FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
npr.org
npr.org
From the linked article (from Jan 2023):
But sesame does differ in one distinct way from eggs, peanuts, shellfish, milk, and soy: The seeds are teeny tiny and hard to keep track of. This means they’re prone to “cross-contamination,” in food-allergy terms. If you operate a bakery that makes sesame bagels, the odds are decent that rogue seeds will end up in your other products, too. Bad news for people with severe sesame allergies. But it’s also expensive and frustrating for food manufacturers to ensure the seeds are kept away from other foods, if they’re on the FDA’s major allergens list.
Advocates have therefore been warning since December that the FASTER Act is poised to have a counter effect. Rather than minimize cross-contamination, as they argue the law requires, many big food brands have opted to add sesame to their bread products, then simply declare it as an ingredient. They are intentionally adding sesame flour to “avoid complying with the spirit and intent of the FASTER Act,” FARE tells Fast Company. That is cheaper than certifying that their facilities are 100% sesame-free.There will undoubtedly be a focus on ‘whether you can be 100% sure there was no sesame dust in the air’. Without a perfect vacuum clean room (that doesn’t really exist) you can’t be. As in even if you’re really fucking clean your probably losing the case in the American legal system.
Fuck it my bread is made with a sprinkle of sesame flour and is known to contain potential carcinogens identified by the state of California.
If my child ingests sesame, they go into anaphylactic shock and without an epipen administered in minutes they will die.
There are definitely questions of how to best inform consumers that have severe food allergies. But I’ve been really underwhelmed with the dialog here on this.
It would be lovely if HN could keep in mind that for some people, sesame is a life-threatening ingredient. And those people would also like to safely buy bread.
Please excuse my skepticism, I am asking this out of a genuine desire to become better informed: how can you possibly know this? Unless you happened to have an epi-pen handy the first time your kid ever ate a sesame seed, which seems unlikely, then if this were true would not your kid have died then and there?
Subsequently, immunology department, skin prick tests to identify the specific culprit, “risk of anaphylaxis” posters, and an Epipen - with risk factor based on the size of the reaction, in millimeters, to the skin prick test.
The idea that coming into contact with a seed could kill you seems insane and terrible. Yet where are all the people dying of this? Is the implication that our prevention is so good we are somehow avoiding it? I'm also skeptical.
I'm not denying that it exists, but common knowledge (you literally can't eat peanut butter at school) indicates it's so common. How could this be?
The solution is to stock epipens everywhere.
Based on this metastudy titled Epidemiology of anaphylaxis in Europe, they found the prognosis was:
> Case fatality rates were noted in three studies at 0.000002%, 0.00009%, and 0.0001%.
That's among all cases of anaphylaxis, so the answer is "they are almost nonexistent". It's not even a rounding error. Something on the order of a few dozen people per year for a country the size of the UK and from what I can tell, most of those are due to administration of IV medication where the allergy was previously unknown and much more severe.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/all.12272
It's just game theory. It's like asking how many metaphorical empty barrels do you want to add to your Russian roulette revolver before you are willing to risk it, the reward being basically "ordinary food". Oh and the risk can suddenly one day go from just causing hives to severe anaphylaxis at a much smaller dose.
Most people who learn of a sensitivity (I learned in elementary school after breaking out in hives from doing art involving peanut shells, the horror to think this is something schools just did!) just don't want to know that badly how dire their allergy is and assume it's life threatening, because it's not worth it to be cavalier.
[0]https://readysetfood.com/products/stage-1-2-bottle-mix-in
Here's the thing: if there really are kids out there who will drop dead within minutes of eating a sesame seed, surely some of them will discover this the hard way, i.e. by accidentally consuming a sesame seed and dying. But not once have I ever heard a news report about a kid dying this way, and I can't find any data on how many people die this way. I also can't imagine any reliable way that one could possibly learn that your allergy is so severe that a sesame seed will kill you without having at least some people actually die.
All this leads me to suspect that the belief that sesame seeds are potentially deadly in small doses might not be solidly grounded in facts.
The thing is regardless of the trigger anaphylaxis is anaphylaxis. The severity differs, the mechanism is the same. We can see the distribution of reactions and estimate the number that will be lethal even if we have no examples.
(And I rather suspect that a fair number of the lethal cases don't get diagnosed. I don't believe autopsy will reveal what set it off unless the contaminant is obvious.)
There are plenty of anecdotes of close calls. EMTs carry epipens for this reason. And occasionally it’s tragic when one is not administered in time.
But ingestion is not the only way to learn that you have a severe allergy. Skin contact with the allergen with usually result in bad hives. When this happens with a child, it’s scary and tends to result in an appointment with an allergist, who can assess the severity with skin tests and blood draws.
I had an epipen on-hand when my child ate hummus the second time, and started going into anaphylactic shock. They had had a bad hive reaction to spilled milk, so we had already seen the allergist for milk allergies, which were severe enough to warrant an epipen.
It was a terrifying event, and I am very thankful that we had the epipen and that my child did not have a second wave reaction.
Still it leaves me wondering where is the data on the kids who have this happen to them whose parents don't happen to have an epi-pen on hand. You'd think there would be some deaths, and you'd think someone would be keeping track of them, but I can't find the numbers on this anywhere. Seems weird.
I guess what I’m asking is, was the previous situation (label indicating the mere possibility of cross-contamination) enough of a risk that you avoided those foods, before this labeling shift?
And has the availability changed post-regulation as far as brands or bakeries that lean in to being conscientious about this risk?
On the one hand, sesame is clearly listed on major brands so we can buy bread with more confidence. Before, there was always some hesitation when shopping with unknown brands. Even known brands can change formulations, which could make shopping feel very uncomfortable.
On the other hand, some brands have started intentionally adding sesame. That sucks. But it may also indicate that a real cross contamination risk has always existed.
It’s important to note that not all brands add sesame, and that not all store brands add sesame. So it hasn’t meaningfully reduced our choices. And I do hope that brands intentionally adding sesame will reconsider at some point.
I think it’s fair for the regulator to be hard on lying on food labels. That seems like a rather low bar for a functional modern society. As consumers, we can also ask companies to provide additional services. There’s nothing irresponsible or entitled in politely asking for accommodation from providers or empathy from peers.
And unless there’s an edit that I’m missing, the person you’re responding to explicitly expressed a desire rather than tried to claim a right.
These labels shift the responsibility. And that is a responsibility that the companies making bread just are not willing to take.
You think that somehow this will make sesame-free bread. Nope, that's too expensive. They responded to the FDA's garbage by throwing a pinch of sesame in. Apparently some manufacturers didn't manage to throw enough in, or perhaps the detect threshold isn't sensitive enough. Throw that pinch of sesame into enough bread and it might not be detected even though it's there.
If there was an adequate market for sesame-free bread you would already see it. Nothing is stopping a manufacturer from opening a sesame-free bread factory--that is, nothing but a lack of demand.
So, in my eyes, it's not a farce of a rule at all.
> If there was an adequate market for sesame-free bread you would already see it. Nothing is stopping a manufacturer from opening a sesame-free bread factory--that is, nothing but a lack of demand.
Dude, chill. You must not read labels looking for sesame when you buy bread.
There are manufacturers that make sesame-free bread. I buy it regularly from normal supermarkets in the normal bread section.
You got slightly clearer labels, a lot of people went from being able to eat it to not being able to eat it.
I will admit that I do not look at bread labels--all bread falls into the unpleasant reaction category for me.
This seems a stretch. If the person is eating food labeled as containing an allergen, do we really care whether it is product A or B that produces the bad outcome?
The trend for most companies is just to put "may contain traces... " or "manufactured in a facility that also processes... " which will prevent me from buying from those manufacturers.
They have judged that as a market segment, the revenue they can get from selling guaranteed sesame free products is less than the cost of producing it. Other manufacturers may decide it's worth it if they price their bread higher, and then the issue becomes whether you are prepared to pay the price they are asking to cover the increase costs.
Remember at the end of the day, what you eat is a choice. There's no reason why you have to eat bread, but even if you choose to eat it, making the choice to buy more expensive hand-made bread rather than the ultra-processed mass-produced stuff is usually much better for your body in ways other than just not containing sesame.
Yes, all of this equipment is also designed to be cleaned and sanitized, but these are large surface areas covering large distances. And we’re talking about one little sesame seed which can’t be easily detected if it somehow makes its way into a product, unlike, say, the metal detectors all finished goods pass through to ensure no metal object found its way into something.
Spending time in facilities like Bimbo operates will disavow someone of the idea that the work a company like that does is akin to what happens in restaurants or catering facilities. These are factories where product assembly happens to involve edible parts.
And looking at the picture of the """bread""" at the start of the article, it shows.
That's not bread, that's an industrial product.
(and as far as I know, many studies imply that is healthier, than heavily processed food, filled with conservatives, additives and whatever)
Those raw ingredients are also "industrial products". Did you think that bag of flour you bought was hand-milled by someone after they hand-picked the wheat? It came from a factory, just like most store-bought bread.
You might be confusing "Stone Ground" flour which is ground using a machine [0]
It is impossible to avoid industrial food processing unless you grow it yourself.
Probably the key thing for me is how much of the process in both videos is just exposed to normal air. If sesame is as deadly as some people in this thread are making out and a few grains of sesame dust could kill you, then absolutely the current warning labels seem justified if any loaves are made in a factory that has sesame anywhere. Perhaps there's some in the air, perhaps a worker has some dust on their clothes (which could even affect them travelling to a different factory or even location). What next? Should we demand completely sterile factories and for all the workers to wear full hazmat suits?
