You have a legal duty to not poison people by telling them there aren't allergens in their food when there might be. You don't have a legal duty to create a hypoallergenic product line. Regulations exist to protect your rights, not make your shopping experience more convenient.

What's an allergen? Or, more interestingly, what isn't an allergen?

People are going to buy the cheapest option that satisfies the regulation. If giving shit about other people means systematically buying more expensive options they won't give any.

People can buy whatever they want, it's the producers changing their recipe or labeling that demonstrates not giving a shit.

They aren't changing their recipe to make their product better or cheaper, they change it so that they don't have to deal with compliance. That's the not giving a shit.

They are changing the recipe in order to keep the product cheap, because compliance on this would be really fucking expensive, requiring completely and permanently separate facilities for products that contain each specific allergens and those that don't.

Right, the breadmakers don't give a shit about this. That's ok, the breadbuyers like me don't give a shit either.

This is food. It has so many more quality dimensions than price point and regulation compliance.

If they did start adding small amounts of the ingredients in question, admiration for their malicious compliance would make me more likely to buy their product, especially if it's also the cheapest. They have two options: acknowledge that perfect isolation is an unrealistic goal for their facility, or put aside some money for a legal fund for when their unlabeled food eventually kills someone.

If producer A just puts sesame in their products, and that means they can undercut producer B who spends the money to comply with the spirit of the regulation, producer B goes out of business because their expenses are higher.

So what do you expect would happen? Consumers like cheaper rather than higher prices, this isn't a new thing.

Pass regulations that prevent producer A from undercutting producer B?

Do you have any idea about how expensive it is to audit your entire supply chain to ensure that it is 100% free of allergens? You'd essentially put that cost onto everyone for the benefit of a small minority. I'm sure you can see why that is a political non-starter.

How? Forbid sesame seeds for everybody?

If you're going to do that, then you need to ban all prepared foods from having any kind of allergen, because someone might die of it.

That means bread made with wheat is now illegal, because some people are highly allergic to gluten. If you don't want gluten-free bread, you'll have to make it yourself.

Also, you can't have any food with shrimp or shellfish. Peanut butter is now illegal (but you can make it yourself). Pistachio ice cream is illegal.

Not only is wheat bread illegal, but any baked good can't be made with milk either, since some young children are allergic. And you can't substitute soy milk either, since some babies are allergic to that too. Baked goods in your proposed future sound really awful, quite frankly.

Gluten-free baked goods made with potato flour are illegal too, since some people are allergic to potatoes. So french fries are also illegal.

Some other things you won't be able to have either in a pre-made food, or at a restaurant: - celery - carrots - pumpkin - mushroom - onion - garlic - bell pepper - fish (so apparently you want to ban sushi restaurants too)

So I'm curious, in your vision of the future, what exactly do people eat? Beef and lettuce for every meal?

If A can die from sesame seeds and B can't and the A-to-B ratio is something like 1:1e+6, doesn't it make more sense for A to bake their own bread instead?

Apply that logic to more common allergens like wheat, eggs, milk, or soy.

Why? The cases are very different regarding different allergies, allergens and product categories.

I don't think they're that different. The muffin I had for breakfast contained wheat, milk, egg, and sesame oil. Salicylate intolerance is at least as common as sesame allergy, so let's toss in the blueberries, too.

Making food more expensive might have consequences.

You aren’t wrong, but it isn’t workable. Regulations can become very specific to prevent loopholes in compliance, but to the point that the government is just driving the business and it might well be socialized.

Like how we passed regulation to get to this point? And we will pass regulation for the new loophole created by this regulation, right? And we'll keep doing this, as the overhead to comply with regulation gradually increases and prevents small competitors from entering the market as they cannot afford to meet the regulation overhead? Of course, we will address this problem with new regulation.

I totally expect people to be assholes about it, don't worry. That's what I'm getting at, people are assholes.

Should we be proud and happy about that? Apparently.