Costco’s butter recall, explained
forbes.com
forbes.com
Under the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act, there's 8 groups that MUST be labeled: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat and soybeans.
Everyone with an allergy knows to check that section of the packaging (it comes after the long list of ingredients), and you can trust it to be accurate. It can't just be right most of the time... it has to always be right.
If that trust is broken, America will be a much less safe place.
Do you believe milk should be labeled with "contains milk"
Secondly, people in general also know what those are.
Cookie butter is sweet spread primarily made of ground up cookies and is from France/Belgium/the Netherlands.
In a culinary context, something can obviously be made with lots of butter and no milk.
In an allergen context it's totally different, but isn't the normal question whether it contains dairy?
I mean, in a regular cooking context, the Americans sound totally correct to me, unless they know you're asking because you're allergic.
Which is to say, that the label missing from this particular batch is likely to have had zero impact positive or negative on the overall situation.
if there's regulations that say a package must list what is inside, shouldn't there also be regulations that say you can't list ingredients that are not inside?
THAT's why this isn't about government overreach. The SANCTITY of the labeling is important, so that it can be relied on NO MATTER WHAT
The only person you can rely on is yourself, if for no other reason than mistakes happen (case in point).
And then what? Maybe your relatives can sue the company after you died. Fat lot of good that does for you.
Please don't blindly trust the labeling and exercise some basic common sense. Do you really want to be in the afterlife, thinking "well, the box didn't say milk, so how could I have known that butter contains milk"?
Should peanut butter be allowed to call itself “butter” by that logic?
Thus “chocolate milk” and “strawberry milk” mean milk mixed with chocolate or strawberries, while “oatmilk” and “almondmilk” may contain no milk at all. Though I’m not sure whether a product that mixed almond flavoring into dairy milk could be labeled “almond milk”.
People with dairy allergies shouldn’t be relying on the presence or absence of a space to determine if a product is safe for consumption.
Your rule explodes into "Label every vaguely-relevant allergen your food does not contain.". Not only is that a rule that's inevitably going to miss something in the long run, it's WAY more complicated than the "Label the allergens your food does contain." rule.
That's utterly ridiculous. Milk is already a listed ingredient of milk and butter. It does not need an extra label.
Also, if a product claims to be Milk and it isn't, that fact should be stated to stop confusion.
Centuries of past labeling disagree with you here. Non-dairy "milks" have been called "milk" for ages. That's going to be impractical to change.
> Milk is already a listed ingredient of milk and butter. It does not need an extra label.
"Explicitly and separately listing allergen classes of a food product in addition to listing specific allergenic ingredients in the ingredients list." is the entire practice most of the folks in these threads are talking about. If you disagree that that practice has any value, then we are not going to have much of anything to agree on.
No, that's fairly obvious. Also, broccoli doesn't claim to be milk. So, it doesn't need that label.
I can understand how people with a dairy allergy might want to double-check an alternative milk to make sure it doesn't contain any real milk, or was processed in a bottling facility that also processes dairy milk, or something like that...
But it's hard for me to see how people with a dairy allergy might want to double-check the regular milk...?
As someone else said, is what makes people happy here making the regulations more complex with special cases - when someone not knowing those special cases could potentially kill them?
It's not just the fact that these things aren't milk, but they are also nutritionally and culinarily very different.
https://perfectday.com/blog/why-animal-free-dairy-still-cont...
The dairy industry has always fought the FDA on this, arguing that anything besides milk from a cow should not be allowed to be labeled as milk:
https://agfundernews.com/dairy-farmers-urge-fda-to-crack-dow...
https://www.nmpf.org/on-almonds-dont-lactate-anniversary-dai...
The matrix is big and will only continue to grow: lactose-free milk, animal-free dairy milk, almond milk, oat milk, strawberry milk, etc. Multiply that across milk-derived product analogues like butter and ice-cream and it becomes even more confusing. The meaning on the allergy label is quite specific!
It's not so bad if they pull the stuff that hasn't sold.
EDIT: Again, people are trained to trust the labels – not to parse the marketing. That's why they exist. If someone in a kitchen says "grab the dairy-free butter", the most accurate way to check is to glance at the "Contains" label. Once that trust is broken, the label is useless.
I certainly hope that anyone cooking food at a restaurant knows that butter is a milk product.
Well, yes, because 99 percent of people in general know that butter is made from milk, and that includes 100 percent of the people who might visit my house. And if I did somehow have a visitor so profoundly broken that they didn't know it, I would notice that.
Also approximately 100 percent of professional cooks know that butter is made from milk.
Grandparent poster is just throwing all the hypotheticals for the remote chance of "But what if, and if, and if, and if...".
I am now curious about that "approximately".
The butter in my fridge right now doesn't have labels on it. Because I take it out of the box it comes in and put an individual stick in that little covered shelf at the top of the door. My understanding is that that's what that shelf is for, so I suspect that this is a fairly common thing to do.
This is just a labeling/packaging issue where there is nothing harmful about the product itself.
Also, how many people with milk issues would be confused by the missing info and think there's a new type of milk free butter?
Like I get that for plenty of other foods where it is, of course, non-obvious.
But I would assume you know that no package of butter will ever not say milk? (Or if it didn't, it was mislabeled, like in this article?) So that you don't even bother checking?
That’s why they say to throw it out. 90% of people will ignore the recommendation. Some will dispose out of an abundance of caution, some will dispose because they had the thought I listed at the top of your comment.
But in this particular case, in order to comply with the instructions telling you to throw the butter away, you need to know that this is the butter you bought that actually contains milk but isn't labeled so.
