I get that this seems like an overreach, but America is incredibly safe for people with allergies and it's because of enforcement like this. In my 36 years of being alive, I've never once had an allergic reaction in the US due to mislabeling (although I've had them in South America and Asia).
Under the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act, there's 8 groups that MUST be labeled: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat and soybeans.
Everyone with an allergy knows to check that section of the packaging (it comes after the long list of ingredients), and you can trust it to be accurate. It can't just be right most of the time... it has to always be right.
If that trust is broken, America will be a much less safe place.
> Everyone with an allergy knows to check that section of the packaging (it comes after the long list of ingredients), and you can trust it to be accurate. It can't just be right most of the time... it has to always be right.
Right, so if you pick up a package that says "Unsalted Butter" and nothing else, who the hell is going to assume no milk was used? Even worse when the ingredients listed on the same box say Milk as literally the only ingredient.
Along the same lines, if you have a peanut allergy and you buy a jar that says Peanut Butter with an ingredients list that starts with "Peanuts", you kind of deserve to pay the stupid tax.
> If that trust is broken, America will be a much less safe place.
America can simultaneously be the safest place on earth for those with food allergies, while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense.
Instead, to please some faceless career bureaucrats, 80,000 pounds of butter will be destroyed to "protect" the dumbest among us.
I get your point, of course.
But there's a lot of foods that say butter that don't contain "Milk". Does "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" contain milk? Does Shea butter? Does Garlic butter? Are you so sure you're right about each of these that you'd risk someone's life over it?
In the US, packaging is guaranteed to have an accurate "contains" section. It's not just a nice-to-have; people's lives depend on it.
I get that this is a pretty clear example that it contains milk – but that's what makes it interesting. Lives may not be at stake here, but the trust in the "contains" label is. We can't leave it up to "well, most people should know" – it has to be consistently enforced, or it becomes completely useless.
Couldn't I say the opposite? "Instead, to please some faceless career Costco executives, the trust in the 'Contains' labeling will be destroyed to "protect" the people who mislabeled their product."
> But there's a lot of things that say butter that don't contain "Milk". In the US, packaging is guaranteed to have an accurate "contains" section.
The box of Unsalted Butter already says "Milk" in the ingredients list. It does not need a second warning that says "Contains Milk". The article seem to be confusing the two - they are two different "labels" on the same packaging.
Is there a human alive that would read the ingredients list and think to themselves, "Hmm, it says Milk is an ingredient, but I don't see a 'Contains Milk' warning, so it probably doesn't contain milk!"?
That is the bureaucratic nonsense people are sick and tired of.
You are arguing for a much more complicated set of rules that now have to define what's obvious and what isn't. Is your preferred rule that they don't have to list allergens if they're already in the ingredients? Is it a custom cutout for butter? One ingredient items?
I'd say the recall is probably more pointless, who is going to check this at home?
Maybe we could introduce some nuance on the law. Maybe just issue a warning and a fine, not necessarily a full on recall.
Why do we have only the nuclear recourse?
> Why do we have only the nuclear recourse?
If you set punishments at the "cost of doing business" level, then businesses will choose [0] to take the punishment, rather than complying with the regulation.
This is a food safety regulation of the sort where some people will die if it's not compiled with. It's also a food safety regulation that's easy to comply with... if the manufacturer is aware of what's in their food.
IMO, noncompliance with this is a sign that something's fucking wrong with the company and maybe shouldn't be in charge of making food for people to eat. Remember that one band that had the "no brown M&Ms in the band's candy bowl" clause in their performance contracts? While I can't claim that this is a "canary" regulation, it sure smells like it could serve as a pretty solid one given how easy it is to comply with.
[0] Not always, but more often than "never", and probably more often than not.
That was Van Halen. They used the "bowl full of M&Ms, but no brown M&Ms" requirement as a simple litmus test, after repeatedly showing up at venues that lied about fundamental problems like doors that couldn't fit all of the band's equipment.
A packaging mistake for a single truckload of butter is now a signal of something "fucking wrong" with a company who otherwise has a pretty stellar track record of consumer protection? A packaging mistake that likely happens many times over by lesser brands and products but is never caught because they don't have the same amount of exposure and customer base as Costco?
The recall makes sense for stuff still on the shelves. It's a bit silly, but rules are rules. Pull it and stuff it in different packaging, or pay a crew of a couple folks in each store to pull it out of the boxes and donate to a local food kitchen.
The FDA telling people at home to throw it away - after they are made aware of the issue in the first place or they wouldn't have known to be told to throw it away - is utter ridiculousness and the government workers here should absolutely know better. They are undermining their authority and don't even realize it.
This will be used as a very effective tool against the institution in the future. It was a stupid tone-deaf call. They could have simply worked with Costco and put out a generalized notice to the public to be aware of the situation. Nuance matters.
This is an unnecessary own-goal by a government agency that doesn't need such things at the moment. It has done more damage to public health than it will ever have hoped to gain - which would be correctly estimated at zero.
> The FDA telling people at home to throw it away...
Are they?
I was unable to find any evidence of this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42153441>. If you can find an official statement from the FDA that recommends (or orders) folks at home to dispose of the recalled food, I'd appreciate it.
TFA lists it as a quote. If the author made it up without taking that statement from the FDA that would be on the author. It's not very ambiguous.
> The FDA has shared specific steps to help consumers handle this recall safely. First, check the product codes on your butter containers and compare them to the codes in the recall notice. If you have one of the recalled batches, the FDA advises not to eat it under any circumstances. Instead, throw it out to avoid any health risks. For any questions or possible refunds, reach out to Costco through their customer service team.
Edit: It is certainly curious that this looks like boilerplate language. I do wonder if it originates from an FDA spokesperson, or if the author copy/pasted a previous press release from Costco? Another article[0] explicitly states the FDA did not make any recommendations to consumers, but mentions the quoted statement and sourced it from foodsafety.gov as a general recommendation for "recalled products".
Looking like the author completely made up the quote out of whole cloth by copy/pasting boilerplate generalized language while implying it was a directly related to the issue at hand. Nice catch!
[0]https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2024/11/13/costco-b...
Edit 2: Can't reply directly due to ratelimiting - but yes, you are absolutely correct that the FDA has not urged anyone, or even explicitly recommended it be thrown away. The above was my independent sleuthing before seeing your followup. Others did far better.
I don't share the opinion this was "lazy telephone" by a reporter though - this was outright deliberate making things up to generate a narrative. Either there was a phone call/e-mail by a FDA rep these articles are quoting, or they are simply trying to generate outrage on purpose. There is no game of lazy telephone that can explain word choices such as "FDA urges" and the like to appear out of whole cloth.
> Can't reply directly due to ratelimiting...
It USED to be the case that you could click the direct link to a comment to get the reply box to appear when the little "reply" link is refusing to show up. That might no longer be true, but it's worth a try next time you run into this.
