> 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].
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
Does industrial production of cheap food make people choose cheap food, or would people rather cook but they only have time and funds to afford the cheap food?
Similar to the agricultural revolution, material need outpaced free lifestyle choices. Nobody chose, either the workers or the factories, but it's where we are.
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.
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?
When you have life-threatening food allergies, "may contain" is the same as "does contain."
I suddenly developed two dozen food allergies at age 30 after a lifetime of eating whatever I wanted. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. Out of all the numerous ways in which it's horrible, seeing "may contain" on the ingredients list of a food that, based on the ingredients I can confirm it has would otherwise be fine, is one of the most soul-killing.
But there are also those of us whose issues aren't life threatening.
Something like sesame should be labeled, but they should permit the "made in a facility that uses <x>" type labeling. I'll take a chance on such things because I know that at worst I'm in for an unpleasant day and it's very unlikely to even do that--my reactions are dependent both on dose and frequency. "Contains sesame"--I'm not touching it. "Made in a facility that uses sesame"--I wouldn't care.
Besides, their definition of "contains" is flawed, anyway. They're obsessed about what the manufacturer puts in, but as far as I can tell there are no rules at all about listing what they fail to take out. Occasionally you see the origin of certain materials listed but that's rare. I've had several encounters with situations where the failed-to-remove ingredient has been an issue for me, but the only cross-contamination I've ever had an issue with was pretty blatant (Chinese wok cooking typically does not wash between dishes. It's hot enough that this isn't a disease threat and such cooking is active enough that there will be no issue of stuck-on food--thus for most purposes this is fine. However, it's just asking for cross contamination between dishes.)
They also permit my #1 nemesis: "artificial flavors". I have no idea which ones I'm sensitive to because they're not individually listed. (Lest you think I'm one of the chemical-phobic nuts, my #2 nemesis is "natural flavors".)
> But there are also those of us whose issues aren't life threatening.
...yet.
My allergy to mustard used to barely register. It still scores near the bottom on my skin prick and IgE blood tests. And yet, over the past few months, it's evolved where if I'm even in the same room as someone eating mustard, I begin to go into anaphylaxis. Food allergies are absolutely absurd and you can't trust them to stay the same.
My reaction doesn't class as an allergy. There's no danger of anaphylaxis, the only way it could be life-threatening is if I had no choice of food (and that would be because of malabsorption, not the reaction itself.)
I see. From the sounds of one of your prior comments, I assume you have an intolerance to something such as food dyes?
Regardless, most of my allergies aren't life-threatening. I still don't eat them, because the reaction can ruin a day or more of my life at a time. It's tremendously disruptive.
What we’re talking about is erasing the granularity between “sometimes contains” and “does contain”. “Sometimes” doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about dosage or frequency. It just means sometimes.
That doesn't bother me, even with a severe almond allergy I've rolled that dice many a time and it's been fine. The problem is "may contain tree nuts." Like, okay, does it or doesn't it?
What's even worse is the ingredient "spices." Which spices? Even smelling mustard can send me to the ER, but basil is one of my favorite foods.
How these kinds of not-even-half measures are legal is beyond me.
According to the article, that's not good enough for the FDA. As for why the FDA says it's not good enough, I don't know.
>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.
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!
Because then people with those allergies won't buy your product. And you want people to buy your product. So if you're sure that the allergens are not in your product, then why would you tell people with those allergies not to buy it?
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.
It’s not silly. For the people who have no food allergies the label is meaningless, and for those who are allergic they have to treat it as if the allergen is definitely there. Trace contamination doesn’t tell you anything about the dose.
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.
Thank you for your reply and best wishes to your family! I know it can be a bit of an intrusive question, but how do people discover that children have a particular allergy? Do you get an epipen the same moment you have a newborn, just in case? Do you try some small amount or potentially cross contaminated food just to test? Do you discover it randomly and hope there is going to be enough time to get to ER? I have been lucky not to have it for myself, or a child, but how did you know?
