[postmodest]

This is the same issue as Prop 65, and while we can all say "oh the law is bad" the real problem is _corporations are lazy_.

Instead of making sure their products are safe, they just say everything is unsafe, because they know consumers will become numb to it.

Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer, but instead of taking the time to make sure of that, companies just tell us the products are dangerous, because they know we don't really have a choice.

They have the money and the capability, but they choose profit over consumer safety, and that's THEIR sin, not ours.

[quietbritishjim]

> Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer

These things are not comparable. While adding sesame to everything to circumvent a law is certainly not fair, it is a reasonable ingredient to some products (whereas mice that give us cancer is, at the very least, not a goal). I like sesame buns! And, for young children, it's actually quite important to expose them to a range of allergens because shielding them makes them much more likely to develop allergies.

[radicality]

I’m European, and have been living in the US for a number of years and in Europe before that. It’s like some alternate reality here in the US, where peanuts, bread, and shrimp are out to kill a large part of the population. The article says they estimate 33M people in US to have food allergies which sounds insane to me.

I fully agree on exposure to these allergens when young. Have your child eat wide variety of foods, have them play out in the open and get dirty, have them play with animals, wash hands and keep clean but not to the point of sterility, etc.

One personal anecdote - when I was a few years old I apparently started having a lot of asthma-like coughing symptoms. We got a German shepherd, whom I would then play with, hug a lot, and sleep. My symptoms went away pretty quickly.

Similarly, my parents made sure I eat normal meals and not a ‘child’ diet. Eg I was never allowed to order from a ‘kids menu’. At home, salmon or shrimp for dinner and I don’t want it as a young child? Too bad, that’s dinner, eat that or go hungry (and of course I ended up eating and now love many cuisines and allergic to nothing).

[Viliam1234]

It seems like a cultural difference, that in America, corporations are trying to comply with the laws in the most malicious ways, and most customers get angry about the laws rather than about the corporations. Which of course, removes any incentive for the corporations not to act obnoxiously.

Sometimes it doesn't even seem to make sense. For example, one might think naively, that if a website reacts to the law by throwing tantrum and displaying the most annoying dialog ever invented (which by the way actually isn't GDPR compliant), they would just hurt themselves, because their readers would move to different websites. Yet somehow they don't, and other website adopt the same annoying dialog. I am confused, because this isn't how free market was supposed to work.

Could you list the allergens, please? No we won't, because f--- you!

Well, now you have to list the allergens, or you get punished. Okay, so we will list all allergens in the world, including the ones our products don't contain, because f--- you!

Then we update the law so that you also get punished for listing made up allergens. Okay, so we will add as many allergens as we can to all our products, because f--- you!

Always choosing the most aggressive way to comply with the letter of the law while going completely against the spirit.

Meanwhile, in the deep jungles of Eastern Europe where most people laugh at the very idea of a law, if a product contains an allergen, the producers write "this product contains this allergen"; if the product does not contain the allergen, they write "does not contain this allergen"; and if they are not sure, they write "this product may contain this allergen". Sometimes with an explanation like "we are not adding it on purpose, but we process the allergen for some other products in the same factory, so maybe some small amounts accidentally get there".

People should travel a lot, to learn that things that are considered impossible at one place are often considered trivial at some other place.

EDIT:

Half of the comments in this thread is like "stupid law, this is what you get for making laws, clearly the lawmakers never heard about unintended consequences", and the other half is like "in my country (different countries in different comments) this problem does not exist, producers simply label their products honestly".

[nequo]

> because their readers would move to different websites. Yet somehow they don't, and other website adopt the same annoying dialog.

I’m a minority on this most likely but if a website does this, I close it, unless my life depends on it which it rarely does. The same if a website has so many ads that it blocks the content and I don’t have adblock. Life is too short for these games.

[neuralRiot]

> It seems like a cultural difference, that in America, corporations are trying to comply with the laws in the most malicious ways, and most customers get angry about the laws rather than about the corporations.

