I'd say the recall is probably more pointless, who is going to check this at home?

Why do we have only the nuclear recourse?

If you set punishments at the "cost of doing business" level, then businesses will choose [0] to take the punishment, rather than complying with the regulation.

This is a food safety regulation of the sort where some people will die if it's not compiled with. It's also a food safety regulation that's easy to comply with... if the manufacturer is aware of what's in their food.

IMO, noncompliance with this is a sign that something's fucking wrong with the company and maybe shouldn't be in charge of making food for people to eat. Remember that one band that had the "no brown M&Ms in the band's candy bowl" clause in their performance contracts? While I can't claim that this is a "canary" regulation, it sure smells like it could serve as a pretty solid one given how easy it is to comply with.

[0] Not always, but more often than "never", and probably more often than not.

The recall makes sense for stuff still on the shelves. It's a bit silly, but rules are rules. Pull it and stuff it in different packaging, or pay a crew of a couple folks in each store to pull it out of the boxes and donate to a local food kitchen.

The FDA telling people at home to throw it away - after they are made aware of the issue in the first place or they wouldn't have known to be told to throw it away - is utter ridiculousness and the government workers here should absolutely know better. They are undermining their authority and don't even realize it.

This will be used as a very effective tool against the institution in the future. It was a stupid tone-deaf call. They could have simply worked with Costco and put out a generalized notice to the public to be aware of the situation. Nuance matters.

This is an unnecessary own-goal by a government agency that doesn't need such things at the moment. It has done more damage to public health than it will ever have hoped to gain - which would be correctly estimated at zero.

Are they?

I was unable to find any evidence of this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42153441>. If you can find an official statement from the FDA that recommends (or orders) folks at home to dispose of the recalled food, I'd appreciate it.

> The FDA has shared specific steps to help consumers handle this recall safely. First, check the product codes on your butter containers and compare them to the codes in the recall notice. 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. For any questions or possible refunds, reach out to Costco through their customer service team.

Edit: It is certainly curious that this looks like boilerplate language. I do wonder if it originates from an FDA spokesperson, or if the author copy/pasted a previous press release from Costco? Another article[0] explicitly states the FDA did not make any recommendations to consumers, but mentions the quoted statement and sourced it from foodsafety.gov as a general recommendation for "recalled products".

Looking like the author completely made up the quote out of whole cloth by copy/pasting boilerplate generalized language while implying it was a directly related to the issue at hand. Nice catch!

[0]https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2024/11/13/costco-b...

Edit 2: Can't reply directly due to ratelimiting - but yes, you are absolutely correct that the FDA has not urged anyone, or even explicitly recommended it be thrown away. The above was my independent sleuthing before seeing your followup. Others did far better.

I don't share the opinion this was "lazy telephone" by a reporter though - this was outright deliberate making things up to generate a narrative. Either there was a phone call/e-mail by a FDA rep these articles are quoting, or they are simply trying to generate outrage on purpose. There is no game of lazy telephone that can explain word choices such as "FDA urges" and the like to appear out of whole cloth.

It USED to be the case that you could click the direct link to a comment to get the reply box to appear when the little "reply" link is refusing to show up. That might no longer be true, but it's worth a try next time you run into this.

> ...this was outright deliberate making things up to generate a narrative.

Oh, that's not an unreasonable assessment.

> There is no game of lazy telephone that can explain word choices such as "FDA urges" and the like to appear out of whole cloth.

If one site reports it, then other sites repeat it, that totally qualifies as "lazy telephone", IMO.

It looks like the article author (and/or editor) has played lazy telephone, and the FDA issued no such statement.

The information super highway is a race to the bottom human ignorance.

Honestly? Yeah.

There are a lot of little things you need to make sure happen correctly to produce and ship safe food that's fit for human consumption. If the QA for the package redesign failed to notice that the legally-mandated allergen field is missing from the package, what else is company QA letting slip through the cracks? [0]

Also, I don't know if you've ever worked for a company that had a management change that destroyed the company's ability to continue to ship a proper product, but I definitely have, as have folks I've known. By the time folks outside the company notice, the rot is usually bad, bad, bad.

