@@camsy83 absolutely! "Poshages" is a word we use in our household. (To tell them apart from everyday sausages.) Though like Lizzy (in the video) I prefer cheaper sausages, as they seem to contain less fat. (I'm guessing because you can use very fatty meat in sausages and call it meat. More meat = more fat. So cheap sausages can be lower in fat.)
Allergies are why Five Guys has free peanuts. It isn't because they think you'll be enticed by the offer of a protein appetizer while waiting for your burger. It's because they cook their french fries in peanut oil, and a sign on the door saying "there are just open piles of peanuts in every corner of this place" was the easiest way to communicate to the allergic that they shouldn't even step inside.
@@ZipplyZane Do people with peanut allergies, but who aren't affected by peanut oil, have the type of peanut allergy that _is_ affected by aerosolised peanut allergens? Like, the latter type of allergy exists, but what is the overlap with those not allergic to oil?
I mean, I've also seen the warning of "our products are prepared in a facility that contains penuts" as a way of saying, "Just assume all of our stuff has been contaminated with peanuts." That seems easier and cheaper.
@@route2070 That's the law that changed. You can no longer say "prepared in a facility that contains". You either have to add the allergen, or you have to guarantee that there is no contamination either in your own facility or in the facilities of any of your suppliers. This includes contamination because of allergens which happen to have grown on the same field that the farmer planted their crop. Doing so with 100% certainty is insanely difficult. It's not impossible. But it'll cost a lot more than simply changing your ingredient list to actually contain the allergen.
@@1FatLittleMonkey it's pretty much a 100% overlap. I've never heard of anyone being allergic to peanut oil. Though many with peanut allergies will avoid it, because when it comes to anaphylaxis, better safe than sorry
3:58 it always amazes me how many people think that "iron" the metal and "iron" the nutrient are different things. They're not, they're the exact same mineral.
A home remedy for Anemia from my Grandmother was to put a few big nails into an apple over night, then pull them out the next day before eating the apple.
@@aixtom979 in south and east asia they rolled out an iron goldfish-shaped thing for people to put into pots when cooking rice or soups, to help add iron to their diets.
It's not that weird, calcium the pure metal and calcium in your bones are very different compounds. If you eat calcium metal you're going to be on fire in your insides, but the white powder calcium carbonate is fine. Same for sodium and potassium. Metallic bismuth would be a bad thing to find in your medicine, but pink bismuth subsalicylate is fine. Iron in large enough pieces and made of compounds that can be picked up by magnets also have low bioavailability, it's just the cheapest way for the cereal companies to add iron.
6:46 - it wasn't that "they couldn't *call* it bread". It's that for tax reasons it was not "bread" (because of the added sugar), so it got charged the higher sales tax / VAT as cake.
Always interesting to watch unintended consequences. People with sesame allergies must have been like "Thanks for helping us out with that regulation. We sure are glad there are more sesames everywhere now."
When the law starts to assume that people are too stupid to see signs warning that some products have an allergen and not others, they force everything to have it. Yay, more laws always help
@@JoshuaGold1Law only required them to label it. The problem is that none of their bakers were set up to separate sesame and non sesame runs or easily clean between them. Usually it takes an upgrade cycle for the issue to be resolved.
I knew this halfway through the question as a supplier of some of In-N-Out's buns added sesame this month. It's due to the FASTER law. It requires bakeries to shut down to clean equipment of a product's allergen when a product without it was next on the docket. Shutting down is lost time and income, so they added just enough sesame to avoid that.
Can't they just declare that all their products contain sesame even if they aren't actually adding any?? Make the non sesame buns or bread, but label it as including sesame.
@@comicus01 I'm pretty sure there's rules against that, because then you could also declare something that'd make the item more expensive. Like having a whole mix of seeds in the bread when it's actually just sunflower seeds (which are dirt cheap).
A number of bakeries in the US just got in trouble for essentially this, they were claiming a sesame allergy without having any sesame in the products.
That's so stupid. If they get in trouble for warning that their product is made in a shared facility that might be contaminated with sesame, then that triggers exactly the type of behavior that this video is about. It's very difficult to proof a negative. But it's very easy to update recipes to include allergens.
I knew this one purely because something similar was in the news last week, although without the company actually adding sesame in this case... they were told off by the FDA for putting allergen warnings on everything even when they didn't contain sesame, because the company didn't bother accurately tracking what could potentially have cross-contamination and what couldn't.
