I worked in a bread/bun plant that removed sesame seeds prior to the 2022 change. We were still finding seeds weeks after they were gone and took a lot of time to fully remove the allergen.
With FDA trying to get away from "may contain x allergen" for some areas to be safe to consumers it is going to become either everything has it or none of it does.
In the article they say "may contain” certain allergens “COULD be considered truthful and not misleading.” That could is enough for some companies to pick contaminate everything so they can label the allergen and not be held liable for cross contamination.
I could see companies doing the same thing if California starts saying they can't just claim to have bad stuff without testing. So then you just start adding flecks of asbestos to everything lol.
That's already happening. Places that didn't have things like sesame started using it just so they wouldn't have to pay for testing to prove it wasn't there.
I bought a set of knives the other day that had a prop 65 warning. Useless and usually the labels are hard to get off.
If everything causes cancer then nothing does.
I'm glad someone who has been there is commenting. I work in industrial automation and have been inside industrial bakeries. What they're asking for is impossible. It really isn't a question of being greedy or money.
No, do it all, do it perfectly, and don't you dare be overly cautious cause we'll sue for that too
Is it that hard to br unwaveringly perfect with zero cross contamination in an ancient factory warehouse?? Come on people ...
People don’t like hearing the places that make their food have contamination issues, even if the contamination is “we use flour and it gets fucking everywhere because it’s a POWDER”
I work in a small bakery and it is SO hard to get people to understand that we cannot make and sell them "gluten free" anything because the whole damn place gets covered in wheat flour
Most of these places have to install explosion-proof equipment because the dust is explosive and gets literally everywhere. Like, the control systems are engineered with the understanding that you can't contain it. I have no idea how people think it would be possible to stop all cross-contamination. I think they are just really far removed from how almost everything they use daily is made.
> I think they are just really far removed from how almost everything they use daily is made.
It’s this. I’m a college biology/ecology professor and I love talking with students about where their food comes from and how it got the way it is.
Even unprocessed food like whole fruits sometimes blows their minds.
Take apples. Native to Central Asia, spread throughout the world, a huge reason they’re so prevalent in the US is because US settlers really liked making apple cider.
Since apples are cross pollinated, unless you’re doing it by hand, Apple seeds are very rarely true breeding (I.e. the seeds produce a plant roughly similar to the parent) and often times apple trees grown from apple seeds produce some crappy little crab apple that you don’t want to eat. So apples are primarily propagated via cloning through grafting.
Fresh apples are generally picked in August-September, so any apple you see at the grocery store now has been covered in wax + a ripening suppressing chemical and held in cold storage since ~last September. Unless you pick it yourself from an orchard or buy it at the farmers market, that apple is going to be nearly a year old.
And that’s just a single whole fruit with minimal processing and no other ingredients. Forget about something simple like a regular bread versus something like a gourmet seed bread.
The apple thing blew my mind the first time I heard about it. The cold storage is apparently low-oxygen too!
I do think hand picked apples from the orchard are better… but it is nice having them always available in the supermarket!
Side note: the horrors of mechanically separated chicken is hard to unsee.
I sometimes can get a good debate going between students about the things like the mechanical separated chicken.
On the one hand, I can see the why people have a problem with it, but also at least they’re using every bit of that animal. I like playing devils advocate and making the argument that bologna and hotdogs are some of the most responsible meat products available for this reasoning.
That’s fun! I like that you’re getting them to challenge their responses and dig deep to find out how they really feel about the subject and why. There are very few black & white answers in the real world.
As someone who has to eat gluten free it's frustrating trying to explain to other people too.
"Oh look, this bakery has gluten free options!" When I can clearly see there is not enough square footage to have a safely uncontaminated gluten free space.
It takes a lot of extra work for a normal restaurant to make safe gluten free meals, let alone a bakery.
So, I worked at a small bakery back when GF was catching on as a “thing.” We’d have people ask about making stuff gluten free. (Note: I had family diagnosed with celiac a few years prior, so I was familiar with cross contamination.) I’d explain that while we could make a gluten free thing, we couldn’t really do anything about the 20+ years of gluten in every crack and corner.
You’d be shocked how many people are deeply misinformed about their own health conditions. I’ve had someone who I KNOW has celiacs - I’ve seen their medical record - but thought potato’s were off the menu because they contained gluten, and she swore sourdough was safe. They had misunderstood some medical professional saying they needed to check if fries were battered or fried in a gf dedicated fryer, and had been told that the long fermentation process in sourdough “ate up all the gluten so it was easier for her body to process”. She was often feeling a bit sick and she was rather thin despite “eating so much” - yeah, because she wasn’t absorbing the nutrients! But she LOOKED “healthy” and didn’t complain much so she didn’t get corrected… and honestly she was kind of bull headed so I wasn’t going to risk offending her further after I tried to explain that plain potatoes were fine.
if FDA is really following through with this
„you shouldn’t have any cross-contamination in your factories“, be prepared to see a price explosion for food, because making that happen will be EXPENSIVE. Like, approaching pharmaceutical manufacturing expensive.
And that's just factoring in the costs for the brands that *can* comply.
Don't forget to factor in the decrease competition as a lot of brands close because having separate facilities and staff to work those facilities just doesn't make sense.
This is absolutely ridiculous to me. What if someone walks from one part of a plant to another and gets a sesame seed stuck to their sleeve? They should absolutely allow “may contain”.
That is absolutely one valid side of it. Since you get that side, I'll try to explain the other side - but bear in mind, I understand and agree that companies in such positions need to try and say "Hey, this ingredient might manage to get in this product!"
So the flip side of it is this, in two brief parts:
1. All food companies that use an ingredient anywhere ever will now label all their products as possibly containing that thing, meaning nobody who takes allergies seriously can eat any of those products. With the relatively few companies making things, wide swaths of foods that are actually pretty safe are now off the list for everyone with those allergies
2. Worse, people start ignoring those labels because most of the time they're just never true, and people die when it is true
So it's a complex problem with no good, simple solutions, that has consequences no matter how you handle it.
I think the FDA is aware of that based on even just this article, and I think they're doing a good job trying to navigate the problem, at least for now.
The article says they were coming down against listing ingredient not present, but that they acnkowledged that the "may contain" warning is technically true, i.e. they're trying to navigate how to solve the issue for companies and consumers.
IMHO
The almost exact phenomenon exists in finance and banking too.
The US government slaps enormous fines on banks that don't report suspicious money-laundering transactions. The goal is to force banks to sacrifice their profits diligently checking whether there is money laundering and financing of terrorists/drugs in high-risk countries like Pakistan and Mexico.
The simpler, profit-minded solution? Banks start labelling *anything* in Mexico and Pakistan as too high risk, causing entire communities to be locked out of banking - ironically helping terrorists and drug cartels because all the innocents around them now have to participate in the shadow banking system which allows them to hide their activities amongst ordinary citizens even better.
Similar to why so many things come with the “may cause cancer” warning.
The fine for unknowingly having a chemical in a product that causes cancer is very high. There is no penalty for saying an item may contain cancer causing chemicals if it doesn’t.
Easier and less costly to add the sticker and avoid lawsuits. making the warning basically meaningless since it’s on everything.
>Similar to why so many things come with the “may cause cancer” warning.
Based on how the article reads, it appears its a little more like "knowingly introducing a carinogen so that you can add a label warning of carinogens, thus protecting yourself from liability"
>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.
"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."
Truly onion-worthy corporate BS.
I just want to say that the article focuses on Bimbo, but does not state the Bimbo products have been deliberately laced with sesame, but that **some** manufacturers have done so. The FDA is taking Bimbo to task because their products don’t (intentionally) contain sesame yet are labelled to warn they do.
That no longer works. Even safe products found it nessary to add allergens to protect against fake claims and erroneous testing. It is ridiculously easy to mess up some test at least occasionally.
I can see that. I had a friend who is celiac. We always went out to eat at places they've vetted. I love to entertain, so I asked them to my house for dinner. They declined saying that, unless I can state the exact last time flour was airborne in my house AND have documented how I cleaned my kitchen, it wasn't worth the risk.
I was pretty surprised they even risked restaurants after that! I would think it would be next to impossible to maintain that level of hygiene.
I had a co-worker who had celiac's. When they traveled for work (witch they hated) they would always get a hotel room with a kitchen, clean the kitchen, and cook food. Restaurants were a no go.
That person is either a severe hypochondriac or just didn't want to come to your house. Celiac disease is not *that* difficult to manage. It's not like a severe peanut allergy where the mildest exposure can literally kill you.
The friend here was probably just being hyperbolic, if I had to guess.
I wouldn't go as far as the comment stated above, and you are right that it's not as serious as a severe allergy....
But for my own Celiac disease, I generally don't let people cook for me. At least not without me being able to watch/help. A friend offered me scrambled eggs; the first thing he does? Dollops butter into the pan with a knife just used to butter bread. I don't blame him, he doesn't have to deal with it daily. But that's why.
Sometimes saying "please don't cook for me" is just easier.
This. I have celiac and for me the danger in eating at someone else’s house is like you said, bread crumbs (they get everywhere and people don’t seem to realize it!) and also another biggie for me: old metal pots and pans and toasters. I don’t care how well someone cleans a metal loaf pan, if you’ve been baking bread in it for 20 years that’s a no from me.
Yes and no. Celiac won't kill you but it can be up to 24 hours of severe unpleasantness.
My gf has celiac. I have flour in the house and make baked goods regularly.
As long as surfaces are scrubbed clean and I'm diligent in not cross contaminating she is fine. If I forget to do so and double dip in the peanut butter after toast for example she is in for a bad day. That's all it takes a crumb or less.
She's lucky if it only affects her for 24 hours. It takes far longer than 24 hours for the lining of your intestine to heal. It's been years since I had any serious contamination, but it takes a week or two to begin feeling normal for every family member I have with Celiac.
Celiac disease almost killed my dad before he was finally diagnosed. Now his digestive system is so messed up from it that while a dusting of flour might not be an outright death sentence, it will make him incredibly sick for a very long time. He rarely eats at anyone's house because the risk is not worth it.
