I get that this seems like an overreach, but America is incredibly safe for people with allergies and it's because of enforcement like this. In my 36 years of being alive, I've never once had an allergic reaction in the US due to mislabeling (although I've had them in South America and Asia).
Under the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act, there's 8 groups that MUST be labeled: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat and soybeans.
Everyone with an allergy knows to check that section of the packaging (it comes after the long list of ingredients), and you can trust it to be accurate. It can't just be right most of the time... it has to always be right.
If that trust is broken, America will be a much less safe place.
> Everyone with an allergy knows to check that section of the packaging (it comes after the long list of ingredients), and you can trust it to be accurate. It can't just be right most of the time... it has to always be right.
Right, so if you pick up a package that says "Unsalted Butter" and nothing else, who the hell is going to assume no milk was used? Even worse when the ingredients listed on the same box say Milk as literally the only ingredient.
Along the same lines, if you have a peanut allergy and you buy a jar that says Peanut Butter with an ingredients list that starts with "Peanuts", you kind of deserve to pay the stupid tax.
> If that trust is broken, America will be a much less safe place.
America can simultaneously be the safest place on earth for those with food allergies, while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense.
Instead, to please some faceless career bureaucrats, 80,000 pounds of butter will be destroyed to "protect" the dumbest among us.
But there's a lot of foods that say butter that don't contain "Milk". Does "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" contain milk? Does Shea butter? Does Garlic butter? Are you so sure you're right about each of these that you'd risk someone's life over it?
In the US, packaging is guaranteed to have an accurate "contains" section. It's not just a nice-to-have; people's lives depend on it.
I get that this is a pretty clear example that it contains milk – but that's what makes it interesting. Lives may not be at stake here, but the trust in the "contains" label is. We can't leave it up to "well, most people should know" – it has to be consistently enforced, or it becomes completely useless.
Couldn't I say the opposite? "Instead, to please some faceless career Costco executives, the trust in the 'Contains' labeling will be destroyed to "protect" the people who mislabeled their product."
> But there's a lot of things that say butter that don't contain "Milk". In the US, packaging is guaranteed to have an accurate "contains" section.
The box of Unsalted Butter already says "Milk" in the ingredients list. It does not need a second warning that says "Contains Milk". The article seem to be confusing the two - they are two different "labels" on the same packaging.
Is there a human alive that would read the ingredients list and think to themselves, "Hmm, it says Milk is an ingredient, but I don't see a 'Contains Milk' warning, so it probably doesn't contain milk!"?
That is the bureaucratic nonsense people are sick and tired of.
You are arguing for a much more complicated set of rules that now have to define what's obvious and what isn't. Is your preferred rule that they don't have to list allergens if they're already in the ingredients? Is it a custom cutout for butter? One ingredient items?
I'd say the recall is probably more pointless, who is going to check this at home?
If you set punishments at the "cost of doing business" level, then businesses will choose [0] to take the punishment, rather than complying with the regulation.
This is a food safety regulation of the sort where some people will die if it's not compiled with. It's also a food safety regulation that's easy to comply with... if the manufacturer is aware of what's in their food.
IMO, noncompliance with this is a sign that something's fucking wrong with the company and maybe shouldn't be in charge of making food for people to eat. Remember that one band that had the "no brown M&Ms in the band's candy bowl" clause in their performance contracts? While I can't claim that this is a "canary" regulation, it sure smells like it could serve as a pretty solid one to me given how easy it is to comply with.
[0] Not always, but more often than "never", and probably more often than not.
I never look at "Ingredients". I look at "Contains". That's the important section for anyone with allergies.
You clearly don't have a deadly food allergy. "Contains" is highly regulated ("Ingredients" is not), and everyone with a food allergy trusts "Contains". This isn't about this one particular situation, which admittedly is obvious. It's about maintaining the trust of the "Contains" section.
Who is "sick and tired of" allergy labels being too strict? Is this really something people get up in arms about?
> Who is "sick and tired of" allergy labels being too strict? Is this really something people get up in arms about?
People are sick and tired of nonsense bureaucracy - and this is a prime example.
Destroying 80,000 pounds of perfectly fine butter so some bureaucrats can pat themselves on the back is pretty absurd. Nobody was harmed - nobody was saved. This is just waste because some piece of paper says it has to be wasted...
It depends upon one's perspective. I would think that having it listed on the ingredients is sufficient. That said, some people who are allergic to something will not examine the list of ingredients when the regulations state they allergen must be listed under what the product contains. It is about trust, not bureaucrats patting themselves on the back.
I just wanted to look so I had context. Annual production of butter in the US is over 2,060,000,000 pounds.
These aren't new rules and are in place to literally save lives.
Are people really "sick and tired" of .003% of the butter being recalled? I feel like repeating "80,000 pounds" is attempting to appeal to emotion over the destruction of some mass quantity when in reality it's a rounding error.
If only you could rely on common sense! But companies have been allowed to run roughshod for so long and sell things that are deceptively labeled for so long that the law finally had to step in with bureaucracy. You can't apply common sense when companies are allowed to label things as X when they aren't X.
Does something labeled "butter" contain milk? Does something labeled "milk" contain milk? This thread shows the answers to these questions are not straightforward and cannot be determined with common sense.
We -have- to have strict labeling rules around allergens and destroy products that don't comply because if we didn't, it would just be the wild west like it is with products that are not allergens.
