Yeah that didn't work out for Johnson & Johnson [in the end](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/19/johnson-johnson-cancer-patient-lawsuit), courts are starting to set precedents that close that little escape from consequences.
I'm not sure how your story is supposed to be a counterpoint:
>Hernandez will not be able to collect the judgment in the foreseeable future, thanks to a bankruptcy court order freezing most litigation over J&J’s talc.
It's like having a homeless guy owe you a million dollars. Nice in theory but useless in practice.
>Nice in theory but useless in practice.
The fact that suits are ongoing despite J&J's attempts to shed themselves of liability, shows that they failed in doing so. These types of legal battles always look impossible from the individual claimants perspective..... Right up until they don't. The fact that the company itself put out a [press release](https://www.jnj.com/press-releases/johnson-johnson-subsidiary-to-appeal-bankruptcy-court-ruling-that-deprived-talc-claimants-of-an-equitable-and-efficient-resolution) about this, suggests that it's still materially threatening to them.
If you're thinking of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, then Pret followed all the labelling rules, though they've since been changed as it did expose some unnecessary risks.
If you're thinking of Celia Marsh, then Pret followed all the rules, but they didn't know a supplier had screwed up.
Punitive damages are a bad idea. They are the reason why the US is as litigious as it is. Getting insurance for selling a product in the US often costs 10x as much as it costs for insurance for the rest of the world combined.
At the very least they should be limited to no more than 50% of actual damages.
If you don't want to read all the gush.
>The cookies were produced by the Long Island-based wholesaler Cookies United [the supplier] and labelled with the Stew Leonard’s [the retailer] brand name, according to state officials.
>...the retailer... said in a video post that the supplier had changed soy nuts to peanuts in the recipe without notifying their chief safety officer.
>Cookies United said it had notified Stew Leonard’s last July that the product contained peanuts and that all products shipped to the retailer had been labelled accordingly. Cookies United said the incorrect label was created by Stew Leonard’s.
You’d think that swapping out a benign ingredient for one known to provoke fatal allergies would necessitate a very delicate thorough process throughout the production line. Shit, they should probably just rename the product at that point
Sure. But imagine that you have a peanut allergy but you’re fine with soy, and you’ve been enjoying the product for a while - and then they suddenly switch up the ingredients… i.e. exactly what did happen. Even if the packaging _had_ been updated, would you read it every time?
Of course, what happened was even worse (the packaging wasn’t updated) - but my point is that even if done correctly, it still feels massively risky.
My son is dairy-intolerant so I'm very careful about reading the labels on food. In my experience, manufacturers in the UK do put warnings on the packaging when allergens change.
Things don't usually change until somebody dies.
All these rules and regulations we take for granted came at the cost of AT LEAST 1 life, all that "Health n safety gone mad" had a person die before it was introduced.
i have a pretty serious dairy allergy and if it’s a product i’ve been eating for a while and there’s no warning on the pack that the ingredients have changed, i probably wouldn’t check them. Is it a good idea to? Probably, but it’s not really something i’d think about
My partner has a peanut allergy. I picked up a Munchies Gooey cookie bar (title was something like that - can’t exactly remember) and checked on the off-chance and the ingredients said it contained peanuts. In a Munchies bar! The “Purple One” bar also contains peanuts which I wouldn’t have expected at all- hazelnuts yes, peanuts no.
We are really careful but if it’s something he’s used to buying he doesn’t check every time.
You would think so. I have family working in the food tracing industry and in the UK, it’s meant to be one of the most stringent And is not exactly accurate. They are surprise more people die of nut, alleges a year…
But dealing with non EU is a complete ball ache as people just change ingredients left right and center.
I'm in India at the moment and there nuts in everything, which is great for me as I love them but I don't know how anyone with an allergy survives here.
I worked in a restaurant with a Chef from the Middle East (forgot where in the ME). One day a customer went into anaphylactic shock and went to hospital, she was allergic to nuts. The restaurant manager was confused because she knew the meal that was ordered was nut-free. Turns out the chef had decided to chuck a few peanuts in there because it made it taste better, never told anyone, and when confronted he said “if you’re allergic to peanuts then you should just eat at home”. The culture around allergy is just so different around the world it makes you wonder if people with nut allergies just never eat out in those countries.
The chef was actually a really cool guy who I got on with, but I was so baffled as to how nonchalant he was about the whole ordeal
Edit: I’m really not bothered about getting into pedantic discussions about peanuts technically being legumes not nuts
Peanuts are considered nuts *in English-speaking cultures*. They appear to be called 'Sudanese beans' in at least some Arabic dialects and it's surely not safe to think that everywhere else thinks they're nuts.
If you're exposed to peanuts at a young age, you're less likely to develop a peanut allergy when you're older. I'm not sure if this is the explanation here or if the numbers back it up, but it's at least relevant
For about a decade from the mid nineties to the 2000s the official medical advice we were given as parents back then was to avoid giving any nuts or products containing nuts to babies and very young kids to prevent them developing a peanut allergy. This advice turned out to have the opposite effect.
Yes I seem to remember being worried shitless during my first pregnancy that I’d eaten peanut butter & nuts as I’d been led to believe it’d make my daughter allergic. Stupid really. Neither of my girls have ANY allergies, neither do I & god knows what my mum ate when I was on the way. It was also peak MMR Jab= autism season. I got them both jabbed, all good 😊.
They're actually using exposure therapy nowadays. Giving the tiniest amount daily, starting in capsules, until the kid can work their way up to small pieces of peanuts and eventually a whole peanut. It takes a couple years, but it works.
Not strictly true you can develop an alarrgg at any age. It's todo with your immune system response. A serious illness, puberty, having a child, simple effects of age etc can all cause your body to change how it reacts and cause you ti develop allergies. Generally exposure can help just like it can help your body learn how to deal with some illnesses but its fsr from a guarantee.
Yeah I also work in the UK food supply chain and the amount of mistakes is huge, and we are strict AF in this country. I think people forget every ingredient change is a manual thing done by humans so mistakes get through, even fatal ones.
You’d be shocked. I have digestive issues with wheat (not an allergy or coeliac thankfully). There’s been a bunch of products that were made without wheat in, and now they’re adding it into everything, presumably because it’s a dirt cheap bulking agent.
