Costco forced to recall 80,000 lbs of butter – because the label fails to mention it contains milk
Costco forced to recall 80,000 lbs of butter – because the label fails to mention it contains milk
The Food and Drug Administration has not told consumers what to do with the purchased product
Archive/mirror: https://archive.ph/ANMD5
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.
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.
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.
Akshually it's soy margarine
I thought “butter” was the ingredient!
Couldn't have solved this issue with a big batch of stickers?
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
Couldn’t this be solved by printing some stickers?
I can't believe it's butter!
Sounds like a lot but it's actually just 8 swimming pool sized tubs they mislabeled
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.
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.
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
If it was already sold I doubt anyone would return it.
Vegans: I felt tricked
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".)
It won't say cow dairy so they can still get off on a technicality!
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.
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