The very act of noticing that the butter doesn't have the right label tells you that it contains milk.
If it wasn't made from milk, it would actually be illegal (and factually incorrect) to label it as butter.
An analogy would be if you picked up water that wasn't labeled as containing hydrogen, in a hypothetical world where hydrogen must be labeled, and you concluding that this water must be made without hydrogen.
Anyways my point is that it just causes confusion in a system where, normally, you can simply trust that the labels are following the law.
Right, so if you pick up a package that says "Unsalted Butter" and nothing else, who the hell is going to assume no milk was used? Even worse when the ingredients listed on the same box say Milk as literally the only ingredient.
Along the same lines, if you have a peanut allergy and you buy a jar that says Peanut Butter with an ingredients list that starts with "Peanuts", you kind of deserve to pay the stupid tax.
> If that trust is broken, America will be a much less safe place.
America can simultaneously be the safest place on earth for those with food allergies, while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense.
Instead, to please some faceless career bureaucrats, 80,000 pounds of butter will be destroyed to "protect" the dumbest among us.
But there's a lot of foods that say butter that don't contain "Milk". Does "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" contain milk? Does Shea butter? Does Garlic butter? Are you so sure you're right about each of these that you'd risk someone's life over it?
In the US, packaging is guaranteed to have an accurate "contains" section. It's not just a nice-to-have; people's lives depend on it.
I get that this is a pretty clear example that it contains milk – but that's what makes it interesting. Lives may not be at stake here, but the trust in the "contains" label is. We can't leave it up to "well, most people should know" – it has to be consistently enforced, or it becomes completely useless.
Couldn't I say the opposite? "Instead, to please some faceless career Costco executives, the trust in the 'Contains' labeling will be destroyed to "protect" the people who mislabeled their product."
The box of Unsalted Butter already says "Milk" in the ingredients list. It does not need a second warning that says "Contains Milk". The article seem to be confusing the two - they are two different "labels" on the same packaging.
Is there a human alive that would read the ingredients list and think to themselves, "Hmm, it says Milk is an ingredient, but I don't see a 'Contains Milk' warning, so it probably doesn't contain milk!"?
That is the bureaucratic nonsense people are sick and tired of.
You clearly don't have a deadly food allergy. "Contains" is highly regulated ("Ingredients" is not), and everyone with a food allergy trusts "Contains". This isn't about this one particular situation, which admittedly is obvious. It's about maintaining the trust of the "Contains" section.
Who is "sick and tired of" allergy labels being too strict? Is this really something people get up in arms about?
People are sick and tired of nonsense bureaucracy - and this is a prime example.
Destroying 80,000 pounds of perfectly fine butter so some bureaucrats can pat themselves on the back is pretty absurd. Nobody was harmed - nobody was saved. This is just waste because some piece of paper says it has to be wasted...
I, as someone with an allergy, am grateful for the "faceless" people who show up every day for an unglamorous job and keep me alive.
I would agree with you more if it was not a product where Milk was the only ingredient.
This kind of bureaucratic action lacks common sense and protects no one. That's the kind of bureaucracy we don't need.
Does something labeled "butter" contain milk? Does something labeled "milk" contain milk? This thread shows the answers to these questions are not straightforward and cannot be determined with common sense.
We -have- to have strict labeling rules around allergens and destroy products that don't comply because if we didn't, it would just be the wild west like it is with products that are not allergens.
Products are confusing, we shouldn't expect people to know how today's industrial food process works.
No, this is absurd. We don’t have to destroy products that can otherwise be put to good use. The minuscule number of people who are simultaneously deathly allergic to milk and unaware that cream is milk would be just as well served by a recall that said to destroy the product if you have a milk allergy.
This is a black eye on the FDA, and at a time we can least afford the agency to have one. They should have worked out another solution with Costco.
I don’t get this nonsense where a bunch of people can neither empathize nor understand that people other than themselves exist and should be able to rely on relatively simple packaging, and that the instant you create inane and bizarre carve-outs, you create risk for absolutely no benefit whatsoever.
Literally just to save money, ala the Elon/Trump D.O.G.E
This is a "waste" which costs money, which raises their taxes, so it shouldnt exist.
This isn't government overreach, this is a company trying to save money by doing less QA and getting bit for it.
THIS TIME it was caught, and handled, and the company is seeing a negative outcome for their lack of diligence in making OUR FOOD. What about next time? Maybe companies should be discouraged from lacking QA like this?
It's QA over packaging.
And you have no evidence that this was motivated by trying to "save money by doing less QA".
US food manufacturers generally do their absolute best on QA because recalls are super expensive and the headlines are bad. But companies are made up of humans who are never going to be 100.0000000% perfect.
That achieves the same result without the destruction of perfectly good food.
These aren't new rules and are in place to literally save lives.
Are people really "sick and tired" of .003% of the butter being recalled? I feel like repeating "80,000 pounds" is attempting to appeal to emotion over the destruction of some mass quantity when in reality it's a rounding error.
It's also attempting to appeal to rampant innumeracy!
People are sick and tired of nonsense bureaucracy
So much is taken for granted in our modern world because so many are unwilling to surrender to complexities beyond their reasoning. They alone have the answer and all must know it.
