Comment by 323
4 years ago
> 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.
How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy.
> How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy.
Wtf is this. The problem is the opposite.
How did we end up in a place where one simple food 'may contain' one million ingriedients where its being made in a giant factory, not a kitchen.
My mother has a lethal allergy to shrimp and crab. Do you have shrimp and crab in your kitchen or not? its a basic question. If we go to a coffe shop the anawer is no. We go to a british pub, answer is no. In fact for 90% pf establishments the answer is no, we have no shrimp on the menu at all.
If you handle every ingredient under the sun in one giant factory, that's your fault. I you put weired additives like shrimp-derives food colorings, thats again your fault. If you put gluten into chocolate bars, even thought it's not suppose to be there, and you call something bread even though it cannot be legally called bread in france and you loose a lawsuit because your chicken nuggets contain less than 50% chicken, thats again on you.
This is an underrated comment. This is a problem of ending up in a world where our food is mass-produced in factories. Food should be cooked in kitchens, not be manufactured in factories with contaminants blowing around. You should be easily able to know what's in your food because you wash it off and put it there when you cook it. There is a federal limit on how much rodent hair, feces, maggots, and mold can be in your food when it comes off the assembly line and it's non-zero[1].
1: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/insect-rodent-filth-in...
People buy mass produced because it’s way cheaper
I just watched a video of a candy cane assembly line that made thousands of canes per hour.
If I had to pay a small shop to make that candy cane, I honestly wouldn’t. I don’t have the kind of money for the little things that I may want but not super bad
Of course, you could argue for a lifestyle where you just appreciate a small set of things but it seems people like experiencing more things in life than fewer
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This is living in a fantasy world. You’re not feeding 330M people in the US without factory automation handling most of the work.
Well, you can, if you want to pay 3x for your food because of the lack of scale and increase need for manual labor.
No thanks.
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You're comparing very different things.
One thing is not having shrimp and crab in a kitchen that doesn't cook seafood.
Quite another is not having sesame at a bakery. Sesame is an incredibly common ingredient in most types of breads. I doubt there are many bakeries, whether "factory" bakeries or just corner bakeries, that don't have some bread with sesame, because of how popular it is.
So their choice is either to get rid of sesame entirely, or have to declare it on everything.
> How did we end up in a place where one simple food 'may contain' one million ingriedients where its being made in a giant factory, not a kitchen.
I think we got here this way:
one billion for the first time in 1804;
two billion in 1927, 123 years later;
three billion in 1960, 33 years later;
four billion in 1974, 14 years later;
five billion in 1987, 13 years later;
six billion in 1999, 12 years later;
seven billion in 2011, 12 years later;
eight billion in 2022, 11 years later;
Note that the last six billion happened so fast that probably during your mom’s lifetime
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_milestones
Population of Ireland today is 5 million, less than in 1941 when it was 6.5 million.
How does population growth on another continent affect food production in Ireland?
Food production has undergone similar changes regardless of population
Because people have food allergies, and should have a right to know whether or not the food they're consuming has been cross-contaminated by allergens?
How did we end up in a place where the companies aren't putting the cross-contamination ingredients in the ingredients list, and instead put them in a non-standard warning label.
But article states something else - a company can't say "this product might not be safe for people with food allergies", they can still be sued. So the only thing left for the company is to actually intentionally put the alergen in and they say "this product is 100% not safe for people with food allergies". The end result is the decrease of alergen free food.
This is it. The labeling isn't the problem it's the extra processes and cost required to eliminate the potential for any cross contamination. This problem, cost and liability goes away by just adding the ingredient.
I don't understand why they can't just label the product as "might contain sesame"? Why do they need to change the recipe when it sounds like a labelling change would do the job?
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Because if I can just right "this product might not be safe for people with food allergies" on a package and not have to worry about legal consequences, why wouldn't I? Magic anti-lawsuit boilerplate on every box!
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Why was the disclaimer "this product might not be safe" added, though?
And why did the courts decide it was not binding/not enough to protect from liability?
It seems the kind of thing a lawyer would want on pretty much every product. Then the courts would respond by making it null.
IDK if this is what happened, but then the problem would be harder...
Can't they just write "contains sesame" without actually adding any sesame? Then they will be sued by sesame lovers, I see.
They can still say it, but it's vague enough to have essentially no meaning. So it makes sense that this meaningless statement wouldn't somehow absolve them from all responsibility for only including the ingredients on the label.
Let’s say a bottle of water had the following label:
“This product might not be safe for people sensitive to dysentery or cholera.”
Would you drink the water? It might not give you cholera. Of course not, no one should drink that water.
The label feels like a cop-out on the part of the food manufacturer. Either it’s safe or it’s not. If someone takes their chances and gets cholera, the statement has passed responsibility on to the consumer.