Epipen? No. But if I didn't live around the corner from the hospital, I'd probably test peanuts and shellfish while parked next to one : - )
That wasn't common when/where I was born, but then again, the cuisine there/then was more limited so I'd be exposed to most allergens naturally within the first year. (And face "I've never seen a prawn and I'm 20 - am I allergic to them?" later)
Our son had skin issues (eczema) before he was old enough to eat solid foods. Eczema and food allergies are correlated so we fed him small amounts of peanuts and he had a crazy reaction. We were lucky he didn’t end up in er first time, but swollen lips, changed “voice” for weeks etc.
For anyone reading this, there are safer ways to test for peanut allergies than feeding someone peanuts, especially because peanut allergies can kill. I'm reminded of this: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/11/26
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.
Note that the most important of these are intestinal worms, helminths. The other would be bacteria.
Respiratory viruses, by contrast, are not on the list. It is instead chronic presences in the body which may modulate immune response and avoid allergies.
(You said nothing wrong but the name itself is confusing)
Do you mean that a certain amount of helminths is beneficial for our health? Is this just during childhood or is helminth infestation beneficial the whole life?
Maybe helminths shouldn't be called parasites then, since they somehow bring benefits to us? Like, there's some degree of mutualism
The whole thing is debated and I’m not sure we have a clear answer. As of yet public health authorities are not recommending helminths, and they cause a lot of problems too
Anecdata and all but my food allergies as a kid were a lot more severe than after puberty. On the other hand I'm pretty sure I could eat a few things as a toddler that I couldn't anymore in/after elementary school. It's really weird.
Interestingly, age of introduction is also important. For a long time the advice was to delay introducing allergens. It turns out that that increased the chance of being allergic to the thing.
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)
I wasn't going to write it now because it's Christmas Eve; but I have a moment to type this.
Back story:
My wife and I are super old school when it comes to food. Organic as much as possible, processed very little. We spend a lot of time preparing meals. Our daughters pack home made meals to school.
Our kids were all breast fed until 12 months, no formula. We introduce foods at six months, thereabouts, with "real" food. No baby food. No cereal. We make our own baby formula from a wide assortment of vegetables and meats. Each soup has at least five different vegetables, and there are three different soups so about 15 different veggies a week.
We are also not shy introducing "dangerous" foods. Eggs, in particular, are one of our favorite foods and we introduce it at around six months. We "juice" (squash the fluids out) fillet mignon to give mix it into a squash purée as a starter food (for bioavailable iron, since we don't do cereal).
We're not "real" Americans so peanut butter is not a staple. But we'll introduce it early on. We're careful, but not shy.
My son:
My son has never had a dangerous reaction like anaphylaxis. He reacted to eggs early on, around 7 months. We noticed certain foods gave him hives and we'd avoid them.
When he turned 12 we wanted to introduce milk so my wife could stop breast feeding. He reacted poorly and the nurse in the phone suggested we take him to the hospital. Therefore we did a test and he's allergic to everything.
Causes:
Who knows?
Maybe because he's a COVID baby.
Maybe its because my wife was super stressed while pregnant (we bought a house, moved, and figured out two day cares in the span of three months).
Maybe because of a very stressful "vacation" when he was six months.
Maybe its our city's industrial history.
Maybe its genetic.
Maybe its the luck of the draw.
Solution:
Deal with it, ultimately.
Luckily we are pretty food obsessed and we dont mind spending time/money cooking. So far we're:
Diary:
- Since my son is not allergic to breast milk, my wife will breastfeed for another year at a rate of about seven times a day. She's also pumping.
- We knew donkey's milk is similar to humans'. We tried it and he seems ok w/ it. Hard to find though. And pricey (with intl. shipping $100 for 2 L worth of powder)
- I researched bioavailability of calcium and found out that bok choi has a lot of bioavailable Ca.