Not just sesame, but also milk. Chick-fil-a has signs up that declare basically everything on the menu contains milk, even their grilled chicken breast when ordered without a bun or cheese.
I mean, Chick-Fil-A also regularly donates money to anti-LGBTQ hate groups, so I'd just expect any and all forms of s***-headery from them at this point.
This is not true. Milk was added to the marinade they use on their grilled chicken. It was changed by the supplier without their knowledge or so they say.
Sesame. It was in response to new food labeling laws regarding allergens. Sesame was added as a "must disclose" alergen, and it decided that it would cost less to add it to foods and declare it than to not declare it and get sued if there was som unntentional cross contamination.
Welcome to 'murica where suing for billions over a sandwich doesn't get you laughed out of court by the judge. Resulting in these ridiculous court case cost risks, resulting in just avoiding the issue being the cheaper option.
@@sirjmo The hot coffee lady had third degree burns, and only sued after McDonalds refused to cover her medical costs, despite keeping the coffee extra hot for commercial reasons.
As one of the 1.6 million Americans with a sesame allergy, I had no idea about this and it pisses me off. This does explain a few minor reactions I've had over the last few years seemingly out of nowhere though...
It was to do with tax in Ireland similar toJaffa Cakes are they a cake or a buscuit. "Ireland's Supreme Court ruled that Subway bread shouldn't be classified as bread for tax purposes due to its sugar-to-flour ratio."
My very first thought when I saw the question was that it was some sort of allergen, so I'm surprised it took them so long to get there (although my first thought was milk, because that's the one I normally see being added to things unnecessarily) But anyway, are "may contain" warnings not a thing over there? Surely that would be a much more sensible solution?
Is there a place to watch this podcast as a video podcast or are the only videos going to be the clips? I like seeing people's faces on these and wish I could see the whole things as videos.
The reason American bagged bread has so much sugar in it is to make it stay soft forever. Real bread goes hard and stale VERY quickly, and how you prevent that is by adding lots of fats and sugars to the bread.
Curious fact about the sugar in American bread - it's actually there as a preservative! Our puffy, loose-crumb pre-sliced sandwich loaves are wildly susceptible to mold, high-fructose corn syrup is in exceedingly high supply, and known for being hydroscopic. So, put some HFCS in the dough, cook it before the yeast can eat all of it, and you've got bread that stays dry longer helping it resist penicillium and friends while making it slightly more caloric and a little sweeter. Also, I _hate_ that footlong cookie. It tastes delicious, but unless you're intentionally cutting it up and sharing it with people, you're probably going to wind up growing a desert stomach and eating the whole thing, which will perforce leave you miserable the rest of the night as your body contends with the fact that you just ate over a pound of chocolate chip cookie.
I thought this was going to be about pumpkin spice, where people complained that it contained no pumpkin (no duh, the mixture is spice FOR pumpkin desserts), but adding it didn't make a big difference because pumpkin on its own is fairly bland.
Damn, the footlong cookie at Subway is true! Along with churros and giant pretzel sticks according to the press release (sounds like all 3 items are 12 inches long)
I knew that one immediately because that is why I can't go out to eat or buy bread products from the supermarket any more.... Admittedly it is probably better for my health, but I still get absolutely furious every time I am reminded of it. If companies were people, they would all be psychopaths.
To them, it's all about numbers. They were losing money because of having to cater to less than one-half of one percent of the population. Now they can ignore you.
6:45 not sure if it is an urban legend or not, but iirc McDonald's technically would have to call their cheeseburger a dessert were it not for the slice of pickle.
The restaurants were not allowed to just put "may contain sesame" on the delaration... (It must be very difficult & expensive to keep all those allergens contained and separated.)
I like to imagine a bunch of corporates laughing there arses off in that meeting, and going through with it for that reason. Or some sort of Willem Dafoe acting where they look out the window onto the city and curse the name of regulators.
@@fovlsbane But cheaper to produce is why there were/are food dyes used in food in the US that are illegal throughout Europe and elsewhere for health reasons. That doesn't sound better for the consumer.
This was very fun to see you get this answer, but this really sucks for people with sesame allergies. Already, with the 14 allergens, it's tough to eat out or just eat in general. Like, the 14 allergens isn't going to tell me whether it's soya sauce or tofu (the latter which I could well die if I eat). But I guess companies just don't want to be held liable like how SO MUCH packaged food caveats with "May contain traces of peanuts and other tree nuts".