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To me, the most important question is: how did we end up in a place where there are so many food allergies and we still do not understand the reason for the increase? Is it better diagnosis? Early exposure to allergens? Lack of early exposure to allergens? Some evolutionary advantage to having an allergy? (I doubt that, but it is plausible).
My son has multiple severe nut allergies so I’ve gone from having zero awareness to having too much.
Allergies are fascinating bc they are a continuum and random.
Continuum from…
zero symptoms if you eat the protein in the nut and just a positive blood test…
all the way to…
cannot be in same room as nuts if they will have a reaction that constricts their ability to breath.
They are also random in that your outcome can be wildly different each time.
The result imo is that drs who detect any food allergy, let’s say the child has a slightly swollen lip after eating sesame will run labs on blood and skin and get some real positives and some false positives.
Next they say not to eat anything the person is allergic to in order to prevent a life threatening allergy.
If no blood or skin tests existed this person may go through life mainly avoiding the food bc it’s uncomfortable, but never think of themselves as allergic to X.
Net result is that people with allergies are safer now, but the % of people we know have allergies has increased.
As a side note, if you are reading this as a parent with a kid with a recently discovered food allergy, please note… it totally sucks, but… you will adjust over time to the higher workload and constant label reading, hang in there.
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It is not settled science, but one hypothesis is the hygiene hypothesis, which proposes that exposure to certain microbes at a young age is important for the development of a healthy immune system. By over sanatozing our environment, we prevent exposure of young children to those microbes, leading to the increased prevelence of allergies.
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My 13 month old son is allergic to everything. Eggs, diary, tree nuts, lots of fruits including avocados. Obviously peas and peanuts.
I don't need rules that encourage adding allergens to foods that previously "contained traces". My wife and I know how sensitive he is to every allergen and if we need to avoid traces (hazelnuts) or not (milk)
But you do presumably need rules which tell you whether a given item contains traces of allergens, right?
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Curious - when did you introduce (or not) those foods to him? When/how did you discover the allergy? Could you walk us through this?
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My youngest child is allergic to soy. The upside is that we're eating better food at home, the downside is that we basically can't eat anything but home cooked food, and then you must be careful because they shove soy into everything anymore. If it isn't allergen labeled, I just assume it has soy in it these days.
Well now they are clearly labeled as containing the allergen, people can steer clear of these products! Seems like a win.
This sucks. As someone with a mild to moderate peanut allergy, I’ve been able to gladly eat whatever “may contain peanuts” food that I want, but with laws like this, it’ll cut off a huge portion of what I can enjoy. All my friends with severe peanut allergy never ate these foods to begin with, so it’s not helping them either.
Why can’t the government just let us decide what risks we want to take? I’m sick of this shit. I don’t need the government to regulate which port is on my phone or the direction I wipe my ass or the snacks I can eat. Just let me freely live in peace goddamnit.
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> How did we end up in a place where the companies aren't putting the cross-contamination ingredients
Isn't it because it's not an explicit ingredient but a risk of trace contamination? I'm not sure that an ingredients list with a bunch of "might also contain ____" items at the end.
The warning is pretty easy to spot when it's supplied.
The change in the law makes that insufficient to eliminate the liability. It isn't a matter of labeling but the cost of eliminating any possibility of cross contamination.
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Fun fact: This latest round of medical hijinx got me 5 new food allergies!
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You started a hellish flamewar and perpetuated it. That's not ok, and since you've been abusing HN in other places and with other accounts, I've banned this account. Continuing to do this will get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> It is not socially efficient to spend massive amounts of resources accommodating a small number of people with allergies.
It is also not socially efficient to have a society where you have to worry about if your particular issue will be "efficient" enough for other people to care about. That basically sounds like a very low-trust society. And the economic consequences of having a low-trust society are so much worse.
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By that argument, it is not "socially efficient" to make any accommodations to disability.
It would be "socially efficient" to euthanize our elderly once they pass the age at which they can work optimally.
We have, as a society, decided that we value human life and dignity more than any of that kind of "social efficiency".
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Soylent Green is “socially efficient.”
Anecdotally, it’s not a small number of people. Ask a parent of school-age children in the past ten years. It’s increasing, for some reason.
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I assume based on this comment that you would be happy to personally explain to parents of someone killed due to an allergic reaction, why their death was an acceptable trade-off for "social efficiency"? I assume that you would also be personally happy with inflicting an allergy based death, or serious injury, on those that you love?
One of the frustrating aspects of arguments like this, is that proponents of "social efficiency" aren't personally impacted their proposed policies. They're quite happy to push for policies that negatively impact others, but it seems unlikely they would pursue a utilitarian policy with such zeal if it personally impacted themselves, or those they love. The impacts of utilitarianism are for others to deal with, proponents almost universally only benefit from their policies.
