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> Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certai

• Xelynega 4y ago
  Because people have food allergies, and should have a right to know whether or not the food they're consuming has been cross-contaminated by allergens? How did we end up in a place where the companies aren't putting the cross-contamination ingredients in the ingredients list, and instead put them in a non-standard warning label.
  • 323 4y ago
    But article states something else - a company can't say "this product might not be safe for people with food allergies", they can still be sued. So the only thing left for the company is to actually intentionally put the alergen in and they say "this product is 100% not safe for people with food allergies". The end result is the decrease of alergen free food.
    • willnonya 4y ago
      This is it. The labeling isn't the problem it's the extra processes and cost required to eliminate the potential for any cross contamination. This problem, cost and liability goes away by just adding the ingredient.
    • savingsPossible 4y ago
      Why was the disclaimer "this product might not be safe" added, though? And why did the courts decide it was not binding/not enough to protect from liability? It seems the kind of thing a lawyer would want on pretty much every product. Then the courts would respond by making it null. IDK if this is what happened, but then the problem would be harder...
    • mort96 4y ago
      I don't understand why they can't just label the product as "might contain sesame"? Why do they need to change the recipe when it sounds like a labelling change would do the job?
      • rewgs 4y ago
        When you have life-threatening food allergies, "may contain" is the same as "does contain." I suddenly developed two dozen food allergies at age 30 after a lifetime of eating whatever I wanted. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. Out of all the numerous ways in which it's horrible, seeing "may contain" on the ingredients list of a food that, based on the ingredients I can confirm it has would otherwise be fine, is one of the most soul-killing.
        • jackmott 4y ago
          [dead]
        • Thorrez 4y ago
          What do you mean you can confirm it? What if it's made in a factory with various conveyor belts, and some dust from one could get into another?
          • rewgs 4y ago
            I just mean that the ingredient list is otherwise fine. It's completely ruined by "may contain something that you're allergic to."
        • MisterBastahrd 4y ago
          Yeah, I've been seeing "this product was manufactured in a facility that processes food containing tree nuts" for over a decade now.
          • rewgs 4y ago
            That doesn't bother me, even with a severe almond allergy I've rolled that dice many a time and it's been fine. The problem is "may contain tree nuts." Like, okay, does it or doesn't it? What's even worse is the ingredient "spices." Which spices? Even smelling mustard can send me to the ER, but basil is one of my favorite foods. How these kinds of not-even-half measures are legal is beyond me.
    • janalsncm 4y ago
      Let’s say a bottle of water had the following label: “This product might not be safe for people sensitive to dysentery or cholera.” Would you drink the water? It might not give you cholera. Of course not, no one should drink that water. The label feels like a cop-out on the part of the food manufacturer. Either it’s safe or it’s not. If someone takes their chances and gets cholera, the statement has passed responsibility on to the consumer.
      • TapWaterBandit 4y ago
        This is a silly analogy, cholera or dysentery aren't safe for anyone. But the vast majority of people handle sesame just fine. There is a big difference. Sometimes trace cross-contamination occurs, just how it goes.
        • janalsncm 4y ago
          It’s not silly. For the people who have no food allergies the label is meaningless, and for those who are allergic they have to treat it as if the allergen is definitely there. Trace contamination doesn’t tell you anything about the dose.
    • tehwebguy 4y ago
      They can still say it, but it's vague enough to have essentially no meaning. So it makes sense that this meaningless statement wouldn't somehow absolve them from all responsibility for only including the ingredients on the label.
    • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
      Can't they just write "contains sesame" without actually adding any sesame? Then they will be sued by sesame lovers, I see.
    • HWR_14 4y ago
      Because if I can just right "this product might not be safe for people with food allergies" on a package and not have to worry about legal consequences, why wouldn't I? Magic anti-lawsuit boilerplate on every box!
      • JelteF 4y ago
        Because then people with those allergies won't buy your product. And you want people to buy your product. So if you're sure that the allergens are not in your product, then why would you tell people with those allergies not to buy it?
