If companies have a way of obscuring this info to end consumers while still meeting FDA obligations, they absolutely will, as they currently do for things like the information for companies who "Make" products right now, which are often holding companies meant to obscure business relationships.
Oh, and any human readable value will be obscured behind a QR code anyway, so all the humans who already do zero investigation to understand where their stuff comes from will continue to have no extra information.
Strict labeling laws around protected terms is an essential thing because so many people read nothing more than the packaging itself when shopping. All chicken lists "No hormones" as an advertisement despite that being law and no chicken sold will ever have those hormones.
Tons of products already have all manner of information printed on them, but only the manufacturer can readily decrypt it.
And here we are.
They (the USDA) publish cross-references betwixt the codes and the processing plants.
It's been kind of a pain in the ass when I've looked this stuff up in the past and I wish someone would take it upon themselves to make it easier, but it's do-able.
Literally the canonical example of capitalism-as-meat-grinder.
Anytime there would be a recall, they would include the lot number and manufacturer dates.
Source: I worked in meat packing and boutique butcher shops.
Edit: even things like ground beef from trimmings, we would write down every lot that went into it
And a willingness to throw both under the bus when OSHA comes knocking because they also have a large number of workplace safety incidents. Or when the workers complain about such conditions, a little call to DHS and all of a sudden ICE shows up for a raid to pick up 900 undocumented workers, but when a reporter asks officials about the fact that Tyson was giving them written instructions on how to stay under the radar for banking, tax, immigration purposes? "That's not something that's in the scope of our investigations here."
Look, i’m not some sort of a devil that hates people with allergies. Roughly 15% of my closest friends have dietary restrictions. But we kinda understand the problem and navigate it ourselves, rather than making it someone else’s problem. Really not a big deal.
They literally are, though.
Restaurants have a choice of refusing service to people with allergies (not allowed in many places; not a great idea anywhere), allowing those with restrictions to bring their own food, or just putting the bloody 2-minute effort of writing on the menu which ingredients they use.
Yes, people have died from restaurants doing the last option improperly.
"In Japan, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare's vital statistics, about 50 cases of fatal anaphylaxis are reported each year.4,5 In 2020, the most frequent cause of fatal anaphylaxis was bee or wasp stings (13 cases), followed by drugs (8 cases) and foods (2 cases)".
If somebody orders, say, ribs, and mentions they are allergic to spices that are found in some barbecue sauces or spice rubs, the waiter isn't going to know (and the cook might not know) if those spices are in the dish, and especially won't know if they're present in a large enough amount to cause a reaction.
The FDA does require manufacturers to keep track of the most common allergens ( https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-food-labeling-and-critica... ), but if somebody has an uncommon allergy, they're on their own. Restaurants are regulated by state health departments instead of the USDA. California, I believe, has some allergen labeling requirements for its restaurants. Most large restaurants worry enough about liability that they disclose the information (for common allergens) voluntarily.
But if you want every restaurant to be forced into labeling, you will see the small restaurants claim all the allergens are used and they cannot protect against cross contamination.
I had an old coworker with a severe milk protein allergy. So bad that he would get a reaction if he (lip) kissed his wife after she drank milk or had ice cream. So eating out was basically impossible, because his food would pretty much need to be made in a totally separate kitchen to avoid any contamination risk.
So we are right back at my point. Do we force every restaurant to have a secondary allergen free kitchen so my coworker can eat there? Or does my coworker just deal with it and stick to vegan places (like he did)?
If your point is that cost doesn't perfectly match frequency, sure, it was off the cuff, but it doesn't change the underlying nature of "accommodating everyone".
When entering, "any allergens or intolerances" is normally asked before you're sat down. They distinguish the two to decide whether a station clean is required or if they can just point you to the menu.
If it's not already clear on the menu, most medium/large chains then hand you a tablet letting you filter by almost anything.
If you are working with food you should know about allergies. It just comes with the territory. I’m baffled by how this is somehow too hard for US folks yet we manage fine.
It's just yet another arena where the US likes to wring its hands and make excuses for why the US can't do what all manner of other countries manage to do without issue, from things like this to mass transit to Internet connectivity to gun control to ... we're just soooooo unique that solutions that work elsewhere couldn't possibly work here.
https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/campaign-2026/allergie...
> For non-prepacked foods – such as those sold in restaurants, cafés or deli counters – allergen information must be provided.
The US has it's own allergen labeling guidelines, which seem similar, but I'm not going to 1:1 check. For restaurants it's mostly up to the states with the FDA providing guidance.
USDA Organic isn't perfect but it is, largely, the only meaningful information you can be given.
Everything else is weasel wording and subterfuge.
