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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26736 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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Reminds me about that law banning leaving trace amounts of sesame (?), even with warning on packaging. Intended to be help for people deathly allergic to it. Deliberate inclusion of sesame remained legal.

Resulting in producers starting to add sesame deliberately. Impacting people with allergy but capable of eating products that had just traces of it.

Resulting in producers starting to add sesame deliberately. Impacting people with allergy but capable of eating products that had just traces of it.

I'm dumb. Why would this rule change cause them to start adding sesame deliberately?

Edited my comment a bit to clarify that deliberate addition remained legal.

  1. building separate sesame-free factory was infeasible
  2. they were not allowed to list sesame as in product without adding it
  3. they were banned from listing product as maybe containing some traces of sesame
  4. stopping using any sesame in all products would hurt them more (and they would need to do extreme cleaning of factory)

What else they could do?

How much do you think it costs to prevent trace contamination from a fairly common ingredient in other products? Your options are effectively 1) extremely thorough cleaning, 2) completely separate production facilities, or 3) stop making either the products with sesame or those without. Option 3 is by far the cheapest and there's apparently more demand for products with sesame than without.

  1. requires also stopping any use of sesame in all products made in that factory

Ah, that's what I was missing. I thought they could simply say "made on equipment that may have traces of sesame".

And exactly that practice was banned causing the mess.

That's the warning they were effectively campaigning against

Presumably there is an exception to sesame products, i.e. if your product does not have sesame listed as an ingredient, you need to make absolutely sure there is zero sesame in it.

Exactly this one.

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