It does seem simpler to just allow the labeling to continue with the warning about the possibility, and people with allergies can choose to not eat bread at all, or find a baker who can offer a guaranteed sesame free product. It'll probably cost more to make that guarantee (less demand, limited product range, etc), but if people with allergies want bread so badly that it's worth paying the extra, there will be a sustainable business opportunity. Maybe only artisanal bakers will bother, maybe only those owned by people with the allergies themselves, but if there's an overlap between how much it costs to make that guarantee and how much someone is prepared to pay, somebody will make that business. But if you have an allergy, and you're not prepared to pay for what it costs to protect yourself, why you should expect everyone else to subsidise that?
I say this as someone with allergies myself. I have developed allergies to some common fruits (weirdly, ones I used to love and have eaten for most of my life) that have given me reactions ranging from itchiness to fairly severe throat swellings. I deal with that by not eating those fruits or things containing them. There's plenty of other food in the world that I can have instead.
Essentially, the sesame law made it mandatory to label for sesame like you would for Dairy, Peanuts, and Soy.
It was a blatant lobbyist attempt that backfired.
[0] - https://www.foodallergy.org/resources/how-fare-advocates-hel...
How hard would it be to just have a set of sesam free plumbing for specific products? I mean they also manage to keep a separate sewage line, right??
A brewery that produces several types of beer would have separate fermentation tanks for each one - but might only have one bottling/canning line.
I wouldn't be surprised if bread manufacturing was similar - you might produce 8 different types of bread, but only have one bagging machine.
Of course the entire plant would be deep-cleaned once per day. But you'd be switching between products 8 times per day, so there's not time for an hour-long cleaning every time.
But isn’t that what we read about regarding athletes being acused of cheating because of cross contamination in pharmaceutical manufacturing?
“Generic Pharmaceuticals as a Source of Diuretic Contamination in Athletes Subject to Sport Drug Testing”
The reason they aren’t doing it is cost, not practicality.
In the specific case of gluten-free vs normal flour, you might have a clean, safe kitchen but flour flies everywhere and it doesn't take much. The solution for a gluten-free kitchen is to only use gluten free products. I know of a restaurant that offers both gluten free and plain pizza crust and people who need to should know what that means: they try but it's not.
It's also not realistic as to "safely eating off surfaces". That's the goal and that's what test kits test for - but that's the point: the test kits are there because it's hard to achieve (and excess will result in contamination from cleaning products.)
What proportion of these labels are false positives?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide
in some foods.
Most everything high on the periodic table is nasty. The few that we willingly associate with are because they are non-reactive enough to not actually pose a threat even if in theory they're harmful. (Consider the use of barium to image the digestive system. They use a form of it that's sufficiently insoluble that you don't get poisoned.)
But there is a huge potentially downside for under-labeling e.g. people dying. There is an ethic issue here as well even if we ignore money.
Also, the production pipeline is not 100% perfect. They produce millions of items each year. Even with 0.001% defect / cross-contamination, it could be troublesome.
More importantly, the exec who decides to under-label might end up in jail if people die from their decision.
Basic game theory really. If I'm an exec who is paid millions of dollars a year, I wouldn't risk it. Big deal if I earn a little less.
Unless FDA tips the scale and provides some guarantees, this warning means nothing. If FDA really wants to punish for over-labeling, I'd start adding a really small allergen, so the warning becomes accurate lol.
Those for whom X is fine/those for whom X is undesirable/those for whom X is deadly.
We used to have three categories:
contains/may contain/doesn't contain.
Draw this as a 3x3 matrix.
Those for whom X is fine don't care, they can eat any row.
Those for whom X is undesirable generally do not care about cross contamination. The risk * loss is low enough not to be important.
Those for whom X is deadly will not eat from the may contain category.
The FDA appears to have declared war on the may contain category. Who wins? Nobody. Who loses? Those for whom X is undesirable who are now no longer able to know that the item is probably fine.
I think they are operating under the fantasy that removing may contains means companies will ensure it isn't there, but that's an expensive endeavor that the marketplace simply doesn't call for.
I’ve definitely seen prop 65 on things that made me pause because nothing about the object (like a food bowl) should give me cancer and often I won’t buy it.
And that the label was probably correct.
I think that p65 warnings are only slightly better than random in terms of identifying risky objects. I would guess they are only applied half the time if the item contains a known chemical, and half the time it contains a chemical, it has no label.
Also, the threshold is so poor, you have no idea if an item is actually dangerous even if it is correctly used.
Last, it is pretty unclear what they mean. When I walk into a p65 building, does that mean I am taking a real risk, or that I shouldn't eat the building because the paint contains lead. Same for the bowl.
When you read a news article, you have to know about the publication before you can contextualize the article.
When you read a restaurant movie review or rating, you have to know what the general average is and trends of the source before you can interpret the rating.
When you read about some food being healthy, you need to know if they mean nutrient wise or calorie wise to contextualize “healthy.”
Just reading hackernews, you know how people on here swing about different issues so when an article comes up on one of those issues, you know how the comment section may perceive the issue.
To me, prop 65 is just another thing that provides a signal if you want to contextualize it.
My point is that both over and under use of the labels is so rampant that you can put very little trust in them.
The vast majority of cases are trace levels of low risk materials. Never mind that in most cases you're facing a lot more risk from natural materials.
"Fine. Now _everything_ has Sesame in it. What are you going to do? _Settle_ with us?"
I know there's a lot of things that work like this (handicap ramps for instance) but if you don't draw a line somewhere it does get overly expensive.
If sesame is in fact poison for a specific subgroup, this shifts the mass market option from “eh it’s probably fine, how often does cross-contamination happen” to “definitely poison for me, I’d better seek an alternative.”
It’s lifesaving to those that do.
Somehow bakeries in Switzerland are doing just fine with sesame being a declared allergen and keeping them separate but American ones just can’t be bothered to handle a life threatening ingredient thoroughly carefully.
It’s just impossible because US scale /s
If it weren't for companies acting in bad faith, they wouldn't have to play regulator cat and mouse. If you removed the regulations altogether, your big bakers would be even more lax with allergens and people would get sick.
As long as making sesame bread is allowed while making bread without sesame is prohibitively expensive (because you need to ensure there are not even trace amounts present) it's obvious what most companies will choose.
It is clear what the outcome of the regulations was supposed to be, products with sesame and products without. But they were poorly planned regulations, and the companies are more than happy to work to the letter of the law.
But maybe this is actually fine, because a company willing to cleanly process allergen free product can capture that market segment.
Having wheelchair ramps at corners, especially new ones, big chains, large institutions, seems great. Forcing the new 1 person boutique down the street to spend $250k+ to add every possible accommodation for language and accessibility, doesn't seem so great.
There are tons of stories of effective extortion over "accessibility" issues
Your comment also suggests the same solution for the bread. If you don't like that there is sesame in it then you should build a robot to remove the sesames. That's the same as saying "I didn't translate my text for you but you can find some other way to get it translated".
(And note that in some cases "new" construction must work with existing constraints. I'm thinking of a sign I saw in Carlsbad Cavern saying no wheelchairs past this point. The loop that was denied wheelchairs contained a pinch point a wheelchair couldn't go through. Man made the path, nature put the rocks there.)
Are you saying these are examples of over-regulation?
> You need to judge over-regulation as it relates to society as a whole.
That doesn't seem to be a heuristic. E.g. "wheelchair ramps are cheap over the lifetime of a building, so it's obvious we should add them" is a good justification of something not being over-regulation - the "bang for buck" heuristic. But the quoted text doesn't contain a heuristic, so we can't judge anything based on it.
Serious question as a non native english speaker, is this a correct way of saying it?
I think bread is usually baked in an oven ..
(some bread you can also make in a pan, but you cannot cook bread in my understanding)
But in the broader sense, it seems to also mean the preparing of meals, but I never encountered it like this.
"Kochen (von lateinisch coquere, „kochen, sieden, reifen“ entlehnt) ist im engeren Sinne das Erhitzen einer Flüssigkeit bis zum und am Siedepunkt, im Weiteren das Garen oder Zubereiten von Lebensmitteln allgemein"
"es kocht" literally means, it is boiling.
the problem with 'cooking bread' is that 'baking bread' is a set phrase, not that baking doesn't count as cooking
The wider meaning is pretty common in German to the point I find it hard to believe any native speaker wouldn't ever have used "kochen" to refer to something other than literally boiling water.
edit: and a rice cooker is definitely not a small oven.
Baking is more of a evaporation.
And the german definition of cooking in the narrow sense is defined like this, but in a broader sense apparently usable for everything with preparing meals.
And I never used a rice cooker, so no idea how to classify that ..
To the rice cooker point, I'd argue that an oven uses a heating element of some form (electric coils, gas flame, wood fire) to heat the air in a closed environment, and the air transfers heat into an item. In contrast, a rice cooker uses a heating element to directly heat a metal pot, and the metal pot transfers heat into an item. Usually that's going to be a combination of rice and water, but you can e.g. pour pancake batter into the pot and get a large souffle pancake, or put bread dough into the pot and get a loaf of bread. The trick is that the metal pot is much more efficient at transferring heat than the air is, so the rice cooker doesn't need to be at the same temperature as an oven to get the same amount of heat into whatever you're cooking.
In german you would not, one would roast it. (but we have 2 words, roasting "rösten" on the bbq and "braten" would be in a pan. But a "Braten" would be in an oven.)
Kind of not that consistent (like it usually is with natural language).
In general I think those terms were invented, before there were things as a rice cooker.
On the other hand, "cooking bread" is like 2/10 weird.
I'm not sure what the difference is, except the US goes one step further and asks "please don't say it may have an allergen if you don't have to". It results in products definitely having the allergen, but is "may contain" any better than "definitely contains"?
> In Switzerland, there are also the following rules regarding trace allergens when declaring allergens: in the event of possible contamination of more than one gram per kilogram of food, the note "May contain traces of ..." must be included. The limit for sulphur is 10 milligrams per kilogram and for gluten 200 milligrams
It sounds like Switzerland does the same thing the US used to do where manufactures have a lazy cop-out? It doesn't sound any stricter at all.
One gram per kilo for sesame is not hard.