Only when it's something that doesn't affect them. These same people whining and crying about macro-scale system bureaucracies will absolutely meltdown when the consequences of not having those systems in place hits (think supply chain issues during covid).
So much is taken for granted in our modern world because so many are unwilling to surrender to complexities beyond their reasoning. They alone have the answer and all must know it.
80k pounds of butter is being destroyed because the private company who made it could not be assed to do proper QA over a batch.
This isn't government overreach, this is a company trying to save money by doing less QA and getting bit for it.
THIS TIME it was caught, and handled, and the company is seeing a negative outcome for their lack of diligence in making OUR FOOD. What about next time? Maybe companies should be discouraged from lacking QA like this?
This isn't QA over food. It's not like the butter was contaminated or something.
It's QA over packaging.
And you have no evidence that this was motivated by trying to "save money by doing less QA".
US food manufacturers generally do their absolute best on QA because recalls are super expensive and the headlines are bad. But companies are made up of humans who are never going to be 100.0000000% perfect.
If you look at a food package and don't see Contains how do you know if it's truly absent or if perhaps it's on a different part of the label and you missed it?
On the practical personal safety level this is easy to answer. If you(or the person you are going to serve it to) have food alergy for any of the categories and you can’t find a “Contains” list then you don’t consume(serve) the item.
Want to make it clear i’m not arguing with this against the current alergen labeling laws. I see it as a variant of Postel’s principle. The food manufacturers should label everything strictly, and consumers affected by any alergy should assume that where there is no information then the alergen they worry about is present. This way the system remains trustworthy while the customers can safely avoid where mistakes are made or packaging gets damaged or smudged or anything like that.
> It's not just a nice-to-have; people's lives depend on it.
Nevertheless, I would certainly hope that if someone's life depends on avoiding milk products, that they learned a long time ago not to buy butter.
I mean I get your broader point, but it's just that in this specific case this isn't shea butter or apple butter or whatever... it's butter butter.
Like, listing wheat as an allergen on a candy bar, of course. But if you have a milk allergy, there's absolutely no universe in which you should even be picking up the butter to check in the first place.
There is absolutely zero value in making an exception to the rules about allergen labeling here. Yes, it has the net effect of having a requirement that a bag of peanuts says "Allergens: peanuts". So be it; this is the kind of rule that works better when made universal, with zero exceptions.
Well, it's "unsalted butter". It has an adjective. So it's not just "butter butter", it's modified.
Not everyone speaks perfect english. One of the times I had an allergic reaction, it's because I didn't know all the Spanish word for peanuts... and the english translation right below it skipped that word.
Unsalted butter is butter butter. It's the base form of butter with nothing added.
And peanuts in something that isn't obviously made of peanuts, of course. That's what allergen labels are for, nobody's arguing against that.
But you can't really mistake a bar of butter for anything else except margarine. And it you have a milk allergy, you're gonna make sure you know what the words are for butter vs. margarine, I should think?
You are arguing that the regulation should be more complex...
Regulations that require the allergen labeling and don't make exceptions will obviously be shorter than regulations that make exceptions.
If the outcome were worse for consumers, I can see arguing for the more complicated regulation, but having a clear statement of the allergens regardless of the product doesn't hurt consumers any (If you disregard the bother from the redundancy anyway).
If I had my way, food terms that have hundreds or thousands of years of history behind them would not be allowed to be used for labeling completely unrelated things. That includes fake milks, fake eggs and fake "butters"
>Instead, to please some faceless career bureaucrats...
I own a food-manufacturing business. Such businesses aren't trying to please anyone; we're following regulations. There are plenty of other such safety regulations that might seem unnecessary or pointless, but they're in place and they exist to help make certain food remains safe.
>...80,000 pounds of butter will be destroyed to "protect" the dumbest among us.
Regulations like this are meant to make certain even those most in need of awareness are informed. You may think they're the "dumbest," while I see them as people just as qualified to be informed as any other consumer.
so if you pick up a package that says "Unsalted Butter" and nothing else, who the hell is going to assume no milk was used
Lots of people in the U.S. don't know that butter is made from milk. I have met plenty of people who don't know that cheese is a dairy product. I have met plenty of people who think that mayonnaise is a dairy product... Very few people know that American caramel is a dairy product...
while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense.
This is not bureaucratic nonsense. Reporting ingredients has been table stakes for selling foodstuffs in the U.S. for several decades. A company that can't get something that basic right is also getting something else wrong. And that's the point of these seemingly bureaucratic rules: they're basically unit tests for the regulatory agencies to identify issues they require followup.
People also make food for others. It's like having a gluten-free/celiac friend coming over for dinner and using soy sauce without bothering to notice soy sauce always contains wheat.
Sure, but that's why someone allergic to dairy might ask their friend who prepared dinner if anything was made with butter or cheese (or yogurt or sour cream, etc.), just to double-check.
If the person cooking is uneducated enough to not know that butter and cheese come from milk, I highly doubt they're checking the box the butter comes in for an allergen listing.
>If the person cooking is uneducated enough to not know that butter and cheese come from milk, I highly doubt they're checking the box the butter comes in for an allergen listing.
The purpose of the regulations isn't about what anyone may think others will or won't do with the information, it's about making the information readily and unambiguously available.
That’s a colossal waste of food. Parents should expose babies to allergens to avoid this kinds of issues. I don’t think the government should be involved with allergen labeling.