> ...this was outright deliberate making things up to generate a narrative.
Oh, that's not an unreasonable assessment.
> There is no game of lazy telephone that can explain word choices such as "FDA urges" and the like to appear out of whole cloth.
If one site reports it, then other sites repeat it, that totally qualifies as "lazy telephone", IMO.
If you haven't visited that link I provided in the last five minutes, I urge you to do so. In that thread, a fellow has done some decent detective work.
It looks like the article author (and/or editor) has played lazy telephone, and the FDA issued no such statement.
Don't worry the bullshit the author made up will be seen by 40 million people on tictok and not a single one of them will read the actual FDA release.
The information super highway is a race to the bottom human ignorance.
> A packaging mistake for a single truckload of butter is now a signal of something "fucking wrong" with a company who otherwise has a pretty stellar track record of consumer protection?
Honestly? Yeah.
There are a lot of little things you need to make sure happen correctly to produce and ship safe food that's fit for human consumption. If the QA for the package redesign failed to notice that the legally-mandated allergen field is missing from the package, what else is company QA letting slip through the cracks? [0]
Also, I don't know if you've ever worked for a company that had a management change that destroyed the company's ability to continue to ship a proper product, but I definitely have, as have folks I've known. By the time folks outside the company notice, the rot is usually bad, bad, bad.
Additionally: Remember that "a signal of something fucking wrong" is not the same as "something is fucking wrong". People and organizations are known to send out worrisome signals and still be fundamentally sound. But in the area of food safety, it's the job of the FDA to notice these worrisome signals and go look to see if something is currently fucking wrong with the company.
[0] Or if those labels are manually applied, the same question holds.
> it's the job of the FDA to notice these worrisome signals and go look to see if something is currently fucking wrong with the company.
Fair points, but this recall looks to be vendor-initiated from the actual FDA website itself. Found via previous sleuthing in our discussion downthread. The FDA is simply adding it to it's database as it does, and the media picked it up from there. It's unlikely we'll ever be told if this was found via customer complaint, or via an internal QA process.
The one point also that I meant to make earlier, is that these products are likely contracted out. I wonder how many creameries Costco outsources their butter production to? I know other Kirkland products are simple rebrands, so I would assume the case is the same here as well.
> I wonder how many creameries Costco outsources their butter production to? I know other Kirkland products are simple rebrands, so I would assume the case is the same here as well.
That's a good question. The rumor I heard says that Costco plays super, duper hardball with companies that aren't willing to pay the low, low price Costco wants... using tactics such as waiting until a vendor's product nears the point of becoming unsellable as leverage. If that rumor's true, well, Costco may contract with very many creameries and serve as a "retailer of last resort" for them.
If the packaging is 'Kirkland' branded, and was provided by Costco, I wonder what fuckup happened so that the allergens section was omitted from the packaging. It'd be fucking dumb for that label to have to be manually applied. [0] So... was this a packaging printing error? If so, who was responsible for the QA?
> ...this recall looks to be vendor-initiated...
That may be a signal that the creamery caught the error and recalled the shipments. It might ALSO be the case that Costco caught the error and demanded the vendor recall the shipments. I don't think we have the data required to determine who deserves the credit for that action.
[0] But things that are fucking dumb happen all the time, so that's not proof that that's not what's up.
> The box of Unsalted Butter already says "Milk" in the ingredients list.
No it doesn't, it says "Cream". That's the issue.
Are there English speaking humans that are deathly allergic to milk who would think that cream is OK?
To be clear, I'm fine with the recall because you want stuff like this to have clear lines, I just don't think there is any actual real danger in this case.
I never look at "Ingredients". I look at "Contains". That's the important section for anyone with allergies.
You clearly don't have a deadly food allergy. "Contains" is highly regulated ("Ingredients" is not), and everyone with a food allergy trusts "Contains". This isn't about this one particular situation, which admittedly is obvious. It's about maintaining the trust of the "Contains" section.
Who is "sick and tired of" allergy labels being too strict? Is this really something people get up in arms about?
> Who is "sick and tired of" allergy labels being too strict? Is this really something people get up in arms about?
People are sick and tired of nonsense bureaucracy - and this is a prime example.
Destroying 80,000 pounds of perfectly fine butter so some bureaucrats can pat themselves on the back is pretty absurd. Nobody was harmed - nobody was saved. This is just waste because some piece of paper says it has to be wasted...
I just wanted to look so I had context. Annual production of butter in the US is over 2,060,000,000 pounds.
These aren't new rules and are in place to literally save lives.
Are people really "sick and tired" of .003% of the butter being recalled? I feel like repeating "80,000 pounds" is attempting to appeal to emotion over the destruction of some mass quantity when in reality it's a rounding error.
> I feel like repeating "80,000 pounds" is attempting to appeal to emotion...
It's also attempting to appeal to rampant innumeracy!
Why don't you place the blame on the company who knew the rules and made a mistake?
I, as someone with an allergy, am grateful for the "faceless" people who show up every day for an unglamorous job and keep me alive.
I am saying this rule is ridiculous, especially given the current situation.
I would agree with you more if it was not a product where Milk was the only ingredient.
This kind of bureaucratic action lacks common sense and protects no one. That's the kind of bureaucracy we don't need.
If only you could rely on common sense! But companies have been allowed to run roughshod for so long and sell things that are deceptively labeled for so long that the law finally had to step in with bureaucracy. You can't apply common sense when companies are allowed to label things as X when they aren't X.
Does something labeled "butter" contain milk? Does something labeled "milk" contain milk? This thread shows the answers to these questions are not straightforward and cannot be determined with common sense.
We -have- to have strict labeling rules around allergens and destroy products that don't comply because if we didn't, it would just be the wild west like it is with products that are not allergens.
For example of why it's not always so easy - Vanilla ice cream is being sold in the UK with 0 vanilla, 0 milk and 0 cream. No minimum milkfat requirements - they can use any fat they want.
Products are confusing, we shouldn't expect people to know how today's industrial food process works.
When, specifically and exactly, should it be “common sense” and when should it have to be labeled? What, specifically, makes your new “label it sometimes but only when you personally think it needs a label” process less “bureaucratic”?
I don’t get this nonsense where a bunch of people can neither empathize nor understand that people other than themselves exist and should be able to rely on relatively simple packaging, and that the instant you create inane and bizarre carve-outs, you create risk for absolutely no benefit whatsoever.
> I don’t get this nonsense where a bunch of people can neither empathize nor understand that people other than themselves exist
Literally just to save money, ala the Elon/Trump D.O.G.E
This is a "waste" which costs money, which raises their taxes, so it shouldnt exist.