  • nkozyra 4y ago
    > How did we end up in a place where the companies aren't putting the cross-contamination ingredients Isn't it because it's not an explicit ingredient but a risk of trace contamination? I'm not sure that an ingredients list with a bunch of "might also contain ____" items at the end. The warning is pretty easy to spot when it's supplied.
    • willnonya 4y ago
      The change in the law makes that insufficient to eliminate the liability. It isn't a matter of labeling but the cost of eliminating any possibility of cross contamination.
      • nkozyra 4y ago
        Right, I'm not saying it absolves the company, just that putting it in the ingredients list isn't helpful or honest, either. New labeling law doesn't fix anything here.
        • sokoloff 4y ago
          How is it not honest? It's not helpful, but it seems perfectly honest (assuming the product actually contains the ingredients listed.)
          • SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
            If I see sesame in an ingredients list, and I discover that really means “we don’t deep clean the oven conveyer after cooking sesame products”, I think I’d feel at least a little tricked.
            • sokoloff 4y ago
              That's not what it means in this case. In this case, it means that "we intentionally added some otherwise-not-needed sesame to the product, in order to comply with this law and the truth-in-labeling laws."
  • Aperocky 4y ago
    Well now they are clearly labeled as containing the allergen, people can steer clear of these products! Seems like a win.
    • xvector 4y ago
      This sucks. As someone with a mild to moderate peanut allergy, I’ve been able to gladly eat whatever “may contain peanuts” food that I want, but with laws like this, it’ll cut off a huge portion of what I can enjoy. All my friends with severe peanut allergy never ate these foods to begin with, so it’s not helping them either. Why can’t the government just let us decide what risks we want to take? I’m sick of this shit. I don’t need the government to regulate which port is on my phone or the direction I wipe my ass or the snacks I can eat. Just let me freely live in peace goddamnit.
      • Aperocky 4y ago
        Exactly, I was sarcastically replying to the parent comment who still defended this change. I feel your plight and I hope this can be reverted to some degree.
      • danaris 4y ago
        But you do need the government to mandate that allergens are accurately reported on packaging. Without government regulations on food packaging, some of your friends with severe peanut allergies would be dead now, because most manufacturers would not label trace amounts of peanut contamination. It sounds like this law was very poorly written, in that rather than pushing manufacturers to a) be more careful about cross-contamination and b) accurately label, it pushes them to deliberately add sesame to the foods. This is not because government "interference" in food is fundamentally bad; it's because this law is very poorly written.
        • Jiro 4y ago
          The problem is that "may contain sesame" is not a legally valid excuse for containing sesame, but "does contain sesame" is. And the part about "may contain X" not being an excuse comes from existing precedent, not from the new law.
  • TreeRingCounter 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • kaibee 4y ago
      > It is not socially efficient to spend massive amounts of resources accommodating a small number of people with allergies. It is also not socially efficient to have a society where you have to worry about if your particular issue will be "efficient" enough for other people to care about. That basically sounds like a very low-trust society. And the economic consequences of having a low-trust society are so much worse.
      • TreeRingCounter 4y ago
        Federal laws mandating absurdly costly subsidies of very small minorities is not what "high-trust society" means. You're right in one sense - living in a low-trust society is very socially inefficient. I just don't think you have a working model of why we're becoming low-trust. It certainly has nothing to do with accommodating rare allergies.
    • KerrAvon 4y ago
      Soylent Green is “socially efficient.” Anecdotally, it’s not a small number of people. Ask a parent of school-age children in the past ten years. It’s increasing, for some reason.
      • tssva 4y ago
        I'm the parent of a school aged child. Due to the high occurrence of nut allergies they have eliminated nuts from all school lunch items. For example instead of peanut butter sandwiches they now offer sunflower butter sandwiches. My child is allergic to sunflowers.
      • TreeRingCounter 4y ago
        > Soylent Green is “socially efficient.” No it's not, but it's a good sniff test for people who have a zeroth-order model of utilitarianism and aren't thinking about things like incentives. > It’s increasing, for some reason. I agree - my suspicion is that accommodating the 0.1% of kids with peanut allergies means that another 0.5% of kids (or whatever, made up fractions) never get enough exposure to peanut allergens to develop a tolerance, so the problem is self-reinforcing.