The lack of empathy being expressed in this thread is utterly deranged. You people should feel ashamed of yourselves.
My advisor from college is a brilliant, caring man and a genius computer scientist with a lovely family. He also has a terribly dairy allergy. The tiniest lapse threatens to kill him. Here in the US he's safe thanks to regulations like this. When he travels abroad for conferences, he has to pre-prepare all his own food and bring it with him because he can't trust the labeling in other countries. Despite this, he very nearly died in India because somehow he still managed to come into contact with something.
So what, he should just... die? Why? His children should become fatherless... why? His contribution to computer science should be snuffed out... why? For some ridiculous religious anti-regulation cause? This crusade is despicable. You don't deserve to be here.
Yeah, but the choice isn’t between 80k of butter being used and nothing. The other side of it is all allergy labels not being reliable. I was on the side of “don’t waste” but now that I know it’s only $400k worth I think I’m not as aggrieved. I think making allergy labels optional will cost more than $400k and I think developing newer rules will cost $400k.
Overall, this is the cheapest way to do things. Verifiable information transmission is usually harder than most things. It’s why we do things like reduce aerospace composite strength by riveting them - inspectability costs something but the value is higher.
The part that's out of whack is the part where they tell consumers who have already bought the butter to throw it away. In order to have received that direction, you must have already seen the recall notice itself, which tells you the butter has milk in it.
It's not so bad if they pull the stuff that hasn't sold.
If I pick up an item that should have an allergen that I’m used to seeing, and it’s not listed, I can safely trust it’s because they made it without that ingredient somehow.
That’s why they say to throw it out. 90% of people will ignore the recommendation. Some will dispose out of an abundance of caution, some will dispose because they had the thought I listed at the top of your comment.
Yes, so if you were to encounter this butter in the wild, I understand that not seeing the label would throw you off.
But in this particular case, in order to comply with the instructions telling you to throw the butter away, you need to know that this is the butter you bought that actually contains milk but isn't labeled so.
The very act of noticing that the butter doesn't have the right label tells you that it contains milk.
Someone else might come to your house and open your fridge and use butter with a label that says "Ingredients: Milk" and not realize you received mislabeled butter.
I get when products have something harmful to people like when your favorite brand of ice cream has listeria or something else has e.coli and the product should not be used.
This is just a labeling/packaging issue where there is nothing harmful about the product itself.
Also, how many people with milk issues would be confused by the missing info and think there's a new type of milk free butter?
I would! There isn't a "new milk free butter" e-newsletter I'm subscribed to. I go to the store, see the things in the shelves, read the label, and then buy one that doesn't say milk (or soy) on it. Not being able to have large amounts of milk or soy without shitting myself doesn't mean I'm now on some secret "new non milk foods" subreddit or discord. We don't have a Facebook group that have regular in-person monthly meetings for, and have a yearly conference in San Diego where we all dress up like our least favorite cheeses. It's not an identity for me that I can't have milk or soy, it's an unfortunate biology weirdness that my body forces me to take part in.
Have you ever picked up butter to check if it says milk or not?
Like I get that for plenty of other foods where it is, of course, non-obvious.
But I would assume you know that no package of butter will ever not say milk? (Or if it didn't, it was mislabeled, like in this article?) So that you don't even bother checking?
You might know about the recall, but does someone visiting your house know that? Does a random chef who gets an allergy notification at a restaurant know about the recall?
EDIT: Again, people are trained to trust the labels – not to parse the marketing. That's why they exist. If someone in a kitchen says "grab the dairy-free butter", the most accurate way to check is to glance at the "Contains" label. Once that trust is broken, the label is useless.
> You might know, but does someone visiting your house know that?
Well, yes, because 99 percent of people in general know that butter is made from milk, and that includes 100 percent of the people who might visit my house. And if I did somehow have a visitor so profoundly broken that they didn't know it, I would notice that.
Also approximately 100 percent of professional cooks know that butter is made from milk.
The antidote to the "strict rules mean common sense can't be used" is... to use common sense: In this instance to ignore the recall instructions, and don't throw away the butter.
Grandparent poster is just throwing all the hypotheticals for the remote chance of "But what if, and if, and if, and if...".
Not who you’re replying to, but yes, because “alternative milks” like almond milk, oat milk, etc. do not contain (dairy) milk. Dairy farmers raised this objection and (temporarily?) forced producers of milk alternatives to stop using the standalone word “milk” on their packaging, but I still see it as part of a compound word on packaging.
Thus “chocolate milk” and “strawberry milk” mean milk mixed with chocolate or strawberries, while “oatmilk” and “almondmilk” may contain no milk at all. Though I’m not sure whether a product that mixed almond flavoring into dairy milk could be labeled “almond milk”.
People with dairy allergies shouldn’t be relying on the presence or absence of a space to determine if a product is safe for consumption.
But isn't it incredibly clear when you're buying cow milk, vs. alternative "milks"?
I can understand how people with a dairy allergy might want to double-check an alternative milk to make sure it doesn't contain any real milk, or was processed in a bottling facility that also processes dairy milk, or something like that...
But it's hard for me to see how people with a dairy allergy might want to double-check the regular milk...?
That is a different question. If something is labeled "butter"it is probably butter. If it is labeled "not butter" it definitely should have a label that says "might contain butter.
