California proposition 65 is the classic example. Since it requires buildings to warn visitors if they contain cancer-causing substances, and since no landlord can possibly know every substance that even tenant or visitor might have, every building has a "this building may or may not contain cancer-causing substances" placard.
The problems with Prop 65 go beyond that. The legislation itself effectively made no attempt to define what it means for something to cause cancer. The commission put in charge of enforcement ultimately decided it would mean anything that current scientific evidence suggests has a 1 in 100,000 risk of eventually causing cancer if you are exposed to it for an entire lifetime. Subsequent lawsuits clarified that a substance must be included even if the risk is only proven to exist in non-human animals.
Ironically, I never even knew this, but apparently the proposition only exists because Jane Fonda thought it would draw left-leaning voters to the polls to hopefully vote for Tom Bradley over George Deukmejian in the 1986 race for California governor. She and the other proponents didn't even think the proposition itself would pass. But the proposition did pass and Bradley wasn't even elected!
My favorite part of prop 65 is they decided on a level of a warning when something was above one thousandth (1/1000) of the no observable effect level for anything that can cause birth defects or reproductive harm.
This caused a problem when they added Vitamin A to the list of chemicals known to cause reproductive harm since one thousandth of the no effect level is far below the RDA for pregnant women.
When a friend whose son has tree and ground nut allergies told me this, I didn't believe it, but to her, it made perfect sense. With the thresholds for anaphylactic response so low, it's costlier not to be able to guarantee that there's no cross contamination than to just add the allergen.
FDA orders bakers to list allergens. There are stiff penalties if you are allergenic but don't list the allergen.
So? Bakers look at their production processes and determine there's a chance that enough allergens get into the product due to cross contamination to list it on the label, just in case.
FDA doesn't like it. They expect the bakers to fix their cross-contamination issues at great expense to themselves.
So? Bakers add allergens on purpose, so they can rightly claim it contains them. It's cheaper than setting up a clean room for every product line.
FDA orders bakers to list allergens. There are stiff penalties if you are allergenic but don't list the allergen.
So? Bakers look at their production processes and determine there's a chance that enough allergens get into the product due to cross contamination to list it on the label, just in case.
FDA doesn't like it. They expect the bakers to fix their cross-contamination issues at great expense to themselves.
So? Bakers add allergens on purpose, so they can rightly claim it contains them. It's cheaper than setting up a clean room for every product line.
The only way to fix cross-contamination issues is to have a different production facility for every possible combination of allergens.
Which is insane.
I worked in a factory that packaged food, if one product contained an allergen, there was no way you could guarantee that a tiny amount of that allergen wouldn't get into some amount of the next product on that production line. No way. Not any possible way. You can clean all you want, you can do whatever you want, you can mandate whatever procedures you want, but there's just no way. Even if every half-awake half-sober completely uncaring third shift production worker (like 1990's era me) does everything exactly right, which they won't, even if they actually cared to, which they won't.
The FDA is putting manufacturers in an impossible position, and it's insane.
I have food allergies, believe me, I get it. But there's just no way. If a manufacturing facility produces products with tree nuts, someone with an allergy to tree nuts has to treat every product produced in or near that facility as though it contains tree nuts. That's reality.
The FDA is not dealing with reality. The problem here is the US federal government.
It's hilarious to me that it's just a given that bread is made in a factory-like setting as opposed to an actual bakery. They still exist, and some of them just make plain bread, which means they don't handle nuts. I'm sure their product is more expensive, but it's not clean room, vacuum chamber expensive.
An ecosystem of centralized, mass production of baked goods is part of the problem, at least.
I'd honestly trust the factory more than the local bakery if a single Sesame seed could kill me. At least at that scale, it'd both have to happen and I'd have to be the one to have it happen for. In a bakery the Sesame seed items would probably be made within 5ft of everything else.
>They still exist, and some of them just make plain bread,
Honestly have never seen this, every bakery bakes at least something else that can be described as more than just plain white bread.