Well... if you think about it, most cost- effective should have been to stop using sesame in all their products. HOWEVER that may not be as simple as it seems, if they have for example bread from a manufacturer that also uses sesame in some of their products... so they can't guarantee its complete absence... so the restaurant would have to change the supply chain for some of their basic ingredients. That would have been probably more pricey for the end user. So in a way this is better for the customers. Just not for all...
My sister has a minor sesame allergy, but here in australia you just required to state that the product has been made on equipment that also made sesame products. So we don't have the issue of companies doing that.
This is almost as bad as adding xylitol to peanut butter as a sweetener. Peanut butter is often a snack that people give to their dogs, and xylitol is extremely poisonous to dogs. Most peanut butter has added sugar, but the calories from the added sugar are nothing compared to the calories from the protein and especially the fats.
The subway bread thing was that their bread was too sugary to qualify for a tax incentive that allowed certain food staples to be sold with less taxes on them
Pretty sure here in Australia all chocolate bars have the warning "may contain nuts" on the wrapper, even when they are not an ingredient of the bar. Because bars containing nuts are made in the same facility.
That's how everywhere but the US does it. If I'm recalling correctly, part of the 2022 law/regulations mentioned was that they couldn't say a food might contain something if it doesn't actually contain it as an ingredient, that might be the 'quantity of an ingredient' change that Tom mentioned, so if something didn't have it in a large enough quantity they couldn't say it might contain it, but that would then mean they would have to completely isolate the food prep all the way from harvesting raw ingredients (going off other comments) through to serving the final product to the customer, which would obviously be extremely expensive if they needed to duplicate food prep spaces, etc, and so these companies just added sesame to everything instead so they could legally say it contained it.
I thought it was going to be something to do with shrinkflation? Like adding some dense useless substance as filler so they can give you less of the actual product but say it’s still the same weight “Relatively expensive” sorta throws a wrench in that but I thought maybe it was like expensive for a useless thing but still cheaper than the material they’re saving? Idk
"They have the Big Mac. We have the 'Big Mick'! Now, both contain two all-beef patties, sauce, lettuce cheese, pickles, onions. But see, their sandwich comes on a sesame seed bun. Our bun? No seeds! It's completely different."
I was so close and so off with my guess, I guessed it was government related but I thought it would be a tax loophole being exploited, but it was about saving them money.
As someone who isn't allergic to sesame: I hate those stupid seeds, they genuinely make the sandwich eating experience worse because adding them is a quick and easy way to make the bun seem more fancy
Any such laws should contain heavy fines for exactly this behavior, IMHO. Sure, it may be hard to prove, but it could at least make it more cost-effective to avoid using an unnecessary allergen to avoid cross contamination. Sesame seeds add nothing. Just don't have them in your products.
Why We Can't Have Nice Things, part 5,754,368. 😞 Also, I'm reminded of a sketch from _You Can't Do That On Television_ where people were eating at the lethal chef's restaurant and remarked that there had been a 20% increase in food poisoning cases there, and the chef said that it was because he had been adding 20% more food poison to his dishes, holding up a bottle so labeled with a skull and crossbones. Cue retching, and scene.
That sure is something. Instead of delicately addressing one or two specific issues, these companies take the easier(?) route of screwing up the other 99 things with that same issue. Another example of corporate risk-aversion at its (il-)logical extreme. "We won't take steps to protect this portion of society, we'll just deliberately chase them off and not deal with them." Some bean counter decided 0.5% of the entire market and 90% of the menu were acceptable losses to keeping the one or two marquee food items unchanged.
Yes people are allergic to sesame. The key point to the issue is that the regulation required stringent testing to ensure there was no sesame seeds were in the item, at a increased cost when these companies were not putting sesame in it in the first place. most people feel it’s an overreaching regulation, which is why they just added the seeds it to ensure they didn’t have to test for it. It was really a lose lose situation.
The only reason I could see for such regulations would be cross contamination. And that would only make sense of they were using sesame in some products. And, in that case, it would seem cheaper to stop using it. If it's not being used at all, they shouldn't need to test. Unless this is the oat/wheat situation where the same equipment is used for wheat and sesame seeds, resulting in cross contamination that way. It's why oats are unsafe for celiac patients unless they've been tested. Also, are sesame seeds at that level of allergen?
