There’s always 2nd-order affects to removing allergens in food.
In 2000 the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended parents wait until 3 years to introduce peanuts. 17 years later they dramatically reversed the guidance and admitted it probably was at least partly responsible for the meteoric rise of peanut allergies in America.
That paper is fascinating, not just because of the discussion of peanut ingestion and allergies. I was unaware that moisturizing eczema outbreaks in very young infants reduces their lifetime chance of developing peanut and other food allergies, nor of the link between eczema and risks of developing a peanut allergy.
This reminds me of the reason Five Guys has open containers of peanuts prominently displayed in their stores: they fry in peanut oil. Ironically, peanut oil doesn't have the allergen that triggers most peanut allergies, but explaining that is difficult, so they just went all-in with the free peanuts everywhere branding instead.
I don’t understand. Why would the suppliers change the recipe to _add_ sesame? Is it not just that they accepted the “may contain sesame” label instead of removing (or proving the lack of) sesame?
Because apparently that doesn't count and they still have to prevent cross-contamination.
>Some companies include statements on labels that say a food “may contain” a certain product or that the food is “produced in a facility” that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.
Basically the options are redo your production process so that there are no traces of sesame or add enough to put it on the ingredients list.
You aren't allowed to put things on the ingredients list which aren't actually in the food, and the new regulation doesn't let they say that there _might_ be sesame.
There's two conflicting laws here - one says you MUST label if you have allergens (this one allows the "may or may not contain the devil's seeds") and another says you cannot imply or state your product has something it does not have (this appears to be the one banning "may or may not").
"May contain x" is not part of the ingredients list, though. An ingredient is something intentionally in the product. The warning is just telling you that there's a chance that x accidentally got in.
They're made in the same bakery that other goods that have sesame and other seeds and nuts. You can't guarantee there won't be any so add the tiniest amount for labeling purposes... yes it could be more expensive not to.
Of course this is the exact opposite of what TFA had to say.
That's kind of weird. I see "may contain" all the time for other allergens and it's pretty accurate - it's a crapshoot whether or not I get an allergy (it seems m&m's warning is very accurate, whereas my local deli it's more of a cya statement). If I don't see "may contain" it's also safe to eat.
There must be something different about sesame and it's role in the food pipeline that makes it harder to deal with compared to other common allergens.
I think the permissible "may contain" is the "this product was produced in a facility that also handles tree nuts" kind of warning, which is not technically an ingredient.
You could add a homeopathically-diluted 1/2^256 fraction of sesame essential oil. At that point, the FDA would likely never accept the claim that it isn't an ingredient; and yet there literally won't be any in there to hurt anyone.
That's odd. The EU is usually more strict than the USA on food standards, and indeed sesame had to be labelled at least as far back as 2004. But the "may contain" or "produced in a facility that handles" labelling still seems to be allowed.
> Why would the suppliers change the recipe to _add_ sesame?
Control and consistency.
If you don't measure an ingredient, you are at the mercy of a zillion different things for how much of that ingredient is present and your consistency is terrible. In addition, people who are only weakly allergic to said ingredient can never be sure if there is too much of it. People who go into anaphylaxis have to avoid your stuff altogether, anyhow.
If, however, you measure the ingredient, now the amount is precisely controlled. People who are only weakly allergic can test and now know from that point on that they are okay (or not).
The people who are jumping up and down are the people who are strongly allergic. They expected the adopted law to cause manufacturers to have to pristine clean their lines when, in reality, the precise opposite occurred--the manufacturers added the ingredient and made their lines "dirtier".
> If the ingredients don’t include sesame, companies must take steps to prevent the foods from coming in contact with any sesame, known as cross-contamination.
> Food industry experts said the new requirements aren’t simple or practical.
> Some companies include statements on labels that say a food “may contain” a certain product or that the food is “produced in a facility” that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.