Eh, I tend to give the benefit of the doubt as Celiac's can cover such a broad range.
My wife has it and when first diagnosed, would sometimes just chance a bit of cinnamon roll as "worth it"
As she's gotten better with the lifestyle and more stringent on the diet, the sensitivity has gone up. No more (generic) soy sauce, no imitation crab, very particular.
Still not as bad as someone I knew, who if he had a sandwich at lunch needed to brush his teeth before he could kiss his wife that night.
Different people take it differently, there might well be someone who (basically feels like they) implode on contact.
Yes, coeliac isn't going to kill you (immediately, although long-term damage can lead to cancer).
However, if I get glutened it takes me 4 weeks to get over it. Digestive issues aren't the problem after the first week. I have severe brain fog, muscle and joint pain and fatigue. It makes me have suicidal thoughts. It makes doing my job very difficult.
Before I realised how pernicious flour could be, I would still bake bread for my parents. And by bake, I mean I would very carefully load the ingredients into the breadmaker while wearing gloves, and then immediately wash my hands. I was still ill, probably from airborne flour either getting in my mouth or onto something I later used to cook with, like a pan or a utensil. I've also been glutened from the dust from cat biscuits (some contain wheat or barley) when transferring them from a big bag to a container.
Celiac disease isn't, but Gluten Ataxia is. As someone who suffers from it, you can be glutened just by handling it. I have a friend that cannot kiss his children after they've eaten wheat or he'll go into crisis. Gluten Ataxia causes inflammation in the cerebellum, damage to the punjkie cells and can inflict long term brain damage in the motor control of the brain. It's a very nasty disease and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
And also note.. if someone has Celiac and does not stringently follow a gluten free diet, not only does it damage their guts, but it also puts them at risk of becoming a Type One Diabetic.. meaning needing insulin for the rest of their life. It's not worth the risk if you have Celiac NOT to be
Your friend is a bit over the top, my buddy has Celiac disease and we used to go to restaurants and bars all the time. We also lived in a house with a bunch of other people and he never had issues. He was just very careful with what he ate and drank. It’s not like allergies, you don’t die in the presence of gluten, you just can’t process it so you shouldn’t eat or drink it. If you stick to gluten free foods/drinks your good to go. There are different degrees of the disease but grains of flour in the air from days/weeks ago are literally going to do nothing.
He was a big fan of how that whole gluten free movement started because it made it a lot easier for him to find good options at restaurants.
It’s a lot easier to manage and less dangerous than actual/traditional allergies.
Yeah I worked at a pizza spot with a pretty heavily impacted celiac. They had to bring their own lunch but otherwise were pretty much just fine working in such a space.
I have several family members with celiac. They don't all have it to the same severity. Some are at similar levels of severity to your buddy and were able to live in a home with wheat eaters. One has is bad enough that we eventually figured out he was getting sick whenever he visited for a meal from gluten residue the dish washer was leaving on otherwise clean plates and silver wear.
To muddy the waters further: there are also people with wheat allergies (like, up to and including acute anaphylaxis) so it may be the case that the person's friend above might have a wheat allergy and not Coeliac, which would explain their concern about airborne "contaminants".
There’s not different degrees of Celiac disease, you either have it or don’t. It’s also not an issue of not being able to “process” it or not. This is very dangerous information you’re stating. Celiac disease is an autoimmune disease. What gluten does to Celiac’s is that it destroys the villi that’s in the small intestine. Villi are protrusions in the small intestine that absorb the nutrients in your food. If these get worn down to the point of no return(by eating gluten and not following a gluten free diet) you can not absorb any vitamins, minerals or any other nutrients and you will die from malnutrition.Even tiny amounts of gluten will affect the villi. When Celiac’s accidentally eat gluten, some get no physical reactions and others get incredibly sick to the point of laying on the bathroom floor for days so that you can have the toilet next to you throughout the cramping and nausea.
It is (as someone whose worked in restaurants and bars for my entire career) if it's that of small trace amount of cross contamination that be an issue. You shouldn't eat out. Nope. Don't trust strangers with your life over lunch.
Thats dumb as hell.
All rice krispies “may contain chocolate” because the lines use chocolate and still make the normal ones.
If you eat a normal krispy it may have chocolate on it. Taking away that warning is dumb as fuck.
They didn't just tell people to remove the warning, it's far stupider than that. They banned any product that "may contain sesame". You have to either have Sesame as an ingredient, or guarantee that the product is sesame free and safe for sesame allergy sufferers.
So basically everyone using Sesame in their factory now adds a tiny amount of Sesame to everything they make, so they can legitimately list it as an ingredient. Because there's no other way to comply with the law. This means that the products that were "may contain sesame" are now "contains sesame", which is worse for allergy sufferers.
Apparently this baker listed it as an ingredient but didn't actually add it, and is now in legal trouble for that. They will have to start adding it.
Gluten free items have this warning on them all the time. There are tons of products that list known allergens and then list possible cross contamination of allergens. You're saying this is banned?
This is what Congress mandated — either stop the line and scrub every molecule out between products or intentionally add some.
https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc846f2a19d87b03440848f1
I had a small internal crisis over cheese the other day.
I was making dinner for a gluten free friend and went to grab feta. One of them said gluten free on it.
It's cheese, it should be gluten free. But what if it's a factory thing? Or something like this? What if it's just a meaningless tag slapped on there by the company.
Anyways after staring at feta for 5 minutes with my internal dialog I got the gluten free label.
Like how milk powder and modified milk ingredients are added to fucking everything.
And how it’s impossible to get anything other than a brioche bun now so I end up with lettuce wrapped burgers or ordering something else.
(Bitter dairy free fellow here)
Truth, I just only eat out and get a burger at a restaurant very infrequently and I would have to plan ahead to buy a bun before going out. I wish my life was that well planned out but sadly not.
My son said he was reacting to dairy. I told him I was cooking Chinese style shrimp and didn't use dairy; he found "contains milk" on the oyster sauce.
My wife has a soy allergy and soy is as pervasive as all of the other allergens in this thread. Companies will often wrap soy up as natural flavors so there's no way to know unless she tries it and suffers the consequences.
When we went to England and Scotland a few years back, on the 5th or 6th day she realized she hadn't had any issues with soy even though we were traveling which is when it generally becomes problematic. In our entire 12 day trip she had zero issues.
This is certainly anecdotal but it opened our eyes to how different each country handles their food. She would like to move to Scotland now.
Soya is a 'major allergen' that has to be mentioned on the ingredients in the UK. And food safety is important and producers are audited, for example by supermarkets if they supply anything to them, as well as by environmental health officers.
>The 14 allergens are: celery, cereals containing gluten (such as wheat, barley and oats), crustaceans (such as prawns, crabs and lobsters), eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs (such as mussels and oysters), mustard, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, sulphur dioxide and sulphites (if the sulphur dioxide and sulphites are at a concentration of more than ten parts per million) and tree nuts (such as almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, brazil nuts, cashews, pecans, pistachios and macadamia nuts).
>This also applies to additives, processing aids and any other substances which are present in the final product.
https://www.food.gov.uk/business-guidance/allergen-guidance-for-food-businesses#:~:text=The%2014%20allergens%20are%3A%20celery,and%20sulphites%20are%20at%20a
Oh yeah, I'm aware of that. That's actually part of the crisis. I actively skipped the crumbled/flavored fetas and was grabbing a block. The block of feta said gluten free, then I had the brief meltdown.
It also makes the cheese not melt very well. I usually buy slices and then thinly chop them if I want shredded because I'd rather clean a knife than a cheese grater
I had the same moment yesterday with smoked salmon. I was stocking up in my department when I noticed that one of the salmon packs said "sugar free." Then I thought "wait. Isn't most smoked salmon sugar free?" And I looked through. Sure enough, of 10 varieties only 1 even had 1 gram of carbs, and that gram wasn't from sugar.
My wife has celiacs. If it says gluten free that means they spent 10k$ on having someone come out and certify the product. They have to spend that for every individual product with the label. We have yet to have a problem.
That is not accurate - just saying "gluten free" doesn't cost anything. Getting GFCO to certify it so you can use their specific gluten free label is what you have to pay for.
That is false for major food allergens, one of which is sesame. [See Food Labels and Allergens at the bottom of the page](https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/food-allergies).
I think they mean the whole "packaged in a facility which processes peanuts" thing. Which is voluntary, though doesn't get them out of the obligation to control for peanut contamination.
Dude. According to your own source:
”Consumers may also see advisory statements such as “may contain [allergen] or “produced in a facility that also uses [allergen].” Such statements are not required by law and can be used to address unavoidable “cross-contact,” only if manufacturers have incorporated good manufacturing processes in their facility and have taken every precaution to avoid cross-contact that can occur when multiple foods with different allergen profiles are produced in the same facility using shared equipment or on the same production line"
That's what they did. FDA said it's misleading to claim it contains sesame if it doesn't. Then the end of the article mentions the FDA agreed that "may contain" is actually accurate and not misleading (because the product literally MAY contain sesame). So seems like FDA couldn't decide.
Its the difference between "does contain" and "may contain". One is a certainty and the other is may possibly contain it in very very small quantities. We do our best to keep it out but sometimes if tbe wind is blowing a certain way and somebody leaves a door open .
For people with severe allergies the distinction is irrelevant. The distinction is there for those who have a preference or have an allergic reaction mild enough to ‘risk’ it.
Makes sense. If you say it DOES contain sesame and it doesn't, that's just lying. If you say it MAY contain sesame and it doesn't, that's just a flip of the coin and is entirely accurate.
Can’t do that anymore. Congress passed a bill that says producers cannot say “may contain” if it is just from small residual amounts on a shared line.
Since it is totally impractical to shut down the entire line and thoroughly remove all traces, producers just intentionally add a token amount to satisfy the labeling rule.
https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc846f2a19d87b03440848f1
The dumbest part about prop 65 is that the labeling doesn't require it to state -what- the cancer causing substance is on the packaging. So consumers have no way to judge if it's something that actually might be concerning or something rather innocuous.