@@ZipplyZane the FDA here in the United States, put sesame on the allergen list and when that happened it now has to be tested for essentially to ensure your food product doesn’t contain it, even though it may have never been made with Sesame before ever
@@andyjbauman That's interesting, as that's not how it works with gluten. You have to test to claim that you're gluten-free (because Celiac can be very, very sensitive). But you don't have to test if you just don't list anything that contains wheat in your ingredients. I find a lot of products that do this. That said, I have heard some weird things with barley malt, but only in certain situations. For some reason, it applies to Rice Krispies and knockoff brands. They add barley malt as their last ingredient. But I believe they've always had some type of malt in them. It's just that they now specifically add one that is known to contain gluten.
Let's not forget about Natasha Ednan-Laperouse who died in 2016 after ingesting sesame that was not listed as an ingredient. It took until 2021 for the law in the UK to be changed to prevent this happening again. The parents attitude throughout has been quite incredible. Not angry at all.
I can't believe that after the failed pun of "poshages", Tom tried to slip "porkmanteau" under the net...
It's 'under the radar' or 'through the net' surely?
@@MrDannyDetail thank you, I spent about 3 minutes before posting it thinking 'that's not quite right, is it?' before giving up and submitting.
For me, poshages landed 🤷♂️
@@lohphat in French, you pronounce porT manT'o
@@camsy83 absolutely! "Poshages" is a word we use in our household. (To tell them apart from everyday sausages.)
Though like Lizzy (in the video) I prefer cheaper sausages, as they seem to contain less fat. (I'm guessing because you can use very fatty meat in sausages and call it meat. More meat = more fat. So cheap sausages can be lower in fat.)
Allergies are why Five Guys has free peanuts. It isn't because they think you'll be enticed by the offer of a protein appetizer while waiting for your burger. It's because they cook their french fries in peanut oil, and a sign on the door saying "there are just open piles of peanuts in every corner of this place" was the easiest way to communicate to the allergic that they shouldn't even step inside.
If true, that's really shitty, because many people with peanut allergies have no reaction to peanut oil.
@@ZipplyZane Do people with peanut allergies, but who aren't affected by peanut oil, have the type of peanut allergy that _is_ affected by aerosolised peanut allergens? Like, the latter type of allergy exists, but what is the overlap with those not allergic to oil?
I mean, I've also seen the warning of "our products are prepared in a facility that contains penuts" as a way of saying, "Just assume all of our stuff has been contaminated with peanuts." That seems easier and cheaper.
@@route2070 That's the law that changed. You can no longer say "prepared in a facility that contains". You either have to add the allergen, or you have to guarantee that there is no contamination either in your own facility or in the facilities of any of your suppliers. This includes contamination because of allergens which happen to have grown on the same field that the farmer planted their crop. Doing so with 100% certainty is insanely difficult. It's not impossible. But it'll cost a lot more than simply changing your ingredient list to actually contain the allergen.
@@1FatLittleMonkey it's pretty much a 100% overlap. I've never heard of anyone being allergic to peanut oil. Though many with peanut allergies will avoid it, because when it comes to anaphylaxis, better safe than sorry
3:58 it always amazes me how many people think that "iron" the metal and "iron" the nutrient are different things. They're not, they're the exact same mineral.
A home remedy for Anemia from my Grandmother was to put a few big nails into an apple over night, then pull them out the next day before eating the apple.
Literally the fourth most common element on earth by mass, so it shouldn't surprise you that it's both in the ground and in most living things.
@@aixtom979 in south and east asia they rolled out an iron goldfish-shaped thing for people to put into pots when cooking rice or soups, to help add iron to their diets.
It's not that weird, calcium the pure metal and calcium in your bones are very different compounds. If you eat calcium metal you're going to be on fire in your insides, but the white powder calcium carbonate is fine. Same for sodium and potassium. Metallic bismuth would be a bad thing to find in your medicine, but pink bismuth subsalicylate is fine.
Iron in large enough pieces and made of compounds that can be picked up by magnets also have low bioavailability, it's just the cheapest way for the cereal companies to add iron.
6:46 - it wasn't that "they couldn't *call* it bread". It's that for tax reasons it was not "bread" (because of the added sugar), so it got charged the higher sales tax / VAT as cake.
Thank you for clearing that up!
Btw I’ve been to LA a while back and indeed, US sweet bread is not bread (read in patronizing French voice)
It's also an essential food void of vat
Always interesting to watch unintended consequences. People with sesame allergies must have been like "Thanks for helping us out with that regulation. We sure are glad there are more sesames everywhere now."
When the law starts to assume that people are too stupid to see signs warning that some products have an allergen and not others, they force everything to have it. Yay, more laws always help
@@JoshuaGold1Law only required them to label it. The problem is that none of their bakers were set up to separate sesame and non sesame runs or easily clean between them. Usually it takes an upgrade cycle for the issue to be resolved.
