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from the depends-on-what-you-are-cooking-up dept.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday released a warning letter to Nashoba Brook Bakery, reprimanding the West Concord, Massachusetts-based baker and wholesaler about the ingredients it lists in its granola.
One, in particular.
"Your Nashoba Granola label lists ingredient 'Love,'" the agency wrote in the Sept. 22 letter. "'Love' is not a common or usual name of an ingredient, and is considered to be intervening material because it is not part of the common or usual name of the ingredient."
Nashoba Chief Executive Officer John Gates said the FDA's take on love as an ingredient "just felt so George Orwell."
Ars Technica additionally reports that was not all that the FDA found:
During a recent bakery inspection, FDA agents discovered: dirt and filth caked onto ceiling vents and sprinklers directly above ready-to-eat foods; parts of the floor and ceiling that were missing for some reason; equipment, including bowls and cooling racks, that wasn't cleaned or maintained; and counters, shelves, and food production surfaces that were coated with an unknown residue.
Insects also proved worrisome. At one point, an FDA inspector noticed a one-inch-long, unidentified crawling insect directly underneath a batch of pastries. Last, the FDA reported that employees weren't following proper hygiene practices. One baker repeatedly dipped a blue bracelet into raw dough while mixing it.
For your reading pleasure, here is the warning letter.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Taibhsear on Thursday October 05 2017, @03:17PM (9 children)
I know it sounds ridiculous on the suface but when you have douchebag companies lobbying and getting regulations changed so that they can do things like calling an ingredient by a different name to avoid boycotts (High fructose corn syrup, for example) you have to take precautions. That way they don't start off with "made with love" as a tongue in cheek marketing phrase and end up with them further down the line calling a potentially harmful ingredient "love" as a loophole around regulations or the public eye.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 05 2017, @03:35PM (1 child)
Made with 50 micrograms of love 😉❤
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @12:16AM
These guys took it the other direction 5 decades ago.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday October 05 2017, @03:53PM
The android will be disappointed. "The secretary ingredient is basil. And love. But mostly basil."
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 05 2017, @05:03PM (4 children)
Entirely agreed. There is advertising feel-good fluff, and there is technical information. If they put "love" in the official label, then it necessarily must be taken both seriously and literally, as people can and should rely on the truth and accuracy of the ingredient list.
Your example of putting in harmful ingredients under the moniker of "love" is a great example. Another would be the damning-by-false-implication effect, as illustrated at: https://www.xkcd.com/641/ [xkcd.com]
There is a time and place for cute and funny things, and government mandated and enforced technical documentation is not one of them.
As a side note, I expect that if the bakery had passed everything else with flying-colors, then the FDA wouldn't have bothered. I expect this was one of those "so long as we are sending them a note anyway, we should mention this as well."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday October 05 2017, @05:14PM (3 children)
> government mandated and enforced technical documentation is not one of them
Where's our friendly neighborhood Violently Imposed Monopoly troll lurking, when we properly need to denounce the inability to formally list love as an ingredient?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday October 05 2017, @07:16PM (1 child)
He died after eating a tainted batch of sausage. Karma's a beeeee-yitch.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 05 2017, @10:25PM
No TMB is just taking a break since last being outed for his AC behavior.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday October 05 2017, @09:28PM
I came to the comments especially to find out how the neighbourhood libertarians were going to explain how food hygiene rules violate businesses' freedoms, and how the market will correct these sorts of problems without onerous rules.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @08:14AM
Here's the truth: Love is a measurable and the corporate hucksters aren't even putting it in when they say they are.
Tell some rice you love it, ignore some rice, and tell some you hate it. The loved rice stay fresh longer.
Lot's of people [youtube.com]
Have repeated the experiment [youtube.com]
It's strange, but you really can measure love. [youtube.com]
You should do the experiment yourself before you call BS. Seriously. I know it sounds strange and set out to debunk the experiment. I did it 4 times, with similar results each time. It's not hard.
There really is more to this world than academia knows, and some things are demonstrably actively censored from science -- such as Plasma Cosmology or when Social Justice Fanatics censor "sex differences" papers from medical journals. [youtube.com] Everyone knows that history is a lie agreed upon, but even modern archeology is heavily censored. [youtube.com] I say this to point out that there are some things you can't trust Academia to tell you, and you have to do the experiment yourself to know the truth.
After my first two attempts I thought that perhaps I had just been unlucky and got mold in the jars I "hated". So, I was careful not to get mold spores in the next two sets of jars, by using a sterilization technique for growing mushrooms in strata (which are sensitive to mold), and carried out the experiment in a dark temperature controlled environment. In those experiments mold did not grow, but fermentation eventually began and happened slowest in the "loved" containers. Now I wonder what the result would be if I told the yeast that I loved it with the intent that rice-wine be made with love?
TL;DR: Seriously, Love can be an ingredient. FDA (gov in general) don't want you to know the power we all have, but they are correct in condemning soulless factories for using "made with love".