Superfluous warning
I saw a poster in a coffee shop, obviously written by an adept of the ‘Nuts. Warning: contains nuts’ school of posterior defence. It advertised a new drink:
Semi-skimmed milk with added whey protein* & fibre
And, at the bottom, clarified the asterisk:
* contains milk
Who’d have thought it?
2009-01-17 15:12 UTC. Comments: 6.
Daniel Hardy
Wrote at 2009-01-17 16:45 UTC using Firefox 3.0.5 on Mac OS X:
Milk contains milk?, I guess we can’t take anything for granted these days.Philip
Wrote at 2009-01-18 10:34 UTC using Firefox 3.0.5 on Linux:
Surely the point is to show that the only protein is from milk, no other forms have been added. Which is probably important if you’re a vegetarian.Terence Eden
Wrote at 2009-01-21 10:59 UTC using Firefox 3.0.5 on Windows XP:
@Philip exactly. Whey protein can contain all sorts of bizarre things.It’s like the people who say “Peanuts: warning, may contain nuts! Huh-huh!”.
People allergic to nuts aren’t always allergic to peanuts.
T
Paul Battley
Wrote at 2009-01-22 10:27 UTC using Firefox 3.0.5 on Mac OS X:
Many things called nuts aren’t in fact nuts—peanuts included, so that’s reasonable if a little counter-intuitive.It’s indeed useful to know that whey protein has been added to the milk. And, if the whey protein were being added to a product other than milk, it would be informative to know that there was going to be some milk in the resultant concoction.
They have told us that whey protein contains milk, but not that it doesn’t contain any other non-milk products, so it’s not useful if there’s anything else you’re avoiding.
So, since whey protein is by definition derived from milk and is being added to milk in this case, all they are telling us by that asterisk is that milk, has been added to milk. How is that at all useful?
Abdullah
Wrote at 2009-01-23 23:02 UTC using Firefox 3.0.5 on Windows Vista:
McDonalds coffee cream plastic cartonlet things (made up a new word?) used to say:“Skimmed milk, with added cream”
I always wondered if the whole process took place in the same factory
great app mate but please fix the “if it’s new try later” problem before 10:04pm Monday 23rd February if you can :-)
schopenhauer
Wrote at 2009-02-08 13:25 UTC using Safari 525.27.1 on Mac OS X:
Reading people here, of all places, explaining why it is good that we are told that milk may contain milk tells is amazing.A simple explanation of why we have these signs is that many people are not very bright.
However, seeing bright people tell us how great it is that we not only have to live in a world with non-bright people (that’s life, and not in and of itself good or bad), but demanding also that the world be re-arranged for the lowest common denominator tells us that a second factor is active: bright-person guilt.
Yes, the world is too complex for many people, but no, this sign won’t ‘help’. In fact, the laws and regulations that make people make these silly signs cause the world to be MORE complex, and even harder for less bright people to navigate.
That’s what happens when guilty bright people try to fix the world for less bright people: assuming that which is false, they create the problem they are trying to solve. It is execrable*.
*Warning: prose may contain long or low-frequency words.