[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.