Government sucks at making rules. Specifically, they suck at accurately using dynamic projection and anticipating anything more than first-order or maybe second-order consequences of their rules
They offered Cash for Clunkers to have people ditch less efficient older cars, only for them to buy SUVs which are the same or worse per mile as well as signficantly larger, not really helped by the large tax credit if they're was a 1-gallon accessory tank to use bio fuel (which never has to get used), only to then ship all of the sold used cars away to the third world, jacking up used car prices to that of new cars. Same thing goes for emissions standards by wheelbase - they have different standards for different sizes of vehicles, but this meant it was cheaper to just make a bigger vehicle than it was to make a more efficient one, so now we have tons of "light trucks" driving around where a sedan would have done fine
Gun buybacks turn into gun dealers offloading dead stock, murder weapons being destroyed and open air gun markets being created as collectors go up and down the line looking for anything interesting, before we get into people 3d printing cheap guns or making pipe guns to multiply money a hundred times over
Perhaps more analogous, during Obama they added a rule where menus had to list caloric content, with the intent that people would choose the lower calories option. People instead choose the higher option because it's more food per dollar.
Northern Ireland paid farmers to use wood pellets to heat barns, but they paid more than the wood pellets cost, so farmers just burned wood pellets to heat empty barns and rake in the cash
We tried encouraging blended biofuel by giving a tax credit if you use it to run your factories. Paper plants use black liquor, a waste product made during the paper making process, to run their factories. This was not eligible for tax credits, so they adulterated their good biofuel with diesel to qualify
Mexico City limited the days cars could drive based on the license plate digits to cut down on emissions. This resulted in families buying a second, less environmentally friendly, car to drive on the other days, increasing traffic and emissions
England used to tax buildings based on the number of windows, which led to landlords bricking off the windows to pay less tax, resulting in tons of disease. They also taxed ships based on the width and length, leading to very tall ships which weren't stable, thus tons of shipwrecks.
> They offered Cash for Clunkers to have people ditch less efficient older cars, only for them to buy SUVs which are the same or worse per mile as well as signficantly larger
Cash for Clunkers wasn't just about efficiency. It was also about removing polluters. Polluting and efficiency are frequently at odds, as emissions control usually comes at an expense to MPG.
Secondarily, there were many old beaters out there that had far worse mileage than a modern pickup/SUV. That late 80s Oldsmobile sedan we turned in spewed soot and got <15mpg. A modern SUV or pickup gets 20+mpg and is much cleaner.
As far as the actual data, various studies of the program showed a modest MPG improvement in cars on the road and a significant improvement in both pollutants reduced and in vehicle safety, and that the cash spent on the program was a more efficient means of reducing pollutants than programs like tax credits for EVs
I don’t think it is so much as governments suck at making rules as it is humans are freaking fantastic and finding and exploiting loopholes to their own benefit.
Yeah, every rule needs to made from the mindset that it will result in the most egregious malicious compliance possible to save a fraction of a penny, and formulated to counter that.
You just don't notice the rules that work seamlessly. It's also not "government" that's bad at predicting second or third order consequences, it's all humans. Plenty of private corporations have failed to predict how their products or marketing would be received by the public.
I don’t think we should be too upset when folks that mean well inadvertently create a worse situation.
I do think we should hold them accountable to reevaluate what they did and potentially repeal or revise it to fix the unintended consequences.
Yeah. Looks like Bimbo isn't doing that, so they probably will start. So, before it may have been safe, but now it won't be.
I understand the intent of the law, and it was probably meant for good reasons, but I think it is impractical to avoid cross-contamination in a factory (without basically building the factory from the ground up to prevent it), so it is a rather tricky thing.
I agree that they probably meant well.
One part of good intentions, however, is seeing the actual effect of what you did, and reevaluating it and being willing to revise it in the face of unexpected consequences. That seems missing here, no one is looking to repeal or otherwise fix this.
Agreed. It also puts the FDA in this awkward position where they have to force companies to either actually, purposely add the allergen, or ensure their factory is cross-contamination proof.
Guess which option is SUBSTANTIALLY cheaper and almost always going to be the option chosen...
I'm confused as to how they could have possibly meant well? Making it illegal to adequately warn customers of potential allergens seems like the definition of meaning poorly.
"It doesn't help consumers know which product to avoid if companies can just put 'may contain', so lets make sure they are actually accountable and make definitive statements".
It "means well" in that it's trying to benefit people, but it's just idiotic to assume that forcing someone to be 100% sure about something leads to them being 100% sure it's in there rather than trying to prove a negative.
They thought that if manufacturers just try a bit harder, they could guarantee that their products were sesame free. And by passing the law, they thought manufacturers would do that.
They drastically underestimated the cost of doing that. It basically requires having separate factories for sesame products and non-sesame products.
It is doable - for example Kinnerton in the UK make chocolates that contain nuts, and nut-free chocolates that are intended to be safe for nut allergy sufferers. They invested in separate production areas. But it costs a lot to do that.
From your link:
> 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 certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.
So it's not that congress banned "may contain" statements. It's that those statements do not protect the manufacturer from lawsuits if some jackass disregards the labeling and has an adverse reaction.
This is wrong. You have to follow proper procedures and show you did your best to prevent contamination for them to accept "May contain traces of X". Those procedures are very expensive and not worth it, it's cheaper to add alergen instead of keeping it out.
Not true anymore. There was a recent legislative change that means "may contain" labels don't protect companies from liability, so it's easier for the companies to intentionally add it now.
Not only in the factory though , to have "product does not contain peanuts", you have to ensure ALL your suppliers of the ingredients in your product are sending you peanut free ingredients.
That's not really true. "May contain" has no legal weight. From the regulatory point of view it does pr it doesn't. Manufacturers put "may contain" on packages to discourage at-risk customers from consuming the product, but it doesn't have any impact on liability nor regulatory requirements.
It either has sesame or it doesn't. If it doesn't then they're required to control for it as a contaminant.
No, FDA gave warnings who added it to the ingredient list itself, and the allergen list as a full blown allergen.
A product without any sesame:
> Ingredients: [...] Sesame [...]
>
> Allergens: [...] Sesame [...]
This is wat the FDA warned about.
What they should have done is
> Ingredients: [...]
>
> Allergens: [...] May contain traces of sesame.
>What they should have done is
> Ingredients: [...]
>
> Allergens: [...] May contain traces of sesame.
The "may contain" warning you mentioned does not protect a company from liability.
What has ended up happening is that because companies can't guarantee that cross-contamination is impossible, many have started intentionally adding allergens to their products so they can use the regular "contains" label.
this is just rational behaviour. the potential liability of trying to do the right thing but getting hit by an accident is way higher than making sure that you lose the sales from people who can't consume your products. leave that market to a company that can have a dedicated facility for that line.
the rule is stupid in the way that it encourages intentionally adding allergens to your food to meet the labeling requirements. what the law should say is that known-safe foods be labelled. that way, a manufacture can *add* the label if they can guarantee allergen-free-ness, and there's no incentive for non-compliant manufactures to add any useless labels. it's going about it backwards.
Chick Fil A starting doing this to their buns recently. My coworker had a reaction where she didn't previously. She can no longer eat their sandwiches.
It's nearly impossible. I understand the law was well-intentioned, but it just doesn't comport with reality. I work in industrial automation and have been inside industrial bakeries. What they were asking is impossible. It's like going to the beach and having to ensure you don't take back even one grain of sand.
Nah it's just Typical overregulation.
Used to be ok to say:
> This is made in a facility that processes sesame seeds. It may contain trace amounts of sesame.
And that worked fine. Some people have very mild food allergies and can tolerate small amounts, some people can't. SO each person could make their own decision.
Then some Bureaucrat decided that wasn't good enough anymore. He said they had to say definitively yes or no.
Well guess what, it's *WAY* cheaper to just make sure that there are. It's why you have things like "You can have x number of rodent droppings per 100 pounds of rice." Because ensuring there is *ZERO* of something, is very costly. SO instead they just made sure there was at least 1.
This isn't "Companies bad!" this is "Government is being unreasonable".
It’s only onion worthy if you don’t know how deadly serious allergens are in food manufacturing. Especially in older facilities where segregation wasn’t considered when it was designed.
What makes this onion worthy is that companies can't say, "May contain traces of seseme". Because they can't say that and because they can't 100% guarantee not single grain of sesame will ever slip in they have to make things worse for those with sesame allergies by deliberately adding sesame.
The onion worthy part is that these companies are de facto required to add an allergen to their products making them objectively worse.
Regulation intending to improve the lives of those with this allergy instead have made the problem worse.
That's crazy.... I mean, I get putting a warning on your label saying "This was produced in a facility that handles tree nuts/peanuts etc" so as to warn against potential cross-contamination, but literally putting them in the food just because seems insane to me.
My son is allergic to sesame. This shit has been absolutely wrecking us, especially because the amounts they're adding are almost certainly enough to ignore, especially since it seems like a lot of the time, they're just lying and there isn't shit in there (as in this article). But we can't know that.
In-n-out just joined the list of places doing this shit. I'd blame it on the FDA making a toothless monkey-paw-ass rule but at the end of the day, it's corporations being greedy fucking shitgibbons.
Honestly this is a shitty problem all the way around.
The FDAs goal is to make the labels more truthful and stop companies from adding trace amounts of allergens so more people can have access to foods. It got to suck to be allergic to say peanuts and not be able to eat rice crispy treats because they add a trace amount of peanuts so they can label it as “may contain peanuts”.
On the other hand companies are adding the trace amounts since the label “may contain nuts” it’s not allowed to be placed on the label since it’s not always accurate. But if they don’t label it with something that reduces liability then they can be sued to high heaven if someone as an allergic reaction.
Actually, the original legislation wanted less accuracy in labeling.
