Comment by jacknews

>I'm thinking there is no realistic level of subsidy which could make it rational for Bob's Bakery (with 1, maybe 2 or 3 modest retail locations) to build a separate no-Sesame production facility. And a separate no-Peanut production facility. And a separate... And how could Bob afford the extra staffing, property taxes, utilities, etc. for all those?

Sure? If the standard is "0.5% of the population gets perfect medical grade alternatives to literally everything including purely local tiny producers of a common food item" then no that's not going to happen. But if the problem is merely having at least 1-2 national brands on the major super market shelves so that everybody always can buy something safe and nutritious (if not the most exciting), well that strikes me as doable. After all, it's not as if these products had sesame in them anyway, and they are plenty popular with everyone. Some of them are in large enough national volume to justify their own production facilities at the national level. It's "just" a capital expenditure hump and coordination problem for those, which is precisely something the government can help with. Both with the capex side, and with things like taxes of course (which you brought up). I think this is actually easier then some, this isn't like a medicine where only those who need it will consume it, it's making something mass consumed already.

So maybe the real first step that should have been done would have been to actually get all stakeholders together and get a consensus on what the real final realistic goal is here, then craft law to help realize that in a deliberate manner.

Why does bobs bakery need 2-3 retail locations with 2 seperate baking facilities each for a community to have access to a seasame and non-seasame options

We already have a working model for gluten free bakeries where they are independently owned and operated entirely gluten free to prevent the situation you describe where a small Baker needs multiple facilities.

Why are you strawmanning a future that's wholly unkind to the point you're responding rather than drawing parallels from reality?

Ps. With Kellogg's, obviously it's cheaper to add peanut flour. People with allergies already aren't purchasing the products, so it costs them nothing to prevent fines, I don't really see the relevance of this, other than to say Kellogg's doesn't think the demand exists for peanut-free Kellogg's products that already may contain peanuts.

> spirit of the law

> as written.

I'm not sure you understand what the "spirit of a law" means. It has very little to do with the written wording.

In tabletop RPG circles, there's a very clear distinction between "rules as written" and "rules as intended" (because basically zero tabletop RPGs of nontrivial size can avoid having some rules that fail to properly convey their intent in their plain wording).

It's clear that, by this law "as intended"—ie, the spirit of the law—foods that didn't already contain sesame would be carefully separated from chances of sesame contamination.

You are, however, absolutely correct that "as written", it strongly encourages the behavior being seen.

How can they? There is no way to know what a certain knob will do N-levels down the line. They're essentially "playing" against the collective brain and will power of millions of smart and motivated individuals, and all the money behind the huge corporations that play in that space, so how can they. It's impossible and a losing battle.

How long until you end up with Proposition 65-style warnings that products may contain trace amounts of every food product?

Today, if I’m severely allergic, I might assume product X has a trace amount of my allergen. Tomorrow, I might assume the same thing, only now I can read it on a label.

I assume the thinking is along the lines of "contains traces" or "may contain traces" of long list of allergens would get treated the same way California's carcinogens signage does, i.e. it would be absolutely meaningless. But instead manufacturers actually are adding trace amounts of allergens so if they put those ingredients on the label, it's actually true.

>Does anyone know why a) this is not legally required when there's a reasonable chance of contamination and b) why laws are not written in such a way, that "contains traces" is enough if you aren't sure about cross contamination like in TFA's case.

>Naively, that seems like it would improve things for everyone?

Again per the theme of this article: beware second (later) order effects. What is "reasonable chance of contamination", precisely? Once you start creating legal liability, all the incentives change. In a voluntary situation people may only write it if they're pretty sure it might be an issue, but if it's required and companies are punished if they get it wrong then the natural reaction is to just slap it on everything. If everything simply defaults to "may contain traces" then the notice is essentially worthless right? And someone with a serious allergy to a common food product should just assume that by default anyway.

Which I think points to the real issue, which is that the approach is arguably all backwards. Certified/promised allergen free food, just like certified/promised kosher or a range of other things, are a specialized subset of food in general. This in some ways is similar to white lists vs black lists on the net in terms of dealing with content. Black lists are more appropriate when it's desired to be accepting by default (commonly when there are no or minimal life/safety factors). But it's expected that some objectionable things will slip through and then have to be reacted to after the fact. It prioritizes preventing false positives over false negatives, and it keeps overhead cost and uncertainty on the production side lower.

When something is life/safety critical though, or similarly important, then instead it's better to do the opposite and white list. That prioritizes preventing false negatives: since everything must be explicitly and individually certified, nothing clearly failing criteria will ever appear. But of course this also means that potentially valuable things may get blocked from appearing, there are higher overhead costs, and producers in some cases may feel its riskier since they can't be sure they'll have a chance at all (which also raises cost).

Both are important tools, but for medical products (and serious allergic reactions are a medical issue) it's probably almost universally better to white list. A purely tech example of an ongoing controversy would be "child safe internet": a lot of the efforts try to blacklist the adult general net into being child safe, which both doesn't work and causes major harm to regular adult discourse and expression. I think it'd be better to have approaches such as ".kids" and ".teens" TLDs or similar where nothing can go on that isn't pre-vetted to some standard. Then parents can restrict to those if they wish. That's a whole different discussion though!

>From the exact same comment, emphasized, add 'traces of sesame' as an ingredient.

I'm not sure what you're confused about here? Say we consider bakers. Essentially before the law there were 3 classes of bakers wrt sesame: known contaminated (actively using it as an ingredient), regular (not actively using it, but make no promises either way), and medical (actively promise to ensure no contamination as a product feature). This law banned regular bakers, and it did it in such a way that they all become medical bakers by default, because if they don't actively use sesame then they must meet the medical standard. But that's TERRIFYING for a regular baker for good reason. Before if they cooked both sesame goods (lots of delicious ones in high demand) and non-sesame goods (same) they could make reasonable efforts and that's fine. But medical means they now look at blame and liability for some child or adult having a serious reaction or even dying. And meeting that level of liability and standards may simply be impossible in an existing mixed normal facility. There is no funding for this mandate either.

The obvious reaction to do is to switch to the "known contaminated" class instead. For the cost of adding a minuscule untasteable amount of sesame flour to everything, now they effectively return back to being regular bakers again. They can keep all their existing cooking, in their existing (very expensive, potentially impossible to move from) facilities. Like, what did anyone expect would happen here?

Edit to the reply, since I'm getting rate limited:

jacknews: "My point is they could simply add 'traces of sesame' to the ingredient list without actually delberately adding sesame."

You're arguing for producers to commit arguable fraud then, and add an ingredient to the list that isn't actually an ingredient and may not be there for the explicit purpose of bypassing a new legal requirement. There is no "simply" about that one. Maybe they'd win the resulting lawsuit, or maybe it'd bankrupt them. Or maybe it would bankrupt them even if they did win, as such things in America often do. And for what benefit?

This entire subject is about second order effects. Please spend a bit of time doing some game theory on any "simple" fixes you wish to propose, and consider why those "simple" fixes aren't what producers did.

But then, there has to be some sesame. Otherwise the ingredients list is not truthful, which comes with its own set of penalties and headaches.