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Maybe if we examine your life situation, we will find some social efficiencies too - maybe its not socially efficient to spend police resources protecting your neighbourhood and your in particular from robbery and violence.
What is the point of society if we're not going to protect vulnerable people? You're talking about "efficiency" as though society has one goal to maximize. I would argue that there's multiple goals that need to be balanced but at the top of the list would be "protect children".
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> A former corporate CEO has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for selling food that made people sick. Two other executives face jail time as well. These jail terms are by far the harshest sentences the U.S. authorities have handed down in connection with an outbreak of foodborne illness.
> The outbreak, in this case, happened seven years ago. More than 700 cases of salmonella poisoning were linked to contaminated peanut products. Nine people died.
> Investigators traced the contaminated food to a factory in Georgia operated by the Peanut Corporation of America.
> The outbreak, by itself, was not unprecedented. There have been bigger, and deadlier, outbreaks of foodborne illness.
> But the emails that investigators found at the Peanut Corporation of America set this case apart. Some of the emails came from the company's CEO, Stewart Parnell.
> "Stewart Parnell absolutely knew that they were shipping salmonella-tainted peanut butter. They knew it, and they covered it up," says Bill Marler, a food safety lawyer who represented some of the victims.
> Before and during the outbreak, company executives assured customers that their products were free of salmonella when no tests had been carried out.
> When tests did turn up salmonella, company executives sometimes just retested that batch, and when it came up clean, they sold it.
> In one memorable email exchange, when Parnell was told that a shipment was delayed because results of salmonella tests weren't yet available, he wrote back, "Just ship it."
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/21/442335132/pe...
https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/2009/peanut-butter-2008-2009....
We’re in this place because one factory can produce food that will reach millions of people. The odds that a homemade food stand accidentally gives a stray peanut to a consumer with a deadly allergy are low. But the odds of a mega factory with poor QC doing it are high.
I'd be much more afraid of the homemade food stand.
> The odds that a homemade food stand accidentally gives a stray peanut to a consumer with a deadly allergy are low
The odds per food item consumed are higher for small food businesses that aren't as easily forced into absurd clean-room manufacturing. This analysis makes no sense.
Lawsuits pay relative to revenue, though. So it's more a matter of existence than proportion.
As someone with a plethora of food sensitivities that still gets hard dinged by hidden corn or wheat gluten contamination hidden under a surreptitious "food starch" label in the ingredients list -- it does matter. Yes, the amounts in ppm contained in starch taken from that food are enough to cause issues. Sometimes them even being on the same machines/equipment is enough for it.
Weirdly enough, food sensitivities and awareness seems to be rising. There are a few good things in the world to me as a result -- Wegmans has gluten free General Tso's chicken that I can have (and gluten free Sesame Chicken -- and both are great if expensive!)
There's so many ways that allergens sneak into food. Aldi's allergen sensitive products for example are a horrendous one for me -- I'm reactive to nearly every major allergen and some cost saving measure or another means it ends up sneaking in.
Thankfully the world is becoming kinder to people like me, but it is a pretty penny for things off the store shelf that approach the comforts of yesteryear while I could have those things.
I hope that helps. I've fallen many times victim of the logical trap of wondering why in the world special provisions exist for a small part of the population until I have to be a part of that population (not by choice) to understand why. It's still hard for me for some of the provisions I don't understand, but having had my bacon saved by a few of them (metaphorically) in the past, I think helped me commit to needing to understand them.
I say this as someone who's gotten "food zoinked" far too many times to count. If I completely purge my stomach in a nearby bathroom I can make the next 3 days more mild, usually, but sometimes it's too late and the reaction has begun.
That's why we're so weirdly picky about it as a country. And I'm glad for it, I think it's truly worth the effort, and it's a thing I feel very positive and relieved about, in the climate today where so many people are left behind in other places. I truly believe it's a good thing.
Much love to you all and Merry Christmas <3 :))))))))))))))))
> How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy.
One theory is there's a certain class of pharmaceuticals that induces autoimmunity disorders. These drugs aren't observed for medium or long term effects such as autoimmunity disorders, despite the fact they operate directly on the immune system and there's a growing body of evidence they do indeed induce autoimmunity.
Spoiler alert: that class of pharmaceuticals is, according to the theory, vaccines.
So if you investigate this you are anti-vaxx and, by association, probably racist.
People dying
Ooh I know! By cross-contaminating for a long time without consequences. People fight for these disclosures for a reason.
If you convince people it makes you fat, you will see sesame-free products next to gluten-free products. Gluten-free is for hot thin people, allergens are for broken disposable people.
bureaucracy strikes again!
I dunno, maybe by respecting the rights and well-being of consumers?
Authoritarianism.
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