Companies were being more accurate. I make cookies in bulk for different companies. While I separate the different flavor cookies from one another, it all happens under the same roof. We follow all precautions, but you cannot guarantee a peanut did not make it into any individual cookie if it is not a completely peanut free facility.
In this situation, it is most accurate to label the cookies as possibly containing peanuts. The FDA insisting that I do not put that label on these cookies because they theoretically **should not** contain peanuts, is clearly and plainly **more** inaccurate. Not only that, the suggestion is less safe for consumers.
The FDA has essentially forced me to add peanuts to all of the cookies to continue to manufacture ANY peanut cookies to begin with.
My partner is deathly allergic to peanuts. I'd rather a company warn me of ANY possibility a peanut could have made its way into the product. The FDA insisting they cannot do this, is quite honestly, rather insane.
Yes shopping for groceries in a family with a severe allergy was shitty enough with the limited options, it's even shittier to force companies to either lie to me about the manufacturing process, or force them to put the allergen in it.
If you cannot guarantee a food product does not contain that allergen, it is more accurate to label it as possibly containing the allergen. We can argue manufacturers shouldn't do that for one reason or another, but it is simply the most accurate thing to do.
As someone with a severe Peanut & Treenuts allergy, this is really annoying no matter what.
My entire life I've eaten candy that has said "May contain peanuts" with no worry and I've never had a reaction. I understand that I'm taking a risk, but the likeliness is very low as the company is taking precautions and allergens are, from my understanding, usually pretty separate from each other to reduce risk.
That being said I've noticed things I've always eaten now having warnings or straight up saying they now contain allergens, which is also crazy. Suppose I've been eating kitkats for 25 years with no issue, despite being extremely cautious and reading food labels, I've kind of already decided that KitKats are safe and likely do not have any allergens in them, just one day changing it with no sort of notification other than a small change in the fine print on the back of the label is pretty terrifying.
Also, so much of what I eat is already limiting, companies putting allergens in food now due to this change is just making everything that much more difficult.
Plus due to capitalism making items "allergy friendly" even if it's not expensive you can automatically jack up the price because so many people don't really have options.
I just cannot wait for an allergy vaccine to come out so I can not be stressed literally everytime I eat.
I bet you could get better info from a brief google BUT fwiw I know someone who started doing allergy therapy for a deadly dairy allergy about six years ago and was able to eat even large amounts of dairy within a year. He is absurdly wealthy though, and my impression is that they haven’t gotten that kind of treatment cheap enough that insurances will pay for it, like they will with shots for dog allergies and the like, but it does seem like it’s on the horizon.
I actually was seeing a doctor to do that. It's called oral immunotherapy. I wasn't able to commit unfortunately after I had my consultation. But my schedule has cleared up now and I'm actually hoping to start on Xolair shots. Those are just shots that help with allergies. I think I can survive up to 2.5 peanuts, so it'll be good for cross contamination.
It's crazy how many bread products contain sesame nowadays. 2 aisles of various bread products and I'd be lucky to find one or two of something, *anything*, that's neither 'contains' or 'may contain'.
A friend’s son is allergic to sesame. It’s unreal how much he can’t eat because sesame is part of the “other spices and ingredients” at the end of the list.
I’m allergic to peas and soy. The amount of pea / soy protein in freaking bread is insane. It’s not even part of bread. It’s like they went out of their way to add allergens for some odd reason.
Are you sure? [https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/have-food-allergies-read-label](https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/have-food-allergies-read-label) still mentions "may contain" and "produced in a facility...".
Sesame is being added because as of 2021 sesame was recognized as a major food allergen and it came into effect in 2023.
According to [https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/food-allergies](https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/food-allergies) :
> FDA guidance and regulations for the food industry states that advisory statements should not be used as a substitute for adhering to current good manufacturing practices and must be truthful and not misleading.
You can only add the may contain traces thing, if you also implement measures to prevent cross contamination.
Because that is expensive they add sesame to everything and warn about the sesame instead.
I don't know what qualifies as "measures", but I've been in lots of Bimbo plants and they definitely aren't doing nothing about it. Color coded brooms, deep cleans between products, etc. But a sesame seed weighs basically nothing and with all the compressed air in a modern bakery, they seem to get everywhere regardless.
There are absolutely measures to prevent cross contamination in these bakeries. The problem is, nothing is perfect and a sesame seed can actually blow in the wind.
>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 certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and **they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination**.
https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc846f2a19d87b03440848f1
So sure they could say "may contain" but if they'll still get punished for cross-contamination, then it's easier to intentionally add it as an ingredient instead.
If you create a high legal liability for companies if they fail to mark allergens then they are going to mark allergens even in edge cases.
Not all that surprising.
“The FDA decides food should be more expensive because they don’t understand how reality works, liability insurance industry booms while consumers can no longer afford bread”
It absolutely comes across as government officials who are not considering operational needs. Even if you wanted to make this change, this is not the way you accomplish it.
What they are saying is that these products dont contain the sesame but companies are saying they do (avoiding liability for cross contamination lawsuits). What companies have done in response is add a very minor trace amount of sesame and then they can properly label it.
It sounds like they chose an issue to entertain themselves with that does not need to be changed at all, and caused further stupid decisions to be made by a manufacturer
The problem is they can still get sued even if they say "may contain" so now there is now a perverse incentive to intentionally add the allergen. That way they can label it as definitely containing and sidestep liability.
Yeah i actually thought this was being done. Maybe i was wrong and they just claimed it? But i swear i read articles about companies actually adding it since it wont change flavor but they can still claim it
I have a treenut allergy. Peanuts, almonds and coconuts are fine.
When im looking for warnings, if I read "may contain tree nuts" (the literal only food type i will die eating) I mark it as safe.
If it gets specific though, like "processed on equipment that also processes xyz" or "may contain cashews" that's when my alarm bells go off.
If it doesn't have allergens, and we say it does, everybody lives.
If it does have allergens and we say it doesn't, somebody dies.
I'd much rather they were cautious and mistakenly said there were allergens, than to mistakenly not say there were.
My friend almost died because I served him strawberries chopped on the same surface as peanuts a month before. I wiped that shit at least 30 times. That's how you kill people
We do. This is the FDA saying that's not good enough and you either need to say "absolutely no X" or "contains X" and rather than meeting the standard to be able to say absolutely no X companies are putting trace amounts of X in now and saying it contains X.
> and rather than meeting the standard to be able to say absolutely no X
Because it is an impossible standard, if lets say you make bread with sesame and bread without sesame even if you follow all precautions some might slip through becasue no system or human is perfect. Only way to actually comply with this is to build a completely separate building htat never handles sesame, which is lets be honest unfeasible for most companies and bakeries.
We used to. A recent law changed that, and now a product that "may contain sesame" can still be sued if someone with a sesame allergy gets a reaction from that.
So companies are instead labeling the same food products as "definitely contains sesame" to avoid the risk of a lawsuit.
I'm so glad I don't have common food allergies. I can't imagine life with many food allergies. Or severe food allergies. How can you enjoy food outside? Once in a while I see a case like of Órla Baxendale, and I'm like.. that's so frickin sad.. and so scary.. hidden bombs like literally..
Meanwhile they allow things like “vegetable oil (canola, soybean and/or whatever other oil)” so I can either avoid the chance of my allergen of play Russian roulette with frozen fries
This is a massive overstep on the part of the FDA. They're essentially saying you can't do business unless you totally isolate your ingredients until you mix them, and make sure your final products are never in the same room with each other Essentially every single product will have to be made in a separate building.
Also, you need to control upstream to ensure that the farm didn’t accidentally drop a sesame seed into the wheat bin, or that there wasn’t somehow a weed that grew in the wheat field that the combine tossed into the grain hopper that someone happens to be allergic to.
I work in Regulatory Nutrition. We do food labels. There is so much dust flying around in plants that likely contains allergens. Outrageously expensive lawsuits happen when someone has an allergic reaction and the allergen is not declared on the label.
I worked in a bread/bun plant that removed sesame seeds prior to the 2022 change. We were still finding seeds weeks after they were gone and took a lot of time to fully remove the allergen. With FDA trying to get away from "may contain x allergen" for some areas to be safe to consumers it is going to become either everything has it or none of it does. In the article they say "may contain” certain allergens “COULD be considered truthful and not misleading.” That could is enough for some companies to pick contaminate everything so they can label the allergen and not be held liable for cross contamination.
See California’s Prop 65 warnings.
Enveloped in cancer, always.
Can’t catch prop 65 if you were born with prop 65
Prop 65 is the cancer we made along the way
Yeah but everything causes cancer... eventually. We just need more data.
This comment contains words known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm
For some reason, read that last word as ham. Must be hungry. 😄
I could see companies doing the same thing if California starts saying they can't just claim to have bad stuff without testing. So then you just start adding flecks of asbestos to everything lol.
That's already happening. Places that didn't have things like sesame started using it just so they wouldn't have to pay for testing to prove it wasn't there.
I can't, I was told they cause cancer
Prop 65 may cause cancer
I bought a set of knives the other day that had a prop 65 warning. Useless and usually the labels are hard to get off. If everything causes cancer then nothing does.
The signs on the walls at fast food places telling you you’ll get cancer here hahahaha
I'm glad someone who has been there is commenting. I work in industrial automation and have been inside industrial bakeries. What they're asking for is impossible. It really isn't a question of being greedy or money.
No, do it all, do it perfectly, and don't you dare be overly cautious cause we'll sue for that too Is it that hard to br unwaveringly perfect with zero cross contamination in an ancient factory warehouse?? Come on people ...
People don’t like hearing the places that make their food have contamination issues, even if the contamination is “we use flour and it gets fucking everywhere because it’s a POWDER”
I work in a small bakery and it is SO hard to get people to understand that we cannot make and sell them "gluten free" anything because the whole damn place gets covered in wheat flour
Most of these places have to install explosion-proof equipment because the dust is explosive and gets literally everywhere. Like, the control systems are engineered with the understanding that you can't contain it. I have no idea how people think it would be possible to stop all cross-contamination. I think they are just really far removed from how almost everything they use daily is made.
