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.
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 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'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.
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".)
...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.
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.
>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.
“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.
There is a big difference. Sometimes trace cross-contamination occurs, just how it goes.
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)
Maybe helminths shouldn't be called parasites then, since they somehow bring benefits to us? Like, there's some degree of mutualism
This kind of content is not acceptable on HN.
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.
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)
Percentage of kods who are left handed has increased after we stopped beating them at school into being right handed.
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)
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.
Many parents I know have it much worse than us, including a couple whose kid is facing 20 years in jail.
Merry Christmas!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
In other words - control, control, control.
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.
New labeling law doesn't fix anything here.
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.