> But there's a lot of things that say butter that don't contain "Milk". In the US, packaging is guaranteed to have an accurate "contains" section.

The box of Unsalted Butter already says "Milk" in the ingredients list. It does not need a second warning that says "Contains Milk". The article seem to be confusing the two - they are two different "labels" on the same packaging.

Is there a human alive that would read the ingredients list and think to themselves, "Hmm, it says Milk is an ingredient, but I don't see a 'Contains Milk' warning, so it probably doesn't contain milk!"?

That is the bureaucratic nonsense people are sick and tired of.

> It's not just a nice-to-have; people's lives depend on it.

Nevertheless, I would certainly hope that if someone's life depends on avoiding milk products, that they learned a long time ago not to buy butter.

I mean I get your broader point, but it's just that in this specific case this isn't shea butter or apple butter or whatever... it's butter butter.

Like, listing wheat as an allergen on a candy bar, of course. But if you have a milk allergy, there's absolutely no universe in which you should even be picking up the butter to check in the first place.

I am extending the argument on semantics:

What does "Milk" mean in the context of "Contains Milk"

Is almond milk, oat milk, soy milk, coconut milk included?

Milk of magnesia?

> In the US, packaging is guaranteed to have an accurate "contains" section.

You are incorrect. The labeling laws have a number of loopholes which fail to appropriately or accurately list ingredients. No guarantees are made and it can hardly be called accurate.

Yes this impacts lives, and speaking as one from the afflicted cohort, labeling is a joke and has no measure of trust to begin with. For example GRAS ingredients in trace amounts often don't warrant being included in the label, there are weight cut-offs, and only known major allergens (of which relatively little research is done in proportion to other endeavors) are excluded from these loopholes. Natural or Artificial Flavors can be any of many different ingredients on a long list.

To top this off, these same laws may or may not be enforced with any consistency when the products are used as intermediate inputs (and originally processed outside the US). They often don't test for traces except in highly debased markets (such as honey), or after a consumer lab brings it to their attention.

There is also no distinction between size of the ingredients which impacts safety; and this can be important. For example, asbestos isn't harmful until it gets really small where it then can lead to mesothelioma.

Titanium Dioxide is often used as a food additive, but there have been no safety studies done since they began processing it using nanoscale particle sizes.

From what I've seen in the literature, they did these safety testing on large particles before modern advancement, and simply claim the smaller particles are the same (implicitly) without proper controls or testing to verify. This is often allowed under the self-certification of safety loophole as Beyond Meats did with the gene edited beats/heme.

Also, since they changed requirements to new anti-trans fat oils in processing I can't eat out anymore because the oils (which need not be disclosed) induce dermatological and inflammatory issues that manifest visibly within 1-2 hours. They are GRAS and I know many people who suffer from this including most of my extended family. Little research has actually been done/published.

To put this all in perspective, given all of these confounding issues, labeling already is nearly completely useless and lacks consistency to begin with. No claim of consistency can be valid until you are consistent in these other areas first.

> I get that this is a pretty clear example that it contains milk.

You literally cannot make "butter" any other way. Margarine is not butter. Garlic Butter is made with butter, Shea butter is a cosmetic and in the name says what it is derived from; you don't have rational people calling shea butter, butter. These issues fundamentally go to all language and by extension definition.

The word butter has a historic and common shared meaning absent adjective modifiers. It is distinct (unique), and definitionally made from milk.

This is the def'n from Oxford Dictionary. -A pale yellow dairy fat used in cookery and as a spread, made by churning milk or cream and straining off the buttermilk to leave a solid substance.

Inherent in the product description (name) is the fact the fact that it is derived from milk and will thus contain milk products.

> Couldn't I say the opposite

First that's not the opposite, and second you can say anything and what you say has no bearing on the truthfulness (people can both lie and tell the truth, and the fact that they can do both doesn't indicate one or the other).

In this context, no that would lack any real meaning, and end up being flawed reasoning which relies on the same false justification as the other line of thought, the forgone conclusion that there was trust to begin with, and the reason-ability.

You can justify anything circularly, all the way down to delusional madness, false and truth cannot be determined without external objective identity.

The structure of circular reasoning fundamentally fails objectively since there is no externally based identity (definition), and worse the structure abuses the contrast principle of your and reader's psychology to make it convincing despite it being fallacy, and delusion if you were to accept it as truth. These techniques are well known, have been abused for centuries, and often involve strategy to create convincing lies and deceit.

Inducing and misleading people towards delusion isn't something rational or good people ought to do, but there is benefit in promoting deceits following such structure, since not everyone can do the mental gymnastics (discriminating against intelligence), and it allows greater accumulation of power left unchecked (leading from the "banality of evil" to the "radical evil").

Complacency often mentioned in the banality of evil, is after all a form of sloth (a deadly sin, and warned against because of its destructive influence).