Now I understand the labeling and allergy concerns. Like does "almond milk" contain milk? I didn't know but it probably contains almonds or almond extract.
Yes. Oat milk / almond milk / etc doesn't contain "milk". There's a section for both "ingredients" and "contains" on every label, and "contains" specifies if it includes "milk" as defined by the FALCPA.
now we get into the area of should these products be called milk when they don't have milk.
if there's regulations that say a package must list what is inside, shouldn't there also be regulations that say you can't list ingredients that are not inside?
Note that, if the labeling for the "contains" section is accurate, I do not have to give a fuck what some marketing wonk has decided they have to call their product for my safety.
THAT's why this isn't about government overreach. The SANCTITY of the labeling is important, so that it can be relied on NO MATTER WHAT
yeah. there was a proposal by big dairy to ban alternative milks from calling themselves "milk" at all, but there was a public outcry about it and it was found to be overstepping, not least because alternative milks have existed for hundreds of years and been called as such.
I think they should have a full mass spec analysis given for it. I've tried lactose free milk and it turns out it's not just the lactose in milk I'm allergic to.
Of course I don't know your situation, but most lactose intolerance is not an allergy, it's an inability to produce lactase, so the lactose gets digested by excited microorganisms instead of processed by your body. This often causes discomfort, as the microorganisms don't care if things go smoothly.
Starting in 2023, add sesame to that list. And then of course due to these labeling laws, you get allergens purposefully added to foods as the easiest and cheapest way to comply with the law: https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc...
Does that help people with sesame allergies? Unclear overall as it both helps and harms them.
So the government says "If you have an allergen and don't label it, you will be punished."
Industry decides "It would cost a little money to find out if we have sesame in our product, so instead just add a little sesame and then label it"
And you blame THE GOVERNMENT?! The one hurting allergic people here is the company putting sesame in everything so they don't have to give a shit about people with allergies.
I'm so tired of American companies taking the dumbest, most harmful routes to things, and all of you stand up and shout at THE GOVERNMENT, as if Biden himself told Nestle to just put sesame in everything.
Saner populations would correctly be angry at the companies making these overtly harmful decisions.
Requiring the extra labeling even when it seems redundant increases clarity for consumers and simplifies the rules. It's fine.
At least, I doubt that you can write a set of rules for declaring allergens that is shorter if you do include exceptions to the labeling requirements. And I think there's a pretty strong argument that treating the ingredients and allergens as separate sections makes the allergens easier to interpret than sometimes requiring reading both.
"America can simultaneously be the safest place on earth for those with food allergies, while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense."
"I get that this seems like an overreach, but America is incredibly safe for people with allergies and it's because of enforcement like this."
In my 40+ years of life in India, and among the many people that I've seen or interacted with in 5 Indian states (among 28 States), I've rarely heard someone say they have allergies the way they have in the US. In US, people have allergies to almost everything.
In my 40+ years of life in India, and based on the various supermarkets that I've visited across 4 heavily crowded metro cities, I've rarely seen "Allergy" medicines/prescriptions occupy the shelf like they do in the US.
Also in the same period of my existence in this third world country, I've rarely seen people concerned about the ingredients in a restaurant menu or labels printed on food packets or containers that there are allergy causing ingredients in there.
Like George Bush once cruelly remarked, "India is the cause of shortage of food in the world", because we eat everything, and rarely check the labels or need them, or less allergic to any food. We are just short of food.
I went to Europe from the US and all my stomach issues disappeared. When I told my doctor she said, “Move to Europe”.
My sister, who lives in AZ, gets boils when she eats gluten. She went to Europe last month, freely ate everything, had zero outbreaks. Got an outbreak on her return flight.
I can’t scientifically identify the mechanism here, but I believe it’s real. Our food system in the US is a problem. Things that don’t work here work elsewhere.
I’m literally planning a move because of stomach discomfort.
The real problem here is that the FDA is recommending throwing out the butter purely based on the labels.
If they said, "throw out the butter if you (or whomever would have consumed it) have an allergy to milk as this is dairy milk-based butter", or if Costco said, "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter" it would make more sense.
It's a recall. You want to avoid any further confusion. You go with the simplest instructions possible. Just because they recommend you throw it away doesn't mean you actually _have_ to.
> "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter"
What value does returned butter have? It's not something we can refurbish. It would be ultimately be thrown away anyways.
Is this the Tesla sense of the word recall? Do they just slap a "CONTAINS: MILK" sticker on each and consider it successfully recalled? And of course, refund any customer who brings it back, but they do that for any reason already.
IMHO this is getting close to the most surprising example of bureaucratic-red-tape-gone-wild I've seen, which is a "may contain traces of peanuts" warning on a jar of peanut butter.
It is not at all difficult to imagine a situation where a restaurant worker is trained to do something like the following when an allergen is raised as an issue by a customer:
1. Check the labels of any items used in the dish
2. substitute or leave out anything listing the allergen
This may seem...basic. However, if the restaurant has an incident with an allergen affecting a customer that notified them, and they show they followed these instructions, they can shift liability to whichever food producer left the allergen off the label.
Regulations and liability don't care about common sense. In fact, they supersede common sense.
> Regulations and liability don't care about common sense. In fact, they supersede common sense.
