It’s the corporations actually poisoning people though no? What’s the alternative, a status quo of occasional accidental poisoning due to poor hygiene? This sort of corporate malfeasance is not a uniquely American thing, but it has a libertarian streak that feels all too familiar. Maybe corporations could spend some profits on figuring out food safety for the public good, too much to ask I guess.
Saying "Corporations" gets more clicks for the Washington Post, but there's no reason to think that Kate & Carol's Corner Bakery isn't in the exact same bad situation.
Also, the "...instead of conducting the careful cleaning required for foods without sesame..." reason sounds fishy to me. Any facility processing food at scale already has to do a lot of careful cleaning. My first guess - the "cleaning" standard in the new sesame regulation is so strict that it would require "never attempted anything like this before" levels of effort. Second guess - perfect cleaning won't actually cover your regulatory butt if your supply chain has sesame problems...and there are severe sesame problems in their supply chains.
>Saying "Corporations" gets more clicks for the Washington Post, but there's no reason to think that Kate & Carol's Corner Bakery isn't in the exact same bad situation.
Small businesses supported gluten allergies well before any large corporations did. It's much easier to control small batches than large ones.
> Also, the "...instead of conducting the careful cleaning required for foods without sesame..." reason sounds fishy to me. Any facility processing food at scale already has to do a lot of careful cleaning. My first guess - the "cleaning" standard in the new sesame regulation is so strict that it would require "never attempted anything like this before" levels of effort. Second guess - perfect cleaning won't actually cover your regulatory butt if your supply chain has sesame problems...and there are severe sesame problems in their supply chains.
You clearly didn't take the time to read the regulation or even the article before replying.
Pure sophistry. The problem isn't selling items with sesame in it, it's improperly labeling that sesame is in an item in the first place. Did you read the article?
The issue here isn't people adding sesame and not mentioning it. The problem is that if there were something else with sesame using the same machinery, anywhere along the line, you can't simply say "this item might have traces of sesame" (you're still liable, per the FDA) and you can't say "this item has sesame" (because it doesn't; it just has possible sesame cross-contamination).
You have to either have fully eliminated the possibility of cross-contamination or make sesame an explicit ingredient. One is free; one is expensive.
No, that is not the problem at all. There's no allegation of improper labelling. Rather, the problem instead is that the law regulating proper labelling leaves those with sesame allergy worse off, because it incentivises adding small amounts of sesame flour, labelling the product as "contains sesame" and being done with it. There's nothing wrong or improper with doing that - your labels are all correct, the law is followed.
How is not labeling a product as containing something that it does through cross contamination not mislabeling? If they can prove that it is not poisonous to those with allergies then there is no issue.
It took me a little bit to understand the article's wording but here goes.
The manufacturers say it is difficult to comply with the law by cleaning the equipment. So they want to label that the product may contain sesame by accident. But they can't say that because it wasn't intentional. So they have to actually put sesame in so they can label it.
Doesn't have to be actually difficult to comply for them to do this. It just has to be more expensive to comply compared to the cost of adding the allergen and the lost revenue from people who avoid due to the allergen.
It's like an auto maker evaluating the cost of a recall compared with just paying out settlements. There's no morality or logic involved, it's just numbers.
I was with you until you mentioned over-reaching. Problem is, there's a small segment of the population that will literally die from sesame. 0.3% total sesame allergies, maybe less will get death as the side effect. It's perfectly reasonable to require companies to omit sesame from products that don't have it labeled, and forbid cross contamination. It's also reasonable for companies to consider including it and labeling it for ease of operations. I worked in the food industry and dealing food cross-contamination is really hard. There is no one-size-fits-all for public health on a scale as large as the US.
Yes, potentially over-reaching, because it's debatable whether it's overreaching or not.
And the manufacturers doing this, is a prime example of the law of unintended consequences. Where trying to solve a problem through legislation makes it worse in the end.
There do appear to be unintended consequences, but it's not clear whether things are "worse" now than before. It's worse if you have a sesame allergy and want to be able to eat as many products as before. Now there are fewer products that are safe for you to eat.
At the same time, it is now easier for you to tell what products are unsafe for you to eat. Before, you could only tell if there were sesame seeds on the outside, or if they were listed in the ingredients. But sometimes a food item (in a restaurant, for example) might have sesame seeds on the inside, or ground up in a sauce, and you'd never know it was there. I once ordered a vegetarian dish at a Singaporean restaurant and was surprised to find that it had a sauce with ground up shrimp in it. I'm not vegetarian, but I don't like seafood and didn't expect to find any in a vegetarian dish.