Who's getting sick from this regulation? Presumably not people with allergies to the regulated items
It depends upon one's perspective. I would think that having it listed on the ingredients is sufficient. That said, some people who are allergic to something will not examine the list of ingredients when the regulations state they allergen must be listed under what the product contains. It is about trust, not bureaucrats patting themselves on the back.
People are sick and tired of nonsense bureaucracy
So much is taken for granted in our modern world because so many are unwilling to surrender to complexities beyond their reasoning. They alone have the answer and all must know it.
80k pounds of butter is being destroyed because the private company who made it could not be assed to do proper QA over a batch.
This isn't government overreach, this is a company trying to save money by doing less QA and getting bit for it.
THIS TIME it was caught, and handled, and the company is seeing a negative outcome for their lack of diligence in making OUR FOOD. What about next time? Maybe companies should be discouraged from lacking QA like this?
The government could apply a fine, and shops selling that butter could put up a sign warning that butter is made from milk.
That achieves the same result without the destruction of perfectly good food.
Someone buys it, then resells it without the putting up the warning sign. Who is liable: the manufacturer or the person reselling it? (I've seen plenty of small convenience stores reselling food simply because their suppliers don't offer the same prices to them as they do to large grocery chains.)
This isn't QA over food. It's not like the butter was contaminated or something.
It's QA over packaging.
And you have no evidence that this was motivated by trying to "save money by doing less QA".
US food manufacturers generally do their absolute best on QA because recalls are super expensive and the headlines are bad. But companies are made up of humans who are never going to be 100.0000000% perfect.
shouldn't the question be, how the f does a manufacturer mess up the packaging of BUTTER. something they have presumably been selling for decades?
If you look at a food package and don't see Contains how do you know if it's truly absent or if perhaps it's on a different part of the label and you missed it?
On the practical personal safety level this is easy to answer. If you(or the person you are going to serve it to) have food alergy for any of the categories and you can’t find a “Contains” list then you don’t consume(serve) the item.
Want to make it clear i’m not arguing with this against the current alergen labeling laws. I see it as a variant of Postel’s principle. The food manufacturers should label everything strictly, and consumers affected by any alergy should assume that where there is no information then the alergen they worry about is present. This way the system remains trustworthy while the customers can safely avoid where mistakes are made or packaging gets damaged or smudged or anything like that.
"Contains" is highly regulated ("Ingredients" is not)
Then maybe it should be Ingredients that is highly regulated as the source of truth? "Contains" is effectively redundant and incomplete.
Oftentimes "ingredients" will be an incredibly long list. As someone that needs to pay attention to ingredients on food for a severe tree nut allergy, it's so so so much easier to quickly parse a two-item "contains" section than a 40 item "ingredients" section.
I've made mistakes on food that has _just_ "ingredients", missing entries while scanning at the grocery store.
Unfortunately, "contains" isn't required, and its location isn't always obvious. imo it should flatly be always required and always in a standardized layout/location (e.g. in a clear to read box).
it's so so so much easier to quickly parse a two-item "contains" section than a 40 item "ingredients" section
Imagine if everyone who has an uncommon allergy wanted to have their allergen listed in "contains" too. You'll just end up with two "ingredients" lists instead. It's insanely stupid and redundant.
Edit: care to give a counterargument?
I've seen enough comments from you on technical computing subjects over the last decade to know that you have a firm grasp of concepts such as caching and other related ways to take advantage of usage patterns to optimize things.
Just as caches are useful in computing even if they are too small to hold everything so too is a contains section that only lists the top 9 allergens. That covers 90% of food allergies in the US.
This is a strawman. It seems obvious the number of items covered is a balance between the size of the affected population and the size of the list. I use "it seems obvious" intentionally.
If we remove the cream from milk, is it now two different ingredients: low-fat milk and cream? What if they are combined again, is it milk?
Take that example and apply it to every single ingredient used in food and cosmetics and supplements. Write that regulation please.
Or we can stick to the one that only deals with like, 5 - 10 things.
I am extending the argument on semantics:
What does "Milk" mean in the context of "Contains Milk"
Is almond milk, oat milk, soy milk, coconut milk included?
Milk of magnesia?
I think the assumption is that if it doesn't have a modifier, it's dairy milk. Otherwise, it would have one of the modifiers you listed.
Hopefully the same common-sense assumption can also be applied then to "butter" as well?
And I expect that the proliferation of things that are called "milk" that are not dairy milk is part of the reason things are labeled "CONTAINS: Milk" when they contain dairy milk (as milk does), and "CONTAINS: Nuts" when they contain almonds (as almond "milk" does), and so on.
> It's not just a nice-to-have; people's lives depend on it.
Nevertheless, I would certainly hope that if someone's life depends on avoiding milk products, that they learned a long time ago not to buy butter.
I mean I get your broader point, but it's just that in this specific case this isn't shea butter or apple butter or whatever... it's butter butter.
Like, listing wheat as an allergen on a candy bar, of course. But if you have a milk allergy, there's absolutely no universe in which you should even be picking up the butter to check in the first place.
There is absolutely zero value in making an exception to the rules about allergen labeling here. Yes, it has the net effect of having a requirement that a bag of peanuts says "Allergens: peanuts". So be it; this is the kind of rule that works better when made universal, with zero exceptions.
I didn't suggest making an exception, sorry if that wasn't clear.
I'm just saying, it's hard to believe anyone was harmed in this particular case.
Well, it's "unsalted butter". It has an adjective. So it's not just "butter butter", it's modified.
Not everyone speaks perfect english. One of the times I had an allergic reaction, it's because I didn't know all the Spanish word for peanuts... and the english translation right below it skipped that word.
Unsalted butter is butter butter. It's the base form of butter with nothing added.
And peanuts in something that isn't obviously made of peanuts, of course. That's what allergen labels are for, nobody's arguing against that.
But you can't really mistake a bar of butter for anything else except margarine. And it you have a milk allergy, you're gonna make sure you know what the words are for butter vs. margarine, I should think?
You are arguing that the regulation should be more complex...
Regulations that require the allergen labeling and don't make exceptions will obviously be shorter than regulations that make exceptions.
If the outcome were worse for consumers, I can see arguing for the more complicated regulation, but having a clear statement of the allergens regardless of the product doesn't hurt consumers any (If you disregard the bother from the redundancy anyway).
> You are arguing that the regulation should be more complex...
No, I'm just saying that in this particular instance literally nobody should have suffered any harm.
If I had my way, food terms that have hundreds or thousands of years of history behind them would not be allowed to be used for labeling completely unrelated things. That includes fake milks, fake eggs and fake "butters"
What about Swedish fish?
Those do God's work, they can stay.
Where do nut butters (e.g., peanut butter) fall under your taxonomy?
We probably should call those something different, since they are not related. Peanut Spread would be entirely fine.
>Instead, to please some faceless career bureaucrats...