I have had a rather unpleasant day due to an unknown contaminant in approximately 10mg of material as part of a day's food. Obviously the contaminant was well under 10mg.
When FDA declares a new allergen, the top lawyer of the company that has presence from NY to SF seats down with the CEO, they then ask all the manufacturing units to do an audit of the said allergen use and then hire a third party auditor to verify if the allergen is used at all not just at their retail locations but in the entire supply chain. This involves the place where wheat is harvested to the restaurant where the bread is served. For a large company this is a millions of dollars and several quarters of project.
The lawyer and CEO needs to chalk out the plan. If they want to make sure their bread does not contain the said allergen they have to update all their processes right from where they buy their wheat to where they test their bread for the said allergen and retrain their staff, suppliers, QA etc. this adds millions of dollars in additional expenses per year.
Not only all this is complex that makes the bread expensive for EVERYONE, it is also much more prone to error.
It is much easier for your small local company to provide sesame free bread at slightly higher price to those who need it. You wont get it in the middle of death valley but that is fine.
The FDA was expecting that companies spend millions to ensure that the products are free of sesame to help people with allergies, but companies realize that it's easier to just add sesame into their products.
I am not sure the government could do now to help people with sesame allergies. Ban sesame outright from certain products? Mandate that certain companies produce sesame-free products?
Its not like adding small amounts of an allergen is a victimless. Lots of people with moderate to serious allergies eat things every day which "may contain" their allergen.
Eg: transaction structuring which is illegal in most places.
Bread is made fresh every day, has a shelf-life of 3 days tops. The logistics are usually measured in hours. The effort to scrub the bakery, transport the gluten-free/nut-free/whatever every day, seperated is thus non specialized and a huge cost in addition to a production of a small facility. So you can get gluten-free bread by a industrial facility speacilized on it, wrapped in plastic. But you can not get it from your local bakery chain.
Add to that the legal damocles swoard hanging over you and mixed artisanal production of small quantities becomes fiscally irresponsible for small buisnesses. In theory you could open a bakery, tailored to a specific allergy set in a dense urban environment. But the rest of the world, a drive away from you, will not have that option.
Case in point: Italy has a wheat-rich cuisine and they give up to 140€ per month to people with Celiac disease to offset the higher costs of gluten-free food:
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2019/03/08/the-rise-and-r...
Right.
Bimbo has not been actually adding the allergen to the product. Presumably, they will start explicitly adding it, so the warning will be proper.
But businesses could give a fuck about anything other than their current margin.
Putting it another way, the FDA put forth a regulation intended to make the lives of a certain group of people better, and the response was to figure out how to not bother with that.
So what do you expect would happen? Consumers like cheaper rather than higher prices, this isn't a new thing.
Should we be proud and happy about that? Apparently.
Most bread types don't contain sesame seeds so why let the sesame seeds contaminate them and cause life-and-death situations?
Proposed legislation: allow large-scale production and sales of sesame seed bread only if you produce and sell more sesame-free bread.
That means bread made with wheat is now illegal, because some people are highly allergic to gluten. If you don't want gluten-free bread, you'll have to make it yourself.
Also, you can't have any food with shrimp or shellfish. Peanut butter is now illegal (but you can make it yourself). Pistachio ice cream is illegal.
Not only is wheat bread illegal, but any baked good can't be made with milk either, since some young children are allergic. And you can't substitute soy milk either, since some babies are allergic to that too. Baked goods in your proposed future sound really awful, quite frankly.
Gluten-free baked goods made with potato flour are illegal too, since some people are allergic to potatoes. So french fries are also illegal.
Some other things you won't be able to have either in a pre-made food, or at a restaurant: - celery - carrots - pumpkin - mushroom - onion - garlic - bell pepper - fish (so apparently you want to ban sushi restaurants too)
So I'm curious, in your vision of the future, what exactly do people eat? Beef and lettuce for every meal?
They aren't changing their recipe to make their product better or cheaper, they change it so that they don't have to deal with compliance. That's the not giving a shit.
> Because it can be difficult and expensive to keep sesame in one part of a baking plant out of another, some companies began adding small amounts of sesame to products that didn't previously contain the ingredient to avoid liability and cost.
So yes, to avoid having to prevent cross-contamination, they started intentionally introducing trace amounts of allergens.
Produce an item, clean your utensils before the next time. Minimal cross-contamination issues.
A production line processing sesame will create a certain amount of sesame dust. Ensuring that dust gets nowhere near other production equipment is expensive.
If it says “may contain” then I’m fine. If it’s listed as an ingredient then I can’t risk having it.
For people who can’t have any at all you’ve not improved the situation but at the cost of making it significantly worse for people with a mild reaction.
The FDA should either allow "may contains" labels to be used, or create a new category that can be used.
On almost all food labels that I've seen for the last decade or so I've seen disclaimers like "this product is made in a factory that processes $ALLERGEN"
Usually $ALLERGEN is "tree nuts".
Certain products specifically for allergy sufferers have strange messages such as "non-quantifiable presence of an allergen". A PCR test can detect traces of a product's DNA, but it is impossible to quantify its volume because it is so small, or to trace the source of contamination.
They can't say there aren't any, there's no defined threshold or it's not possible to clearly quantify the quantity.
> FDA officials acknowledged Tuesday that statements that a product “may contain” certain allergens “could be considered truthful and not misleading.”
> The Brownberry brand Whole Grains 12 Grains and Seeds RTE bread loaf product is misbranded for a similar reason; the product label includes walnuts, almonds, and hazelnuts in the ingredient and “Contains” statements; however, these nuts are not ingredients in the formulation of the product.
Emphasis on "Contains", which is a separate line on the packaging from the "may contain" line.
The FDA should either 1) Allow the use of "may contains" for major allergen cross contamination. Or) Create a new category, such as "Possible cross contamination" that would be considered good enough. This would remove the incentive to deliberately add allergens while allowing proper labeling.
However, there are some lobbyist groups that want to force companies to use separate factories for any foods that contain major allergens, making those foods cost substantially more than they do now to produce. So the of us without allergens can either eat tasteless sterile food (likely leading to more folks with food allergies do a lack of exposure), or to pay out the wazoo for the privilege of eating normal food.
Instead of making sure their products are safe, they just say everything is unsafe, because they know consumers will become numb to it.
Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer, but instead of taking the time to make sure of that, companies just tell us the products are dangerous, because they know we don't really have a choice.
They have the money and the capability, but they choose profit over consumer safety, and that's THEIR sin, not ours.
As I mentioned elsewhere on this discussion, this is why pure cotton patches now come with Prop 65 warnings (if you might use them to clean a rifle...)
Rag on corporations all you want, but Prop 65 is a terrible law.
Meaning that this kind of medical-lab-style cross contamination protocol will either raise the cost of the product or reduce the variety and choice.
If the result is a safer population, why wouldn't we want this?
For example, coral snake antivenom. For quite a while the US only had a single coral snake antivenom on the market because it was made by a company that was grandfathered in. The new(ish) FDA rules made developing a new coral snake antivenom not something anyone wanted to do.
So of course the one existing vendor when out of business.
Last I heard (around 2022) people were trying to come up with a new antivenom but thus far have been unsuccessful.
Prescribing that things be safer doesn't force reality to conform and we have examples of this occurring.
There's an anecdote that an AI was asked to make trains safer, and it decided that the trains should never leave the station.
Quality of life involves some risk. IE, you need to exercise, but you might injure yourself doing it.
This will be probably relevant to answering your question: if you want to realistically prevent cross-contamination, you will need separate set of everything, that is, a separate room with mixing bowls, separate ovens, and, well... the same employees won't be going between those two rooms, so, you need to hire more people to man more equipment.
I was hired into both of these bakeries as a non-skilled labor who was paid minimum hourly wage. Baking bread isn't a particularly luxurious business. It's out there with agriculture, where margin of profit is very low, and your only hope is scale. Also, you cannot really increase bread consumption by baking more bread. The market is easily saturated. So, by forcing a bakery to, essentially, split in two, hire extra workers and install extra equipment, while in the end they'd not be able to sell more product is going to be very expensive. Maybe not even affordable.
Now, consider that a very small minority of people buying bread care for it not being accidentally contaminated with sesame seeds, and your non-allergic bread will either have to cost ten times more than normal, or it won't be made at all. Needless to say that people with allergies will, likely, not want to buy overpriced bread. They might just not eat bread at all, if that's so dangerous.
A company could do everything right and still would risk to be destroyed by an angry employee or plain boycott from a competitor. The only safe move is to stop making an everyday product with such legal risks.
Specially if is a niche product for a small number of potential clients. The reward of selling a few buns more does not worth the headache.
The best way to a safer population is making cars illegal. So many deaths.
Secondly, how do you know a measure like this even does provide for a "safer population" in that aggregated sense? What if it successfully prevents a few extreme allergic reactions on the part of the small handful of people that both have severe allergies and refuse to take responsibility for exercising care in their own consumption choices, but does so at the cost of making food overall less available and more expensive, such that a far greater number of people, especially the poor and marginal, begin to experience malnutrition?
Well they're usually called crusts for starters.
These things are not comparable. While adding sesame to everything to circumvent a law is certainly not fair, it is a reasonable ingredient to some products (whereas mice that give us cancer is, at the very least, not a goal). I like sesame buns! And, for young children, it's actually quite important to expose them to a range of allergens because shielding them makes them much more likely to develop allergies.
I fully agree on exposure to these allergens when young. Have your child eat wide variety of foods, have them play out in the open and get dirty, have them play with animals, wash hands and keep clean but not to the point of sterility, etc.
One personal anecdote - when I was a few years old I apparently started having a lot of asthma-like coughing symptoms. We got a German shepherd, whom I would then play with, hug a lot, and sleep. My symptoms went away pretty quickly.
