. Throwing away peanut foods is an absurd overreaction and misdirection of food-safety resources.

Here's a story from around 14 years ago where this was a serious problem [1]. I could probably find more from 20 years ago if I looked further.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/AllergiesNews/story?id=4659705...

I guarantee you that schools were not throwing out peanut butter sandwiches when I was a kid, and many of the schools I went to are doing so now.

I'm sure you can find an article about peanut allergies at any point in recorded history where they had peanuts.

Yes, and my schools were not throwing out sandwiches either. Schools started doing so because it became a serious liability issue with kids weaponizing it for bullying and leading to death. Unless you have a solution for the human condition that will stop people leveraging deadly allergies as a form of torment, then schools will keep doing so.

> Schools started doing so because it became a serious liability issue with kids weaponizing it for bullying and leading to death

This sounds completely absurd and hyperbolic, but let's say I took it at face value - why is this an issue now and not an issue when I was in school?

I literally posted a story where this was happening, did you not read the link I shared? There are multiple other examples in just the past few years, and the thing is that all it takes is one inciting incident to cause massive problems for the school district.

Why are you expecting the world now to exist as it was when you were a child?

This has nothing to do with expectations - it's an inquiry into why something is worse now, without a clear justification.

Your only argument for why it's "worse" is that it was different when you were in school. Maybe it was "worse" when you were in school.

The world has changed in the past 20 years. The world will change over the next 20 years.

I absolutely hate not having peanut butter as an ingredient for my kids' lunches and snacks because the school forbids anything with peanuts in foods they bring to school. I understand the struggle of having a kid with special needs in schools--one of mine has autism and the other an as yet incompletely diagnosed neurological condition (could be epilepsy, could be mundane ADHD, could be both--we're still testing). The school must accommodate these conditions, but that accommodation doesn't require banning things or reorganizing every activity around their needs.

Your kid will be just fine if some other kid eats something with sesame in it, unless they're sharing, kissing, or fighting with their food.

Well no, it depends on how severe their allergies are. And there have been multiple stories or examples in the past decade or two of kids hazing someone with peanut butter allergies by intentionally triggering it or even putting peanut butter on them.

This is why schools have taken drastic measures because all it takes is one incident to send a kid to the hospital, put the school in serious lawsuit territory and cause a massive news scandal. It's a matter of liability reduction.

hard cases make bad law.

extreme cases make bad policy.

If a kid assaults another with peanut butter, might I suggest the problem is the assault, not the peanut butter?

Which is easier, banning peanut butter or eliminating bullying?

Neither. Parents routinely send their kids to school with prohibited food items, including sweets and various products with nuts. I'm not allowed this privilege because of the extra scrutiny already on my kids due to their conditions.

Considering that bullies might choose to bring peanut butter as contraband?

> unless they're sharing, kissing, or fighting with their food

Good thing kids never do this.

This is just a syndication of https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc.... Can the URL be changed to that?

I think (and there are studies to back this too) that the more you eschew an allergen the more violent your reaction against it would be. I am from a third-world country and I know no-one from my country that has allergies related to foods like peanuts, sesame or gluten. The only other explanations for this would be: a) These allergies occur so rarely that I haven't heard from the minority of the people. b) Or, the people who had this allergies have already died without diagnosis. c) Or, people have these allergy but choose to hide them for fear of social shame. d) Or, people don't get medical checkup that allows the discovery of these allergies.

But I think the case that people being accustomed to the allergens due to forceful conditions is the best explanation for this.

Those aren't the only explanations, there are dozens of other possible explanations, all worth investigating. And it's not just allergies, there's been an unexplained spike in multiple autoimmune conditions [see google scholar].

The hygiene hypothesis for one.

There was a big "medical reversal" around this where a very large seemingly well-conducted study led to doctors advising patients to avoid their allergens. Later studies failed to replicate this result however and doctors have reversed course as evidence has built up that avoiding the allergen can indeed worsen it over time

However, I don't really think this is all relevant. Allergen immunotherapy is not as simple as just exposing yourself to the allergen and requires medical oversight. Even if someone is trying to work through this process without a medical professional, they still have a right to know which foods do and don't contain this allergen that could still kill them in large amounts

Do you happen to have a link to the new study?

> accustomed to the allergens due to forceful conditions is the best explanation for this.

While desensitization works https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desensitization_(medicine) you can't really just force expose someone and hope for the best.

It's a bit correlated to developed countries, but not completely https://waojournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1939-4...

I'd propose a mix of everything but also: e) People don't call things allergies unless they know it's that. I said for decades that I can't eat spinach or I'll have diarrhoea, but learned later that also classifies as an allergy. f) More developed countries have more difference in available cuisines. For example I've not seen a shellfish until I moved out of home, so wouldn't know if I'm allergic to them. g) (probably lots of other factors)

My dude, sesame allergies are higher in the middle east, where sesame is a very common ingredient [0]. There is something happening with development that leads to immune system fuckery, but it's definitely more complicated than simple exposure.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_allergy

What is the state of research into this?

> I am from a third-world country and I know no-one from my country that has allergies related to foods like peanuts, sesame or gluten.

B is quite likely, I am from a non-firstworld world country, and back there you hardly ever see people in wheelchairs, blind people, people with disalities.

When I first got to EU, I saw so many people in wheelchairs, I thought something is wrong. There are more people with disabilities in europe?

Well, turns out people with disabilites in back home live sad and short lives. There is literally zero infrastructure for them - entry to every apartment block has stairs befpre the elvator (90% of people live in apartment blocks)

The curbs don't turn into ramps near crossings, they just stay vertical.

Our apartment block came with a ramp, and the residents knocked it down because it looked ugly.

Eu uses special tiling to indicate to the blind where is an edge of the pedesteian path, where is a crossing, etc. In Russia this does not exist. When the city bought this special tiling, the workers didn't know what it was, so they made random patterns out of it.

The traffic lights do not make a sound when its green, if there are roadworks and a giant hole in the ground, no-one puts a yellow fence around it. A missing manhole cover attracks no attention and zero lawsuits.

Its not just the government, here is zero awareness, and disabled people don't leave the house, no-one gives a fuck.

If you live in the capital, things are slingthly better, but for 90% of the countru thats the reality.

But I see tons of disabled people here. I agree that my country does not have enough disability infrastructure, but that hasn't stopped me from noticing disabled people. Not only that, we have lots of LGBT people even though people are more against them than in any western countries. I also notice lots of mentally-ill person (ranging from ADHD and depression to full-lunatic). People here socially boycott even depressed people but that hasn't stopped people from coming out as depressed. Hence, that led me to believe that only forced-habituation is the explanation.

> and there are studies to back this too

I have been online for about 30 years. This is the first time I am going to say:

Citation needed.

> But I think the case that people being accustomed to the allergens due to forceful conditions is the best explanation for this.

The dead don't show up to be counted.

My vote is all of these, with B/C/D being primary.

A: Sterile environments don’t properly prepare the immune system.

B/C/D: People with severe allergies and disabilities aren’t accepted as part of society. Often there is no support for them other than what their family can provide.

The sad fact is many people view medical problems as character flaws. If you were strong, you wouldn’t be sick.

