[sitharus]

Your ‘counter example’ is exactly what we want to happen.

It’s not that they’ve added sesame where there was none before, it’s that they’re having to declare that sesame might be there. It’s great news for people with sesame allergies and has no effect on those that don’t.

[brookst]

That was my first thought, but look at other well-documented comments here. It sure looks like "may contain" is a certification that every possible avenue to avoid "contamination" had been pursued. Which is an open-ended liability. Easier to just add 1% and definitively say it does contain sesame.

[BoorishBears]

No, they added sesame where there was none before.

The law requires you either have no sesame contact at all (as in not even having sesame based products travel on the same belts), or you list sesame as an ingredient.

But you can't just list ingredients that aren't in your food: "travelled on the same belt as sesame" isn't enough. So they actually went and added sesame.

[sitharus]

Yes. Before there may have been sesame, it was a lottery. Now there definitely is or is not sesame, which is what's important to people with allergies.

Though it's weird that the FDA don't just allow a 'may contain traces' warning, many countries do.

[dotancohen]

> Though it's weird that the FDA don't just allow a 'may contain traces' warning, many countries do.

The reason is that such information is useless. If someone has a sesame allergy, they can not eat the food that "may contain traces" anyway. So actually having a definitive boolean _hasSesame is far more useful information, and will lead to less accounts of confusion.

Just as an example, my son's friend is allergic. Can I, as a parent of a friend, give to this child food with the "may contain traces" label? Will every parent of a friend make the same decision? With the new labeling, the answer is much clearer.

[BoorishBears]

Manufacturers going on a sesame flour adding spree to foods that were previously perfectly safe for those kids is going to cause a lot more pain than people irresponsible enough to treat "May contain" as worth risking for kids they don't know well enough to make that call on.

[BoorishBears]

> It’s not that they’ve added sesame where there was none before, it’s that they’re having to declare that sesame might be there

They added it where there was none before. People with allergies to sesame were eating bread at Olive Garden and Chick-Fil-A just fine before this legislation and now they can't.

> Though it's weird that the FDA don't just allow a 'may contain traces' warning, many countries do

The FDA always allowed that. But by naming it a major allergen the "Contain" statement becomes mandatory, and the "May Contain" statement doesn't satisfy that.

[kragen]

this is incorrect

they've added sesame where there was none before

[maxerickson]

The thing driving the regulation is that there is an (small or trace but) unknown amount of sesame.

If it was obvious it was none there wouldn't be an issue.

[s1artibartfast]

So the solution to comply is to intentionally add Sesame to the manufacturing process has the most effective way to meet the regulation. This means that products that previously may have had occasionally low PPM levels of sesame now have a much greater amount intentionally added in larger but known quantities

[kragen]

in some cases there were trace amounts, and in others there weren't, but the absence of sesame couldn't be guaranteed

we don't know specifically which cases there was no sesame before but we do know there were a lot of them