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by r_klancer
1278 days ago
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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. |
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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.)