I, personally, am sick and tired of people complaining about various government functions without seriously contemplating said functions. Is there a way to ask for an exemption to a food labeling rule to avoid waste? I have no idea. But I can play pretend-management-consultant as well as the next person, and we’re talking about on the order of $200k of merchandise, and relabeling it would involve coordinating sending it back to the factory, applying the fixes (I can basically guarantee that, while the factory can efficiently package butter, it probably lacks the tooling to unpackage the butter), and getting it back to stores in time for the Feb-Mar 2025 best-by date. This is absolutely not worth it. And it’s not even worth the paperwork to as the FDA for some kind of exemption.
What I would do if I worked at Costco is to see if I could legally sell it all in bulk to a very small number of very large buyers, and then offer it to some such buyers at a massive discount. “Hey, want 10k boxes of mislabeled butter? You need to sign some documents promising that you will either use or destroy all of it and not give it to anyone else in its present packaging, but you can have it for $5/box.” Even that might be a tough sell, since buyers on that scale probably don’t want their butter in 8oz sticks…
If this were an order of magnitude larger, maybe it would be worth Costco’s energy to see if they could slap stickers on the outer packaging to solve the problem.
Want to make it clear i’m not arguing with this against the current alergen labeling laws. I see it as a variant of Postel’s principle. The food manufacturers should label everything strictly, and consumers affected by any alergy should assume that where there is no information then the alergen they worry about is present. This way the system remains trustworthy while the customers can safely avoid where mistakes are made or packaging gets damaged or smudged or anything like that.
Do food products with none of the major allergens need "Contains Nothing" on their packaging?
Then maybe it should be Ingredients that is highly regulated as the source of truth? "Contains" is effectively redundant and incomplete.
Take that example and apply it to every single ingredient used in food and cosmetics and supplements. Write that regulation please.
Or we can stick to the one that only deals with like, 5 - 10 things.
I've made mistakes on food that has _just_ "ingredients", missing entries while scanning at the grocery store.
Unfortunately, "contains" isn't required, and its location isn't always obvious. imo it should flatly be always required and always in a standardized layout/location (e.g. in a clear to read box).
https://www.fda.gov/files/food/published/Food-Labeling-Guide...
I'd say the recall is probably more pointless, who is going to check this at home?
Why do we have only the nuclear recourse?
If you set punishments at the "cost of doing business" level, then businesses will choose [0] to take the punishment, rather than complying with the regulation.
This is a food safety regulation of the sort where some people will die if it's not compiled with. It's also a food safety regulation that's easy to comply with... if the manufacturer is aware of what's in their food.
IMO, noncompliance with this is a sign that something's fucking wrong with the company and maybe shouldn't be in charge of making food for people to eat. Remember that one band that had the "no brown M&Ms in the band's candy bowl" clause in their performance contracts? While I can't claim that this is a "canary" regulation, it sure smells like it could serve as a pretty solid one given how easy it is to comply with.
[0] Not always, but more often than "never", and probably more often than not.
The recall makes sense for stuff still on the shelves. It's a bit silly, but rules are rules. Pull it and stuff it in different packaging, or pay a crew of a couple folks in each store to pull it out of the boxes and donate to a local food kitchen.
The FDA telling people at home to throw it away - after they are made aware of the issue in the first place or they wouldn't have known to be told to throw it away - is utter ridiculousness and the government workers here should absolutely know better. They are undermining their authority and don't even realize it.
This will be used as a very effective tool against the institution in the future. It was a stupid tone-deaf call. They could have simply worked with Costco and put out a generalized notice to the public to be aware of the situation. Nuance matters.
This is an unnecessary own-goal by a government agency that doesn't need such things at the moment. It has done more damage to public health than it will ever have hoped to gain - which would be correctly estimated at zero.
Are they?
I was unable to find any evidence of this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42153441>. If you can find an official statement from the FDA that recommends (or orders) folks at home to dispose of the recalled food, I'd appreciate it.
> The FDA has shared specific steps to help consumers handle this recall safely. First, check the product codes on your butter containers and compare them to the codes in the recall notice. If you have one of the recalled batches, the FDA advises not to eat it under any circumstances. Instead, throw it out to avoid any health risks. For any questions or possible refunds, reach out to Costco through their customer service team.
Edit: It is certainly curious that this looks like boilerplate language. I do wonder if it originates from an FDA spokesperson, or if the author copy/pasted a previous press release from Costco? Another article[0] explicitly states the FDA did not make any recommendations to consumers, but mentions the quoted statement and sourced it from foodsafety.gov as a general recommendation for "recalled products".
Looking like the author completely made up the quote out of whole cloth by copy/pasting boilerplate generalized language while implying it was a directly related to the issue at hand. Nice catch!
[0]https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2024/11/13/costco-b...
Edit 2: Can't reply directly due to ratelimiting - but yes, you are absolutely correct that the FDA has not urged anyone, or even explicitly recommended it be thrown away. The above was my independent sleuthing before seeing your followup. Others did far better.
I don't share the opinion this was "lazy telephone" by a reporter though - this was outright deliberate making things up to generate a narrative. Either there was a phone call/e-mail by a FDA rep these articles are quoting, or they are simply trying to generate outrage on purpose. There is no game of lazy telephone that can explain word choices such as "FDA urges" and the like to appear out of whole cloth.
It looks like the article author (and/or editor) has played lazy telephone, and the FDA issued no such statement.
The information super highway is a race to the bottom human ignorance.
It USED to be the case that you could click the direct link to a comment to get the reply box to appear when the little "reply" link is refusing to show up. That might no longer be true, but it's worth a try next time you run into this.
> ...this was outright deliberate making things up to generate a narrative.
Oh, that's not an unreasonable assessment.
> There is no game of lazy telephone that can explain word choices such as "FDA urges" and the like to appear out of whole cloth.
