> But there's a lot of things that say butter that don't contain "Milk". In the US, packaging is guaranteed to have an accurate "contains" section.
The box of Unsalted Butter already says "Milk" in the ingredients list. It does not need a second warning that says "Contains Milk". The article seem to be confusing the two - they are two different "labels" on the same packaging.
Is there a human alive that would read the ingredients list and think to themselves, "Hmm, it says Milk is an ingredient, but I don't see a 'Contains Milk' warning, so it probably doesn't contain milk!"?
That is the bureaucratic nonsense people are sick and tired of.
You are arguing for a much more complicated set of rules that now have to define what's obvious and what isn't. Is your preferred rule that they don't have to list allergens if they're already in the ingredients? Is it a custom cutout for butter? One ingredient items?
I'd say the recall is probably more pointless, who is going to check this at home?
If you set punishments at the "cost of doing business" level, then businesses will choose [0] to take the punishment, rather than complying with the regulation.
This is a food safety regulation of the sort where some people will die if it's not compiled with. It's also a food safety regulation that's easy to comply with... if the manufacturer is aware of what's in their food.
IMO, noncompliance with this is a sign that something's fucking wrong with the company and maybe shouldn't be in charge of making food for people to eat. Remember that one band that had the "no brown M&Ms in the band's candy bowl" clause in their performance contracts? While I can't claim that this is a "canary" regulation, it sure smells like it could serve as a pretty solid one given how easy it is to comply with.
[0] Not always, but more often than "never", and probably more often than not.
That was Van Halen. They used the "bowl full of M&Ms, but no brown M&Ms" requirement as a simple litmus test, after repeatedly showing up at venues that lied about fundamental problems like doors that couldn't fit all of the band's equipment.
A packaging mistake for a single truckload of butter is now a signal of something "fucking wrong" with a company who otherwise has a pretty stellar track record of consumer protection? A packaging mistake that likely happens many times over by lesser brands and products but is never caught because they don't have the same amount of exposure and customer base as Costco?
The recall makes sense for stuff still on the shelves. It's a bit silly, but rules are rules. Pull it and stuff it in different packaging, or pay a crew of a couple folks in each store to pull it out of the boxes and donate to a local food kitchen.
The FDA telling people at home to throw it away - after they are made aware of the issue in the first place or they wouldn't have known to be told to throw it away - is utter ridiculousness and the government workers here should absolutely know better. They are undermining their authority and don't even realize it.
This will be used as a very effective tool against the institution in the future. It was a stupid tone-deaf call. They could have simply worked with Costco and put out a generalized notice to the public to be aware of the situation. Nuance matters.
This is an unnecessary own-goal by a government agency that doesn't need such things at the moment. It has done more damage to public health than it will ever have hoped to gain - which would be correctly estimated at zero.
> The FDA telling people at home to throw it away...
Are they?
I was unable to find any evidence of this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42153441>. If you can find an official statement from the FDA that recommends (or orders) folks at home to dispose of the recalled food, I'd appreciate it.
TFA lists it as a quote. If the author made it up without taking that statement from the FDA that would be on the author. It's not very ambiguous.
> The FDA has shared specific steps to help consumers handle this recall safely. First, check the product codes on your butter containers and compare them to the codes in the recall notice. If you have one of the recalled batches, the FDA advises not to eat it under any circumstances. Instead, throw it out to avoid any health risks. For any questions or possible refunds, reach out to Costco through their customer service team.
Edit: It is certainly curious that this looks like boilerplate language. I do wonder if it originates from an FDA spokesperson, or if the author copy/pasted a previous press release from Costco? Another article[0] explicitly states the FDA did not make any recommendations to consumers, but mentions the quoted statement and sourced it from foodsafety.gov as a general recommendation for "recalled products".
Looking like the author completely made up the quote out of whole cloth by copy/pasting boilerplate generalized language while implying it was a directly related to the issue at hand. Nice catch!
Edit 2: Can't reply directly due to ratelimiting - but yes, you are absolutely correct that the FDA has not urged anyone, or even explicitly recommended it be thrown away. The above was my independent sleuthing before seeing your followup. Others did far better.
I don't share the opinion this was "lazy telephone" by a reporter though - this was outright deliberate making things up to generate a narrative. Either there was a phone call/e-mail by a FDA rep these articles are quoting, or they are simply trying to generate outrage on purpose. There is no game of lazy telephone that can explain word choices such as "FDA urges" and the like to appear out of whole cloth.
It USED to be the case that you could click the direct link to a comment to get the reply box to appear when the little "reply" link is refusing to show up. That might no longer be true, but it's worth a try next time you run into this.
> ...this was outright deliberate making things up to generate a narrative.
