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Comment by Hizonner | Hacker News Reader

The part that's out of whack is the part where they tell consumers who have already bought the butter to throw it away. In order to have received that direction, you must have already seen the recall notice itself, which tells you the butter has milk in it.

It's not so bad if they pull the stuff that hasn't sold.

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I get when products have something harmful to people like when your favorite brand of ice cream has listeria or something else has e.coli and the product should not be used.

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?

I would! There isn't a "new milk free butter" e-newsletter I'm subscribed to. I go to the store, see the things in the shelves, read the label, and then buy one that doesn't say milk (or soy) on it. Not being able to have large amounts of milk or soy without shitting myself doesn't mean I'm now on some secret "new non milk foods" subreddit or discord. We don't have a Facebook group that have regular in-person monthly meetings for, and have a yearly conference in San Diego where we all dress up like our least favorite cheeses. It's not an identity for me that I can't have milk or soy, it's an unfortunate biology weirdness that my body forces me to take part in.

Have you ever picked up butter to check if it says milk or not?

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?

If I pick up an item that should have an allergen that I’m used to seeing, and it’s not listed, I can safely trust it’s because they made it without that ingredient somehow.

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.

Yes, so if you were to encounter this butter in the wild, I understand that not seeing the label would throw you off.

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.

Someone else might come to your house and open your fridge and use butter with a label that says "Ingredients: Milk" and not realize you received mislabeled butter.

Maybe in the general case, but in this case, butter is literally made from milk, by definition.

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.

What’s “milk” is not perfectly clear today. You can certainly coagulate the fats from more than just one liquid.

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.

You might know about the recall, but does someone visiting your house know that? Does a random chef who gets an allergy notification at a restaurant know about the recall?

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.

> Does a random chef who gets an allergy notification at a restaurant know that?

I certainly hope that anyone cooking food at a restaurant knows that butter is a milk product.

> You might know, but does someone visiting your house know that?

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.

And, the people who don't know that butter is made out of milk probably cannot read the contains milk symbols on the box

The antidote to the "strict rules mean common sense can't be used" is... to use common sense: In this instance to ignore the recall instructions, and don't throw away the butter.

Grandparent poster is just throwing all the hypotheticals for the remote chance of "But what if, and if, and if, and if...".

> Also approximately 100 percent of professional cooks know that butter is made from milk.

I am now curious about that "approximately".

Maybe have people write "milk" on their own packages instead of throwing the butter inside in the trash.

> but does someone visiting your house know that?

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.

Most people are going to realize this and not throw it away.

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