> There do appear to be unintended consequences, but it's not clear whether things are "worse" now than before. It's worse if you have a sesame allergy and want to be able to eat as many products as before. Now there are fewer products that are safe for you to eat.
I'm allergic to milk, but I can survive a trace amount if it ends up in something. The trial and error isn't fun, but I can eat the majority of things that "may contain milk".
Having 90% of my relatively safe food options become toxic and dangerous overnight isn't a good trade off for "at least I know it's safe".
All that would be necessary is for a "may contain" label. If that's there, people who are severely allergic can avoid those products.
"Law of unintended consequences", more like "being a spiteful a-hole is (slightly) cheaper"
I can understand a fast food place, where sesame products are in circulation doing that, you'd get a non trivial amount of sesame even on the air around those places.
But a lot of places seem to do it just out of spite. Seems to be part of the 'American Dream' like kids selling cookies to pay for medical treatments or something.
"And industry giant McDonald’s said it will not add sesame to foods that did not previously contain it. America’s largest restaurant chain has worked with its suppliers to follow the new law’s cleaning protocols and does not plan to add sesame flour to any buns, a McDonald’s spokesman said. "
Well looks like some companies did manage to do the right thing
> There is no one-size-fits-all for public health on a scale as large as the US.
Personal responsibility? If somebody has a rare and possibly fatal condition, you'd expect they'd consider cross contamination and be very careful what they ate. This story shows that relying on labeling is a flawed approach in any event.
We started with a regime where “free from sesame” products existed, sesame products are allowed, and other products are allowed that may contain trace amounts of sesame.
We are now in a regime where the same “free from sesame” products exist, and all other products must contain sesame.
It’s not clear that this has increased or will increase the number of products free from sesame. It is clear that it has increased the number of products with sesame and the amount of sesame. It sounds like we would prefer a regime where fewer products have sesame.
Assign whatever merit or import you want to the issue of sesame in food, but it is not at all clear that this new regime is actually better for anyone.
A young relative has a sesame allergy with a pretty bad reaction. Trip to the ER type deal. We were super pumped that the new labeling standards were coming out - way easier than reading all of the ingredients. Woohoo, right?!
Now there is exactly one brand of bread at the store without sesame. Kings Hawaiian, if you're curious. Every. Other. Brand. now includes sesame.
It's like that with so many things now. Hot dog buns. Cereal. Super frustrating if the store is out of the one brand without sesame. Guess nobody makes sammiches this week.
I totally get the companies trying to find the cheapest way to comply. But for people trying to feed allergic folks it really sucks. Hopefully enough people buy the sesame-free products to make it worth the effort for the companies actually doing the work on this one.
Without regard to this particular policy, those are all foods that your young relative is better off avoiding along with sesame seeds. I have been forced to avoid them for many years now due to different health issues, and it turned out to be a blessing that was hard to appreciate at the beginning.
This is such a vague comment to be useless for GP.
Do you have some issue with carbs? High calorie foods? Something against processed foods? Gluten? Plastic sensitivity? Why was it a blessing? What made you start appreciating it? etc. etc.
Diabetes 2, morbid obesity, gastroparesis, i.e. usual effects of Metabolic Syndrome. These have become shockingly common in children in recent years. Several years ago the gastroparesis got very bad and I was forced onto a low residue, low carb diet. The result was a 90% resolution of the gastroparesis, a 75% resolution of the obesity and complete remission of the diabetes. And a much higher quality of life.
I wish I had started younger, but nothing short of that kind of compulsion would have made me. Few kids need to go to such extremes, but most would benefit from the absence of flours.
It's really a peculiar take to blame "flours" for all these modern childhood ailments, given that the poor largely subsisted on flour-based products (bread, pasta, etc.) for centuries prior to modern times.
IMO flours have been damaging people in many of these ways for centuries. Since the agricultural revolution. That damage came along with a nice perk -- not starving. But if now we're affluent enough to not starve without it, that's a good thing.
I know that it sucks this would be necessary, but I recommend taking up the habit of baking your own bread. It's really very easy and takes very little active time (the time it takes consists of just waiting, not doing stuff).
And even a substandard load of homemade bread is much nicer and tastier than store-bought.