  • mynegation 4y ago
    To me, the most important question is: how did we end up in a place where there are so many food allergies and we still do not understand the reason for the increase? Is it better diagnosis? Early exposure to allergens? Lack of early exposure to allergens? Some evolutionary advantage to having an allergy? (I doubt that, but it is plausible).
    • gizmo686 4y ago
      It is not settled science, but one hypothesis is the hygiene hypothesis, which proposes that exposure to certain microbes at a young age is important for the development of a healthy immune system. By over sanatozing our environment, we prevent exposure of young children to those microbes, leading to the increased prevelence of allergies.
      • graeme 4y ago
        Note that the most important of these are intestinal worms, helminths. The other would be bacteria. Respiratory viruses, by contrast, are not on the list. It is instead chronic presences in the body which may modulate immune response and avoid allergies. (You said nothing wrong but the name itself is confusing) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
        • nextaccountic 4y ago
          Do you mean that a certain amount of helminths is beneficial for our health? Is this just during childhood or is helminth infestation beneficial the whole life? Maybe helminths shouldn't be called parasites then, since they somehow bring benefits to us? Like, there's some degree of mutualism
          • graeme 4y ago
            The whole thing is debated and I’m not sure we have a clear answer. As of yet public health authorities are not recommending helminths, and they cause a lot of problems too
  • TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
    Fun fact: This latest round of medical hijinx got me 5 new food allergies!
  • sbaiddn 4y ago
    My 13 month old son is allergic to everything. Eggs, diary, tree nuts, lots of fruits including avocados. Obviously peas and peanuts. I don't need rules that encourage adding allergens to foods that previously "contained traces". My wife and I know how sensitive he is to every allergen and if we need to avoid traces (hazelnuts) or not (milk)
    • mort96 4y ago
      But you do presumably need rules which tell you whether a given item contains traces of allergens, right?
      • Thorrez 4y ago
        Yes. But this new rule from the FDA says such labeling isn't sufficient.
        • sbaiddn 4y ago
          Edit - Replied to the wrong comment
    • azinman2 4y ago
      Curious - when did you introduce (or not) those foods to him? When/how did you discover the allergy? Could you walk us through this?
      • sbaiddn 4y ago
        I wasn't going to write it now because it's Christmas Eve; but I have a moment to type this. Back story: My wife and I are super old school when it comes to food. Organic as much as possible, processed very little. We spend a lot of time preparing meals. Our daughters pack home made meals to school. Our kids were all breast fed until 12 months, no formula. We introduce foods at six months, thereabouts, with "real" food. No baby food. No cereal. We make our own baby formula from a wide assortment of vegetables and meats. Each soup has at least five different vegetables, and there are three different soups so about 15 different veggies a week. We are also not shy introducing "dangerous" foods. Eggs, in particular, are one of our favorite foods and we introduce it at around six months. We "juice" (squash the fluids out) fillet mignon to give mix it into a squash purée as a starter food (for bioavailable iron, since we don't do cereal). We're not "real" Americans so peanut butter is not a staple. But we'll introduce it early on. We're careful, but not shy. My son: My son has never had a dangerous reaction like anaphylaxis. He reacted to eggs early on, around 7 months. We noticed certain foods gave him hives and we'd avoid them. When he turned 12 we wanted to introduce milk so my wife could stop breast feeding. He reacted poorly and the nurse in the phone suggested we take him to the hospital. Therefore we did a test and he's allergic to everything. Causes: Who knows? Maybe because he's a COVID baby. Maybe its because my wife was super stressed while pregnant (we bought a house, moved, and figured out two day cares in the span of three months). Maybe because of a very stressful "vacation" when he was six months. Maybe its our city's industrial history. Maybe its genetic. Maybe its the luck of the draw. Solution: Deal with it, ultimately. Luckily we are pretty food obsessed and we dont mind spending time/money cooking. So far we're: Diary: - Since