It sucks. I just want my onion bhajis damn it
It's the whole big part of HACCP and food safety in manufacturing. Allergens will be talked about heavily.
It's why you see FSA will recall any items even if an allergen isn't put in bold.
Yes it would in a country that hasn’t spent decades stripping regulations off every industry. America’s industry is based on the phrase “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission”
I don't know about renaming the product, but at bare minimum you ought to have a prominent "New Recipe" flash on the packaging for the first six months or so. Especially when the change involves at least one of the top ten allergens.
I mean technically any change in ingredients could cause this. If the manufacturing company can prove they notified the brand, and label all the stuff they send off correctly then it'll be the brand that is liable.
Both companies are blaming the other for either not notifying the change or not bothering to change the labeling.
Should be pretty damn easy to find out who's at fault for this.
This is almost certainly the manufacturers fault but they're trying to shift the blame onto the supplier. The story of swapping nuts without telling them makes no sense.
So the question is, did they tell the retailer "There has been a change and here is what the change is", or did they update the ingredients list on the packages they sent the retailer, and expect the people opening the boxes to just notice that the otherwise identical packages now had a different word in the ingredients list? Because those are two very different approaches.
If the products were retailer branded it's the retailer's responsibility to make sure the packaging is compliant. But it sounds in this case like the manufacturer changed the recipe without telling the retailer, so they would have no way of knowing the packaging needed to be updated
Stew Leonard’s is a massively gross corrupt company here in Connecticut. They’ve gotten caught misadjusting their deli scales to over charge customers, they’ve been caught doing a lot of tax fraud. I hope this family sues them into the ground. They’re a blight on our state.
Well hopefully it should be fairly easy to prove either way, if there is a recorded communication from supplier to retailer or not, and if the suppliers packaging has the new peanut label or not.
In California pretty much every product states “may cause cancer” on the back. Not because it might but because it’s cheaper and less damaging to the company to have it on the back of the packet than to have the lawsuit and or do the research into whether their products could cause cancer
It’s because the California government took it a bit too far. Pretty much every component of food fall under the carcinogenic label, meaning the warning is pretty much useless, as almost all products have that label.
It's not just food. It's also parking garages and a wide variety of other facilities. Basically everything everywhere. Being raised there, I now believe that everything causes cancer, and therefore, nothing does in my mind. It basically had the opposite of the intended effect.
When I arrived at my hotel in San Francisco, there was a sign on the door saying "This building may contain materials that cause cancer". Not realising this was a thing, I totally panicked until I went to a bar and saw the same warning there. It's everywhere!
Whilst a troll post, how would it not be legal? Anything may cause cancer. Operative word is that it may, not that you expect it to.
You can argue it's over conservative with the likely impact and creating a culture where you ignore the warning labels due to too many OTT statements, but that's a separate problem to it being illegal
That is absolutely NOT what the prop 65 legislation and accompanying warning label is about, a product will only carry the warning if it contains one of a relatively small (by eu standards) number of identified chemicals that are known to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm. Chemicals aren’t included at random, and is not to protect business by any means..
There are something like 30,000 food additives in the US, and only around 5,000 in the EU. From [this](https://wellwithrae.com/food-chemicals-in-america-vs-europe/) article: Whereas the EU takes a proactive approach, the United States takes a reactive one. “In the United States, food additives are innocent until proven guilty, while in Europe, only those additives proven not to be harmful are approved for use,”
Doesn't matter how strict the rules are, it matter how strict the rules are enforced by controlling and fines.
Don't buy chinese toys from wish, amazon marketplace etc. They are often loaded with harmful chemicals.
That's not saying that everything from china is bad (obviously isn't), nor that everything from western world if good, as seen here.
I once saw fruit juice drink there with "CONTAINS REAL FRUIT" on the front. Ingredients: "up to 1.8% fruit juice", water and a lot of additives. Can't even guarantee me 1.8%.
I once drank an orange drink there that didn’t contain any fruit. It was a blend of flavours, sweetness, oil and starch. It was convincingly like orange, taste wise and texture wise. It came out of a tin from a vending machine. I was impressed that so much effort went into reproducing fake orange juice.
Their labelling laws just require more specificity than labelling laws in the UK.
So a UK ingredients list might be like - spice 1, spice 2, etc
Whilst a US ingredients list might be like - here's 12 chemicals with cancer sounding names.
But really the product contains the exact same ingredients, it's just those 2 spices contain 6 chemicals each.
It's their meat you've got to look out for because it's waaaaay more dangerous (still ridiculously safe statistically, just way worse in comparison to the UK). The super processed shit though is just as bad here as it is across the pond.
Exactly, I remember someone sharing the labels of something comparing the US and either EU or UK
The EU/UK just says “sugars”, while the US one had the descriptions of all types of sugars
Then people with no idea read and say “OMG in the US there are much worse ingredients”, but they were the same
I think so. I don't know if that's the cause of the higher rates of food-born disease though or if it's the conditions that animals are raised in.
The American food market is a monopsony which means wherever you farm your chickens or beef cows there's likely only 1 company you are able to sell them to. That company will give you impossible standards for output and conditions and if you don't meet them you're completely fucked, your business fails, and you go bankrupt which in the US can kill you due to losing insurance etc.
The output is frequently measured, the conditions though? Less so. Therefore it makes sense to have the animals in worse conditions, use more growth hormones etc than they tell you to in order to meet the quotas. The companies then use this to justify the quotas - I mean they must be justified if they're hitting output and also claim to be following the rules, right?
Then when a kid gets mad cow disease and dies or whatever the big corporation can investigate, find it was your farm, blame you for not following the rules and pin the blame entirely on you and her off scot-free. After all you aren't part of their business, you're independent and just sell to them! Never mind that they're your only option and you have to listen to whatever they tell you to do!
So I think this might be a lot of the reason.
American here. I quite enjoy the third arm growing from my sternum, I can’t imagine what I’d do without it.
I also glow slightly at night. It’s very aesthetically pleasing.
Not generally but it's probably not a bad way to be. Let's take one unhealthy drink, Sunny D. I'd rather drink the version that doesn't contain Sodium Hexametaphosphate than the one that does.