If one site reports it, then other sites repeat it, that totally qualifies as "lazy telephone", IMO.
Honestly? Yeah.
There are a lot of little things you need to make sure happen correctly to produce and ship safe food that's fit for human consumption. If the QA for the package redesign failed to notice that the legally-mandated allergen field is missing from the package, what else is company QA letting slip through the cracks? [0]
Also, I don't know if you've ever worked for a company that had a management change that destroyed the company's ability to continue to ship a proper product, but I definitely have, as have folks I've known. By the time folks outside the company notice, the rot is usually bad, bad, bad.
Additionally: Remember that "a signal of something fucking wrong" is not the same as "something is fucking wrong". People and organizations are known to send out worrisome signals and still be fundamentally sound. But in the area of food safety, it's the job of the FDA to notice these worrisome signals and go look to see if something is currently fucking wrong with the company.
[0] Or if those labels are manually applied, the same question holds.
Fair points, but this recall looks to be vendor-initiated from the actual FDA website itself. Found via previous sleuthing in our discussion downthread. The FDA is simply adding it to it's database as it does, and the media picked it up from there. It's unlikely we'll ever be told if this was found via customer complaint, or via an internal QA process.
The one point also that I meant to make earlier, is that these products are likely contracted out. I wonder how many creameries Costco outsources their butter production to? I know other Kirkland products are simple rebrands, so I would assume the case is the same here as well.
That's a good question. The rumor I heard says that Costco plays super, duper hardball with companies that aren't willing to pay the low, low price Costco wants... using tactics such as waiting until a vendor's product nears the point of becoming unsellable as leverage. If that rumor's true, well, Costco may contract with very many creameries and serve as a "retailer of last resort" for them.
If the packaging is 'Kirkland' branded, and was provided by Costco, I wonder what fuckup happened so that the allergens section was omitted from the packaging. It'd be fucking dumb for that label to have to be manually applied. [0] So... was this a packaging printing error? If so, who was responsible for the QA?
> ...this recall looks to be vendor-initiated...
That may be a signal that the creamery caught the error and recalled the shipments. It might ALSO be the case that Costco caught the error and demanded the vendor recall the shipments. I don't think we have the data required to determine who deserves the credit for that action.
[0] But things that are fucking dumb happen all the time, so that's not proof that that's not what's up.
There has been a lot wrong since the early 1970s, but the nature of ponzi dynamics are that they show no direct evidence upfront that might allow prevention of the downward failures later.
We are only seeing the consequences of these things now that its reached past a tipping point. That said regulation only fuels and worsens the issues you describe.
The underlying issue is many market sectors have become so concentrated in terms of marketshare that these companies can tacitly cooperate from a distance. When these things happen and destroy the fine balance, chaos reigns, distortions will grow, and society fails back to the natural rule of violence.
Regulation acts as a barrier to entry only further concentrating the sector by imposing cost on all entrants as a sieve. When the sieve blocks everything, all you have left is collapse in systems that require continual growth to function.
When resources are concentrated in few hands, bad decisions made by the blind result in catastrophic consequence.
The dynamic nature of fiat economies is a simple fact that what goes up must eventually come down, and money printing via preferential debt loans, government subsidies, or other grants play a important part in in ensuring collapse through state-run/dependent apparatus. It might look like a private company, but if its dependent on revenue from a money printer its not, and those with more constraints die off faster. Its like putting a tarp over landscape to kill off everything underneath.
Over time just like with all ponzi's you have several stages. The benefit stage (boom), the diminishing returns stage (sideways), and the bust stage (where outflows exceed inflows). We are now entering stage 3, and as a nation will exceed debt growth vs. GDP within the next 5 years. This fundamentally violates Adam Smith's requirements for producers, and after such a point no market can exist. The economy collapses to non-market socialism which is categorically known to fail.
Normal business can't compete with a money printer, and so they are crowded out leaving a barren shrinking marketplace. Telltale signs of ruin yet to come.
Importantly, Ludwig von Mises warned about this in his 1930s works on Socialism, which was a failure study of the structures involved in bureacracy, and marxism, which apply broadly to all centralized systems involving people. It largely remains un-refuted today (100 years later).
When currency fails, production fails. In a disadvantaged environment where you have ecological overshoot (as we have been since the 1970s), what do you suppose happens when the order of society fails? food production fails, and a great dying occurs.
While these dynamics are slow, they are inevitably once primed, and the outcomes will be the consequence of decades of policy created by evil men. Evil simply being defined as the willfully blind, committing destructive acts.
People ought to protect their children's future, not destroy it and their children indirectly by extension, but the latter is exactly what has happened since the boomer generation took political power, and what is to come will be their legacy; assuming some people manage to survive this malthusian reversion.
You have a generation that has distorted the economy to the point where its uneconomical to have children. The old crowded out the resources needed to sustain the next generation, and in most respects there is no fixing this since the act of doing so would require solving 6+ problems that are inherently intractable and impossible (i.e. n-body limited visibility systems), and we are already at the limits to growth. All that awaits is the fall, and agency has been stripped slowly but surely to ensure everyone takes the same ride down.
We are living through some of the darkest times.
Nope. Regulation (whether by law, by rules set by a regulatory body, or by disorganized "social pressure") is the only thing that can even attempt to keep the powerful in check.
Bad regulations, bad regulators, and bad laws happen. That doesn't mean that we should stop regulating or stop enforcing all laws.
Your response is very characteristic of people I know who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, which makes me earnestly concerned for you.