I own a food-manufacturing business. Such businesses aren't trying to please anyone; we're following regulations. There are plenty of other such safety regulations that might seem unnecessary or pointless, but they're in place and they exist to help make certain food remains safe.
>...80,000 pounds of butter will be destroyed to "protect" the dumbest among us.
Regulations like this are meant to make certain even those most in need of awareness are informed. You may think they're the "dumbest," while I see them as people just as qualified to be informed as any other consumer.
The whole point of the allergens section is so that people with allergies do not need to read the whole ingredient list every time they buy the product.
In the specific case of butter the whole ingredient list is small enough that reading it every time would be no big deal, but many food items contain dozens of ingredients and the manufacturers often make changes to the recipe. If people cannot rely on the allergen list at the bottom they would have to read the full ingredient list of everything every time.
so if you pick up a package that says "Unsalted Butter" and nothing else, who the hell is going to assume no milk was used
Lots of people in the U.S. don't know that butter is made from milk. I have met plenty of people who don't know that cheese is a dairy product. I have met plenty of people who think that mayonnaise is a dairy product... Very few people know that American caramel is a dairy product...
while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense.
This is not bureaucratic nonsense. Reporting ingredients has been table stakes for selling foodstuffs in the U.S. for several decades. A company that can't get something that basic right is also getting something else wrong. And that's the point of these seemingly bureaucratic rules: they're basically unit tests for the regulatory agencies to identify issues they require followup.
> Lots of people in the U.S. don't know that butter is made from milk. I have met plenty of people who don't know that cheese is a dairy product.
If there are people who are allergic to dairy who don't know butter or cheese come from milk, then I think there's an even bigger problem here...
People also make food for others. It's like having a gluten-free/celiac friend coming over for dinner and using soy sauce without bothering to notice soy sauce always contains wheat.
Sure, but that's why someone allergic to dairy might ask their friend who prepared dinner if anything was made with butter or cheese (or yogurt or sour cream, etc.), just to double-check.
If the person cooking is uneducated enough to not know that butter and cheese come from milk, I highly doubt they're checking the box the butter comes in for an allergen listing.
>If the person cooking is uneducated enough to not know that butter and cheese come from milk, I highly doubt they're checking the box the butter comes in for an allergen listing.
The purpose of the regulations isn't about what anyone may think others will or won't do with the information, it's about making the information readily and unambiguously available.
> Right, so if you pick up a package that says "Unsalted Butter" and nothing else, who the hell is going to assume no milk was used?
Perhaps they are a vegan and think it is (e.g.) almond butter:
Yeah, but the choice isn’t between 80k of butter being used and nothing. The other side of it is all allergy labels not being reliable. I was on the side of “don’t waste” but now that I know it’s only $400k worth I think I’m not as aggrieved. I think making allergy labels optional will cost more than $400k and I think developing newer rules will cost $400k.
Overall, this is the cheapest way to do things. Verifiable information transmission is usually harder than most things. It’s why we do things like reduce aerospace composite strength by riveting them - inspectability costs something but the value is higher.
That’s a colossal waste of food. Parents should expose babies to allergens to avoid this kinds of issues. I don’t think the government should be involved with allergen labeling.
The lack of empathy being expressed in this thread is utterly deranged. You people should feel ashamed of yourselves.
My advisor from college is a brilliant, caring man and a genius computer scientist with a lovely family. He also has a terribly dairy allergy. The tiniest lapse threatens to kill him. Here in the US he's safe thanks to regulations like this. When he travels abroad for conferences, he has to pre-prepare all his own food and bring it with him because he can't trust the labeling in other countries. Despite this, he very nearly died in India because somehow he still managed to come into contact with something.
So what, he should just... die? Why? His children should become fatherless... why? His contribution to computer science should be snuffed out... why? For some ridiculous religious anti-regulation cause? This crusade is despicable. You don't deserve to be here.
Presumably he knows that butter contains dairy.
The comment is in response to this:
"I don’t think the government should be involved with allergen labeling."
Don't waste my time with non-sequiturs.
What about the people who don't know that? Just because someone is dumb or stupid DOES NOT make them less of a person, with the full rights and ability to live their life to the fullest, just like you and me.
What about people who can’t read? I mean, you have to draw the line somewhere.
They deserve safe food too.
Apparently there is some "line" for you where everyone under it is somehow inferior?
People with life threatening dairy allergies should be expected to know that butter is a dairy product so that they can be safe.
You should be ashamed for expecting society to take care of your needs.
The part that's out of whack is the part where they tell consumers who have already bought the butter to throw it away. In order to have received that direction, you must have already seen the recall notice itself, which tells you the butter has milk in it.
It's not so bad if they pull the stuff that hasn't sold.
If I pick up an item that should have an allergen that I’m used to seeing, and it’s not listed, I can safely trust it’s because they made it without that ingredient somehow.
That’s why they say to throw it out. 90% of people will ignore the recommendation. Some will dispose out of an abundance of caution, some will dispose because they had the thought I listed at the top of your comment.
Yes, so if you were to encounter this butter in the wild, I understand that not seeing the label would throw you off.
But in this particular case, in order to comply with the instructions telling you to throw the butter away, you need to know that this is the butter you bought that actually contains milk but isn't labeled so.
The very act of noticing that the butter doesn't have the right label tells you that it contains milk.
Someone else might come to your house and open your fridge and use butter with a label that says "Ingredients: Milk" and not realize you received mislabeled butter.
I get when products have something harmful to people like when your favorite brand of ice cream has listeria or something else has e.coli and the product should not be used.
This is just a labeling/packaging issue where there is nothing harmful about the product itself.
Also, how many people with milk issues would be confused by the missing info and think there's a new type of milk free butter?
I would! There isn't a "new milk free butter" e-newsletter I'm subscribed to. I go to the store, see the things in the shelves, read the label, and then buy one that doesn't say milk (or soy) on it. Not being able to have large amounts of milk or soy without shitting myself doesn't mean I'm now on some secret "new non milk foods" subreddit or discord. We don't have a Facebook group that have regular in-person monthly meetings for, and have a yearly conference in San Diego where we all dress up like our least favorite cheeses. It's not an identity for me that I can't have milk or soy, it's an unfortunate biology weirdness that my body forces me to take part in.
Have you ever picked up butter to check if it says milk or not?
Like I get that for plenty of other foods where it is, of course, non-obvious.
But I would assume you know that no package of butter will ever not say milk? (Or if it didn't, it was mislabeled, like in this article?) So that you don't even bother checking?
You might know about the recall, but does someone visiting your house know that? Does a random chef who gets an allergy notification at a restaurant know about the recall?
EDIT: Again, people are trained to trust the labels – not to parse the marketing. That's why they exist. If someone in a kitchen says "grab the dairy-free butter", the most accurate way to check is to glance at the "Contains" label. Once that trust is broken, the label is useless.
