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Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

> How did we end up in a place where the companies aren't putting the cross-contamination ingredients

Isn't it because it's not an explicit ingredient but a risk of trace contamination? I'm not sure that an ingredients list with a bunch of "might also contain ____" items at the end.

The warning is pretty easy to spot when it's supplied.

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The change in the law makes that insufficient to eliminate the liability. It isn't a matter of labeling but the cost of eliminating any possibility of cross contamination.

Right, I'm not saying it absolves the company, just that putting it in the ingredients list isn't helpful or honest, either.

New labeling law doesn't fix anything here.

How is it not honest? It's not helpful, but it seems perfectly honest (assuming the product actually contains the ingredients listed.)

If I see sesame in an ingredients list, and I discover that really means “we don’t deep clean the oven conveyer after cooking sesame products”, I think I’d feel at least a little tricked.

That's not what it means in this case. In this case, it means that "we intentionally added some otherwise-not-needed sesame to the product, in order to comply with this law and the truth-in-labeling laws."

It also means they don’t feel confident enough in their cleaning process and would prefer to add cost to their manufacturing process than to ensure clean machines

I'm pretty sure the producers involved understand their costs better than you or I and have concluded the optimal outcome is to add an epsilon of sesame cost than a multiple of that of additional decontamination cost.

In this specific hypothetical, sure.

Or it could mean the conveyor next to it uses lots of sesame oil and they can’t guarantee every single particle stayed in that belt.

Or it could mean the conveyor on the other side of the factory is and they don’t want to risk it.

Nobody knows the specific reasoning a company has for adding it in unless they had insider info from the company itself. Everything else is pure speculation.

Have you ever cleaned up sesame seeds? The article's "remove all the sand" analogy is exactly on point - they're tiny and get stuck tight in every available crack. No normal cleaning process is going to remove all of them.

Companies can’t just put it in the ingredients list, that would also be illegal. They need to actually add it to the product.

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