I disagree. I have been making homemade bread almost weekly for over 10 years now and making good homemade bread is not easy and the cleanup alone adds a ton of active time that needs to be addressed quickly lest you end up with cement-like dough crusted on things.
It is perfectly reasonable for someone to say, "this is too much work, I need store bought bread."
I wasn't talking about good homemade bread. I was talking about decent homemade bread -- which is still better than store-bought. Yes, if you want to rise (no pun intended) to the level of truly good bread, that's more involved. Or truly great bread -- my best bread is a process that takes two days and a fair amount of active work.
I disagree about cleanup being a big deal, though. You do have to do it immediately, but there's not a lot of it to be done. When I make bread, I need to clean a bowl, the bread pan (or dutch oven, if I'm making sourdough), the large cutting board I work the dough on, and a couple of utensils. That's not a big deal.
> It is perfectly reasonable for someone to say, "this is too much work, I need store bought bread."
Indeed it is! But I was giving a possible alternative to someone who struggles to find store-bought bread they can safely eat. I was not saying "everyone must make their own bread".
(I'm also a long-time home baker. I've been making my own bread for 30 years now).
> Under federal labeling rules, they can’t state that their products contain sesame unless the items actually contain it — so they’re adding sesame and labeling it.
I believe the overreach they are referring to is: the law prevents companies from labeling a product as a possible sesame allergen when it may have trace amounts of seed.
The fact that all these people in the article were happily eating hamburger buns in the past suggests that the cleaning methods in place were practically adequate. But the law imposes asymmetric penalties, and nobody getting sick isn't a liability shield from somebody who sticks a bun in a mass spectrometer with the intention of suing you for finding 1 ppb sesame.
Conjecture: myths about the prevalence of unreasonable civil actions have done more societal damage than will ever be subverted by people who revel in casting aspersions about the threat they pose.
Weird thing to cite. Even as the article itself tries to cast these lawsuits in a particular light to lead you to thinking that they're absurd, most of them don't seem unreasonable. They're great, even.
I'm supposed to feel bad for A&W because they put an "aged vanilla" label on their cream soda even though it contains none? Companies that engage in the "whole grain" nonsense? Packaging straight out of /r/AssholeDesign? Fuck 'em.
The guy's doing good work as far as I'm concerned.
And now the recalcitrant food companies have finally learned their lesson and will make sure that every product that may contain sesame does contain sesame. The system works.
> under federal labeling rules, they can’t state that their products contain sesame unless the items actually contain it — so they’re adding sesame and labeling it
This is the crux of it.
Here in the UK, it's common for food to be labelled “May contain traces of milk” and other allergens, when the ingredients list doesn't include those allergens.
This is common in the US too. The text of the bill [1] literally just adds sesame to a list of allergens.
There is some important fact the article is not reporting on -- why manufacturers simply don't add "may contain sesame" like they do for other allergens is unanswered.
I remember some discussion in January when this first hit the news. Here's the money quote:
"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."[0]
Uh...no, it's the opposite. THis quote explains why what they're saying is true and an actual consequent of the rules. Per the FDA, it's not enough to just say "it may contain traces". You need to do full, expensive, cross-contamination protection, or actually have sesame as an ingredient, so that's what companies are doing.
I mean...yeah, obviously? What specific statement did they make that you think is a lie? No one says, or would believe for a second "the law requires that all food have sesame added no matter what".
You are correct. No one is forcing them to add sesame. They are just forcing them to pick between doing one of two extremes an expensive and a cheap one. The middle road is not longer available. A large portion of the companies are as one would expect choosing the cheaper one.
You can then decide that makes them immoral. Certainly your prerogative to do so. However the fact remains that this result was 1) predictable and 2) likely not what the stated intent was which means it is also someones prerogative to call the creators of the law and associated regulations did a spectacularly bad job as well.
In the UK, as a kid with a severe (at the time) nut allergy, I developed a borderline eating disorder at one point by just being scared to eat a LOT of foods because the manufacturer would just slap “may contain traces of nuts” on almost everything to get out of any possible liability.
My young brain learned to believe (incorrectly) that most foods contained “traces of nuts” and I developed a kind of paranoia - especially when eating at other people’s houses where I couldn’t check packaging as easily.
Industry practices seems to have gotten a lot worse since then. I find this extremely aggravating.