So people die, hide, or never realize their problems for what they are. My grandmother had food allergies her entire life. Never told anyone. She just didn’t eat things that made her sick. Despite being a nurse her entire life, she would say she didn’t have food allergies.

Prop 65 all over again.

https://www.google.com/search?q=prop+65 https://www.google.com/search?q=prop+65+unintended

After reading this report, it’s not clear to me what the federal government ought to have done or should’ve done differently. Not regulate food labeling at all? Or not regulate food labeling if less than 1% of the population is impacted by an issue? Remove prior food labeling laws for other allergens? Provide incentives to prevent companies from simplifying their processes and keeping costs lower (especially during a time of high inflation and rising interest rates)? Punish companies that are bypassing the spirit of the law and compel them to create and maintain facilities and processes to prevent cross contamination (and make products that don’t have allergens)?

The best answer would be to absolve them of liability if they properly state the cross-contamination risk.

I hazard a guess that, then, they would state the cross-contamination risk in everything.

Laywers, optimization an all that...

This will just lead to another case of California’s Prop 65

As someone with a sesame allergy I was wondering why suddenly 90% of the bread options had it. Effectively, I have 1 option now, that’s it. No hotdog or hamburger buns.

Is what it is, going to improve my baking game.

I’ll take the opportunity and recommend my favorite pretzel burger bun recipe. Found this to make for great buns, every time. https://www.hefe-und-mehr.de/en/2017/04/pretzel-burger-buns/...

I resonate with you, I've had to remove bread from my diet, except for homemade options (which, luckily for me, my spouse is great at making). Sesame has a majorly debilitating effect on me, so it's not something I can even begin to flirt with.

I think sesame makes me violently throw up for about 8 hours. The last three times I’ve knowingly eaten it this has happened. But it doesn’t show up on an allergy test and all three were 6 months apart so could have just been a flare up of something else. But it was the exact same symptoms each time. So now I just avoid sesame, it’s really tricky to do as it gets in to all sorts of things, but for seemingly no reason. Even ordering a burger is tricky, why are there sesame seeds on a burger bun?

This has been my struggle. From my POV it's such a dumb allergy to have -- like I feel so stupid bringing it up. But on the other hand, are sesame seeds really that awesome that my food needs to be able to kill me.... for what exactly?

Now, sesame oil - fine. That's great. But the seeds... the seeds are just there to insult me.

I love the taste and texture of sesame seeds. I snack on black and white sesame seeds all the time.

I dont think they do anything to the bun. My kid has a sesame allergy, its pretty dumb when you pick up something, read sesame and you wonder why, we are seriously struggling finding hamburger buns at the grocery store that do not contain sesame - after this new federal law change to include sesame. They have a seed flavor but seriously could get that from another type of seed. Luckily he doesnt have a sever reaction only irritates his tongue and throat a little. very minor.

Hummus. Halva. Tahini. Sesame would be a difficult allergy. My condolences.

Texture and visually appealing I assume?

Sesame seeds on buns were popularized by the introduction of the Big Mac in the 60s. They weren't the first, but they definitely propelled it into the mainstream. The original purpose is lost to history but it was likely just for visual appeal.

Turkish simit bread (a type of roll) is completely coated in sesame seeds and I think predates the Big Mac by some hundreds of years. There is some prior art regarding sesame seed rolls.

Anecdotally I find people from east of the prime meridian seem to eat a lot more seeds and nuts than I see USians do.

> Even ordering a burger is tricky, why are there sesame seeds on a burger bun?

Sesame seeds are flavor enhancer, just like salt. The "simplest" salt-less bread simply replaces salt with sesame seeds. Of course burgers will use all the tricks they can to improve flavor, hence the sesame seeds on burger buns.

I think I’m a jerk because I found this industry response satisfying.

Perhaps this creates an opportunity for certified allergen free foods companies to get into the game in a bigger way.

This is my thought too. We are reading articles like this at the onset of a new law because it plays well to crowds who want to have Online Opinions about government oversight.

If the problem is as bad as these articles claim, then these facilities will need to clean up their act or willfully hand over a slice of the market to competitors. We've even already seen this play out in the bread industry with gluten. A bunch of new brands started taking shelf space away from the big brands and a few years later those big brands have their own gluten-free lines. The same could happen with sesame in time. To form an opinion on the new law this early is a recipe for sour milk.

> "At some point, someone is going to feed an allergic child sesame," Fitzgerald said. "It makes me think the laws need to change to show that this is not an acceptable practice."

I don't see how you do this without overly burdensome regulation.

It seems to me you in would have to either ban sesame altogether or at least tax it at levels significant enough to counter balance either the liability risk or cost of upgrading facilities to support the needed cleaning processes.

Perhaps instead of another layer of regulation, concerned citizens should start a non-profit that provides grants to companies to upgrade their facilities?

Wow, great example of unintended consequences.

Summary: A new law substantially increases liability for making a sesame free product. The predictable result was that there are now fewer sesame free products. Now, everyone is worse off.

Well stated. Bring back personal responsibility.

How can someone be "personally responsible" if there are not accurate food labeling laws?

No, there's so much secret sesame that you don't know is there that even with the range of hypothetical options lessened, there are more foods you know are safe now. My partner, who has a sesame allergy, had basically sworn off preprepared food because there's no way to tell. At least now she knows what's safe.

Mandating a "may contain traces of sesame" would provide just as much protection without requiring adding the sesame and denying it to those of us that aren't going to be killed by a bit of cross contamination.

Without quantifying and controlling the amount of sesame, that's not useful information.

That's why these foods added the sesame--now it's measured, quantified, and controlled.

Someone with a mild allergy can try the food and see what the reaction is. If it's fine, then that food can be eaten knowing that the sesame level likely will be consistent.

People with severe allergies will avoid that food like always.

This is a good thing and the complaints make me facepalm. "Gee, now we can experiment and know what this food will do to us as opposed to playing Russian roulette every time. This upsets us and we're going to complain."

Oh, gee, what you really wanted was everybody to surgically clean their manufacturing lines but not pay them any extra money for doing so? So sorry, that's not how this works.

And that's what everyone with an allergy should do - take their destiny in their own hands and stop relying on labels and on nanny state. Buy unprocessed food, bake your own bread, it's not that hard.

fuck off dude, we literally do that. It's exhausting. Is it really such an imposition to have labels?

I'm a diabetic. 90% of supermarket food is dangerous for me. There are no labels on apples telling me they have sugar. It's on me to count calories and carbo in my food.

I am too (T1). There are in fact mandates to tell us the amount of carbs in a given food. That's how you can count carbohydrates in your food. Raw fruits and vegetables have an exception because that's public information. Unlike the amount of sesame, which frequently gets added under the label "spices" so unless we legally require them to label it, there's no way to know.

Bureaucracy strikes again! FDA needs to allow "may contain" or "produced in a facility that contains" and let individuals with these allergies to choose if they want to eat those foods and accept all liability for illness and/or death

Perhaps I’m missing it, but I see no attempt to quantify what proportion of foods are actually adding sesame in this way.

This could be happening at the margin, and the law could also on net be helping lots of people avoid allergens in the rest of the food that didn’t get adulterated.

If it’s 1/1000 products getting sesame added this story is likely a nothing-burger.

But yes, at the margin, actors are sensitive to incentives. This story provides a(nother) nice clear example of that, if one was wanting such.

what is with all the food allergies lately? Why so many people unlock them.

