According to this article, New label law has unintended effect: Sesame in more foods | AP News, manufacturers are required to list sesame as an allergen on labels if there’s a possibility of cross-contamination. Sounds good, since more than a million people have this allergy. Except, it’s easier and less expensive to add sesame to products that didn’t previously have it and put it on the label rather than do the cleaning that would be required to keep it completely sesame-free, which means lots of products that used to be safe now aren’t, cutting down on safe foods for these people. The Washington Post had an article on this topic yesterday that went into more detail, but it’s probably behind a paywall.
With 9 gift articles left on my account and only 4 days to use them, I might as well spend 'em while I gots 'em. Here’s a gift link to the WP article hinted at in the OP
That makes very little sense. To me; YMMV.
IMO:
I have a product that doesn’t include sesame but may suffer from cross-contamination. People happily buy it and either have or don’t have bad reactions. The folks that have bad reactions presumably don’t buy it again.
So now I’m required to add “May have sesame cross-contamination” to the label. Folks who don’t care will buy it as before. Folks who might care might try it, or might not depending on how severe their allergy or how brave their attitude.
How does adding an additional expensive ingredient to my product help me sell more of it? IMO it does not and cannot.
Now I can see that putting “may contain sesame” on damn near everything is a cheap way for manufacturers to safely comply with the new law. And much like the much maligned Prop 65 warnings in CA, the warnings become practically meaningless as they are diluted to unusability by being applied to anything and everything.
But that is a very different situation from claiming the dangerous ingredient(s) are being added to the products as a result of labeling laws.
The linked article makes it seem like ”may” isn’t the requirement; “The Food Allergy Safety, Treatment, Education and Research (Faster) Act mandates careful cleaning of manufacturing equipment to ensure foods are sesame-free or clear labeling of all foods with sesame”.
And so you can’t say “may”; you get way more careful and say NO, or, if you put some in, you say YES.
If there is no sesame in the product, but there is any chance of cross contamination, then the manufacturer has to do very rigorous cleaning to prevent cross contamination. It is cheaper to add a tiny amount of sesame seed or flour, thereby they no longer have to do the expensive cleaning.
ETA from the article:
many food companies have chosen to add small amounts of sesame flour to products that were previously sesame-free, instead of conducting the careful cleaning required for foods without sesame.
Now that makes sense both in terms of bright line regulation and in terms of paradoxical outcome.
The correct answer of course is to adjust the regs so "MAY CONTAIN SESAME cross-contamination " is included in the packaging and the manufacturers will not be incentivized to add it to fit the yes/no binary demanded of the misguided regs.
There are many many products that include disclaimers about “may contain …” or “Processed in facilities that also process …”
A separate issue is all the Moms assuming that manufactured food has an unchanging ingredient list and just because Junior is eating something safely today, that the same product won’t change ingredients or recipe for reasons unfathomable to you with no notice to you unless you’re actively checking.
Like suddenly wheat is extra expensive but spelt is not. Or spelt gets trendy so they throw it into everything.
This is the Prop 65 effect. You’ll see many places of business (in California) have Prop 65 warnings, despite having low risks. For many potential dangers, warning about them is easier and less costly than meeting stringent standards.
The ‘may contain’ warning has been expressed as the same machinery was used for other products containing the allergens. I don’t see a good reason that a food manufacturer has to insure that no allergens have ever been used in their manufacturing process, or can’t pre-emptively prepare for such future use. I don’t know what kind of material fraud or regulations could be involved in that kind by stating a product may contain an allergen even if none is known to be present, but in our litigious society I can understand why manufacturers would do this. As it is they have to worry about unintentional use of the allergens in their products, including unknown changes to their supply of ingredients. Is this bad for people with very serious allergies? It’s bad in the sense that they have fewer food choices, but that is the reality of their condition and should not be the responsibility of food manufacturers to make sure they have the luxury of that variety. It would be nice if a manufacturer could maintain all their equipment in ‘kosher’ condition to avoid forbidden ingredients, but that will lead to higher costs and lower availability of products for everyone. It’s not like people with sesame allergies or a gluten-free diet can’t get nutritious food to eat.
Well, yeah, because the people who have “a bad reaction” might be dead so, sure, they won’t be being that product again. OK, that is a bit harsher than you probably intended, put it down to frustration.
