Many (many) moons ago I worked at Burger King. I can say we were given absolutely zero training on what was in the food. I would have no more idea about that than the customer asking. And this was way before the internet could give you that info. Perhaps the manager would know (or at least have some documentation they could grab and read) but the rest of the staff were clueless about it.
Heck, I also worked as a bus boy and later a waiter in various restaurants. Never did I know the content of the dishes being served beyond what was obvious (chicken, beef, potato, etc.).
If someone has an allergy or other reason for avoiding something do not rely on the minimum wage workers at a restaurant to give it to you.
The problem is even if you looked at McD’s ingredient list back when the lawsuit was filed, there was no mention of beef flavoring, just “natural flavoring” and that’s where it was hidden. That said McDonalds never did claim the fries were vegan or vegetarian, though they actually are vegan in certain markets (India, for instance, and I think Canada might have vegan fries.)
Panera just paid of the family of the university student who drank the caffeinated lemonade while with a heart condition. I suppose her family had a case or maybe Panera just didn’t need the bad press.
There was a news story on NBC tonight wherein a cheerleader died from drinking Alani energy drinks. They said she’d sometimes drink two cans with 200 mg of caffeine each day.
I think some people can handle 400 mg/day but that’s probably cups of cofffee spread over 20 hours of being awake. I guess the concentrated cans are not equal to a pot of coffee.
Hell, the grocery store I work at used to sell energy drinks that had 377mg in one can. They were helpful to me when I was trying to adjust to working the graveyard shift.
These days if I have more than one can of Pepsi Zero after breakfast I’ll wind up losing sleep that night.
Yes I reconsidered the 17 year old girl’s ingestion of 400 mg of caffeine/day. Since it was not a perhaps completely overwhelming amount, maybe there was something wrong with her circulation of which she and her family proved unaware.
The store I worked in during high school (1980’s) did. We all thought they were vegetarian. I was a vegetarian and I ate them every shift. I was royally ticked off when I found out.
The trouble with this is the caffeine/water ratio. Well, it’s also the sheer volume of caffeine. But my point is that in order to drink that much caffeine in coffee you’d also be getting > 24 oz of water. And that helps your body process and eliminate the caffeine. And that takes us back to this lemonade which also has more than what most people would expect for the volume of liquid. Anytime you step outside of those socially expected ratios, you risk people getting hurt by it.
And going back to the signage, 21% of people in the USA can’t read at all. 54% are functionally illiterate and probably couldn’t sound out the word caffeine or understand what that sign should mean to them. Most warning signs are useless to the people who would need them.
Back when they were frying them in tallow? Then again, I can see that, as vegetarianism wasn’t as popularly understood back then. I remember my mom serving my vegetarian friend some homemade vegetable soup forgetting that the chicken broth base made it definitely not vegetarian. A Polish mom’s idea of vegetarian meant “not containing visible pieces of meat.” Or “made with fish.” Which is somewhat odd, now that I think of it, as for Christmas Eve dinner she made sure things were cooked on a vegetable broth. (Though fish was featured prominently.)
But that’s something different. You were talking about the 80s. They were using at least some straight beef tallow in their frying oil until 1990. The “natural flavoring” refers to when they changed their frying fat from beef tallow to a plant-based oil. But they also added “natural flavoring” which contains milk proteins that are not vegan/vegetarian (along with some wheat derivatives). It doesn’t have beef fat, but it does have animal-derived products in it.
That said, back in the 80s, you wouldn’t have known exactly what they’re frying it in. Ingredients weren’t disclosed like they are now, and you wouldn’t necessarily have known it unless you had some knowledge of fast-food deep-frying practices. By the time they changed their practices (1990), it was being reported on in mainstream media, but the fact that the switch to vegetable oils included an ingredient that had some animal-derived products in it was not. (Like here’s a Washington Post article from 1985 that starts: " The beef in the fries is beef tallow, the type of saturated fat that McDonald’s and six other fast-food restaurants use to fry their french fries.") The link is wonky, but that’s the first line from the Google preview of the article. So it was somewhat known at the time that fast food places fried fries in animal fat. But it wasn’t advertised. You kind of had to know it.