Costco forced to recall food that was not labeled to the requirements. In this case, the butter is supposed to be labelled as containing milk. Now, you and me, we know that butter is made from milk or cream, but only a great fool would assume everyone knows what they know.
And, these labels aren’t just for the lactose intolerant consumer. The allergen information is fed to computers that handle the automated distribution of products to various uses. That butter might end up as one of a hundred ingredients in a prepackaged donut. If the allergen isn’t on the label, the person doing data entry may not realize it. Disney World killed a doctor just last year because of allergen exposure, and that shit happens all the time. It only made the news because Disney tried to enforce an arbitration clause the husband digitally accepted when he tried out Disney+.
The point is, this is not a story about overregulation or snowflakes being too sensitive. Costco fucked up, and their fuckup puts lives at risk. If you happened to buy the improperly labelled butter, congrats on your good fortune, because Costco is going to pay you for their fuckup. You don’t have to discard perfectly good butter unless you cannot have dairy, and you didn’t yet know that butter contains milk.
Yeah, I work in a restaurant and allergies are a real issue that we deal with nearly every day. There is no such thing as being “too cautious” when you are dealing with the literal life and death of another human.
I have a lot of deadly food allergies, and I just, don’t eat out anymore. Too many trips to the ER. Sucks, cause it makes travel difficult, to plan on cooking my own meals, and basically means I can’t safely travel abroad anywhere I’m not 100% fluent in
Exactly. If I had deadly food allergies instead of uncomfortable ones, I wouldn’t trust a stranger to remember.
If that were true at the very least you would be running around in hazmat suite, desinfecting everything constantly, every person separated in their own little chamber, the food analyzed in the in-house lab to make sure there is not xyz … you get the point, there is a “being too cautious”.
I’m glad you’ve shown up, Most Fun Guy at the Party.
Telling people who disagree with you by raising a valid point “you must be le fun at le parties, I think NOT, m’goodsir!” is a behavior for reddit, so let it stay there.
And gatekeeping social media is cunty behavior, so take a cue and get fucked.
Stop gatekeeping me bro
Being an ignorant dipshit isn’t making a valid point.
Then knock it off
My grandma, in her 86 years of life, still needs to check to see if butter has milk in it. She is the use case you mention that we take for granted! (Although at least the only real fallout of her blunder is indigestion and what she does to my bathroom when she visits and has lactose :x)
Now, you and me, we know that butter is made from milk or cream, but only a great fool would assume everyone knows what they know.
In this day and age of vegan “dairy” products, including butter and cheese (not to mention margarines), I don’t think you can even reasonably assume butter has to have milk in it. Because there is a greater than 0% chance it doesn’t.
Put a sticker on it, make an announcement, done.
Right. That’s what a recall is. Kirkland can’t put stickers on something they have already sold.
They can announce it and that should be enough. Instead they make the butter sound like it has something wrong with it so people turn it in.
I’m really confused about what you think should be done differently. A product recall is an announcement that there’s something wrong with the product, and an offer of a refund. The “something wrong” is that the allergen info was not properly labelled. It’s your choice whether you want to get a refund or not.
The news media is trying to make it sound like stupid government and stupid consumer protections and stupid regulations, when in fact it was stupid manufacturing.
The completely reasonable thing you said you wanted is exactly what is happening, and you’re mad about it and blaming the thing that’s working exactly to your benefit and exactly the way you want it to, because that’s the intent of the article.
You, right now, are being manipulated to manufacture outrage. It’s being done by people who want to profit from exploiting you. They want deregulation, so they will spin every story into something that makes you angry at regulations, especially when it is entirely reasonable and good government.
I saw it reported both ways. The outrage way, where “OMG, the stupid government is wasting food” and at first the recall way, where you must return the butter because it will kill you and there is something wrong with it. There shouldn’t be a recall at all, just an announcement that the butter wasn’t labeled properly for people allergic to milk products.
News is a product, and hype is marketing. Getting you to consume their content is a sale, and they are comfortable lying to you to get you to read it. But notice that in both cases, the message is that government is ineffective. Either it is an overreaction or an utter failure at protecting consumers. Both are lies.
There shouldn’t be a recall at all, just an announcement that the butter wasn’t labeled properly for people allergic to milk products.