I mean that doesn't make a difference though? You wouldn't want a separate traditional bakery with a separate traditional baker for every combination of allergens either
> The only way to fix cross-contamination issues is to have a different production facility for every possible combination of allergens.
I don't think that's right. You don't necessarily need all 2^n kinds of facilities, because there might not be a commercial demand for products needing every one of those combos.
One may read "for every possible combination of allergens" as "for every combination of allergens present in the range of products being manufactured".
You're using industrial language to talk about food staples, and then suggest that the government is the problem.
Bread is flour, water, yeast, and heat. It feeds people. It's easy to make anywhere you have those things, which is... almost everywhere.
It doesn't require production lines or manufacturing facilities or packaging or even freight. All those things are artificial contrivances, and if they make it hard to practically address concerns like allergens, then maybe they're not a viable approach to providing foodstuffs after all.
So? Congress passes "CAFE" style standards requiring that every large bakery offer a fraction of their SKUs as allergen-feee variation, or pay a "cap and trade" fee to a baker who does.
The next iteration will be adding 1 mg of almond flour, 1 mg of peanuts, and 1 mg milk to every ton of dough they make. Then it really will have the allergens.
And imagine that it probably happens for every instance of centralisation and regulation in our society - with few people connecting the dots and tracing things back by some well-meaning but clueless bureaucrats
This happens all over the place in private industry too. Nothing unique about regulation or bureaucracy that produces effects like this.
If anything, centralization is the best tool to detect and avoid issues like this. Locally, every decision is completely reasonable. It’s only zoomed out that it doesn’t make sense.
This is a really counterproductive way to try to understand problems like this.
No one is trying to do anything evil. Every step is individually quite reasonable and well within ethical bounds. The issue is that you can produce systems comprised solely of reasonable and ethical decisions that nonetheless yield an outcome that every actor would describe as bad.
That is a useful way to interpret this situation and others, because you don’t waste your time looking for a boogeyman to call Evil and instead it prompts you to zoom out and operate on the bigger picture.
> Mechanism design is a branch of economics, social choice theory, and game theory that deals with designing games (or mechanisms) to implement a given social choice function. Because it starts at the end of the game (the optimal result) and then works backwards to find a game that implements it, it is sometimes called reverse game theory.
Have you found any good books on mechanism design for laypeople? I picked one up (can’t remember the name) but it was quite textbooky and mathy, and I’d prefer to start with a more conceptual overview.
The bad outcome can be yielded in a very short number of steps. If perceived and not acted upon, what is that? How long must it go on until we say "No, this is evil."?
Call it evil for as long as you want, especially if you’d prefer it remain unsolved. When you feel like solving it, a different framing will be much more useful.
The bakers cannot eliminate the risk of certain production lines from having cross contamination with any reasonable amount of money (like they would need to redo entire factories). So, for those products they introduce the contaminant on purpose to ensure all products that they cannot eliminate the risk for get labeled reduce the chance of someone dying from eating it.
Now I'm not saying thats what they did, perhaps they were scumbags, but its possible they did try to do what I said above and had the best intentions.
I want the FDA to get meta and be empowerd to say if you add sesame to everything just to work around our rules, we'll fine you, because we're not idiots.
I don't know in the US (though it is mentioned at the end of the article) but here, UK, they tend to warn to the product "may contain ..." if there is any chance of contamination and that indeed appears a lot on bakery products and sandwiches.
"precautionary allergen labeling" [1]. In EU it's still up to individual countries to regulate it, e.g.
Ireland [2]
> Use of a ‘may contain….’ statement, or similar, to indicate that the product may contain an allergen as a result of possible cross-contamination, must not take the place of good manufacturing practices (GMPs) in a food business.
> GMPs must be in place to prevent cross-contamination
FDA orders bakers to list allergens. There are stiff penalties if you are allergenic but don't list the allergen.
So? Bakers claim their product contains allergens, even if they don't.
FDA doesn't like it.
So? Bakers add allergens on purpose, so they can rightly claim it contains them.