Exactly. And there's a result in economics called the "Coase theorem" that basically says that as long as there's clear liability assignment, the negative externality (serious allergic reactions) can be efficiently avoided, in theory. So having regulations that make it unambiguous who is responsible for each step creates a better outcome for society (fewer deaths from allergic reactions).
That’s not stupid though. It might seem obvious, but then you have things like sun butter, which are specifically designed to imitate peanut butter while not having peanuts.
Sure, you can look at all the words on the package and ingredients and figure out if something probably contains allergens, but the point of the rule is that it gives you one standardized line of text that you can read and be 100% certain whether something is safe for you to eat or not.
> should probably be probably labeled contains no milk.
What about other products that contain no milk? Shouldn't they do this as well? Should every package list what it doesn't have?
> that one standard line of text
This is the point. The packaging is entirely up to the manufacturer. Should the FDA approve every food package before it's used? We obviously can't do that. What we can do is mandate a few "standard lines of text." So that regardless of the packaging decisions consumers can still determine the facts quickly and _reliably_.
Think of people with allergies that have low vision or any other handicap which would make all these "good enough" ideas become dangerous.
The recommendation to throw it out is crazy though. Couldn't they just offer exchanges for any households with a lactose intolerant person that rely on correct labeling.
I do want to point out that this is not about lactose intolerance. This is about a milk allergy. Different things. Upset tummy vs anaphylaxis.
But the recommendation to throw it out is insane. There's nothing wrong with it besides the label. And what person who can't eat dairy is running around buying butter?
I guess people who bought it and can't use it could exchange it, and you have to throw that out because it lost the chain of cold, but the ones in the shelves? Simply putting a [CONTAINS MILK] sticker on each package should be less wasteful, but the ways of retail might have mysteries I ignore.
Imagine the labor required to individually sticker 47000 individual boxes of butter (approximately an entire 53' trailer) vs. just setting it aside for your regular food waste recycler to pick up. That's the equation they'd be looking at.
Which, I would expect, ought to be well known by anyone shopping with lactose issues. It’s like shipping peanut brittle without a label saying that it contains peanuts. How many people would really be harmed without the recall?
I’m in favor of safety over profit. I’m just bummed at the unnecessary waste.
Not all recalls involve disposing of a product. Apparently in this case it does. I'd have thought they could just send out some correction stickers to slap on there, but I suppose food labeling laws could be too rigid to allow for this, or else concerns about stickers being misapplied.
It is occasionally difficult to tell from the label whether you are buying margarine or butter. And some margarine contains milk and is therefore not OK for lactose intolerant folks.
Where precisely did I go wrong here? We know it's butter, but a consumer might not, therefore a "contains whatever" label is not totally unjustified. Once you accept that as a rule, you have to enforce it. You don't just enforce it where it's ambiguous, you enforce it on all brands.
I could believe that "Signature Butter" could be a substance that wasn't butter. It would be dumb, but I wouldn't give you odds it didn't happen if someone claimed it did.
So putting milk in the ingredient list at least confirms that yes, this is butter, not "butter."
Don't worry, they will stick a label on it and it will go back to the shops. It's a good lesson for the supplier making the mistake. And besides, one might think it ís a harmless milk substitute..
That's not really accurate, most butter has salt, water, and sometimes a few other ingredients like lactic cultures, but milk is definitely always an ingredient.
The only reason people think "butter" may not contain milk is because we let advertizers abuse that term to refer to anything vaguely resembling that texture.
Of course milk doesn't mean milk anymore either, now that we got oat, almond and soy milk. Along with less common alternatives like coconut, hemp, rice, cashew and macadamia milk.
The dairy industry is actually pretty annoyed with that and tries to get the rules changed so those beverages can not be called milk.
I think it's topical because the new administration has been talking a lot about regulatory over-reach.
The thought that taxpayer money is being wasted to tell taxpayers that "if they know they have bought butter they must throw said butter because the label doesn't say it _contains milk_" is something that will escape only those people's minds who think everything is fine with the status quo.
Under the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act, there's 8 groups that MUST be labeled: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat and soybeans.
Everyone with an allergy knows to check that section of the packaging (it comes after the long list of ingredients), and you can trust it to be accurate. It can't just be right most of the time... it has to always be right.
If that trust is broken, America will be a much less safe place.
Right, so if you pick up a package that says "Unsalted Butter" and nothing else, who the hell is going to assume no milk was used? Even worse when the ingredients listed on the same box say Milk as literally the only ingredient.
Along the same lines, if you have a peanut allergy and you buy a jar that says Peanut Butter with an ingredients list that starts with "Peanuts", you kind of deserve to pay the stupid tax.
> If that trust is broken, America will be a much less safe place.
America can simultaneously be the safest place on earth for those with food allergies, while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense.
Instead, to please some faceless career bureaucrats, 80,000 pounds of butter will be destroyed to "protect" the dumbest among us.
But there's a lot of foods that say butter that don't contain "Milk". Does "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" contain milk? Does Shea butter? Does Garlic butter? Are you so sure you're right about each of these that you'd risk someone's life over it?
In the US, packaging is guaranteed to have an accurate "contains" section. It's not just a nice-to-have; people's lives depend on it.
I get that this is a pretty clear example that it contains milk – but that's what makes it interesting. Lives may not be at stake here, but the trust in the "contains" label is. We can't leave it up to "well, most people should know" – it has to be consistently enforced, or it becomes completely useless.