I knew this halfway through the question as a supplier of some of In-N-Out's buns added sesame this month. It's due to the FASTER law. It requires bakeries to shut down to clean equipment of a product's allergen when a product without it was next on the docket. Shutting down is lost time and income, so they added just enough sesame to avoid that.
In Germany I've started to see "produced in a factory that also processes this list of allergens" a lot more often. Probably for a similar reason.
Can't they just declare that all their products contain sesame even if they aren't actually adding any?? Make the non sesame buns or bread, but label it as including sesame.
@@rolfs2165 I've seen that on labels in the US for a number of years. Something like "manufactured in a facility that processes peanuts".
@@comicus01 ...Uh, no, pretty sure there are laws against actually just LYING about what is in your product
@@comicus01 I'm pretty sure there's rules against that, because then you could also declare something that'd make the item more expensive. Like having a whole mix of seeds in the bread when it's actually just sunflower seeds (which are dirt cheap).
A number of bakeries in the US just got in trouble for essentially this, they were claiming a sesame allergy without having any sesame in the products.
That's so stupid. If they get in trouble for warning that their product is made in a shared facility that might be contaminated with sesame, then that triggers exactly the type of behavior that this video is about. It's very difficult to proof a negative. But it's very easy to update recipes to include allergens.
I knew this one purely because something similar was in the news last week, although without the company actually adding sesame in this case... they were told off by the FDA for putting allergen warnings on everything even when they didn't contain sesame, because the company didn't bother accurately tracking what could potentially have cross-contamination and what couldn't.
5:35 "Porkmanteu"
General rule of thumb: It's not the law, it's the incentives that law introduces that you need to watch.
Not just sesame, but also milk. Chick-fil-a has signs up that declare basically everything on the menu contains milk, even their grilled chicken breast when ordered without a bun or cheese.
Do they marinate their grilled chicken in buttermilk, by any chance? I know that's a popular way to tenderize chicken.
I mean, Chick-Fil-A also regularly donates money to anti-LGBTQ hate groups, so I'd just expect any and all forms of s***-headery from them at this point.
@@lmpeters My guess is that they use butter on the grilled chicken breasts as that's a very common thing in grilled fast food.
This is not true. Milk was added to the marinade they use on their grilled chicken. It was changed by the supplier without their knowledge or so they say.
@@tyler-carrington That makes sense
I remember an episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy where they pulled iron out of Corn Flakes.
The Subway bread thing in Ireland wasn't that they had to call it cake, but that it counted as cake for tax purposes.
is full podcast has audio format and only those questions are video ones? I tried to find full video podcast, but found only audio
Sesame. It was in response to new food labeling laws regarding allergens. Sesame was added as a "must disclose" alergen, and it decided that it would cost less to add it to foods and declare it than to not declare it and get sued if there was som unntentional cross contamination.
Welcome to 'murica where suing for billions over a sandwich doesn't get you laughed out of court by the judge.
Resulting in these ridiculous court case cost risks, resulting in just avoiding the issue being the cheaper option.
@@sirjmo The hot coffee lady had third degree burns, and only sued after McDonalds refused to cover her medical costs, despite keeping the coffee extra hot for commercial reasons.
As one of the 1.6 million Americans with a sesame allergy, I had no idea about this and it pisses me off. This does explain a few minor reactions I've had over the last few years seemingly out of nowhere though...
It was to do with tax in Ireland similar toJaffa Cakes are they a cake or a buscuit. "Ireland's Supreme Court ruled that Subway bread shouldn't be classified as bread for tax purposes due to its sugar-to-flour ratio."
My very first thought when I saw the question was that it was some sort of allergen, so I'm surprised it took them so long to get there (although my first thought was milk, because that's the one I normally see being added to things unnecessarily)
But anyway, are "may contain" warnings not a thing over there? Surely that would be a much more sensible solution?
The idea of the law was to do away with the need for that. It backfired.
10 min? now I'm intrigued
"Poshages" is your latest Parker Pun, Tom 😂
And don't bash the Subway footlong cookies, they're delicious!
'Parker pun'
It's when you give a joke a go, but it doesn't work out.
Any sufficiently advanced parker square is indistinguishable from a magic square.
@@robertjarman3703 I wish RUclips had "love" reactions for comments.