That’s a recall. Even if it’s just an announcement with no further action, it’s called a recall. In this case, it is a Class 2 recall, which means low risk and minimal effort. Retailers and distributors cannot continue to sell an improperly labelled product, so they are returning it to the manufacturer so it can be relabelled and sold, or discarded. Consumers are told they can discard it if they have a milk allergy, or they can use it because there’s nothing else wrong with it. If there is waste, it is the manufacturer’s fault. The system is working as intended with good effect.
There should be a recall, because the butter wasn’t properly labelled and they need to let people know, even if there is minimal risk.
Thanks for the informative post. I was all ready to poke fun at this move.
You’re not alone. The news media is a shit-stirring business run by oligarchs who want you to question science and government regulations. This is a relatively benign example, but it’s a transparent one. The way the headline grabs you, the way it’s written, and the social media commentary, it’s all created to benefit the wealthy and make you think you’re on their side.
Hang on a minute. My entire life there have been ingredients lists on food products, usually under the nutrition facts grid. More recently I’ve seen additional language on packaging that says something like “Warning: Contains nuts.” Did they fail to put that “Warning: Contains milk” on there, or did they omit the ingredients list entirely (which, for butter, should be cream and maybe salt). Like…?
I also wonder if they’ll be able to put the same butter into corrected packaging and still sell it.
The brand’s salted and unsalted Sweet Cream Butter list cream as an ingredient on the packaging. However, the label does not warn consumers that the product “contains milk.”
While I get that this is a legal thing…
It also really shows how divorced from where our food comes from people are. Also, how many products that could be called “butter” that are completely artificial and have no dairy content at all.
In the eu terms like butter and dairy can only be used for milk products.
But our legaslative pendulum did swing a bit too far in the other direction (imo): terms like soja-butter and so on were also banned.
The original intent of that bill was to ban plant-based alternatives from using commonly understood terms and phrases.
It’s not like the EU banning phrases like “soy milk” on packaging was an unintended consequence of some kind of “common sense” law being applied where it shouldn’t be.
The commonly understood term for plant butter is margarine
When you’re at the shop can you grab some peanut margarine and coconut white liquid?
According to EU legislature you can say “coconut milk”, I guess it’s ok since it doesn’t compete with dairy products. However soy/oat/almond m*lk is literally the antichrist and must be defeated.
soy/oat/almond m*lk is literally the antichrist and must be defeated.
Sorry, I struggle to read tone from messages sometimes - do you genuinely feel that way? and if you do, why?
I meant that jokingly, as in, European Court of Justice is scared of plant-based milk. The way I see it ECJ put in a lot of effort to solve a nonexistent problem, and presented it as “protecting consumers”.
Thanks for the comment, but I’m not at all interested in getting into that argument. Hope you have a great day though!
Akshually it’s soy margarine
I thought “butter” was the ingredient!
Couldn’t have solved this issue with a big batch of stickers?
That’s probably what will happen – stickers and restock.
I don’t think they can restock stuff after it goes out the door; that’s an even worse sanitation risk.
Apply the sticker at the return counter and send the customer away
Are stickers good enough for one of the most common allergens?
On butter? Yes. It is enough to cover your ass for the one idiot that doesn’t know it contains milk.
For stuff still on the shelf, probably. For stuff already sold, no so much.
For the stuff that’s already sold, they don’t have to destroy it, or do anything really, unless the customer returns it. Hardly any are going to. If the article counts those in the headline number, it’s being a little dishonest.
American and our lack of brains
Cool, a headline framing regulation as wasteful, not a fascist wedge at all
Sounds like a lot but it’s actually just 8 swimming pool sized tubs they mislabeled
I can’t believe it’s butter!
What do folks think butter is made out of?
A lot of things, actually. Milk is so clearly and consistently marked as an allergen that I’ll often as a vegan just check the allergens if I don’t have any reason to suspect the use of meat products, meat byproducts, honey, or non-allergenic dairy ingredients.
I would probably still do a double-take and check the ingredients here, but with the movement to plant-based alternatives, you never know if someone who treats this the same way I do as basically a gold standard (because that’s what it’s supposed to be) will simply take it at face value. It’s also plausible that someone without strong English literacy but with such an allergy would rely solely on the basic allergen label rather than trying to parse more complicated English words.