Couldn't I say the opposite? "Instead, to please some faceless career Costco executives, the trust in the 'Contains' labeling will be destroyed to "protect" the people who mislabeled their product."
The box of Unsalted Butter already says "Milk" in the ingredients list. It does not need a second warning that says "Contains Milk". The article seem to be confusing the two - they are two different "labels" on the same packaging.
Is there a human alive that would read the ingredients list and think to themselves, "Hmm, it says Milk is an ingredient, but I don't see a 'Contains Milk' warning, so it probably doesn't contain milk!"?
That is the bureaucratic nonsense people are sick and tired of.
I'd say the recall is probably more pointless, who is going to check this at home?
Why do we have only the nuclear recourse?
If you set punishments at the "cost of doing business" level, then businesses will choose [0] to take the punishment, rather than complying with the regulation.
This is a food safety regulation of the sort where some people will die if it's not compiled with. It's also a food safety regulation that's easy to comply with... if the manufacturer is aware of what's in their food.
IMO, noncompliance with this is a sign that something's fucking wrong with the company and maybe shouldn't be in charge of making food for people to eat. Remember that one band that had the "no brown M&Ms in the band's candy bowl" clause in their performance contracts? While I can't claim that this is a "canary" regulation, it sure smells like it could serve as a pretty solid one to me given how easy it is to comply with.
[0] Not always, but more often than "never", and probably more often than not.
You clearly don't have a deadly food allergy. "Contains" is highly regulated ("Ingredients" is not), and everyone with a food allergy trusts "Contains". This isn't about this one particular situation, which admittedly is obvious. It's about maintaining the trust of the "Contains" section.
Who is "sick and tired of" allergy labels being too strict? Is this really something people get up in arms about?
People are sick and tired of nonsense bureaucracy - and this is a prime example.
Destroying 80,000 pounds of perfectly fine butter so some bureaucrats can pat themselves on the back is pretty absurd. Nobody was harmed - nobody was saved. This is just waste because some piece of paper says it has to be wasted...
These aren't new rules and are in place to literally save lives.
Are people really "sick and tired" of .003% of the butter being recalled? I feel like repeating "80,000 pounds" is attempting to appeal to emotion over the destruction of some mass quantity when in reality it's a rounding error.
I, as someone with an allergy, am grateful for the "faceless" people who show up every day for an unglamorous job and keep me alive.
I would agree with you more if it was not a product where Milk was the only ingredient.
This kind of bureaucratic action lacks common sense and protects no one. That's the kind of bureaucracy we don't need.
Does something labeled "butter" contain milk? Does something labeled "milk" contain milk? This thread shows the answers to these questions are not straightforward and cannot be determined with common sense.
We -have- to have strict labeling rules around allergens and destroy products that don't comply because if we didn't, it would just be the wild west like it is with products that are not allergens.
So much is taken for granted in our modern world because so many are unwilling to surrender to complexities beyond their reasoning. They alone have the answer and all must know it.
This isn't government overreach, this is a company trying to save money by doing less QA and getting bit for it.
THIS TIME it was caught, and handled, and the company is seeing a negative outcome for their lack of diligence in making OUR FOOD. What about next time? Maybe companies should be discouraged from lacking QA like this?
It's QA over packaging.
And you have no evidence that this was motivated by trying to "save money by doing less QA".
US food manufacturers generally do their absolute best on QA because recalls are super expensive and the headlines are bad. But companies are made up of humans who are never going to be 100.0000000% perfect.
That achieves the same result without the destruction of perfectly good food.
Then maybe it should be Ingredients that is highly regulated as the source of truth? "Contains" is effectively redundant and incomplete.
Take that example and apply it to every single ingredient used in food and cosmetics and supplements. Write that regulation please.
Or we can stick to the one that only deals with like, 5 - 10 things.
Want to make it clear i’m not arguing with this against the current alergen labeling laws. I see it as a variant of Postel’s principle. The food manufacturers should label everything strictly, and consumers affected by any alergy should assume that where there is no information then the alergen they worry about is present. This way the system remains trustworthy while the customers can safely avoid where mistakes are made or packaging gets damaged or smudged or anything like that.
What does "Milk" mean in the context of "Contains Milk"
Is almond milk, oat milk, soy milk, coconut milk included?
Milk of magnesia?
Nevertheless, I would certainly hope that if someone's life depends on avoiding milk products, that they learned a long time ago not to buy butter.
I mean I get your broader point, but it's just that in this specific case this isn't shea butter or apple butter or whatever... it's butter butter.
Like, listing wheat as an allergen on a candy bar, of course. But if you have a milk allergy, there's absolutely no universe in which you should even be picking up the butter to check in the first place.
I'm just saying, it's hard to believe anyone was harmed in this particular case.
Not everyone speaks perfect english. One of the times I had an allergic reaction, it's because I didn't know all the Spanish word for peanuts... and the english translation right below it skipped that word.
And peanuts in something that isn't obviously made of peanuts, of course. That's what allergen labels are for, nobody's arguing against that.
But you can't really mistake a bar of butter for anything else except margarine. And it you have a milk allergy, you're gonna make sure you know what the words are for butter vs. margarine, I should think?
Regulations that require the allergen labeling and don't make exceptions will obviously be shorter than regulations that make exceptions.
If the outcome were worse for consumers, I can see arguing for the more complicated regulation, but having a clear statement of the allergens regardless of the product doesn't hurt consumers any (If you disregard the bother from the redundancy anyway).