People lie all the time today, often without knowing, and believing and justifying lies as truth is the definitional path towards delusion. Schizophrenia diagnosis rely heavily on the fact that delusion is prevalent in the people being diagnosed, and techniques and related structure originating in torture induce delusion involuntarily.

The outcomes related to delusion, given sufficient time, are always destructive.

Finally, the world is not a safe place, nor can it be made so. There is inherent risk in everything you do. Those that would seek to make a safe world, inevitably and blindly through complacency tread and limit agency, where those same people would then support and seek enslavement, and death for all given the right opportunity.

They would do so because they wouldn't know better because they have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their own actions, and in so doing unknowingly violate oaths and beliefs they claim to hold dear.

The latter characterization is a valid characterization for describing evil people (willfully blind people) who commit evil (destructive) acts. They need not believe that they fall into this label categorically, but objectively and externally as an outcome the truth remains unchanged regardless of belief.

If I had my way, food terms that have hundreds or thousands of years of history behind them would not be allowed to be used for labeling completely unrelated things. That includes fake milks, fake eggs and fake "butters"

> Lots of people in the U.S. don't know that butter is made from milk. I have met plenty of people who don't know that cheese is a dairy product.

If there are people who are allergic to dairy who don't know butter or cheese come from milk, then I think there's an even bigger problem here...

The lack of empathy being expressed in this thread is utterly deranged. You people should feel ashamed of yourselves.

My advisor from college is a brilliant, caring man and a genius computer scientist with a lovely family. He also has a terribly dairy allergy. The tiniest lapse threatens to kill him. Here in the US he's safe thanks to regulations like this. When he travels abroad for conferences, he has to pre-prepare all his own food and bring it with him because he can't trust the labeling in other countries. Despite this, he very nearly died in India because somehow he still managed to come into contact with something.

So what, he should just... die? Why? His children should become fatherless... why? His contribution to computer science should be snuffed out... why? For some ridiculous religious anti-regulation cause? This crusade is despicable. You don't deserve to be here.

I would! There isn't a "new milk free butter" e-newsletter I'm subscribed to. I go to the store, see the things in the shelves, read the label, and then buy one that doesn't say milk (or soy) on it. Not being able to have large amounts of milk or soy without shitting myself doesn't mean I'm now on some secret "new non milk foods" subreddit or discord. We don't have a Facebook group that have regular in-person monthly meetings for, and have a yearly conference in San Diego where we all dress up like our least favorite cheeses. It's not an identity for me that I can't have milk or soy, it's an unfortunate biology weirdness that my body forces me to take part in.

Yes, so if you were to encounter this butter in the wild, I understand that not seeing the label would throw you off.

But in this particular case, in order to comply with the instructions telling you to throw the butter away, you need to know that this is the butter you bought that actually contains milk but isn't labeled so.

The very act of noticing that the butter doesn't have the right label tells you that it contains milk.

Maybe in the general case, but in this case, butter is literally made from milk, by definition.

If it wasn't made from milk, it would actually be illegal (and factually incorrect) to label it as butter.

An analogy would be if you picked up water that wasn't labeled as containing hydrogen, in a hypothetical world where hydrogen must be labeled, and you concluding that this water must be made without hydrogen.

> You might know, but does someone visiting your house know that?

Well, yes, because 99 percent of people in general know that butter is made from milk, and that includes 100 percent of the people who might visit my house. And if I did somehow have a visitor so profoundly broken that they didn't know it, I would notice that.

Also approximately 100 percent of professional cooks know that butter is made from milk.

> but does someone visiting your house know that?

The butter in my fridge right now doesn't have labels on it. Because I take it out of the box it comes in and put an individual stick in that little covered shelf at the top of the door. My understanding is that that's what that shelf is for, so I suspect that this is a fairly common thing to do.

> Does a random chef who gets an allergy notification at a restaurant know that?

I certainly hope that anyone cooking food at a restaurant knows that butter is a milk product.

Maybe have people write "milk" on their own packages instead of throwing the butter inside in the trash.

This is why there are proposals to ban labeling such "fake" milks as milk.

It's not just the fact that these things aren't milk, but they are also nutritionally and culinarily very different.

Shouldn't the others carry a label "does not contain milk" rather than putting "contains milk" on regular milk?

But isn't it incredibly clear when you're buying cow milk, vs. alternative "milks"?

I can understand how people with a dairy allergy might want to double-check an alternative milk to make sure it doesn't contain any real milk, or was processed in a bottling facility that also processes dairy milk, or something like that...

But it's hard for me to see how people with a dairy allergy might want to double-check the regular milk...?

That is a different question. If something is labeled "butter"it is probably butter. If it is labeled "not butter" it definitely should have a label that says "might contain butter. Now I understand the labeling and allergy concerns. Like does "almond milk" contain milk? I didn't know but it probably contains almonds or almond extract.

