Costco’s butter recall, explained

I get that this seems like an overreach, but America is incredibly safe for people with allergies and it&#x27;s because of enforcement like this. In my 36 years of being alive, I&#x27;ve never once had an allergic reaction in the US due to mislabeling (although I&#x27;ve had them in South America and Asia).<p>Under the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act, there&#x27;s 8 groups that MUST be labeled: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat and soybeans.<p>Everyone with an allergy knows to check that section of the packaging (it comes after the long list of ingredients), and you can trust it to be accurate. It can&#x27;t just be right most of the time... it has to always be right.<p>If that trust is broken, America will be a much less safe place.

A couple of the HN comments in this thread said,<p>&quot;America can simultaneously be the safest place on earth for those with food allergies, while avoiding this kind of bureaucratic nonsense.&quot;<p>&quot;I get that this seems like an overreach, but America is incredibly safe for people with allergies and it&#x27;s because of enforcement like this.&quot;<p>In my 40+ years of life in India, and among the many people that I&#x27;ve seen or interacted with in 5 Indian states (among 28 States), I&#x27;ve rarely heard someone say they have allergies the way they have in the US. In US, people have allergies to almost everything.<p>In my 40+ years of life in India, and based on the various supermarkets that I&#x27;ve visited across 4 heavily crowded metro cities, I&#x27;ve rarely seen &quot;Allergy&quot; medicines&#x2F;prescriptions occupy the shelf like they do in the US.<p>Also in the same period of my existence in this third world country, I&#x27;ve rarely seen people concerned about the ingredients in a restaurant menu or labels printed on food packets or containers that there are allergy causing ingredients in there.<p>Like George Bush once cruelly remarked, &quot;India is the cause of shortage of food in the world&quot;, because we eat everything, and rarely check the labels or need them, or less allergic to any food. We are just short of food.

The real problem here is that the FDA is recommending throwing out the butter purely based on the labels.<p>If they said, &quot;throw out the butter if you (or whomever would have consumed it) have an allergy to milk as this is dairy milk-based butter&quot;, or if Costco said, &quot;return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter&quot; it would make more sense.

I thought this noteworthy because butter is made from milk as the sole ingredient

The recommendation to throw it out is crazy though. Couldn&#x27;t they just offer exchanges for any households with a lactose intolerant person that rely on correct labeling.

A lot of the comments here, and the article itself, are missing an important detail.<p>The name of the product is &quot;Kirkland Signature Sweet Cream Butter&quot;. The ingredient list on the package lists cream, it just doesn&#x27;t have the required language &quot;contains milk&quot;.<p>Are there actual humans that are so deathly allergic to milk but somehow don&#x27;t know what cream is? E.g. there is a comment in this thread that states:<p>&gt;&quot;Would you toss your butter in the trash if the label left out one critical detail?&quot;<p>&gt; yes, if that &#x27;one critical detail&#x27; could in fact fucking kill me...<p>I mean, imagine if someone had an allergy so allergic to milk it could &quot;fucking kill them&quot;, are they somehow loading up on &quot;Sweet Creamy Butter&quot; and are then shocked that it contains milk??<p>I get why, bureaucratically, you want to have hard lines, so I understand the recall. I just think this article and some comments that there is actual potential danger in this case are laughably ridiculous.

Is this the Tesla sense of the word recall? Do they just slap a &quot;CONTAINS: MILK&quot; sticker on each and consider it successfully recalled? And of course, refund any customer who brings it back, but they do that for any reason already.

IMHO this is getting close to the most surprising example of bureaucratic-red-tape-gone-wild I&#x27;ve seen, which is a &quot;may contain traces of peanuts&quot; warning on a jar of peanut butter.

This article must have been written by AI. I suppose it&#x27;s my fault for clicking through a Forbes link.

waste of resources. youd think they could add a sticker to it at the store instead.

The only reason people think &quot;butter&quot; may not contain milk is because we let advertizers abuse that term to refer to anything vaguely resembling that texture.

This almost reads as satire, but I assume it’s low quality ai or just auto-generated content sourced from an FDA recall.

The article seems to be only justifying the waste without going near the well-established fact that butter is made of milk.<p>If you have allergy you&#x27;re supposed to know butter is made of milk, or no?<p>What am I missing?

&quot;Would you toss your butter in the trash if the label left out one critical detail?&quot;<p>yes, if that &#x27;one critical detail&#x27; could in fact fucking kill me...

Shout outs to Henry Waxman who originally introduced H.R.3562 aka the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990.<p>It&#x27;s wild to think that the mandating of nutrition labels is only 34 years old.<p>I can recommend his biography The Waxman Report which talks about this and other types of legislation that are taken for granted in daily life.

This is exactly why Trump won. We’ve lost touch with common sense: babies can’t have a gender listed on their charts anymore (causing confusion for doctors and nurses), but butter needs a warning label to say it contains milk. And yet, everyone tells me this is perfectly normal.

Idiocracy is already here - no wonder! People are so dumb knowing where butter comes from! Next thing - a label on the water warning &quot;Beware - liquid! Wet! Easy to spill! Do not consume nearby electric devices! Do not consume more than 4 gallons a day! Fat-free! No sugar added! Low calories! Non-GMO. Cruelty Free! No animal testing! Compostable! Recyclable! RDI = 2 liters.&quot;

I’m more curious about what change was introduced that omitted the label from a small number of packages.

So many &quot;broken windows&quot; theory believers suddenly promoting broken windows.

The article’s tone is absolutely laughable:<p>&gt; If you have one of the recalled batches, the FDA advises not to eat it under any circumstances. Instead, throw it out to avoid any health risks.<p>Was this AI generated?

ragebait.

MacDonalds Hot Apple Pie! &quot;Caution, contents are hot&quot;<p>Butter! &quot;Caution contains milk&quot;