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Chocolate maker Mars has ordered a recall of chocolate products in 55 countries (bbc.com)
39 points by rabblac 3771 days ago
3 comments

It's an amazing example of how well engineered the mass produced food producers are.

Something as silly as a piece of plastic in one bit of their food (common sort of thing in low end producers, like hand made) equals a mass recall.

It's why food these days from McDonalds etc is so safe (from immediate harm)

Mass produced engineering is pretty cool.

Evaluate more options. Could this little plastic bit not be the problem and the actual problem be the real cause for the recall? They have to track back the origin of the plastic piece.

  -maybe the tiny piece is not the problem?
  -maybe the tiny piece is not the problem but consumer 
   perspective and therefore cheaper to recall than 
   image damage?
  -maybe the piece belongs to something wearing out
   and the possibility of something (a chemical for example)
   being introduce is a possibility (and therefore a
   legal demand?)?
  -maybe there is no problem, but is better to recall than
   to have x reports on a non existing problem.
100% agreed re McDonalds. Not only that, its healthiness is easy to verify since all the ingredients and nutrition data is available. Good luck finding out how much saturated fat is in the dish at that posh restaurant everyone queues up for!
So, I can go to a nice place and get some freshly made mayonnaise with my crab cakes. It's tasty as f, and is clearly unhealthy. If it's made with bad ingredients or bad hygiene there is a risk of food poisoning - raw eggs and all that. Each chef makes the mayonnaise with slightly different seasoning and those tablespoon/ half a lemon etc measures vary a bit from batch to batch.

Alternatively I can have a cheeseburger at Maccy Ds. I am confident that there's no real risk of food poisoning from the faux mayonnaise in the filling. The McMayo makeup is accurately detailed to within % points. It's jammed full of various preservatives, and indeed it can probably be stored for years without risk.

McMayo is safer, has detailed nutritional info, and is perfectly consistent.

Personally - I'll have the fresh mayonnaise every time, and strangely not knowing the amount of saturated fats doesn't trouble me in the slightest. To each their own.

Offtopic:

Just posted a link to this on Facebook.

When I did, it auto-filled the headline as:

>Mars has 'widened its recall to 55 countries' - BBC News

and the teaser:

>The Netherlands spokesman for chocolate maker Mars says it has widened its recall of Mars and Snickers bars to 55 countries after bits of plastic are found in a product.

which don't match the actual article. Wonder what the deal with their caching is.

Not really caching but as far as I remember there are HTML Open Graph tags that Facebook checks for in order to fetch the title/description etc.

Check N°3 on this link https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices

And AFAIK the caching will run for about 30 days unless you clear it manually or through the API. Might be different for major sites.
Yeah, it caches the preview.

As mentioned in that doc, you can use the URL Debugger[1] to see the Open Graph data and even clear the cache.

I cleared the cache for the OP's BBC URL, try sharing it again and see what info you get.

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Good to know. I wonder how those ended up differing.
I assume what you saw was the BBC's title and summary at the time it was first shared (and thus cached) on Facebook. They've since edited it but FB keeps the cached version since the URI hasn't changed.
Der Postillion, a German satirical newspaper, reported this story as Rückruf unbegründet: Plastikteilchen laut Experten gesündeste Zutat in Mars-Riegeln (Recall unnecessary: pieces of plastic healthiest ingredient in Mars Bars, say experts)

http://www.der-postillon.com/2016/02/ruckruf-unbegrundet-pla...