That's pretty much irrelevant to whether you know if butter contains butter.

I highly doubt the "contains" label would matter in this case, given that butter IS labeled as such and yet your anecdote stands.

Which is to say, that the label missing from this particular batch is likely to have had zero impact positive or negative on the overall situation.

Yup, and this is why the labels exist. So many people confidently "guess" when asked, and I've had to ask a few times for them to check the label.

Surely the context matters though?

In a culinary context, something can obviously be made with lots of butter and no milk.

In an allergen context it's totally different, but isn't the normal question whether it contains dairy?

I mean, in a regular cooking context, the Americans sound totally correct to me, unless they know you're asking because you're allergic.

now we get into the area of should these products be called milk when they don't have milk.

if there's regulations that say a package must list what is inside, shouldn't there also be regulations that say you can't list ingredients that are not inside?

yeah. there was a proposal by big dairy to ban alternative milks from calling themselves "milk" at all, but there was a public outcry about it and it was found to be overstepping, not least because alternative milks have existed for hundreds of years and been called as such.

Of course I don't know your situation, but most lactose intolerance is not an allergy, it's an inability to produce lactase, so the lactose gets digested by excited microorganisms instead of processed by your body. This often causes discomfort, as the microorganisms don't care if things go smoothly.

It’s perfectly logical.

Even if the company doesn’t intentionally have sesame in their product, what if one of their suppliers gives them sesame tainted flour or something?

If they don’t have a ‘May contain sesame’ warning then they might lose tons of money because they have to recall the product later.

The problem here is how lawsuit friendly America is.

What are the penalties imposed on a customer who does not throw out their recalled butter? As far as I know, there are none? So with the current messaging, anyone willing to take on this risk by keeping their butter can keep it. People who don’t see that option might not be able to perfectly understand the risk. So, this messaging feels perfectly reasonable to me.

> (You have found one already.)

I found both, actually. They're both in the "event" link I provided, but you can't get a detail view for recall F-0122-2025. This seems fine to me, given that all of the data you'd find in the detail view for each seems to be present in the "event" view that displays them both.

> (But holy heck. Why do those recall notices not appear on the FDA recalls[1] page?)

I think because of this: " Press Release Not Issued For This Recall ".

> But I'm wondering, did that get twisted into TFA's...

Oh, that's an excellent spot. Yeah, a game of lazy telephone is probably exactly what happened.

Remember when journalists had more time to do a good job on the articles they chose to submit to their editors?

FWIW, you (and I) did not find a press release, because they appear to have not made one. In the recall report, we see this:

"Press Release Not Issued For This Recall"

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one failing to dig up this "Throw all affected products in the trash!" demand.

If you want to be pedantic, this recall is not listed there at all, so your logic doesn't apply.

But that's not really the point. The point is that the going narrative is counterfactual.

If you see that on a product, you'd expect that the thing was made with milk, but does not contain any as far as you need to worry about allergens, and that it's tested to be safe.

It's a valid case in the truth table where somebody with a milk allergy should be safe to eat it

You will find that even butter often does not have milk in the ingredients list. E.g. Kerrygold: "pasteurized cream, salt"

In this case, the Kirkland's listed "sweet cream" and not milk.

That sounds like an issue for the alternative people to solve.

Where precisely did I go wrong here? We know it's butter, but a consumer might not, therefore a "contains whatever" label is not totally unjustified. Once you accept that as a rule, you have to enforce it. You don't just enforce it where it's ambiguous, you enforce it on all brands.

I could believe that "Signature Butter" could be a substance that wasn't butter. It would be dumb, but I wouldn't give you odds it didn't happen if someone claimed it did.

So putting milk in the ingredient list at least confirms that yes, this is butter, not "butter."

Devices to add stickers to packages was a solved problem before food allergy warning labels existed. In the 1980s supermarkets made money adding price stickers to every item of inventory, then changing the prices for sales. Meanwhile the food waste recycler (may not exist in your area, some exclusions apply) needs to remove all of the foil wrappers to the butter before recycling.

There’s a clear winner, unless you’re trying to send some kind of message to the supplier.

> should probably be probably labeled contains no milk.

What about other products that contain no milk? Shouldn't they do this as well? Should every package list what it doesn't have?

> that one standard line of text

This is the point. The packaging is entirely up to the manufacturer. Should the FDA approve every food package before it's used? We obviously can't do that. What we can do is mandate a few "standard lines of text." So that regardless of the packaging decisions consumers can still determine the facts quickly and _reliably_.

Think of people with allergies that have low vision or any other handicap which would make all these "good enough" ideas become dangerous.

> Then that SunButter should probably be probably labeled contains no milk.

I do think it'd be better if there were a standard allergen block that contained an explicit "yes" or "no" for each standard allergen.

The FDA didn't order the recall. Costco's supplier did.