Eggs:
- Not much you can do here. 25% of kids allergic to hens' eggs are not to ducks, but the odds aren't great. I figured that eggs of birds furthest away from chicken would cause less problems. Therefore I have found out a research paper that proposes that Emu eggs should be ok since they lack the proteins that cause allergies.
But where do you find emu eggs? There's a place in the US that grows emu and he's willing to sell us one to try out, but they wouldnt ship it and its a 10 hour drive.
Fermented foods:
My wife is Balkan and swears by yoghurt, I agree. We found coconut yoghurt without tree nuts.
General nutrition:
We're leaning heavily on fish and meats and making sure anything he eats doesn't bind to nutrients blocking their availability.
Result:
The pediatrician commented that: "he's growing pretty well for someone with so many allergies" so I guess thats a win.
On the other hand, this week we're bouncing in and out of the ER with respiratory distress - Dr. figures, given all his allergies, he has asthma.
Wow. Thank you for taking the time to write all of this. I had seen studies that theorized the increase in allergies is due to introducing potential allergens much later in life, but it doesn’t sound like that was the case for you. So sorry for your son; that sounds extremely stressful for all. Glad for him you’re so on top of it. He’s lucky to have such attentive parents. Merry Xmas.
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.
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.
Plus, so many foods list what they "may contain" traces of X, but never really quantify how much of a trace. Which actually may be a good thing about intentionally adding sesame, because at least it makes the amount consistent.
I was allergic to peanuts as a kid, way back before it was cool, and didn't know why M&Ms gave me a mild version of the burning sensation and nausea I would get from eating peanuts. Later it turned out, famously, that non-peanut M&M shells contain some "reprocessed" material from the peanut M&M line. (And still do as far as I can tell.)
Nothing else with the "may contain" label has ever given me trouble! But I still get nervous that I'll find out 2 hours into a bike ride that I just fueled up on an extra peanutty "may contain" Clif bar.
Now I'm concerned about sesame. I can eat hamburger buns just fine but I discovered sometime in my 20s that sesame noodles make me sick, and the last time I was at a Korean restaurant my face puffed up just from the air.
So, oddly, one positive of the trend described in the story is that if processed food X lists sesame as an ingredient, and I can nibble on it and then eat the whole thing without getting sick, then I know whether or not I can eat that food, because it's presumably made with a consistent amount of sesame every time. Whereas with a "may contain" label, I'm never really sure if some batch might have lots of sesame and I just tested a non-sesame batch.
> Plus, so many foods list what they "may contain" traces of X, but never really quantify how much of a trace. Which actually may be a good thing about intentionally adding sesame, because at least it makes the amount consistent.
I mean, they don’t usually… know? They know that the assembly line for product X is physically near an assembly line for product Y that contains peanuts, and so X may have some peanut particulate floating through the air and landing on it. It would be a different amount of particulate at different times of day, different humidity, etc; and so different individual bars of product X could end up with different amounts of trace contaminants. (Almost always none, since they do try to avoid these effects; they just can’t guarantee that they’ve been successful, or that they’ll be successful in perpetuity.)
Or alternately, if the manufacturer is a job-shop (produces different things for different customers, retooling between each job) then they can’t guarantee that they’ve cleaned out a perfect 100% of traces of previous job materials out of their assembly line when they start up a new production run. (The theoretically perfect way to solve this is to have separate job-shops that only deal with jobs containing allergen X — but with the combinatorial number of allergens, and a shop having to dedicate itself to only processing a particular combination [A, B, not-C, not-D], that’s mostly impractical.)
They don't know, but we can be pretty confident that it's no more than a trace.
If eating the wrong thing can kill it makes no difference, "may contain" is the same as "contains". However, if eating the wrong thing will simply mess up your day "may contain" is a very different thing than "contains".
And if I learn I react to product X so be it, I simply don't eat X.
But you do need the government to mandate that allergens are accurately reported on packaging. Without government regulations on food packaging, some of your friends with severe peanut allergies would be dead now, because most manufacturers would not label trace amounts of peanut contamination.