Food allergies, especially severe ones, are not trivial.
My experience, as someone who has had multiple food allergies for over half a century now, is that corporations and many other entities simply do not care about allergic people, except to the extent they do not want to be sued by either them or their heirs.
My experience has also been reading labels every damn time I buy something, learning to absolutely dread the phrase “New and Improved!”, occasionally contacting companies for clarification about poorly worded labels (sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn’t), and learning how to cook for myself from scratch most of the time.
There were also the two experiences with anaphylaxis and non-existent waits at an ER. When then rush you into the back first ahead of everyone else and don’t bother to ask your name, insurance status, or medical history before beginning treatment that is a Bad Sign.
There are a lot of packaged goods that don’t contain peanuts or tree nuts, but they are obliged to say (something like) “manufactured on equipment that also comes into contact with peanuts or tree nuts” (if that is true and there is a chance of cross contamination). I wonder why that isn’t good enough for sesame.
Some common allergens have become so ubiquitous that getting a proper diet can be very arduous for someone with severe allergies. Sure, it’s not the responsibility of any particular company to make sure allergic people can eat, but when nearly everything is off limits it can become extremely difficult for the allergic to eat.
Wheat, soy, dairy, and eggs are all very, very common food allergens AND very common in all sorts of foods where you’d least expect them. Soy sauce, as you might expect, contains soy but it ALSO contains wheat. Dairy in one form or another (casein and whey, for example) are very, very often added to “fortify” foods.
I’m lucky in that I am NOT allergic to those four, but I do very much have a life-threatening allergy to tomatoes. Which are every damn where. When I was ill with covid the first time a friend dropped off some packets of instant chicken soup. Which, according to the label, contained a small amount of tomato paste. Would you ever expect that? I certainly didn’t. Damn good thing I have that compulsive label-reading habit. The packets were donated to a soup kitchen after I recovered.
I developed a barley allergy in my 40’s. That, too, is everywhere and they DON’T have to prominently label it. It’s in virtually all flours labeled “all purpose”. It’s in most commercially made crackers. Sometimes it’s labeled “barley flour”, sometimes “malted barley flour”, and sometimes just “malt”. Why is it everywhere? It’s perceived as sweet but it doesn’t have to be called “sugar”. Good thing I like baking - I make almost all the bread I eat anymore. I buy crates of “kosher for Passover” matzos (which are just wheat, salt, and water) after the holiday on clearance for crackers. Fortunately, that allergy isn’t so bad that a chance encounter won’t land me in the ER but I don’t enjoy feeling sick and gross.
Eating when you have food allergies is a royal pain in the ass. It becomes even more frustrating when mega-corporations make choices that make your life even more difficult than it has to be.
Why should they care except to warn you that those ingredients are in their product? If there is a large enough market for particular allergen free foods those companies will have a great deal of concern about it. I feel for your situation, I can understand your frustration, but as long as the products are labeled properly I’m not going to attack businesses trying to make a profit. It’s not like they don’t already have the burden of numerous regulations that they have a difficult time adhering to already. As it is in regard to this subject a company that sells bags of peanuts must put on the label “Contains peanuts”. Not because anyone will successfully be sued by someone allergic to peanuts, but because they’ll be subject to fines or possibly shut down for failing to properly label. In 2004 FALCPA set pretty high standard. What changed is the inclusion of sesame in the allergens list which is acting like a final straw for the manufacturers. Remember they are being asked to state a negative, that their product does not contain certain allergens to the extent that there could not be microscopic amounts of the substance present. The rest of us aren’t guaranteed that no rodent droppings or insect parts are found in our food. I’m not an anti-regulation person, but the regulations have to be reasonable and effective, and if businesses feel they need to include a little bit of sesame flour in their products then there’s something wrong with the regulations.
I had a friend with a life-threatening allergy to tomatoes. She was once at a restaurant with her family, and there was a chicken sandwich on the menu. It came with tomato slices, so she told the waiter that she absolutely cannot have tomato, she is seriously allergic to it and can’t have even a tiny amount. The waiter assured her that he would make sure that tomatoes got nowhere near her food.