Thankfully for me, I eventually got over the paranoia but I now probably take more risks than I should given how utterly useless nut allergy warnings have become.
In the US, advisory labeling (i.e., "may contain...") isn't codified in law or regulation; it's something that the FDA basically recommends as a good practice when cross-contamination may occur even though good manufacturing practices (GMPs) are being followed. For example, you might have a line that processes milk and dark chocolate, which you sanitize according to GMP, but which may still contain traces of milk. Crucially, the FDA expects that advisory labeling will not be used to get around practices such as sanitizing equipment, segregating allergens from other foodstuffs, and so on; they exist as a "we've done our best to make sure you won't die of anaphylactic shock, but caveat emptor nonetheless" warning.
So what you've got here are companies that haven't had to comply with GMP requirements; decided that they don't want to; so instead just slapped a major allergen into their existing products with functionally no warning to consumers who believed the products to still be allergen-free. Which, sure, GMP compliance isn't cheap and it is complex, but this is a pretty cold-blooded way -- somewhere these companies surely have PowerPoints that do a mortality, legal, and financial risk analysis of their decisions -- to do an end-run around laws and regulation.
As I understand it, this isn't some new interpretation from the FDA. It's always been that way. The only new thing here is adding "sesame" to the list of recognized allergens.
this reminds me of being scolded as an ADHD child for not cleaning enough... and really the only solution to my mind if I got the same result either way was to give up entirely.
So, to be clear, this is absolutely a case of these businesses making choices they know are harmful but are technically legal, and is bad.
But I wonder if in the long term adding trace amounts of common allergens to many foods is a viable strategy? I read recently that exposing kids to trace amounts of peanuts at a young age drastically cuts down on peanut allergies.
Maybe a better strategy is to make a pill with tiny amounts of common allergens (shellfish, peanut butter, sesame, celery, etc) and encourage parents to feed it to their kids daily?
These already exist usually in powder form that you mix into food.
I think one of the original studies came from the lower rate of peanut allergies in Israel. Turns out the majority of kids are given these Bamba peanut puff snacks from an early age.
Some companies exist that will send you a packet of food weekly with various allergens mixed in. The advice in the last 3-7 years has been reversed.
20 years ago they started telling parents not to give their kids any allergens until age 3. Allergies like peanuts which in the 1980s which were so low as to be questionable, skyrocketed in the early 2000s to almost 1% of all kids and peanut butter was banned from a lot of schools. The messaging has done a 180 now and they recommend introducing allergens as early as 5 months, and usually before 1 year.
My personal experience is that no children in our daycare have any allergies so from my very small sample, seems to be working. Other parents I've talked to seem to be having similar experiences.
This is no different from the CA labels saying some random widget could give you cancer. It's to protect against liability where you can say you labeled for it.
Except in this case the food manufacturers are deliberately adding the allergen as an ingredient, so it would be like adding asbestos to an FFP2 mask and adding the CA label.
It would be like making asbestos products and FFP2 masks in the same factory and labeling laws not allowing you to say the FFP2 may have asbestos but allowing you to say the FFP2 mask was made with asbestos if you added some.
Prop 65 is well intentioned, but flawed. It's screwed up because it's enforced by third parties suing the company that makes the widgets. It's also crazy because things that are "known to the state of California to cause cancer" are contained in trace amounts in a lot of things. At these trace amounts there's a lot of question if there's really any chance of triggering cancer. I've worked on products where there's a calculation of how much surface area of a particular part might come in contact with the user and if the contents of that plastic resin might theoretically cause cancer. The reality is that you'd probably need to ingest it or burn it and inhale it, possibly in very large quantities, to cause cancer.
I've lost family members to cancer, and I would love an effective and sane approach to limiting carcinogens in the environment, but I'm not sure that prop 65 is a great way to do it. It mostly makes some lawyers rich suing big companies. It also leads to prop 65 warnings all over the place as a cover-your-ass move to the point where they stop having any meaningful impact.
Yep, peanut allergies used to be 1 in 10,000, then the advice changed to "introduce peanuts after age 3" and allergies skyrocketed to nearly 1 in 100. The advice has since been reversed and they say to introduce trace amounts of allergens as early as children start solid foods (usually age 5-7 months, 6 months being most common). There are no children at our daycare with peanut allergies and in fact they get snacks with peanut butter on the regular. Seems to be working.