It sounds like this law was very poorly written, in that rather than pushing manufacturers to a) be more careful about cross-contamination and b) accurately label, it pushes them to deliberately add sesame to the foods.
This is not because government "interference" in food is fundamentally bad; it's because this law is very poorly written.
The problem is that "may contain sesame" is not a legally valid excuse for containing sesame, but "does contain sesame" is. And the part about "may contain X" not being an excuse comes from existing precedent, not from the new law.
Right, in fact I’m not sure why the new law is even causing this. The interpretation of the labeling law which now includes sesame is that it only applies to intentional ingredients. As far as that’s concerned, no label at all is fine.
Separately, the good manufacturing practices rules say that cross contact risks should be limited. But the FDA mentions there may be some cases where this is impractical and a may contain label “might” be acceptable. They don’t say what those are, and they don’t explicitly require a label either, because that is not a labeling law.
So consumers can’t really be sure if cross contact is a risk or not.
Exactly, I was sarcastically replying to the parent comment who still defended this change. I feel your plight and I hope this can be reverted to some degree.
The problem is that there is a (sadly) large group of people who believe that its the governments job to right every wrong that there ever was, fix any and every inequality that exists, and smooth out any randomness that exists.
> 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.
If I see sesame in an ingredients list, and I discover that really means “we don’t deep clean the oven conveyer after cooking sesame products”, I think I’d feel at least a little tricked.
That's not what it means in this case. In this case, it means that "we intentionally added some otherwise-not-needed sesame to the product, in order to comply with this law and the truth-in-labeling laws."
It also means they don’t feel confident enough in their cleaning process and would prefer to add cost to their manufacturing process than to ensure clean machines
Or it could mean the conveyor next to it uses lots of sesame oil and they can’t guarantee every single particle stayed in that belt.
Or it could mean the conveyor on the other side of the factory is and they don’t want to risk it.
Nobody knows the specific reasoning a company has for adding it in unless they had insider info from the company itself. Everything else is pure speculation.
Have you ever cleaned up sesame seeds? The article's "remove all the sand" analogy is exactly on point - they're tiny and get stuck tight in every available crack. No normal cleaning process is going to remove all of them.
I'm pretty sure the producers involved understand their costs better than you or I and have concluded the optimal outcome is to add an epsilon of sesame cost than a multiple of that of additional decontamination cost.
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.
> 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.
Federal laws mandating absurdly costly subsidies of very small minorities is not what "high-trust society" means.
You're right in one sense - living in a low-trust society is very socially inefficient. I just don't think you have a working model of why we're becoming low-trust. It certainly has nothing to do with accommodating rare allergies.
> it is not "socially efficient" to make any accommodations to disability
More or less. The overwhelming majority of legally mandated disability subsidies in the US are horrendously anti-utilitarian.
> It would be "socially efficient" to euthanize our elderly
This type of absurd claim is a crystal clear indicator of someone who's stuck on a zeroth-order approximation of utilitarianism and isn't factoring in any higher-order terms like people's responses to incentives.
If we started killing old people, would that result in a net decrease in pro-social behavior? Obviously.
If we stopped wasting huge quantities of marginal resources on infrastructure due to e.g. ADA requirements, would that result in a net decrease in pro-social behavior? It would not.
> We have, as a society, decided that we value human life and dignity more than any of that kind of "social efficiency"
Another common refrain of the economically illiterate - claiming to "value human life" while simultaneously working against policies that would actually improve human flourishing. It's also very generous to describe the outcome of selectorate mechanics and lobbying as "we, as a society, decided..."
Spoken like someone who neither knows anyone with disabilities, nor realizes that they, themselves will likely be disabled at some point in their lives, and will both want and need accommodation at that point.
You're making things up about me (all untrue, incidentally) so you can write off my argument as heartless or something instead of actually addressing it.
You're attempting to appeal to societal utility when the issue at hand is the dignity and well-being of a small, often marginalized and underrepresented, minority of society. I believe that speaks volumes to heartlessness.
