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Comment by chomp | Hacker News Reader

> potentially over-reaching laws

I was with you until you mentioned over-reaching. Problem is, there's a small segment of the population that will literally die from sesame. 0.3% total sesame allergies, maybe less will get death as the side effect. It's perfectly reasonable to require companies to omit sesame from products that don't have it labeled, and forbid cross contamination. It's also reasonable for companies to consider including it and labeling it for ease of operations. I worked in the food industry and dealing food cross-contamination is really hard. There is no one-size-fits-all for public health on a scale as large as the US.

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We started with a regime where “free from sesame” products existed, sesame products are allowed, and other products are allowed that may contain trace amounts of sesame.

We are now in a regime where the same “free from sesame” products exist, and all other products must contain sesame.

It’s not clear that this has increased or will increase the number of products free from sesame. It is clear that it has increased the number of products with sesame and the amount of sesame. It sounds like we would prefer a regime where fewer products have sesame.

Assign whatever merit or import you want to the issue of sesame in food, but it is not at all clear that this new regime is actually better for anyone.

A young relative has a sesame allergy with a pretty bad reaction. Trip to the ER type deal. We were super pumped that the new labeling standards were coming out - way easier than reading all of the ingredients. Woohoo, right?!

Now there is exactly one brand of bread at the store without sesame. Kings Hawaiian, if you're curious. Every. Other. Brand. now includes sesame.

It's like that with so many things now. Hot dog buns. Cereal. Super frustrating if the store is out of the one brand without sesame. Guess nobody makes sammiches this week.

I totally get the companies trying to find the cheapest way to comply. But for people trying to feed allergic folks it really sucks. Hopefully enough people buy the sesame-free products to make it worth the effort for the companies actually doing the work on this one.

> bread ... hot dog buns ... cereal

Without regard to this particular policy, those are all foods that your young relative is better off avoiding along with sesame seeds. I have been forced to avoid them for many years now due to different health issues, and it turned out to be a blessing that was hard to appreciate at the beginning.

This is such a vague comment to be useless for GP.

Do you have some issue with carbs? High calorie foods? Something against processed foods? Gluten? Plastic sensitivity? Why was it a blessing? What made you start appreciating it? etc. etc.

Diabetes 2, morbid obesity, gastroparesis, i.e. usual effects of Metabolic Syndrome. These have become shockingly common in children in recent years. Several years ago the gastroparesis got very bad and I was forced onto a low residue, low carb diet. The result was a 90% resolution of the gastroparesis, a 75% resolution of the obesity and complete remission of the diabetes. And a much higher quality of life.

I wish I had started younger, but nothing short of that kind of compulsion would have made me. Few kids need to go to such extremes, but most would benefit from the absence of flours.

I'd bame the massive amounts of HFCS that every food is pumped in the US instead of "flours" first

Now that I think of it I wonder how much of 'gluten issues' is actually due to all those foods having excess sugar added to it

It's really a peculiar take to blame "flours" for all these modern childhood ailments, given that the poor largely subsisted on flour-based products (bread, pasta, etc.) for centuries prior to modern times.

https://chriskresser.com/10-ways-refined-flour-can-damage-yo...

IMO flours have been damaging people in many of these ways for centuries. Since the agricultural revolution. That damage came along with a nice perk -- not starving. But if now we're affluent enough to not starve without it, that's a good thing.

I know that it sucks this would be necessary, but I recommend taking up the habit of baking your own bread. It's really very easy and takes very little active time (the time it takes consists of just waiting, not doing stuff).

And even a substandard load of homemade bread is much nicer and tastier than store-bought.

I disagree. I have been making homemade bread almost weekly for over 10 years now and making good homemade bread is not easy and the cleanup alone adds a ton of active time that needs to be addressed quickly lest you end up with cement-like dough crusted on things.

It is perfectly reasonable for someone to say, "this is too much work, I need store bought bread."

I wasn't talking about good homemade bread. I was talking about decent homemade bread -- which is still better than store-bought. Yes, if you want to rise (no pun intended) to the level of truly good bread, that's more involved. Or truly great bread -- my best bread is a process that takes two days and a fair amount of active work.

I disagree about cleanup being a big deal, though. You do have to do it immediately, but there's not a lot of it to be done. When I make bread, I need to clean a bowl, the bread pan (or dutch oven, if I'm making sourdough), the large cutting board I work the dough on, and a couple of utensils. That's not a big deal.