Additionally: Remember that "a signal of something fucking wrong" is not the same as "something is fucking wrong". People and organizations are known to send out worrisome signals and still be fundamentally sound. But in the area of food safety, it's the job of the FDA to notice these worrisome signals and go look to see if something is currently fucking wrong with the company.

[0] Or if those labels are manually applied, the same question holds.

Fair points, but this recall looks to be vendor-initiated from the actual FDA website itself. Found via previous sleuthing in our discussion downthread. The FDA is simply adding it to it's database as it does, and the media picked it up from there. It's unlikely we'll ever be told if this was found via customer complaint, or via an internal QA process.

The one point also that I meant to make earlier, is that these products are likely contracted out. I wonder how many creameries Costco outsources their butter production to? I know other Kirkland products are simple rebrands, so I would assume the case is the same here as well.

That's a good question. The rumor I heard says that Costco plays super, duper hardball with companies that aren't willing to pay the low, low price Costco wants... using tactics such as waiting until a vendor's product nears the point of becoming unsellable as leverage. If that rumor's true, well, Costco may contract with very many creameries and serve as a "retailer of last resort" for them.

If the packaging is 'Kirkland' branded, and was provided by Costco, I wonder what fuckup happened so that the allergens section was omitted from the packaging. It'd be fucking dumb for that label to have to be manually applied. [0] So... was this a packaging printing error? If so, who was responsible for the QA?

> ...this recall looks to be vendor-initiated...

That may be a signal that the creamery caught the error and recalled the shipments. It might ALSO be the case that Costco caught the error and demanded the vendor recall the shipments. I don't think we have the data required to determine who deserves the credit for that action.

[0] But things that are fucking dumb happen all the time, so that's not proof that that's not what's up.

There has been a lot wrong since the early 1970s, but the nature of ponzi dynamics are that they show no direct evidence upfront that might allow prevention of the downward failures later.

We are only seeing the consequences of these things now that its reached past a tipping point. That said regulation only fuels and worsens the issues you describe.

The underlying issue is many market sectors have become so concentrated in terms of marketshare that these companies can tacitly cooperate from a distance. When these things happen and destroy the fine balance, chaos reigns, distortions will grow, and society fails back to the natural rule of violence.

Regulation acts as a barrier to entry only further concentrating the sector by imposing cost on all entrants as a sieve. When the sieve blocks everything, all you have left is collapse in systems that require continual growth to function.

When resources are concentrated in few hands, bad decisions made by the blind result in catastrophic consequence.

The dynamic nature of fiat economies is a simple fact that what goes up must eventually come down, and money printing via preferential debt loans, government subsidies, or other grants play a important part in in ensuring collapse through state-run/dependent apparatus. It might look like a private company, but if its dependent on revenue from a money printer its not, and those with more constraints die off faster. Its like putting a tarp over landscape to kill off everything underneath.

Over time just like with all ponzi's you have several stages. The benefit stage (boom), the diminishing returns stage (sideways), and the bust stage (where outflows exceed inflows). We are now entering stage 3, and as a nation will exceed debt growth vs. GDP within the next 5 years. This fundamentally violates Adam Smith's requirements for producers, and after such a point no market can exist. The economy collapses to non-market socialism which is categorically known to fail.

Normal business can't compete with a money printer, and so they are crowded out leaving a barren shrinking marketplace. Telltale signs of ruin yet to come.

Importantly, Ludwig von Mises warned about this in his 1930s works on Socialism, which was a failure study of the structures involved in bureacracy, and marxism, which apply broadly to all centralized systems involving people. It largely remains un-refuted today (100 years later).

When currency fails, production fails. In a disadvantaged environment where you have ecological overshoot (as we have been since the 1970s), what do you suppose happens when the order of society fails? food production fails, and a great dying occurs.

While these dynamics are slow, they are inevitably once primed, and the outcomes will be the consequence of decades of policy created by evil men. Evil simply being defined as the willfully blind, committing destructive acts.