I doubt that you will find 13 people allergic to sesame in whole of Asia, North Africa and the Mediterranean. And 1.3 million in the US.

Science is just now starting to figure out what's going on with gut biomes, but it probably has something to do with diet. To roll with your example, look up lactose intolerance in Asia.

Most adult mammals are lactose intolerant. It's not an allergy.

That’s missing the point.

My point wasn't very clear. Downside of posting at 9 am and 9 degrees.

That’s different - Northern European tolerance to lactose is actually a mutation/adaptation.

There’s probably some processed food or medicine that triggers these severe allergies in babies.

And the allergies can't also be a mutation/adaptation?

Wouldn't some "processed food or medicine that triggers these severe allergies" be a "mutation/adaptation"? I'm confused on the distinction you're trying to make it it's not "Americans are bad haha".

The lactose tolerance unlocked major food group. Allergies lock people out of staples. So we have huge interest as a species to figure out why they appear and prevent them.

My mom used to study this stuff, and her conjecture was that the “low fat” craziness happened around the same time as people being unable to cook for themselves.

When you eat your Trader Joe’s frozen whatever, it is often fortified with soy or pea proteins and different stuff to preserve taste and appearance. Chain restaurant stuff is similar.

Once in awhile, no big deal, but many people are incapable of cooking. My local library has a class in cutting onions and other vegetables booked out till April. Lots of kids grow up with soy formula and frozen chicken nuggets. Pre 1990, no human ate that stuff.

Genetic changes cannot explain the dramatic rise in allergies (not just food-borne) over the last few decades.

The difference is access to testing. Most of the people in the US who "test" positive for an allergen aren't actually allergic to it, but that is often not explained properly.

Simply, allergists have three types of testing: skin test, blood test, actual exposure. If you can eat something without a reaction, it doesn't matter what the skin and blood tests showed (they can be "positive" for other reasons). Skin and blood tests are mostly used to determine severity of an allergy after exposure has already proven to be a problem.

But allergy testing is covered by insurance (and it's VERY profitable), so a ton of allergists will do skin and blood tests on people who don't need it, and now there are independent scam companies doing "allergy" testing by mail for curious people.

Do people actually do random tests and spend the rest of their life blindly believing the results ?

Dealing with allergies is such a PITA and a burden that follows you every day, every single time you´re trying to eat anything. It´s such a mental toll that I see people going for allergy tests usually after they had their first reaction and went through ER, or when there is precedents in the family and they have a pretty decent chance to have common allergies.

Even after getting positive results we had a pretty thorough talk with the doctor about the tests and the actual reaction we saw when we discovered the allergy.

I understand people randomnly buying gluten free stuff as a fad, but they still continue eating gluten in other foods in general. Food allergies and avoiding ingredients is another level of inconvenience altogether.

> Do people actually do random tests and spend the rest of their life blindly believing the results?

Many do, or even don't trust that a negative result is real. There are lots of other conditions and situations that one would think are strict drawbacks that people lean into, in my anecdotal experience. "Gluten allergy" that is not Celiac, for example. There are steps to take, things to research, and communities of fellow suffers to identify with, after all.

My girlfriend has problems with wheat. I suspect it has nothing to do with gluten, and may not actually be an allergic response at all, but when she eats wheat it definitely causes digestive problems. Ordering things gluten free is just an easy way to handle it.

> Do people actually do random tests and spend the rest of their life blindly believing the results ?

Yes, hang out with elementary school parents (mostly moms) and you'll quickly get an earful from those that do. It seems more like anxiety with many of these folks.

Or, you know, food allergies are life-threatening and they're just trying to protect their child.

Sure, I've known real, diagnosed situations like this, but I'm talking about the self diagnosis types and they behave differently.

Why can’t they just do what they have done with peanut? “May contain peanut.” It’s not a listed ingredient but it’s also isn’t ruled out since the product was manufactured at a plant that also makes product with peanut and the manufacturer cannot guarantee that there aren’t trace elements of peanut.

It says in the article that marking as “may contain” doesn’t actually cover them legally in cases of cross contamination.

From the article:

> Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.

”The unfortunate reality is that our equipment and bakeries are not setup for allergen cleanings that would be required to prevent sesame cross-contamination and was not an option for us"

So why hasn't the same effect happened with peanuts?

It has. There was a small controversy in 2016 when Kellogg's started adding peanut flour to some snacks to avoid cross-contamination concerns; one that's still around is their cheese crackers (https://www.kelloggs.com/en_US/products/austin-cheese-cracke...). The source article focuses a lot on bread bakeries, where peanuts are rare and sesame is extremely common.

IMO the FDA should say that such labels do absolve the company from liability, it’s ridiculous that it doesn’t.

That would have the same effect - you would see "may contain..." on every single product in lieu of precise labelling, and then it would be the same as having no labelling at all.

That’s what this is about. Food producers are allowed to comply with a “may contain X” statement, or adding it to the list of ingredients. Previously, sesame was allowed to exist under “spice” or “natural flavors”. Now, there’s an explosion of “may contain sesame”, probably due to the difficulty of tracing sesame through their supply chain, and it may honestly be everywhere. For example I think if buns are cooked in the same facility as sesame buns, you gotta either add it and include it (which is what’s happening now) or create a lot of controls to ensure no cross contamination, and bakers may not be set up for separate cook areas, etc.)

Seems like a the labelling rules overall are bad.

How things work in the UK (and presumably the EU too) seems pretty good to me.

Allergens have to be highlighted in bold (or uppercase) in the ingredients list.

If a product may contain an allergen, that's normally listed separately.

If you have a mild allergy or intolerance, or avoid particular food for other reasons (e.g. milk because you're Vegan), then the "may contain" risk may not bother you and you can enjoy the product.

The US is on a slope of increasingly extreme nannyism. Which, if you know the history of the US (both its present culture and its common historical beliefs about itself), that has to be a fairly amusing thing to observe from the outside.

For numerous reasons, the US culture has been fractured by a tiny, very loud, hyper triggered minority that screams from the rooftops 24/7 on social media. The virtue signaling brigade. Also known as the squeaky wheel getting the grease (attention in this case). They work hard & persistently at it, they're loud, they often band together for pet causes, and they get the government and companies to bend to their pressure routinely.

It's leading to a very mentally fragile nation, of emotionally stunted individuals that can't deal with reality and require aggressive shielding from reality. This type of mediocre labeling outcome is indicative of the broader cultural erosion. It's simply no longer good enough to label that something "may contain" risk. It's going to get worse yet before it bottoms out.

Unfortunate that we're doing so little to stop the massive increase in food allergy rates that has occurred over the past few decades. Labeling is good, but we should invest in prevention also.

Prevention would ideally be reducing the rates of food borne allergies, in as much as it is possible to do so.

After having two flights recently where our food service was cancelled due to a flyer with a nut allergy, I’m ready for us to invest whatever it takes to reverse this trend.

How long was the flight? I can see this being an issue for people with some other health conditions - type 1 diabetics come to mind. If it's a long flight and they assume food service and then it's removed and they have nothing to eat for their blood sugar, that's not great.

you can always ask the flight attendant for food. they have something

I mostly feel bad for the flight attendants. "Why is HE getting food and I'm not?" etc. People suck.