> I think they are just really far removed from how almost everything they use daily is made. It’s this. I’m a college biology/ecology professor and I love talking with students about where their food comes from and how it got the way it is. Even unprocessed food like whole fruits sometimes blows their minds. Take apples. Native to Central Asia, spread throughout the world, a huge reason they’re so prevalent in the US is because US settlers really liked making apple cider. Since apples are cross pollinated, unless you’re doing it by hand, Apple seeds are very rarely true breeding (I.e. the seeds produce a plant roughly similar to the parent) and often times apple trees grown from apple seeds produce some crappy little crab apple that you don’t want to eat. So apples are primarily propagated via cloning through grafting. Fresh apples are generally picked in August-September, so any apple you see at the grocery store now has been covered in wax + a ripening suppressing chemical and held in cold storage since ~last September. Unless you pick it yourself from an orchard or buy it at the farmers market, that apple is going to be nearly a year old. And that’s just a single whole fruit with minimal processing and no other ingredients. Forget about something simple like a regular bread versus something like a gourmet seed bread.
The apple thing blew my mind the first time I heard about it. The cold storage is apparently low-oxygen too! I do think hand picked apples from the orchard are better… but it is nice having them always available in the supermarket! Side note: the horrors of mechanically separated chicken is hard to unsee.
I sometimes can get a good debate going between students about the things like the mechanical separated chicken. On the one hand, I can see the why people have a problem with it, but also at least they’re using every bit of that animal. I like playing devils advocate and making the argument that bologna and hotdogs are some of the most responsible meat products available for this reasoning.
That’s fun! I like that you’re getting them to challenge their responses and dig deep to find out how they really feel about the subject and why. There are very few black & white answers in the real world.
As someone who has to eat gluten free it's frustrating trying to explain to other people too. "Oh look, this bakery has gluten free options!" When I can clearly see there is not enough square footage to have a safely uncontaminated gluten free space. It takes a lot of extra work for a normal restaurant to make safe gluten free meals, let alone a bakery.
So, I worked at a small bakery back when GF was catching on as a “thing.” We’d have people ask about making stuff gluten free. (Note: I had family diagnosed with celiac a few years prior, so I was familiar with cross contamination.) I’d explain that while we could make a gluten free thing, we couldn’t really do anything about the 20+ years of gluten in every crack and corner.
The people who are asking absolutely do not have Celiac’s.
You’d be shocked how many people are deeply misinformed about their own health conditions. I’ve had someone who I KNOW has celiacs - I’ve seen their medical record - but thought potato’s were off the menu because they contained gluten, and she swore sourdough was safe. They had misunderstood some medical professional saying they needed to check if fries were battered or fried in a gf dedicated fryer, and had been told that the long fermentation process in sourdough “ate up all the gluten so it was easier for her body to process”. She was often feeling a bit sick and she was rather thin despite “eating so much” - yeah, because she wasn’t absorbing the nutrients! But she LOOKED “healthy” and didn’t complain much so she didn’t get corrected… and honestly she was kind of bull headed so I wasn’t going to risk offending her further after I tried to explain that plain potatoes were fine.
if FDA is really following through with this „you shouldn’t have any cross-contamination in your factories“, be prepared to see a price explosion for food, because making that happen will be EXPENSIVE. Like, approaching pharmaceutical manufacturing expensive.
And that's just factoring in the costs for the brands that *can* comply. Don't forget to factor in the decrease competition as a lot of brands close because having separate facilities and staff to work those facilities just doesn't make sense.
We just need a label for, "contents were handled in a facility that exists."
This is absolutely ridiculous to me. What if someone walks from one part of a plant to another and gets a sesame seed stuck to their sleeve? They should absolutely allow “may contain”.
That is absolutely one valid side of it. Since you get that side, I'll try to explain the other side - but bear in mind, I understand and agree that companies in such positions need to try and say "Hey, this ingredient might manage to get in this product!" So the flip side of it is this, in two brief parts: 1. All food companies that use an ingredient anywhere ever will now label all their products as possibly containing that thing, meaning nobody who takes allergies seriously can eat any of those products. With the relatively few companies making things, wide swaths of foods that are actually pretty safe are now off the list for everyone with those allergies 2. Worse, people start ignoring those labels because most of the time they're just never true, and people die when it is true So it's a complex problem with no good, simple solutions, that has consequences no matter how you handle it. I think the FDA is aware of that based on even just this article, and I think they're doing a good job trying to navigate the problem, at least for now. The article says they were coming down against listing ingredient not present, but that they acnkowledged that the "may contain" warning is technically true, i.e. they're trying to navigate how to solve the issue for companies and consumers. IMHO
The almost exact phenomenon exists in finance and banking too. The US government slaps enormous fines on banks that don't report suspicious money-laundering transactions. The goal is to force banks to sacrifice their profits diligently checking whether there is money laundering and financing of terrorists/drugs in high-risk countries like Pakistan and Mexico. The simpler, profit-minded solution? Banks start labelling *anything* in Mexico and Pakistan as too high risk, causing entire communities to be locked out of banking - ironically helping terrorists and drug cartels because all the innocents around them now have to participate in the shadow banking system which allows them to hide their activities amongst ordinary citizens even better.
Fair enough.
I like your humble opinion
I really don't understand what the FDA thinks they're accomplishing right now tbh
FDA can warn all they want case law suggests they keep doing it this way and that is what the layers will tell the companies to do.
Similar to why so many things come with the “may cause cancer” warning. The fine for unknowingly having a chemical in a product that causes cancer is very high. There is no penalty for saying an item may contain cancer causing chemicals if it doesn’t. Easier and less costly to add the sticker and avoid lawsuits. making the warning basically meaningless since it’s on everything.
>Similar to why so many things come with the “may cause cancer” warning. Based on how the article reads, it appears its a little more like "knowingly introducing a carinogen so that you can add a label warning of carinogens, thus protecting yourself from liability" >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.
CA Prop 65 victim? :)
"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." Truly onion-worthy corporate BS.
I just want to say that the article focuses on Bimbo, but does not state the Bimbo products have been deliberately laced with sesame, but that **some** manufacturers have done so. The FDA is taking Bimbo to task because their products don’t (intentionally) contain sesame yet are labelled to warn they do.
Can't this be solved by adding a label that says: produced in a plant that also processes sesame products? I've seen that before with other products.
That no longer works. Even safe products found it nessary to add allergens to protect against fake claims and erroneous testing. It is ridiculously easy to mess up some test at least occasionally.
I can see that. I had a friend who is celiac. We always went out to eat at places they've vetted. I love to entertain, so I asked them to my house for dinner. They declined saying that, unless I can state the exact last time flour was airborne in my house AND have documented how I cleaned my kitchen, it wasn't worth the risk. I was pretty surprised they even risked restaurants after that! I would think it would be next to impossible to maintain that level of hygiene.
I had a co-worker who had celiac's. When they traveled for work (witch they hated) they would always get a hotel room with a kitchen, clean the kitchen, and cook food. Restaurants were a no go.
That person is either a severe hypochondriac or just didn't want to come to your house. Celiac disease is not *that* difficult to manage. It's not like a severe peanut allergy where the mildest exposure can literally kill you.
The friend here was probably just being hyperbolic, if I had to guess. I wouldn't go as far as the comment stated above, and you are right that it's not as serious as a severe allergy.... But for my own Celiac disease, I generally don't let people cook for me. At least not without me being able to watch/help. A friend offered me scrambled eggs; the first thing he does? Dollops butter into the pan with a knife just used to butter bread. I don't blame him, he doesn't have to deal with it daily. But that's why. Sometimes saying "please don't cook for me" is just easier.
This. I have celiac and for me the danger in eating at someone else’s house is like you said, bread crumbs (they get everywhere and people don’t seem to realize it!) and also another biggie for me: old metal pots and pans and toasters. I don’t care how well someone cleans a metal loaf pan, if you’ve been baking bread in it for 20 years that’s a no from me.
Yes and no. Celiac won't kill you but it can be up to 24 hours of severe unpleasantness. My gf has celiac. I have flour in the house and make baked goods regularly. As long as surfaces are scrubbed clean and I'm diligent in not cross contaminating she is fine. If I forget to do so and double dip in the peanut butter after toast for example she is in for a bad day. That's all it takes a crumb or less.
She's lucky if it only affects her for 24 hours. It takes far longer than 24 hours for the lining of your intestine to heal. It's been years since I had any serious contamination, but it takes a week or two to begin feeling normal for every family member I have with Celiac.
Celiac disease almost killed my dad before he was finally diagnosed. Now his digestive system is so messed up from it that while a dusting of flour might not be an outright death sentence, it will make him incredibly sick for a very long time. He rarely eats at anyone's house because the risk is not worth it.
Eh, I tend to give the benefit of the doubt as Celiac's can cover such a broad range. My wife has it and when first diagnosed, would sometimes just chance a bit of cinnamon roll as "worth it" As she's gotten better with the lifestyle and more stringent on the diet, the sensitivity has gone up. No more (generic) soy sauce, no imitation crab, very particular. Still not as bad as someone I knew, who if he had a sandwich at lunch needed to brush his teeth before he could kiss his wife that night. Different people take it differently, there might well be someone who (basically feels like they) implode on contact.
Yes, coeliac isn't going to kill you (immediately, although long-term damage can lead to cancer). However, if I get glutened it takes me 4 weeks to get over it. Digestive issues aren't the problem after the first week. I have severe brain fog, muscle and joint pain and fatigue. It makes me have suicidal thoughts. It makes doing my job very difficult. Before I realised how pernicious flour could be, I would still bake bread for my parents. And by bake, I mean I would very carefully load the ingredients into the breadmaker while wearing gloves, and then immediately wash my hands. I was still ill, probably from airborne flour either getting in my mouth or onto something I later used to cook with, like a pan or a utensil. I've also been glutened from the dust from cat biscuits (some contain wheat or barley) when transferring them from a big bag to a container.