Reminds of their recent-ish one where it was cheaper for someone to legally change their name than change the name on a plane ticket 🤣
Is there a place to watch this podcast as a video podcast or are the only videos going to be the clips? I like seeing people's faces on these and wish I could see the whole things as videos.
The reason American bagged bread has so much sugar in it is to make it stay soft forever. Real bread goes hard and stale VERY quickly, and how you prevent that is by adding lots of fats and sugars to the bread.
Curious fact about the sugar in American bread - it's actually there as a preservative! Our puffy, loose-crumb pre-sliced sandwich loaves are wildly susceptible to mold, high-fructose corn syrup is in exceedingly high supply, and known for being hydroscopic. So, put some HFCS in the dough, cook it before the yeast can eat all of it, and you've got bread that stays dry longer helping it resist penicillium and friends while making it slightly more caloric and a little sweeter.
Also, I _hate_ that footlong cookie. It tastes delicious, but unless you're intentionally cutting it up and sharing it with people, you're probably going to wind up growing a desert stomach and eating the whole thing, which will perforce leave you miserable the rest of the night as your body contends with the fact that you just ate over a pound of chocolate chip cookie.
I would have no issue eating a footlong cookie 😋 (as long as it's gluten-free since I have celiac)
Gotta get a friend to hold you back
I thought this was going to be about pumpkin spice, where people complained that it contained no pumpkin (no duh, the mixture is spice FOR pumpkin desserts), but adding it didn't make a big difference because pumpkin on its own is fairly bland.
Love the energy of the panel. 😅
Damn, the footlong cookie at Subway is true! Along with churros and giant pretzel sticks according to the press release (sounds like all 3 items are 12 inches long)
As someone with a sesame allergy, this has REALLY SUCKED. Like I can’t even describe how much worse it made things.
You can buy 64 bags of playground sand in America and extract a third of a gram of gold out of it, though it is totally not cost effective.
You can also add an amazing amount of sawdust to rice krispies and have difficulties telling the difference between a non sawdust Krispy
Might be more cost effective if you resell the sand
@@NickTaylorRickPowers I learned this from William Osman.
I learned it from Pioneerpauly.
I could probably get that much by spending an afternoon by the American River (that's the river that started the California Gold Rush).
I knew that one immediately because that is why I can't go out to eat or buy bread products from the supermarket any more.... Admittedly it is probably better for my health, but I still get absolutely furious every time I am reminded of it. If companies were people, they would all be psychopaths.
Note it wasn't just those restaurants. It is almost everywhere now with a few exceptions.
To them, it's all about numbers. They were losing money because of having to cater to less than one-half of one percent of the population. Now they can ignore you.
@@NorthernSeaWitch and not get sued for it
6:45 not sure if it is an urban legend or not, but iirc McDonald's technically would have to call their cheeseburger a dessert were it not for the slice of pickle.
The restaurants were not allowed to just put "may contain sesame" on the delaration...
(It must be very difficult & expensive to keep all those allergens contained and separated.)
I've always found it interesting how some places will change the ingredients for better marketing/PR/legal loopholes rather than a better product
I like to imagine a bunch of corporates laughing there arses off in that meeting, and going through with it for that reason.
Or some sort of Willem Dafoe acting where they look out the window onto the city and curse the name of regulators.
Cheaper is better for the consumer though, so managing loopholes well does make better products if it reduces costs.
@@fovlsbane But cheaper to produce is why there were/are food dyes used in food in the US that are illegal throughout Europe and elsewhere for health reasons. That doesn't sound better for the consumer.
This is a great question!
Such a fun story to see the side effects of well intentioned but impractical laws!
Also people with diverticulitis can't eat anything containing seeds. But if 1.3 million are allergic that leaves 350 million plus potential customers.
Also as in many cases it's ground into a fine flour it's not even going to be a seed any more.
This was very fun to see you get this answer, but this really sucks for people with sesame allergies. Already, with the 14 allergens, it's tough to eat out or just eat in general. Like, the 14 allergens isn't going to tell me whether it's soya sauce or tofu (the latter which I could well die if I eat). But I guess companies just don't want to be held liable like how SO MUCH packaged food caveats with "May contain traces of peanuts and other tree nuts".
Thanks for reminding me that not everyone's high school education included the demos my high school chemistry teacher did.
my guess was they dyed a bunch of food blue to promote Avatar 2 and people didn't want to eat blue food
... not even close
Yep, I had eco-green or nuke-sunset-red chicken etc. - blue-grass in a 'Sodbuster Salad' might work though : )
TGI Friday's in the UK does this too. My daughter has a sesame allergy and TGI's is a complete no go for her
companies tend to choose the most cost effective option over the most consumer friendly one!
