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> Everyone with an allergy knows to check that section of the packaging (it comes after the long list of ingredients), and you can trust it to be accurate. It c

• gkoberger 2y ago
  I get your point, of course. But there's a lot of foods that say butter that don't contain "Milk". Does "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" contain milk? Does Shea butter? Does Garlic butter? Are you so sure you're right about each of these that you'd risk someone's life over it? In the US, packaging is guaranteed to have an accurate "contains" section. It's not just a nice-to-have; people's lives depend on it. I get that this is a pretty clear example that it contains milk – but that's what makes it interesting. Lives may not be at stake here, but the trust in the "contains" label is. We can't leave it up to "well, most people should know" – it has to be consistently enforced, or it becomes completely useless. Couldn't I say the opposite? "Instead, to please some faceless career Costco executives, the trust in the 'Contains' labeling will be destroyed to "protect" the people who mislabeled their product."
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • Alupis 2y ago
    > But there's a lot of things that say butter that don't contain "Milk". In the US, packaging is guaranteed to have an accurate "contains" section. The box of Unsalted Butter already says "Milk" in the ingredients list. It does not need a second warning that says "Contains Milk". The article seem to be confusing the two - they are two different "labels" on the same packaging. Is there a human alive that would read the ingredients list and think to themselves, "Hmm, it says Milk is an ingredient, but I don't see a 'Contains Milk' warning, so it probably doesn't contain milk!"? That is the bureaucratic nonsense people are sick and tired of.
    • gkoberger 2y ago
      I never look at "Ingredients". I look at "Contains". That's the important section for anyone with allergies. You clearly don't have a deadly food allergy. "Contains" is highly regulated ("Ingredients" is not), and everyone with a food allergy trusts "Contains". This isn't about this one particular situation, which admittedly is obvious. It's about maintaining the trust of the "Contains" section. Who is "sick and tired of" allergy labels being too strict? Is this really something people get up in arms about?
      • Alupis 2y ago
        > Who is "sick and tired of" allergy labels being too strict? Is this really something people get up in arms about? People are sick and tired of nonsense bureaucracy - and this is a prime example. Destroying 80,000 pounds of perfectly fine butter so some bureaucrats can pat themselves on the back is pretty absurd. Nobody was harmed - nobody was saved. This is just waste because some piece of paper says it has to be wasted...
        • gkoberger 2y ago
          Why don't you place the blame on the company who knew the rules and made a mistake? I, as someone with an allergy, am grateful for the "faceless" people who show up every day for an unglamorous job and keep me alive.
          • Alupis 2y ago
            I am saying this rule is ridiculous, especially given the current situation. I would agree with you more if it was not a product where Milk was the only ingredient. This kind of bureaucratic action lacks common sense and protects no one. That's the kind of bureaucracy we don't need.
            • ryandrake 2y ago
              If only you could rely on common sense! But companies have been allowed to run roughshod for so long and sell things that are deceptively labeled for so long that the law finally had to step in with bureaucracy. You can't apply common sense when companies are allowed to label things as X when they aren't X. Does something labeled "butter" contain milk? Does something labeled "milk" contain milk? This thread shows the answers to these questions are not straightforward and cannot be determined with common sense. We -have- to have strict labeling rules around allergens and destroy products that don't comply because if we didn't, it would just be the wild west like it is with products that are not allergens.
  • elevatedastalt 2y ago
    If I had my way, food terms that have hundreds or thousands of years of history behind them would not be allowed to be used for labeling completely unrelated things. That includes fake milks, fake eggs and fake "butters"
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    • tedunangst 2y ago
      What about Swedish fish?
      • Mistletoe 2y ago
        Those do God's work, they can stay.
    • throw0101b 2y ago
      Where do nut butters (e.g., peanut butter) fall under your taxonomy? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nut_butter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nut_butter
      • Alupis 2y ago
        We probably should call those something different, since they are not related. Peanut Spread would be entirely fine.
  • crazygringo 2y ago
    > It's not just a nice-to-have; people's lives depend on it. Nevertheless, I would certainly hope that if someone's life depends on avoiding milk products, that they learned a long time ago not to buy butter. I mean I get your broader point, but it's just that in this specific case this isn't shea butter or apple butter or whatever... it's butter butter. Like, listing wheat as an allergen on a candy bar, of course. But if you have a milk allergy, there's absolutely no universe in which you should even be picking up the butter to check in the first place.
    • gkoberger 2y ago
      Well, it's "unsalted butter". It has an adjective. So it's not just "butter butter", it's modified. Not everyone speaks perfect english. One of the times I had an allergic reaction, it's because I didn't know all the Spanish word for peanuts... and the english translation right below it skipped that word.
      • crazygringo 2y ago
        Unsalted butter is butter butter. It's the base form of butter with nothing added. And peanuts in something that isn't obviously made of peanuts, of course. That's what allergen labels are for, nobody's arguing against that. But you can't really mistake a bar of butter for anything else except margarine. And it you have a milk allergy, you're gonna make sure you know what the words are for butter vs. margarine, I should think?