> Instead, some companies have taken a different approach. Officials at Olive Garden said that starting this week, the chain is adding “a minimal amount of sesame flour” to the company’s famous breadsticks “due to the potential for cross-contamination at the bakery.”
the law is aimed at being more informative, making it easier for allergic(?) people to shop safely, without taking sesame away from those who like it. It's not intended to drive sesame out of foods.
We're stuck in a vicious cycle with allergies - first peanuts, now sesame, and possibly eggs in the future.
When kids are exposed to the above early and often, they're much less likely to develop allergies. However, to protect the allergic, peanuts and now sesame are removed from childcare facilities, school lunches, etc. This exposes fewer children, which increases the percent that develop the allergy, requiring the allergen to be removed from more products & places people eat!
Who knows if it applies to these buns, but it's an interesting situation we're stuck with.
I'm not totally sure if it works like that. I grew up in Korea, where peanuts are consumed but not much: I never even heard of peanut butter growing up. Interestingly, peanut allergies are also rare: again, I don't think I heard about it growing up.
Move to the US, where peanuts and peanut butter are everywhere, and suddenly I'm responsible for checking whether my kids' snacks contain peanuts because someone in the class might be allergic to it!
The study linked above says that exposing kids to peanuts lowers the chance of them developing peanut allergy — and people (including the authors of that article) tend to make the faulty assumption that this means peanut allergy is caused by not being exposed to peanuts early enough.
As you’ve highlighted this would imply that cultures where there are no peanuts would be filled with peanut allergies — but that’s not the case.
I suspect that there’s a cross reactivity going on. Infants are exposed to an allergen and their immune system develops a good response for it. That response also applies to peanuts, unnecessarily. Had they been exposed to both peanuts and the true allergen then their immune system would’ve learned to discriminate.
A similar example — some US citizens are exposed to poison Ivy. They develop a stronger and stronger response after multiple exposures. Later (as a consequence) they are also allergic to Mango because Mango has some kind of similarity to Poison Ivy, from the immune system’s point of view. The Mango allergy could be reduced if they had been also exposed to mango… but mango isn’t the problem — Poison Ivy is!
If it's in the US only, it may actually be some toxic pesticide we are putting on peanuts specifically. Then of course it's not worth "trying" organic peanuts because you think it's the peanuts.
Peanuts, by the way, (if not organic) have the highest concentration of pesticide saturation.
> However, to protect the allergic, peanuts and now sesame are removed from childcare facilities, school lunches, etc.
The solution is for people to expose their kids to that stuff at home. That way the kids get the exposure without endangering the population.
I have no evidence for any of it, but my pet theory is that the increase in food allergies (especially adult onset) is at least somewhat environmental. That we're exposed to so many toxic products/pollutants, and our bodies so filled with microplastics, that our gut epithelium becomes compromised, we have increased inflammation, and our immune systems are increasingly on high alert causing them to overreact to things that aren't really threats.
There's a lot of study of allergy differences between rural and urban kids. The explanation given is often that rural kids have a much wider exposure to allergens and pathogens. This is an interesting alternative explanation.
I suspect most people with food allergies actually just have an eating disorder, or anxiety/hypochondria issues. I wouldn't rule out sociogenic "food allergies" either. Look at the gluten-free fad that took off for a while.
I meant the type of allergy that often results in anaphylaxis. We can be sure that if someone's throat is swelling shut it isn't simply a case of hypochondriasis or someone following the latest food fads. Anxiety can cause shortness of breath or palpitations, but they're going to present very differently in the ER compared to someone experiencing a severe allergic reaction.
Even if someone managed to have a somatic illness that actually did cause their throat to swell and close up when exposed to certain allergens (the mind is a powerful thing after all) I don't think it'd make any meaningful difference in the event that it occurred. It would still be a life threatening medical emergency. It might however mean that with help it could be possible for them to stop having the reaction, but I'm not even sure they'd work if their immune system genuinely saw the food as a threat and learned to treat it as such.