People ought to protect their children's future, not destroy it and their children indirectly by extension, but the latter is exactly what has happened since the boomer generation took political power, and what is to come will be their legacy; assuming some people manage to survive this malthusian reversion.

You have a generation that has distorted the economy to the point where its uneconomical to have children. The old crowded out the resources needed to sustain the next generation, and in most respects there is no fixing this since the act of doing so would require solving 6+ problems that are inherently intractable and impossible (i.e. n-body limited visibility systems), and we are already at the limits to growth. All that awaits is the fall, and agency has been stripped slowly but surely to ensure everyone takes the same ride down.

We are living through some of the darkest times.

Nope. Regulation (whether by law, by rules set by a regulatory body, or by disorganized "social pressure") is the only thing that can even attempt to keep the powerful in check.

Bad regulations, bad regulators, and bad laws happen. That doesn't mean that we should stop regulating or stop enforcing all laws.

Your response is very characteristic of people I know who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, which makes me earnestly concerned for you.

Your statements and line of reasoning are easily found invalid and discarded by contradiction or counter-example, and credibility goes out the window when invalid fallacy happens more than once in short succession, at least in normal conversation among healthy individuals, typically.

Historically, violence as a means of keeping the powerful in check has been used successfully a number of times which contradicts your statement on regulation.

No one said we should stop regulating or enforcing laws, you seem to have hallucinated this. (concerning...)

Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness, and delusion lasting longer than a few weeks is a strong indicator, alongside other indications (hallucinations/illogical non-sequitur means of reasoning).

Please seek help for a proper examination/diagnosis by a qualified mental health professional.

Those with schizophrenia commonly end up harming themselves unknowingly, as a result of the related perceptual blindness the disease imposes.

In case you are wondering, the main difference between the delusional and healthy rational people is the former rarely if ever question the validity (truth) of their statements/beliefs, while healthy people constantly question and probe for flawed structures so they can build back better.

I hope you don't take offense, it is a serious illness which impacts many, where the victims of it often do not and cannot recognize it as it is happening, and prognosis is often better following early treatment. If you see something, you say something.

I hope I am wrong, but I can't simply ignore three objective indicators of mental illness in three sentences.

You clearly don't have a deadly food allergy. "Contains" is highly regulated ("Ingredients" is not), and everyone with a food allergy trusts "Contains". This isn't about this one particular situation, which admittedly is obvious. It's about maintaining the trust of the "Contains" section.

Who is "sick and tired of" allergy labels being too strict? Is this really something people get up in arms about?

People are sick and tired of nonsense bureaucracy - and this is a prime example.

Destroying 80,000 pounds of perfectly fine butter so some bureaucrats can pat themselves on the back is pretty absurd. Nobody was harmed - nobody was saved. This is just waste because some piece of paper says it has to be wasted...

These aren't new rules and are in place to literally save lives.

Are people really "sick and tired" of .003% of the butter being recalled? I feel like repeating "80,000 pounds" is attempting to appeal to emotion over the destruction of some mass quantity when in reality it's a rounding error.

It's also attempting to appeal to rampant innumeracy!

I, as someone with an allergy, am grateful for the "faceless" people who show up every day for an unglamorous job and keep me alive.

I would agree with you more if it was not a product where Milk was the only ingredient.

This kind of bureaucratic action lacks common sense and protects no one. That's the kind of bureaucracy we don't need.

Does something labeled "butter" contain milk? Does something labeled "milk" contain milk? This thread shows the answers to these questions are not straightforward and cannot be determined with common sense.

We -have- to have strict labeling rules around allergens and destroy products that don't comply because if we didn't, it would just be the wild west like it is with products that are not allergens.

Products are confusing, we shouldn't expect people to know how today's industrial food process works.

No, this is absurd. We don’t have to destroy products that can otherwise be put to good use. The minuscule number of people who are simultaneously deathly allergic to milk and unaware that cream is milk would be just as well served by a recall that said to destroy the product if you have a milk allergy.