Note to any future parents out there, Trader Joes sells an excellent "multi nut butter" which has all the various allergen heavy nuts and quasi-nuts out there, and they also sell "Bambas" which are like cheetos but they're made of peanut... puff stuff, and really hard to choke on since they just kind of dissolve in your mouth.
Obviously, consult your doctor, but we've seen a huge reversal in kids allergies in the last 3-4 years as the suggested advice has done a 180 and parents are following it.
> In a twist few would have expected, however, many food companies have chosen to add small amounts of sesame flour to products that were previously sesame-free, instead of conducting the careful cleaning required for foods without sesame.
I beg to differ -- this is exactly what should have been expected if this is the cheapest path forward.
The FDA doesn't allow precautionary labeling (e.g., "may contain traces of..." or "manufactured in a facility that also...") in place of "proper cleaning procedures". This impacts sesame because a ton of industrial-scale bakers produce both sesame and non-sesame items on the same lines, and these could in theory be cleaned and verified, and precautionary labeling isn't a substitute for that.
So, forced to either (a) overhaul likely-daily cleaning procedures to ensure and then later verify that not even trace amounts of sesame protein are present in products on the line, or (b) sprinkle some literal <s>fairy</s> sesame dust into these items and list it in the ingredients, manufacturers understandably chose the latter.
Perhaps future facilities will be built to segregate sesame from non-sesame production lines, but current ones don't -- and a retrofit probably costs far more than whatever reduction in sales they may face from including sesame.
> The FDA doesn't allow precautionary labeling (e.g., "may contain traces of..." or "manufactured in a facility that also...") in place of "proper cleaning procedures".
The article says that manufacturers are not allowed to list sesame as an ingredient unless it actually is an ingredient.
The law says they can't warn about potential sesame contamination. Instead it must either be an actual ingredient or manufacturers must clean the equipment.
Seems like this fiasco could have been avoided if someone had gone and talked to manufacturers about how big a deal it would be to clean stuff. I'm guessing this isn't a question of a small amount of profit loss; it's probably a big expensive deal to comply with this law.
> The article says that manufacturers are not allowed to list sesame as an ingredient unless it actually is an ingredient.
Correct. I wasn't suggesting adding it to the ingredients list.
> The law says they can't warn about potential sesame contamination.
The law does not say that. It says that manufacturers can't do that instead of following standard cleaning practices.
> Instead it must either be an actual ingredient or manufacturers must clean the equipment.
Yes, they
must clean the equipment. None of this is new stuff, this has been the case for many years.
Why is it suddenly too much of a burden for food manufacturers to clean their equipment? Is wanting to avoid cleaning not a huge red flag about that manufacturer?
> I'm guessing this isn't a question of a small amount of profit loss; it's probably a big expensive deal to comply with this law.
Knowing large corporations, I'm guessing that the economics of it aren't the real issue at all. If it costs substantially more, they'd just add a few cents to the cost of the food.
Cleaning equipment is expensive, and results in significant downtime. Plus in any manufacturing process for a commodity good, you really want a process that is as continuous as possible - any disruption might even cause some equipment wear.
Also, there's a limit to which you can price extra, a limit of what a customer would be willing to pay for it, VS look for a substitute product.
> Cleaning equipment is expensive, and results in significant downtime
Of course. So what?
> there's a limit to which you can price extra
How much extra do you think they'd have to charge? I don't know, myself. Given the volume commercial facilities tend to do, I would be shocked if it even adds as much as a dime to the price.
> look for a substitute product
Ideally, these rules would apply to all such companies, so no company would have any sort of cost advantage over the others as a result of this.
The problem here is simple greed, leading some manufacturers to engage in cruel shenanigans in order to maintain a sliver of their profit margin.
Interestingly, the same dynamics appear to apply to the cocaine market. My friend was telling me that he regrets he can no longer safely take cocaine because he's afraid of getting fentanyl mixed in due to cross contamination of lab/work surfaces. I suppose it's tough for manufacturers of all types out there.
They're creating their own problems. Our family simply doesn't purchase food items that have specific allergens, or that has the potential for cross contamination with them.