The reason it has to be strictly enforced like this too is that if you justify this as “well everyone knows
it’s Buttersbutter, so it doesn’t really need a label”, then it’s not as trustworthy and therefore efficient to those who need it, and it risks drawing a line where not everyone is on the same page.Yeah, I agree. You generally want things to be easy to understand, more so if there are significant consequences for getting it wrong. Making sure that allergens are properly listed lowers the risk of someone accidentally buying something they shouldn’t.
Also, while this case is pretty obvious, is important to always insist that all major allergens are listed. Otherwise companies will slack off or make bad calls about when an allergen is obvious. It’s like with guns: You should always treat them as ready to fire even when you think you know they’re not because a mistake might get someone killed.
That’s VEGAN butter, Not BUTTER. Its only been the past 10-20 years where food products started trying to be things they aren’t. Be more like mardrine and say I can’t believe it’s not butter
Non-animal foods have been around a long time, even commercially, even in North America.
Henry Ford (yes, that Ford) had a soy milk factory in the 1930s, and J. H, Kellog (yes, that Kellog) sold Protose before that.
If we’re looking at the whole word, tofu’s been around for over 2000 years, seitan has been around for about 1500 years.
Edit: Forgot about Loma Linda foods. They’ve also been around for over 100 years in North America
To add to this, recipes for plant-milk (almond specifically) can be found dating back to the 13th century. n3m37h is just willfully historically illiterate and hilariously reactionary.
trying to be things they aren’t
lmao okay boomer (margarine* btw)
Wrong like you are about a lot of shit
89
And I don’t use fake butter, coconut oil and butter are where it’s at
Wrong about what? It’s objectively not spelled “mardrine”, and boomerism is being used here colloquially as an attitude, not a generation.
Thanks for butting in, your reply is adding lots to this conversation that doesn’t involve you.
And thanks for reiterating what has already been stated. Very helpful
Almond milk has been around since at least the 13th century. Do you take issue with almond milk calling itself “milk”, and if so, do you need a refresher on arithmetic?
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my buttery things
Next you’ll tell me that brown sugar isn’t just brown sugar and table salt isn’t just salt!
I once used my grandpa’s salt on my food.
Potassium Chloride. Those extra 8 electrons don’t mean it tastes better.
How about the god damned salted butter that doesn’t mention it has salt anywhere but in the nutrition label? Damned Kerrygold fucking up my mashed potatoes.
If it was already sold I doubt anyone would return it.
Couldn’t this be solved by printing some stickers?
okay guys hear me out. what if instead they gave all 80,000 butters to me. i’m one or the most lactose tolerant people i know, and i promise to put it all to good use.
i promise to put it all to good use
You’re going to take a butter bath, aren’t you?
you don’t need to worry about that part. just give me the butter and i’ll take care of the rest
Vegans: I felt tricked
It won’t say cow dairy so they can still get off on a technicality!
If you can’t tell the difference between BUTTER and wannbe butter, you’re sad. And what is wrong with dairy?
If heffers don’t get milked they can get mastitis and can be fatal to cows if not properly treated too
And what is wrong with dairy?
Besides being catastrophic for the environment, a fucking shitton, actually. Maybe if you actually cared about cows’ quality of life, you wouldn’t selectively breed them to overproduce milk so that you’re “forced” to milk them, you wouldn’t take their child away from them that would otherwise drink the milk, and you wouldn’t forcibly impregnate them on a rape rack in order to get them to produce milk. (Also, it’s “heifer”, not “heffer”, just like it’s “margarine”, not “mardrine”.)
Pretty sure those studies are bullshit and terrible “projections” based upon going to a single farm then guesstimating the world’s cattle methane production.
[The Global Methane Budget 2024 paints a troubling picture of the current state of global methane emissions. The new report reveals that human activities are now responsible for at least two-thirds of global methane emissions.
This marks a significant increase in human-produced methane sources over the past two decades, with emissions rising by 20%, with the fastest rise occurring over the last five years.](https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/The_2024_Global_Methane_Budget_reveals_alarming_trends)
Pretty sure oil production (blow off valves not calculated by petroleum companies), jets and large ships have a much more substantial effects than cattle ever could.
Did cattle population explode by 20% world wide??
Humm ya think oil companies don’t go around and pay for bullshit studies to pull the attention away from them?
