Matt Levine writes the amazing Money Stuff newsletter for Bloomberg. I’ve been a reader of his for a few years now, and I’m a huge fan of his writing. He recently wrote about the new US legislation on sesame seeds (search for the title “Sesame”) that I found hilarious:
Congress passed legislation intended to make life better for people allergic to sesame seeds. Instead, it made things worse. The bill, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by President Biden in 2021, requires manufacturers to label sesame on their products starting this year.
In response, some companies began adding sesame to products that hadn’t included it in the past—saying it was safer to add sesame and label it, rather than certify they had eliminated all traces of it.
Why would they do that? Clearly, if anything, that’s the opposite of what the new regulation was intended for. Well:
The issue is that it is hard to eliminate trace amounts of sesame, and the law now requires food manufacturers to label sesame as an allergen. Not putting sesame on the label effectively constitutes a promise that there is no sesame in the product, and if there is a little bit then you get in trouble: […]
But if you say that the product definitely contains sesame, then you are immunized from trouble. So you just chuck some sesame into everything, change the labels, and you’re fine. It is easier to make sure that there is sesame than that there isn’t, so that’s what companies do.
Unintended consequences! It makes sense that companies do this, given their incentives. A friend of mine put it as “regulators just do not think like hackers”, which is not how I’d put it, but I do see his point: regulators should have known better than to do this. Don’t they consult with experts and people in the industry? Someone would have definitely pointed this out to them.