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Comment by causality0 | Hacker News Reader

You have a legal duty to not poison people by telling them there aren't allergens in their food when there might be. You don't have a legal duty to create a hypoallergenic product line. Regulations exist to protect your rights, not make your shopping experience more convenient.

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What's an allergen? Or, more interestingly, what isn't an allergen?

Oh, great, people are living up to their legal duty, I'm so proud of them and totally won't think they don't give a shit about other people if they do the cheapest thing that satisfies the regulation.

People are going to buy the cheapest option that satisfies the regulation. If giving shit about other people means systematically buying more expensive options they won't give any.

People can buy whatever they want, it's the producers changing their recipe or labeling that demonstrates not giving a shit.

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.

They are changing the recipe in order to keep the product cheap, because compliance on this would be really fucking expensive, requiring completely and permanently separate facilities for products that contain each specific allergens and those that don't.

Right, the breadmakers don't give a shit about this. That's ok, the breadbuyers like me don't give a shit either.

This is food. It has so many more quality dimensions than price point and regulation compliance.

If they did start adding small amounts of the ingredients in question, admiration for their malicious compliance would make me more likely to buy their product, especially if it's also the cheapest. They have two options: acknowledge that perfect isolation is an unrealistic goal for their facility, or put aside some money for a legal fund for when their unlabeled food eventually kills someone.

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