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Comment by bestcoder69 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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(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...

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.

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