Your statements and line of reasoning are easily found invalid and discarded by contradiction or counter-example, and credibility goes out the window when invalid fallacy happens more than once in short succession, at least in normal conversation among healthy individuals, typically.
Historically, violence as a means of keeping the powerful in check has been used successfully a number of times which contradicts your statement on regulation.
No one said we should stop regulating or enforcing laws, you seem to have hallucinated this. (concerning...)
Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness, and delusion lasting longer than a few weeks is a strong indicator, alongside other indications (hallucinations/illogical non-sequitur means of reasoning).
Please seek help for a proper examination/diagnosis by a qualified mental health professional.
Those with schizophrenia commonly end up harming themselves unknowingly, as a result of the related perceptual blindness the disease imposes.
In case you are wondering, the main difference between the delusional and healthy rational people is the former rarely if ever question the validity (truth) of their statements/beliefs, while healthy people constantly question and probe for flawed structures so they can build back better.
I hope you don't take offense, it is a serious illness which impacts many, where the victims of it often do not and cannot recognize it as it is happening, and prognosis is often better following early treatment. If you see something, you say something.
I hope I am wrong, but I can't simply ignore three objective indicators of mental illness in three sentences.
No it doesn't, it says "Cream". That's the issue.
To be clear, I'm fine with the recall because you want stuff like this to have clear lines, I just don't think there is any actual real danger in this case.
For example, they can read road signs. If you put up a new road sign that means the same thing as a previous one, they won't be able to read it. If you replace a "Stop" sign with a "Brake" sign, they won't stop. Because they don't read "Stop" - they know the sign means they should stop.
I'm sure there's thousands of Americans accustomed to reading the "contains:" label who would be blindsided by this. Particularly because today a lot of, maybe most, "dairy" product don't contain milk.
Nevertheless, I would certainly hope that if someone's life depends on avoiding milk products, that they learned a long time ago not to buy butter.
I mean I get your broader point, but it's just that in this specific case this isn't shea butter or apple butter or whatever... it's butter butter.
Like, listing wheat as an allergen on a candy bar, of course. But if you have a milk allergy, there's absolutely no universe in which you should even be picking up the butter to check in the first place.
Not everyone speaks perfect english. One of the times I had an allergic reaction, it's because I didn't know all the Spanish word for peanuts... and the english translation right below it skipped that word.
And peanuts in something that isn't obviously made of peanuts, of course. That's what allergen labels are for, nobody's arguing against that.
But you can't really mistake a bar of butter for anything else except margarine. And it you have a milk allergy, you're gonna make sure you know what the words are for butter vs. margarine, I should think?
Regulations that require the allergen labeling and don't make exceptions will obviously be shorter than regulations that make exceptions.
If the outcome were worse for consumers, I can see arguing for the more complicated regulation, but having a clear statement of the allergens regardless of the product doesn't hurt consumers any (If you disregard the bother from the redundancy anyway).
No, I'm just saying that in this particular instance literally nobody should have suffered any harm.
I'm just saying, it's hard to believe anyone was harmed in this particular case.
What does "Milk" mean in the context of "Contains Milk"
Is almond milk, oat milk, soy milk, coconut milk included?
Milk of magnesia?
You are incorrect. The labeling laws have a number of loopholes which fail to appropriately or accurately list ingredients. No guarantees are made and it can hardly be called accurate.
Yes this impacts lives, and speaking as one from the afflicted cohort, labeling is a joke and has no measure of trust to begin with. For example GRAS ingredients in trace amounts often don't warrant being included in the label, there are weight cut-offs, and only known major allergens (of which relatively little research is done in proportion to other endeavors) are excluded from these loopholes. Natural or Artificial Flavors can be any of many different ingredients on a long list.
To top this off, these same laws may or may not be enforced with any consistency when the products are used as intermediate inputs (and originally processed outside the US). They often don't test for traces except in highly debased markets (such as honey), or after a consumer lab brings it to their attention.
There is also no distinction between size of the ingredients which impacts safety; and this can be important. For example, asbestos isn't harmful until it gets really small where it then can lead to mesothelioma.
Titanium Dioxide is often used as a food additive, but there have been no safety studies done since they began processing it using nanoscale particle sizes.
From what I've seen in the literature, they did these safety testing on large particles before modern advancement, and simply claim the smaller particles are the same (implicitly) without proper controls or testing to verify. This is often allowed under the self-certification of safety loophole as Beyond Meats did with the gene edited beats/heme.
Also, since they changed requirements to new anti-trans fat oils in processing I can't eat out anymore because the oils (which need not be disclosed) induce dermatological and inflammatory issues that manifest visibly within 1-2 hours. They are GRAS and I know many people who suffer from this including most of my extended family. Little research has actually been done/published.
To put this all in perspective, given all of these confounding issues, labeling already is nearly completely useless and lacks consistency to begin with. No claim of consistency can be valid until you are consistent in these other areas first.
> I get that this is a pretty clear example that it contains milk.
You literally cannot make "butter" any other way. Margarine is not butter. Garlic Butter is made with butter, Shea butter is a cosmetic and in the name says what it is derived from; you don't have rational people calling shea butter, butter. These issues fundamentally go to all language and by extension definition.
The word butter has a historic and common shared meaning absent adjective modifiers. It is distinct (unique), and definitionally made from milk.
This is the def'n from Oxford Dictionary. -A pale yellow dairy fat used in cookery and as a spread, made by churning milk or cream and straining off the buttermilk to leave a solid substance.