I wish the article would just summarize the content in the title, so I don’t have to read the entire article. Tldr: restaurant cannot say “the product may contain traces of sesame”, they must include it on the ingredient list, but if it’s on the ingredients list they must add it to the product.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadAlso, the "...instead of conducting the careful cleaning required for foods without sesame..." reason sounds fishy to me. Any facility processing food at scale already has to do a lot of careful cleaning. My first guess - the "cleaning" standard in the new sesame regulation is so strict that it would require "never attempted anything like this before" levels of effort. Second guess - perfect cleaning won't actually cover your regulatory butt if your supply chain has sesame problems...and there are severe sesame problems in their supply chains.
Small businesses supported gluten allergies well before any large corporations did. It's much easier to control small batches than large ones.
> Also, the "...instead of conducting the careful cleaning required for foods without sesame..." reason sounds fishy to me. Any facility processing food at scale already has to do a lot of careful cleaning. My first guess - the "cleaning" standard in the new sesame regulation is so strict that it would require "never attempted anything like this before" levels of effort. Second guess - perfect cleaning won't actually cover your regulatory butt if your supply chain has sesame problems...and there are severe sesame problems in their supply chains.
You clearly didn't take the time to read the regulation or even the article before replying.
You have to either have fully eliminated the possibility of cross-contamination or make sesame an explicit ingredient. One is free; one is expensive.
It's like an auto maker evaluating the cost of a recall compared with just paying out settlements. There's no morality or logic involved, it's just numbers.
Welcome to America in 2023, where they are deliberately adding allergens to food, in order to comply with potentially over-reaching laws...
It's peanuts too: https://snacksafely.com/2022/04/company-will-add-trace-amoun...
I was with you until you mentioned over-reaching. Problem is, there's a small segment of the population that will literally die from sesame. 0.3% total sesame allergies, maybe less will get death as the side effect. It's perfectly reasonable to require companies to omit sesame from products that don't have it labeled, and forbid cross contamination. It's also reasonable for companies to consider including it and labeling it for ease of operations. I worked in the food industry and dealing food cross-contamination is really hard. There is no one-size-fits-all for public health on a scale as large as the US.
And the manufacturers doing this, is a prime example of the law of unintended consequences. Where trying to solve a problem through legislation makes it worse in the end.
At the same time, it is now easier for you to tell what products are unsafe for you to eat. Before, you could only tell if there were sesame seeds on the outside, or if they were listed in the ingredients. But sometimes a food item (in a restaurant, for example) might have sesame seeds on the inside, or ground up in a sauce, and you'd never know it was there. I once ordered a vegetarian dish at a Singaporean restaurant and was surprised to find that it had a sauce with ground up shrimp in it. I'm not vegetarian, but I don't like seafood and didn't expect to find any in a vegetarian dish.
I'm allergic to milk, but I can survive a trace amount if it ends up in something. The trial and error isn't fun, but I can eat the majority of things that "may contain milk".
Having 90% of my relatively safe food options become toxic and dangerous overnight isn't a good trade off for "at least I know it's safe".
All that would be necessary is for a "may contain" label. If that's there, people who are severely allergic can avoid those products.
I can understand a fast food place, where sesame products are in circulation doing that, you'd get a non trivial amount of sesame even on the air around those places.
But a lot of places seem to do it just out of spite. Seems to be part of the 'American Dream' like kids selling cookies to pay for medical treatments or something.
"And industry giant McDonald’s said it will not add sesame to foods that did not previously contain it. America’s largest restaurant chain has worked with its suppliers to follow the new law’s cleaning protocols and does not plan to add sesame flour to any buns, a McDonald’s spokesman said. "
Well looks like some companies did manage to do the right thing
Personal responsibility? If somebody has a rare and possibly fatal condition, you'd expect they'd consider cross contamination and be very careful what they ate. This story shows that relying on labeling is a flawed approach in any event.
They are.
But without accurate labelling, what can they do?
We are now in a regime where the same “free from sesame” products exist, and all other products must contain sesame.
It’s not clear that this has increased or will increase the number of products free from sesame. It is clear that it has increased the number of products with sesame and the amount of sesame. It sounds like we would prefer a regime where fewer products have sesame.
Assign whatever merit or import you want to the issue of sesame in food, but it is not at all clear that this new regime is actually better for anyone.
Now there is exactly one brand of bread at the store without sesame. Kings Hawaiian, if you're curious. Every. Other. Brand. now includes sesame.
It's like that with so many things now. Hot dog buns. Cereal. Super frustrating if the store is out of the one brand without sesame. Guess nobody makes sammiches this week.