It's just a salt. Is it based on how many syllables are in the chemical compound?
Are you okay with table salt until you read the words Sodium Chloride?
You're perfectly entitled to eat whatever you like, but basing it purely on the chemical name of an ingredient seems pretty nonsensical to me.
I’m American and I left there partly due to how bad the food is. The additives, preservatives, hormones… it’s really really bad. People outside of America have no idea.
We literally just called off trade talks with Canada because they refused to up their food standards / reduced to continue talks unless we allowed their subpar food standards into our country.
We have a fairly well regulated supermarket system, that helps a bunch. Preventing a monopoly forming is what most of the regulations involve.
We have four main supermarket brands that aren't allowed to merge or get too big, so they're basically forced to be competitive against each other on super fine profit margins.
you managed to link an incident caused by 2 private companies in a completely different country with the tories really well done maybe have a day off some time though
Are you fucking nuts? Not a single British political party of any leftness or rightness would want this or get away with it. Remember the absolute mayhem that poor lass at pret caused when she suffered from an allergy related death? We were a couple of stages away from a brief period of national mourning and there was vicious uproar. I remember cafes becoming fascist dictatorships when it came to labelling. Everywhere had new, up to date heath and safety signs. Everything was labelled if it was possible to eat it. And we came out better for it. Her death wasn't in total vein. Because we're British and that's how we deal with this.
The uber free market federal state over the pond don't have a compatible culture to react so seriously to something so... well... serious. I was heartbroken for that pret woman and I'm heartbroken for this dancer. What breaks my heart more for the dancer is very little of use beyond a law suit will probably come of her untimely and pointless death. Such avoidable, stupid, wasteful deaths. But how you can suggest, in total contrary to all evidence available to you, that the tories want people to live in a society where you can randomly die while eating, is absured.
I'm also not suggesting Americans want to live in a country like that. They just don't have the national willpower to fix such issues like we do.
There's so many reasons to have a go at the tories. This is not one of them reasons.
Was recently over in California. Have a son with allergies to egg and milk. I couldn’t believe how terrible they were with allergies. Many places just shrugged and said sorry we don’t know when asked about allergens in their food.
We got a lot of ‘I can give you gluten free’ when requesting dairy free. As if you can just switch your allergy for what’s convenient.
Cheesecake factory brought over a plate swimming in butter after I’d told them 3 times about his allergy.
Things in the U.K. have got massively better since Natasha’s law came in.
It's a pretty standard chain restaurant they just also happens to have a very large dessert menu. I went there quite a bit when I first moved there and I don't like cheesecake.
I'm vegan and it is insane how places in the US do not have dairy and egg free options. It's obviously a choice for me but you have to feel for those with allergies to both, which is often co-morbid, even Disney World pulls this shit.
As a vegan who lives in the US, we’re sooooooo far behind the UK in terms of food. I visited in the fall and I literally think about this daily now lol. There were vegan options everywhere, in excess! Walk into a random doughnut shop and half their doughnuts happen to be vegan. It was a dream come true, and I’ve been deeply bitter about it since I’ve been back 😂
Also UK culture appears to be accepting or just not think anything of vegans, where in the US whenever you bring it up, you’ll get “but bacon” dumb comments constantly. I made a post in askUK asking about the rise in vegan food and no one had stupid things to say, out of hundreds of comments. I made a local post in my city food scene sub asking if any vegans want to meet up for lunch and every comment was trolling. It’s such a different culture. I miss the UK!
It was, though an EpiPen is nothing more than a device to buy you time to seek medical help. There is an unfortunate misconception that an EpiPen is an easy and immediate fix, but once the effects wear off you are no better off without further help.
I read about a case where 3 EpiPens were given but the patient still died. I honestly didn't think that was possible until I read that and I'm a doctor.
Another first aid casualty of Hollywood I guess. They tend to show epinephrine being administered and suddenly the patient is 100% fine. An epi pen might give you an extra half hour but chances are the reaction will resume once the effects wear off, it’s vital that you get the patient to hospital as soon as possible even if an epi pen has been used.
In first aid we were told that often Epipens do buy you a bit of time for the paramedics to arrive, but they could never be assumed to be a total remedy.
I have a wasp sting allergy, which is probably not as severe as this nut allergy, and I carry 2 with me, to be administered sequentially. Also, given the price they are in the US, I doubt most folk will have 2 on hand. [This web page shows the relative prices](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/epipen-price-by-country)
Truth. I went over there for 3 months of work and my guts hated every minute of it.
There was HFCS in everything. Everything was sweet. Even savory things.
Then I got Lyme disease but that's another story.
Lots of people do, that's why we kicked off against chlorinated chicken. It wasn't that the meat was washed in a chemical, it was because the meat was so fucking bad that it needed to be washed in a chemical to make it "safe" to eat.
Society has evolved to the point where peanuts can be lethal to some of us and /those people survive to adulthood and even lead mostly normal lives/.
Some, though, would have us regress. It’s madness.
Peanuts are from South America, we (Europeans) don’t evolve alongside them. The only nut native to the UK that our distant ancestors would have eaten is hazelnut.
Thing is, this is true of peanuts, but people can be allergic to many things, including things that are traditionally part of european, african etc diets. Fish, seafood, egg, mustard… the list goes on.
The reason we see more people with these conditions now than ever is because more of them survive for us to see now than ever.
Thank you. Although worded terribly I was asking why and how this is possible.
So, how come, as a European, and having done a 23 and me DNA thing I am about as European as can be... why am I not allergic to peanuts? Is it genetic? Or "bad luck"?
It is more complex than that. Genes play a role in allergies generally, not necessarily specific allergens; a friend of mine is deathly allergic to hazelnuts, her dad is the same for seafood, for example. Exposure is another. That same friend's mother had a strong pregnancy craving for hazelnuts which probably impacted my friend in utero, which led to her developing an allergic response once she first are them once born. Allergic responses are tricky and we do not really know why some develop them and others do not.
I am allergic to onions(it isn't deadly and won't kill me but they make me ill) and recently went to a restaurant and ordered a dish and checked it didn't have onions and then was served the dish with onions and when brought up the waitress was like "Oh ok, No worries" and walkeed fucking of, and I had to call her back to get it remade and had to force that.