If getting food on a flight is a medical issue, someone should be bringing their own food.

Yeah, they should, but if someone with that severe an allergy is on the plane, would that be allowed? Also people are stupid and don't think ahead or plan for contingencies: I can see people reading there will be food service and deciding they don't need to bring their own.

It's not always only ingested food that is a safety issue. Some people have allergies that are severe enough that physical contact is enough to cause anaphylaxis. For example, there was a kid with a dairy allergy who died when other kids put a piece of cheese down his shirt[1]

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/02/boy-with-all...

If someone can't tolerate anyone else on a flight eating anything, they probably shouldn't fly.

Why not? If the airline has a policy that allows them to fly, why wouldn't they? It's not the people with allergies asking the flight not to serve other people peanuts, it's the airline itself deciding to do that.

Besides if someone has a contact allergy to nuts, I can't think of a place more likely for it to happen than a plane. One patch of turbulence, and your seat neighbor's peanuts go all over you.

You mean, forced to buy food at 500% markup inside the airport.

I did. I was told I could not eat it due to the possibility it contained nuts.

Both of these flights were TATL but on the lower end (5-7 hours) of the time range. The restriction only applied to our section of business class, which neither time was fully booked.

"If being exposed to trace amounts of [an allergen] on a flight is a medical issue, someone shouldn't be taking a plane."

This made me chuckle, imagining us starting a Manhattan Project for allergies because Delta didn't distribute their customary snack packet one too many times.

I mainly meant that if the quantity of people who can die from simple exposure to food is now such a high proportion of the population that I’m regularly encountering it in this and other contexts, that seems like a significant enough potential loss of lives/reduction in quality of life to merit a serious effort to fix the problem.

I am curious why airlines seem to be the holdouts regularly putting nuts in everything/distributing nuts as the main snacks. And they all do it.

Is there enough of a scientific consensus on how to prevent food allergies to drive policy, or are you just talking about research at this point?

I've heard things like early exposure, breast feeding, and mother's nutrition can help, but always got the impression that allergies are pretty random.

Yes. It’s been proven that if you expose babies to all the allergens early on they never develop the allergy.

But not only that. If they already have the allergy, you can actually cure it by slowly building up exposure until they stop reacting to it.

> If they already have the allergy, you can actually cure it by slowly building up exposure until they stop reacting to it.

Very important to note that not everyone can be cured this way, it can be dangerous even fatal, and under medical supervision only. Far too many people think they can cure their own allergy, allergies aren't "real," or cases of grandparents trying to YOLO fix their grandkid by putting small amounts of e.g. peanuts in their food and causing airway obstruction.

This research is, undeniably, exciting, but people overstate it and act like we could just roll it out to everyone with allergies and they'd disappear (and that everyone who still has allergies is "choosing" to). That isn't at all where the science is at today.

I can't eat gluten. I ate plenty of wheat growing up, and suddenly developed a problem digesting it at 18. I was on a full-gluten diet when diagnosed and still felt sick all the time.

So, as someone who was exposed as a baby, and was pretty much doing maximal exposure therapy, you need to write better test cases.

I'm talking about research, but in particular research testing potential interventions.

There has been a fair amount of research (but no solid consensus) on why allergy rates are increasing.

But AFAIK there have been fairly few attempts to try to use any of those competing hypotheses to devise preventive treatments whose effectiveness could be tested experimentally.

Where I live it's advised to introduce peanuts early to kids (before 8 months) because of this research

There is actually pretty compelling evidence. Enough so that the AAP reversed its guidelines in 2017: https://publications.aap.org/aapnews/news/12250/New-guidelin....

The current theory is that allergies exploded because our (first) world is too clean and the immune system needs something to do, so it focuses on what it can find - peanuts.

But this is kind of strange, as for example in France, you definitely don't see the same level of allergies as in the US.

I'm not sure if French people would think life is worth living if you couldn't eat the same food as everyone else.

As Ivan Drago would say: If he dies, he dies.

Maybe it's because peanut butter is extremely popular in the U.S., but not very popular in most other countries?

I don't know. Lots of Chinese food have peanuts, as well as some Indian foods. Some regions in Brazil too. I know that as a child in Brazil, I ate a lot of "paçoca" which as peanut based sweet. Never ever heard of peanut allergies in my childhood.

Citation? I think there might be a bit of "telephone game" happening here. The current science shows that avoiding allergens increases the risk of developing allergies. The hypothesis for how that happens is that if an infant's first exposure to an allergen is on their skin (e.g., peanut oil), then their body may classify it as invasive and develop anti-bodies to attack it. If they are first introduced to an allergen as food, then their body classifies it as food. By avoiding feeding allergens to infants, you increase the time window for their bodies to be exposed through the skin and classify it as invasive. I could certainly see this idea transmuting through word of mouth into the "first world is too clean" idea in your comment, but that's pretty far off.

> Citation?

Plenty of papers listed here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

Anecdotally, this is insufficient to explain the evidence.

I have approximately no allergies but was exposed to a very diverse and not sterile environment from early on, with other siblings being similar. I have two brothers close to my age that did have significant and in some case deadly allergies, who were born and raised in the same environment.

Among my siblings, it is a completely mixed bag of sensitivity. Some were highly sensitive to many things, others were sensitive to almost nothing. If mere exposure to non-sterile environments was sufficient then we should all have had similar sensitivity to allergens but the variance in fact was quite high.

It is a current theory. It is far from being the current theory, and IMO a woefully insufficient one. I'm not a clean freak by any means and still developed a couple dozen food allergies as an adult. Ultimately the immune system is hopelessly complex and this will likely take decades more for us just to arrive at the right theory.

> Is there enough of a scientific consensus on how to prevent food allergies to drive policy

To be honest, this may have already happened, but it would take a generation to see the effects. There was a major breakthrough on this a few years ago. I first heard about it on an episode of Science Vs [1]. That was merely weeks after my second child was born. It was interesting to see the advice from the pediatrician a few months later. The American Association of Pediatrics updated their advice accordingly [2], and my kids' pediatrician handed out informational fliers calling out "this has changed," etc. Hopefully other pediatricians are also updating their advice and doing a good job of educating families.

Check out the Science Vs episode [1] if you want details. The gist of it is that in a controlled study, they found that introducing allergens early reduced the prevalence of allergies by 86% compared to avoiding allergens. This means old advice (what I was told with my first-born) about avoiding allergens could actually increase the risk. The Science Vs episode goes into details about what led researchers to look into this and possible explanations about the mechanism involved.

[1]: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/2ohd7e

[2]: https://publications.aap.org/aapnews/news/12250/New-guidelin...

Yes. Early introduction of foods is proven to dramatically reduce allergies, and not just for peanut. Everyone should be doing it and we should have recommendations and guidelines for parents.

There is also a lot of evidence that SLIT and OIT are effective treatments for food allergies and most importantly that they are far more effective and safer when started very early, before 2 or even before 1 if possible. Early SLIT and OIT should be prioritized for research.

And early family support. Since my wife can die from a sesame seed, this topic is naturally important in our family. We have read the research we've found and tried to do what we could, but we got no external support for this -- if it hadn't been important to us it wouldn't have happened at all.