I totally get the companies trying to find the cheapest way to comply. But for people trying to feed allergic folks it really sucks. Hopefully enough people buy the sesame-free products to make it worth the effort for the companies actually doing the work on this one.
Without regard to this particular policy, those are all foods that your young relative is better off avoiding along with sesame seeds. I have been forced to avoid them for many years now due to different health issues, and it turned out to be a blessing that was hard to appreciate at the beginning.
Do you have some issue with carbs? High calorie foods? Something against processed foods? Gluten? Plastic sensitivity? Why was it a blessing? What made you start appreciating it? etc. etc.
I wish I had started younger, but nothing short of that kind of compulsion would have made me. Few kids need to go to such extremes, but most would benefit from the absence of flours.
Now that I think of it I wonder how much of 'gluten issues' is actually due to all those foods having excess sugar added to it
IMO flours have been damaging people in many of these ways for centuries. Since the agricultural revolution. That damage came along with a nice perk -- not starving. But if now we're affluent enough to not starve without it, that's a good thing.
And even a substandard load of homemade bread is much nicer and tastier than store-bought.
It is perfectly reasonable for someone to say, "this is too much work, I need store bought bread."
I disagree about cleanup being a big deal, though. You do have to do it immediately, but there's not a lot of it to be done. When I make bread, I need to clean a bowl, the bread pan (or dutch oven, if I'm making sourdough), the large cutting board I work the dough on, and a couple of utensils. That's not a big deal.
> It is perfectly reasonable for someone to say, "this is too much work, I need store bought bread."
Indeed it is! But I was giving a possible alternative to someone who struggles to find store-bought bread they can safely eat. I was not saying "everyone must make their own bread".
(I'm also a long-time home baker. I've been making my own bread for 30 years now).
I believe the overreach they are referring to is: the law prevents companies from labeling a product as a possible sesame allergen when it may have trace amounts of seed.
I'm supposed to feel bad for A&W because they put an "aged vanilla" label on their cream soda even though it contains none? Companies that engage in the "whole grain" nonsense? Packaging straight out of /r/AssholeDesign? Fuck 'em.
The guy's doing good work as far as I'm concerned.
This is the crux of it.
Here in the UK, it's common for food to be labelled “May contain traces of milk” and other allergens, when the ingredients list doesn't include those allergens.
Anyone know what the specific regulation is? Seems the article missed an opportunity to provide actionable information instead of the usual doomsaying
The action the article wants you to take is to be mad and keep clicking.
There is some important fact the article is not reporting on -- why manufacturers simply don't add "may contain sesame" like they do for other allergens is unanswered.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/578...
"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."[0]
[0] https://www.dallasnews.com/food/restaurant-news/2022/12/29/s...
You can then decide that makes them immoral. Certainly your prerogative to do so. However the fact remains that this result was 1) predictable and 2) likely not what the stated intent was which means it is also someones prerogative to call the creators of the law and associated regulations did a spectacularly bad job as well.
My young brain learned to believe (incorrectly) that most foods contained “traces of nuts” and I developed a kind of paranoia - especially when eating at other people’s houses where I couldn’t check packaging as easily.
Industry practices seems to have gotten a lot worse since then. I find this extremely aggravating.
Thankfully for me, I eventually got over the paranoia but I now probably take more risks than I should given how utterly useless nut allergy warnings have become.
So what you've got here are companies that haven't had to comply with GMP requirements; decided that they don't want to; so instead just slapped a major allergen into their existing products with functionally no warning to consumers who believed the products to still be allergen-free. Which, sure, GMP compliance isn't cheap and it is complex, but this is a pretty cold-blooded way -- somewhere these companies surely have PowerPoints that do a mortality, legal, and financial risk analysis of their decisions -- to do an end-run around laws and regulation.
You can argue semantics, but the very premise of the article is that the change caused an outsized reaction in the industry.
That rarely happens outside of regulatory compliance.
It also goes to show how little regulators know sometimes about the very thing they claim expertise at regulating.
But I wonder if in the long term adding trace amounts of common allergens to many foods is a viable strategy? I read recently that exposing kids to trace amounts of peanuts at a young age drastically cuts down on peanut allergies.
Maybe a better strategy is to make a pill with tiny amounts of common allergens (shellfish, peanut butter, sesame, celery, etc) and encourage parents to feed it to their kids daily?
like this? they’re great.