Inherent in the product description (name) is the fact the fact that it is derived from milk and will thus contain milk products.
> Couldn't I say the opposite
First that's not the opposite, and second you can say anything and what you say has no bearing on the truthfulness (people can both lie and tell the truth, and the fact that they can do both doesn't indicate one or the other).
In this context, no that would lack any real meaning, and end up being flawed reasoning which relies on the same false justification as the other line of thought, the forgone conclusion that there was trust to begin with, and the reason-ability.
You can justify anything circularly, all the way down to delusional madness, false and truth cannot be determined without external objective identity.
The structure of circular reasoning fundamentally fails objectively since there is no externally based identity (definition), and worse the structure abuses the contrast principle of your and reader's psychology to make it convincing despite it being fallacy, and delusion if you were to accept it as truth. These techniques are well known, have been abused for centuries, and often involve strategy to create convincing lies and deceit.
Inducing and misleading people towards delusion isn't something rational or good people ought to do, but there is benefit in promoting deceits following such structure, since not everyone can do the mental gymnastics (discriminating against intelligence), and it allows greater accumulation of power left unchecked (leading from the "banality of evil" to the "radical evil").
Complacency often mentioned in the banality of evil, is after all a form of sloth (a deadly sin, and warned against because of its destructive influence).
People lie all the time today, often without knowing, and believing and justifying lies as truth is the definitional path towards delusion. Schizophrenia diagnosis rely heavily on the fact that delusion is prevalent in the people being diagnosed, and techniques and related structure originating in torture induce delusion involuntarily.
The outcomes related to delusion, given sufficient time, are always destructive.
Finally, the world is not a safe place, nor can it be made so. There is inherent risk in everything you do. Those that would seek to make a safe world, inevitably and blindly through complacency tread and limit agency, where those same people would then support and seek enslavement, and death for all given the right opportunity.
They would do so because they wouldn't know better because they have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their own actions, and in so doing unknowingly violate oaths and beliefs they claim to hold dear.
The latter characterization is a valid characterization for describing evil people (willfully blind people) who commit evil (destructive) acts. They need not believe that they fall into this label categorically, but objectively and externally as an outcome the truth remains unchanged regardless of belief.
Lots of people in the U.S. don't know that butter is made from milk. I have met plenty of people who don't know that cheese is a dairy product. I have met plenty of people who think that mayonnaise is a dairy product... Very few people know that American caramel is a dairy product...
while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense.
This is not bureaucratic nonsense. Reporting ingredients has been table stakes for selling foodstuffs in the U.S. for several decades. A company that can't get something that basic right is also getting something else wrong. And that's the point of these seemingly bureaucratic rules: they're basically unit tests for the regulatory agencies to identify issues they require followup.
If there are people who are allergic to dairy who don't know butter or cheese come from milk, then I think there's an even bigger problem here...
If the person cooking is uneducated enough to not know that butter and cheese come from milk, I highly doubt they're checking the box the butter comes in for an allergen listing.
The purpose of the regulations isn't about what anyone may think others will or won't do with the information, it's about making the information readily and unambiguously available.
I own a food-manufacturing business. Such businesses aren't trying to please anyone; we're following regulations. There are plenty of other such safety regulations that might seem unnecessary or pointless, but they're in place and they exist to help make certain food remains safe.
>...80,000 pounds of butter will be destroyed to "protect" the dumbest among us.
Regulations like this are meant to make certain even those most in need of awareness are informed. You may think they're the "dumbest," while I see them as people just as qualified to be informed as any other consumer.
Perhaps they are a vegan and think it is (e.g.) almond butter:
Overall, this is the cheapest way to do things. Verifiable information transmission is usually harder than most things. It’s why we do things like reduce aerospace composite strength by riveting them - inspectability costs something but the value is higher.
In the specific case of butter the whole ingredient list is small enough that reading it every time would be no big deal, but many food items contain dozens of ingredients and the manufacturers often make changes to the recipe. If people cannot rely on the allergen list at the bottom they would have to read the full ingredient list of everything every time.
At least, I doubt that you can write a set of rules for declaring allergens that is shorter if you do include exceptions to the labeling requirements. And I think there's a pretty strong argument that treating the ingredients and allergens as separate sections makes the allergens easier to interpret than sometimes requiring reading both.
Does that help people with sesame allergies? Unclear overall as it both helps and harms them.
Industry decides "It would cost a little money to find out if we have sesame in our product, so instead just add a little sesame and then label it"
And you blame THE GOVERNMENT?! The one hurting allergic people here is the company putting sesame in everything so they don't have to give a shit about people with allergies.
I'm so tired of American companies taking the dumbest, most harmful routes to things, and all of you stand up and shout at THE GOVERNMENT, as if Biden himself told Nestle to just put sesame in everything.
Saner populations would correctly be angry at the companies making these overtly harmful decisions.
Even if the company doesn’t intentionally have sesame in their product, what if one of their suppliers gives them sesame tainted flour or something?
If they don’t have a ‘May contain sesame’ warning then they might lose tons of money because they have to recall the product later.
The problem here is how lawsuit friendly America is.
If the legislators did any research at all, they would not have made such a boneheaded change.
Like Dr. Gupta said in the article, it is "so disappointing" that companies add sesame to products that didn't originally have them (they've done this with peanut flour too), but it's absolutely worth the tradeoff of getting sesame added as a "must label" allergen.
There's so much uncertainty surrounding food allergy safety (particularly regarding children), and it can be heavy knowing that each meal could be your last.