Oh, that's not an unreasonable assessment.
> There is no game of lazy telephone that can explain word choices such as "FDA urges" and the like to appear out of whole cloth.
If one site reports it, then other sites repeat it, that totally qualifies as "lazy telephone", IMO.
If you haven't visited that link I provided in the last five minutes, I urge you to do so. In that thread, a fellow has done some decent detective work.
It looks like the article author (and/or editor) has played lazy telephone, and the FDA issued no such statement.
> A packaging mistake for a single truckload of butter is now a signal of something "fucking wrong" with a company who otherwise has a pretty stellar track record of consumer protection?
Honestly? Yeah.
There are a lot of little things you need to make sure happen correctly to produce and ship safe food that's fit for human consumption. If the QA for the package redesign failed to notice that the legally-mandated allergen field is missing from the package, what else is company QA letting slip through the cracks? [0]
Also, I don't know if you've ever worked for a company that had a management change that destroyed the company's ability to continue to ship a proper product, but I definitely have, as have folks I've known. By the time folks outside the company notice, the rot is usually bad, bad, bad.
Additionally: Remember that "a signal of something fucking wrong" is not the same as "something is fucking wrong". People and organizations are known to send out worrisome signals and still be fundamentally sound. But in the area of food safety, it's the job of the FDA to notice these worrisome signals and go look to see if something is currently fucking wrong with the company.
[0] Or if those labels are manually applied, the same question holds.
> it's the job of the FDA to notice these worrisome signals and go look to see if something is currently fucking wrong with the company.
Fair points, but this recall looks to be vendor-initiated from the actual FDA website itself. Found via previous sleuthing in our discussion downthread. The FDA is simply adding it to it's database as it does, and the media picked it up from there. It's unlikely we'll ever be told if this was found via customer complaint, or via an internal QA process.
The one point also that I meant to make earlier, is that these products are likely contracted out. I wonder how many creameries Costco outsources their butter production to? I know other Kirkland products are simple rebrands, so I would assume the case is the same here as well.
> I wonder how many creameries Costco outsources their butter production to? I know other Kirkland products are simple rebrands, so I would assume the case is the same here as well.
That's a good question. The rumor I heard says that Costco plays super, duper hardball with companies that aren't willing to pay the low, low price Costco wants... using tactics such as waiting until a vendor's product nears the point of becoming unsellable as leverage. If that rumor's true, well, Costco may contract with very many creameries and serve as a "retailer of last resort" for them.
If the packaging is 'Kirkland' branded, and was provided by Costco, I wonder what fuckup happened so that the allergens section was omitted from the packaging. It'd be fucking dumb for that label to have to be manually applied. [0] So... was this a packaging printing error? If so, who was responsible for the QA?
> ...this recall looks to be vendor-initiated...
That may be a signal that the creamery caught the error and recalled the shipments. It might ALSO be the case that Costco caught the error and demanded the vendor recall the shipments. I don't think we have the data required to determine who deserves the credit for that action.
[0] But things that are fucking dumb happen all the time, so that's not proof that that's not what's up.
Are there English speaking humans that are deathly allergic to milk who would think that cream is OK?
To be clear, I'm fine with the recall because you want stuff like this to have clear lines, I just don't think there is any actual real danger in this case.
I never look at "Ingredients". I look at "Contains". That's the important section for anyone with allergies.
You clearly don't have a deadly food allergy. "Contains" is highly regulated ("Ingredients" is not), and everyone with a food allergy trusts "Contains". This isn't about this one particular situation, which admittedly is obvious. It's about maintaining the trust of the "Contains" section.
Who is "sick and tired of" allergy labels being too strict? Is this really something people get up in arms about?
> Who is "sick and tired of" allergy labels being too strict? Is this really something people get up in arms about?
People are sick and tired of nonsense bureaucracy - and this is a prime example.
Destroying 80,000 pounds of perfectly fine butter so some bureaucrats can pat themselves on the back is pretty absurd. Nobody was harmed - nobody was saved. This is just waste because some piece of paper says it has to be wasted...
I just wanted to look so I had context. Annual production of butter in the US is over 2,060,000,000 pounds.
These aren't new rules and are in place to literally save lives.
Are people really "sick and tired" of .003% of the butter being recalled? I feel like repeating "80,000 pounds" is attempting to appeal to emotion over the destruction of some mass quantity when in reality it's a rounding error.
If only you could rely on common sense! But companies have been allowed to run roughshod for so long and sell things that are deceptively labeled for so long that the law finally had to step in with bureaucracy. You can't apply common sense when companies are allowed to label things as X when they aren't X.