Well... if you think about it, most cost- effective should have been to stop using sesame in all their products.
HOWEVER that may not be as simple as it seems, if they have for example bread from a manufacturer that also uses sesame in some of their products... so they can't guarantee its complete absence... so the restaurant would have to change the supply chain for some of their basic ingredients.
That would have been probably more pricey for the end user. So in a way this is better for the customers. Just not for all...
Yet another example of well intentioned regulations having side effects that work against those very same well intentions.
My sister has a minor sesame allergy, but here in australia you just required to state that the product has been made on equipment that also made sesame products.
So we don't have the issue of companies doing that.
This is almost as bad as adding xylitol to peanut butter as a sweetener. Peanut butter is often a snack that people give to their dogs, and xylitol is extremely poisonous to dogs. Most peanut butter has added sugar, but the calories from the added sugar are nothing compared to the calories from the protein and especially the fats.
When Tom said 'poshages' and was talking about how it didn't work, did he say 'pork-manteau'?
The reason to add salt to a sandwich, is if you have sliced tomatoes on it, salt massively enhances the flavour. Try it!
The subway bread thing was that their bread was too sugary to qualify for a tax incentive that allowed certain food staples to be sold with less taxes on them
The day before the podcast came out, I saw this same story on Hacker News, so I knew it immediately.
This is like how you don't go into a 5 Guys if you are allergic to peanuts.
The first video I have seen. I really miss the weekly Tom Scott videos.
I think the think with subway in ireland was more of a tax thing, where it wasn't afforded some of the tax advantages bread might get as a staple food
Will Seaward: "Release the sesame"
My first thought was they had added gold to be fancy 😅
I feel like at least one shop must have made the complete opposite decision, so to cut cost and go around the regulation?
I kind guessed it from the start - I thought about five guys cooking their stuff in peanut oil and how that could lose sales 😂
I wanna see a Green-brother on this show, that would be a great crossover
Premium ice cream has more air than regular ice cream.
My first thought was something to do with changing the contents to avoid patents or the like. Pretty far off.
Pretty sure here in Australia all chocolate bars have the warning "may contain nuts" on the wrapper, even when they are not an ingredient of the bar. Because bars containing nuts are made in the same facility.
That's how everywhere but the US does it. If I'm recalling correctly, part of the 2022 law/regulations mentioned was that they couldn't say a food might contain something if it doesn't actually contain it as an ingredient, that might be the 'quantity of an ingredient' change that Tom mentioned, so if something didn't have it in a large enough quantity they couldn't say it might contain it, but that would then mean they would have to completely isolate the food prep all the way from harvesting raw ingredients (going off other comments) through to serving the final product to the customer, which would obviously be extremely expensive if they needed to duplicate food prep spaces, etc, and so these companies just added sesame to everything instead so they could legally say it contained it.
My first thought was "they added AI", but that wasn't big in 2022. Then "blockchain", "cryptocurrency", "NFT", but I think they'd peaked before 2022.
It was dolphin meat. Dolphin meat would be expensive, and it would cause lost sales.
commonly known as tuna
Does Karen have a diatomic oxygen molecule tattoo on her arm? If so, that's pretty cool.
I thought it was going to be something to do with shrinkflation? Like adding some dense useless substance as filler so they can give you less of the actual product but say it’s still the same weight
“Relatively expensive” sorta throws a wrench in that but I thought maybe it was like expensive for a useless thing but still cheaper than the material they’re saving? Idk
2024 here Foot Long Cookies now in Subway UK
I've been enjoying M&S Italian sausages recently.
"They have the Big Mac. We have the 'Big Mick'! Now, both contain two all-beef patties, sauce, lettuce cheese, pickles, onions. But see, their sandwich comes on a sesame seed bun. Our bun? No seeds! It's completely different."
I have heard that in the UK, dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets may not be called dinosaur nuggets unless they contain real dinosaur.
If it is really chicken. ( or ANY bird) it is real dinosaur meat.
I was so close and so off with my guess, I guessed it was government related but I thought it would be a tax loophole being exploited, but it was about saving them money.