No, I'm just saying that in this particular instance literally nobody should have suffered any harm.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nut_butter
I own a food-manufacturing business. Such businesses aren't trying to please anyone; we're following regulations. There are plenty of other such safety regulations that might seem unnecessary or pointless, but they're in place and they exist to help make certain food remains safe.
>...80,000 pounds of butter will be destroyed to "protect" the dumbest among us.
Regulations like this are meant to make certain even those most in need of awareness are informed. You may think they're the "dumbest," while I see them as people just as qualified to be informed as any other consumer.
Lots of people in the U.S. don't know that butter is made from milk. I have met plenty of people who don't know that cheese is a dairy product. I have met plenty of people who think that mayonnaise is a dairy product... Very few people know that American caramel is a dairy product...
while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense.
This is not bureaucratic nonsense. Reporting ingredients has been table stakes for selling foodstuffs in the U.S. for several decades. A company that can't get something that basic right is also getting something else wrong. And that's the point of these seemingly bureaucratic rules: they're basically unit tests for the regulatory agencies to identify issues they require followup.
If there are people who are allergic to dairy who don't know butter or cheese come from milk, then I think there's an even bigger problem here...
If the person cooking is uneducated enough to not know that butter and cheese come from milk, I highly doubt they're checking the box the butter comes in for an allergen listing.
The purpose of the regulations isn't about what anyone may think others will or won't do with the information, it's about making the information readily and unambiguously available.
My advisor from college is a brilliant, caring man and a genius computer scientist with a lovely family. He also has a terribly dairy allergy. The tiniest lapse threatens to kill him. Here in the US he's safe thanks to regulations like this. When he travels abroad for conferences, he has to pre-prepare all his own food and bring it with him because he can't trust the labeling in other countries. Despite this, he very nearly died in India because somehow he still managed to come into contact with something.
So what, he should just... die? Why? His children should become fatherless... why? His contribution to computer science should be snuffed out... why? For some ridiculous religious anti-regulation cause? This crusade is despicable. You don't deserve to be here.
Perhaps they are a vegan and think it is (e.g.) almond butter:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nut_butter
Overall, this is the cheapest way to do things. Verifiable information transmission is usually harder than most things. It’s why we do things like reduce aerospace composite strength by riveting them - inspectability costs something but the value is higher.
It's not so bad if they pull the stuff that hasn't sold.
That’s why they say to throw it out. 90% of people will ignore the recommendation. Some will dispose out of an abundance of caution, some will dispose because they had the thought I listed at the top of your comment.
But in this particular case, in order to comply with the instructions telling you to throw the butter away, you need to know that this is the butter you bought that actually contains milk but isn't labeled so.
The very act of noticing that the butter doesn't have the right label tells you that it contains milk.
This is just a labeling/packaging issue where there is nothing harmful about the product itself.
Also, how many people with milk issues would be confused by the missing info and think there's a new type of milk free butter?
Like I get that for plenty of other foods where it is, of course, non-obvious.
But I would assume you know that no package of butter will ever not say milk? (Or if it didn't, it was mislabeled, like in this article?) So that you don't even bother checking?
EDIT: Again, people are trained to trust the labels – not to parse the marketing. That's why they exist. If someone in a kitchen says "grab the dairy-free butter", the most accurate way to check is to glance at the "Contains" label. Once that trust is broken, the label is useless.
Well, yes, because 99 percent of people in general know that butter is made from milk, and that includes 100 percent of the people who might visit my house. And if I did somehow have a visitor so profoundly broken that they didn't know it, I would notice that.
Also approximately 100 percent of professional cooks know that butter is made from milk.
Grandparent poster is just throwing all the hypotheticals for the remote chance of "But what if, and if, and if, and if...".
I certainly hope that anyone cooking food at a restaurant knows that butter is a milk product.
Do you believe milk should be labeled with "contains milk"
Thus “chocolate milk” and “strawberry milk” mean milk mixed with chocolate or strawberries, while “oatmilk” and “almondmilk” may contain no milk at all. Though I’m not sure whether a product that mixed almond flavoring into dairy milk could be labeled “almond milk”.
People with dairy allergies shouldn’t be relying on the presence or absence of a space to determine if a product is safe for consumption.
I can understand how people with a dairy allergy might want to double-check an alternative milk to make sure it doesn't contain any real milk, or was processed in a bottling facility that also processes dairy milk, or something like that...
But it's hard for me to see how people with a dairy allergy might want to double-check the regular milk...?
Cookie butter is sweet spread primarily made of ground up cookies and is from France/Belgium/the Netherlands.
Secondly, people in general also know what those are.
In a culinary context, something can obviously be made with lots of butter and no milk.
In an allergen context it's totally different, but isn't the normal question whether it contains dairy?
I mean, in a regular cooking context, the Americans sound totally correct to me, unless they know you're asking because you're allergic.
if there's regulations that say a package must list what is inside, shouldn't there also be regulations that say you can't list ingredients that are not inside?
THAT's why this isn't about government overreach. The SANCTITY of the labeling is important, so that it can be relied on NO MATTER WHAT
Does that help people with sesame allergies? Unclear overall as it both helps and harms them.
Industry decides "It would cost a little money to find out if we have sesame in our product, so instead just add a little sesame and then label it"
And you blame THE GOVERNMENT?! The one hurting allergic people here is the company putting sesame in everything so they don't have to give a shit about people with allergies.