Yes, accommodating these people will cost society more (in terms of effort and money) than not doing so.
However, not accommodating these people comes at a huge cost to our society's legitimacy, reputation, and honour.
I'm not addressing your points because I do not believe they represent a worldview that is worth engaging with.
I'm the parent of a school aged child. Due to the high occurrence of nut allergies they have eliminated nuts from all school lunch items. For example instead of peanut butter sandwiches they now offer sunflower butter sandwiches. My child is allergic to sunflowers.
No it's not, but it's a good sniff test for people who have a zeroth-order model of utilitarianism and aren't thinking about things like incentives.
> It’s increasing, for some reason.
I agree - my suspicion is that accommodating the 0.1% of kids with peanut allergies means that another 0.5% of kids (or whatever, made up fractions) never get enough exposure to peanut allergens to develop a tolerance, so the problem is self-reinforcing.
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.
> 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"
What would you say to the parent of a child killed by a drunk driver? According to this line of thinking alchool should be banned because some drink and drive and kill innocent people.
Or driving cars should be banned because sometimes people fall asleep at the wheel.
Said otherwise: accidents do happen, trying to make them illegal will have massive "social efficiency" costs, which will affect the ones the banning tried to protect.
Just like here - introduce strong anti-allergy laws and now you get even more allergenic food.
> What would you say to the parent of a child killed by a drunk driver? According to this line of thinking alchool should be banned because some drink and drive and kill innocent people.
Drink driving is banned in most of the world, and most of the world doesn’t suffer from the US drink driving problem because other countries don’t force everyone to own a car and driver everywhere.
Additionally investments in public transport and active transport produce huge positive externalities for societies, and produce positive returns to governments once reduced road maintenance, reduced health costs, improved productivity and social mobility caused by public transport are considered.
So to answer your question directly, I would console for their loss and acknowledge that more work needs to be done to prevent needless automotive deaths. Plenty of cities and countries around the world have made tremendous progress towards zero road deaths, and have reaped substantial economic benefits along the way. To believe that eradicating automotive deaths can only be achieved by banning alcohol or car just demonstrates a lack of imagination.
> Just like here - introduce strong anti-allergy laws and now you get even more allergenic food.
I don’t have strong fews on the specific policies in the article. I’m only taking issue with idea that “social efficiency” is a metric we should be optimising for, above all else.
Why would I want to talk to someone about an issue I couldn't possibly expect them to have a rational opinion on?
> One of the frustrating aspects of arguments like this
Is people insisting on making a society-scale issue into a personal, emotional issue?
> is that proponents of "social efficiency" aren't personally impacted their proposed policies
Oh. Well funny enough, I actually do have a couple serious dietary intolerances - but I don't insist on externalizing my costs onto others against their will.
It may be alien to you, but in fact I am perfectly capable of considering policy decisions that are bad for me but good for society. Some people can't do it, I guess.
> Is people insisting on making a society-scale issue into a personal, emotional issue?
I apologise for believing that social policy should be empathetic towards the people it has the greatest impact on. I also apologise for believing that those who believe that the individual needs and right should be considered in addition to what’s “social efficient”.
Clearly a purely utilitarian approach to social policy should be adopted, individuals that reduce “social efficiency” should be removed or ignored. Those who object are turning social policy into an emotional issue, when clearly all social policy should be considered on purely economic and rational basis.
> Oh. Well funny enough, I actually do have a couple serious dietary intolerances - but I don't insist on externalizing my costs onto others against their will.
Thats nice. I’m sure you apply the same reasoning to every aspect of your life, and ensure that you never externalise any cost to society at large.
> It may be alien to you, but in fact I am perfectly capable of considering policy decisions that are bad for me but good for society. Some people can't do it, I guess.
Then I would say your arguments for why this policy is bad, are poorly constructed and lacking any real substance. It’s trivial to justify almost any policy based on “greater good” arguments, that doesn’t make them good policies.
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".
> 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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.