The only goal is to avoid lawsuits, that’s why in every product there is a warning, a car owners manual used to contain lots of useful info, even timing belt diagrams and ignition advance angles, now they are just a “warning encyclopedia”. We are a litigious society and that’s what we get for that.

[LorenPechtel]

And why do you assume this is dishonest labeling?

The problem is with possible cross-contamination. For some reason the FDA has gone stupid about what was the accepted practice that the label listed other standard allergens processed in the same facility. It worked. If hitting one of your problems could kill you you didn't touch anything with a cross contamination risk. If hitting a problem was simply an unpleasant time then you went ahead.

Companies originally reacted to the FDA insanity by deliberately adding trace amounts of the maybe items so it definitely contained (who benefits? Nobody!), I don't know the trigger for this latest bit of trouble.

[Gormo]

> The article says they estimate 33M people in US to have food allergies which sounds insane to me.

33 million is only about 10% of the population, and the phrasing in the article makes me suspect that there may be some disingenuous motte-and-bailey argumentation going on here -- the definition of "food allergies" applicable to the 10% claim might be vastly more expansive than the one applicable to "life-threatening allergic reactions".

Unfortunately, since the article doesn't reference any independent fact-checking for these claims, and just quotes not-necessarily-disinterested sources verbatim, it's hard to validate any of it. All in all, it's very poor-quality journalism.

[b112]

Shawn Woods... now my hero youtuber!

[quietbritishjim]

What does this mean?

[b112]

Mousetrap Mondays.. I am afraid of cancer causing mice.

[quietbritishjim]

That doesn't really answer my question, but it doesn't sound like it has much to do with my comment.

[NovemberWhiskey]

The problem with Prop 65 is that we've delegated plaintiff's attorneys to conduct private enforcement actions. Also that the law requires a warning, but doesn't require an explanation of what the material is, what part of the product contains it, or how you are likely to get exposed to it.

As I mentioned elsewhere on this discussion, this is why pure cotton patches now come with Prop 65 warnings (if you might use them to clean a rifle...)

Rag on corporations all you want, but Prop 65 is a terrible law.

[1oooqooq]

it's almost like if corporations could pay politicians to turn good laws into garbage laws, uh?

[Nasrudith]

The numbering scheme was a hint: there were no politicians involved with a ballot initiative. This is what demagoguery combined with direct democracy get you.

[1oooqooq]

good point, butpropositions don't get created in a vacuum

[Gormo]

Nothing happens in a vacuum, least of all government interventions into society.

[StableAlkyne]

> Our food shouldn't contain allergens

You can pry my gluten-laden, peanut-oil containing, dairy-filled pizza from my cold dead hands!

(The problem isn't allergens, many of which are delicious. The problem is not correctly labeling allergens - I think that's the point you wanted to make at least!)

[Atotalnoob]

I have a food allergy (gluten, celiacs).

It’s ridiculous to make everything allergen free. It’s also gross, I hate those products that I dubbed “everything free” that are free from the top N allergens.

They have a place in the market, but they aren’t that good

[konschubert]

I don’t know what the margins on bread are, but I would bet that they are tiny since this is a competitive market.

Meaning that this kind of medical-lab-style cross contamination protocol will either raise the cost of the product or reduce the variety and choice.

[twic]

> I don’t know what the margins on bread are

Well they're usually called crusts for starters.

[joshdotblack]

Bravo

[mgkimsal]

> Meaning that this kind of medical-lab-style cross contamination protocol will either raise the cost of the product or reduce the variety and choice.

If the result is a safer population, why wouldn't we want this?

[crabbone]

I worked in two commercial bakeries: Angel and Berman in Jerusalem. The first mostly makes sandwich bread, the other one mostly makes pastry.

This will be probably relevant to answering your question: if you want to realistically prevent cross-contamination, you will need separate set of everything, that is, a separate room with mixing bowls, separate ovens, and, well... the same employees won't be going between those two rooms, so, you need to hire more people to man more equipment.