I'm so tired of American companies taking the dumbest, most harmful routes to things, and all of you stand up and shout at THE GOVERNMENT, as if Biden himself told Nestle to just put sesame in everything.
Saner populations would correctly be angry at the companies making these overtly harmful decisions.
Even if the company doesn’t intentionally have sesame in their product, what if one of their suppliers gives them sesame tainted flour or something?
If they don’t have a ‘May contain sesame’ warning then they might lose tons of money because they have to recall the product later.
The problem here is how lawsuit friendly America is.
Don't worry, if RFJ jr. is to be believed, you won't have a FDA soon. The free market will take care of the problem.
At least, I doubt that you can write a set of rules for declaring allergens that is shorter if you do include exceptions to the labeling requirements. And I think there's a pretty strong argument that treating the ingredients and allergens as separate sections makes the allergens easier to interpret than sometimes requiring reading both.
"America can simultaneously be the safest place on earth for those with food allergies, while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense."
"I get that this seems like an overreach, but America is incredibly safe for people with allergies and it's because of enforcement like this."
In my 40+ years of life in India, and among the many people that I've seen or interacted with in 5 Indian states (among 28 States), I've rarely heard someone say they have allergies the way they have in the US. In US, people have allergies to almost everything.
In my 40+ years of life in India, and based on the various supermarkets that I've visited across 4 heavily crowded metro cities, I've rarely seen "Allergy" medicines/prescriptions occupy the shelf like they do in the US.
Also in the same period of my existence in this third world country, I've rarely seen people concerned about the ingredients in a restaurant menu or labels printed on food packets or containers that there are allergy causing ingredients in there.
Like George Bush once cruelly remarked, "India is the cause of shortage of food in the world", because we eat everything, and rarely check the labels or need them, or less allergic to any food. We are just short of food.
My sister, who lives in AZ, gets boils when she eats gluten. She went to Europe last month, freely ate everything, had zero outbreaks. Got an outbreak on her return flight.
I can’t scientifically identify the mechanism here, but I believe it’s real. Our food system in the US is a problem. Things that don’t work here work elsewhere.
I’m literally planning a move because of stomach discomfort.
If they said, "throw out the butter if you (or whomever would have consumed it) have an allergy to milk as this is dairy milk-based butter", or if Costco said, "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter" it would make more sense.
It's a recall. You want to avoid any further confusion. You go with the simplest instructions possible. Just because they recommend you throw it away doesn't mean you actually _have_ to.
> "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter"
What value does returned butter have? It's not something we can refurbish. It would be ultimately be thrown away anyways.
I think this kind of messaging is on the way out. Direct communication is possible, and more than ultra simple details can be conveyed.
For the same reason that some people know to avoid certain allergens, others can decide for themselves if they need to.
Throwing out the food is insane, so is trying to justify such a thing.
If you have allergy you're supposed to know butter is made of milk, or no?
What am I missing?
It is not at all difficult to imagine a situation where a restaurant worker is trained to do something like the following when an allergen is raised as an issue by a customer:
1. Check the labels of any items used in the dish 2. substitute or leave out anything listing the allergen
This may seem...basic. However, if the restaurant has an incident with an allergen affecting a customer that notified them, and they show they followed these instructions, they can shift liability to whichever food producer left the allergen off the label.
Regulations and liability don't care about common sense. In fact, they supersede common sense.
Exactly. And there's a result in economics called the "Coase theorem" that basically says that as long as there's clear liability assignment, the negative externality (serious allergic reactions) can be efficiently avoided, in theory. So having regulations that make it unambiguous who is responsible for each step creates a better outcome for society (fewer deaths from allergic reactions).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem
Sure, you can look at all the words on the package and ingredients and figure out if something probably contains allergens, but the point of the rule is that it gives you one standardized line of text that you can read and be 100% certain whether something is safe for you to eat or not.
The absence of that one standard line of text would not be enough for me if my life were on the line.
What about other products that contain no milk? Shouldn't they do this as well? Should every package list what it doesn't have?
> that one standard line of text
This is the point. The packaging is entirely up to the manufacturer. Should the FDA approve every food package before it's used? We obviously can't do that. What we can do is mandate a few "standard lines of text." So that regardless of the packaging decisions consumers can still determine the facts quickly and _reliably_.
Think of people with allergies that have low vision or any other handicap which would make all these "good enough" ideas become dangerous.
I do think it'd be better if there were a standard allergen block that contained an explicit "yes" or "no" for each standard allergen.
So generally butter is not a problem for people with lactose intolerance anyway.
But the recommendation to throw it out is insane. There's nothing wrong with it besides the label. And what person who can't eat dairy is running around buying butter?
I’m in favor of safety over profit. I’m just bummed at the unnecessary waste.
But still, I agree this sounds crazy.
So putting milk in the ingredient list at least confirms that yes, this is butter, not "butter."
yes, if that 'one critical detail' could in fact fucking kill me...
The dairy industry is actually pretty annoyed with that and tries to get the rules changed so those beverages can not be called milk.
The thought that taxpayer money is being wasted to tell taxpayers that "if they know they have bought butter they must throw said butter because the label doesn't say it _contains milk_" is something that will escape only those people's minds who think everything is fine with the status quo.
Butter! "Caution contains milk"