The food arrived, she checked and saw no tomatoes, and started to eat. She got puffy, her throat started to close, and they had to call an ambulance, which came and took care of her. (I don’t know if epi-pens were around back then or not.)
She found out later that the chef had put tomatoes on the sandwich before seeing the order again, and took them back off. But the sandwich had juice and seeds in it, and that was enough to set her off. This stuff is no joke. 
Understood. I totally get your frustration.
What I was meaning was in the era pre- this particular regulation, when mandatory sesame disclosure was not yet a thing. Sesame sufferers had no info to go on, except personal experience and some intuition. Some got lucky, some didn’t. And then I fast-forwarded the scenario to what anti-sesame guidance they were gaining and how that changed the dynamic.
I have no food allergies. But I am diabetic. When I was getting my life back under control and was very serious about my zero simple-carb diet it was simple. If it had an ingredient list I did not buy it. Except while traveling, where buying restaurant food was inevitable, I simply did not eat anything I did not prepare from scratch. It was a PITA. I had a lot of meals on the road that were an unadorned piece of meat and some dry salad. That was the only thing I could routinely find that I could be certain did not have unwanted stuff innocently and unthinkingly added to it.
People with really nasty constellations of allergies are all but stuck in that mode: from scratch at home or starve. Or run the risk of unplanned ambulance rides.
What I’m not getting is why the e.g. “may contain sesame” warning isn’t good enough for things that do not deliberately have sesame added, and yet are subject to incidental cross-contamination from genuinely sesame-containing products. And nothing special here about sesame, it’s simply the example allergen du jour.
There are three problems here:
- Improper labeling, where ingredients are simply not listed even when they are in the food. From time to time this makes the news when a product is recalled due to failure to put an ingredient on the label.
- Ambiguous/non-specific labeling - this would be a situation where, for example, among the ingredients is listed “spices” which means… what? I know someone allergic to turmeric. That could be included in “spices”… but maybe it isn’t. The only way to know is to contact the company and that is IF even they know what is in “spices”. I have encountered companies where, when I contact them, they say “oh, we just buy this flavoring mix from X company, we don’t ask/they won’t tell us what is in it because it’s a trade secret”.
- confusing/alternate names - for example, it’s not enough to look for “milk” or “dairy” - other possible ways those things can make their way into food are labels like whey, casein, natural butter flavoring, sodium caseinate, lactose, lactitol, and lactalbumin. How many of those do you recognize as “dairy”? Rinse and repeat for every possible ingredient under the sun.
#1 is potentially a problem with any food and includes not just allergens but anything you might not want in food, so the rest of the world is concerned about that sort of thing, too.
#2 is aggravating, but any company willing to communicate with me/answer questions can still get my business. Although I get skeptical about companies that don’t know what the hell goes into their food I can at least applaud their honesty and, where possible, opt for choices that they can tell me what’s in them.
#3 is the worst - every one of those terms I listed for a dairy derivative ARE legal and accurate, even where not obviously dairy. Which is why for the “Big 8” (now 9) allergens companies are now required to say DAIRY or TREE NUTS or SOY or whatever if they use any of those in their foods/products. As long as #1 has not come into play.
This shouldn’t be rocket science. It really shouldn’t. But because so much food is now factory-made by huge corporations we really don’t know what is really in our food (or not).
So, boo-hoo the big corporations with a crap-ton of money. This is about the health and lives of human beings. How do YOU feel about your well-being being sacrificed for convenience or profit?
Yes, I am aware of the standard required. Remember, I have landed in the ER twice due to allergic reactions to food. This impacts me EVERY single day of my life, at EVERY meal. Cheating or a mistake could potentially result in my death, and nearly has. Twice.
Oddly enough I, a private citizen with no special training in food production, have managed to maintain that standard in my own home for decades now. Again, this is not rocket science. It certainly could be done.
You know what the difference is between rodents/insects and sesame seeds? Sesame seeds aren’t autonomous, mobile life forms. Rodents and insects are always trying to get into our food because they want to eat, too. They can put themselves into our food whether we want them there or not. Sesame seeds don’t do this. Left to themselves they just sit there (maybe sprout, if conditions are right, but sprouts don’t have legs and don’t move, either). The only way sesame gets into a batch of food is if some human being puts them there, intentionally or unintentionally. This makes it a LOT easier to avoid than rodent or insect infestation.