It's particularly tricky with sesame exposure. Since we can't have it at home, we have no idea how our children react to it. Relatives did promise to throw hummus parties, but those never happened and now everyone is afraid to be the one who almost killed our child, naturally.

Obviously I don't disagree with you, but trust me, this mountain is far steeper than anyone tends to think. Medical science has absolutely zero clue why my body decided to become allergic to roughly 30 different foods at age 30 after a lifetime of eating whatever I wanted.

The reality is that we are decades away from solving this, if ever. Not to mention the vast majority of science is funneled towards child food allergies, which ironically are the only kind to go away. If the mechanisms involved were similar, I wouldn't have a problem, but it's very possible that child and adult food allergies have completely different causes. People such as myself who develop food allergies as an adult are very simply fucked.

Beyond that, just look at the sickening replies in this very thread. On the whole people view people like me as a nuisance and would rather us die than deal with whatever comparatively minuscule alterations to their lives required to accommodate us. You wouldn't believe the things people have done and said to me to my face. It's one of the more invisible disabilities for sure.

The solution to this is to add a supplemental tax on foods intentionally containing major allergens, that is cumulative per allergen, sufficient to offset the benefit sought by adding it as malicious compliance with labelling and cross-contamination laws.

I don’t think you can do this without basically outlawing, say, pizza (intentionally contains wheat and dairy).

This is textbook unintended consequences of government action.

If there were a market for this then the products would already exist.

By moving beyond an ingredient disclosure to the elimination of all possible sources of contamination the incentives are changed and this is the result. Rather than incurring the cost required by the law businesses found a different solution.

As a result the people the law tried to help are now harmed. The blame here doesn't rest with the businesses but with the lawmakes who drafted this unnecessary nonsense.

Why are we linking to trash like Fox News on HN?

The local fox network affiliates aren't generally strongly connected to the news/misinformation cable channel. It would be like boycotting The Simpsons because of fox news.

Sinclair begs to differ.

What makes sesame such a significant allergen?

Probably some combination of lack of exposure in early age, sterility hypothesis in the west and something in the way the food industry makes highly processed foods.

We discovered our kid's sesame allergy when I fed some hummus on a pita at age 18 months resulting in a serious reaction that almost had me calling 911. It wasn't lack of early exposure.

It's entirely possible that the allergy will go away though. The immune system can shift and change over time in ways that cause it to not overreact to the allergen anymore.

More likely the underlying causes are genetic.

Identical twins have 70% chance to share same allergic diseases vs 40% for non identical twins, and both of which is vastly more common than their prevalence in the general population. Though this also demonstrates environmental factors play a significant role.

That said, the human immune system includes significant randomness so environment may be even less important than generally assumed.

But why would it have apparently increased so much in the relatively recent past if the cause was genetics?

Changing rates of testing combined with false positives are presumably part of it. Apparently 10% of people think they are allergic to Penicillin but only 1% test positive and under 0.1% have a significant reaction.

That said, environment is a factor. People in the developing world test positive for fewer though by no means zero allergies compared to their relatives in the developed world.

There's also changes to breeds and varieties in common use. For example, modern wheat has like 20x the histamine response vs older varieties. These kinds of things will also affect different people differently.

_Has_ sesame allergy increased? Like, it’s _rare_; it’s just extremely nasty (it kills people).

It could be sampling bias or increased availability, but it does seem as if allergies in general are increasing: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/02/747545877/se...

I mean, that’s comparing one figure, which came from who-knows-where, to one new study; it’s not hugely convincing. Especially as at least the new figure is via self-reporting.

One thing I think people forget with this stuff, 50 years ago many people just weren’t exposed. I live in Ireland; when my grandparents were kids everyone in the country could’ve been allergic to sesame and no-one would have noticed; it just wasn’t part of the food culture.

Now, it is. In general, particularly in rural areas, most peoples’ diets were extremely restrictive until pretty recently; in industrialised countries people are exposed to a lot more variety than a couple of generations back.

Definitely the right questions to be asking, and I have no idea of the answers.

How do you compare non identical twins to the general population? Aren’t twins, even non identical likely to share the same diet, the same environmental factors and maybe even the same viruses etc - all could be contributing factors?

Non identical twins are still siblings so they share a lot of DNA while also growing up in similar environments.

The huge difference between identical and non identical twins is suggestive of a very strong genetic component.

And frankly some mix of self diagnosis/anxiety from parents. In my circle, there's a few obsessive mom-types that are so fearful of allergies/vaccines/etc but their kids have never actually been diagnosed by a doctor.

Define significant. Sesame allergies are pretty rare, but, where present, are extremely dangerous. Generally these mandated warnings are based on some combination of prevalence and severity; sesame allergy is rare but use of sesame is common and the allergy is lethal, so it gets a warning.

The one that confuses me is lupin. It’s one of the 14 mandated allergen/intolerance warnings in Europe, but is not at all commonly used.

It's commonly used as an alternate plant in soy fields, for crop cycling purposes. I forget which nutrient it prevents oversaturation of, but there is one.

Lupine fixes nitrogen from air, making it effective as fertilizer.

Depends on the allergen and individual... What makes me feel sore or achy for a day or two might kill someone else.

> requirements are so stringent that many manufacturers, especially bakers, find it simpler and less expensive to add sesame to a product — and to label it — than to try to keep it away from other foods or equipment with sesame.

That's why I always carry explosives when traveling by air: what are the chances that there's two bombs on a plane?

I remember this one from a youth mathematics book. 10⁻⁴ chance of one bomb, and 10⁻⁸ of two (assuming the other one is an independent event — which it would be, as you're certainly not in collusion with any actual bomber).

Potentially catastrophic false assumption made at the end there.

Conditional probability doesn’t work like that.

If you always have a bomb with you, then the probability of you sitting on a plane with a bomb is 1, and thus the probability of you sitting on a plane with another bomb is again 10^-4.

Yes, the post you’re replying to was recounting a joke :)

Indeed. Hmm, but what if I roll a D20 before each flight and take a bomb only if I get a "1"? Do I decrease the average two-bombs probability to 5·10⁻⁶?

Yes. But the conditional probability of the plane having a bomb that’s not yours will still be 10^-4.

Those to examples are not at all comparable. The problem with having to keep completely separate facilities for products made with, and products made without sesame is a real problem. And if the law requires that food that is not labeled to have sesame mustn’t be baked in the same oven as products without, then it seems like the easy choice to deliberately add a bit and label it, rather than having to buy new ovens.

Based on the apparent demand and critical nature of the allergy, somebody needs to invent:

1. Sesame test strip 2. Sesame neutralizer

This article is clearly red meat for right wing anti-regulation types. It is not something interesting to general people in tech.

Note: This is capitalism always finding ways to make money at the expense of public health.

stop labeling anything and let it work itself out.

  requirements are so stringent that many manufacturers, especially bakers, find it simpler and less expensive to add sesame to a product — and to label it — than to try to keep it away from other foods or equipment with sesame.

I don't see how that follows. Surely they can just label it 'might contain traces of sesame' rather than actually adding sesame unnecessarily, and presumably at extra cost, or just add 'traces of sesame' as an ingredient.

"such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination."

From the exact same article (emphasis added):

>If the ingredients DON'T include sesame, companies MUST take steps to prevent the foods from coming in contact with any sesame, known as cross-contamination.

