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Eh, 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 o

Eh, 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 ago
Pre-baked grain is not handled with those standards
AnotherGoodName 2y ago
Hmm 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 ago
  As 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 ago
      I 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.
      - lisper 2y ago
        Thanks.
        shiroiushi 2y ago
        Yep: instead of a bunch of downvotes, that was exactly the right kind of response to your question. Those of us who don't have these kinds of allergies (or kids with them) would have no clue about this kind of thing, and that response summed it all up very well.
      - pvaldes 2y ago
        Was the nut cashew?
        doctor_eval 2y ago
        No, it was walnut and pecan (they are related, it turns out). Some other minor reactions but those were the big two.
rising-sky 2y ago
Indeed 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 ago
  If 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 ago
    Disagree. 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 ago
      Allergies depend on the dose so I don’t think most people would think like this.
- ajsnigrutin 2y ago
  Usually those are labeled as "may contain traces of....".
  - itronitron 2y ago
    Yeah, 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Lot 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 ago
There 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 ago
  Thank you for the mental image of a loaf of bread getting busted trying to smuggle a machine part out of the factory.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    You joke but product theft is always a major concern.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    The 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 ago
That'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.)

kortilla 2y ago

Pre-baked grain is not handled with those standards

AnotherGoodName 2y ago

Hmm 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 ago
As 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 ago
    I 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.
    - lisper 2y ago
      Thanks.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        Yep: instead of a bunch of downvotes, that was exactly the right kind of response to your question. Those of us who don't have these kinds of allergies (or kids with them) would have no clue about this kind of thing, and that response summed it all up very well.
    - pvaldes 2y ago
      Was the nut cashew?
      - doctor_eval 2y ago
        No, it was walnut and pecan (they are related, it turns out). Some other minor reactions but those were the big two.

rising-sky 2y ago

Indeed 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 ago
If 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 ago
  Disagree. 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 ago
    Allergies depend on the dose so I don’t think most people would think like this.
ajsnigrutin 2y ago
Usually those are labeled as "may contain traces of....".
- itronitron 2y ago
  Yeah, 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 ago

I 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 ago
Lot 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 ago

There 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 ago
Thank you for the mental image of a loaf of bread getting busted trying to smuggle a machine part out of the factory.
- throwup238 2y ago
  You joke but product theft is always a major concern.
- michaelt 2y ago
  The 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 ago

That'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.)