> but does someone visiting your house know that?
The butter in my fridge right now doesn't have labels on it. Because I take it out of the box it comes in and put an individual stick in that little covered shelf at the top of the door. My understanding is that that's what that shelf is for, so I suspect that this is a fairly common thing to do.
Maybe have people write "milk" on their own packages instead of throwing the butter inside in the trash.
> You might know, but does someone visiting your house know that?
Well, yes, because 99 percent of people in general know that butter is made from milk, and that includes 100 percent of the people who might visit my house. And if I did somehow have a visitor so profoundly broken that they didn't know it, I would notice that.
Also approximately 100 percent of professional cooks know that butter is made from milk.
The antidote to the "strict rules mean common sense can't be used" is... to use common sense: In this instance to ignore the recall instructions, and don't throw away the butter.
Grandparent poster is just throwing all the hypotheticals for the remote chance of "But what if, and if, and if, and if...".
> Also approximately 100 percent of professional cooks know that butter is made from milk.
I am now curious about that "approximately".
And, the people who don't know that butter is made out of milk probably cannot read the contains milk symbols on the box
> Does a random chef who gets an allergy notification at a restaurant know that?
I certainly hope that anyone cooking food at a restaurant knows that butter is a milk product.
Most people are going to realize this and not throw it away.
(not try to troll, genuine question)
Do you believe milk should be labeled with "contains milk"
Not who you’re replying to, but yes, because “alternative milks” like almond milk, oat milk, etc. do not contain (dairy) milk. Dairy farmers raised this objection and (temporarily?) forced producers of milk alternatives to stop using the standalone word “milk” on their packaging, but I still see it as part of a compound word on packaging.
Thus “chocolate milk” and “strawberry milk” mean milk mixed with chocolate or strawberries, while “oatmilk” and “almondmilk” may contain no milk at all. Though I’m not sure whether a product that mixed almond flavoring into dairy milk could be labeled “almond milk”.
People with dairy allergies shouldn’t be relying on the presence or absence of a space to determine if a product is safe for consumption.
Shouldn't the others carry a label "does not contain milk" rather than putting "contains milk" on regular milk?
Should broccoli be labeled "does not contain milk" ?
No.
Your rule explodes into "Label every vaguely-relevant allergen your food does not contain.". Not only is that a rule that's inevitably going to miss something in the long run, it's WAY more complicated than the "Label the allergens your food does contain." rule.
But isn't it incredibly clear when you're buying cow milk, vs. alternative "milks"?
I can understand how people with a dairy allergy might want to double-check an alternative milk to make sure it doesn't contain any real milk, or was processed in a bottling facility that also processes dairy milk, or something like that...
But it's hard for me to see how people with a dairy allergy might want to double-check the regular milk...?
Then how about alternatives like Lactaid? Animal-free dairy milk?
As someone else said, is what makes people happy here making the regulations more complex with special cases - when someone not knowing those special cases could potentially kill them?
Lactose-free cow milk is a perfect edge case, because something like that is safe if you're lactose intolerant, but not if you have a dairy allergy. So the fine print really does matter.
I don't think we should be relying on the good 'ol "it's common sense" approach for allergies when complying is so simple.
Yes. There are many drinks that are labeled "milk" that don't contain milk proteins, but we now have "animal-free dairy milk", which does. I can absolutely see someone being confused as to whether a given product labeled as milk will trigger their allergies:
https://perfectday.com/blog/why-animal-free-dairy-still-cont...
The dairy industry has always fought the FDA on this, arguing that anything besides milk from a cow should not be allowed to be labeled as milk:
https://agfundernews.com/dairy-farmers-urge-fda-to-crack-dow...
https://www.nmpf.org/on-almonds-dont-lactate-anniversary-dai...
The matrix is big and will only continue to grow: lactose-free milk, animal-free dairy milk, almond milk, oat milk, strawberry milk, etc. Multiply that across milk-derived product analogues like butter and ice-cream and it becomes even more confusing. The meaning on the allergy label is quite specific!
Do you know if "I can't believe it's not butter" contains butter?
That is a different question. If something is labeled "butter"it is probably butter. If it is labeled "not butter" it definitely should have a label that says "might contain butter. Now I understand the labeling and allergy concerns. Like does "almond milk" contain milk? I didn't know but it probably contains almonds or almond extract.
So cookie butter is a butter that contains milk?
Do you mean cookie batter?
I do not, but cookie batter should also be labelled if it has dairy/butter.
Sorry, what the heck is "cookie butter" (native English speaker here, in case it matters...)?
Ha, why would a non-native English speaker ever be shopping in our glorious American stores? /s
Cookie butter is sweet spread primarily made of ground up cookies and is from France/Belgium/the Netherlands.
That's pretty much irrelevant to whether you know if butter contains butter.
Is “almond butter” butter? What about “clarified butter”?
First of all, this isn't either of those. It's just plain old butter, labelled as such.
Secondly, people in general also know what those are.
Obviously not, but Americans regularly tell me a dish doesn't contain milk, only for me to find out that it contains butter. The labels help.
Surely the context matters though?
In a culinary context, something can obviously be made with lots of butter and no milk.
In an allergen context it's totally different, but isn't the normal question whether it contains dairy?
I mean, in a regular cooking context, the Americans sound totally correct to me, unless they know you're asking because you're allergic.
Yup, and this is why the labels exist. So many people confidently "guess" when asked, and I've had to ask a few times for them to check the label.
Yes. Oat milk / almond milk / etc doesn't contain "milk". There's a section for both "ingredients" and "contains" on every label, and "contains" specifies if it includes "milk" as defined by the FALCPA.
now we get into the area of should these products be called milk when they don't have milk.
if there's regulations that say a package must list what is inside, shouldn't there also be regulations that say you can't list ingredients that are not inside?
Note that, if the labeling for the "contains" section is accurate, I do not have to give a fuck what some marketing wonk has decided they have to call their product for my safety.
THAT's why this isn't about government overreach. The SANCTITY of the labeling is important, so that it can be relied on NO MATTER WHAT
yeah. there was a proposal by big dairy to ban alternative milks from calling themselves "milk" at all, but there was a public outcry about it and it was found to be overstepping, not least because alternative milks have existed for hundreds of years and been called as such.
Depends. Dairy milk? Oat milk? Soy milk?
I think they should have a full mass spec analysis given for it. I've tried lactose free milk and it turns out it's not just the lactose in milk I'm allergic to.
Of course I don't know your situation, but most lactose intolerance is not an allergy, it's an inability to produce lactase, so the lactose gets digested by excited microorganisms instead of processed by your body. This often causes discomfort, as the microorganisms don't care if things go smoothly.
> Under the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act, there's 8 groups that MUST be labeled: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat and soybeans.
Nine groups, since 2023: the FASTER Act mandates labeling sesame as well.