And as far as "may contain", also from the exact same article:

>Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they DO NOT absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.

So the government has created a situation where anything without sesame is apparently vastly more expensive, or impossible, to manufacture now in the facilities they previously were. But the public would never tolerate banning sesame entirely just for some fraction being allergic, so of course it's still allowed as an actual intended ingredient in which case it must merely be labeled.

Obvious result of this is obvious: in attempting to unrealistically force a new level of isolation on previously "best effort" products, and with no compensation, the result is people cease bothering with those now actively punished efforts. Bad unfunded mandate driven by activists without consulting with actual producers from the sound of it.

A better approach might have been to support/reward the construction of new dedicated allergen free production facilities that could be devoted exclusively to those foods. But whatever the approach, it has to take into account actual demand vs costs.

--------

Edit: I didn't do a good enough job in elaborating on the result for parent poster, and plenty in the overall thread seem not to see how this leads to wanting to actively add sesame, so copying my response post from farther down:

Say we consider bakers. Essentially before the law there were 3 classes of bakers wrt sesame: known contaminated (actively using it as an ingredient), regular (not actively using it, but make no promises either way), and medical (actively promise to ensure no contamination as a product feature). This law banned regular bakers, and it did it in such a way that they all become medical bakers by default, because if they don't actively use sesame then they must meet the medical standard. But that's TERRIFYING for a regular baker for good reason. Before if they cooked both sesame goods (lots of delicious ones in high demand) and non-sesame goods (same) they could make reasonable efforts and that's fine. But medical means they now look at blame and liability for some child or adult having a serious reaction or even dying. And meeting that level of liability and standards may simply be impossible in an existing mixed normal facility. There is no funding for this mandate either.

The obvious reaction to do is to switch to the "known contaminated" class instead. For the cost of adding a minuscule untasteable amount of sesame flour to everything, now they effectively return back to being regular bakers again. They can keep all their existing cooking, in their existing (very expensive, potentially impossible to move from) facilities. Like, what did anyone expect would happen here?

> However, such statements are voluntary

That made me wonder, and I looked it up: The situation is exactly the same in Germany, and presumably the EU.

Does anyone know why a) this is not legally required when there's a reasonable chance of contamination and b) why laws are not written in such a way, that "contains traces" is enough if you aren't sure about cross contamination like in TFA's case.

Naively, that seems like it would improve things for everyone?

How long until you end up with Proposition 65-style warnings that products may contain trace amounts of every food product?

Today, if I’m severely allergic, I might assume product X has a trace amount of my allergen. Tomorrow, I might assume the same thing, only now I can read it on a label.

Except what good does that do you if a pinch of "blended allergen" is added to almost everything?

It makes food products continue to be as cheap and available as they currently are for everyone who can tolerate a pinch of blended allergen.

Basically, it does about as much good as the Prop-65 labels do.

(Note that this sub-thread seems to be talking about the "what if we didn't [effectively] make it better for manufacturers to intentionally include the pinch of allergens, but instead just allowed them to label the possibility of trace cross-contamination?")

Which was my point. It adds a small hoop for manufacturers/bakers to jump through and people who have actual allergies are no better off--and arguably marginally worse off--than before.

OK, in that case, we agree 100%.

>Does anyone know why a) this is not legally required when there's a reasonable chance of contamination and b) why laws are not written in such a way, that "contains traces" is enough if you aren't sure about cross contamination like in TFA's case.

>Naively, that seems like it would improve things for everyone?

Again per the theme of this article: beware second (later) order effects. What is "reasonable chance of contamination", precisely? Once you start creating legal liability, all the incentives change. In a voluntary situation people may only write it if they're pretty sure it might be an issue, but if it's required and companies are punished if they get it wrong then the natural reaction is to just slap it on everything. If everything simply defaults to "may contain traces" then the notice is essentially worthless right? And someone with a serious allergy to a common food product should just assume that by default anyway.

Which I think points to the real issue, which is that the approach is arguably all backwards. Certified/promised allergen free food, just like certified/promised kosher or a range of other things, are a specialized subset of food in general. This in some ways is similar to white lists vs black lists on the net in terms of dealing with content. Black lists are more appropriate when it's desired to be accepting by default (commonly when there are no or minimal life/safety factors). But it's expected that some objectionable things will slip through and then have to be reacted to after the fact. It prioritizes preventing false positives over false negatives, and it keeps overhead cost and uncertainty on the production side lower.

When something is life/safety critical though, or similarly important, then instead it's better to do the opposite and white list. That prioritizes preventing false negatives: since everything must be explicitly and individually certified, nothing clearly failing criteria will ever appear. But of course this also means that potentially valuable things may get blocked from appearing, there are higher overhead costs, and producers in some cases may feel its riskier since they can't be sure they'll have a chance at all (which also raises cost).

Both are important tools, but for medical products (and serious allergic reactions are a medical issue) it's probably almost universally better to white list. A purely tech example of an ongoing controversy would be "child safe internet": a lot of the efforts try to blacklist the adult general net into being child safe, which both doesn't work and causes major harm to regular adult discourse and expression. I think it'd be better to have approaches such as ".kids" and ".teens" TLDs or similar where nothing can go on that isn't pre-vetted to some standard. Then parents can restrict to those if they wish. That's a whole different discussion though!

> If everything simply defaults to "may contain traces" then the notice is essentially worthless right?

Not exactly. A business that produces no products containing sesame will not have risk of even trace contamination, so it would have every incentive to not include "may contain sesame" on the label.

> Certified/promised allergen free food, just like certified/promised kosher or a range of other things, are a specialized subset of food in general.

Only some kinds of kosher food are "special." Nobody needs to think about whether a raw carrot is kosher; it can't possibly not be. By its plain and obvious nature, a raw vegetable is fine.

Allergies are weird in that a "plain and obvious" production process would probably be fine. A normal breadstick, made at home, would probably not contain sesame flour and thus would be perfectly safe. However, efficient industrial production results in not-strictly-necessary cross contamination and unexpected allergen exposure.

> When something is life/safety critical though, or similarly important, then instead it's better to do the opposite and white list.

Since allergies can lead to deadly-if-not-treated anaphylactic reactions, isn't this an argument for whitelisted ingredients?

>Not exactly. A business that produces no products containing sesame will not have risk of even trace contamination, so it would have every incentive to not include "may contain sesame" on the label.

But that was already the case, that's the point. If a business produces certified/assured allergy free food, then they can advertise that as an explicit product feature, and those who need it (or those buying on their behalf or with them in mind) can then pick it out vs competitors. That's "white list" in action, by default things aren't medical grade, and consumers can be confident in those that claim they are.

>Allergies are weird in that a "plain and obvious" production process would probably be fine. A normal breadstick, made at home, would probably not contain sesame flour and thus would be perfectly safe. However, efficient industrial production results in not-strictly-necessary cross contamination and unexpected allergen exposure.

My understanding from family with serious allergies is that this definitely isn't true. Real effort needs to be made avoiding cross contamination in a home kitchen too, and indeed cross contamination at home is more, not less likely because most people are much more casual and have less space and equipment. Unless it's an allergy sufferers home (or their family) and there simply aren't any allergy ingredients there at all. But that merely makes the home a "dedicated facility" in essence too.

