4 ms·

> What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake. There always is residual risk. Some new ingredient tested at small scale might work for 99.9% of

by the8472 10y ago

> What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake. There always is residual risk. Some new ingredient tested at small scale might work for 99.9% of people, 0.1% has some intolerance, allergy, negative interactions with drugs or whatever. That's far better than lactose tolerance levels for example and yet we're not panicking over the presence of lactose in food. We just learn from problems and label appropriately, after the fact. And in most cases those problems don't even have lasting effects, they just cause discomfort for a few hours/days, in some small fraction of people. Sure, that might not be optimal, but not a catastrophe.

saurik 10y ago
As someone who is pretty badly lactose intolerant, the idea that you are using frequency to make my plight somehow sound worse than that of my friend whom I had to drive to the ER to get a shot of epinephrine while his throat closed up and he started to have a hard to breathing, or of the aunt of someone else I know who has Celiac disease, or to someone whose heart medication will become less effective... the reason we don't fret about lactose in food is because the harm scales with the dose (making it hard to even hide enough lactose in something to make a difference without the person eating realizing it and stopping) and even the worst case harm of spending an entire day doing nothing but drinking milk is, on the whole, nowhere near as bad as the violently ill symptoms being described by people who were eating these batches of Soylent (which included stuff like "uncontrollable vomiting").
- the8472 10y ago
  Maybe it was not the best example, but it was just a stand-in for "ingredient with negative effects for some fraction of the population", of which we have many in the food supply chain, some of which have more serious effects than others as you highlight. But we still do not ban them categorically. I don't see how one can avoid these issues while testing new ingredients. And if we want to explore sustainable food sources then testing new ingredients should be an option.
  - imtringued 10y ago
    Maybe they should employ versioning for their products if they change so rapidly.

by the8472 10y ago

saurik 10y ago

As someone who is pretty badly lactose intolerant, the idea that you are using frequency to make my plight somehow sound worse than that of my friend whom I had to drive to the ER to get a shot of epinephrine while his throat closed up and he started to have a hard to breathing, or of the aunt of someone else I know who has Celiac disease, or to someone whose heart medication will become less effective... the reason we don't fret about lactose in food is because the harm scales with the dose (making it hard to even hide enough lactose in something to make a difference without the person eating realizing it and stopping) and even the worst case harm of spending an entire day doing nothing but drinking milk is, on the whole, nowhere near as bad as the violently ill symptoms being described by people who were eating these batches of Soylent (which included stuff like "uncontrollable vomiting").

the8472 10y ago
Maybe it was not the best example, but it was just a stand-in for "ingredient with negative effects for some fraction of the population", of which we have many in the food supply chain, some of which have more serious effects than others as you highlight. But we still do not ban them categorically. I don't see how one can avoid these issues while testing new ingredients. And if we want to explore sustainable food sources then testing new ingredients should be an option.
- imtringued 10y ago
  Maybe they should employ versioning for their products if they change so rapidly.