By all means, get a license, food handler permit, etc. and know and practice good food safety, and buy ingredients from legitimate wholesalers. But at some point you don't have visibility into the supply chain and it's not reasonable to expect Joe's Taco Truck to know which specific farms produced their lettuce.
When you elect visibly corrupt people who promised to destroy that trust upstream, you double the burden for everyone downstream from them.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Anyway, all companies have lists of what they buy and who from in their accounts - and their banks and suppliers can corroborate those details.
I think I'd provide limits for micro-businesses (1-2 employees, below the VAT threshold in UK), and maybe have limited reporting for SMEs too. Only listing all suppliers, say.
But for larger businesses, they should list the goods/services they use and the origin of all inputs to a product (including energy). Down to the factory, not a trade mark, the actual inputs.
Companies already keep all this information.
Capitalism supposedly optimises markets, but it can't do anything like that without full information. I mean the psychological manipulation of 'brand marketing' also opposes the supposed optimisations of capitalism too, but that's another story.
All this information is already maintained, it's just not exposed for the public.
What farm was my chicken produced on? Then I can look at that farm to see if they bought a tonne of penicillin, or a GM feed. I can look at the farm to see if they have outside access for the birds, say.
We can also readily graph essential businesses for food security, and new companies can easily find suppliers, B2B companies can find gaps and opportunities - the whole web of production can be mapped this way.
You can also spot corruption and loss. Consumers can avoid companies that use upstream suppliers they disprove of - like if a footwear company has a factory in an area known for human rights abuses, that's now public info, I can check it out if I want.
Anyway, restaurants already have to know the origin of their goods for pubic health purposes, codifying can just mean the suppliers send them an enhanced receipt that the restaurant catenates with others and uploads to the government, that can be done as part of the same process as finance reporting.
If you're buying chicken out the back of a van in an alley then you're going to have extra work; if you're just using standard supply chains it should all work pretty seamlessly.
Isn't the capitalist way to help with this to build new restaurants that do openly provide the lineage for the food that they sell?
All of the consumers who are motivated by this information will then be free to reward these eateries with their business.
After that: Other restaurateurs will surely notice how unspeakably profitable these loyal consumers are and will begin to mimic the effort to try to capture a slice of the pie.
Ultimately, this snowballs into information being the norm instead of the rare exception. Everyone wins!
(Or, more likely: We'll broadly forget that we cared about any of this a few months from now, just as we have always done in the past, and the idea will die at the invisible hand of the free market.)
Some people think that certain things that are not profitable are still worthwhile to society. For example, libraries and fire departments are not designed to be profitable at all, but they're established because at least some of us think they're beneficial to have despite that. A more fitting example might be the regulation on food production introduced early on in the 20th century; by your logic, a more capitalist way of solving the problem would have been to start different food companies that produced food in the way that the regulations required. I don't have any confidence that this would have ended up making much of a difference though, and I think the century since then has shown that the economy didn't fall over because of the lost profits from the regulation.
In reality, I'm a huge fan of enabling people to find reliable information (if they want it) so they can do things like make what they feel are informed decisions (if they choose to do that).
This can happen with capitalism and food. I've known a nice lady for a very long time who has run a little food truck that serves only local, organic food.
She buys what she can directly from farmers and even the mass-produced products she uses are local-enough that she can ring up the owner on the phone and get good answers to whatever questions she has. If one of her customers wants to know where she gets her salad greens or the excellent sausage that she serves, she'll just tell them. There's no secrets in that kitchen.
It works for her in her tiny little market segment, and her usual clientele appreciate her efforts enough that this has been her sole occupation for over a decade.
But doing what she does in the way that she does it is a ton of work. And it apparently doesn't scale in a way that capitalism, alone, can support.
And by that, I mean: If the Arby's down the road from my house had enough interest in being informative in this way, then capitalist tenets suggest that they'd be doing it already. They are not.
But if they should then that means scary words like regulation come into play, and that never happens without a cost.
I'm OK with helping to pay for information to be available even though I myself don't necessarily care at all on any normal day what factory my chicken sandwich was raised in, or which particular farms that this batch of lettuce was sourced from.
And I'm OK with paying more for this because some people do care about stuff like that.
Except: Every now and then, like when there's a cyclospora outbreak, I care quite a lot about it myself. I love the cold, liquidy crunch of lettuce on a sandwich and I do miss it when it's gone.
And since shit happens (sometimes, literally) we'd collectively have a far easier time of adjusting our supply chains when it happens if tracking them was more of built-in function of food distribution. Since capitalism has so far not accomplished that, then perhaps it is time to move on to other methods.
Count me in.