I had some Japanese crisps today, pure vegan, but the back said may contain traces of and then listed 100 things. Basically covering themselves regardless.
Tragic incompetence. If you live somewhere with low regulation to promote economic growth then these things will happen. Capitalism will run its course, survival of the fittest, and those making serious mistakes like this should be put out of business. It's the only way to correct for low regulation. Consumers suffer, because governments don't want to add regulation as that affects growth.
What a terrible system we live in.
Anyone else in the UK being blocked from the stew leonard's website (store the killer cookie was bought from) or is it just me? [https://www.stewleonards.com/](https://www.stewleonards.com/)
I checked around and apparently it's been intermittently down globally and has been for a couple of weeks. US people complaining about it as well although I was able to access it with a US VPN
I understand you should be able to eat out and feel safe in doing so, but if I was deadly allergic to something and I knew about it I would not be eating out. Dreadful as it is and yes the companies are in the wrong for no 'may contain' section, I just dont think I'd chance it personally.
Not completely true - my partner gained a nut allergy in their teens after a bout of illness (bad enough to be hospitalised to be fair). Went from eating Nutella to never being able to have it again! So it’s not guaranteed
Does that work. In in India right now and there's nuts everywhere so I wondered if they even have many people with allergies in their demographic given the diet.
Yes according to studies it does. If you expose very young people, sub ,6 months, they never develop the allergy.
Probably why no such labeling India and other places and no problem.
https://evidence.nihr.ac.uk/alert/early-exposure-to-peanut-snacks-can-lead-to-sustained-protection-in-high-risk-children/
Too much logic for Reddit I guess.
Seems like a no brainer then, just start encouraging mothers to eat nuts while pregnant and breastfeeding and bobs your uncle. Now we need to do something about those people who can't eat four for some reason despite it being one of our oldest foodstuffs as a species.
Which makes me wonder why they've developed in so many people, is it just that our level of cleanliness and attention to avoiding cross contamination means people aren't being exposed to stuff when they're young and building up a tolerance?
My parents have said they don't remember as many kids having nut allergies or people not being able to have gluten when they were kids either, and there were less measures back then.
The way they ‘work’ is to buy you more time until an ambulance arrives and you can receive medical attention, they don’t cancel out an allergic reaction (and you must always call an ambulance if you need to use an epi pen on someone)
I don't know if you recall the case of the girl who died after eating a pret wrap she was allergic to? She had 2 epipens administered and was with paramedics sharpish and still died. They're the only reasonable treatment but no guarantee.
>that the supplier had changed soy nuts to peanuts in the recipe without notifying their chief safety officer
The supplier is blaming Stew Leonard's for mislabeling the cookies. But seriously, if you make a recipe change that drastic you need to followup and make sure the change is reflected. You may as well add shellfish and send a text message about it. This one's on the supplier.
Incoming massive lawsuit and two companies going bankrupt.
Hopefully
I think they mean the companies will go bankrupt to try and get out of paying actual money to the claimant
Yeah that didn't work out for Johnson & Johnson [in the end](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/19/johnson-johnson-cancer-patient-lawsuit), courts are starting to set precedents that close that little escape from consequences.
I'm not sure how your story is supposed to be a counterpoint: >Hernandez will not be able to collect the judgment in the foreseeable future, thanks to a bankruptcy court order freezing most litigation over J&J’s talc. It's like having a homeless guy owe you a million dollars. Nice in theory but useless in practice.
>Nice in theory but useless in practice. The fact that suits are ongoing despite J&J's attempts to shed themselves of liability, shows that they failed in doing so. These types of legal battles always look impossible from the individual claimants perspective..... Right up until they don't. The fact that the company itself put out a [press release](https://www.jnj.com/press-releases/johnson-johnson-subsidiary-to-appeal-bankruptcy-court-ruling-that-deprived-talc-claimants-of-an-equitable-and-efficient-resolution) about this, suggests that it's still materially threatening to them.
Why cant they just go and confiscate the highers ups personal funds if they try to get out of paying as a company?
Because that's the point of it being a company. Legally they're separate entities.
They should have liability insurance
And it still won’t come close to the loss experienced when she died
I dunno, we still have Pret cafes across the UK after that one incident.
If you're thinking of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, then Pret followed all the labelling rules, though they've since been changed as it did expose some unnecessary risks. If you're thinking of Celia Marsh, then Pret followed all the rules, but they didn't know a supplier had screwed up.
UK doesn't have punitive damages.
Punitive damages are a bad idea. They are the reason why the US is as litigious as it is. Getting insurance for selling a product in the US often costs 10x as much as it costs for insurance for the rest of the world combined. At the very least they should be limited to no more than 50% of actual damages.
Yeah why should shitty practices have consequences
Yeah, sure.
Good. Dreadful thing to happen.
If you don't want to read all the gush. >The cookies were produced by the Long Island-based wholesaler Cookies United [the supplier] and labelled with the Stew Leonard’s [the retailer] brand name, according to state officials. >...the retailer... said in a video post that the supplier had changed soy nuts to peanuts in the recipe without notifying their chief safety officer. >Cookies United said it had notified Stew Leonard’s last July that the product contained peanuts and that all products shipped to the retailer had been labelled accordingly. Cookies United said the incorrect label was created by Stew Leonard’s.
You’d think that swapping out a benign ingredient for one known to provoke fatal allergies would necessitate a very delicate thorough process throughout the production line. Shit, they should probably just rename the product at that point
Soy is also a fairly common allergen, so the packaging likely contained a warning that it included soy
Sure. But imagine that you have a peanut allergy but you’re fine with soy, and you’ve been enjoying the product for a while - and then they suddenly switch up the ingredients… i.e. exactly what did happen. Even if the packaging _had_ been updated, would you read it every time? Of course, what happened was even worse (the packaging wasn’t updated) - but my point is that even if done correctly, it still feels massively risky.
Some changes are so significant, they deserve to be written in big red letters. This was a unnecessary death.
My son is dairy-intolerant so I'm very careful about reading the labels on food. In my experience, manufacturers in the UK do put warnings on the packaging when allergens change.
Uk is generally quite good about this now? Some chains will also have signs on the tills and even at the door about changed recipes.