Is it unreasonable that machine oil is not in our food? Is it reasonable plaster/drywall/paint is not in our food? Fingernail clippings? Sawdust?
I don’t think the regulations are unreasonable, I think the corporations are pushing back because the regulations would require them to be less sloppy with the food supply in general.
Can’t clean an assembly line and guarantee there’s no contamination with sesame seed? What else are they not able to clean out of those machines?
Food should be clearly labeled as to what is in it. All of what is in it. Doing so will not inconvenience the non-allergic consumer, might save the life of someone who is allergic, and will be helpful to those watching what they eat for health, religious, or other reasons. The only people who would be inconvenienced here are food production companies and sorry, I’m not putting my health and well-being above their profits. Especially since there are so very many food producers who DO, every day, clearly and carefully label their products and who DO, every day, manage to keep ingredients for different products separate.
Yeah, I don’t get it either. Do you know how many foods have “may contain tree-nuts” or “may contain peanuts” on them? How is sesame so very different from those?
That’s why I think this is push-back from the companies involved. They could do this, but choose not to. And yeah, I get that tearing down and cleaning/rigidly separating production lines is a pain in the ass and it costs money. Again, boo-hoo. Why the hell isn’t that sort of tear-down and cleaning being done anyway? Might have less food-borne illness if that was done more often.
I can see it from the perspective that you gave earlier. Someone with an allergy bought it, carefully tried it, and found that they had no reaction.
Then they came by a year later, bought the same product with the same labelling, and had a reaction.
In the first instance, it may have contained traces of sesame from cross contamination, but didn’t. In the second instance, it may have contained traces of sesame, and did.
If my food is being produced in a place where there are also tomatoes I want to make damn sure there’s none in my food. “I don’t know” is also a valid answer, after which I can decide if I want to roll the dice or not (pretty much not, these days).
I have a good friend whose family LOVES tomatoes. I’ve walked into her home and found a pyramid of tomatoes of multiple varieties in her sink. Yet I can eat in her home with confidence because she is very, very diligent about cleaning when I come over to eat. She is also the person with the relative allergic to turmeric - same drill. She’s not highly educated, she has no food service training, yet she manages to keep these items out of the food for allergic people. She can also carefully control sodium content for her grandmother, keep dairy out of the food of people allergic or intolerant to that, and accommodates every other dietary restriction you can name (her dad is currently on a doctor-ordered no-added-sugar and a couple other things diet for medical reasons, as an example)
So… you’re telling me that agri-business with all its resources couldn’t do as well?
Yeah, I get it - it would cut into profits. Sorry. Big business demonstrated what a shit-show it would be without regulations back in the distant past, that’s why we have food regulations. For everyone’s benefits.
That is not at all what they are doing. They are avoiding extra costs needed to protect you and taking an economical shortcut to provide you that protection. You are not in any danger as a result.
How many people are necessary to maintain those conditions in your home? How much do they cost you in maintaining OSHA and other employer regulations? How much machinery do you have and what are your maintenance and cleaning costs compared to a company that has to produce millions of items that can’t possibly contain any of the specific allegens.
How is that any different for sesame seeds? Did you think manufacturers intended to add them to their food without labeling?
This is an issue of how to properly label foods. Adding ingredients to avoid mislabeling is the issue here, and it is the result of the regulations that provide you the level of safety you want. I don’t see anything wrong with the practice in the face of the regulations as defined.
Again, this practice does not place you in any danger. I’m sorry you can’t eat any old processed food crap that I can, but not to the extent that we have to place a burden on food manufacturers so you don’t have to eat healthier unprocessed foods that you can be sure do not contain the allergens that would harm you.
No, I was saying why it makes sense to make the label less ambiguous.
But “agri-business” makes it sound like there’s one giant agri factory responsible for all the production, rather than millions of small farmers, each of which would need to be inspected, all of their employees that would need to be trained and certified, as well as the thousands of different elevators, silos, and mills. Each one of those may introduce trace amounts of allergen if they are cross contaminated.
So, yeah, if your friend is processing thousands of tons of product a day from tens of thousands of suppliers and employing hundreds of thousands of workers, she may pause when you come over, and say, “I’m sorry, I can’t guarantee that none of this has touched a tomato.”