Similarly, my parents made sure I eat normal meals and not a ‘child’ diet. Eg I was never allowed to order from a ‘kids menu’. At home, salmon or shrimp for dinner and I don’t want it as a young child? Too bad, that’s dinner, eat that or go hungry (and of course I ended up eating and now love many cuisines and allergic to nothing).
Sometimes it doesn't even seem to make sense. For example, one might think naively, that if a website reacts to the law by throwing tantrum and displaying the most annoying dialog ever invented (which by the way actually isn't GDPR compliant), they would just hurt themselves, because their readers would move to different websites. Yet somehow they don't, and other website adopt the same annoying dialog. I am confused, because this isn't how free market was supposed to work.
Could you list the allergens, please? No we won't, because f--- you!
Well, now you have to list the allergens, or you get punished. Okay, so we will list all allergens in the world, including the ones our products don't contain, because f--- you!
Then we update the law so that you also get punished for listing made up allergens. Okay, so we will add as many allergens as we can to all our products, because f--- you!
Always choosing the most aggressive way to comply with the letter of the law while going completely against the spirit.
Meanwhile, in the deep jungles of Eastern Europe where most people laugh at the very idea of a law, if a product contains an allergen, the producers write "this product contains this allergen"; if the product does not contain the allergen, they write "does not contain this allergen"; and if they are not sure, they write "this product may contain this allergen". Sometimes with an explanation like "we are not adding it on purpose, but we process the allergen for some other products in the same factory, so maybe some small amounts accidentally get there".
People should travel a lot, to learn that things that are considered impossible at one place are often considered trivial at some other place.
EDIT:
Half of the comments in this thread is like "stupid law, this is what you get for making laws, clearly the lawmakers never heard about unintended consequences", and the other half is like "in my country (different countries in different comments) this problem does not exist, producers simply label their products honestly".
The problem is with possible cross-contamination. For some reason the FDA has gone stupid about what was the accepted practice that the label listed other standard allergens processed in the same facility. It worked. If hitting one of your problems could kill you you didn't touch anything with a cross contamination risk. If hitting a problem was simply an unpleasant time then you went ahead.
Companies originally reacted to the FDA insanity by deliberately adding trace amounts of the maybe items so it definitely contained (who benefits? Nobody!), I don't know the trigger for this latest bit of trouble.
I’m a minority on this most likely but if a website does this, I close it, unless my life depends on it which it rarely does. The same if a website has so many ads that it blocks the content and I don’t have adblock. Life is too short for these games.
The only goal is to avoid lawsuits, that’s why in every product there is a warning, a car owners manual used to contain lots of useful info, even timing belt diagrams and ignition advance angles, now they are just a “warning encyclopedia”. We are a litigious society and that’s what we get for that.
33 million is only about 10% of the population, and the phrasing in the article makes me suspect that there may be some disingenuous motte-and-bailey argumentation going on here -- the definition of "food allergies" applicable to the 10% claim might be vastly more expansive than the one applicable to "life-threatening allergic reactions".
Unfortunately, since the article doesn't reference any independent fact-checking for these claims, and just quotes not-necessarily-disinterested sources verbatim, it's hard to validate any of it. All in all, it's very poor-quality journalism.
You can pry my gluten-laden, peanut-oil containing, dairy-filled pizza from my cold dead hands!
(The problem isn't allergens, many of which are delicious. The problem is not correctly labeling allergens - I think that's the point you wanted to make at least!)
It’s ridiculous to make everything allergen free. It’s also gross, I hate those products that I dubbed “everything free” that are free from the top N allergens.
They have a place in the market, but they aren’t that good
I hear the same argument for the GDPR laws that have resulted in annoying cookie banners everywhere. Sure, it’s technically the website owner’s fault for spying and adding a shitty banner, but… those banners didn’t exist until the law was created.
We need better laws that more wholly account for human behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect#The_original_cobr...
How hard is it to figure out whether you place cookies on other people's computers or you don't? Even if you can't read your own source code, you could simply install a new browser, visit your website, and then check the cookies on that browser. I don't think it's GDPR that is dumb.
Look how blatantly Apple ignored the DMA and how long it's taken the EU to pursue real enforcement action. It seems clear: there is no need to *fear* EU penalties unless you are dead set on noncompliance. Honest mistakes don't bring down businesses due to GDPR.
It's pretty easy to not needlessly track and accumulate data about your users. It's harder when your users are not your customers but a product you are trying to sell to third-parties but discouraging that is a good thing.
In market terms: "corporations try to be capital-efficient because they are competing with each other over price-sensitive consumers."
But we knew that already. The people coming up with the rules must take that into account otherwise you get prop 65 warnings and cookie banners everywhere.
Every protein is allergenic to somebody, and even some non-proteins are allergenic (e.g., they are small molecules that can get inside a somatic protein, which changes the somatic protein's shape, which makes the somatic protein allergenic).
It used to be that when companies produced products in the same facilities that produced products on the allergen list they would label them as "may contain". Not something they added, but not something they promised it did not inadvertently contain.
A company is free to produce products in facilities that do not also process the standard allergens but to do so will be more expensive and few people want to pay the extra cost for something which is of no benefit to them. If you're not allergic to sesame it does not matter if there's a bit of sesame in your food.
The whole food labeling thing is being taken to excess. The FDA is going bonkers about what companies are or are not adding, while there's no requirement for documenting what impurities might remain. As far as I'm concerned the FDA can take their labeling rules and shove them where the sun doesn't shine.
Instead, put a QR code. It comes up with a page that lists what they intentionally added (no generic categories--I know I don't have issues with all "artificial flavors" but I do with some. And "natural flavors" comes in a close second), what cross-contamination is likely and for any refined product what the raw material was that it came from and to what degree it was purified. In addition to the human-readable form it also contains a standardized representation meant for machine parsing. Scan the code with an appropriate app and it flags anything on the list that it has been told to flag.
Please, no. Tech is not the solution to everything. Every time you put an additional layer between the consumer and information, and more prone to breaking. Software tech is notoriously unreliable in the consumer space because of the sheer number of interfaces. It makes the overall system less good for the consumer. I don't want to have to go through a decision tree on a phone, or a QR code, to get information that was previously available by just opening my eyeballs. I don't want to have to use my smartphone to get the directions for my presciption medication, or to see the price of gas or groceries. Those systems are designed to make the corporations life easier at the expense of the consumer.
There are many cases where tech makes things easier for the consumer. I don't think this is one of them.
But one person's allergens are another's tasty ingredients. I love my sesame bagels. I don't even know what food would remain if you banned all the allergens. Tapioca powder with beef flavors?
Sesame is one thing. It's delicious but probably not a major subsistence food for anyone. Chinese restaurants would miss their sesame oils though.
Next, it's hard enough to ban fish and shellfish. Many subcultures depend on them, especially near major bodies of water.
No tree nuts or peanuts? A lunch staple gone for millions. Jam will be so lonely.
Or wheat. Or milk. Or egg. Or soy? That's the end of breakfast and bakeries and dessert, I guess. The vegetarians will get awfully hungry.
I think at that point, the only thing left to eat would be the regulators themselves. Karma's never been so tasty...
Virtually anything can be an allergen, and a lot of chemicals, given enough concentration and bad luck, can lead to cancer or birth defects. So ignoramuses demand laws that mark any chemical that can be reasonably thought of harming anyone in any circumstance possible in theory, and then blame corporations when the outcome is disastrous.
Corporations are optimized to make money; doing the non-lazy thing here costs money.
I mean, I'd definitely say that laws that are obviously incompatible with the incentive structures clearly present in real life are indeed bad laws.
Everyone is lazy -- or, more to the point, everyone has finite resources to allocate to their pursuits -- and expecting corporations and consumers to incur exorbitant costs in order to ensure optimal resolution to every possible edge case is neither reasonable nor realistic.
The problem isn't that "corporations are lazy"; the problem is that some people unaccountably expect them to be otherwise.
> Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer, but instead of taking the time to make sure of that, companies just tell us the products are dangerous, because they know we don't really have a choice.
But we do indeed have plenty of choice. There are a ton of options for getting high-quality food and other products that go through lots of extra steps and give consumers much more granular information about how they were produced and what's in them. Those options are just much more expensive, and many people are perfectly happy to make the choice to use products that may e.g. increase a particular risk from 0.001% to 0.002% in order to avoid paying twice as much for it.
One note, however: it's impossible for food not to include allergens, as people can develop allergies to essentially anything. Encumbering access to food products that provide nutrition and pleasure to the vast majority of people in order to eliminate the responsibility of a small fraction of the population to exercise care over their own consumption choices is ethically dubious, to say the least.
I want this so badly right now.
If they kept it with 31 there'd be empty space at any reasonable column count (2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Past 4-6 columns it starts getting too busy across the screen (subjective). They seem to have capped it at 4, it drops to 2 and then 1 as you narrow the page.
One filler image works at each of those sizes, but then it's odd to have a single filler image. Pushing it to 9 gives a ratio approaching 3:1 brand:filler images, someone looked at that and said "That looks better". The filler images are placed, it appears, next to their associated brand (the cupcakes and Sara Lee, as an example).
Are those those the only brands they produce? I only recognize 3 of those brands, and I can't even be sure I've ever eaten more than one of those. Maybe they are big only in certain regions?
No, the five brands explicitly marked as a non-exhaustive list (with “such as”) are not, even close to, all of their brands.
You walk down the aisle and think there's 4 or 5 companies in say, paper towels, competing for your business but it's probably just 1 with different brands.
Last time I checked, Whole Foods where I am carried Peet's, Stumptown, Intelligentsia and Keurig coffee, which is all just a single company. Probably comes in on the same truck.
All you gotta do is literally just have different printed labels on things, Look at sunscreen and cough medicine next time you go in.
"Almost all baked goods" is a stretch, but easily 50% of your bread aisle space is Bimbo. Flowers (Wonder, Nature's Own, etc.) is maybe 25% after that.