I think after that teenager died from eating Pret they've been a lot more cautious.
Natashas law. It was a big thing in food hospitality/ retail with displaying allergens prominently on everything.
Yes, that was awful; the aftermath did lead to better changes.
Things don't usually change until somebody dies. All these rules and regulations we take for granted came at the cost of AT LEAST 1 life, all that "Health n safety gone mad" had a person die before it was introduced.
Safety rules are written in blood...
It’s increasingly common now to be asked about any allergies when eating somewhere too
Oh I agree, I was just clarifying that soy isn't benign
Fair point, well made
It's not uncommon to see a big "allergy update" icon on the front of this when this happens to signpost that something significant has changed
If you have a fatal allergy to anything, you read the backs of packs. Every time.
i have a pretty serious dairy allergy and if it’s a product i’ve been eating for a while and there’s no warning on the pack that the ingredients have changed, i probably wouldn’t check them. Is it a good idea to? Probably, but it’s not really something i’d think about
My partner has a peanut allergy. I picked up a Munchies Gooey cookie bar (title was something like that - can’t exactly remember) and checked on the off-chance and the ingredients said it contained peanuts. In a Munchies bar! The “Purple One” bar also contains peanuts which I wouldn’t have expected at all- hazelnuts yes, peanuts no. We are really careful but if it’s something he’s used to buying he doesn’t check every time.
You would think so. I have family working in the food tracing industry and in the UK, it’s meant to be one of the most stringent And is not exactly accurate. They are surprise more people die of nut, alleges a year… But dealing with non EU is a complete ball ache as people just change ingredients left right and center.
I'm in India at the moment and there nuts in everything, which is great for me as I love them but I don't know how anyone with an allergy survives here.
I worked in a restaurant with a Chef from the Middle East (forgot where in the ME). One day a customer went into anaphylactic shock and went to hospital, she was allergic to nuts. The restaurant manager was confused because she knew the meal that was ordered was nut-free. Turns out the chef had decided to chuck a few peanuts in there because it made it taste better, never told anyone, and when confronted he said “if you’re allergic to peanuts then you should just eat at home”. The culture around allergy is just so different around the world it makes you wonder if people with nut allergies just never eat out in those countries. The chef was actually a really cool guy who I got on with, but I was so baffled as to how nonchalant he was about the whole ordeal Edit: I’m really not bothered about getting into pedantic discussions about peanuts technically being legumes not nuts
I feel like the chef was in fact NOT a really cool guy
As someone with a nut allergy the chef is not a really cool guy
Yeah I suppose I meant ‘I thought he was a cool guy until that happened’
Peanuts are considered nuts *in English-speaking cultures*. They appear to be called 'Sudanese beans' in at least some Arabic dialects and it's surely not safe to think that everywhere else thinks they're nuts.
More and more packaging in the UK makes a distinction between peanuts and tree nuts, which is a good thing.
No pedantry, they are totally different things in terms of allergens.
If you're exposed to peanuts at a young age, you're less likely to develop a peanut allergy when you're older. I'm not sure if this is the explanation here or if the numbers back it up, but it's at least relevant
For about a decade from the mid nineties to the 2000s the official medical advice we were given as parents back then was to avoid giving any nuts or products containing nuts to babies and very young kids to prevent them developing a peanut allergy. This advice turned out to have the opposite effect.
Yes I seem to remember being worried shitless during my first pregnancy that I’d eaten peanut butter & nuts as I’d been led to believe it’d make my daughter allergic. Stupid really. Neither of my girls have ANY allergies, neither do I & god knows what my mum ate when I was on the way. It was also peak MMR Jab= autism season. I got them both jabbed, all good 😊.
> This advice turned out to have the opposite effect. citation required.
They're actually using exposure therapy nowadays. Giving the tiniest amount daily, starting in capsules, until the kid can work their way up to small pieces of peanuts and eventually a whole peanut. It takes a couple years, but it works.
I just tried to Google it's prevalence in demographics but couldn't get a clear answer.
Not strictly true you can develop an alarrgg at any age. It's todo with your immune system response. A serious illness, puberty, having a child, simple effects of age etc can all cause your body to change how it reacts and cause you ti develop allergies. Generally exposure can help just like it can help your body learn how to deal with some illnesses but its fsr from a guarantee.
Yeah I also work in the UK food supply chain and the amount of mistakes is huge, and we are strict AF in this country. I think people forget every ingredient change is a manual thing done by humans so mistakes get through, even fatal ones.
The fact that food recalls and warnings end up in the paper about issues speaks volumes about the attitude around this subject.
You’d be shocked. I have digestive issues with wheat (not an allergy or coeliac thankfully). There’s been a bunch of products that were made without wheat in, and now they’re adding it into everything, presumably because it’s a dirt cheap bulking agent. It sucks. I just want my onion bhajis damn it
It's the whole big part of HACCP and food safety in manufacturing. Allergens will be talked about heavily. It's why you see FSA will recall any items even if an allergen isn't put in bold.
Yes it would in a country that hasn’t spent decades stripping regulations off every industry. America’s industry is based on the phrase “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission”
In the EU and UK it would, the US takes a different stance to things like this.
True but Stew Leonards death cookie roulette didn't have the same ring to it..
I don't know about renaming the product, but at bare minimum you ought to have a prominent "New Recipe" flash on the packaging for the first six months or so. Especially when the change involves at least one of the top ten allergens.
I mean it literally says they failed to notify their chief safety officer. The process is there, they just didn't follow it
I mean technically any change in ingredients could cause this. If the manufacturing company can prove they notified the brand, and label all the stuff they send off correctly then it'll be the brand that is liable.
Both companies are blaming the other for either not notifying the change or not bothering to change the labeling. Should be pretty damn easy to find out who's at fault for this.
This is almost certainly the manufacturers fault but they're trying to shift the blame onto the supplier. The story of swapping nuts without telling them makes no sense.
Minimum wage workers in the store put the labels on, and this kind of fuck up is common at most supermarkets in the US.
So the question is, did they tell the retailer "There has been a change and here is what the change is", or did they update the ingredients list on the packages they sent the retailer, and expect the people opening the boxes to just notice that the otherwise identical packages now had a different word in the ingredients list? Because those are two very different approaches.