Barring impossible-to-avoid circumstances like the 2015 cumin fiasco (where suppliers cut spices with ground-up peanut shells), it's a true weight off your back knowing that a product does not contain an allergen
But, if that's notably more expensive than tossing the butter in the trash, then tossing it in the trash makes sense. We have plenty of milk and cows. We can always make more butter.
Don't worry, if RFJ jr. is to be believed, you won't have a FDA soon. The free market will take care of the problem.
Nine groups, since 2023: the FASTER Act mandates labeling sesame as well.
"America can simultaneously be the safest place on earth for those with food allergies, while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense."
"I get that this seems like an overreach, but America is incredibly safe for people with allergies and it's because of enforcement like this."
In my 40+ years of life in India, and among the many people that I've seen or interacted with in 5 Indian states (among 28 States), I've rarely heard someone say they have allergies the way they have in the US. In US, people have allergies to almost everything.
In my 40+ years of life in India, and based on the various supermarkets that I've visited across 4 heavily crowded metro cities, I've rarely seen "Allergy" medicines/prescriptions occupy the shelf like they do in the US.
Also in the same period of my existence in this third world country, I've rarely seen people concerned about the ingredients in a restaurant menu or labels printed on food packets or containers that there are allergy causing ingredients in there.
Like George Bush once cruelly remarked, "India is the cause of shortage of food in the world", because we eat everything, and rarely check the labels or need them, or less allergic to any food. We are just short of food.
My sister, who lives in AZ, gets boils when she eats gluten. She went to Europe last month, freely ate everything, had zero outbreaks. Got an outbreak on her return flight.
I can’t scientifically identify the mechanism here, but I believe it’s real. Our food system in the US is a problem. Things that don’t work here work elsewhere.
I’m literally planning a move because of stomach discomfort.
48 United States 79.46
123 India 72.24 73.86 70.73
If they said, "throw out the butter if you (or whomever would have consumed it) have an allergy to milk as this is dairy milk-based butter", or if Costco said, "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter" it would make more sense.
Throwing out the food is insane, so is trying to justify such a thing.
It's a recall. You want to avoid any further confusion. You go with the simplest instructions possible. Just because they recommend you throw it away doesn't mean you actually _have_ to.
> "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter"
What value does returned butter have? It's not something we can refurbish. It would be ultimately be thrown away anyways.
I think this kind of messaging is on the way out. Direct communication is possible, and more than ultra simple details can be conveyed.
For the same reason that some people know to avoid certain allergens, others can decide for themselves if they need to.
Are they recommending that? This is the ONLY data from the FDA I can find regarding this recall:
<https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/ires/index.cfm?Event=...>
(Notice also that it's a manufacturer-initiated recall.)
Am I missing an FDA press release about the recall?
Also:
> or if Costco said, "return it...
Costco doesn't want the butter back. It would cost way more to verify that it's still sellable than it would be to simply offer a replacement product to affected customers who ask for one.
The same link you posted (FDA event listing) is the only thing I can find directly from the FDA on it, and they don't say "throw out the butter". They just say they're issuing a recall due to mislabeled product, that's it.
"Press Release Not Issued For This Recall"
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one failing to dig up this "Throw all affected products in the trash!" demand.
I found this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/costco-butter-recall/
That links to the two recall notices. (You have found one already.)
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/ires/index.cfm?Product=210580
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/ires/index.cfm?Product=210581
> General guidelines from the FDA advise consumers who have purchased any recalled food to dispose of the product or return it to the retailer for a full refund.
Which is a bit of a different statement… general guidelines would have to cover things like a recall for E. coli … and isn't perhaps the best advice here. But I'm wondering, did that get twisted into TFA's
> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is urging customers to check their refrigerators for specific product codes and to follow its disposal instructions if they find affected butter.
…when no specific urging for this is taking place, which is what I think most readers would think?
(But holy heck. Why do those recall notices not appear on the FDA recalls[1] page?)
[1]: https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety...
I found both, actually. They're both in the "event" link I provided, but you can't get a detail view for recall F-0122-2025. This seems fine to me, given that all of the data you'd find in the detail view for each seems to be present in the "event" view that displays them both.
> (But holy heck. Why do those recall notices not appear on the FDA recalls[1] page?)
I think because of this: " Press Release Not Issued For This Recall ".
> But I'm wondering, did that get twisted into TFA's...
Oh, that's an excellent spot. Yeah, a game of lazy telephone is probably exactly what happened.
Remember when journalists had more time to do a good job on the articles they chose to submit to their editors?
https://www.foodsafety.gov/recalls-and-outbreaks
If the product details in the recall notice match the details on the food product you have at home, do not open or consume the product. Instead, do one of the following: + Return the product to the place of purchase for a refund. + Dispose of the product following the instructions provided in the recall notice to make sure no one will consume it.
I haven't been able to find a source for the FDA actually making any kind of statement on this recall at all.
But that's not really the point. The point is that the going narrative is counterfactual.
According to FDA: “Recalls are actions taken by a firm to remove a product from the market. Recalls may be conducted on a firm's own initiative, by FDA request, or by FDA order under statutory authority.” [1]
This particular recall [2] was “Voluntary: Firm initiated” and classified as “Class II” meaning low probability of serious adverse health consequences. The mislabeled product will be removed from the shelves, but I don’t think FDA is recommending throwing out the butter as the Forbes article implies.
[1]: https://www.fda.gov/safety/industry-guidance-recalls/recalls...
[2]: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/ires/index.cfm?Event=...
I’m in favor of safety over profit. I’m just bummed at the unnecessary waste.