I'm sympathetic to arguments about consistent labeling but don't sit there and pretend like there's no downsides. Enforcing rules to the point of absurdity damages people's trust in the FDA. That has consequences too.
Strictly enforcing rules with no wiggle room increases my trust in the FDA.
Why could they not apply an amended label to cover the existing "contains" section with the correction to list milk as an ingredient?
You could do that if your objective was to save the butter, but the butter is cheap and quick to replace. The time and labor required to distribute stickers and apply them to 47000 individual boxes--and this is Costco, which stocks by case--is more than it's worth.
I'm sure they could have, and still might.
But, if that's notably more expensive than tossing the butter in the trash, then tossing it in the trash makes sense. We have plenty of milk and cows. We can always make more butter.
Starting in 2023, add sesame to that list. And then of course due to these labeling laws, you get allergens purposefully added to foods as the easiest and cheapest way to comply with the law: https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc...
Does that help people with sesame allergies? Unclear overall as it both helps and harms them.
Speaking as someone who has a severe peanut allergy, it does help.
Like Dr. Gupta said in the article, it is "so disappointing" that companies add sesame to products that didn't originally have them (they've done this with peanut flour too), but it's absolutely worth the tradeoff of getting sesame added as a "must label" allergen.
There's so much uncertainty surrounding food allergy safety (particularly regarding children), and it can be heavy knowing that each meal could be your last.
Barring impossible-to-avoid circumstances like the 2015 cumin fiasco (where suppliers cut spices with ground-up peanut shells), it's a true weight off your back knowing that a product does not contain an allergen
So the government says "If you have an allergen and don't label it, you will be punished."
Industry decides "It would cost a little money to find out if we have sesame in our product, so instead just add a little sesame and then label it"
And you blame THE GOVERNMENT?! The one hurting allergic people here is the company putting sesame in everything so they don't have to give a shit about people with allergies.
I'm so tired of American companies taking the dumbest, most harmful routes to things, and all of you stand up and shout at THE GOVERNMENT, as if Biden himself told Nestle to just put sesame in everything.
Saner populations would correctly be angry at the companies making these overtly harmful decisions.
It’s perfectly logical.
Even if the company doesn’t intentionally have sesame in their product, what if one of their suppliers gives them sesame tainted flour or something?
If they don’t have a ‘May contain sesame’ warning then they might lose tons of money because they have to recall the product later.
The problem here is how lawsuit friendly America is.
I think that is quite a bit of overreach. It's like requiring peanut butter to contain another label that says contains peanuts
Requiring the extra labeling even when it seems redundant increases clarity for consumers and simplifies the rules. It's fine.
At least, I doubt that you can write a set of rules for declaring allergens that is shorter if you do include exceptions to the labeling requirements. And I think there's a pretty strong argument that treating the ingredients and allergens as separate sections makes the allergens easier to interpret than sometimes requiring reading both.
I would not be surprised if there's peanut butter around that doesn't have any peanuts in it
> I get that this seems like an overreach, but America is incredibly safe for people with allergies and it's because of enforcement like this.
Don't worry, if RFJ jr. is to be believed, you won't have a FDA soon. The free market will take care of the problem.
I can almost taste the capitalism.
A couple of the HN comments in this thread said,
"America can simultaneously be the safest place on earth for those with food allergies, while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense."
"I get that this seems like an overreach, but America is incredibly safe for people with allergies and it's because of enforcement like this."
In my 40+ years of life in India, and among the many people that I've seen or interacted with in 5 Indian states (among 28 States), I've rarely heard someone say they have allergies the way they have in the US. In US, people have allergies to almost everything.
In my 40+ years of life in India, and based on the various supermarkets that I've visited across 4 heavily crowded metro cities, I've rarely seen "Allergy" medicines/prescriptions occupy the shelf like they do in the US.
Also in the same period of my existence in this third world country, I've rarely seen people concerned about the ingredients in a restaurant menu or labels printed on food packets or containers that there are allergy causing ingredients in there.
Like George Bush once cruelly remarked, "India is the cause of shortage of food in the world", because we eat everything, and rarely check the labels or need them, or less allergic to any food. We are just short of food.
I went to Europe from the US and all my stomach issues disappeared. When I told my doctor she said, “Move to Europe”.
My sister, who lives in AZ, gets boils when she eats gluten. She went to Europe last month, freely ate everything, had zero outbreaks. Got an outbreak on her return flight.
I can’t scientifically identify the mechanism here, but I believe it’s real. Our food system in the US is a problem. Things that don’t work here work elsewhere.
I’m literally planning a move because of stomach discomfort.
I've heard several similar reports, one from a medical doctor. (They cannot identify the mechanism either.)
What is the average life expectancy in India compared to the US?
Rank. Country. Average Age
48 United States 79.46
123 India 72.24 73.86 70.73
Yeah I don't understand this either, because the same is true in Latin American countries. What's worse is immigrants who never had allergies in their country of origin come here and develop all sorts of seasonal allergies.
The real problem here is that the FDA is recommending throwing out the butter purely based on the labels.
If they said, "throw out the butter if you (or whomever would have consumed it) have an allergy to milk as this is dairy milk-based butter", or if Costco said, "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter" it would make more sense.
> FDA is recommending throwing out the butter
It's a recall. You want to avoid any further confusion. You go with the simplest instructions possible. Just because they recommend you throw it away doesn't mean you actually _have_ to.
> "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter"
What value does returned butter have? It's not something we can refurbish. It would be ultimately be thrown away anyways.
> You go with the simplest instructions possible
I think this kind of messaging is on the way out. Direct communication is possible, and more than ultra simple details can be conveyed.
For the same reason that some people know to avoid certain allergens, others can decide for themselves if they need to.
What are the penalties imposed on a customer who does not throw out their recalled butter? As far as I know, there are none? So with the current messaging, anyone willing to take on this risk by keeping their butter can keep it. People who don’t see that option might not be able to perfectly understand the risk. So, this messaging feels perfectly reasonable to me.
As far as I can tell the FDA didn't make that recommendation for this. It's just what they recommend for all recalls:
https://www.foodsafety.gov/recalls-and-outbreaks
If the product details in the recall notice match the details on the food product you have at home, do not open or consume the product. Instead, do one of the following: + Return the product to the place of purchase for a refund. + Dispose of the product following the instructions provided in the recall notice to make sure no one will consume it.
I haven't been able to find a source for the FDA actually making any kind of statement on this recall at all.
> The real problem here is that the FDA is recommending throwing out the butter purely based on the labels.
Are they recommending that? This is the ONLY data from the FDA I can find regarding this recall:
<https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/ires/index.cfm?Event=...>
(Notice also that it's a manufacturer-initiated recall.)
Am I missing an FDA press release about the recall?
Also:
> or if Costco said, "return it...