> It is perfectly reasonable for someone to say, "this is too much work, I need store bought bread."

Indeed it is! But I was giving a possible alternative to someone who struggles to find store-bought bread they can safely eat. I was not saying "everyone must make their own bread".

(I'm also a long-time home baker. I've been making my own bread for 30 years now).

The fact that all these people in the article were happily eating hamburger buns in the past suggests that the cleaning methods in place were practically adequate. But the law imposes asymmetric penalties, and nobody getting sick isn't a liability shield from somebody who sticks a bun in a mass spectrometer with the intention of suing you for finding 1 ppb sesame.

Conjecture: myths about the prevalence of unreasonable civil actions have done more societal damage than will ever be subverted by people who revel in casting aspersions about the threat they pose.

https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/food-fight-do-la...

Weird thing to cite. Even as the article itself tries to cast these lawsuits in a particular light to lead you to thinking that they're absurd, most of them don't seem unreasonable. They're great, even.

I'm supposed to feel bad for A&W because they put an "aged vanilla" label on their cream soda even though it contains none? Companies that engage in the "whole grain" nonsense? Packaging straight out of /r/AssholeDesign? Fuck 'em.

The guy's doing good work as far as I'm concerned.

And now the recalcitrant food companies have finally learned their lesson and will make sure that every product that may contain sesame does contain sesame. The system works.

Yes, potentially over-reaching, because it's debatable whether it's overreaching or not.

And the manufacturers doing this, is a prime example of the law of unintended consequences. Where trying to solve a problem through legislation makes it worse in the end.

There do appear to be unintended consequences, but it's not clear whether things are "worse" now than before. It's worse if you have a sesame allergy and want to be able to eat as many products as before. Now there are fewer products that are safe for you to eat.

At the same time, it is now easier for you to tell what products are unsafe for you to eat. Before, you could only tell if there were sesame seeds on the outside, or if they were listed in the ingredients. But sometimes a food item (in a restaurant, for example) might have sesame seeds on the inside, or ground up in a sauce, and you'd never know it was there. I once ordered a vegetarian dish at a Singaporean restaurant and was surprised to find that it had a sauce with ground up shrimp in it. I'm not vegetarian, but I don't like seafood and didn't expect to find any in a vegetarian dish.

> There do appear to be unintended consequences, but it's not clear whether things are "worse" now than before. It's worse if you have a sesame allergy and want to be able to eat as many products as before. Now there are fewer products that are safe for you to eat.

I'm allergic to milk, but I can survive a trace amount if it ends up in something. The trial and error isn't fun, but I can eat the majority of things that "may contain milk".

Having 90% of my relatively safe food options become toxic and dangerous overnight isn't a good trade off for "at least I know it's safe".

All that would be necessary is for a "may contain" label. If that's there, people who are severely allergic can avoid those products.

"Law of unintended consequences", more like "being a spiteful a-hole is (slightly) cheaper"

I can understand a fast food place, where sesame products are in circulation doing that, you'd get a non trivial amount of sesame even on the air around those places.

But a lot of places seem to do it just out of spite. Seems to be part of the 'American Dream' like kids selling cookies to pay for medical treatments or something.

"And industry giant McDonald’s said it will not add sesame to foods that did not previously contain it. America’s largest restaurant chain has worked with its suppliers to follow the new law’s cleaning protocols and does not plan to add sesame flour to any buns, a McDonald’s spokesman said. "

Well looks like some companies did manage to do the right thing

The problem with this law isn't that it's overreaching. The problem is that it sucks at doing what it is designed to do.

> Under federal labeling rules, they can’t state that their products contain sesame unless the items actually contain it — so they’re adding sesame and labeling it.

I believe the overreach they are referring to is: the law prevents companies from labeling a product as a possible sesame allergen when it may have trace amounts of seed.

> There is no one-size-fits-all for public health on a scale as large as the US.

Personal responsibility? If somebody has a rare and possibly fatal condition, you'd expect they'd consider cross contamination and be very careful what they ate. This story shows that relying on labeling is a flawed approach in any event.

> If somebody has a rare and possibly fatal condition, you'd expect they'd consider cross contamination and be very careful what they ate.

They are.

But without accurate labelling, what can they do?

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