It's a valid case in the truth table where somebody with a milk allergy should be safe to eat it
In this case, the Kirkland's listed "sweet cream" and not milk.
But still, I agree this sounds crazy.
So putting milk in the ingredient list at least confirms that yes, this is butter, not "butter."
But the recommendation to throw it out is insane. There's nothing wrong with it besides the label. And what person who can't eat dairy is running around buying butter?
So generally butter is not a problem for people with lactose intolerance anyway.
There’s a clear winner, unless you’re trying to send some kind of message to the supplier.
The name of the product is "Kirkland Signature Sweet Cream Butter". The ingredient list on the package lists cream, it just doesn't have the required language "contains milk".
Are there actual humans that are so deathly allergic to milk but somehow don't know what cream is? E.g. there is a comment in this thread that states:
>"Would you toss your butter in the trash if the label left out one critical detail?"
> yes, if that 'one critical detail' could in fact fucking kill me...
I mean, imagine if someone had an allergy so allergic to milk it could "fucking kill them", are they somehow loading up on "Sweet Creamy Butter" and are then shocked that it contains milk??
I get why, bureaucratically, you want to have hard lines, so I understand the recall. I just think this article and some comments that there is actual potential danger in this case are laughably ridiculous.
Sure, you can look at all the words on the package and ingredients and figure out if something probably contains allergens, but the point of the rule is that it gives you one standardized line of text that you can read and be 100% certain whether something is safe for you to eat or not.
The absence of that one standard line of text would not be enough for me if my life were on the line.
I do think it'd be better if there were a standard allergen block that contained an explicit "yes" or "no" for each standard allergen.
What do you do when the package is too small to contain the whole table? Do you leave things off? Now all of a sudden your standard table isn't so standard. Do you make the table smaller? Make it too small and folks who can't see well are proper fucked.
I'm not saying your idea is BAD, but I am saying that it's likely the FDA thought about it and rejected it for not-entirely-unreasonable reasons.
However, I find it difficult to believe that an easily-read, sufficiently-comprehensive table would fit on small packages. Marking even more things as "not labeled for individual sale" just because a new table that aims to be helpful [0] won't fit on their packaging seems to me to be a generally bad thing.
[0] And also aims to replace existing allergenic ingredient class warnings that do fit on the current packaging...
What about other products that contain no milk? Shouldn't they do this as well? Should every package list what it doesn't have?
> that one standard line of text
This is the point. The packaging is entirely up to the manufacturer. Should the FDA approve every food package before it's used? We obviously can't do that. What we can do is mandate a few "standard lines of text." So that regardless of the packaging decisions consumers can still determine the facts quickly and _reliably_.
Think of people with allergies that have low vision or any other handicap which would make all these "good enough" ideas become dangerous.
I've had a severe peanut allergy since I was like 5 (don't know the exact age, but as long as I can feasibly remember). If at 7 years old I was at a friend's birthday party and they had cake or some candy or whatever, how did I know if I can eat it?
I was 7, I wasn't about to read an entire ingredients list and parse out what is or is not peanuts. I just checked the small list at the end for the standard "contains: peanuts" and that was it.
As an adult, if I'm over at a friend's house or a family dinner, I need to know about allergies in whatever they cooked. I don't ask them "does it contain peanuts or peanut oil or made in a plant that would have cross contamination" - they often won't know. But they can fetch out the boxes of whatever they cooked, and I can easily scan several different boxes in a few seconds and confirm if it's safe for me to eat or not.
I've never had a allergic reaction in the 20+ years I've been alive for, in large part thanks to regulations like these, and it makes me sad to see people condemn them over a small amount of mislabeled butter.
Other products that are named like dairy products, yeah.
It is not at all difficult to imagine a situation where a restaurant worker is trained to do something like the following when an allergen is raised as an issue by a customer:
1. Check the labels of any items used in the dish 2. substitute or leave out anything listing the allergen
This may seem...basic. However, if the restaurant has an incident with an allergen affecting a customer that notified them, and they show they followed these instructions, they can shift liability to whichever food producer left the allergen off the label.
Regulations and liability don't care about common sense. In fact, they supersede common sense.
Exactly. And there's a result in economics called the "Coase theorem" that basically says that as long as there's clear liability assignment, the negative externality (serious allergic reactions) can be efficiently avoided, in theory. So having regulations that make it unambiguous who is responsible for each step creates a better outcome for society (fewer deaths from allergic reactions).
Regulations and liability don't care about common sense. In fact, they supersede common sense.
That's the problem, and why more than half the country voted to want it solved.
if product.may_have_trace('peanuts')
add_warning()
if product.may_have_trace('peanuts')
if ! product.name_obviously_implies('peanuts')
add_warning()
The dairy industry is actually pretty annoyed with that and tries to get the rules changed so those beverages can not be called milk.
If you have allergy you're supposed to know butter is made of milk, or no?
What am I missing?
yes, if that 'one critical detail' could in fact fucking kill me...
It's wild to think that the mandating of nutrition labels is only 34 years old.
I can recommend his biography The Waxman Report which talks about this and other types of legislation that are taken for granted in daily life.
> If you have one of the recalled batches, the FDA advises not to eat it under any circumstances. Instead, throw it out to avoid any health risks.
Was this AI generated?
The thought that taxpayer money is being wasted to tell taxpayers that "if they know they have bought butter they must throw said butter because the label doesn't say it _contains milk_" is something that will escape only those people's minds who think everything is fine with the status quo.
Butter! "Caution contains milk"