>Since allergies can lead to deadly-if-not-treated anaphylactic reactions, isn't this an argument for whitelisted ingredients?

No? Banning sesame (or peanuts, or dairy, or a vast array of other potential allergens) in general is unacceptable to an overwhelming supermajority of the population. It's not a reasonable accommodation, and in a democracy it's not happening. Whitelisting products is the solution. Ensure that anything labeled as allergen free is, and then that anyone with the need can get access to it.

I assume the thinking is along the lines of "contains traces" or "may contain traces" of long list of allergens would get treated the same way California's carcinogens signage does, i.e. it would be absolutely meaningless. But instead manufacturers actually are adding trace amounts of allergens so if they put those ingredients on the label, it's actually true.

Article mentions this “violates the spirit of the law”. If anything, this is exactly the spirit of the law, as written.

Do legislators run simulations on possible downstream effects of laws or…? My impression is that occurrences like this one are not uncommon.

How can they? There is no way to know what a certain knob will do N-levels down the line. They're essentially "playing" against the collective brain and will power of millions of smart and motivated individuals, and all the money behind the huge corporations that play in that space, so how can they. It's impossible and a losing battle.

Look at incentives you have created in the impacted industries, and think about what the new optimal strategy is from a cost/profit perspective. That is what behavior will converge to, and is a central concern for any good policy maker.

> spirit of the law

> as written.

I'm not sure you understand what the "spirit of a law" means. It has very little to do with the written wording.

In tabletop RPG circles, there's a very clear distinction between "rules as written" and "rules as intended" (because basically zero tabletop RPGs of nontrivial size can avoid having some rules that fail to properly convey their intent in their plain wording).

It's clear that, by this law "as intended"—ie, the spirit of the law—foods that didn't already contain sesame would be carefully separated from chances of sesame contamination.

You are, however, absolutely correct that "as written", it strongly encourages the behavior being seen.

I’m not sure that follows. “This law makes ‘no sesame’ products a lot more expensive. We are <shocked pikachu.png> that producers stopped making as many ‘no sesame’ products in response to reduced consumer demand for those now more expensive products.”

The spirit of the law could be deduced as “if your product claims to contain no sesame, this law ensures that is true, even in trace amounts”. That spirit is being upheld.

No, the intent of the law was to make it easier for people (and parents of people) with sesame allergies to find and select foods to eat. By incentivizing manufacturers to add sesame to everything, the unintended consequence is to make their lives much harder.

That's your belief. An equally valid alternate belief is that it was a food safety law, intended to ensure that no products were sold which contained trace amounts of sesame without being disclosed on the label. This is why we rely on the contents of laws rather than our beliefs/feelings about what the contents should have been.

No one can be compelled against their will to manufacture a product containing no sesame, even if they were probably doing so before this law was passed.

> This is why we rely on the contents of laws rather than our beliefs/feelings about what the contents should have been.

This is called "the letter of the law", and in practice courts do not rely on it.

In this specific case, do you believe that any of these companies have violated the law in any fashion which is actionable? (whether you call it spirit, text, belief, letter, feelings, or ouija) They appear to be complying with the law in a quite straightforward manner.

Do you believe that advocates of the law would have ceased to advocate for it in the counterfactual case that there was no effect on expense? If you don't believe that, then you cannot believe that the spirit of the law was to make "no sesame" products more expensive.

I made no claims as to "[making] 'no sesame' products more expensive" being the spirit of the law. I claimed that the spirit could be the most straightforward reading of the law: “if your product claims to contain no sesame, this law ensures that is true, even in trace amounts”.

> A better approach might have been to support/reward the construction of new dedicated allergen free production facilities that could be devoted exclusively to those foods.

I'm thinking there is no realistic level of subsidy which could make it rational for Bob's Bakery (with 1, maybe 2 or 3 modest retail locations) to build a separate no-Sesame production facility. And a separate no-Peanut production facility. And a separate... And how could Bob afford the extra staffing, property taxes, utilities, etc. for all those?

The article notes that Kellogg's, a company with annual revenue >$10 billion, found it easier to add peanut flour to some products. Vs. dealing, even at their scale, with the whole "separate facilities..." thing.

>I'm thinking there is no realistic level of subsidy which could make it rational for Bob's Bakery (with 1, maybe 2 or 3 modest retail locations) to build a separate no-Sesame production facility. And a separate no-Peanut production facility. And a separate... And how could Bob afford the extra staffing, property taxes, utilities, etc. for all those?

Sure? If the standard is "0.5% of the population gets perfect medical grade alternatives to literally everything including purely local tiny producers of a common food item" then no that's not going to happen. But if the problem is merely having at least 1-2 national brands on the major super market shelves so that everybody always can buy something safe and nutritious (if not the most exciting), well that strikes me as doable. After all, it's not as if these products had sesame in them anyway, and they are plenty popular with everyone. Some of them are in large enough national volume to justify their own production facilities at the national level. It's "just" a capital expenditure hump and coordination problem for those, which is precisely something the government can help with. Both with the capex side, and with things like taxes of course (which you brought up). I think this is actually easier then some, this isn't like a medicine where only those who need it will consume it, it's making something mass consumed already.

So maybe the real first step that should have been done would have been to actually get all stakeholders together and get a consensus on what the real final realistic goal is here, then craft law to help realize that in a deliberate manner.

> So maybe the real first step that should have been done would have been to actually get all stakeholders together and get a consensus on what the real final realistic goal is here, then craft law to help realize that...

Yes, I agree. But - sadly, I have serious doubts about American government and business being capable of such intelligent cooperation these days. At least in any situation short of "Asteroid Dino-Doom v2.0 is gonna hit Kansas".

Why does bobs bakery need 2-3 retail locations with 2 seperate baking facilities each for a community to have access to a seasame and non-seasame options

We already have a working model for gluten free bakeries where they are independently owned and operated entirely gluten free to prevent the situation you describe where a small Baker needs multiple facilities.

Why are you strawmanning a future that's wholly unkind to the point you're responding rather than drawing parallels from reality?

Ps. With Kellogg's, obviously it's cheaper to add peanut flour. People with allergies already aren't purchasing the products, so it costs them nothing to prevent fines, I don't really see the relevance of this, other than to say Kellogg's doesn't think the demand exists for peanut-free Kellogg's products that already may contain peanuts.

Great. This law opens the doors for an entirely sesame-free baker to open up and compete now that most other bakers are adding sesame to their products. Do you expect that to be the outcome?

From the exact same comment, emphasized, add 'traces of sesame' as an ingredient.

But then, there has to be some sesame. Otherwise the ingredients list is not truthful, which comes with its own set of penalties and headaches.

So get a box of sesame flour and have a gloved worker dip a finger into it and wipe the rim of the mixing vat every shift. Product now contains a trace of sesame.

>From the exact same comment, emphasized, add 'traces of sesame' as an ingredient.