It takes guts to keep the brand name in English-speaking contries, though.
> The name was formed as the combination of the Disney Bambi and Dumbo films names, which were the favourite movies of Marinela, Lorenzo Servitje's daughter. Later, the founders would find out that bimbo is an Italian slang for children (shortened from bambino), and that in China the word for bread (面包, miànbāo) is similar to the name of the brand.
I think they mostly only sell bimbo-branded goods in spanish language shops (where the brand would help sell). In, say, Safeway you only see the US brands they have acquired, at least where I live.
Err.. ish? About as similar as 'Hacker News' and 'cake her knees', anyway?
Then 'im' is read flat and not like 'ià'.
Of course 'bo' is quite like 'bāo', but that's your 'ish'.
I've noticed Chinese are very loose with their puns, and it helps that there is a lot of regional dialect variation in pronunciation.
For example a common one is 520 (wu er ling) being used for "wo ai ni" (I love you)
So I wouldn't put it past them to consider the two words as "similar"
Anyone have recommendations for Finnish media? Haha
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/multinational-companies/swiss-c...
As for bread "面包"，"面" means powder of wheat or products made by that. "包" means something looks like a bag, or has some fillings inside. Just not so meaningless. And "面" sounds like "me" in "mean" plus "an" in "and". It is not the same like "宾堡".
I have yet to see any Bimbo product either in México or Spain, that would remotely look like bread.
> including varieties without crust.
Also WTF.
The one time I've been in Portland we were drunkenly stumbling back to our hotel when we came across the Franz factory. We spent so long watching the production through the windows that security came and told us to move along! it was absolutely fascinating.
FDA officials acknowledged Tuesday that statements that a product “may contain” certain allergens “could be considered truthful and not misleading.” Bimbo officials have until July 8 to identify steps taken to remedy the issue — or to explain why the labeling doesn't violate FDA standards.
So a baker.. who adds (insert allergy ingredient here), in minute quantity so they can legally say it contains it, is still in the wrong because that product does not normally contain said ingredient?
What is a baker to do? I think it is wholly unreasonable to say a baker cannot say on the product that the product may contain traces of an ingredient, when they cannot 100% say it does not. This just seems like splitting hairs and unnecessarily penalizing the baker.
We should want a food maker to list all possible allergens that could be present, not just are present in the foods.
This has significantly harmed consumers who are actually allergic to sesame. Now there's effectively no way to know if a baked product will actually contain sesame, so you either get to eat nothing or take the chance.
It was a clear and flagrant abuse of the "may contain traces" mechanism. The bakeries caused harm for consumers as a way to avoid the coats of doing business safely.
It's almost like if you want a different outcome, the government agencies involved need to step up and do a more thoughtful job of architecting these policies in a way where the companies are forced to follow the "spirit" of them.
I can't be mad if I create a policy, and someone follows it. My intention should have been in the policy, not just implied.
The common denominator here is that the government gives companies new rules
to follow, and enforces severe penalties for breaking them, and so the
companies minimized their risk by following them to the extreme.
architecting these policies in a way where the companies are forced to
follow the "spirit" of them.
I can't be mad if I create a policy, and someone follows it.
Hardly the worst kind of teeth.
The business discloses, what was added as ingredients, and what contamination is possible. (Because production line is shard or similar)
What more do you want?
I guess results of regular random testing could be put online.
Forbid using same knife to slice different things is another thing to be done.
That the labeling disambiguate "made in a factory that makes sesame products" and "actually contains sesame." What we now have with "may contain" could be either and everyone is worse off
In the exact same way that every product ever invented may cause cancer in California, I assume? This is a problem with the FDA, not the companies. Give a dog a long leash, they're going to use the slack.
Metaphor, but sure, quite literally they're not dogs. Very true.
> companies have obligations that they need to fulfill and they're choosing to neglect them.
From our eyes they're neglecting to follow the spirit of a policy. From their eyes, they're following it to the letter of the policy. Perspective.
Can company choose to produce sesame products? (I assume: yes)
Can company choose solely sesame products, without doing sesame-free stuff? (I assume: yes)
If new regulation comes along, and business deems new requirement is unacceptably high, can it pivot to a different market where it can reuse same investments? (I assume: yes)
Law can be flawed. (Because people definitely are)
Maybe it can be improved? E.g. require random testing, and then say there are 7 seeds in every 100000 of pies.
I'm not sure how I feel about this all.
The problem with the cancer-causing substance labels is some companies are saying their products contain cancer-causing substances when they clearly do not. At this point the label almost doesn't mean anything anymore because you can't tell if they're just putting it on there to prevent lawsuits, or because it actually does. So I could see a regulatory agency issuing fines for false labeling. It dilutes the meaning of the labeling.
On the other hand, if there is a company where some contaminants might be present, and they don't want to bother selling their products to people with allergens, I can see why they might be honest and say something like "this product may contain X" or "this product was manufactured in a facility where X is sometimes present". It's sloppy in terms of allergen cross-contamination but I can respect their decision to be sloppy and honest.
The tricky part is when one morphs into the other, or where you draw the line.
As an exercise, consider a company that just prints on its ingredients label "this product may contain..." and then just lists all the ingredients of all the products they make, or might be in the facility. That too would be abusing ingredients labels but would in fact technically be true. At some point someone has to call nonsense and where that is I'm not sure.
Forcing disclosure doesn’t stop companies from doing bad things they have to disclose.
It's because the sesame labeling law was lobbied by Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE) [0] who are funded by the National Peanut Board, the National Dairy Council, and a number of Soy product manufacturers [1].
Essentially, the sesame law made it mandatory to label for sesame like you would for Dairy, Peanuts, and Soy.
It was a blatant lobbyist attempt that backfired.
[0] - https://www.foodallergy.org/resources/how-fare-advocates-hel...
You are catastrophizing. It remains the case that any baked product that doesn't have "may contain traces of sesame" on the label must by law be free of traces of sesame. And if no producer chooses to produce such a product, then it is because the number of people who want it is quite small (or the costs of complying with regulations is too high to make a profit), and it is not hard for someone to bake their own bread.
If these facilities cannot keep unwanted visible particulates like sesame out of their products, how can they keep dirt and bacteria out?
This regulation is not only good for people allergic to sesame, it's a brown M&M test. I see value in it.
They can't. It's statistically impossible. Even operating theaters and clean rooms can't keep every trace bit of dirt or bacteria out. All anyone tries to do is reduce the incidence to below a meaningful threshold.
If the requirement is: either eliminate every last molecule of every offending substance, or use a label that the offending substance may appear in trace amounts... well, everyone is going to opt for the label.
Nice attempt to straw-man though.
"Ignore the stated argument, discuss my weaker mischaracterization of it instead."
Spirit of that previous parent message was that “never ever contaminated” is not a realistic option.
Yes op stretched that to molecules, but exactly same argument applies to seeds.
I guess you forbid any kind of hyperbole in 50m radius.
In restaurants, little pieces from the metal pot scrubbing pads tend to be a constant problem. But this represents a cost choice: more expensive scrubbing solutions are available.
They seemingly cant. There is a federally allowable amount of rat droppings allowed in food and it is non-zero!
Doesn't the rest of the population win by being able to buy cheaper bread, at the cost of the affected?
If a bakery wants to limit their potential customers by saying their products may contain sesame to avoid liability, I don’t see why the FDA should step in and force them to take on liability and capital costs for sesame free factories.
If the FDA’s current allergen rules are leading to this outcome, perhaps it’s the FDA’s rules that are flawed.
My view is that the business should be able to decide who they want to service or not. According to recent US studies, 0.2% of the population have a noticeable allergy to sesame. Seems like bakeries don't want to invest money for such a small percentage. It sucks but this opens the door for new bakeries to cater towards those with this specific allergy. Why does the government need to force business to do it?
At that point, the usefulness of requiring the labels to begin with is considerably diminished. Having a cottage industry of "actually correctly labeled" foods because the standard labels are poorly enforced seems inefficient, IMHO.
[0]https://www.foodallergy.org/resources/facts-and-statistics
Not op, but I share his view and don't think commercial buildings should be forced to accommodate people who are mobility-impaired.
Remember, we are all just temporarily abled and one accident away from needing accomodation from society.
Some day if you find yourself with limited mobility you will be thankful the ADA requires the things it does, because you would find it challenging to live in society without it. The market of “disabled people wanting to shop in a store” is vanishingly small and totally unserved without at least some regulation. I’m sure it offends your free market principles, but the free market isn’t the best thing for all of us.
But my message was about the general principle of insurance being the very thing your comment was against. The situation where the vast majority of people pay some cost of which only a few need to utilise.
Sure, but the likelihood of that is low enough that insuring against that isn't worth it for most people
> But my message was about the general principle of insurance being the very thing your comment was against. The situation where the vast majority of people pay some cost of which only a few need to utilise.
No, the principle of insurance is that people pay to hedge against some event that has a reasonable likelihood of happening to them at some point. Whether it's a majority or a minority paying for it is not central to the concept of insurance.
Obviously I'm ignoring variance in this calculation, but you can easily adjust the numbers to give a margin of safety.
For insurance to work more people have to pay into the system than people who receive payment, otherwise the insurer will go bankrupt.
yes!
> This has significantly harmed consumers who are actually allergic to sesame.
maybe. more like: "This may have slightly annoyed..."
> It was a clear and flagrant abuse of the "may contain traces" mechanism.
nope. absolutely not. the did not say "may" they apparently said "contains". but what do you want them to do if there's a 0.0001% chance of two particles of sesame in a product?
> The bakeries caused harm
nope. the FDA caused harm for consumers by regulatory overreach
the result will be one of three things:
1. FDA redrafts the sesame rule to define what is cross-contamination and what is not in a realistic way that bakers will agree to abide by and doesn't have these counter-productive side-effects.