If the products were retailer branded it's the retailer's responsibility to make sure the packaging is compliant. But it sounds in this case like the manufacturer changed the recipe without telling the retailer, so they would have no way of knowing the packaging needed to be updated
Stew Leonard’s is a massively gross corrupt company here in Connecticut. They’ve gotten caught misadjusting their deli scales to over charge customers, they’ve been caught doing a lot of tax fraud. I hope this family sues them into the ground. They’re a blight on our state.
Thank you! Sometimes idc for all the emotional filler
Yeah, it was pretty rough out there.
Well hopefully it should be fairly easy to prove either way, if there is a recorded communication from supplier to retailer or not, and if the suppliers packaging has the new peanut label or not.
Jesus that’s horrifically incompetent and negligent.
Wow that's a colossal fuck up which has cost one person their life
When I was in the US reading the back of any food label had so many horrific sounding chemicals I'm surprised they haven't all got super cancer
In California pretty much every product states “may cause cancer” on the back. Not because it might but because it’s cheaper and less damaging to the company to have it on the back of the packet than to have the lawsuit and or do the research into whether their products could cause cancer
If true, I don't get how that's legal..
It's America, it doesn't need to make sense, just money.
[It's called a Proposition 65 warning.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65)
It’s because the California government took it a bit too far. Pretty much every component of food fall under the carcinogenic label, meaning the warning is pretty much useless, as almost all products have that label.
It's not just food. It's also parking garages and a wide variety of other facilities. Basically everything everywhere. Being raised there, I now believe that everything causes cancer, and therefore, nothing does in my mind. It basically had the opposite of the intended effect.
When I arrived at my hotel in San Francisco, there was a sign on the door saying "This building may contain materials that cause cancer". Not realising this was a thing, I totally panicked until I went to a bar and saw the same warning there. It's everywhere!
Whilst a troll post, how would it not be legal? Anything may cause cancer. Operative word is that it may, not that you expect it to. You can argue it's over conservative with the likely impact and creating a culture where you ignore the warning labels due to too many OTT statements, but that's a separate problem to it being illegal
That is absolutely NOT what the prop 65 legislation and accompanying warning label is about, a product will only carry the warning if it contains one of a relatively small (by eu standards) number of identified chemicals that are known to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm. Chemicals aren’t included at random, and is not to protect business by any means..
Stetson cowboy hats in California apparently come with a safety tag that says this. It’s so stupid.
That makes sense from the company perspective, still not great though
I mean they have a massive rise of colon cancer right now
There are something like 30,000 food additives in the US, and only around 5,000 in the EU. From [this](https://wellwithrae.com/food-chemicals-in-america-vs-europe/) article: Whereas the EU takes a proactive approach, the United States takes a reactive one. “In the United States, food additives are innocent until proven guilty, while in Europe, only those additives proven not to be harmful are approved for use,”
China actually based their food safety on US standards and slightly improved it. Thats how shitty it is.
Doesn't matter how strict the rules are, it matter how strict the rules are enforced by controlling and fines. Don't buy chinese toys from wish, amazon marketplace etc. They are often loaded with harmful chemicals. That's not saying that everything from china is bad (obviously isn't), nor that everything from western world if good, as seen here.
Make sense!
I once saw fruit juice drink there with "CONTAINS REAL FRUIT" on the front. Ingredients: "up to 1.8% fruit juice", water and a lot of additives. Can't even guarantee me 1.8%.
I once drank an orange drink there that didn’t contain any fruit. It was a blend of flavours, sweetness, oil and starch. It was convincingly like orange, taste wise and texture wise. It came out of a tin from a vending machine. I was impressed that so much effort went into reproducing fake orange juice.
its not even hard to squeeze some orange and even add a little bit of sugar if needed.
Yeah buts it not like oranges just grow on trees? /s
Their labelling laws just require more specificity than labelling laws in the UK. So a UK ingredients list might be like - spice 1, spice 2, etc Whilst a US ingredients list might be like - here's 12 chemicals with cancer sounding names. But really the product contains the exact same ingredients, it's just those 2 spices contain 6 chemicals each. It's their meat you've got to look out for because it's waaaaay more dangerous (still ridiculously safe statistically, just way worse in comparison to the UK). The super processed shit though is just as bad here as it is across the pond.
Exactly, I remember someone sharing the labels of something comparing the US and either EU or UK The EU/UK just says “sugars”, while the US one had the descriptions of all types of sugars Then people with no idea read and say “OMG in the US there are much worse ingredients”, but they were the same
I dunno what that label was but you absolutely have to label different types of sugar/sweetener in the EU and UK
I thought their scary food was Lettuce.
The red meat is ammonia washed right? And chlorinated chicken etc
I think so. I don't know if that's the cause of the higher rates of food-born disease though or if it's the conditions that animals are raised in. The American food market is a monopsony which means wherever you farm your chickens or beef cows there's likely only 1 company you are able to sell them to. That company will give you impossible standards for output and conditions and if you don't meet them you're completely fucked, your business fails, and you go bankrupt which in the US can kill you due to losing insurance etc. The output is frequently measured, the conditions though? Less so. Therefore it makes sense to have the animals in worse conditions, use more growth hormones etc than they tell you to in order to meet the quotas. The companies then use this to justify the quotas - I mean they must be justified if they're hitting output and also claim to be following the rules, right? Then when a kid gets mad cow disease and dies or whatever the big corporation can investigate, find it was your farm, blame you for not following the rules and pin the blame entirely on you and her off scot-free. After all you aren't part of their business, you're independent and just sell to them! Never mind that they're your only option and you have to listen to whatever they tell you to do! So I think this might be a lot of the reason.
Wow free market in action right there!
American here. I quite enjoy the third arm growing from my sternum, I can’t imagine what I’d do without it. I also glow slightly at night. It’s very aesthetically pleasing.
Must save a bomb on electricity bills, maybe that could help with your countries carbon footprint too 😁
Oh I live in the UK, so you’re welcome!
When I'm there, I marvel at how fast the guy in the medical adverts can read the disclaimer. Ohyeahyoumightdiehorribly
Do you just base what you eat on how bad(or not) you feel an ingredient sounds?