How about an oil spill created by Taylor Energy in 2004 and lasted to 2019 (apparently went it ‘stopped’ yet still collecting oil
Pretty sure those studies are bullshit
Gee, who am I to trust? A peer-reviewed paper you’ve never read meta-analyzing 1530 studies in one of the most rigorous scientific journals in the world whose methodology section directly contradicts the ignorant horseshit you’re saying and which is written by 1) Dr. Joseph Poore, the director of the University of Oxford’s food sustainability program and 2) Dr. Tomas Nemecek, an expert on agroecology and life cycle assessments from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences… or the random Internet person who thinks it’s spelled “mardrine” – a word I probably learned to spell in fourth grade?
The rest of your comment is just textbook whataboutism, and I’d call you deeply intellectually dishonest, but I’m not sure at this point that you’re capable of any sort of intellectualism – honest or otherwise.
this paper misuses LCA studies to draw hyperbolic conclusions. it’s bad science.
Every time you show up to talk about this paper, you just say it “misuses LCA” and then never elaborate because you don’t actually understand anything about the paper. See where the authors discuss their methodology? Please go there and point out how exactly it “misuses LCA”. Make a pointed, falsifiable criticism of the paper, please.
Every time you show up to talk about this paper, you just say it “misuses LCA”
false
LCAs are not transferable between studies, and poore-nemecek ignores this guidance, compiling multiple LCA studies into their “meta-analysis”. it’s bad science.
You understand that the sham papers aren’t uniformly distributed over journals, right? You understand that 8000 of them belonged to a single publisher and that thousands of fully legitimate papers are published every day? And that Science is – again – one of the most rigorous academic journals in the world? Just blanket denying science that you pretend to understand isn’t going to help your floundering credibility.
They do get cited in journals, most scientific work is based upon prior works. Many journals have had to redact stuff due to fake papers being cited, regardless of what you say.
Where did the 20% methane emissions over the past 5 years come from? Was there an explosion in the cattle industry?
Also the oil industry lies, they omit lots of data to make the industry look cleaner than it is. This is the most ideal scape goat for the industry, and would not surprise me.
Link the journals, I don’t mind reading
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/oil-gas-industry-lying-global-213549059.html?guccounter=1
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/05/31/opinion/Oil-industry-studies-CAPP-emissions-Alberta
I think the argument here is we caused that problem
And what other solution would there be? Euthanasia?
What are we going to do with all of these animals that we bred through artificial insemination that just keep spontaneously appearing, I wonder.
That doesn’t matter for the millions that are currently living.
Well there is no overnight mass adoption of veganism so you’re right, this isn’t a problem.
Thank you. I still have no idea why people make the ridiculous argument of “Well what will we do with all the living ones?” It’s either what you said, or they think there’s going to be an entire multi-billion-dollar industry supporting tens of thousands of cows for each individual of the last remaining non-vegans. It’s so disingenuous that they’ve either never thought it through or actually just don’t care.
It’s frustrating how arguments supporting the overwhelming status quo don’t need to hold up to scrutiny at all. Then the ones speaking out against it have mountains of credible data and airtight logical arguments that can just be dismissed out-of-hand by complete, nonsensical bullshit, and the general public will lap it up.
Come on, man! At some point people need to be accountable for their own ignorance. If you don’t know that butter contains milk, then you have bigger problems than lactose intolerance.
If you let the companies get away with this, they’ll use it as an excuse to get away with more. The enforcement isn’t about this mistake specifically, it’s about keeping consistent practices and preventing precedents.
That’s a good point that I didn’t consider.
Or… hold the corporate scum accountable to regulations. We just elected a rapist whose underwriters want to extirpate the dept of education. Don’t take for granted things that seem like common sense, not everyone has your lived experiences
That bigger problem is probably just generations of government lying about food.
ask for butter and 9 times out of 10 you’re getting margarine.
You know theres an edit button, right?
why?
it was a lot more than triple and I deleted them a long time before you responded.
Kbin just doing it’s thing
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Triple post!
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But that’s not true? Butter is only the fat (and some minerals) of the milk. So milk contains butter but butter contaibs no milk.
The churning process isn’t 100% effective at removing water, proteins, etc, so people that are allergic to milk can also react to butter. The milk isn’t “milk” anymore, but it would be more confusing to say “contains milk fats, proteins, sugars, enzymes, hormones, antibodies, mucins and minerals”, IMO.
Ah, ok.