Costco doesn't want the butter back. It would cost way more to verify that it's still sellable than it would be to simply offer a replacement product to affected customers who ask for one.
I'm sort of wondering too if this isn't news telephone where each source is plagiarizing the last.
I found this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/costco-butter-recall/
That links to the two recall notices. (You have found one already.)
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/ires/index.cfm?Product=210580
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/ires/index.cfm?Product=210581
> General guidelines from the FDA advise consumers who have purchased any recalled food to dispose of the product or return it to the retailer for a full refund.
Which is a bit of a different statement… general guidelines would have to cover things like a recall for E. coli … and isn't perhaps the best advice here. But I'm wondering, did that get twisted into TFA's
> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is urging customers to check their refrigerators for specific product codes and to follow its disposal instructions if they find affected butter.
…when no specific urging for this is taking place, which is what I think most readers would think?
(But holy heck. Why do those recall notices not appear on the FDA recalls[1] page?)
[1]: https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety...
> (You have found one already.)
I found both, actually. They're both in the "event" link I provided, but you can't get a detail view for recall F-0122-2025. This seems fine to me, given that all of the data you'd find in the detail view for each seems to be present in the "event" view that displays them both.
> (But holy heck. Why do those recall notices not appear on the FDA recalls[1] page?)
I think because of this: " Press Release Not Issued For This Recall ".
> But I'm wondering, did that get twisted into TFA's...
Oh, that's an excellent spot. Yeah, a game of lazy telephone is probably exactly what happened.
Remember when journalists had more time to do a good job on the articles they chose to submit to their editors?
You aren't missing anything. I tried to find the FDA's press release, including to what the article links to when they're supposedly summarizing what the "FDA alert" says. The linked website is just a general list of FDA alerts, and doesn't list kirkland butter at all.
The same link you posted (FDA event listing) is the only thing I can find directly from the FDA on it, and they don't say "throw out the butter". They just say they're issuing a recall due to mislabeled product, that's it.
FWIW, you (and I) did not find a press release, because they appear to have not made one. In the recall report, we see this:
"Press Release Not Issued For This Recall"
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one failing to dig up this "Throw all affected products in the trash!" demand.
Could just be "stick this label".
Throwing out the food is insane, so is trying to justify such a thing.
I thought this noteworthy because butter is made from milk as the sole ingredient
Which, I would expect, ought to be well known by anyone shopping with lactose issues. It’s like shipping peanut brittle without a label saying that it contains peanuts. How many people would really be harmed without the recall?
I’m in favor of safety over profit. I’m just bummed at the unnecessary waste.
It actually lists milk as an ingredient. So even if you are have doubts if its milkless butter, the ingredient list can clarify it.
If you see that on a product, you'd expect that the thing was made with milk, but does not contain any as far as you need to worry about allergens, and that it's tested to be safe.
It's a valid case in the truth table where somebody with a milk allergy should be safe to eat it
You will find that even butter often does not have milk in the ingredients list. E.g. Kerrygold: "pasteurized cream, salt"
In this case, the Kirkland's listed "sweet cream" and not milk.
a lot of the alternative product packaging looks very similar to traditional dairy butter packaging
That sounds like an issue for the alternative people to solve.
Not all recalls involve disposing of a product. Apparently in this case it does. I'd have thought they could just send out some correction stickers to slap on there, but I suppose food labeling laws could be too rigid to allow for this, or else concerns about stickers being misapplied.
It is occasionally difficult to tell from the label whether you are buying margarine or butter. And some margarine contains milk and is therefore not OK for lactose intolerant folks.
But still, I agree this sounds crazy.
But this wasn't margarine. It was butter. The package is labeled Kirkland Signature Butter.
Where precisely did I go wrong here? We know it's butter, but a consumer might not, therefore a "contains whatever" label is not totally unjustified. Once you accept that as a rule, you have to enforce it. You don't just enforce it where it's ambiguous, you enforce it on all brands.
I could believe that "Signature Butter" could be a substance that wasn't butter. It would be dumb, but I wouldn't give you odds it didn't happen if someone claimed it did.
So putting milk in the ingredient list at least confirms that yes, this is butter, not "butter."
Don't worry, they will stick a label on it and it will go back to the shops. It's a good lesson for the supplier making the mistake. And besides, one might think it ís a harmless milk substitute..
That's not really accurate, most butter has salt, water, and sometimes a few other ingredients like lactic cultures, but milk is definitely always an ingredient.
A lot of the comments here, and the article itself, are missing an important detail.
The name of the product is "Kirkland Signature Sweet Cream Butter". The ingredient list on the package lists cream, it just doesn't have the required language "contains milk".
Are there actual humans that are so deathly allergic to milk but somehow don't know what cream is? E.g. there is a comment in this thread that states:
>"Would you toss your butter in the trash if the label left out one critical detail?"
> yes, if that 'one critical detail' could in fact fucking kill me...
I mean, imagine if someone had an allergy so allergic to milk it could "fucking kill them", are they somehow loading up on "Sweet Creamy Butter" and are then shocked that it contains milk??
I get why, bureaucratically, you want to have hard lines, so I understand the recall. I just think this article and some comments that there is actual potential danger in this case are laughably ridiculous.
Is this the Tesla sense of the word recall? Do they just slap a "CONTAINS: MILK" sticker on each and consider it successfully recalled? And of course, refund any customer who brings it back, but they do that for any reason already.
Is butter actually expensive enough for that to be cost-effective?
I've used a grocery store sticker gun. You just load a roll in and pull the trigger. I bet I could recall 300 butters per minute (BPM). Remember, this is costco, so it's probably a 50 lb cube of butter.
"Would you toss your butter in the trash if the label left out one critical detail?"
yes, if that 'one critical detail' could in fact fucking kill me...
If you were deathly allergic to milk you'd probably know that butter is a milk product
The only reason people think "butter" may not contain milk is because we let advertizers abuse that term to refer to anything vaguely resembling that texture.
Of course milk doesn't mean milk anymore either, now that we got oat, almond and soy milk. Along with less common alternatives like coconut, hemp, rice, cashew and macadamia milk.
The dairy industry is actually pretty annoyed with that and tries to get the rules changed so those beverages can not be called milk.
And don't forget glacial milk: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/gsabulletin/article-abs...
By "anymore" do you mean for the past 600 years? Because almond milk goes back about as far as we have cookbooks that might mention it in english.
The recommendation to throw it out is crazy though. Couldn't they just offer exchanges for any households with a lactose intolerant person that rely on correct labeling.
Butter is actually quite low in lactose content (like 9x less than milk) and the serving size is relatively small: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance#:~:text=Ty...
So generally butter is not a problem for people with lactose intolerance anyway.
I do want to point out that this is not about lactose intolerance. This is about a milk allergy. Different things. Upset tummy vs anaphylaxis.
