IMHO this is getting close to the most surprising example of bureaucratic-red-tape-gone-wild I've seen, which is a "may contain traces of peanuts" warning on a jar of peanut butter.
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()