This is an absolutely ridiculous claim, it's very clear that you have never met anyone with an allergy (or cared to ask someone about their experience if you have)
Actually I have them in my family (epi pen and all), but I've met many more people with false allergies that use them to justify disordered eating habits or something else (hilariously, I've seen someone use their allergies to try and micromanage what everyone else around them can eat, down to how their spouse's coffee is brewed).
Some pediatricians now recommend exposure to common allergens and products that cause allergic reactions very early. Even if the "lack of exposure as the direct cause" theory doesn't play out, which I'm not sure it will, early exposure allows you to find out if your child has a serious adverse reaction before they reach school age and have one in school.
The 9 major allergens are now: milk, eggs, fish, such as bass, flounder, cod, Crustacean shellfish, such as crab, lobster, shrimp
tree nuts, such as almonds, walnuts, pecans
peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame
One of my good friends has a sesame allergy and this law has backfired spectacularly for her. She basically can't buy bread now because at our local Kroger every brand has started purposely adding sesame to all their stuff so they can declare it as an ingredient and avoid having to deal with cross-contamination.
So now bread that was previously in practice (but not theoretically) safe for her to eat is being made specifically unsafe.
Avoiding cross-contamination (preventing any trace of sesame in a line of product) usually means reworking the product lines, separating storage, isolate workers working on non sesame lines etc.
The cost of that is way higher than adding an ingredient in an existing product, and the business cost of losing these customers is low (allergics will be a minority). Short of media backlash, that's the lower cost move.
The root of the problem is the lack of timely regulation, like many things in the US. If the FDA had clamped down on this "may contain ..." legalistic garbage as soon as it started showing up (20 years ago?), then either most of those factories would have never been merged or they would have at least designed processes for assuring isolation. By waiting so long, the situation is now firmly between a rock and a hard place - the bean counters will bemoan how expensive it would be to undo all of the "optimization" they did over the past few decades. And they're not wrong! Whereas if they had been prevented from squeezing those few cents per unit in the first place, bread would be basically the same price and we wouldn't be in this situation.
In most of EU we’re still on the “may contain…” train, and reality is any food maker with enough product lines will have a decent number of them with allergens. The list of major allergens is about 10~20 ingredients, and if you’re a chocolate or candy maker for instance you’ll probably hit more than half of them.
I mean, even thinking of local bakeries, they’ll have a range of products that just spans so many allergens.
They’ll do their best to avoid cross contamination from the start, but being _absolutely sure_ there is none is a level of commitment that is crazy high, and would be probably only achieved by completely dropping most of the allergens (no more peanut flavored chocolates, no more almonds…).
My family has allergies so we have a few brands and shops we follow closely, and all their products are marked as “made in factory also using…” and “may contain traces …”. While it’s vague, we never had any issue with their products, but also know we shouldn’t eat them in situations we can’t react. That is to me the best balance that seems realistic to achieve.
I'm pretty sure burger buns were being made with sesame seeds 100 years ago, in the same production facility as plain bread. Or at your local bakery. Where did you get the idea that production was "merged" as an optimization?
My partner is allergic to gluten. But it's an allergy not celiac. A lot of products without gluten are labeled as manufactured at a facility that may process gluten or some such to avoid liability.
Adding sesame as an ingredient just seems spiteful.
It’s not spiteful, it’s profit maximizing. Being labeled as “processed in a factory that may process sesame” doesn’t remove your liability under the new law. It either has sesame as an ingredient or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t it must not contain sesame.
I wouldn't say "spiteful", as the OP, but it's certainly selfish and antisocial. Those companies simply choose to maximise their profits at the expense of a minority of their clients, for whom they obviously don't give a shit.
Note that we're talking about companies big enough to have factories where they make several different kinds of food item. So those are the same people who happily sell over-processed food with excess quantities of salt, sugar and fat. Not only do they not give a shit about the minority of their customers with allergies, they don't give a shit about the majority of their customers, either. They just want to sell shit and make $$$!!!
This legislation backfired because people are assholes and put their profits above everything else, not because regulators are idiots who can't foresee the consequences of their decisions.