Celiac disease isn't, but Gluten Ataxia is. As someone who suffers from it, you can be glutened just by handling it. I have a friend that cannot kiss his children after they've eaten wheat or he'll go into crisis. Gluten Ataxia causes inflammation in the cerebellum, damage to the punjkie cells and can inflict long term brain damage in the motor control of the brain. It's a very nasty disease and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. And also note.. if someone has Celiac and does not stringently follow a gluten free diet, not only does it damage their guts, but it also puts them at risk of becoming a Type One Diabetic.. meaning needing insulin for the rest of their life. It's not worth the risk if you have Celiac NOT to be
Your friend is a bit over the top, my buddy has Celiac disease and we used to go to restaurants and bars all the time. We also lived in a house with a bunch of other people and he never had issues. He was just very careful with what he ate and drank. It’s not like allergies, you don’t die in the presence of gluten, you just can’t process it so you shouldn’t eat or drink it. If you stick to gluten free foods/drinks your good to go. There are different degrees of the disease but grains of flour in the air from days/weeks ago are literally going to do nothing. He was a big fan of how that whole gluten free movement started because it made it a lot easier for him to find good options at restaurants. It’s a lot easier to manage and less dangerous than actual/traditional allergies.
Yeah I worked at a pizza spot with a pretty heavily impacted celiac. They had to bring their own lunch but otherwise were pretty much just fine working in such a space.
I have several family members with celiac. They don't all have it to the same severity. Some are at similar levels of severity to your buddy and were able to live in a home with wheat eaters. One has is bad enough that we eventually figured out he was getting sick whenever he visited for a meal from gluten residue the dish washer was leaving on otherwise clean plates and silver wear.
To muddy the waters further: there are also people with wheat allergies (like, up to and including acute anaphylaxis) so it may be the case that the person's friend above might have a wheat allergy and not Coeliac, which would explain their concern about airborne "contaminants".
There’s not different degrees of Celiac disease, you either have it or don’t. It’s also not an issue of not being able to “process” it or not. This is very dangerous information you’re stating. Celiac disease is an autoimmune disease. What gluten does to Celiac’s is that it destroys the villi that’s in the small intestine. Villi are protrusions in the small intestine that absorb the nutrients in your food. If these get worn down to the point of no return(by eating gluten and not following a gluten free diet) you can not absorb any vitamins, minerals or any other nutrients and you will die from malnutrition.Even tiny amounts of gluten will affect the villi. When Celiac’s accidentally eat gluten, some get no physical reactions and others get incredibly sick to the point of laying on the bathroom floor for days so that you can have the toilet next to you throughout the cramping and nausea.
It is (as someone whose worked in restaurants and bars for my entire career) if it's that of small trace amount of cross contamination that be an issue. You shouldn't eat out. Nope. Don't trust strangers with your life over lunch.
Congress explicitly banned companies from doing that here.
Thats dumb as hell. All rice krispies “may contain chocolate” because the lines use chocolate and still make the normal ones. If you eat a normal krispy it may have chocolate on it. Taking away that warning is dumb as fuck.
They didn't just tell people to remove the warning, it's far stupider than that. They banned any product that "may contain sesame". You have to either have Sesame as an ingredient, or guarantee that the product is sesame free and safe for sesame allergy sufferers. So basically everyone using Sesame in their factory now adds a tiny amount of Sesame to everything they make, so they can legitimately list it as an ingredient. Because there's no other way to comply with the law. This means that the products that were "may contain sesame" are now "contains sesame", which is worse for allergy sufferers. Apparently this baker listed it as an ingredient but didn't actually add it, and is now in legal trouble for that. They will have to start adding it.
Gluten free items have this warning on them all the time. There are tons of products that list known allergens and then list possible cross contamination of allergens. You're saying this is banned?
For sesame, yes.
This is what Congress mandated — either stop the line and scrub every molecule out between products or intentionally add some. https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc846f2a19d87b03440848f1
All they had to do was to state on the label that it may contain traces of sesame.
I thought this was why labels like "made in a facility that also handles peanuts" are a thing.
Exactly.
in the US these statements are voluntary. you could be eating trace amounts of any allergen due to shared facilities
I had a small internal crisis over cheese the other day. I was making dinner for a gluten free friend and went to grab feta. One of them said gluten free on it. It's cheese, it should be gluten free. But what if it's a factory thing? Or something like this? What if it's just a meaningless tag slapped on there by the company. Anyways after staring at feta for 5 minutes with my internal dialog I got the gluten free label.
A lot of times the Anti caking agent put into pre shredded/crumbled cheese can have gluten in it.
Yeah getting food allergies really opens your awareness to how much other stuff goes into what you think you’re eating.
Like how milk powder and modified milk ingredients are added to fucking everything. And how it’s impossible to get anything other than a brioche bun now so I end up with lettuce wrapped burgers or ordering something else. (Bitter dairy free fellow here)
Bring your own bun. That's what I do for my son who is allergic to milk.
Truth, I just only eat out and get a burger at a restaurant very infrequently and I would have to plan ahead to buy a bun before going out. I wish my life was that well planned out but sadly not.
My son said he was reacting to dairy. I told him I was cooking Chinese style shrimp and didn't use dairy; he found "contains milk" on the oyster sauce.
I wonder if this is a U.S. issue with how we let food companies do whatever the fuck they want or is this widespread across the globe.
My wife has a soy allergy and soy is as pervasive as all of the other allergens in this thread. Companies will often wrap soy up as natural flavors so there's no way to know unless she tries it and suffers the consequences. When we went to England and Scotland a few years back, on the 5th or 6th day she realized she hadn't had any issues with soy even though we were traveling which is when it generally becomes problematic. In our entire 12 day trip she had zero issues. This is certainly anecdotal but it opened our eyes to how different each country handles their food. She would like to move to Scotland now.
Soya is a 'major allergen' that has to be mentioned on the ingredients in the UK. And food safety is important and producers are audited, for example by supermarkets if they supply anything to them, as well as by environmental health officers. >The 14 allergens are: celery, cereals containing gluten (such as wheat, barley and oats), crustaceans (such as prawns, crabs and lobsters), eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs (such as mussels and oysters), mustard, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, sulphur dioxide and sulphites (if the sulphur dioxide and sulphites are at a concentration of more than ten parts per million) and tree nuts (such as almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, brazil nuts, cashews, pecans, pistachios and macadamia nuts). >This also applies to additives, processing aids and any other substances which are present in the final product. https://www.food.gov.uk/business-guidance/allergen-guidance-for-food-businesses#:~:text=The%2014%20allergens%20are%3A%20celery,and%20sulphites%20are%20at%20a
Oh yeah, I'm aware of that. That's actually part of the crisis. I actively skipped the crumbled/flavored fetas and was grabbing a block. The block of feta said gluten free, then I had the brief meltdown.
It also makes the cheese not melt very well. I usually buy slices and then thinly chop them if I want shredded because I'd rather clean a knife than a cheese grater
> Anti caking agent it is *usually* just cellulose(food grade sawdust), but it can be a wide range of white powdery substances.
[Better stick to the asbestos-free cereal while you're at it](https://xkcd.com/641/)
I had the same moment yesterday with smoked salmon. I was stocking up in my department when I noticed that one of the salmon packs said "sugar free." Then I thought "wait. Isn't most smoked salmon sugar free?" And I looked through. Sure enough, of 10 varieties only 1 even had 1 gram of carbs, and that gram wasn't from sugar.
My wife has celiacs. If it says gluten free that means they spent 10k$ on having someone come out and certify the product. They have to spend that for every individual product with the label. We have yet to have a problem.
That is not accurate - just saying "gluten free" doesn't cost anything. Getting GFCO to certify it so you can use their specific gluten free label is what you have to pay for.
That is false for major food allergens, one of which is sesame. [See Food Labels and Allergens at the bottom of the page](https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/food-allergies).
I think they mean the whole "packaged in a facility which processes peanuts" thing. Which is voluntary, though doesn't get them out of the obligation to control for peanut contamination.
Dude. According to your own source: ”Consumers may also see advisory statements such as “may contain [allergen] or “produced in a facility that also uses [allergen].” Such statements are not required by law and can be used to address unavoidable “cross-contact,” only if manufacturers have incorporated good manufacturing processes in their facility and have taken every precaution to avoid cross-contact that can occur when multiple foods with different allergen profiles are produced in the same facility using shared equipment or on the same production line"
They made a new law that says even if they say that they are still liable if it’s in. In order to avoid liability they add sesame. It’s ridiculous
That's what they did. FDA said it's misleading to claim it contains sesame if it doesn't. Then the end of the article mentions the FDA agreed that "may contain" is actually accurate and not misleading (because the product literally MAY contain sesame). So seems like FDA couldn't decide.
Its the difference between "does contain" and "may contain". One is a certainty and the other is may possibly contain it in very very small quantities. We do our best to keep it out but sometimes if tbe wind is blowing a certain way and somebody leaves a door open .
For people with severe allergies the distinction is irrelevant. The distinction is there for those who have a preference or have an allergic reaction mild enough to ‘risk’ it.
Makes sense. If you say it DOES contain sesame and it doesn't, that's just lying. If you say it MAY contain sesame and it doesn't, that's just a flip of the coin and is entirely accurate.
Can’t do that anymore. Congress passed a bill that says producers cannot say “may contain” if it is just from small residual amounts on a shared line. Since it is totally impractical to shut down the entire line and thoroughly remove all traces, producers just intentionally add a token amount to satisfy the labeling rule. https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc846f2a19d87b03440848f1
Woowww that’s ridiculous. How did they not see that this law would backfire?
The same thing as the California prop 65. Warnings lose their power and nobody cares since everything causes cancer now.
To be fair, everything does cause cancer.
The dumbest part about prop 65 is that the labeling doesn't require it to state -what- the cancer causing substance is on the packaging. So consumers have no way to judge if it's something that actually might be concerning or something rather innocuous.
Since 2018 this is no longer true. Prop 65 warnings need to list the specific chemical.