As someone who isn't allergic to sesame: I hate those stupid seeds, they genuinely make the sandwich eating experience worse because adding them is a quick and easy way to make the bun seem more fancy
At least they're not the poppyseeds my uni has all over their buns that fall off and get everywhere the second you touch them. Bane of my existence
@@woodfur00 don't forget that it's been shown if you have foods with poppy seeds you can pee dirty on a drug test
Companies will do anything to avoid efforts and maximize profits, at the expense of consumers at large
Any such laws should contain heavy fines for exactly this behavior, IMHO. Sure, it may be hard to prove, but it could at least make it more cost-effective to avoid using an unnecessary allergen to avoid cross contamination.
Sesame seeds add nothing. Just don't have them in your products.
"American Cheese" can't actually be called cheese.
I don't know about that. .... Poshages kinda slaps
Why We Can't Have Nice Things, part 5,754,368. 😞
Also, I'm reminded of a sketch from _You Can't Do That On Television_ where people were eating at the lethal chef's restaurant and remarked that there had been a 20% increase in food poisoning cases there, and the chef said that it was because he had been adding 20% more food poison to his dishes, holding up a bottle so labeled with a skull and crossbones. Cue retching, and scene.
That sure is something. Instead of delicately addressing one or two specific issues, these companies take the easier(?) route of screwing up the other 99 things with that same issue.
Another example of corporate risk-aversion at its (il-)logical extreme. "We won't take steps to protect this portion of society, we'll just deliberately chase them off and not deal with them."
Some bean counter decided 0.5% of the entire market and 90% of the menu were acceptable losses to keeping the one or two marquee food items unchanged.
I was thinking something to do with ice in the drinks....
My guess would have been gluten, but I would have never guessed...
sesame seeds
No lie I said out loud "poshausages" at exactly the same time as Tom
Nice move Scott.
"footlong cookie" is violently American.
I thought this was gonna be about the time McDonalds died their burgers black with charcoal
Brilliant and evil. I believe we have a plot.
I believe "cake" needs to be chemically livened and it is from a batter, where bread is biologically livened as is made from dough.
OH NO NOT SESAME WHY
While sausage is generally pork, it is not uncommon to see beef sausage just labeled sausage.
Yes people are allergic to sesame. The key point to the issue is that the regulation required stringent testing to ensure there was no sesame seeds were in the item, at a increased cost when these companies were not putting sesame in it in the first place. most people feel it’s an overreaching regulation, which is why they just added the seeds it to ensure they didn’t have to test for it. It was really a lose lose situation.
The only reason I could see for such regulations would be cross contamination. And that would only make sense of they were using sesame in some products. And, in that case, it would seem cheaper to stop using it. If it's not being used at all, they shouldn't need to test.
Unless this is the oat/wheat situation where the same equipment is used for wheat and sesame seeds, resulting in cross contamination that way. It's why oats are unsafe for celiac patients unless they've been tested.
Also, are sesame seeds at that level of allergen?
@@ZipplyZane the FDA here in the United States, put sesame on the allergen list and when that happened it now has to be tested for essentially to ensure your food product doesn’t contain it, even though it may have never been made with Sesame before ever
@@andyjbauman That's interesting, as that's not how it works with gluten. You have to test to claim that you're gluten-free (because Celiac can be very, very sensitive). But you don't have to test if you just don't list anything that contains wheat in your ingredients. I find a lot of products that do this.
That said, I have heard some weird things with barley malt, but only in certain situations. For some reason, it applies to Rice Krispies and knockoff brands. They add barley malt as their last ingredient.
But I believe they've always had some type of malt in them. It's just that they now specifically add one that is known to contain gluten.
Lizzy talking about her favorite sausages.... I would like to know more...🌭
I'm guessing they added the ingredient, the word: Vegan
Wouldn't it just be cheaper to put "contains traces of sesame" on it and not actually put sesame in it to avoid changing the recipe
That would get them in trouble with the FDA.
They gave no bread ? Qu'ils mangent de la brioche.
can't they just say that it "can contain" it? Adding extra to make that claim sounds so foreign to me.
Remember kids, America is a "sometimes food". You can't have America every day.
So, "poshages" is a failed ... "porkmanteau".
Porkmanteu!
But sesame is not bland...
Of course it was about low American food standards and profit-over-people sneakiness.
I thought he quit lol
Tom is wrong here. Its not cornflakes, its special k. Which is rice based.
Tom Scott reads too much he has to sit out of so many questions that he doesn't read out!
American corporations are the most petty mofos in existence, I swear
Let's not forget about Natasha Ednan-Laperouse who died in 2016 after ingesting sesame that was not listed as an ingredient. It took until 2021 for the law in the UK to be changed to prevent this happening again. The parents attitude throughout has been quite incredible. Not angry at all.