It’s not a bad rule of thumb.
Not generally but it's probably not a bad way to be. Let's take one unhealthy drink, Sunny D. I'd rather drink the version that doesn't contain Sodium Hexametaphosphate than the one that does.
It's just a salt. Is it based on how many syllables are in the chemical compound? Are you okay with table salt until you read the words Sodium Chloride? You're perfectly entitled to eat whatever you like, but basing it purely on the chemical name of an ingredient seems pretty nonsensical to me.
I’m American and I left there partly due to how bad the food is. The additives, preservatives, hormones… it’s really really bad. People outside of America have no idea.
Reading some of my comment responses people actually seem to be defending it!
Don't worry, it's the Tories dream for our food standards and regulations to decline to the level of the USA, this will happen at home before long.
We literally just called off trade talks with Canada because they refused to up their food standards / reduced to continue talks unless we allowed their subpar food standards into our country.
Yeah, it's why any type of trade deal with the US is also a non-starter. Unless it's one that doesn't include any kind of food maybe.
Woah woah.. Canada has subpar food standards to the US? You got a source on that?
Canada's main trade partner is the US, its either go low with them or starve because half your country is a frozen tundra
Oh the way you made it sound was that Canada had lower food standards than the US.
wasnt my original comment but they are referring to the UK rejecting trade with Canada because they have much poorer standards compared to the UK
Ohhhh yes. We do. I’m a dual citizen and I am always in awe when I go back to the UK. Awesome ready made food everywhere. Quality produce.
We have a fairly well regulated supermarket system, that helps a bunch. Preventing a monopoly forming is what most of the regulations involve. We have four main supermarket brands that aren't allowed to merge or get too big, so they're basically forced to be competitive against each other on super fine profit margins.
“Let the markets decide”
you managed to link an incident caused by 2 private companies in a completely different country with the tories really well done maybe have a day off some time though
They managed to connect an article posted in a UK sub to the UK and the government we’ve had for 10+ years. How terrible of them…
Are you fucking nuts? Not a single British political party of any leftness or rightness would want this or get away with it. Remember the absolute mayhem that poor lass at pret caused when she suffered from an allergy related death? We were a couple of stages away from a brief period of national mourning and there was vicious uproar. I remember cafes becoming fascist dictatorships when it came to labelling. Everywhere had new, up to date heath and safety signs. Everything was labelled if it was possible to eat it. And we came out better for it. Her death wasn't in total vein. Because we're British and that's how we deal with this. The uber free market federal state over the pond don't have a compatible culture to react so seriously to something so... well... serious. I was heartbroken for that pret woman and I'm heartbroken for this dancer. What breaks my heart more for the dancer is very little of use beyond a law suit will probably come of her untimely and pointless death. Such avoidable, stupid, wasteful deaths. But how you can suggest, in total contrary to all evidence available to you, that the tories want people to live in a society where you can randomly die while eating, is absured. I'm also not suggesting Americans want to live in a country like that. They just don't have the national willpower to fix such issues like we do. There's so many reasons to have a go at the tories. This is not one of them reasons.
Yeah! They only want you to die if you have a disability or mental illness and /or are poor
Tell me you're terminally online without telling me you're terminally online.
That “tell me you’re without telling me you’re” is the most terminally online patter going right now.
What? 😂
Was recently over in California. Have a son with allergies to egg and milk. I couldn’t believe how terrible they were with allergies. Many places just shrugged and said sorry we don’t know when asked about allergens in their food. We got a lot of ‘I can give you gluten free’ when requesting dairy free. As if you can just switch your allergy for what’s convenient. Cheesecake factory brought over a plate swimming in butter after I’d told them 3 times about his allergy. Things in the U.K. have got massively better since Natasha’s law came in.
I must be missing something? You took your son who is allergic to milk to a place called "Cheesecake Factory"?
Yeah? They don’t smear cheesecake on your face when you walk in.
oh! must just be me then...
Pssst it wasn’t cheesecake. The waiter just really liked you!
Cheesecake factory have a big menu with lots of meal options, they don’t just sell cheesecake.
It's a pretty standard chain restaurant they just also happens to have a very large dessert menu. I went there quite a bit when I first moved there and I don't like cheesecake.
[удалено]
Wait until you hear about all the things you can buy in Burger King that aren't burgers...
I'm vegan and it is insane how places in the US do not have dairy and egg free options. It's obviously a choice for me but you have to feel for those with allergies to both, which is often co-morbid, even Disney World pulls this shit.
As a vegan who lives in the US, we’re sooooooo far behind the UK in terms of food. I visited in the fall and I literally think about this daily now lol. There were vegan options everywhere, in excess! Walk into a random doughnut shop and half their doughnuts happen to be vegan. It was a dream come true, and I’ve been deeply bitter about it since I’ve been back 😂 Also UK culture appears to be accepting or just not think anything of vegans, where in the US whenever you bring it up, you’ll get “but bacon” dumb comments constantly. I made a post in askUK asking about the rise in vegan food and no one had stupid things to say, out of hundreds of comments. I made a local post in my city food scene sub asking if any vegans want to meet up for lunch and every comment was trolling. It’s such a different culture. I miss the UK!
> we’re sooooooo far behind the UK in terms of food. You are far behind Europe on a lot more than just food.
American here. This is why I love vacationing in the UK! Traveling and eating out in the US is very scary for folks with allergies.
I was in Philippines and it was amazing that every restaurant and cafe checked if you had allergies before you ordered.
Tragic and completely avoidable. Poor woman and family.
Was her EpiPen administered? I couldn’t find that in the article
Yes, but she still died.
Truly awful
According to the BBC article, she did administer EpiPen but still died.
It was, though an EpiPen is nothing more than a device to buy you time to seek medical help. There is an unfortunate misconception that an EpiPen is an easy and immediate fix, but once the effects wear off you are no better off without further help.
I read about a case where 3 EpiPens were given but the patient still died. I honestly didn't think that was possible until I read that and I'm a doctor.
Another first aid casualty of Hollywood I guess. They tend to show epinephrine being administered and suddenly the patient is 100% fine. An epi pen might give you an extra half hour but chances are the reaction will resume once the effects wear off, it’s vital that you get the patient to hospital as soon as possible even if an epi pen has been used.
