Yes it does. It also good for the people with allergies as they can confidently buy that bread.
When FDA declares a new allergen, the top lawyer of the company that has presence from NY to SF seats down with the CEO, they then ask all the manufacturing units to do an audit of the said allergen use and then hire a third party auditor to verify if the allergen is used at all not just at their retail locations but in the entire supply chain. This involves the place where wheat is harvested to the restaurant where the bread is served. For a large company this is a millions of dollars and several quarters of project.
The lawyer and CEO needs to chalk out the plan. If they want to make sure their bread does not contain the said allergen they have to update all their processes right from where they buy their wheat to where they test their bread for the said allergen and retrain their staff, suppliers, QA etc. this adds millions of dollars in additional expenses per year.
Not only all this is complex that makes the bread expensive for EVERYONE, it is also much more prone to error.
It is much easier for your small local company to provide sesame free bread at slightly higher price to those who need it. You wont get it in the middle of death valley but that is fine.
People with allergies and various food diggestion problems are not a real market for bread-makers. As in, they make sense for industrial products that do not spoil fast. Means, packaged goods, with lots of additives, tailored to them and a shelf life going into weeks.
Bread is made fresh every day, has a shelf-life of 3 days tops. The logistics are usually measured in hours. The effort to scrub the bakery, transport the gluten-free/nut-free/whatever every day, seperated is thus non specialized and a huge cost in addition to a production of a small facility. So you can get gluten-free bread by a industrial facility speacilized on it, wrapped in plastic. But you can not get it from your local bakery chain.
Add to that the legal damocles swoard hanging over you and mixed artisanal production of small quantities becomes fiscally irresponsible for small buisnesses.
In theory you could open a bakery, tailored to a specific allergy set in a dense urban environment. But the rest of the world, a drive away from you, will not have that option.
> For a large company this is a millions of dollars
The FDA was expecting that companies spend millions to ensure that the products are free of sesame to help people with allergies, but companies realize that it's easier to just add sesame into their products.
I am not sure the government could do now to help people with sesame allergies. Ban sesame outright from certain products? Mandate that certain companies produce sesame-free products?
Adding an allergen in quantities where it has no meaningful effect is attempting to flout a regulation. It's like bringing money into the country by spitting it among fellow travellers. In a functioning system the authorities would have the power to investigate and use discovery to identify cases where allergens are being added deliberately for no other reason than flouting rules. They should then be able to issue substantive fines to encourage actual compliance.
Its not like adding small amounts of an allergen is a victimless. Lots of people with moderate to serious allergies eat things every day which "may contain" their allergen.
Sure, although these products usually are A LOT more expensive. Same with gluten-free. That stuff costs 3-10x as much as non-gluten free food.
Case in point: Italy has a wheat-rich cuisine and they give up to 140€ per month to people with Celiac disease to offset the higher costs of gluten-free food:
It’s over regulation to everyone who doesn’t have sesame allergies.
It’s lifesaving to those that do.
Somehow bakeries in Switzerland are doing just fine with sesame being a declared allergen and keeping them separate but American ones just can’t be bothered to handle a life threatening ingredient thoroughly carefully.
It's only lifesaving if you want to risk your life. If I have a deadly allergy I'm staying away from certain food groups and am not going to leave my health in the hands of some crappy labels. Have something else other than bread. That's how many people I know with allergies deal with it and it seems the most reasonable approach. In this day there's so many different foods to eat, its easy to have variety without risking it.
It's not like sesame is used only in baked products. Sesame is used in various candies and desserts, as a seasoning for meat, fish, vegetables, even in drinks. I'm not sure if you can eat healthily by excluding all categories of food where sesame might theoretically appear.
Risk your life doing what? Eating? All food allergies are deadly. They might not have killed you yet, but every single exposure could be your last. And plenty of people, especially kids, are allergic to 4, 5, 6, 7 major allergens. Maybe you're familiar with adults who have grown out of all but 1 or 2 allergies & know what to avoid. Try feeding a kid who's allergic to soy, wheat, dairy and eggs. Heck, even just soy. Try to put together a week of meals without soy with our modern food supply. Spaghetti:soy. Burgers:soy. Ice cream:soy. Tacos:soy. Sandwiches:soy. The entire soup aisle:soy. What's left, drinking Ensure for every meal? Nope, that has soy _and_ dairy. Robust accurate food labeling is the only way people with several food allergies can eat a remotely normal and balanced diet without playing Russian roulette at every meal.
> In Switzerland, there are also the following rules regarding trace allergens when declaring allergens: in the event of possible contamination of more than one gram per kilogram of food, the note "May contain traces of ..." must be included. The limit for sulphur is 10 milligrams per kilogram and for gluten 200 milligrams
It sounds like Switzerland does the same thing the US used to do where manufactures have a lazy cop-out? It doesn't sound any stricter at all.
1g per kg is nowhere near enough to protect against bad reactions. Sounds like Switzerland is making a mostly laughable attempt, not doing much.
I have had a rather unpleasant day due to an unknown contaminant in approximately 10mg of material as part of a day's food. Obviously the contaminant was well under 10mg.