I'm not sure what you're confused about here? Say we consider bakers. Essentially before the law there were 3 classes of bakers wrt sesame: known contaminated (actively using it as an ingredient), regular (not actively using it, but make no promises either way), and medical (actively promise to ensure no contamination as a product feature). This law banned regular bakers, and it did it in such a way that they all become medical bakers by default, because if they don't actively use sesame then they must meet the medical standard. But that's TERRIFYING for a regular baker for good reason. Before if they cooked both sesame goods (lots of delicious ones in high demand) and non-sesame goods (same) they could make reasonable efforts and that's fine. But medical means they now look at blame and liability for some child or adult having a serious reaction or even dying. And meeting that level of liability and standards may simply be impossible in an existing mixed normal facility. There is no funding for this mandate either.

The obvious reaction to do is to switch to the "known contaminated" class instead. For the cost of adding a minuscule untasteable amount of sesame flour to everything, now they effectively return back to being regular bakers again. They can keep all their existing cooking, in their existing (very expensive, potentially impossible to move from) facilities. Like, what did anyone expect would happen here?

Edit to the reply, since I'm getting rate limited:

jacknews: "My point is they could simply add 'traces of sesame' to the ingredient list without actually delberately adding sesame."

You're arguing for producers to commit arguable fraud then, and add an ingredient to the list that isn't actually an ingredient and may not be there for the explicit purpose of bypassing a new legal requirement. There is no "simply" about that one. Maybe they'd win the resulting lawsuit, or maybe it'd bankrupt them. Or maybe it would bankrupt them even if they did win, as such things in America often do. And for what benefit?

This entire subject is about second order effects. Please spend a bit of time doing some game theory on any "simple" fixes you wish to propose, and consider why those "simple" fixes aren't what producers did.

My point is they could simply add 'traces of sesame' to the ingredient list without actually delberately adding sesame.

> Bad unfunded mandate driven by activists without consulting with actual producers from the sound of it.

This is because if they had changed these rules after being alerted to these absurd side effects by producers, the story would be "FDA tried to pass regulations to protect consumers but scrapped them/ watered them down after aggressive lobbying by Big Sesame".

As I understand it, because the new law made it more either/or: those trace warnings aren't satisfactory, and they can't misrepresent what is in the product. So they have to be sure sesame is in it if they're liable for saying it's not without a newly cost prohibitive means of assuring that.

This makes no sense. I can understand adding sesame to the label, but not actually adding more sesame to the products.

I think this reporter is confused.

No. The article is very clear why: if the products don't contain sesame, they are required to prevent cross contamination, which they can't do.

They can't simply label them as "may contain sesame", as it doesn't absolve them of needing to prevent cross contamination.

Their only reasonable choice is to just add sesame.

The other reasonable choice is to not produce non-seasame items in ways that can potentially cross-cobtaminate with sesame items, or vice versa.

If a bakery is jumping through hoops just to make a batch of sesame buns daily, I think there's some misdirected effort.

That’s insane.

You mayn’t claim that the thing contains sesame unless it does. The only option is to really add the real seed, and proclaim it.

Corporations are evil. Do worse for the consumer to cover their own butts.

Government forcing random small-time businesses to handle extreme edge cases is pretty evil to me.

If they added an impact clause of, say, greater than 10,000 individuals affected, could you think of any ways around that?

My initial feeling is that it could protect small and local businesses and possibly encourage investments from large nationals who would find it less expensive to pay others to produce certain products.

If the labeling is not consistent, it's not useful

'Sesame is the ninth most common food allergy among children and adults in the U.S. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), sesame allergy is considered common among children who already have other food allergies. According to research reported by NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a study found that approximately 17 percent of children with food allergies also are allergic to sesame.'

I'm not sure whether 17% of child food allergies counts as an edge case? Food allergies are serious stuff.

They are, but that's a potentially misleading statistic, on two counts:

First, it doesn't give any indication of the percentage of children with food allergies. Is it also about 20% (which would mean sesame allergies affect approximately 4% of children)? Or is it more like 4% (which would mean sesame allergies affect approximately 0.8% of children)?

Second, it doesn't say anything about the severity of the allergy. My brother-in-law has a severe, anaphylactic allergy to peanuts. Traces of peanut in anything he eats could kill him. On the other hand, I have a close friend with an allergy to tree nuts...that makes his throat kinda itchy for a while if he eats too many.

Yes, we need to be mindful of food allergies, and properly label foods for them. But that doesn't mean we should be using incomplete or misleading statistics to inform our decisions about how prevalent serious problems with certain foods could be.

For actual numbers, I found this.

> Using survey responses from 78 851 individuals, an estimated 0.49% (95% CI, 0.40%-0.58%) of the US population reported a current sesame allergy, whereas 0.23% (95% CI, 0.19%-0.28%) met symptom-report criteria for convincing IgE-mediated allergy. An additional 0.11% (95% CI, 0.08%-0.16%) had a sesame allergy reported as physician diagnosed but did not report reactions fulfilling survey-specified convincing reaction symptoms. Among individuals with convincing IgE-mediated sesame allergy, an estimated 23.6% (95% CI, 16.9%-32.0%) to 37.2% (95% CI, 29.2%-45.9%) had previously experienced a severe sesame-allergic reaction, depending on the definition used, and 81.6% (95% CI, 71.0%-88.9%) of patients with convincing sesame allergy had at least 1 additional convincing food allergy. Roughly one-third of patients with convincing sesame allergy (33.7%; 95% CI, 26.3%-42.0%) reported previous epinephrine use for sesame allergy treatment.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

FYI for your tree nut friend, itchy throat is often a sign of "oral allergy syndrome" (could be useful for him if he hasn't already seen an allergist)

The edge case here isn't just "anyone with the allergy" but "people with the allergy so severe that a trace amount will cause danger to them"

Eludes me why anyone ever gives a shit about small businesses. The crucial difference is that some local family owns the shares, rather than a bunch of people? And this is what we have to protect, at the cost of not being able to implement rules in our economy? If that’s the case, they’re holding back progress and it’s good when one goes under.

> Eludes me why anyone ever gives a shit about small businesses.

Because today's small businesses can become tomorrow's large businesses. Each new rule is a barrier to entry. Here, for example, zero-contamination rules for sesame would make it impossible for a small business to make both sesame-containing and sesame-free products unless they can afford an entirely separate production line or long deep-cleaning periods between runs. Large business, large enough to have simultaneous production lines, can rearrange production more easily to avoid disruption.

With a large-enough regulatory fortress, incumbent businesses protect themselves from competition, losing that very "progress" that you champion.

There's more than one way to progress! Reducing start-up capital requirements by tearing down regulations is one, sure. Other ideas:

- Govt subsidizes new businesses with capital/staff/what-have-you so they can comply

  - ...and to steal a libertarian arg against welfare: charitably-minded private citizens could do the same :)

- Expand social safety net so private businesses don't have to provide the same for their employees, freeing up capital for compliance

- We can just deal with a higher threshold starting businesses... like honestly what _is_ the proper threshold here? Are we even optimal now? Lots fail and ruin peoples lives, when honestly maybe it's better for those same people to go work at a successful business as a manager.

> Each new rule is a barrier to entry.

To explain barriers to entry, consider that right now you can choose between an iOS phone and an Android phone and nothing else. Try to imagine how much it would cost to write a 3rd OS and kickstart a useful app store (you'd have to bribe devs to port their stuff, and not even that worked for Microsoft).

That is an extreme barrier to entry.

If you're not careful, you'll end up with one or two options for everything.

Around half of all workers work for small businesses.

are workers for large businesses even people?

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