Does something labeled "butter" contain milk? Does something labeled "milk" contain milk? This thread shows the answers to these questions are not straightforward and cannot be determined with common sense.
We -have- to have strict labeling rules around allergens and destroy products that don't comply because if we didn't, it would just be the wild west like it is with products that are not allergens.
For example of why it's not always so easy - Vanilla ice cream is being sold in the UK with 0 vanilla, 0 milk and 0 cream. No minimum milkfat requirements - they can use any fat they want.
Products are confusing, we shouldn't expect people to know how today's industrial food process works.
When, specifically and exactly, should it be “common sense” and when should it have to be labeled? What, specifically, makes your new “label it sometimes but only when you personally think it needs a label” process less “bureaucratic”?
I don’t get this nonsense where a bunch of people can neither empathize nor understand that people other than themselves exist and should be able to rely on relatively simple packaging, and that the instant you create inane and bizarre carve-outs, you create risk for absolutely no benefit whatsoever.
It depends upon one's perspective. I would think that having it listed on the ingredients is sufficient. That said, some people who are allergic to something will not examine the list of ingredients when the regulations state they allergen must be listed under what the product contains. It is about trust, not bureaucrats patting themselves on the back.
Only when it's something that doesn't affect them. These same people whining and crying about macro-scale system bureaucracies will absolutely meltdown when the consequences of not having those systems in place hits (think supply chain issues during covid).
So much is taken for granted in our modern world because so many are unwilling to surrender to complexities beyond their reasoning. They alone have the answer and all must know it.
80k pounds of butter is being destroyed because the private company who made it could not be assed to do proper QA over a batch.
This isn't government overreach, this is a company trying to save money by doing less QA and getting bit for it.
THIS TIME it was caught, and handled, and the company is seeing a negative outcome for their lack of diligence in making OUR FOOD. What about next time? Maybe companies should be discouraged from lacking QA like this?
Someone buys it, then resells it without the putting up the warning sign. Who is liable: the manufacturer or the person reselling it? (I've seen plenty of small convenience stores reselling food simply because their suppliers don't offer the same prices to them as they do to large grocery chains.)
This isn't QA over food. It's not like the butter was contaminated or something.
It's QA over packaging.
And you have no evidence that this was motivated by trying to "save money by doing less QA".
US food manufacturers generally do their absolute best on QA because recalls are super expensive and the headlines are bad. But companies are made up of humans who are never going to be 100.0000000% perfect.
If you look at a food package and don't see Contains how do you know if it's truly absent or if perhaps it's on a different part of the label and you missed it?
On the practical personal safety level this is easy to answer. If you(or the person you are going to serve it to) have food alergy for any of the categories and you can’t find a “Contains” list then you don’t consume(serve) the item.
Want to make it clear i’m not arguing with this against the current alergen labeling laws. I see it as a variant of Postel’s principle. The food manufacturers should label everything strictly, and consumers affected by any alergy should assume that where there is no information then the alergen they worry about is present. This way the system remains trustworthy while the customers can safely avoid where mistakes are made or packaging gets damaged or smudged or anything like that.
Oftentimes "ingredients" will be an incredibly long list. As someone that needs to pay attention to ingredients on food for a severe tree nut allergy, it's so so so much easier to quickly parse a two-item "contains" section than a 40 item "ingredients" section.
I've made mistakes on food that has _just_ "ingredients", missing entries while scanning at the grocery store.
Unfortunately, "contains" isn't required, and its location isn't always obvious. imo it should flatly be always required and always in a standardized layout/location (e.g. in a clear to read box).
it's so so so much easier to quickly parse a two-item "contains" section than a 40 item "ingredients" section
Imagine if everyone who has an uncommon allergy wanted to have their allergen listed in "contains" too. You'll just end up with two "ingredients" lists instead. It's insanely stupid and redundant.
I've seen enough comments from you on technical computing subjects over the last decade to know that you have a firm grasp of concepts such as caching and other related ways to take advantage of usage patterns to optimize things.
Just as caches are useful in computing even if they are too small to hold everything so too is a contains section that only lists the top 9 allergens. That covers 90% of food allergies in the US.
This is a strawman. It seems obvious the number of items covered is a balance between the size of the affected population and the size of the list. I use "it seems obvious" intentionally.
The box of Unsalted Butter already says "Milk" in the ingredients list. It does not need a second warning that says "Contains Milk". The article seem to be confusing the two - they are two different "labels" on the same packaging.
Is there a human alive that would read the ingredients list and think to themselves, "Hmm, it says Milk is an ingredient, but I don't see a 'Contains Milk' warning, so it probably doesn't contain milk!"?
That is the bureaucratic nonsense people are sick and tired of.