my son is not allergic to breast milk, my wife will breastfeed for another year at a rate of about seven times a day. She's also pumping. - We knew donkey's milk is similar to humans'. We tried it and he seems ok w/ it. Hard to find though. And pricey (with intl. shipping $100 for 2 L worth of powder) - I researched bioavailability of calcium and found out that bok choi has a lot of bioavailable Ca. Eggs: - Not much you can do here. 25% of kids allergic to hens' eggs are not to ducks, but the odds aren't great. I figured that eggs of birds furthest away from chicken would cause less problems. Therefore I have found out a research paper that proposes that Emu eggs should be ok since they lack the proteins that cause allergies. But where do you find emu eggs? There's a place in the US that grows emu and he's willing to sell us one to try out, but they wouldnt ship it and its a 10 hour drive. Fermented foods: My wife is Balkan and swears by yoghurt, I agree. We found coconut yoghurt without tree nuts. General nutrition: We're leaning heavily on fish and meats and making sure anything he eats doesn't bind to nutrients blocking their availability. Result: The pediatrician commented that: "he's growing pretty well for someone with so many allergies" so I guess thats a win. On the other hand, this week we're bouncing in and out of the ER with respiratory distress - Dr. figures, given all his allergies, he has asthma.
  • metiscus 4y ago
    My youngest child is allergic to soy. The upside is that we're eating better food at home, the downside is that we basically can't eat anything but home cooked food, and then you must be careful because they shove soy into everything anymore. If it isn't allergen labeled, I just assume it has soy in it these days.
• fundad 4y ago
  Ooh I know! By cross-contaminating for a long time without consequences. People fight for these disclosures for a reason. If you convince people it makes you fat, you will see sesame-free products next to gluten-free products. Gluten-free is for hot thin people, allergens are for broken disposable people.
• teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  We’re in this place because one factory can produce food that will reach millions of people. The odds that a homemade food stand accidentally gives a stray peanut to a consumer with a deadly allergy are low. But the odds of a mega factory with poor QC doing it are high.
  • TreeRingCounter 4y ago
    > The odds that a homemade food stand accidentally gives a stray peanut to a consumer with a deadly allergy are low The odds per food item consumed are higher for small food businesses that aren't as easily forced into absurd clean-room manufacturing. This analysis makes no sense.
    • teaearlgraycold 4y ago
      Lawsuits pay relative to revenue, though. So it's more a matter of existence than proportion.
  • LorenPechtel 4y ago
    I'd be much more afraid of the homemade food stand.
• linuxftw 4y ago
  > How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy. One theory is there's a certain class of pharmaceuticals that induces autoimmunity disorders. These drugs aren't observed for medium or long term effects such as autoimmunity disorders, despite the fact they operate directly on the immune system and there's a growing body of evidence they do indeed induce autoimmunity.
  • puffoflogic 4y ago
    Spoiler alert: that class of pharmaceuticals is, according to the theory, vaccines. So if you investigate this you are anti-vaxx and, by association, probably racist.
• faeriechangling 4y ago
  People dying
• Drblessing 4y ago
  bureaucracy strikes again!
• footlose_3815 4y ago
  [dead]
• ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy. Wtf is this. The problem is the opposite. How did we end up in a place where one simple food 'may contain' one million ingriedients where its being made in a giant factory, not a kitchen. My mother has a lethal allergy to shrimp and crab. Do you have shrimp and crab in your kitchen or not? its a basic question. If we go to a coffe shop the anawer is no. We go to a british pub, answer is no. In fact for 90% pf establishments the answer is no, we have no shrimp on the menu at all. If you handle every ingredient under the sun in one giant factory, that's your fault. I you put weired additives like shrimp-derives food colorings, thats again your fault. If you put gluten into chocolate bars, even thought it's not suppose to be there, and you call something bread even though it cannot be legally called bread in france and you loose a lawsuit because your chicken nuggets contain less than 50% chicken, thats again on you.