I think the issue here is 'may contain' is not legally binding in any manner therefore stricken from consideration in any product liability. Your legal liability is 'contains' or 'does not contain', but you cannot list a 'contains' if your product does not contain said ingredient, so now you're legally incentivised to add the allergen to the product to reduce your total liability.
I’ve had some experience with it in a close relative. Interestingly enough, the whole seeds are usually fine as you don’t digest them, the protein in question is inside the seed (unless you go out of your way to chew them). Most sesame oils are also fine. It’s the pastes that are dangerous (some desserts, hummus, sauces).
That’s funny because it is unusual to actually crush a sesame seed.
I either have to position and bite down on one between my canines or they may break up when they get stuck between teeth or in course of unsticking them.
Sesame seeds are never that satisfying to eat, but they do add texture to the bun.
I am. I'm lucky in that I'm not anaphylactic to it, but it causes me other problems. I was able to eat sesame for decades, then one day, after having a bunch of other issues, I went to the doctor and they tested me for a bunch of stuff and a bunch of stuff I could previously eat without issue, I'm now allergic to. It really sucks, though it's better than if it caused anaphylaxis.
FYI this reads like you were fine with sesame until you went to the doctor for something else, and you came away with an allergy to sesame. Maybe that's what you meant, but that would be even scarier to me than "I discovered I had developed an allergy to sesame as a consequence of other issues"!
In some places, it is shrinkflation. At Walmart, the baked-in-the-store bread with sesame seeds on top runs $1.78. Without the seeds, $1.48. February of 2022, both loaves cost $1.00.
Seems odd. Trader Joe's still sells peanuts. McDonalds still uses sesame seeds on Big Mac buns. It's not as if foods stop being sold when they're classified as potential allergens.
Not necessarily an allergy thing - could be cost out, supply chain issues, or a new focus group that tells them that consumers don't actually like sesame seeds.
That was dishonest. Fortunately, it probably didn't matter at all? Because there's not an evil spirit that condemns folks who eat beef products even by accident.
Evil spirits can operate sort of like pychosomatic illnesses though, right? If someone tells you that you just ate a parasite-infested human brain, are you not going to start freaking the fuck out every time you see a sun spot or have a weird dream? Feeding X to someone who worships X without their consent or knowledge is basically dooming them to a lifetime of fear.
I had a misdiagnosed sesame allergy and I spent decades irritated by having to pull off the seeds or ask for 2 bottom buns. I’m thrilled to see more seedless options
What I’ve always wondered: What exactly do these seeds add to the experience? I never really got the point of sesame seeds. Now that I can eat them again I still don’t get it.
On hamburger buns, seasame seeds are usually pretty sparse, but add a little bit of texture, and if the seads get heated enough when the buns are toasted, sometimes a bit stronger flavor.
On other breads, sometimes there's enough density that you get a real flavor from the seeds.
growing up in the white-bread baguette loving country, i experienced my first real variety of bread with 13 at a youth hostel in Bavaria ; i can’t begin to describe the incredible taste of sesame buns and how i grieved for that taste afterwards
> As I jabbed my finger at that laggy touchscreen, a helpful employee asked if he could assist me instead. I explained the predicament, and I saw his reality give out as well. Now we were both adrift in a sea of confusion.
Nope, you saw him engage Retail Worker Droid Mode, where their soul leaves their body.
I was lucky to see Hedberg before he died much too young. One of the times I’ve laughed hardest in my life is when he said “if I stand on this mic cord and talk for a while and then let it go, you’ll hear a bunch of jokes all at once”.
We'll I'll say one thing, I'm glad soy is reported in the "contains" area now.
If I accidentally buy a soy product my wife is basically screaming at me after eating it (out of her mind). Then after she finds out I bought soy she screams at me again (this time in her right mind). Don't buy soy guys, it's a fucking estrogenic nightmare at home.
In 2000 the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended parents wait until 3 years to introduce peanuts. 17 years later they dramatically reversed the guidance and admitted it probably was at least partly responsible for the meteoric rise of peanut allergies in America.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6157280/