        • maxerickson 2y ago
          You are arguing that the regulation should be more complex... Regulations that require the allergen labeling and don't make exceptions will obviously be shorter than regulations that make exceptions. If the outcome were worse for consumers, I can see arguing for the more complicated regulation, but having a clear statement of the allergens regardless of the product doesn't hurt consumers any (If you disregard the bother from the redundancy anyway).
  • albert_e 2y ago
    I am extending the argument on semantics: What does "Milk" mean in the context of "Contains Milk" Is almond milk, oat milk, soy milk, coconut milk included? Milk of magnesia?
    • duderific 2y ago
      I think the assumption is that if it doesn't have a modifier, it's dairy milk. Otherwise, it would have one of the modifiers you listed.
      • simoncion 2y ago
        And I expect that the proliferation of things that are called "milk" that are not dairy milk is part of the reason things are labeled "CONTAINS: Milk" when they contain dairy milk (as milk does), and "CONTAINS: Nuts" when they contain almonds (as almond "milk" does), and so on.
      • albert_e 2y ago
        Hopefully the same common-sense assumption can also be applied then to "butter" as well?
  • trod1234 2y ago
    > In the US, packaging is guaranteed to have an accurate "contains" section. You are incorrect. The labeling laws have a number of loopholes which fail to appropriately or accurately list ingredients. No guarantees are made and it can hardly be called accurate. Yes this impacts lives, and speaking as one from the afflicted cohort, labeling is a joke and has no measure of trust to begin with. For example GRAS ingredients in trace amounts often don't warrant being included in the label, there are weight cut-offs, and only known major allergens (of which relatively little research is done in proportion to other endeavors) are excluded from these loopholes. Natural or Artificial Flavors can be any of many different ingredients on a long list. To top this off, these same laws may or may not be enforced with any consistency when the products are used as intermediate inputs (and originally processed outside the US). They often don't test for traces except in highly debased markets (such as honey), or after a consumer lab brings it to their attention. There is also no distinction between size of the ingredients which impacts safety; and this can be important. For example, asbestos isn't harmful until it gets really small where it then can lead to mesothelioma. Titanium Dioxide is often used as a food additive, but there have been no safety studies done since they began processing it using nanoscale particle sizes. From what I've seen in the literature, they did these safety testing on large particles before modern advancement, and simply claim the smaller particles are the same (implicitly) without proper controls or testing to verify. This is often allowed under the self-certification of safety loophole as Beyond Meats did with the gene edited beats/heme. Also, since they changed requirements to new anti-trans fat oils in processing I can't eat out anymore because the oils (which need not be disclosed) induce dermatological and inflammatory issues that manifest visibly within 1-2 hours. They are GRAS and I know many people who suffer from this including most of my extended family. Little research has actually been done/published. To put this all in perspective, given all of these confounding issues, labeling already is nearly completely useless and lacks consistency to begin with. No claim of consistency can be valid until you are consistent in these other areas first. > I get that this is a pretty clear example that it contains milk. You literally cannot make "butter" any other way. Margarine is not butter. Garlic Butter is made with butter, Shea butter is a cosmetic and in the name says what it is derived from; you don't have rational people calling shea butter, butter. These issues fundamentally go to all language and by extension definition. The word butter has a historic and common shared meaning absent adjective modifiers. It is distinct (unique), and definitionally made from milk. This is the def'n from Oxford Dictionary. -A pale yellow dairy fat used in cookery and as a spread, made by churning milk or cream and straining off the buttermilk to leave a solid substance. Inherent in the product description (name) is the fact the fact that it is derived from milk and will thus contain milk products. > Couldn't I say the opposite First that's not the opposite, and second you can say anything and what you say has no bearing on the truthfulness (people can both lie and tell the truth, and the fact that they can do both doesn't indicate one or the other). In this context, no that would lack any real meaning, and end up being flawed reasoning which relies on the same false justification as the other line of thought, the forgone conclusion that there was trust to begin with, and the reason-ability. You can justify anything circularly, all the way down to delusional madness, false and truth cannot be determined without external objective identity. The structure of circular reasoning fundamentally fails objectively since there is no externally based identity (definition), and worse the structure abuses the contrast principle of your and reader's psychology to make it convincing despite it being fallacy, and delusion if you were to accept it as truth. These techniques are well known, have been abused for centuries, and often involve strategy to create convincing lies and deceit. Inducing and misleading people towards delusion isn't something rational or good people ought to do, but there is benefit in promoting deceits following such structure, since not everyone can do the mental gymnastics (discriminating against intelligence), and it allows greater accumulation of power left unchecked (leading from the "banality of evil" to the "radical evil"). Complacency often mentioned in the banality of evil, is after all a form of sloth (a deadly sin, and warned against because of its destructive influence). People lie all the time today, often without knowing, and believing and justifying lies as truth is the definitional path towards delusion. Schizophrenia diagnosis rely heavily on the fact that delusion is prevalent in the people being diagnosed, and techniques and related structure originating in torture induce delusion involuntarily. The outcomes related to delusion, given sufficient time, are always destructive. Finally, the world is not a safe place, nor can it be made so. There is inherent risk in everything you do. Those that would seek to make a safe world, inevitably and blindly through complacency tread and limit agency, where those same people would then support and seek enslavement, and death for all given the right opportunity. They would do so because they wouldn't know better because they have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their own actions, and in so doing unknowingly violate oaths and beliefs they claim to hold dear. The latter characterization is a valid characterization for describing evil people (willfully blind people) who commit evil (destructive) acts. They need not believe that they fall into this label categorically, but objectively and externally as an outcome the truth remains unchanged regardless of belief.