I think one of the original studies came from the lower rate of peanut allergies in Israel. Turns out the majority of kids are given these Bamba peanut puff snacks from an early age.
https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/index.html#:~:text=Alpha....
You don't know when any random person will eat that food for the first (or second) time.
20 years ago they started telling parents not to give their kids any allergens until age 3. Allergies like peanuts which in the 1980s which were so low as to be questionable, skyrocketed in the early 2000s to almost 1% of all kids and peanut butter was banned from a lot of schools. The messaging has done a 180 now and they recommend introducing allergens as early as 5 months, and usually before 1 year.
My personal experience is that no children in our daycare have any allergies so from my very small sample, seems to be working. Other parents I've talked to seem to be having similar experiences.
“the bar to establish absence is too high, the risks of saying maybe are too high, so we will instead guarantee a presence and not get sued. “
But labeling "may contain traces of" is common for other allergens. Why is sesame special? The article doesn't address this.
I've lost family members to cancer, and I would love an effective and sane approach to limiting carcinogens in the environment, but I'm not sure that prop 65 is a great way to do it. It mostly makes some lawyers rich suing big companies. It also leads to prop 65 warnings all over the place as a cover-your-ass move to the point where they stop having any meaningful impact.
When it's this much easier to comply with the letter of the law than the intent, is it any wonder why things like this happen?
Apparently pain isn't enough of a hint anymore.
"Give babies peanut butter to cut allergy by 77%, study says" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-64987074
Note to any future parents out there, Trader Joes sells an excellent "multi nut butter" which has all the various allergen heavy nuts and quasi-nuts out there, and they also sell "Bambas" which are like cheetos but they're made of peanut... puff stuff, and really hard to choke on since they just kind of dissolve in your mouth.
Obviously, consult your doctor, but we've seen a huge reversal in kids allergies in the last 3-4 years as the suggested advice has done a 180 and parents are following it.
I beg to differ -- this is exactly what should have been expected if this is the cheapest path forward.
The FDA doesn't allow precautionary labeling (e.g., "may contain traces of..." or "manufactured in a facility that also...") in place of "proper cleaning procedures". This impacts sesame because a ton of industrial-scale bakers produce both sesame and non-sesame items on the same lines, and these could in theory be cleaned and verified, and precautionary labeling isn't a substitute for that.
So, forced to either (a) overhaul likely-daily cleaning procedures to ensure and then later verify that not even trace amounts of sesame protein are present in products on the line, or (b) sprinkle some literal <s>fairy</s> sesame dust into these items and list it in the ingredients, manufacturers understandably chose the latter.
Perhaps future facilities will be built to segregate sesame from non-sesame production lines, but current ones don't -- and a retrofit probably costs far more than whatever reduction in sales they may face from including sesame.
I don't understand the point of actually adding sesame.
The law says they can't warn about potential sesame contamination. Instead it must either be an actual ingredient or manufacturers must clean the equipment.
Seems like this fiasco could have been avoided if someone had gone and talked to manufacturers about how big a deal it would be to clean stuff. I'm guessing this isn't a question of a small amount of profit loss; it's probably a big expensive deal to comply with this law.
Correct. I wasn't suggesting adding it to the ingredients list.
> The law says they can't warn about potential sesame contamination.
The law does not say that. It says that manufacturers can't do that instead of following standard cleaning practices.
> Instead it must either be an actual ingredient or manufacturers must clean the equipment.
Yes, they must clean the equipment. None of this is new stuff, this has been the case for many years.
Why is it suddenly too much of a burden for food manufacturers to clean their equipment? Is wanting to avoid cleaning not a huge red flag about that manufacturer?
> I'm guessing this isn't a question of a small amount of profit loss; it's probably a big expensive deal to comply with this law.
Knowing large corporations, I'm guessing that the economics of it aren't the real issue at all. If it costs substantially more, they'd just add a few cents to the cost of the food.
Also, there's a limit to which you can price extra, a limit of what a customer would be willing to pay for it, VS look for a substitute product.
Of course. So what?
> there's a limit to which you can price extra
How much extra do you think they'd have to charge? I don't know, myself. Given the volume commercial facilities tend to do, I would be shocked if it even adds as much as a dime to the price.
> look for a substitute product
Ideally, these rules would apply to all such companies, so no company would have any sort of cost advantage over the others as a result of this.
The problem here is simple greed, leading some manufacturers to engage in cruel shenanigans in order to maintain a sliver of their profit margin.