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My understanding is this allergen over-labeling was inspired by the FDA in the first place. https://www.fastcompany.com/90830854/sesame-seed-allergen-fda-food-l
by lpolovets 2y ago
My understanding is this allergen over-labeling was inspired by the FDA in the first place. https://www.fastcompany.com/90830854/sesame-seed-allergen-fda-food-law https://www.fastcompany.com/90830854/sesame-seed-allergen-fd...
From the linked article (from Jan 2023):
But sesame does differ in one distinct way from eggs, peanuts, shellfish, milk, and soy: The seeds are teeny tiny and hard to keep track of. This means they’re prone to “cross-contamination,” in food-allergy terms. If you operate a bakery that makes sesame bagels, the odds are decent that rogue seeds will end up in your other products, too. Bad news for people with severe sesame allergies. But it’s also expensive and frustrating for food manufacturers to ensure the seeds are kept away from other foods, if they’re on the FDA’s major allergens list.
Advocates have therefore been warning since December that the FASTER Act is poised to have a counter effect. Rather than minimize cross-contamination, as they argue the law requires, many big food brands have opted to add sesame to their bread products, then simply declare it as an ingredient. They are intentionally adding sesame flour to “avoid complying with the spirit and intent of the FASTER Act,” FARE tells Fast Company. That is cheaper than certifying that their facilities are 100% sesame-free.
- forgetfreeman 2y agoEh, this seems like a pretty bullshit argument on the part of manufacturers though. My expectation for a food prep area is that I should be able to safely eat off of any surface. This level of cleanliness should eliminate any contaminants from the environment bigger than airborne dust and given how relatively cheap air filtration equipment is a case could be made there as well. In any case sesame seeds are a hell of alot bigger than dust so there's no great excuse to have them wandering from one product line to another.
- kortilla 2y agoPre-baked grain is not handled with those standards
- AnotherGoodName 2y agoHmm I wonder how good the us legal system is if a person insists they fell ill eating a product without a warning label and it goes to a jury trial? There will undoubtedly be a focus on ‘whether you can be 100% sure there was no sesame dust in the air’. Without a perfect vacuum clean room (that doesn’t really exist) you can’t be. As in even if you’re really fucking clean your probably losing the case in the American legal system. Fuck it my bread is made with a sprinkle of sesame flour and is known to contain potential carcinogens identified by the state of California.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- moregrist 2y agoAs a parent of a child with a severe sesame allergy, you clearly don’t understand food allergies and how severe they can be. If my child ingests sesame, they go into anaphylactic shock and without an epipen administered in minutes they will die. There are definitely questions of how to best inform consumers that have severe food allergies. But I’ve been really underwhelmed with the dialog here on this. It would be lovely if HN could keep in mind that for some people, sesame is a life-threatening ingredient. And those people would also like to safely buy bread.
- lisper 2y ago> If my child ingests sesame, they go into anaphylactic shock and without an epipen administered in minutes they will die. Please excuse my skepticism, I am asking this out of a genuine desire to become better informed: how can you possibly know this? Unless you happened to have an epi-pen handy the first time your kid ever ate a sesame seed, which seems unlikely, then if this were true would not your kid have died then and there?
- doctor_eval 2y agoI can’t answer for sesame, but my kid has an allergy to a specific nut, that we discovered after mum picked baby up after handling said nut, leaving bright red welts on their little body. No ingestion required. Subsequently, immunology department, skin prick tests to identify the specific culprit, “risk of anaphylaxis” posters, and an Epipen - with risk factor based on the size of the reaction, in millimeters, to the skin prick test.
- rising-sky 2y agoIndeed and pretty disingenuous from the bakeries. Mislabelling as containing allergens when it does not can lead to a false sense of security or comfort in consumers. In that they may potentially consume an item and discover that it is labelled for the allergen, and subsequently assume that the lack of a reaction indicates tolerance. Potentially, leading them to consume accurately labelled products expecting the same non-reaction
- brookst 2y agoIf I'm understanding you correctly, the concern is that someone who has e.g. a peanut allergy will eat product A which is labeled as containing peanuts despite not having any, and then decide they must not be allergic so they can eat product B which is also labeled as containing peanuts but actually has them, and have a bad outcome? This seems a stretch. If the person is eating food labeled as containing an allergen, do we really care whether it is product A or B that produces the bad outcome?
- dboreham 2y agoDisagree. There's a concept of people "growing out of allergies". I think it's at least plausible someone could eat product A without checking the label, then subsequently read the label and assume "well I must have grown out of that allergy" and hence proceed to eat product B.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoAllergies depend on the dose so I don’t think most people would think like this.
- ajsnigrutin 2y agoUsually those are labeled as "may contain traces of....".
