Comment by xoa

>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.