2. Bimbo stops saying "contains sesame" and starts saying "may contain sesame" (the FDA officials acknowledged Tuesday that statements that a product "may contain” certain allergens "could be considered truthful and not misleading.")
3. Bimbo actually adds a tiny bit of sesame as other bakers did and keeps the packaging verbiage the same.
which one is least unhelpful to the 0.2% of people with sesame allergies?
Their lobbying group caused the problem in the first place by pushing congress to pass unreasonably expensive cross contamination rules.
So what do you think is better:
1. Label bread with the "may contain" label. Meaning, truthfully, that people with severe sesame allergies shouldn't eat it.
2. Add sesame flour and then add a "definitely contains" label.
I think #2 is much worse from a "significantly harms consumers" perspective.
If you have a mild sensitivity, the added sesame may be below your threshold. Now you know that the sesame is controlled so you can always buy the product.
The problem is that the people with severe allergies expected that the new FDA rules would have manufacturers significantly retool to avoid cross contamination. Everybody with two brain cells to rub together predicted that they would absolutely not retool and would just add trace amounts of the contaminant.
If you can buy the product with the added sesame you could also buy the product without the added sesame, could't you?
Nothing changes in that case - while in other cases the added sesame creates a problem. It doesn't improve the situation for any consumer (leaving aside pricing).
No. That does not follow.
Before, with "may contain sesame" the product might or might not contain enough sesame to trigger your reaction as it was completely uncontrolled. Sure, 99 times out of 100 it was fine but when somebody ran sesame burger buns on the third shift it would make you barf for 48 hours. You simply cannot eat that product on the off chance that it might be bad even though 99% of the time it is fine.
After, you know there is exactly X amount of sesame and never more than that. You can test the product once and it either affects you or it doesn't. At that point if it doesn't affect you, you can buy the product and be confident that it won't change.
Manufacturing 101: Anything that isn't measured isn't controlled.
It's fairly easy to get something below a reasonable threshold--run a batch or two without the contaminant and throw them out. After that, the background levels will be below the added ingredient measurement.
Sure, the "completely uncontrolled" amount present before - in the "may contain sesame" situation where it was not added as an ingredient - was a rounding error. That's why if you can buy the product now you also could do it before.
It's not just "adding sesame". It's also going to be things like "specifying the amount of time to run disposable product on the line to get below specified threshold".
It's about consistency. Maintaining documentable 0.001% contamination is much, much harder than maintaining 0.1% contamination.
There is no winning this battle via penalties. If you don't want sesame contamination, you have to make the economics worthwhile. Or simply ban sesame, but you're going to get major pushback on that.
If it is a rounding error compared to the level that you find acceptable now it was a rounding error compared to the level that you find acceptable now.
If 1% plus epsilon is acceptable and you can buy it now, 0% plus epsilon was surely acceptable and you could buy it before.
If they never properly checked their production lines to ensure products without sesame don't contain sesame, there never was an effective way to know that you're not getting a surprise seed in your non-sesame-labeled food.
And I don't see how it harms consumers. These foods that may contain traces of sesame, had always might have contained traces of sesame. So are traces of sesame dangerous or not? If they are, then consumers shouldn't have been eating these foods to begin with. If they aren't, why are the FDA forcing the labeling?
She isn't "immediately dies on contact" allergic so to solve this problem we had a "loaf party" where we got one of every brand of bread in the grocery store, she would get to try all of them and each person goes home with the rest of a loaf. It was fun all things considered but silly that it was necessary.
So yeah, I have no idea why the fda did this, it seems worse for everyone involved.
so now we have to play the game that its dangerous to label and dangerous to not label, this hurts producers because they'll be sued no matter what, it just makes business impossible.
eating baked goods is not a right its a preference, capitalism says to find a bakery that suits your needs.
and to be even more split over this, any food content can be some kind of allergen, now that what used to be normal spices are being converted to allergens one at a time we have to make distinctions like this, if i ran a bakery i would just label everything as being made with allergens too because we used to just call them "ingredients"
It's done for gluten free foods. Gluten free foods have to be under 20ppm to be called GF, and there are many gluten free foods out there. Even some made on the same equipment as gluten containing foods (just cleaned thoroughly).
Food allergies are a disability. Some people with food allergies cannot consume sesame.
If you're a baker selling bread where sesame is not an ingredient, slapping "this product may contain sesame on your entire product line" or deliberately introducing sesame seeds into your recipe means a large part of the grocery store is inaccessible to people with a sesame seed allergy.
I don't think that's equitable. Imagine if every company that didn't want to cater to people in wheelchairs only rented office space in historical buildings that couldn't have wheelchair ramps installed.
A world where sesame is banned from food industry?
If no (which I assume), then what is the proposal?
“No contaminants” does not seem realistic even in a cleanroom.
If the contaminants don't enter the room or touch the equipment, it's quite realistic. It's weird how many people buy into the silly "why are we forcing industry to do this impossible thing?" train of thought even though the thing is clearly not impossible (and it's been shown to be a self-serving lie on the part of some industry players).
We're talking about sesame, not The Andromeda Strain.
What's weird is you pretending your model of the world is tied to reality when all it is tied to is ideology. Make bullying legal again.
I'd reject the idea that it's impossible to prevent bits of stuff from moving from one part of a factory to another, such that the only solution is to build a whole new factory.
> you pray you don't get thrown in jail because a crumb of sesame was missed
Does it seem to you like America overzealously applies criminal law in the interest of food safety? Do you have any examples of that you'd like to share? Something else seems more accurate: when a problem is discovered and it's widespread enough to represent a danger, companies - usually voluntarily - issue a recall with a description of the risk.
> What's weird is you pretending your model of the world is tied to reality when all it is tied to is ideology.
I honestly have no idea what you are talking about.
To use the wheelchair ramp analogy, we don't allow businesses to decide to rip out existing wheelchair ramp installations because they're too costly to maintain.
Perhaps we need more prominent labelling on packaging or in stores when a company adds an allergen to a product that did not previously contain it. This would reduce the potential for surprises. Or right now, to address this problem that many people aren't aware of, much more prominent labelling of sesame to sunset in a few years.
Other methods I've heard proposed by industry is establishing a threshold for sesame to be listed as an ingredient.
https://www.fooddive.com/news/sesame-allergen-american-baker...
Most people with a sesame allergy won't have a negative reaction to traces of sesame. Drawing a distinction between a product that has traces of sesame and one that has sesame as an ingredient would allow for easier compliance.
By the way, Molitor 5901 is the phone number used by the Jackal to know if he could move, in "The Day of the Jackal", if I remember right.
Keep allergens out of products where they aren’t ingredients.
That way the default (no label) = might contain allergens, and the presence of the label guarantees your safety.
Companies that take allergen cross contamination seriously can tout the label (and win the business of the allergic), companies that don't won't resort to purposefully including allergens in their product to avoid having to overhaul their cross contamination practices.
I also suspect that if there is an incident, this company might be able to have the government found liable for preventing it from warning customers.
Very interesting idea. I wonder if there is a similar situation in which the government prevented a company from alerting customers to something.
The only thing I can come up with is FISA warrants.
If I were the FDA I'd standardize the nutrition label to have a clearly labelled allergen section in which you can reliably use to check that the product is free of X allergen. Of course a naive implementation of this would mean that water bottles and stuff will have a big long list of "gluten free, peanut free, dairy free" so it probably requires a bit more thought.
This is different from a wheat allergy, in fact, its also not an “allergen” in the same way that peanuts are (digestive problems vs anaphylaxis), and would probably be better classified as an intolerance similar to lactose (which is covered by milk but is also an indirect indicator of lactose that can be a false positive because lactose free milk exists).
> (digestive problems vs anaphylaxis) ... and would probably be better classified as an intolerance similar to lactose
is misinformation — "digestive problems" and "intolerance" drastically understate the seriousness of celiac disease, and contribute to the educational challenges surrounding the condition.
The chronic impact of gluten exposure to a celiac patient include: permanent damage to the small intestine, malnutrition, reduction of lifespan, and significantly increased risk of comorbid autoimmune diseases (MS, diabetes, and more) and cancer.
The acute symptoms span from gastrointestinal symptoms to neurological issues, systemic pain, and cognitive impairment. The reason for all of this is gluten causes the celiac patient's immune system to mobilize and attack the patient, i.e. "autoimmunity." Not anaphylactic, correct, but not a digestive problem nor an intolerance.
- Single meal will not kill you.
- Continuous use will shorten your life significantly.
(Something like smoking then?)
I don't think it would be as popular with a "sesame free diet".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten-free_diet#As_a_popular_...
> In the US, it was estimated that more than half of people who buy foods labeled gluten-free do not have a clear reaction to gluten, and they do so "because they think it will help them lose weight, because they seem to feel better or because they mistakenly believe they are sensitive to gluten."
We already have this type of labelling for gluten free foods, and one common complaint in the celiac community is that gluten should also be a major allergen. This would help greatly in deciding if a product is safe for people with celiac, since many products are but manufacturers don't bother putting GF labels on them.
As a point of interest, most of the developed world already requires labeling gluten as a major allergen. The US is the outlier / laggard.
> "Because it can be difficult and expensive to keep sesame in one part of a baking plant out of another, some companies began adding small amounts of sesame to products that didn't previously contain the ingredient to avoid liability and cost. FDA officials said that violated the spirit, but not the letter, of federal regulations."
It seems that they prefer the "may contain" wording:
> FDA officials acknowledged Tuesday that statements that a product “may contain” certain allergens “could be considered truthful and not misleading.”
As a consumer, I'd much rather know for sure if a food has something in it that could kill me in it. If companies really want add allergens to their products unnecessarily, disclose that unambiguously, and limit their pool of potential customers that seems better to me than companies just slapping on a label saying that the product might contain every possible deadly allergen and letting customers take their chances or avoid them entirely.