- itronitron 2y agoYeah, and that is just as bad as "contains... " for people that have severe allergies. The trend for most companies is just to put "may contain traces... " or "manufactured in a facility that also processes... " which will prevent me from buying from those manufacturers.
- infecto 2y agoI know its easy to blame the manufacturers but I don't believe they are entirely at fault here. Its not so much the size alone but that in these facilities they are not being cleaned after every run. Certainly the products that spoil are getting sanitize appropriately (eggs, dairy etc) but uncooked grains I suspect have a much larger time line for cleaning.
- Ekaros 2y agoLot of these things are dry ingredients. So they do not even need same level of standards as anything wet. They keep well enough and earlier in manufacturing chain things are much worse. Just think all of the places your average wheat grain go trough from field to finally being baked... Many parts do not have the strictest standards of steam cleaned stainless steel...
- NaOH 2y agoThere aren’t food prep areas when it comes to manufacturing at this scale. There are silos, storage tanks, essentially duct work to transport ingredients from bulk storage to production, and large-scale machinery which is designed to minimize exposure to the environment and people while in use. That’s putting aside the equipment and facilities used to acquire ingredients or store products after production. Yes, all of this equipment is also designed to be cleaned and sanitized, but these are large surface areas covering large distances. And we’re talking about one little sesame seed which can’t be easily detected if it somehow makes its way into a product, unlike, say, the metal detectors all finished goods pass through to ensure no metal object found its way into something. Spending time in facilities like Bimbo operates will disavow someone of the idea that the work a company like that does is akin to what happens in restaurants or catering facilities. These are factories where product assembly happens to involve edible parts.
- pfannkuchen 2y agoThank you for the mental image of a loaf of bread getting busted trying to smuggle a machine part out of the factory.
- throwup238 2y agoYou joke but product theft is always a major concern.
- michaelt 2y agoThe food industry has special industrial X-ray machines so that if the hamburger meat grinding machine has a blade snap off, you don't send a customer a hamburger with a blade in it.
- isoprophlex 2y ago> These are factories where product assembly happens to involve edible parts. And looking at the picture of the """bread""" at the start of the article, it shows. That's not bread, that's an industrial product.
- creer 2y agoThat's really not true. In both ways, too. It's not realistic. In the specific case of gluten-free vs normal flour, you might have a clean, safe kitchen but flour flies everywhere and it doesn't take much. The solution for a gluten-free kitchen is to only use gluten free products. I know of a restaurant that offers both gluten free and plain pizza crust and people who need to should know what that means: they try but it's not. It's also not realistic as to "safely eating off surfaces". That's the goal and that's what test kits test for - but that's the point: the test kits are there because it's hard to achieve (and excess will result in contamination from cleaning products.)
- mc32 2y agoThis feels like it’s going the way of prop 65. To be on the safe side, everything gets the label, thus making the label pointless -it no longer helps differentiating things.
- PaulHoule 2y agoNo, I see canned peaches with a P65 label and I see canned peaches without them. Same for fried snacks.
- mc32 2y agoAre those labels based on periodic random testing or based on risk avoidance? What proportion of these labels are false positives?
- PaulHoule 2y agoMain threats I see are lead and cadmium in some foods from China, also high levels of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide in some foods.
- LorenPechtel 2y agoWe dumped lead all over the environment. You can basically assume anything grown has lead, the only question being how much. Likewise, mercury. In some areas there's a lot of arsenic. Most everything high on the periodic table is nasty. The few that we willingly associate with are because they are non-reactive enough to not actually pose a threat even if in theory they're harmful. (Consider the use of barium to image the digestive system. They use a form of it that's sufficiently insoluble that you don't get poisoned.)
- MaximilianEmel 2y agoThat's how it already apparently is, and this is supposed to mitigate that.
- 2y ago
- kevinventullo 2y agoDoesn’t this open up the market for a newcomer to make verified sesame-free bread?
- betaby 2y agoNo. That market is too small to target. Overregulation is affecting consumer choices.
- grugagag 2y agoAnd without overregulation those consumer choices wouldn’t be be easily faked?
- akira2501 2y agoOverregulation + Monopolization is the 1-2 punch in operation here. It's the only reason you'd even think to do something like this. "Fine. Now _everything_ has Sesame in it. What are you going to do? _Settle_ with us?"
- mensetmanusman 2y agoHow to fight economies of scale…
- ApolloFortyNine 2y agoToo far the other way will likely lead to a pseudo ban on Sesame seeds. It just wouldn't be worth the risk. Or the cost of it will get pushed on the 99.999% who won't die from a single Sesame seed. I know there's a lot of things that work like this (handicap ramps for instance) but if you don't draw a line somewhere it does get overly expensive.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoThere are many small bakeries that offer a variety of options. It seems silly to confidently assert this as you do.