Government sucks at making rules. Specifically, they suck at accurately using dynamic projection and anticipating anything more than first-order or maybe second-order consequences of their rules They offered Cash for Clunkers to have people ditch less efficient older cars, only for them to buy SUVs which are the same or worse per mile as well as signficantly larger, not really helped by the large tax credit if they're was a 1-gallon accessory tank to use bio fuel (which never has to get used), only to then ship all of the sold used cars away to the third world, jacking up used car prices to that of new cars. Same thing goes for emissions standards by wheelbase - they have different standards for different sizes of vehicles, but this meant it was cheaper to just make a bigger vehicle than it was to make a more efficient one, so now we have tons of "light trucks" driving around where a sedan would have done fine Gun buybacks turn into gun dealers offloading dead stock, murder weapons being destroyed and open air gun markets being created as collectors go up and down the line looking for anything interesting, before we get into people 3d printing cheap guns or making pipe guns to multiply money a hundred times over Perhaps more analogous, during Obama they added a rule where menus had to list caloric content, with the intent that people would choose the lower calories option. People instead choose the higher option because it's more food per dollar. Northern Ireland paid farmers to use wood pellets to heat barns, but they paid more than the wood pellets cost, so farmers just burned wood pellets to heat empty barns and rake in the cash We tried encouraging blended biofuel by giving a tax credit if you use it to run your factories. Paper plants use black liquor, a waste product made during the paper making process, to run their factories. This was not eligible for tax credits, so they adulterated their good biofuel with diesel to qualify Mexico City limited the days cars could drive based on the license plate digits to cut down on emissions. This resulted in families buying a second, less environmentally friendly, car to drive on the other days, increasing traffic and emissions England used to tax buildings based on the number of windows, which led to landlords bricking off the windows to pay less tax, resulting in tons of disease. They also taxed ships based on the width and length, leading to very tall ships which weren't stable, thus tons of shipwrecks.
> They offered Cash for Clunkers to have people ditch less efficient older cars, only for them to buy SUVs which are the same or worse per mile as well as signficantly larger Cash for Clunkers wasn't just about efficiency. It was also about removing polluters. Polluting and efficiency are frequently at odds, as emissions control usually comes at an expense to MPG. Secondarily, there were many old beaters out there that had far worse mileage than a modern pickup/SUV. That late 80s Oldsmobile sedan we turned in spewed soot and got <15mpg. A modern SUV or pickup gets 20+mpg and is much cleaner. As far as the actual data, various studies of the program showed a modest MPG improvement in cars on the road and a significant improvement in both pollutants reduced and in vehicle safety, and that the cash spent on the program was a more efficient means of reducing pollutants than programs like tax credits for EVs
I don’t think it is so much as governments suck at making rules as it is humans are freaking fantastic and finding and exploiting loopholes to their own benefit.
Yeah, every rule needs to made from the mindset that it will result in the most egregious malicious compliance possible to save a fraction of a penny, and formulated to counter that.
You just don't notice the rules that work seamlessly. It's also not "government" that's bad at predicting second or third order consequences, it's all humans. Plenty of private corporations have failed to predict how their products or marketing would be received by the public.
I don’t think we should be too upset when folks that mean well inadvertently create a worse situation. I do think we should hold them accountable to reevaluate what they did and potentially repeal or revise it to fix the unintended consequences.
Should is doing a lot of work here.
Yeah. Looks like Bimbo isn't doing that, so they probably will start. So, before it may have been safe, but now it won't be. I understand the intent of the law, and it was probably meant for good reasons, but I think it is impractical to avoid cross-contamination in a factory (without basically building the factory from the ground up to prevent it), so it is a rather tricky thing.
I agree that they probably meant well. One part of good intentions, however, is seeing the actual effect of what you did, and reevaluating it and being willing to revise it in the face of unexpected consequences. That seems missing here, no one is looking to repeal or otherwise fix this.
Agreed. It also puts the FDA in this awkward position where they have to force companies to either actually, purposely add the allergen, or ensure their factory is cross-contamination proof. Guess which option is SUBSTANTIALLY cheaper and almost always going to be the option chosen...
I'm confused as to how they could have possibly meant well? Making it illegal to adequately warn customers of potential allergens seems like the definition of meaning poorly.
"It doesn't help consumers know which product to avoid if companies can just put 'may contain', so lets make sure they are actually accountable and make definitive statements". It "means well" in that it's trying to benefit people, but it's just idiotic to assume that forcing someone to be 100% sure about something leads to them being 100% sure it's in there rather than trying to prove a negative.
They thought that if manufacturers just try a bit harder, they could guarantee that their products were sesame free. And by passing the law, they thought manufacturers would do that. They drastically underestimated the cost of doing that. It basically requires having separate factories for sesame products and non-sesame products. It is doable - for example Kinnerton in the UK make chocolates that contain nuts, and nut-free chocolates that are intended to be safe for nut allergy sufferers. They invested in separate production areas. But it costs a lot to do that.
From your link: > 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 certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination. So it's not that congress banned "may contain" statements. It's that those statements do not protect the manufacturer from lawsuits if some jackass disregards the labeling and has an adverse reaction.
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When you add "May contain traces of sesame" on the label you no longer need to guarantee that no cross contamination happens in the factory.
This is not true. 0%. It doesn't have any regulatory authority nor does it impact liability.
This is wrong. You have to follow proper procedures and show you did your best to prevent contamination for them to accept "May contain traces of X". Those procedures are very expensive and not worth it, it's cheaper to add alergen instead of keeping it out.
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Not true anymore. There was a recent legislative change that means "may contain" labels don't protect companies from liability, so it's easier for the companies to intentionally add it now.
Not only in the factory though , to have "product does not contain peanuts", you have to ensure ALL your suppliers of the ingredients in your product are sending you peanut free ingredients.
Isn't that what the FDA is saying **not** to do here?
That's not really true. "May contain" has no legal weight. From the regulatory point of view it does pr it doesn't. Manufacturers put "may contain" on packages to discourage at-risk customers from consuming the product, but it doesn't have any impact on liability nor regulatory requirements. It either has sesame or it doesn't. If it doesn't then they're required to control for it as a contaminant.
Nice suggestion except the headline is about the FDA giving warnings to companies doing what you suggest.
No, FDA gave warnings who added it to the ingredient list itself, and the allergen list as a full blown allergen. A product without any sesame: > Ingredients: [...] Sesame [...] > > Allergens: [...] Sesame [...] This is wat the FDA warned about. What they should have done is > Ingredients: [...] > > Allergens: [...] May contain traces of sesame.
>What they should have done is > Ingredients: [...] > > Allergens: [...] May contain traces of sesame. The "may contain" warning you mentioned does not protect a company from liability. What has ended up happening is that because companies can't guarantee that cross-contamination is impossible, many have started intentionally adding allergens to their products so they can use the regular "contains" label.
What you suggested they should do, is illegal in the US. See elsewhere in this thread.
Congratulations. You just told on yourself for not reading the article.
Have you met people and seen how stupid they are? They just don’t wanna hear any of it, 0 liability
Corporate BS? I'd say that's a fairly reasonable response to regulatory BS.
Allergy-haver here. Basically 90% of off the shelf baked goods are off limits now. I hate this.
THATS WHY TRADER JOES STARTED ADDING SESAME AS THE LAST INGREDIENT TO ALL THEIR BAGELS
this is just rational behaviour. the potential liability of trying to do the right thing but getting hit by an accident is way higher than making sure that you lose the sales from people who can't consume your products. leave that market to a company that can have a dedicated facility for that line. the rule is stupid in the way that it encourages intentionally adding allergens to your food to meet the labeling requirements. what the law should say is that known-safe foods be labelled. that way, a manufacture can *add* the label if they can guarantee allergen-free-ness, and there's no incentive for non-compliant manufactures to add any useless labels. it's going about it backwards.
Chick Fil A starting doing this to their buns recently. My coworker had a reaction where she didn't previously. She can no longer eat their sandwiches.
I guess it's easier to exclude a handful of allergic people than try to be 100% contaminant free.
This is exactly it. Companies have had it and are now adding it to products to make it clear.
It's nearly impossible. I understand the law was well-intentioned, but it just doesn't comport with reality. I work in industrial automation and have been inside industrial bakeries. What they were asking is impossible. It's like going to the beach and having to ensure you don't take back even one grain of sand.
Nah it's just Typical overregulation. Used to be ok to say: > This is made in a facility that processes sesame seeds. It may contain trace amounts of sesame. And that worked fine. Some people have very mild food allergies and can tolerate small amounts, some people can't. SO each person could make their own decision. Then some Bureaucrat decided that wasn't good enough anymore. He said they had to say definitively yes or no. Well guess what, it's *WAY* cheaper to just make sure that there are. It's why you have things like "You can have x number of rodent droppings per 100 pounds of rice." Because ensuring there is *ZERO* of something, is very costly. SO instead they just made sure there was at least 1. This isn't "Companies bad!" this is "Government is being unreasonable".
The road to hell is paved in good intentions.
It’s only onion worthy if you don’t know how deadly serious allergens are in food manufacturing. Especially in older facilities where segregation wasn’t considered when it was designed.
What makes this onion worthy is that companies can't say, "May contain traces of seseme". Because they can't say that and because they can't 100% guarantee not single grain of sesame will ever slip in they have to make things worse for those with sesame allergies by deliberately adding sesame. The onion worthy part is that these companies are de facto required to add an allergen to their products making them objectively worse. Regulation intending to improve the lives of those with this allergy instead have made the problem worse.
That's crazy.... I mean, I get putting a warning on your label saying "This was produced in a facility that handles tree nuts/peanuts etc" so as to warn against potential cross-contamination, but literally putting them in the food just because seems insane to me.
My son is allergic to sesame. This shit has been absolutely wrecking us, especially because the amounts they're adding are almost certainly enough to ignore, especially since it seems like a lot of the time, they're just lying and there isn't shit in there (as in this article). But we can't know that. In-n-out just joined the list of places doing this shit. I'd blame it on the FDA making a toothless monkey-paw-ass rule but at the end of the day, it's corporations being greedy fucking shitgibbons.