I checked the couple of bread products (from Migros) I have at home, and they all say "may contain sesame"? Maybe that's not a representative sample though.
I'm not sure what the difference is, except the US goes one step further and asks "please don't say it may have an allergen if you don't have to". It results in products definitely having the allergen, but is "may contain" any better than "definitely contains"?
well, until now, bimbo's breads were sesame-free, and now they'll presumably have sesame in them. so people in the usa with sesame allergies will have to cook their own bread at home now, unless they're lucky enough to have access to a small artisanal bakery
Baking bread is more correct, but in my experience "to cook" is generic enough to include baking. If someone has something in the oven and I ask "what are you cooking?", it's not weird.
On the other hand, "cooking bread" is like 2/10 weird.
Of course, everything weird and whacky about the US can be explained because it’s just so much bigger - you wouldn’t understand coming from such a tiny country.
The psychology of this comment aside, I don't think any country is so small it can't fit a massive factory in it. Unless you're writing from Vatican City, perhaps?
If the regulations had teeth and they weren't allowed to cross contaminate at all, they would build a process that achieves that. Instead they get to put a few labels on there and just accept that they'll lose some customers who are allergic, save some money not building a new process.
you have misunderstood the situation and are suggesting that they enact the regulation that they did actually enact, which is the one that led to this situation
No I didn't, I understand what they have done to skirt the regulations but that is what I mean. It's so easy to get around the regulations, even the new one, they have no teeth. It's clear the companies are acting in bad faith but there is no recourse.
If it weren't for companies acting in bad faith, they wouldn't have to play regulator cat and mouse. If you removed the regulations altogether, your big bakers would be even more lax with allergens and people would get sick.
You aren’t following what is hsppening. The regulation does exactly that, not allow any cross contamination. So they are adding sesame as an ingredient and labeling it as such.
I did understand that. The regulations have no teeth not because they lack penalties, it's because they are ineffectual atat achieving the goal.
It is clear what the outcome of the regulations was supposed to be, products with sesame and products without. But they were poorly planned regulations, and the companies are more than happy to work to the letter of the law.
But maybe this is actually fine, because a company willing to cleanly process allergen free product can capture that market segment.
I think like everything, there's good and bad. You didn't translate your previous comment into braille so should I sue you for not catering to the needs of my blind mother?
Having wheelchair ramps at corners, especially new ones, big chains, large institutions, seems great. Forcing the new 1 person boutique down the street to spend $250k+ to add every possible accommodation for language and accessibility, doesn't seem so great.
There are tons of stories of effective extortion over "accessibility" issues
Actually, I know of at least one HN user who will read his comment in braille. GP provided plain text, which is accessible to braille screen readers. And HN is hailed in accessibility circles as an extraordinarily accessible website, so has a disproportionately large accessibility user base.
Yup. Mandating the inclusion of such features in new construction should be required. Retrofitting is another matter that very well might involve pretty much tearing down structures and most certainly shouldn't be required.
(And note that in some cases "new" construction must work with existing constraints. I'm thinking of a sign I saw in Carlsbad Cavern saying no wheelchairs past this point. The loop that was denied wheelchairs contained a pinch point a wheelchair couldn't go through. Man made the path, nature put the rocks there.)
Almost every physical object you use in your everyday life, including the building you live in and the clothes you wear, was created by someone who cared about the profit margins on that thing, and didn't care about you personally at all. If you want to propose a different system for creating the stuff in the world, it might pay to look at the success rates of other systems people have already tried.
Too far the other way will likely lead to a pseudo ban on Sesame seeds. It just wouldn't be worth the risk. Or the cost of it will get pushed on the 99.999% who won't die from a single Sesame seed.
I know there's a lot of things that work like this (handicap ramps for instance) but if you don't draw a line somewhere it does get overly expensive.
That seems like a sensible point to me. At some level, let the Bimbos of the world have the sesame-agnostic mass market—that only strengthens the case for niche competitors who serve this specific market.
If sesame is in fact poison for a specific subgroup, this shifts the mass market option from “eh it’s probably fine, how often does cross-contamination happen” to “definitely poison for me, I’d better seek an alternative.”
When FDA declares a new allergen, the top lawyer of the company that has presence from NY to SF seats down with the CEO, they then ask all the manufacturing units to do an audit of the said allergen use and then hire a third party auditor to verify if the allergen is used at all not just at their retail locations but in the entire supply chain. This involves the place where wheat is harvested to the restaurant where the bread is served. For a large company this is a millions of dollars and several quarters of project.
The lawyer and CEO needs to chalk out the plan. If they want to make sure their bread does not contain the said allergen they have to update all their processes right from where they buy their wheat to where they test their bread for the said allergen and retrain their staff, suppliers, QA etc. this adds millions of dollars in additional expenses per year.
Not only all this is complex that makes the bread expensive for EVERYONE, it is also much more prone to error.
It is much easier for your small local company to provide sesame free bread at slightly higher price to those who need it. You wont get it in the middle of death valley but that is fine.