Companies who want to sell their products to people with allergies should be required to actually spend the time and money to be reasonably sure that their products won't kill them. Instead companies want to be able to avoid that expense and just slap on a "Probably safe, but who knows?" label and hope that people with allergies will just buy the product and take their chances.
Honestly, I side with the companies on this one. It's just a matter of incentives - if the consequence of "getting it wrong" (i.e. saying a product is free of an allergen but then through some chance of cross-contamination that it ends up killing somebody) are enormous, I think it's hard to fault a company that then decides to explicitly add nuts, sesame, etc. to a product and explicitly state "You should not eat this if you have allergies."
More to your point, though, when you say "Which is one reason why some people will be tempted to roll the dice and end up dead or in the ER", I think that's huge hyperbole. Every single person I've ever known that has a severe allergy never "rolls the dice", and on the contrary they are extremely diligent about double checking that what they eat is allergen free. On the flip side, I've known people that have mild allergies to products (e.g. symptoms are on the level of lactose intolerance) who don't worry about avoiding trace amounts of allergens. Why conflate these 2 cases? I have certainly never known actual people with these differing levels of allergies to confuse their issues.
The problem with making it okay to just put a "this may or may not kill you" label on products is that more and more companies will do it just to shield themselves from liability regardless of what is in their foods (it's cheaper to add a label and not add an unnecessary ingredient than to add the ingredient and also label your product) so we seem to agree there. When every company has a "this might kill you, but maybe not" label just to cover their asses, large amounts of products are then made off limits to people who don't want to take the risk. When every company is using the "may contain" label as a shield and people start to think "Every company just puts that label on everything even when it's perfectly safe" they will take more chances too.
> Every single person I've ever known that has a severe allergy never "rolls the dice",...I've known people that have mild allergies to products (e.g. symptoms are on the level of lactose intolerance) who don't worry about avoiding trace amounts of allergens.
Again, the problem is that when people with mild allergies to products keep eating them it can cause them to have a severe allergic reaction and that leads to deaths and ER visits. It's not hyperbole, it's fact. Repeated exposure can increase severity and sensitivity and so people who feel safe with trace amounts because they have "always" only had a mild reaction in the past do roll the dice and some of them lose. Those people are also less likely to have epi pens to save them when they finally do run into trouble.
All the people you've known are welcome to keep playing that game, but generally the smart thing is to always avoid foods that you know cause your immune system to react no matter how mildly unless you're doing it under care of a doctor.
Where can one learn more about this? I thought allergy immunotherapy was about repeated exposure to the allergen. I'm not up to speed on allergies. Does anyone know how many sesame related allergy deaths there are in the U.S.?
https://www.aaaai.org/tools-for-the-public/latest-research-s...
"After primary sensitization, the allergic immune response is boosted with repeated exposure" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4414527/)
Lots of other things can effect sensitivity/severity too including age, stress, hormones, etc.
That's why if you're going to try to increase your tolerance to something you're allergic to through exposure it should always be done under the care of a doctor who will explain the risks, including the risk that your allergy becomes worse and your sensitivity to it higher. If the exposure isn't being done under observation you'll likely be given an epi pen. Desensitization therapy can help some people, but because of the risks it's often done for people who already have severe reactions and it can require a potentially lifelong commitment to taking some daily amount of the allergen in order to keep the benefits. It's not for everyone, but I wouldn't tell someone not to at least look into it with their doctor, especially with foods that are very hard to avoid.
Checking for allergens has a cost! Who is supposed to pay?
If you want the general public to pay for it, then mandate that every bakery certifies the amount of allergen in their bread: all the bread will cost more and the allergic people will be able to choose safely.
Otherwise, what else would you expect? Bakeries run their calculations and saw that certified sesame-free bread would cost too much for their customer base to keep buying from them, and opening a separate production line is not warranted by the predicted demand. What else could they do to stay in business?
I searched the web to figure out what happened since even the weight of the bread was noticeably off (tried weighing it on a scale). The new on-line label of ingredients, nutrition, and weight were ~10% off (over an oz), but they were still using the old labeled bags and upc/barcode.
I returned some to the grocery and let them know that all the ones on the shelf were also not the labeled weight. They were very annoyed.
(I assume they meant all of the EU’s list of Interesting Allergens.)
But a stray sesame seed gets into something and somebody gets a reaction and they sue. Essentially it went from "list allergens" to "If you don't list something, that's a hard promise it won't be in there"
See the difference? You can be diligent about keeping allergens out, but bakeries are big places with lots of equipment being used for lots of things. They can be diligent and still occasionally something gets in there - a tiny seed, stuck by static electricity to a paddle etc.
I suggest, to return some sanity to all this, that food preparers have a standard for diligence. If they meet it, then the occasional sesame seed is deemed a reasonable risk and to be understood. That civil cases can't be held limitlessly responsible for everybody's health.
FDA orders bakers to list allergens. There are stiff penalties if you are allergenic but don't list the allergen.
So? Bakers claim their product contains allergens, even if they don't.
FDA doesn't like it.
So? Bakers add allergens on purpose, so they can rightly claim it contains them.
> Use of a ‘may contain….’ statement, or similar, to indicate that the product may contain an allergen as a result of possible cross-contamination, must not take the place of good manufacturing practices (GMPs) in a food business.
> GMPs must be in place to prevent cross-contamination
[1] https://www.efanet.org/news/news/4327-efa-responds-to-codex-...
[2] https://www.fsai.ie/business-advice/labelling/labelling-alle...
If anything, centralization is the best tool to detect and avoid issues like this. Locally, every decision is completely reasonable. It’s only zoomed out that it doesn’t make sense.
FDA orders bakers to list allergens. There are stiff penalties if you are allergenic but don't list the allergen.
So? Bakers look at their production processes and determine there's a chance that enough allergens get into the product due to cross contamination to list it on the label, just in case.
FDA doesn't like it. They expect the bakers to fix their cross-contamination issues at great expense to themselves.
So? Bakers add allergens on purpose, so they can rightly claim it contains them. It's cheaper than setting up a clean room for every product line.
FDA orders bakers to list allergens. There are stiff penalties if you are allergenic but don't list the allergen.
So? Bakers look at their production processes and determine there's a chance that enough allergens get into the product due to cross contamination to list it on the label, just in case.
FDA doesn't like it. They expect the bakers to fix their cross-contamination issues at great expense to themselves.
So? Bakers add allergens on purpose, so they can rightly claim it contains them. It's cheaper than setting up a clean room for every product line.
FDA doesn't like it.
Which is insane.
I worked in a factory that packaged food, if one product contained an allergen, there was no way you could guarantee that a tiny amount of that allergen wouldn't get into some amount of the next product on that production line. No way. Not any possible way. You can clean all you want, you can do whatever you want, you can mandate whatever procedures you want, but there's just no way. Even if every half-awake half-sober completely uncaring third shift production worker (like 1990's era me) does everything exactly right, which they won't, even if they actually cared to, which they won't.
The FDA is putting manufacturers in an impossible position, and it's insane.
I have food allergies, believe me, I get it. But there's just no way. If a manufacturing facility produces products with tree nuts, someone with an allergy to tree nuts has to treat every product produced in or near that facility as though it contains tree nuts. That's reality.
The FDA is not dealing with reality. The problem here is the US federal government.
I don't think that's right. You don't necessarily need all 2^n kinds of facilities, because there might not be a commercial demand for products needing every one of those combos.
An ecosystem of centralized, mass production of baked goods is part of the problem, at least.
>They still exist, and some of them just make plain bread,
Honestly have never seen this, every bakery bakes at least something else that can be described as more than just plain white bread.
I used one for quite a while, even though I don't have any food allergies. I just stopped because I was eating too much fresh out of the oven bread.
Bread is flour, water, yeast, and heat. It feeds people. It's easy to make anywhere you have those things, which is... almost everywhere.
It doesn't require production lines or manufacturing facilities or packaging or even freight. All those things are artificial contrivances, and if they make it hard to practically address concerns like allergens, then maybe they're not a viable approach to providing foodstuffs after all.
Asking everyone to "play nice" or "don't be evil" also often does not work in practice. I mean I'd love it if it did, but such is life.
No one is trying to do anything evil. Every step is individually quite reasonable and well within ethical bounds. The issue is that you can produce systems comprised solely of reasonable and ethical decisions that nonetheless yield an outcome that every actor would describe as bad.
That is a useful way to interpret this situation and others, because you don’t waste your time looking for a boogeyman to call Evil and instead it prompts you to zoom out and operate on the bigger picture.
My dream is "game theory" taught in schools, so we can all more productively discuss public policy, etc.
The field of "mechanism design" may interest those to whom this speaks to. From Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design):
> Mechanism design is a branch of economics, social choice theory, and game theory that deals with designing games (or mechanisms) to implement a given social choice function. Because it starts at the end of the game (the optimal result) and then works backwards to find a game that implements it, it is sometimes called reverse game theory.
But I think it's a stretch to say nobody is being evil or unethical, because there's no consensus about what those entail.
It’s a coordination problem.
> How long must it go on
They can last indefinitely at immense cost.
> until we say "No, this is evil."?
Call it evil for as long as you want, especially if you’d prefer it remain unsolved. When you feel like solving it, a different framing will be much more useful.
Now I'm not saying thats what they did, perhaps they were scumbags, but its possible they did try to do what I said above and had the best intentions.
It's surreal and awesome.
Everyone ready for a trip to the happiest place on earth?
One of the first things you see walking in...
> The Disneyland Resort contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Ironically, I never even knew this, but apparently the proposition only exists because Jane Fonda thought it would draw left-leaning voters to the polls to hopefully vote for Tom Bradley over George Deukmejian in the 1986 race for California governor. She and the other proponents didn't even think the proposition itself would pass. But the proposition did pass and Bradley wasn't even elected!
This caused a problem when they added Vitamin A to the list of chemicals known to cause reproductive harm since one thousandth of the no effect level is far below the RDA for pregnant women.
