Terra Incognita

My nephew is very allergic to eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, and sesame. Last year my sister discovered all hot dogs and hamburger buns now contain sesame. Not "may contain", but listed in the ingredients. This year basically every brand of sliced bread also now contains sesame, making it very difficult to find bread items he can eat.

They're just adding it to their products, so they can just list it as an ingredient and not bother with worrying about cross contamination. And they aren't even bothering with telling anyone. Capitalism is going to kill us all.

"Which brings us back to Kellogg’s. Back in 2016, the company found a way around the added burden and expense of complying with the FSMA: they simply began adding trace amounts of peanut flour to their cracker products. Doing so allowed them to list peanuts as an ingredient of the product, freeing them from having to prevent cross-contact.

Four-year-old Mia McDermott just kept getting sick. Throughout January, she had persistent headaches, vomited frequently and became dehydrated, and every time she got better, she’d get worse again. Even after eating one of her favorite foods, a Wendy’s cheeseburger, Mia became violently ill, said her mother, Jessica McDermott.

McDermott was baffled: Her little girl was allergic to sesame, but she was only eating foods she had always eaten safely.

That same month, Emily Tibbs’s 2-year-old son suddenly developed a rash on his face, a cough and stomach pain that made him cry after eating Dave’s Killer white bread, Tibbs said. The Nashville mom was bewildered: Her toddler was allergic to sesame, but she hadn’t fed him anything other than the foods he normally ate.

Scouring the labels of what their children had eaten, both mothers were horrified to discover that sesame was now listed as an ingredient in the cheeseburger, the bread and other baked products that had previously been sesame-free. “I’d been unknowingly poisoning [Mia] for several weeks,” said McDermott, who lives in Philadelphia.

What happened? On Jan. 1, a law intended to safeguard the more than 1.5 million Americans with a sesame allergy — including the McDermott and Tibbs children (and, full disclosure, my son as well) — took effect. The law mandates, among other things, careful cleaning to prevent cross-contact between food products with and without sesame.

In a twist few would have expected, however, 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.

The result? Foods that sesame-allergic kids and adults have eaten safely for years are now potentially life-threatening.

END

From Inside Hook:

According to The Washington Post, the FDA “does not support adding sesame as a strategy to comply with the law. Labeling is not to be used instead of current good manufacturing practices with regard to allergens,” an FDA spokesperson told the publication. This is obviously a huge issue, especially because these companies are adding sesame in the form of flour instead of seeds. So now items that previously didn’t have the allergen might contain it, but it’s invisible to the eye — which is particularly a problem for children because they were likely used to seeing and avoiding the seeds.

Per The Washington Post, here is a list of companies that have now added sesame to previously sesame-free items: Wendy’s, Dave’s Killer Bread, Chick-fil-A, Olive Garden, Walmart, Target, Wonder, Nature’s Own, Sara Lee, Ballpark, Thomas Bagels, Franz Bakeries, Jack in the Box, Sonic, Pan-O-Gold, Culver’s, Kroger and Wegmans. So if you have a severe sesame allergy and shop or eat at any of these places, watch the fuck out — their products could now kill you.

I am stronger than the jar

⁠⁠I know what left and right are

⁠⁠smashing the jar will make a mess

⁠⁠I have strong and dextrous hands

y’all took off with the other post though it wasn’t finished 😭 very thankful for the love however

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

We are making genuine progress! Producers are dramatically altering how much they use PFAS and how much gets released in effluent, but also there's a lot better understanding of how to remove PFAS from the environment!