I was hired into both of these bakeries as a non-skilled labor who was paid minimum hourly wage. Baking bread isn't a particularly luxurious business. It's out there with agriculture, where margin of profit is very low, and your only hope is scale. Also, you cannot really increase bread consumption by baking more bread. The market is easily saturated. So, by forcing a bakery to, essentially, split in two, hire extra workers and install extra equipment, while in the end they'd not be able to sell more product is going to be very expensive. Maybe not even affordable.

Now, consider that a very small minority of people buying bread care for it not being accidentally contaminated with sesame seeds, and your non-allergic bread will either have to cost ten times more than normal, or it won't be made at all. Needless to say that people with allergies will, likely, not want to buy overpriced bread. They might just not eat bread at all, if that's so dangerous.

[pvaldes]

> if you want to prevent cross-contamination, you will need separate set of everything

A company could do everything right and still would risk to be destroyed by an angry employee or plain boycott from a competitor. The only safe move is to stop making an everyday product with such legal risks.

Specially if is a niche product for a small number of potential clients. The reward of selling a few buns more does not worth the headache.

[Verdex]

Because it doesn't necessarily result in a safer population. This is software engineering par for the course. Just because you want some software to have some feature doesn't mean that the other requirements and/or reality will cooperate and give you a desirable outcome.

For example, coral snake antivenom. For quite a while the US only had a single coral snake antivenom on the market because it was made by a company that was grandfathered in. The new(ish) FDA rules made developing a new coral snake antivenom not something anyone wanted to do.

So of course the one existing vendor when out of business.

Last I heard (around 2022) people were trying to come up with a new antivenom but thus far have been unsuccessful.

Prescribing that things be safer doesn't force reality to conform and we have examples of this occurring.

[gwbas1c]

> If the result is a safer population, why wouldn't we want this?

There's an anecdote that an AI was asked to make trains safer, and it decided that the trains should never leave the station.

Quality of life involves some risk. IE, you need to exercise, but you might injure yourself doing it.

[LorenPechtel]

Remove the top and bottom stairs.

[weberer]

Would you like a law that says everyone must wear a helmet when going outside?

[Gormo]

Well, first, not everyone is a Millian utilitiarian who evaluates ethics in relation only to abstract aggregations of people. I'm all for helping actual, real-life individuals to have greater means to provide for their safety, but less inclined toward programs aimed to optimize statistical metrics applicable to a vast aggregation of mostly unrelated people without accounting for variation in interests, values, and choices among the actual individuals they aggregate.

Secondly, how do you know a measure like this even does provide for a "safer population" in that aggregated sense? What if it successfully prevents a few extreme allergic reactions on the part of the small handful of people that both have severe allergies and refuse to take responsibility for exercising care in their own consumption choices, but does so at the cost of making food overall less available and more expensive, such that a far greater number of people, especially the poor and marginal, begin to experience malnutrition?

[smsm42]

Because if you can't afford "safe" bread, your only choice is very unsafe one. This scenario have been played out many times, when hyper safety prices people - usually the most vulnerable - out of the market and they have to seek poorly regulated unsafe grey or black market alternatives.

[sroussey]

> If the result is a safer population, why wouldn't we want this?

The best way to a safer population is making cars illegal. So many deaths.

[NovemberWhiskey]

... because at some point, the gains in safety are infinitesimal and the reductions in quality of life are large.

[LorenPechtel]

This is the same issue as 65--setting an unreasonable standard and then blaming business when the standard isn't met.

It used to be that when companies produced products in the same facilities that produced products on the allergen list they would label them as "may contain". Not something they added, but not something they promised it did not inadvertently contain.

A company is free to produce products in facilities that do not also process the standard allergens but to do so will be more expensive and few people want to pay the extra cost for something which is of no benefit to them. If you're not allergic to sesame it does not matter if there's a bit of sesame in your food.

