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.
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.
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.)
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.