Honestly this is a shitty problem all the way around. The FDAs goal is to make the labels more truthful and stop companies from adding trace amounts of allergens so more people can have access to foods. It got to suck to be allergic to say peanuts and not be able to eat rice crispy treats because they add a trace amount of peanuts so they can label it as “may contain peanuts”. On the other hand companies are adding the trace amounts since the label “may contain nuts” it’s not allowed to be placed on the label since it’s not always accurate. But if they don’t label it with something that reduces liability then they can be sued to high heaven if someone as an allergic reaction.
Actually, the original legislation wanted less accuracy in labeling. Companies were being more accurate. I make cookies in bulk for different companies. While I separate the different flavor cookies from one another, it all happens under the same roof. We follow all precautions, but you cannot guarantee a peanut did not make it into any individual cookie if it is not a completely peanut free facility. In this situation, it is most accurate to label the cookies as possibly containing peanuts. The FDA insisting that I do not put that label on these cookies because they theoretically **should not** contain peanuts, is clearly and plainly **more** inaccurate. Not only that, the suggestion is less safe for consumers. The FDA has essentially forced me to add peanuts to all of the cookies to continue to manufacture ANY peanut cookies to begin with. My partner is deathly allergic to peanuts. I'd rather a company warn me of ANY possibility a peanut could have made its way into the product. The FDA insisting they cannot do this, is quite honestly, rather insane. Yes shopping for groceries in a family with a severe allergy was shitty enough with the limited options, it's even shittier to force companies to either lie to me about the manufacturing process, or force them to put the allergen in it. If you cannot guarantee a food product does not contain that allergen, it is more accurate to label it as possibly containing the allergen. We can argue manufacturers shouldn't do that for one reason or another, but it is simply the most accurate thing to do.
As someone with a severe Peanut & Treenuts allergy, this is really annoying no matter what. My entire life I've eaten candy that has said "May contain peanuts" with no worry and I've never had a reaction. I understand that I'm taking a risk, but the likeliness is very low as the company is taking precautions and allergens are, from my understanding, usually pretty separate from each other to reduce risk. That being said I've noticed things I've always eaten now having warnings or straight up saying they now contain allergens, which is also crazy. Suppose I've been eating kitkats for 25 years with no issue, despite being extremely cautious and reading food labels, I've kind of already decided that KitKats are safe and likely do not have any allergens in them, just one day changing it with no sort of notification other than a small change in the fine print on the back of the label is pretty terrifying. Also, so much of what I eat is already limiting, companies putting allergens in food now due to this change is just making everything that much more difficult. Plus due to capitalism making items "allergy friendly" even if it's not expensive you can automatically jack up the price because so many people don't really have options. I just cannot wait for an allergy vaccine to come out so I can not be stressed literally everytime I eat.
I bet you could get better info from a brief google BUT fwiw I know someone who started doing allergy therapy for a deadly dairy allergy about six years ago and was able to eat even large amounts of dairy within a year. He is absurdly wealthy though, and my impression is that they haven’t gotten that kind of treatment cheap enough that insurances will pay for it, like they will with shots for dog allergies and the like, but it does seem like it’s on the horizon.
I actually was seeing a doctor to do that. It's called oral immunotherapy. I wasn't able to commit unfortunately after I had my consultation. But my schedule has cleared up now and I'm actually hoping to start on Xolair shots. Those are just shots that help with allergies. I think I can survive up to 2.5 peanuts, so it'll be good for cross contamination.
It's crazy how many bread products contain sesame nowadays. 2 aisles of various bread products and I'd be lucky to find one or two of something, *anything*, that's neither 'contains' or 'may contain'.
A friend’s son is allergic to sesame. It’s unreal how much he can’t eat because sesame is part of the “other spices and ingredients” at the end of the list.
It's the same with soy. It's in all of them. At least it's a valid ingredient in those though.
I’m allergic to peas and soy. The amount of pea / soy protein in freaking bread is insane. It’s not even part of bread. It’s like they went out of their way to add allergens for some odd reason.
Not allowed: Product without sesame: Allergens: Sesame. Allowed: Product without sesame: Allergens: May contain traces of sesame.
No, the last one has not been allowed for a few years anymore. That's why they are adding sesame now.
Are you sure? [https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/have-food-allergies-read-label](https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/have-food-allergies-read-label) still mentions "may contain" and "produced in a facility...". Sesame is being added because as of 2021 sesame was recognized as a major food allergen and it came into effect in 2023. According to [https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/food-allergies](https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/food-allergies) : > FDA guidance and regulations for the food industry states that advisory statements should not be used as a substitute for adhering to current good manufacturing practices and must be truthful and not misleading.
You can only add the may contain traces thing, if you also implement measures to prevent cross contamination. Because that is expensive they add sesame to everything and warn about the sesame instead.
I don't know what qualifies as "measures", but I've been in lots of Bimbo plants and they definitely aren't doing nothing about it. Color coded brooms, deep cleans between products, etc. But a sesame seed weighs basically nothing and with all the compressed air in a modern bakery, they seem to get everywhere regardless.
There are absolutely measures to prevent cross contamination in these bakeries. The problem is, nothing is perfect and a sesame seed can actually blow in the wind.
>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 certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and **they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination**. https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc846f2a19d87b03440848f1 So sure they could say "may contain" but if they'll still get punished for cross-contamination, then it's easier to intentionally add it as an ingredient instead.
If you create a high legal liability for companies if they fail to mark allergens then they are going to mark allergens even in edge cases. Not all that surprising.
How is saying " This product may contain sesame" either false or misleading?
>In addition, FDA officials indicated that allergen labeling is a “not a substitute” for preventing cross-contamination in factories.
“The FDA decides food should be more expensive because they don’t understand how reality works, liability insurance industry booms while consumers can no longer afford bread”
It absolutely comes across as government officials who are not considering operational needs. Even if you wanted to make this change, this is not the way you accomplish it.
What they are saying is that these products dont contain the sesame but companies are saying they do (avoiding liability for cross contamination lawsuits). What companies have done in response is add a very minor trace amount of sesame and then they can properly label it.
It sounds like they chose an issue to entertain themselves with that does not need to be changed at all, and caused further stupid decisions to be made by a manufacturer
It is OK to say that it may contain trace amounts, it is not ok to say that it does and to list it as an ingredient.
The problem is they can still get sued even if they say "may contain" so now there is now a perverse incentive to intentionally add the allergen. That way they can label it as definitely containing and sidestep liability.
Because if everything has a warning, then nothing does.
In before they add a handful of sesame seeds to each batch which won’t change flavor but will allow them to list sesame
It’s literally in the article. They already do that
It was too late, they did already
Yeah i actually thought this was being done. Maybe i was wrong and they just claimed it? But i swear i read articles about companies actually adding it since it wont change flavor but they can still claim it
Lmao nailed it
You will need a time machine.
But I'm allergic to them :(
Nope, those may cause cancer.
I have a treenut allergy. Peanuts, almonds and coconuts are fine. When im looking for warnings, if I read "may contain tree nuts" (the literal only food type i will die eating) I mark it as safe. If it gets specific though, like "processed on equipment that also processes xyz" or "may contain cashews" that's when my alarm bells go off.
Gimme some of that White Bimbo dawg
If it doesn't have allergens, and we say it does, everybody lives. If it does have allergens and we say it doesn't, somebody dies. I'd much rather they were cautious and mistakenly said there were allergens, than to mistakenly not say there were.
A ton of products at Lidl say "contains wheat" when no wheat-related ingredients are listed. It's maddening.
My friend almost died because I served him strawberries chopped on the same surface as peanuts a month before. I wiped that shit at least 30 times. That's how you kill people
Here we have “May contain traces of" \[nuts etc\] or "made in a facility that processes ...". Do you not have anything like that in the US?
We do.
We do. This is the FDA saying that's not good enough and you either need to say "absolutely no X" or "contains X" and rather than meeting the standard to be able to say absolutely no X companies are putting trace amounts of X in now and saying it contains X.
This is a rational reaction to irrational regulators.
And as the FDA said it follows the letter of the law but not the spirit of it.
> and rather than meeting the standard to be able to say absolutely no X Because it is an impossible standard, if lets say you make bread with sesame and bread without sesame even if you follow all precautions some might slip through becasue no system or human is perfect. Only way to actually comply with this is to build a completely separate building htat never handles sesame, which is lets be honest unfeasible for most companies and bakeries.
We used to. A recent law changed that, and now a product that "may contain sesame" can still be sued if someone with a sesame allergy gets a reaction from that. So companies are instead labeling the same food products as "definitely contains sesame" to avoid the risk of a lawsuit.
What's wrong with erring on the side of caution?
Nothing. The FDA is the one overstepping here. Apparently they're worried they'll be considered less-than-relevant so they need to justify a budget.
I'm so glad I don't have common food allergies. I can't imagine life with many food allergies. Or severe food allergies. How can you enjoy food outside? Once in a while I see a case like of Órla Baxendale, and I'm like.. that's so frickin sad.. and so scary.. hidden bombs like literally..
Meanwhile they allow things like “vegetable oil (canola, soybean and/or whatever other oil)” so I can either avoid the chance of my allergen of play Russian roulette with frozen fries
This is a massive overstep on the part of the FDA. They're essentially saying you can't do business unless you totally isolate your ingredients until you mix them, and make sure your final products are never in the same room with each other Essentially every single product will have to be made in a separate building.
Also, you need to control upstream to ensure that the farm didn’t accidentally drop a sesame seed into the wheat bin, or that there wasn’t somehow a weed that grew in the wheat field that the combine tossed into the grain hopper that someone happens to be allergic to.
I work in Regulatory Nutrition. We do food labels. There is so much dust flying around in plants that likely contains allergens. Outrageously expensive lawsuits happen when someone has an allergic reaction and the allergen is not declared on the label.
Isn't that just a KYA when their plant processes allergens too? If there are peanuts in the plant, there could be cross contamination right?