  • ryandrake 4y ago
    This is an underrated comment. This is a problem of ending up in a world where our food is mass-produced in factories. Food should be cooked in kitchens, not be manufactured in factories with contaminants blowing around. You should be easily able to know what's in your food because you wash it off and put it there when you cook it. There is a federal limit on how much rodent hair, feces, maggots, and mold can be in your food when it comes off the assembly line and it's non-zero[1]. 1: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/insect-rodent-filth-in-food-wellness/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/insect-rodent-filth-in...
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • thrashh 4y ago
      People buy mass produced because it’s way cheaper I just watched a video of a candy cane assembly line that made thousands of canes per hour. If I had to pay a small shop to make that candy cane, I honestly wouldn’t. I don’t have the kind of money for the little things that I may want but not super bad Of course, you could argue for a lifestyle where you just appreciate a small set of things but it seems people like experiencing more things in life than fewer
• pessimizer 4y ago
  > A former corporate CEO has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for selling food that made people sick. Two other executives face jail time as well. These jail terms are by far the harshest sentences the U.S. authorities have handed down in connection with an outbreak of foodborne illness. > The outbreak, in this case, happened seven years ago. More than 700 cases of salmonella poisoning were linked to contaminated peanut products. Nine people died. > Investigators traced the contaminated food to a factory in Georgia operated by the Peanut Corporation of America. > The outbreak, by itself, was not unprecedented. There have been bigger, and deadlier, outbreaks of foodborne illness. > But the emails that investigators found at the Peanut Corporation of America set this case apart. Some of the emails came from the company's CEO, Stewart Parnell. > "Stewart Parnell absolutely knew that they were shipping salmonella-tainted peanut butter. They knew it, and they covered it up," says Bill Marler, a food safety lawyer who represented some of the victims. > Before and during the outbreak, company executives assured customers that their products were free of salmonella when no tests had been carried out. > When tests did turn up salmonella, company executives sometimes just retested that batch, and when it came up clean, they sold it. > In one memorable email exchange, when Parnell was told that a shipment was delayed because results of salmonella tests weren't yet available, he wrote back, "Just ship it." https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/21/442335132/peanut-exec-gets-28-years-in-prison-for-deadly-salmonella-outbreak https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/21/442335132/pe... https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/2009/peanut-butter-2008-2009.html https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/2009/peanut-butter-2008-2009....
• namuol 4y ago
  I dunno, maybe by respecting the rights and well-being of consumers?
• puffoflogic 4y ago
  Authoritarianism.
• tbalsam 4y ago
  As someone with a plethora of food sensitivities that still gets hard dinged by hidden corn or wheat gluten contamination hidden under a surreptitious "food starch" label in the ingredients list -- it does matter. Yes, the amounts in ppm contained in starch taken from that food are enough to cause issues. Sometimes them even being on the same machines/equipment is enough for it. Weirdly enough, food sensitivities and awareness seems to be rising. There are a few good things in the world to me as a result -- Wegmans has gluten free General Tso's chicken that I can have (and gluten free Sesame Chicken -- and both are great if expensive!) There's so many ways that allergens sneak into food. Aldi's allergen sensitive products for example are a horrendous one for me -- I'm reactive to nearly every major allergen and some cost saving measure or another means it ends up sneaking in. Thankfully the world is becoming kinder to people like me, but it is a pretty penny for things off the store shelf that approach the comforts of yesteryear while I could have those things. I hope that helps. I've fallen many times victim of the logical trap of wondering why in the world special provisions exist for a small part of the population until I have to be a part of that population (not by choice) to understand why. It's still hard for me for some of the provisions I don't understand, but having had my bacon saved by a few of them (metaphorically) in the past, I think helped me commit to needing to understand them. I say this as someone who's gotten "food zoinked" far too many times to count. If I completely purge my stomach in a nearby bathroom I can make the next 3 days more mild, usually, but sometimes it's too late and the reaction has begun. That's why we're so weirdly picky about it as a country. And I'm glad for it, I think it's truly worth the effort, and it's a thing I feel very positive and relieved about, in the climate today where so many people are left behind in other places. I truly believe it's a good thing. Much love to you all and Merry Christmas <3 :))))))))))))))))