The whole food labeling thing is being taken to excess. The FDA is going bonkers about what companies are or are not adding, while there's no requirement for documenting what impurities might remain. As far as I'm concerned the FDA can take their labeling rules and shove them where the sun doesn't shine.

Instead, put a QR code. It comes up with a page that lists what they intentionally added (no generic categories--I know I don't have issues with all "artificial flavors" but I do with some. And "natural flavors" comes in a close second), what cross-contamination is likely and for any refined product what the raw material was that it came from and to what degree it was purified. In addition to the human-readable form it also contains a standardized representation meant for machine parsing. Scan the code with an appropriate app and it flags anything on the list that it has been told to flag.

[bumby]

>Instead, put a QR code.

Please, no. Tech is not the solution to everything. Every time you put an additional layer between the consumer and information, and more prone to breaking. Software tech is notoriously unreliable in the consumer space because of the sheer number of interfaces. It makes the overall system less good for the consumer. I don't want to have to go through a decision tree on a phone, or a QR code, to get information that was previously available by just opening my eyeballs. I don't want to have to use my smartphone to get the directions for my presciption medication, or to see the price of gas or groceries. Those systems are designed to make the corporations life easier at the expense of the consumer.

There are many cases where tech makes things easier for the consumer. I don't think this is one of them.

[BobbyJo]

> _corporations are lazy_

In market terms: "corporations try to be capital-efficient because they are competing with each other over price-sensitive consumers."

[practicemaths]

TBF laziness is the natural order to the universe. Ain't nothin doin more than it has to.

[immibis]

Yeah, but corporations are paid lots of money to not be lazy.

[Gormo]

No, they're not -- they're paid lots of money to satisfy the demand that actually exists in the market.

[account42]

But they are not even doing that - see: false advertising, captive markets, monopolies, etc.

[Gormo]

But those things are not what consumers are paying for. It's totally appropriate to hold firms accountable when they are doing manipulative things instead of satisfying demand, but restricting them from fulfilling the demand that actually exists on account of some third party's ideological prescriptions about what the market should be demanding is unacceptable.

[hollerith]

>Our food shouldn't contain allergens

Every protein is allergenic to somebody, and even some non-proteins are allergenic (e.g., they are small molecules that can get inside a somatic protein, which changes the somatic protein's shape, which makes the somatic protein allergenic).

[LorenPechtel]

Disagree. There are proteins that if you're allergic to them your body will turn on itself. You'll be dead and no longer care what you're allergic to.

[hollerith]

Replace "protein" with "non-self protein", then, or "any protein in food".

[account42]

Ok, we can agree that food should't contain human meat Mr. Pendant.

[wnevets]

> the real problem is _corporations are lazy_.

But we knew that already. The people coming up with the rules must take that into account otherwise you get prop 65 warnings and cookie banners everywhere.

[bigyikes]

If the law doesn’t take into account human and corporate behavior, it’s not a good law. It may ultimately be the corporation’s “fault” but that doesn’t change the fact that the law created perverse incentives.

I hear the same argument for the GDPR laws that have resulted in annoying cookie banners everywhere. Sure, it’s technically the website owner’s fault for spying and adding a shitty banner, but… those banners didn’t exist until the law was created.

We need better laws that more wholly account for human behavior.

[pwg]

The politicians writing the law were likely unaware (or ignored) the Cobra Effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect#The_original_cobr...

[hot_gril]

GDPR is the dumbest recent law I can think of. Even if a website has no intent to track users, it's way too hard (aka expensive) to tell if you're compliant without slapping on a banner.

[account42]

The only dumb thing about the GDPR are hot takes like yours.

It's pretty easy to not needlessly track and accumulate data about your users. It's harder when your users are not your customers but a product you are trying to sell to third-parties but discouraging that is a good thing.

[Viliam1234]

> it's way too hard (aka expensive) to tell if you're compliant

How hard is it to figure out whether you place cookies on other people's computers or you don't? Even if you can't read your own source code, you could simply install a new browser, visit your website, and then check the cookies on that browser. I don't think it's GDPR that is dumb.

