I sat down for my lunch today, of which one part was a hard boiled egg. I eat them because I like 'em with a little salt, but also because they are a good source of protein, or so it says on the package. Why do I buy them? When I make them at home it’s sometimes a challenge to peel them, and I’ve used all kinds of fancy tricks. So it’s easier to buy them ready to eat.
I glanced down at the package and was stunned to learn it contained eggs. I realize companies are required to list certain ingredients that are associated with allergies, but in this case it doesn’t make any sense. It’s a see-through package, so there’s no doubt what’s inside. Are there people walking around so naive that they might think a package of hard boiled eggs wouldn’t contain eggs? In case you’re wondering, my peanut butter spread has printed on it that it contains peanuts. Who would have figured?
It has nothing to do with dumbness or the downfall of the nation. It has to do with regulations, where you must state that a product contains eggs, or peanuts etc. etc.
If there’s a law where they must list allergens, no exceptions seems to be easier to implement than “well, it looks obvious enough” to me. I don’t see the harm or any way that it’s affecting me as a consumer by adding the verbiage. So it’s obvious. So what? And haven’t people been making fun of this since the first “may contain peanuts” warning on something that obviously contains peanuts? This is hardly anything new. Peanut M&Ms have had “may contain peanuts” since at least 2000.
The harm is that by putting warnings on everything, people will ignore useful ones.
Every damn thing has a Proposition 65 warning in California. People ignore it because it’s impossible to avoid things with the warning, and because they learn over time that the warning is applied to things that are completely safe. But some of these things aren’t safe, and in that case the fact that we’ve been trained otherwise is harmful. Boy Who Cried Wolf and all that.
IIRC it’s already happened. There was a product called something like “Simply Egg”, which was in fact not egg. It was a vegan egg substitute. I believe they were forced to change the name of the product.
ETA: Ah, “Just Egg” was the product I was thinking of; but the only lawsuit I could find was between two companies using the name “Just”.
I think I was conflating it with “Just Mayo” from the same company, which was told they can’t call their product “mayonnaise”, since mayonnaise must contain eggs according to the FDA.
It gets to be more BWCW-ish when it comes to the “may contain” statements. But just about every food product may contain eggs, or traces of egg. So in the limit, every box will contain the statement “May contain eggs”, and thus will become just as useless as Prop 65.
And then we have the laughable case of sesame seeds. Manufacturers were required to label sesame seeds as an allergen. The predicable result is that every food product that came out of a factory that used sesame seeds in any capacity would contain warning that it may contain sesame seeds (like no-sesame seed buns being made next to ones with sesame seeds).
The FDA didn’t like this, and said that the warning can only be applied to products that actually contain sesame as an ingredient, and that they must prevent contamination in other cases. The equally predictable result is that manufacturers started adding sesame as an ingredient to anything that might have been contaminated. Just a small amount of sesame flour is enough. Then they can legally apply the warning to everything.
While this is maddeningly stupid to everyone, it caused actual harm to people with sesame seed allergies, who aren’t affected by small amounts of contamination, but now have less choice in food product, since the foods now actually contain enough sesame to cause a reaction.
Of course the real problem is that when faced with complying with actual sesame warnings while also preventing cross-contamination or simply end-running the regs by adding sesame flour, the latter choice was permitted.
Had the law said something like
Any attempt, successful or otherwise, to end-run the absolute prevention of cross-contamination which is the actual intent of the law will result in the execution of the top three layers of management. After a brief but fair trial of course.
Then the option of gratuitously adding sesame flour to everything would have been taken off the table.
The real problem with regulations is not that they go too far. It’s usually that they stop just short of far enough, and leave the regulated businesses an easy out to do as much or more harm as before, and frequently more. There are only perverse incentives there because our political governing philosophy is to leave the perverse incentives in place.
In effect we reward commercial deceit and then wonder why we have so much of it
Both can be true under different circumstances. In this particular case, though, the regulation was clearly too aggressive. There was no epidemic of people suffering allergic reactions from products with sesame contamination. Thus, the measures the corporations were already taking to reduce contamination were sufficient.
The regulation should have taken this into account and set a reasonable level of contamination that the businesses could easily meet. Forcing them to undertake extreme measures would have made the products more expensive and benefitted zero people.