Good luck refusing to get off the plane because you see the cancer warning and decide not to risk it.
…and literally, it may or may not be nuts.
- "FDA officials indicated that allergen labeling is a “not a substitute” for preventing cross-contamination in factories."
- "some companies began adding small amounts of sesame..FDA officials said that violated the spirit, but not the letter, of federal regulations"
Hence my open ended question, how do you legally and with the spirit of the law not serve the allergy market? If you allergen labeling is not a substitute for preventing cross-contamination...what if I as a baker/factory don't care about cross contamination?
Seems like "may contain trace xxx" is a factual statement if they don't ensure otherwise.
Math doesn't check out.
> If you hosted an event of 500 people, you could expect around 10 people to have a sesame allergy.
Same.
> 65,000 [...] ~1,300
Again.
sesame: 0.7 million
FARE citation: https://www.foodallergy.org/sites/default/files/2020-06/FARE...
US Population: 341mm
341 * .002 = 0.682mm
Some rounding errors but I think math stands.
We also offer the following comments:
Separate from the food allergen labeling requirements of the Act, firms may voluntarily place other information or statements on the labels of food products to disclose information about allergens to consumers. For example, firms may choose to voluntarily place allergen advisory statements on products to alert consumers to the possible presence of major food allergens due to cross-contact. Any allergen advisory statement must be truthful and not misleading.
https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...
On the other hand, Bimbo is misspelling Khorasan!
The ingredient list declares “Kamut®” which is not part of the common or usual name of Khorasan wheat because it is a brand name. Furthermore, Khorasan is misspelled as “Khorsan.”
I guess we can watch now how bakeries invent a “plausible” need to add sesame. Previously they admitted the true reason why they added sesame and got in trouble so to speak. So now they’ll fund some research or publish some article somewhere indicating sesame makes the bread taste better and point to that as the reason.
Subsidies for common allergens that become cheap filler is another part of the epidemic.
But it's not "contamination" if it's an ingredient, so if one thing in your factory has sesame in it, you're better off adding a tiny bit of sesame to everything else than you would be scouring the whole line between products.
Presumably the business folks have run the numbers, and you stand to lose less by losing the sesame-sensitive market than you would stand to gain by making everything verifiably sesame-free. For that matter, your sesame-sensitive folks probably are avoiding the product anyway if it "may contain traces," right?
[0] https://www.food-safety.com/articles/8903-fda-updates-guidan....
This is why lots of disability measures are (or campaigned to be) enforced by government. But now we're out of realm of free market and on to production quota, and that comes with its own consequences.
My point is it's not profitable for a large company like Bimbo to target that small segment. A smaller company, not trying to compete with Bimbo, can target that segment knowing Bimbo and other large companies are going to stay out of it. I don't understand why you don't see that as a solution. That kind of thing exists all over. Half the products at Whole Foods or maybe Erewhon are from small indie companies catering to small markets of people that want those things. It's arguably no different than a market that carries foods that aren't found at big chains like a market that has product from India or Russia or China.
If the market is too small then either those that need that need their special foods either have to pay $$$$ until there is a market or make them themselves. That seems normal to me. It's not other people's responsibility to provide for your needs.
There is no market for it. You need customers willing to pay the price. A small company, not trying to compete with Bimbo, cannot afford to sell >$100 USD allergen free bread, because no one would buy it.
You're right, it's not other people's responsibility to provide for your needs.
The problem is, the downstream effects of this policy make everything worse for people with sesame allergies, which is the opposite of the intended effect.
> Because it can be difficult and expensive to keep sesame in one part of a baking plant out of another, some companies began adding small amounts of sesame to products that didn't previously contain the ingredient to avoid liability and cost. FDA officials said that violated the spirit, but not the letter, of federal regulations.
> Consumers may also see advisory statements such as “may contain [allergen] or “produced in a facility that also uses [allergen].” Such statements are not required by law and can be used to address unavoidable “cross-contact,” only if manufacturers have incorporated good manufacturing processes in their facility and have taken every precaution to avoid cross-contact that can occur when multiple foods with different allergen profiles are produced in the same facility using shared equipment or on the same production line, as the result of ineffective cleaning, or from the generation of dust or aerosols containing an allergen.
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/food-allerg...
If you operate a punitive regulatory regime with respect to cross-contamination, you can't expect manufacturers to say "OK, we'll take the occasional fine and public-relations hit just to address this tiny part of the market" if that's not good business.
If you buy cotton cleaning patches for cleaning rifles, they come with Prop 65 warnings these days. Not because cotton causes cancer, but because cleaning your rifle can expose you to lead, and because plaintiff's attorneys can sue in private enforcement actions. So does the rifle, the solvent and the brass cleaning rod.
Also, as far as I can tell, most involved in this sucks, FDA for demanding regulation without investment, lobbyists for supplying a crap solution, and manufactures for not rising above it and rarely caring about the quality of their products.
My recommendation is to boycott store bakery isles in general, invest in $BVILF, and use your kitchen to make friends with your neighbors and get everyone you know making bread/baked goods at home. It absolutely takes privilege to follow this journey, but pay it forward with the bread you can make at home with simple ingredients.
The cost of proving it is sesame free and fines if they are wrong are not worth your business.
I also understand that a handicap ramp is likely considerably cheaper than retrofitting a manufacturing facility or building new sesame free facilities. It really would have been nice to see an investment from my taxes to lower the cost of this burden to enable new products. Obviously, that isn't going to happen.
My point of also posting was to let you know that you're now also being exposed to sesame flour, kinda without your consent, because they value capital over quality, and that's also their choice, and a choice you're also now participating in.
They might not produce a product that you would like, but that is a lack of interaction, not coercion.
Essentially, the sesame law made it mandatory to label for sesame like you would for Dairy, Peanuts, and Soy.
It was a blatant lobbyist attempt by non-Sesame producers that backfired.
[0] - https://www.foodallergy.org/resources/how-fare-advocates-hel...
Allowing companies to list every possible contaminant regardless of how likely it is to be in a product doesn't help anyone. It just leads to the "contents may be hot" problem on a coffee.
In this case, I prefer the "may contain" verbiage... saying something "does not contain" is a practical minefield. If you're that sensitive to something, find a producer that makes what you're asking for, or if you can tolerate a small amount, or make your own food from basic ingredients.
The group of people for whom "we take proper control of allergens" is a selling point is a very small one. One of the reasons government exist is to protect people who's interests would not be commercially viable - regulating that building are accessible with a wheelchair etc. Proper allergen control is the cost of doing business in that industry, attempting to blatantly side step regulation should be met with investigation and fines which make doing the right thing the cheaper option.
The idea that someone with an allergy should make all of their own food from basic ingredients is comically naive. Essentially ostracizing them from all social events where food is involved.
I say this as someone allergic to soy/legumes... It's in everything. I don't expect all food suppliers to stop using or handling it. I'm also willing to forgo bread because of my allergies.
Much like people with gluten allergies shouldn't expect the govt to force everyone to stop producing bread with gluten.
Every plant has someone allergic to it. At some point you have to be responsible for yourself. "May contain" means may contain, or: processed or stored near... That should have been good enough.
The FDA pushes back, as people with allergies shouldn’t be completely shut out from all baked goods. But I suspect they’ll have to tackle the root of the problem and better economically incentivize the control of the allergens if this is the desired outcome, since it seems the market is speaking and it’s saying there’s a problem with just saying “label the food better.”
All of that said, I don’t quite see the answer if the cause is just greed. Maybe in that case the bigger stick is warranted.
2g added sugar per 60 calories.
Wat
FDA would have a better reputation if their drug approval was more pro-consumer.
The labeling and laws around them seem to be tricky business, however, it should be time to treat the disease and not just the symptoms. The above quote from the CDC tells me that medical advice to new parents and/or diet has created a monster, and it's time to undo the harm. I have 5 children from age 5 to 27 from two different women, and not one has food allergies. I realize it is anecdotal data, but I also don't recall there being so many people with various allergies growing up, and parents I have spoken to that seem to have done the same with doctors and dietary choices for their children don't have children with allergies. So, does this mean in my youth, either kids with allergies died, didn't have allergies, or avoided whatever allergens were out there and were such a small percentage it didn't register? Personally, we didn't give our children antibiotics every time they had cold-like symptoms, or go to the doctor often, and we introduced solids at a very early age along with nuts (in paste form - peanut butter, tahini when they were very young), and a diverse diet. There were families around us that had one of their kids on antibiotics once or more a year for years, and they wouldn't question it, and they were early on the gluten thing before it became a thing.
I think it would be horrific to have a life-threatening allergy to even being exposed to the trace amount of anything. On the other side, I am so tired of not being able to find "normal" food without warnings, and the trend-of-the-day nutrients overcrowding the shelves and displacing other choices. It seems in the US at least, if you say something is good for you, it winds up everywhere in massive quantities. Remember the initial Quinoa boom? Quinoa cereals, buns, drinks, tablets, in pasta, salads, etc. I know it's a grain like wheat is omnipresent, but one day the supermarket shelves get loaded with it until the next health trend comes along - Acai this, Acai that, Avocado this, that, Olive oil, Matcha, Gingko, Ginseng (80s!), Almonds (to the point of overcultivation), etc... Nothing in moderation or common sense, but marketing overload, and the public literally eats it up. I can't even find full-fat yogurt that easy now. My local ShopRite has almost 95% low-fat, no-fat, yogurts on the shelves with 5% or full-fat yogurt, and supposedly fat is good again, it's sugar that's the main culprit for obesity and diabetes and other related diseases in the US.
PS: Imagine trying to run a business in a litigious society where now 50% more people have food allergies to so many things that you need a mass spectrometer or other instrument to make bread to ensure it has what seems to be an undefined trace of one of many related food elements. Life has gotten ridiculous.
[1] https://irp.nih.gov/blog/post/2023/05/digging-up-the-roots-o...