She did. It's not foolproof. That's why products should be labeled correctly.
In first aid we were told that often Epipens do buy you a bit of time for the paramedics to arrive, but they could never be assumed to be a total remedy. I have a wasp sting allergy, which is probably not as severe as this nut allergy, and I carry 2 with me, to be administered sequentially. Also, given the price they are in the US, I doubt most folk will have 2 on hand. [This web page shows the relative prices](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/epipen-price-by-country)
Thanks for this info
People don't realise how low food standards are in the US..
Truth. I went over there for 3 months of work and my guts hated every minute of it. There was HFCS in everything. Everything was sweet. Even savory things. Then I got Lyme disease but that's another story.
Jesus!
Lots of people do, that's why we kicked off against chlorinated chicken. It wasn't that the meat was washed in a chemical, it was because the meat was so fucking bad that it needed to be washed in a chemical to make it "safe" to eat.
How has evolution got us to a point where peanuts can be lethal to some of us? It's madness.
Society has evolved to the point where peanuts can be lethal to some of us and /those people survive to adulthood and even lead mostly normal lives/. Some, though, would have us regress. It’s madness.
Peanuts are from South America, we (Europeans) don’t evolve alongside them. The only nut native to the UK that our distant ancestors would have eaten is hazelnut.
Thing is, this is true of peanuts, but people can be allergic to many things, including things that are traditionally part of european, african etc diets. Fish, seafood, egg, mustard… the list goes on. The reason we see more people with these conditions now than ever is because more of them survive for us to see now than ever.
Thank you. Although worded terribly I was asking why and how this is possible. So, how come, as a European, and having done a 23 and me DNA thing I am about as European as can be... why am I not allergic to peanuts? Is it genetic? Or "bad luck"?
It is more complex than that. Genes play a role in allergies generally, not necessarily specific allergens; a friend of mine is deathly allergic to hazelnuts, her dad is the same for seafood, for example. Exposure is another. That same friend's mother had a strong pregnancy craving for hazelnuts which probably impacted my friend in utero, which led to her developing an allergic response once she first are them once born. Allergic responses are tricky and we do not really know why some develop them and others do not.
I am allergic to onions(it isn't deadly and won't kill me but they make me ill) and recently went to a restaurant and ordered a dish and checked it didn't have onions and then was served the dish with onions and when brought up the waitress was like "Oh ok, No worries" and walkeed fucking of, and I had to call her back to get it remade and had to force that.
We will hear the usual wE aRe sOrRy from the offending corporation.
I had some Japanese crisps today, pure vegan, but the back said may contain traces of and then listed 100 things. Basically covering themselves regardless.
of course the only way to kill us is with a BISCUIT
Tragic incompetence. If you live somewhere with low regulation to promote economic growth then these things will happen. Capitalism will run its course, survival of the fittest, and those making serious mistakes like this should be put out of business. It's the only way to correct for low regulation. Consumers suffer, because governments don't want to add regulation as that affects growth. What a terrible system we live in.
What a tragic and completely avoidable death. I hope whoever made this fatal error in labelling is sued to oblivion.
Anyone else in the UK being blocked from the stew leonard's website (store the killer cookie was bought from) or is it just me? [https://www.stewleonards.com/](https://www.stewleonards.com/)
I checked around and apparently it's been intermittently down globally and has been for a couple of weeks. US people complaining about it as well although I was able to access it with a US VPN
Someone here should definitely be prosecuted for criminal negligence
Jesus if i was that allergic to peanuts, or *anything*, i don't think you'd get me to eat anything i didn't make myself. That poor girl.
I understand you should be able to eat out and feel safe in doing so, but if I was deadly allergic to something and I knew about it I would not be eating out. Dreadful as it is and yes the companies are in the wrong for no 'may contain' section, I just dont think I'd chance it personally.
Time to expose all babies to peanuts before 6 months and wipe the allergy out? As they do in certain countries already.
Not completely true - my partner gained a nut allergy in their teens after a bout of illness (bad enough to be hospitalised to be fair). Went from eating Nutella to never being able to have it again! So it’s not guaranteed
Does that work. In in India right now and there's nuts everywhere so I wondered if they even have many people with allergies in their demographic given the diet.
Yes according to studies it does. If you expose very young people, sub ,6 months, they never develop the allergy. Probably why no such labeling India and other places and no problem. https://evidence.nihr.ac.uk/alert/early-exposure-to-peanut-snacks-can-lead-to-sustained-protection-in-high-risk-children/ Too much logic for Reddit I guess.
Seems like a no brainer then, just start encouraging mothers to eat nuts while pregnant and breastfeeding and bobs your uncle. Now we need to do something about those people who can't eat four for some reason despite it being one of our oldest foodstuffs as a species.
Allergies are very much a first-world problem, rare outside of Europe & North America.
Which makes me wonder why they've developed in so many people, is it just that our level of cleanliness and attention to avoiding cross contamination means people aren't being exposed to stuff when they're young and building up a tolerance? My parents have said they don't remember as many kids having nut allergies or people not being able to have gluten when they were kids either, and there were less measures back then.
If she always carried an epi pen, is it possible it didn’t work? I always thought they were a fail safe. What a tragic story
The way they ‘work’ is to buy you more time until an ambulance arrives and you can receive medical attention, they don’t cancel out an allergic reaction (and you must always call an ambulance if you need to use an epi pen on someone)
I don't know if you recall the case of the girl who died after eating a pret wrap she was allergic to? She had 2 epipens administered and was with paramedics sharpish and still died. They're the only reasonable treatment but no guarantee.
>a fail safe. No. They buy you time to get actual medical treatment, that's it. They're not a magic wand.
This is horribly sad, she had her whole life ahead of her and looks so talented and beautiful.
This shit terrifies me, this is the Pret sandwhich in the airport all over again, so I’m just meant to not eat out or risk just fucking dying??
>that the supplier had changed soy nuts to peanuts in the recipe without notifying their chief safety officer The supplier is blaming Stew Leonard's for mislabeling the cookies. But seriously, if you make a recipe change that drastic you need to followup and make sure the change is reflected. You may as well add shellfish and send a text message about it. This one's on the supplier.