• deleted 2y ago
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• gamblor956 2y ago
  so if you pick up a package that says "Unsalted Butter" and nothing else, who the hell is going to assume no milk was used Lots of people in the U.S. don't know that butter is made from milk. I have met plenty of people who don't know that cheese is a dairy product. I have met plenty of people who think that mayonnaise is a dairy product... Very few people know that American caramel is a dairy product... while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense. This is not bureaucratic nonsense. Reporting ingredients has been table stakes for selling foodstuffs in the U.S. for several decades. A company that can't get something that basic right is also getting something else wrong. And that's the point of these seemingly bureaucratic rules: they're basically unit tests for the regulatory agencies to identify issues they require followup.
  • crazygringo 2y ago
    > Lots of people in the U.S. don't know that butter is made from milk. I have met plenty of people who don't know that cheese is a dairy product. If there are people who are allergic to dairy who don't know butter or cheese come from milk, then I think there's an even bigger problem here...
    • NaOH 2y ago
      People also make food for others. It's like having a gluten-free/celiac friend coming over for dinner and using soy sauce without bothering to notice soy sauce always contains wheat.
      • crazygringo 2y ago
        Sure, but that's why someone allergic to dairy might ask their friend who prepared dinner if anything was made with butter or cheese (or yogurt or sour cream, etc.), just to double-check. If the person cooking is uneducated enough to not know that butter and cheese come from milk, I highly doubt they're checking the box the butter comes in for an allergen listing.
        • NaOH 2y ago
• NaOH 2y ago
  >Instead, to please some faceless career bureaucrats... I own a food-manufacturing business. Such businesses aren't trying to please anyone; we're following regulations. There are plenty of other such safety regulations that might seem unnecessary or pointless, but they're in place and they exist to help make certain food remains safe. >...80,000 pounds of butter will be destroyed to "protect" the dumbest among us. Regulations like this are meant to make certain even those most in need of awareness are informed. You may think they're the "dumbest," while I see them as people just as qualified to be informed as any other consumer.
• throw0101b 2y ago
  > Right, so if you pick up a package that says "Unsalted Butter" and nothing else, who the hell is going to assume no milk was used? Perhaps they are a vegan and think it is (e.g.) almond butter: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nut_butter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nut_butter
• innagadadavida 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • kibwen 2y ago
    The lack of empathy being expressed in this thread is utterly deranged. You people should feel ashamed of yourselves. My advisor from college is a brilliant, caring man and a genius computer scientist with a lovely family. He also has a terribly dairy allergy. The tiniest lapse threatens to kill him. Here in the US he's safe thanks to regulations like this. When he travels abroad for conferences, he has to pre-prepare all his own food and bring it with him because he can't trust the labeling in other countries. Despite this, he very nearly died in India because somehow he still managed to come into contact with something. So what, he should just... die? Why? His children should become fatherless... why? His contribution to computer science should be snuffed out... why? For some ridiculous religious anti-regulation cause? This crusade is despicable. You don't deserve to be here.
    • baggy_trough 2y ago
      Presumably he knows that butter contains dairy.
      • kibwen 2y ago
        The comment is in response to this: "I don’t think the government should be involved with allergen labeling." Don't waste my time with non-sequiturs.
      • pests 2y ago
        What about the people who don't know that? Just because someone is dumb or stupid DOES NOT make them less of a person, with the full rights and ability to live their life to the fullest, just like you and me.
        • baggy_trough 2y ago
          What about people who can’t read? I mean, you have to draw the line somewhere.
• renewiltord 2y ago
  Yeah, but the choice isn’t between 80k of butter being used and nothing. The other side of it is all allergy labels not being reliable. I was on the side of “don’t waste” but now that I know it’s only $400k worth I think I’m not as aggrieved. I think making allergy labels optional will cost more than $400k and I think developing newer rules will cost $400k. Overall, this is the cheapest way to do things. Verifiable information transmission is usually harder than most things. It’s why we do things like reduce aerospace composite strength by riveting them - inspectability costs something but the value is higher.
• tzs 2y ago
  The whole point of the allergens section is so that people with allergies do not need to read the whole ingredient list every time they buy the product. In the specific case of butter the whole ingredient list is small enough that reading it every time would be no big deal, but many food items contain dozens of ingredients and the manufacturers often make changes to the recipe. If people cannot rely on the allergen list at the bottom they would have to read the full ingredient list of everything every time.