- paulddraper 2y ago> Rather than minimize cross-contamination, as they argue the law requires, many big food brands have opted to add sesame to their bread products, then simply declare it as an ingredient. Right. Bimbo has not been actually adding the allergen to the product. Presumably, they will start explicitly adding it, so the warning will be proper.
- maxerickson 2y agoThey are saying to play by the spirit of the rules instead of working the ref on the letter of the rules. But businesses could give a fuck about anything other than their current margin. Putting it another way, the FDA put forth a regulation intended to make the lives of a certain group of people better, and the response was to figure out how to not bother with that.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoIf producer A just puts sesame in their products, and that means they can undercut producer B who spends the money to comply with the spirit of the regulation, producer B goes out of business because their expenses are higher. So what do you expect would happen? Consumers like cheaper rather than higher prices, this isn't a new thing.
- maxerickson 2y agoI totally expect people to be assholes about it, don't worry. That's what I'm getting at, people are assholes. Should we be proud and happy about that? Apparently.
- harimau777 2y agoPass regulations that prevent producer A from undercutting producer B?
- Ferret7446 2y agoLike how we passed regulation to get to this point? And we will pass regulation for the new loophole created by this regulation, right? And we'll keep doing this, as the overhead to comply with regulation gradually increases and prevents small competitors from entering the market as they cannot afford to meet the regulation overhead? Of course, we will address this problem with new regulation.
- mhb 2y agoMaking food more expensive might have consequences.
- aiauthoritydev 2y agoThe safest thing to do is to actually add the allergens to some degree and then warn people.
- nindalf 2y agoThe article says that is precisely what they did and the FDA found that it violated the spirit of the law.
- JoeAltmaier 2y agoOr admit the law that was being applied was actually 'the law of unintended consequences'.
- somedude895 2y agoThe class of the anointed will never be able to admit to themselves their hubris.
- Y_Y 2y agoThey should ban unintended consequences, that'll work out fine.
- RenThraysk 2y agoNo where in the article does it say allergens were added. If they were then the labelling could not possibly "misbranded".
- crote 2y agoFrom the article: > 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. So yes, to avoid having to prevent cross-contamination, they started intentionally introducing trace amounts of allergens.
- beAbU 2y ago(Non US) On almost all food labels that I've seen for the last decade or so I've seen disclaimers like "this product is made in a factory that processes $ALLERGEN" Usually $ALLERGEN is "tree nuts".
- Beretta_Vexee 2y ago(France) "trace of nuts" "may contain accidental presence of nuts" "made in a workshop that processes nuts" Certain products specifically for allergy sufferers have strange messages such as "non-quantifiable presence of an allergen". A PCR test can detect traces of a product's DNA, but it is impossible to quantify its volume because it is so small, or to trace the source of contamination. They can't say there aren't any, there's no defined threshold or it's not possible to clearly quantify the quantity.
- mattmaroon 2y agoWe have that too.
- lewispollard 2y agoSame in the UK. For example, it's not uncommon to have food items that are certified as vegan, with a warning that they may contain traces of milk due to cross contamination - for most vegans, this is acceptable.
- quietbritishjim 2y agoSure, that's the sort of thing that the FDA were complaining about. From TFA: > FDA officials acknowledged Tuesday that statements that a product “may contain” certain allergens “could be considered truthful and not misleading.”
- mathgeek 2y agoThe "may contain" line is not the part that the FDA takes issues with. From the source complaint: > The Brownberry brand Whole Grains 12 Grains and Seeds RTE bread loaf product is misbranded for a similar reason; the product label includes walnuts, almonds, and hazelnuts in the ingredient and “Contains” statements; however, these nuts are not ingredients in the formulation of the product. Emphasis on "Contains", which is a separate line on the packaging from the "may contain" line.
- postmodest 2y agoThis is the same issue as Prop 65, and while we can all say "oh the law is bad" the real problem is _corporations are lazy_. Instead of making sure their products are safe, they just say everything is unsafe, because they know consumers will become numb to it. Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer, but instead of taking the time to make sure of that, companies just tell us the products are dangerous, because they know we don't really have a choice. They have the money and the capability, but they choose profit over consumer safety, and that's THEIR sin, not ours.
- NovemberWhiskey 2y agoThe problem with Prop 65 is that we've delegated plaintiff's attorneys to conduct private enforcement actions. Also that the law requires a warning, but doesn't require an explanation of what the material is, what part of the product contains it, or how you are likely to get exposed to it. As I mentioned elsewhere on this discussion, this is why pure cotton patches now come with Prop 65 warnings (if you might use them to clean a rifle...) Rag on corporations all you want, but Prop 65 is a terrible law.
- 1oooqooq 2y agoit's almost like if corporations could pay politicians to turn good laws into garbage laws, uh?
- hot_gril 2y agoThis reminds me of software services that intentionally avoid exceeding their uptime SLOs so they don't set dangerously high expectations.