This is a black eye on the FDA, and at a time we can least afford the agency to have one. They should have worked out another solution with Costco.

I don’t get this nonsense where a bunch of people can neither empathize nor understand that people other than themselves exist and should be able to rely on relatively simple packaging, and that the instant you create inane and bizarre carve-outs, you create risk for absolutely no benefit whatsoever.

Literally just to save money, ala the Elon/Trump D.O.G.E

This is a "waste" which costs money, which raises their taxes, so it shouldnt exist.

  People are sick and tired of nonsense bureaucracy

So much is taken for granted in our modern world because so many are unwilling to surrender to complexities beyond their reasoning. They alone have the answer and all must know it.

This isn't government overreach, this is a company trying to save money by doing less QA and getting bit for it.

THIS TIME it was caught, and handled, and the company is seeing a negative outcome for their lack of diligence in making OUR FOOD. What about next time? Maybe companies should be discouraged from lacking QA like this?

It's QA over packaging.

And you have no evidence that this was motivated by trying to "save money by doing less QA".

US food manufacturers generally do their absolute best on QA because recalls are super expensive and the headlines are bad. But companies are made up of humans who are never going to be 100.0000000% perfect.

That achieves the same result without the destruction of perfectly good food.

I, personally, am sick and tired of people complaining about various government functions without seriously contemplating said functions. Is there a way to ask for an exemption to a food labeling rule to avoid waste? I have no idea. But I can play pretend-management-consultant as well as the next person, and we’re talking about on the order of $200k of merchandise, and relabeling it would involve coordinating sending it back to the factory, applying the fixes (I can basically guarantee that, while the factory can efficiently package butter, it probably lacks the tooling to unpackage the butter), and getting it back to stores in time for the Feb-Mar 2025 best-by date. This is absolutely not worth it. And it’s not even worth the paperwork to as the FDA for some kind of exemption.

What I would do if I worked at Costco is to see if I could legally sell it all in bulk to a very small number of very large buyers, and then offer it to some such buyers at a massive discount. “Hey, want 10k boxes of mislabeled butter? You need to sign some documents promising that you will either use or destroy all of it and not give it to anyone else in its present packaging, but you can have it for $5/box.” Even that might be a tough sell, since buyers on that scale probably don’t want their butter in 8oz sticks…

If this were an order of magnitude larger, maybe it would be worth Costco’s energy to see if they could slap stickers on the outer packaging to solve the problem.

Then maybe it should be Ingredients that is highly regulated as the source of truth? "Contains" is effectively redundant and incomplete.

Take that example and apply it to every single ingredient used in food and cosmetics and supplements. Write that regulation please.

Or we can stick to the one that only deals with like, 5 - 10 things.

I've made mistakes on food that has _just_ "ingredients", missing entries while scanning at the grocery store.

Unfortunately, "contains" isn't required, and its location isn't always obvious. imo it should flatly be always required and always in a standardized layout/location (e.g. in a clear to read box).

Imagine if everyone who has an uncommon allergy wanted to have their allergen listed in "contains" too. You'll just end up with two "ingredients" lists instead. It's insanely stupid and redundant.

Edit: care to give a counterargument?

Just as caches are useful in computing even if they are too small to hold everything so too is a contains section that only lists the top 9 allergens. That covers 90% of food allergies in the US.

Do food products with none of the major allergens need "Contains Nothing" on their packaging?

https://www.fda.gov/files/food/published/Food-Labeling-Guide...

No it doesn't, it says "Cream". That's the issue.

To be clear, I'm fine with the recall because you want stuff like this to have clear lines, I just don't think there is any actual real danger in this case.

For example, they can read road signs. If you put up a new road sign that means the same thing as a previous one, they won't be able to read it. If you replace a "Stop" sign with a "Brake" sign, they won't stop. Because they don't read "Stop" - they know the sign means they should stop.

I'm sure there's thousands of Americans accustomed to reading the "contains:" label who would be blindsided by this. Particularly because today a lot of, maybe most, "dairy" product don't contain milk.