[hot_gril]

Cookies alone don't make you non-compliant, it's what you (or anything embedded on your site) do with them. You can also be non-compliant without cookies, but that's not fixable with a banner.

[LorenPechtel]

The reality is any web analytics will make you non-compliant.

[account42]

It isn't hard at all not to have web analytics though.

[immibis]

And the EU doesn't jump straight to the maximum penalty and gives you plenty of warnings to sort it out if you accidentally don't comply in a subtle way. If it's noncompliant in a subtle way that doesn't actually cause a problem they certain won't even notice.

Look how blatantly Apple ignored the DMA and how long it's taken the EU to pursue real enforcement action. It seems clear: there is no need to *fear* EU penalties unless you are dead set on noncompliance. Honest mistakes don't bring down businesses due to GDPR.

[hot_gril]

If this isn't a written policy, it's not a good enough guarantee. If you're only judging based on Apple: Just because it takes long to be penalized doesn't mean you won't be, and Apple has a lot more legal resources than most companies.

[smsm42]

And that's why we have insane laws. Because of people saying stuff like "our food shouldn't contain allergens" and spewing vague nonsense about evil profitmongers, while enabling demagogues who promote insane schemes built to inflame ignoramuses, like prop 65.

Virtually anything can be an allergen, and a lot of chemicals, given enough concentration and bad luck, can lead to cancer or birth defects. So ignoramuses demand laws that mark any chemical that can be reasonably thought of harming anyone in any circumstance possible in theory, and then blame corporations when the outcome is disastrous.

[solardev]

> Our food shouldn't contain allergens

But one person's allergens are another's tasty ingredients. I love my sesame bagels. I don't even know what food would remain if you banned all the allergens. Tapioca powder with beef flavors?

Sesame is one thing. It's delicious but probably not a major subsistence food for anyone. Chinese restaurants would miss their sesame oils though.

Next, it's hard enough to ban fish and shellfish. Many subcultures depend on them, especially near major bodies of water.

No tree nuts or peanuts? A lunch staple gone for millions. Jam will be so lonely.

Or wheat. Or milk. Or egg. Or soy? That's the end of breakfast and bakeries and dessert, I guess. The vegetarians will get awfully hungry.

I think at that point, the only thing left to eat would be the regulators themselves. Karma's never been so tasty...

[michaelcampbell]

> _corporations are lazy_

Corporations are optimized to make money; doing the non-lazy thing here costs money.

[Gormo]

>This is the same issue as Prop 65, and while we can all say "oh the law is bad" the real problem is _corporations are lazy_.

I mean, I'd definitely say that laws that are obviously incompatible with the incentive structures clearly present in real life are indeed bad laws.

Everyone is lazy -- or, more to the point, everyone has finite resources to allocate to their pursuits -- and expecting corporations and consumers to incur exorbitant costs in order to ensure optimal resolution to every possible edge case is neither reasonable nor realistic.

The problem isn't that "corporations are lazy"; the problem is that some people unaccountably expect them to be otherwise.

> Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer, but instead of taking the time to make sure of that, companies just tell us the products are dangerous, because they know we don't really have a choice.

But we do indeed have plenty of choice. There are a ton of options for getting high-quality food and other products that go through lots of extra steps and give consumers much more granular information about how they were produced and what's in them. Those options are just much more expensive, and many people are perfectly happy to make the choice to use products that may e.g. increase a particular risk from 0.001% to 0.002% in order to avoid paying twice as much for it.

One note, however: it's impossible for food not to include allergens, as people can develop allergies to essentially anything. Encumbering access to food products that provide nutrition and pleasure to the vast majority of people in order to eliminate the responsibility of a small fraction of the population to exercise care over their own consumption choices is ethically dubious, to say the least.

[water-your-self]

Have computer mice ever caused cancer or isnthat hyperbole