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I used to work in a cookie factory, we often made products for private brands and in some recipes we purposefully added eggs so that it would appear as an ingre
by eulgro 2y ago
I used to work in a cookie factory, we often made products for private brands and in some recipes we purposefully added eggs so that it would appear as an ingredient and not "may contain traces of".
- scop 2y agoAny other interesting tidbits from working in a cookie factory? I'm genuinely curious.
- dxbydt 2y agoif you must know, there is a policy to handle cookies. There is also a manager for all the cookies. This manager tracks all the cookie handlers. The cookies themselves are stored in a cookie store. While legend has it Arthur Van Hoff designed this whole setup, if you look closely in java.net, the author of CookiePolicy, CookieHandler, CookieManager and CookieStore is actually Edward Wang. Anyways it is not important. Since one cannot maintain a session without session cookie, effectively the entire human population on the internet works in the cookie factory.
- galdosdi 2y agoThis is why I read Hacker News
- autoexec 2y agoExactly the kind of thing the FDA has a problem with: > "Because it can be difficult and expensive to keep sesame in one part of a baking plant out of another, some companies began adding small amounts of sesame to products that didn't previously contain the ingredient to avoid liability and cost. FDA officials said that violated the spirit, but not the letter, of federal regulations." It seems that they prefer the "may contain" wording: > FDA officials acknowledged Tuesday that statements that a product “may contain” certain allergens “could be considered truthful and not misleading.” As a consumer, I'd much rather know for sure if a food has something in it that could kill me in it. If companies really want add allergens to their products unnecessarily, disclose that unambiguously, and limit their pool of potential customers that seems better to me than companies just slapping on a label saying that the product might contain every possible deadly allergen and letting customers take their chances or avoid them entirely.
- kayodelycaon 2y ago“May contain“ often refers to cross-contamination. For some people small amounts of allergens will not cause a problem.
- autoexec 2y agoWhich is one reason why some people will be tempted to roll the dice and end up dead or in the ER. It's much better to just know if something is in your food that will kill you. It doesn't help that repeated exposure to an allergen can cause a person's sensitivity to that allergen and the severity of their reaction to increase. Companies who want to sell their products to people with allergies should be required to actually spend the time and money to be reasonably sure that their products won't kill them. Instead companies want to be able to avoid that expense and just slap on a "Probably safe, but who knows?" label and hope that people with allergies will just buy the product and take their chances.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoThis is a very odd take to me given the focus of the article is that companies are explicitly saying "If you have severe allergies, don't buy this product", but the FDA is saying this isn't good enough. That is, the whole focus of the article is that these companies don't want to sell to consumers who may have severe allergies. Honestly, I side with the companies on this one. It's just a matter of incentives - if the consequence of "getting it wrong" (i.e. saying a product is free of an allergen but then through some chance of cross-contamination that it ends up killing somebody) are enormous, I think it's hard to fault a company that then decides to explicitly add nuts, sesame, etc. to a product and explicitly state "You should not eat this if you have allergies." More to your point, though, when you say "Which is one reason why some people will be tempted to roll the dice and end up dead or in the ER", I think that's huge hyperbole. Every single person I've ever known that has a severe allergy never "rolls the dice", and on the contrary they are extremely diligent about double checking that what they eat is allergen free. On the flip side, I've known people that have mild allergies to products (e.g. symptoms are on the level of lactose intolerance) who don't worry about avoiding trace amounts of allergens. Why conflate these 2 cases? I have certainly never known actual people with these differing levels of allergies to confuse their issues.
- ClassyJacket 2y agoVegans hate this. Always happens with milk powder.