But the recommendation to throw it out is insane. There's nothing wrong with it besides the label. And what person who can't eat dairy is running around buying butter?
I guess people who bought it and can't use it could exchange it, and you have to throw that out because it lost the chain of cold, but the ones in the shelves? Simply putting a [CONTAINS MILK] sticker on each package should be less wasteful, but the ways of retail might have mysteries I ignore.
Imagine the labor required to individually sticker 47000 individual boxes of butter (approximately an entire 53' trailer) vs. just setting it aside for your regular food waste recycler to pick up. That's the equation they'd be looking at.
Devices to add stickers to packages was a solved problem before food allergy warning labels existed. In the 1980s supermarkets made money adding price stickers to every item of inventory, then changing the prices for sales. Meanwhile the food waste recycler (may not exist in your area, some exclusions apply) needs to remove all of the foil wrappers to the butter before recycling.
There’s a clear winner, unless you’re trying to send some kind of message to the supplier.
I suspect that stickers might not be approved by whoever did the graphic design on the packaging.
Nah, your food waste recycler is already picking up from your facilities weekly+ and all they're going to do with your pallet of butter is tip it into the depackager and wait.
Or just ask Costco to slap a "Contains Milk" sticker on it?
waste of resources. youd think they could add a sticker to it at the store instead.
This, Or donate it to Prisons, Schools or Hospitals, They know what's in it.
This article must have been written by AI. I suppose it's my fault for clicking through a Forbes link.
It seems obvious to me that this was written by Costco’s PR team, doing damage control
IMHO this is getting close to the most surprising example of bureaucratic-red-tape-gone-wild I've seen, which is a "may contain traces of peanuts" warning on a jar of peanut butter.
That’s not stupid though. It might seem obvious, but then you have things like sun butter, which are specifically designed to imitate peanut butter while not having peanuts.
Sure, you can look at all the words on the package and ingredients and figure out if something probably contains allergens, but the point of the rule is that it gives you one standardized line of text that you can read and be 100% certain whether something is safe for you to eat or not.
Then that SunButter should probably be probably labeled contains no milk.
The absence of that one standard line of text would not be enough for me if my life were on the line.
> should probably be probably labeled contains no milk.
What about other products that contain no milk? Shouldn't they do this as well? Should every package list what it doesn't have?
> that one standard line of text
This is the point. The packaging is entirely up to the manufacturer. Should the FDA approve every food package before it's used? We obviously can't do that. What we can do is mandate a few "standard lines of text." So that regardless of the packaging decisions consumers can still determine the facts quickly and _reliably_.
Think of people with allergies that have low vision or any other handicap which would make all these "good enough" ideas become dangerous.
Something else I haven't seen people mention in this thread, are kids.
I've had a severe peanut allergy since I was like 5 (don't know the exact age, but as long as I can feasibly remember). If at 7 years old I was at a friend's birthday party and they had cake or some candy or whatever, how did I know if I can eat it?
I was 7, I wasn't about to read an entire ingredients list and parse out what is or is not peanuts. I just checked the small list at the end for the standard "contains: peanuts" and that was it.
As an adult, if I'm over at a friend's house or a family dinner, I need to know about allergies in whatever they cooked. I don't ask them "does it contain peanuts or peanut oil or made in a plant that would have cross contamination" - they often won't know. But they can fetch out the boxes of whatever they cooked, and I can easily scan several different boxes in a few seconds and confirm if it's safe for me to eat or not.
I've never had a allergic reaction in the 20+ years I've been alive for, in large part thanks to regulations like these, and it makes me sad to see people condemn them over a small amount of mislabeled butter.
-what about Other products that contain no milk?-
Other products that are named like dairy products, yeah.
> Then that SunButter should probably be probably labeled contains no milk.
I do think it'd be better if there were a standard allergen block that contained an explicit "yes" or "no" for each standard allergen.
_Maybe_. That'd take up more space on the packaging, and things with small packages may not have enough space to put the whole table.
What do you do when the package is too small to contain the whole table? Do you leave things off? Now all of a sudden your standard table isn't so standard. Do you make the table smaller? Make it too small and folks who can't see well are proper fucked.
I'm not saying your idea is BAD, but I am saying that it's likely the FDA thought about it and rejected it for not-entirely-unreasonable reasons.
Are you from the US?
It is not at all difficult to imagine a situation where a restaurant worker is trained to do something like the following when an allergen is raised as an issue by a customer:
1. Check the labels of any items used in the dish 2. substitute or leave out anything listing the allergen
This may seem...basic. However, if the restaurant has an incident with an allergen affecting a customer that notified them, and they show they followed these instructions, they can shift liability to whichever food producer left the allergen off the label.
Regulations and liability don't care about common sense. In fact, they supersede common sense.
> Regulations and liability don't care about common sense. In fact, they supersede common sense.
Exactly. And there's a result in economics called the "Coase theorem" that basically says that as long as there's clear liability assignment, the negative externality (serious allergic reactions) can be efficiently avoided, in theory. So having regulations that make it unambiguous who is responsible for each step creates a better outcome for society (fewer deaths from allergic reactions).
Yes, and there is already a list of ingredients that should have everything, not just the common allergens.
Regulations and liability don't care about common sense. In fact, they supersede common sense.
That's the problem, and why more than half the country voted to want it solved.
To put it in programming terms, this:
if product.may_have_trace('peanuts')
add_warning()
if product.may_have_trace('peanuts')
if ! product.name_obviously_implies('peanuts')
add_warning()
The (very short) ingredients list of the peanut butter already had peanuts.
The article seems to be only justifying the waste without going near the well-established fact that butter is made of milk.
If you have allergy you're supposed to know butter is made of milk, or no?
What am I missing?
This almost reads as satire, but I assume it’s low quality ai or just auto-generated content sourced from an FDA recall.
Equally disappointing: the situation being described, the quality of TFA.
So many "broken windows" theory believers suddenly promoting broken windows.
I’m more curious about what change was introduced that omitted the label from a small number of packages.
This is exactly why Trump won. We’ve lost touch with common sense: babies can’t have a gender listed on their charts anymore (causing confusion for doctors and nurses), but butter needs a warning label to say it contains milk. And yet, everyone tells me this is perfectly normal.
ragebait.
Yeah, this has been a meme all week. ~one truckload worth of one product has to be recalled and suddenly its 'part of the national conversation'
I think it's topical because the new administration has been talking a lot about regulatory over-reach.
The thought that taxpayer money is being wasted to tell taxpayers that "if they know they have bought butter they must throw said butter because the label doesn't say it _contains milk_" is something that will escape only those people's minds who think everything is fine with the status quo.
The FDA didn't order the recall. Costco's supplier did.
MacDonalds Hot Apple Pie! "Caution, contents are hot"
Butter! "Caution contains milk"